Innovations in Educational Ethnography

Theories, Methods, and Results

George Spindler, Lorie Hammond

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136872693
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Forschung im Bildungswesen

This volume focuses on and exemplifies how ethnography--a research tool devoted to looking at human interaction as a cultural process rather than individual psychology--can shed light on educational processes framed by the complex, internationalized societies in which we live today. Part I offers theoretical chapters about ethnography and examples of innovative ethnography from particular perspectives. In Part II, the emphasis is on the application of ethnographic approaches to educational settings.Each contribution not only takes the reader on a thoughtful and enlightening journey, but raises issues that are important to both educators and ethnographers, including the relationship of researcher to subject, the meaning of "participant" in participant observation, and ways to give voice to disenfranchised players, and on the complex ways in which all parties experience identities such as "race" in the modern world.
Innovations in Educational Ethnography: Theory, Methods, and Results is a product of both continuity and change. It presents current writings from mentors in the field of ethnography and education, as well of the work of their students, and of educators engaged in cultural studies of their work. In many ways it provides fresh, new vistas on the old questions that have always guided ethnographic research, and can be used as a survey both of what ethnography has been and what it is becoming.
This book is the work of many hands, and provides excellent examples of trends in both basic and applied ethnography of education. These two kinds of work augment and reinforce each other, and also represent important current research directions--in-depth reflection on the process of ethnography itself, and an application of its insights to teaching and learning in schools, universities, and communities. No one philosophy guides the contributions to this volume, nor were they chosen as exemplary of a particular approach, yet foundational understandings and principles of ethnography shine through the work, in both predictable and unexpected ways.

I

Theoretical and Methodological Explorations in Ethnography

1

Reconstructing Culture in Educational Research

Ray McDermott

Stanford University

Hervé Varenne

Teachers College, Columbia University

Ray McDermott is a cultural anthropologist and a Professor in the School of Education, Stanford University. He has been doing research on theories of political economy and their relation to theories of mind, literacy, learning, ability, disability, and genius. From years of close work at the level of the classroom, his overall take is that American schooling is the unfortunate handmaiden of the divisive social forces that lead a duplicitous life in all the cultural materials available to participants. Recent work includes “A Century of Margaret Mead” and “Estranged Labor Learning” (with Jean Lave).

Hervé Varenne is a cultural anthropologist and a Professor of Education at Teachers College, Columbia University, where he is chair of the Department of International and Transcultural Studies. He is the author of many books and articles on aspects of everyday life and education in the United States and Ireland, including Americans Together (1977), American School Language (1983), and Ambiguous Harmony: Family Talk in America (1992). Most recently, he and Ray McDermott published Successful Failure (1998).

The word of ambition at the present day is Culture.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1860)

We concluded our recent book on Successful Failure with an unusual call. To improve the fate of children at risk of any labeled failure, “the first and perhaps only step is to turn away from them” (Varenne & McDermott, 1998, p. 217). Counter-intuitive, yes, and surprisingly constructive and respectful to all children. If the only tools available for helping children in trouble are the diagnostic and remedial preoccupations of American education, it might be best to forget individual children and focus instead on how we have created contexts that make some children—about half of them—so problematic. If schools are for all children to flourish, then the individual child can be our unit of concern, but not our unit of analysis or reorganization. Why should kids be the focus of change when it is the rest of us—the culture that is acquiring them—that arranges their trouble? This conclusion was the systematic product of a cultural analysis applied to the most pressing issue in American schooling: the attribution of success/failure. In this chapter, we restate our conclusion in order, first, to discuss why culture—and neither the individual nor socializing group—is the crucial analytic unit for educational research and, second, to sketch how a cultural analysis leads to a new articulation of major policy issues, in particular, the failure of students and its complex relation to kinds of person by gender and race.¹

