?Written in a clear, accessible style, this inspirational book is both a practical guide and a survey of the different ways of doing ethnography. Drawing on wide-ranging examples and using classic and contemporary ethnographies, the authors demonstrate the importance of developing an ethnographic sensibility. A most valuable resource?
- Cris Shore, University of Auckland
Ethnography in Education is an accessible guidebook to the different approaches taken by ethnographers studying education. Drawing on their own experience of teaching and using these methods, the authors help you cultivate an ?ethnographic imagination? in your own research and writing.
With extended examples of ethnographic analysis, the book will introduce you to:
- ethnographic ?classics?
- the best existing textbooks
- debates about new approaches and innovations.
This book is ideal for postgraduate students in Education and related disciplines seeking to use an ethnographic approach in their Masters and Doctoral theses.
David Mills is a University Lecturer in Education, University of Oxford.
Missy Morton is Associate Professor and Head of School of Educational Studies and Leadership, College of Education, University of Canterbury
Research Methods in Education series:
Each book in this series maps the territory of a key research approach or topic in order to help readers progress from beginner to advanced researcher.
Each book aims to provide a definitive, market-leading overview and to present a blend of theory and practice with a critical edge. All titles in the series are written for Master?s-level students anywhere and are intended to be useful to the many diverse constituencies interested in research on education and related areas.
Other books in the series:
Using Case Study in Education Research, Hamilton and Corbett-Whittier
- Qualitative Research in Education, Atkins and Wallace
- Action Research in Education, McAteer
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Yes, you can access Ethnography in Education by David Mills,Missy Morton in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Pedagogía & Educación multicultural. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.
A short history of ethnographic writing and its key protagonists
An introduction to influential educational ethnographies
Advice and guidance on reading ethnographic texts
A reading template to structure your own reading
A discussion of recent debates around ethnographic representation
Introduction
We begin with a puzzle. If, as we argued in our Introduction, ethnography is simultaneously about being, seeing and writing, how does one combine these together? More than a research method, more than a genre of writing, it is an approach to crafting knowledge that makes heavy demands on the researcher. It takes time, sensitivity and an acceptance that, as a budding ethnographer, you become a central part of the research. The word itself contains the etymological clues you need to understand this commitment, ‘ethnos’ and ‘graph’ – writing the people. Ethnography is an approach that structures both your research and writing. Or rather, it disavows the possibility of dividing the two: writing becomes integral to the ethnographic method. As Madden puts it, ‘writing is a method’ (2010, 25). Rather than being the final act of the qualitative research drama, writing is the stage on which the ethnographic encounter unfolds. As Delamont and Atkinson remind us, ‘the discipline of ethnography must include an awareness of how it is written … it is time for us to realise that ethnographic work is inescapably rhetorical’ (Delamont and Atkinson 1995, 49). Ethnographers are always writing: writing is integral to the method. If you like keeping a diary, or taking notes, you’ll relish the challenge of learning how to turn fieldnotes and diaries and into more polished pieces of writing, a topic we return to in Chapter 4.
As students, we were both encouraged to read as many ethnographic monographs as we could. These single-authored book-length accounts of a particular ethnographic setting or topic were not always immediately accessible. They required patience and time as they unfolded the shared significance and meanings behind particular linguistic concepts, symbols or rituals. But the rewards were manifold. We still have strong memories of the worlds that were evoked within them, from spirit possession amongst Sudanese women to dope-smoking American teenagers, from the legitimisation of male violence in Uganda to the anomie of disenchanted British school-kids.
The only way to grasp the full potential and strength of ethnographic writing is to read ethnographies. The best writers are always the most diligent readers. By reading voraciously and widely you will begin to understand how ethnographic writing and argument ‘works’, the truths it conveys, and the forms of rhetoric and style it relies on. Reading ethnographies helps you understand the disciplinary debates to which this writing contributes, and develop your own ethnographic ‘being’ or sensibility. In this chapter, we start with some examples of the connections that ethnographers make in their writing, in order to illustrate the particular combination of description and analysis that characterises the genre. We want you to think about whether these rhetorical and argumentative connections work for you.
The tricky task facing every ethnographer is working out how, both in your writing and your research, to maintain a balance between familiarity and strangeness. The ambition is to help one’s readers be surprised and puzzled by the situations being described, but also help them make connections between these lived experiences and the understandings they bring to them. This stylistic balancing act is particularly tricky when you are doing research in one’s own school or college, but it is one that all ethnographic writing has to deal with. If, as we have suggested in our Introduction, ethnography is an ‘uncomfortable’ science, this book explores how to sustain a generative sense of critical discomfort and distance.
How is this chapter structured?
To help you on your way this chapter starts with ‘Making ethnographic connections’, a short history of educational ethnography, highlighting path-breaking work and influential texts. We go on in ‘How shall I read?’ to offer advice on how to read critically, and provide a reading template for you to use, whether on your own or with others. It gives you some tools and tips on what to look out for, but also serves as a reminder to keep writing. Reading whilst keeping your own project at the back of your mind, you will soon find that your notes begin to develop an analytical tone, as you make connections and links. Finally, in a section entitled ‘Ethnographies are not what they used to be’, we introduce you to the heated debates about ethnographic writing and representation that stirred up so much controversy in the late 1980s. The self-criticism led some to abandon the ethnographic project, but also provoked experimental new ways of representing, engaging with and portraying social worlds. Rather than be intimidated by these critiques, we welcome the creativity that this has emerged, highlighting a couple of recent examples.
