Session Information
19 SES 17, Dilemas and Complexity in Educational Ethnography
Paper Session
Contribution
In our paper we would like to draw attention to questions concerning the production and the sharing of knowledge in educational ethnography. Since the ethnographic gaze on everyday educational practices differs systematically from the perceptions of pedagogical actors of their own actions, the process of producing and sharing ethnographic knowledge runs the risk of provoking irritation and relational dilemmas. To exemplify this issue, we draw on an ongoing research project called “Conspicuous Children. An Ethnography of Processes of Recognition in the Kindergarten”, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation. In this project we focus on how teachers try to meet the challenging demands of inclusive education in their everyday practice. We describe and analyse how the teachers manage their pupil’s everyday behaviour and performances and how they deal with individual differences.
At this point the challenges arise. Whereas the dominant perspective in the field and in pedagogy assumes that the everyday task of teachers is to educate and nurture children with different needs, we came to see this differently. What we observed were the activities and actions of teachers and children alike and their accounts thereof, within a quite strict organisational framework of rules and requirements embedded in a wider societal context. The two perspectives are not completely incommensurable, but the difference is big enough to cause unease on both sides. The normativity of the pedagogical field, with its strong desire to intervene, promote and help children, was challenging for us as ethnographers from the very start, since the ethnographic analysis with its social-constructivist perspective brought to light the role of the interactional and organisational order in ‘producing’ such children. Therefore, we were confronted with a schism, in terms of looking at the supposedly same situations, actors and interactions but with a very different interpretation.
This schism is nothing new in and for the ethnographic discussion (Geertz 1973; Clifford und Marcus 1986), but it is and will also be in the future a major challenge in terms of managing field relations, especially when sharing knowledge with the research field. What we would like to address in our paper is a reflection on three different topics that inevitably will emerge in educational ethnographic research projects when doing long-term participant observation. We will embed our analysis of the relational dilemmas within the concept of familiarity and strangeness in relation to a field (see Delamont und Atkinson 1996; Atkinson 2014). Without overcoming and rejecting the ‘taken-for-granted assumptions’ (Delamont & Atkinson 1996, 11) in a field, there can be no scientifically meaningful analysis of everyday situations, no independent and critical production of knowledge. We wish to extend the notion of familiarity to encompass issues such as proximity and distance between the researcher and researched. Therefore, we focus in our paper first on the pitfalls of making oneself known in the field: how much of our theoretical foundations and epistemological interests could we lay bare without confusing or irritating our partners in the field? Secondly, we focus on the question of interpretational authority: how do we deal with the possible incorporation of the researcher into the logics and normativity of the field? And thirdly we ask about ‘massaging the realities’ when feeding back data to the field: How exactly do we report back our knowledge about the creation of a social reality?
Method
Our fieldwork was being conducted in three kindergartens in an urban area of Switzerland for two years. We visited the kindergartens regularly, for about three to five hours a day, where we participated as visitors and performed our observations at the same time. After every visit, we wrote down our field-notes and organised any other data we had recorded and documents we had collected. Each kindergarten is assigned to a different school district in the city and serves an average of 24 children and their families. The kindergartens selected for this study have been chosen on the basis of their accessibility and the differing socio-economic environments in which they are situated. One is located in a clearly upper-class area, one in a mixed lower middle-class part of the city with a (nevertheless) considerable proportion of migrants and one in lower-class area with a mostly migrant population. It is relevant to know that in Switzerland nearly one third of the population was not born there but migrated to the country. Officially, all three kindergartens are part of the compulsory education since 2008. They share the same curriculum and are all subject to the same supervision and administration by the city.
Expected Outcomes
In our paper, we start with what we discussed as the tension between familiarity and strangeness in relation to a research field. We present and analyse the tensions between the field role and the proximity required for ethnography by showing how tricky this can be in terms of 1) identifying oneself, 2) maintaining scientific interpretational authority and 3) the way in which you report back to those being researched. In doing so, we elaborate on the concept of familiarity in educational ethnography. While familiarity has been rightly accused of obscuring and impeding the sociological gaze in the field of education (see: Delamont and Atkinson, 1996), these three other issues at least are linked to this concept too. Ethnographic research performed in classrooms is always a joint product between the ethnographers and the people in the field. Therefore, we cannot but adapt to such situations by taking into account what relational issues might arise.
References
Agar, Michael H. (1996): The professional stranger. An informal introduction to ethnography. London und New York: Academic Press. Atkinson, Paul Anthony. 2014. For Ethnography. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications Ltd. Atkinson, Paul/Delamont, Sara/Housely, William (2007): Contours of culture. Complex ethnography and the ethnography of complexity. Walnut Creek: Altamira Press. Bergman, Åsa/Lindgren, Monica (2017): Navigating between an emic and an etic approach in ethnogra¬phic research. Crucial aspects and strategies when communicating critical results to participants. In: Ethnography and Education online, S. 1–13. Burawoy, Michael (2003): Revisits: an outline of a theory of reflexive ethnography. In: American Socio¬logical Review 68, S. 645–679. Clifford, James (1983): On ethnographic authority. In: Representations 2, 4, S. 118–146. Delamont, Sara/Atkinson, Paul (1996): Fighting familiarity. Essays on education and ethnography. Cresskill,New Jersey: Hampton Press. Delamont, Sara/Atkinson, Paul/Pugsley, Lesley (2010): The concept smacks of magic: Fighting familiar¬ity today. In: Teaching and Teacher Education 26, 1, S. 3–10. Dennis, Barbara (2010): Ethical dilemmas in the field. The complex nature of doing education ethnog¬raphy. In: Ethnography and Education 5, 2, 123-127. Fine, Gary Alan (1993): Ten lies of ethnography. In: Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 22, S. 267–294. Geertz, Clifford. 1973. «Thick Description: towards an interpretative theory of culture». In The Interpretation of cultures: selected essays by Clifford Geertz, herausgegeben von Clifford Geertz. New York: Basic Books Geertz, Clifford (1983): Blurred genres: The refiguration of social thought. In: Clifford Geertz (Hrsg.): Local knowledge: Further essays in interpretive anthropology. New York: Basic Books, S. 19–35. Goffman, Erving (1989): On fieldwork. In: Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 18, H. 2, S. 123–132. Hammersley, Martyn (1999): Not bricolage but boatbuilding: exploring two metaphors for thinking about ethnography. In: Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 28, S. 574–575. Marcus, George E. (2010): Ethnography through thick and thin. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Monahan, Torin/Fisher, Jill A. (2015): Strategies for obtaining access to secretive or guarded organiza¬tions. In: Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 44, S. 709–736. Sanday, Peggy Reeves (1982): Anthropologists in schools: school ethnography and ethnology. In: Gilmore, Perry/Glatthorn, Allan A. (Hrsg.): Children in and out of School,.Washington, D.C.: Center for Applied Linguistics, S. 237–240. Sieber Egger, Anja/Unterweger, Gisela (2018): Ethnographic research in schools. Historical roots and developments with a focus on Germany and Switzerland. In: Beach, Dennis/Bagley, Carl/Marquez da Silva, Sofia (Hrsg.): The Wiley Handbook of the Ethnography of Education, S. 233–256. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell.
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