When we studied children having bad days at school, home, or after-school clubs, we often saw adults rushing to help, but unsure of what to do. Comfort them, protect them, tutor them, these were short-lived possibilities. Helping individual children takes time, and their problems, even at an early age, can seem so deep. Problems continue, and adults run out of time, patience, and know-how. Then, in a fateful shorthand that lasts and lasts, the adults diagnose “the child’s problem.” Thirty years of researching children with other children, teachers, and parents have led us to doubt any special help that first requires a personal identification or diagnosis and then proceeds with a treatment of the person. To care for the children in trouble, the best action is not to diagnose them, but to reorganize the processes that made adults focus on the children and their received problems rather than on adults themselves. As researchers and policy-makers, and as teachers and parents interested in the best for every individual child, we should not allow isolation, diagnosis, and remediation to be our only recourse. Suppose we focus instead on the institutions that foreground each child’s problem, including the institutions that place some of us seemingly in a position to help. Where do these institutions come from historically? What are the grounds of their authority? How are they maintained? How can they be played with, tampered with, and otherwise transformed in unpredictable directions?

Educational institutions must be faced as historical, arbitrary, and artificial, that is, as cultural in the best sense of the term. The concept of “culture” is not new anymore, and no one should use it without respect for its lineage. In the last generation, psychology, sociology, philosophy, and literary criticism have joined anthropology, history, and linguistics in recapturing a sense of collectivity and duration by making culture an indispensable theoretical term. At their best, they have stressed culture as active and constitutive, and so do we—although not without some trepidation. Recently, many in the disciplines most closely involved with culture, fearing what has been done to “culture,” have attempted to move beyond the term (e.g., in anthropology, Abu-Lugod, 1991; Ortner, 1999; Rosaldo, 1990; in sociology, Bonnell & Hunt, 1999). We share their concern, but do not think we can ignore whatever it is that anthropologists and others write about “nowadays” when they write about something that is “multi-spatio-ethno-fragmented-scapes/scopesas-processually-practiced-and-agentively-reinvented-contestatorially” (Boon, 1999, p. 2)—in one word: culture.

American anthropology borrowed the term culture from 19th-century German philosophers and transformed it for new purposes. As Boasian anthropologists developed it, culture was used to celebrate what others, far from Europe, produce in their daily round. It was also used, by Franz Boas himself (1940) and more explicitly by the founders of the anthropology of education, Jules Henry (1963) and George Spindler (Spindler & Spindler, 2000), to warn that all cultures are dangerous to their participants, who cannot escape being identified, understood, or explained with the categories used by their significant others. And then something was lost, first in versions of anthropology, and then, even more radically, when the concept was borrowed by other disciplines, and particularly by researchers in education. In the movement from “culture” (as the process driving human adaptations and their products) to “a culture” (as a temporary configuration of institutions, many borrowed from neighbors far and wide) to “a person’s culture” (as the internalized property of a grown-up self), the collectivity that was core to earlier theories disappeared. Reconstructing culture in educational research may be part of what has to be done to reconstruct education.

After a section on the misleading use of culture in education, our chapter is in three main parts. First, we make “culture” the central unit of analysis in educational research and propose three requirements of a cultural analysis: a minimal unit of three or more people interpreting each other across time; a goal of moving systematically beyond received categories; and a logic of focusing less on the behavior of isolated persons and more on the work people do to isolate each other as problems independent of their mutuality. Second, we suggest what might be gained by a strict cultural analysis of phenomena one may initially want to address as matters of academic achievement, gender, or race. Third, we note further the consequences of a cultural approach for systematic investigation or research.

Culture: From Past Cause to Current Challenge

Every thought you now have and every act and intention owes its complexion to the acts of your dead and living brothers.

—William James (1868)

The application of the concept of culture to educational issues has been both remarkable and disappointing: remarkable in initially moving theory away from a myopic concern with the properties of individuals, and disappointing when conceptualized as a variable explaining individual behavior. Informed readers of educational research might be confused. Did not anthropologists urge educational researchers to use culture as a key category in the study of individual learning? Yes, as stated, but not much as taken. The initial purpose was to encourage educational researchers to expand the list of things considered in any theory of learning (or any apparent lack of learning), but the deeper purpose, only slowly realized in response to how culture came be popularized in educational writing, was to substitute culture for the individual child as the unit of analysis. Methodologically, anthropologists have always proceeded this way. They have always tried to study what they foolishly called whole cultures—foolishly because they necessarily studied only parts of cultures, parts often borrowed from still other cultures—but behind the rush to wholeness was a sound instinct: the theoretical prize always went to fieldworkers who unpacked the largest and most inclusive forms of constraint on the behavior of individuals. The unit of analysis was the tribe, the region, the economy, the language, the kinship system, and so on, often analyzed in action, fully contested, argued over, worried about, died for, and sometimes rearranged. Individuals and their psychological make-up—good term, make-up, for individuals are always made up—were crucial, of course, but never independent of the worlds with which they were in never-relenting interaction.

Consider only the following:

[The culture concept] denotes an historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols, a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and attitudes toward life. (Geertz, 1966, p. 89)

or that:

The term culture [refers to] what is learned, . . . the things one needs to know in order to meet the standards of others. . . . If culture is learned, its ultimate locus must be in individuals rather than in groups. (Goodenough, 1971, pp. 19–20)

Both these statements can be, and often are, interpreted to mean that the communicating and learning individual is a privileged unit in cultural analysis. A methodological individualism is more apparent in Goodenough than in Geertz (see the critique by Geertz, 1973, p. 11, of Goodenough for “holding that ‘culture [is located] in the minds and hearts of men’ ”). The differences between them are small once we compare the methods and results of their fieldwork and miniscule if we compare their anthropological approaches to the work of American educational researchers who assume that, if school is not going well, we should try to fix the kids, sometimes their teachers or parents, occasionally the school system, but never those of us who are watching, documenting, diagnosing, researching, and prognosticating. Both Geertz and Goodenough became important anthropologists because they carefully watched people in interaction and listened endlessly not only to interpretations of those interactions but to interpretations of the interpretations, each level being a thread in a knitted portrait eventually brought home in a report (see Geertz, 1960, 1973; Goodenough, 1951). Individuals were their friends, but analytically, we repeat, analytically, they always looked at those persons with a consideration of everyone else in the interpretive networks called Java, Bali, or Truk. Cultural analysis, like school reform, requires we take persons seriously while analytically looking through them—as much as possible in their own terms—to the world with which they are struggling. It is not easy, but it is the best way to see them in their full complexity; anything less delivers a thin portrait of their engagements and leaves them vulnerable to being labeled, classified, diagnosed, blamed, charged, and found lacking without any consideration of how they had been arranged, misheard, unappreciated, set up, and denied by others.

Most anthropologists have emphasized that culture is, above all, about “activities” in relation to a people’s “natural environment, to other groups, to members of the group itself and of each individual to himself” (Boas, 1911/ 1938, p. 149). Recently, the same intuition has been recaptured in various theories of “practice” “situated” in “distributed” settings, thereby pointing researchers toward both historical conditions and personal activity (Cole, 1996; Holland et al., 1998; Lave & McDermott, 2002; Lave & Wenger, 1992; Ortner, 1984).

When William James (1868) remarked that “every thought you now have and every act and intention owes its complexion to the acts of your dead and living brothers” (yes, and sisters, of course), he offered a self that is analytically and experientially available only in relation to others, the others actively making something for the self to work with and reorganize. To locate even the most private self, we must focus on its coordination with what has been made by dead and living relatives and neighbors. As John Dewey put it later (1920, p. 200), social institutions are “not a means for obtaining something for individuals, not even happiness. They are the means of creating individuals.”² Culture is not a consequence of adding up individuals, but of people dealing with each other under both perduring and emergent circumstances. Take a fact from our biographies. Varenne cannot deny he is “French,” because all who matter to him know he was born and raised in France. Nor can McDermott deny he is “Irish American” of a kind easily found in New York City. Analytically, we want to resist these...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• I Theoretical and Methodological Explorations in Ethnography
• II Studying “Side by Side”: Ethnographic Applications to Educational Settings
• Author Index
• Subject Index