Making ethnographic connections
When does ethnography begin? The label hardly existed before the 1920s, but some anthropologists have suggested that the Greek historian Herodotus should be our first role model, with his interest in depicting strange customs and exotic social mores. If thoughtful and perceptive travel writers have existed since classical times, the modern age brought with it European explorers’ and adventurers’ accounts of ‘uncharted’ territories and ‘unknown’ worlds. This new genre relied for its authority on the sense of immediacy and ‘being there’ that the narrator created in the text. Colonial rule brought a host of new contributions from amateur collectors, missionaries and administrators, all of whom shaped the rise of the anthropological sciences. Come the twentieth century, the first professional ethnographers embarked on an unmapped literary journey towards a genre of ‘writing culture’ that was scientifically authoritative but also rhetorically convincing.
Bronislaw Malinowski – a Polish émigré of immense self-belief – did more than anyone else to crack this conundrum. Trapped in the South Pacific by the declaration of hostilities in the First World War, he embarked on an extensive period of research that involved living in the community which he was studying. His famous first book, jauntily titled Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922), is an ethnographic account of the complex symbolic ‘Kula-ring’ trading network between a set of Pacific Islands. Its style is partly explained by Malinowski’s huge admiration of Joseph Conrad and his writing. After a few pages explaining his scientific approach, Malinowski leavens his writing with this vignette:
Imagine yourself suddenly set down surrounded by all your gear, alone on a tropical beach close to a native village, while the launch or dinghy which has brought you sails away out of sight. Since you take up your abode in the compound of some neighbouring white man, trader, or missionary, you have nothing to do, but to start at once on your ethnographic work. Imagine further that you are a beginner, without previous experience, with nothing to guide you and no one to help you. For the white man is temporarily absent, or else unable or unwilling to waste any time of his own on you. This exactly describes my first initiation into fieldwork on the south coast of New Guinea. I will remember the long visits I paid to the village during the first weeks; the feeling of hopelessness and despair after many obstinate but futile attempts had entirely failed to bring me into real touch with the natives, or supply me with any material. I had periods of despondency, when I buried myself in the reading of novels, as a man might take to drink in a fit of tropical depression and boredom. (1922, 14)
This one paragraph has come to represent, more than any other, the founding moment of the ethnographic genre and the discipline of social anthropology. Encouraged to put ourselves in his shoes, our trust in his depiction of this social world is bolstered by his own brutally honest self-dissection. There was no doubt that he was there, and we’re not sure if we want to be there too. Despite the paradise South Sea setting, he lets us know of his deep frustrations and the deprivations. The posthumous publication of his diaries made clear just how much he tormented himself. Most of the book is written in an objectivist tone, but the rhetorical power of such vignettes is what remains with the readers. To use a phrase popularised by Clifford Geertz, that most literary of ethnographers, ethnographic writing is all about conveying ‘being there’ (Geertz 2000).
At around the same time, Margaret Mead, perhaps the first ethnographer of education, was pursuing a rather different fieldwork project on Samoa. Drawing inspiration from Freud rather than Conrad, her search to make sense of her own upbringing led her to ask about informal educational cultures: ‘Are the disturbances which vex our adolescents due to the nature of adolescence itself or to the civilization? Under different conditions does adolescence present a different picture?’ (Mead 1928, 3). Mead’s playful writing and cross-cultural populism appealed to her growing American readership, and she draws a number of lessons from her ethnographic vignettes of Samoa about American adolescence. Accused by some anthropologists of adopting an over-simplistic ‘an x is simply a y’ approach to comparing cultures (di Leonardo 1998), the sweep of her analysis, and her willingness to make audacious statements about American mores, guaranteed her an illustrious career. She became the grande dame of American cultural anthropology and a sixties counter-culture icon. She was not unique in pointing to what she saw as the malign effects of modern ‘Western’ education on other societies, but she did it with a rhetorical flourish:
All the irritating, detailed routine of housekeeping, which in our civilization is accused of warping the souls and souring the tempers of grown women, is here performed by children under fourteen years of age. A fire or a pipe to be kindled, a call for a drink, a lamp to be lit, the baby’s cry, the errand of the capricious adult – these haunt them from morning until night. With the introduction of several months a year of government schools these children are being taken out of their homes for most of the day. This brings about a complete disorganization of the native households … (Mead 1928, 28)
We turn now from 1920s Samoa to 1970s Birmingham, and a vignette of a different sort. For many ethnographers of education, Paul Willis’s Learning to Labour is the defining modern classic, and remains much discussed and much cited, partly because of Willis’s sophisticated theoretical discussion of the relationship between education and social-class formation. However the book begins with an initial forty pages entitled simply ‘Ethnography’. This section is full of vivid tableaus that immediately invoke the ambience of an inner-city secondary school and the tension between working-class ‘lads’ and the more diligent ‘ear’oles’. Take this brusque dialogue, as the researcher realises that ‘having a laugh’ is a key motivation of the ‘lads’, and explains their dismissive attitude to school and formal qualifications:
‘Why not be like the ear’oles, why not try and get some CSEs?’
‘They don’t get any fun, do they?’
‘Cos they’m prats like, one kid he’s got on his report now, he’s got 5 As and one B.’
‘… I mean what will they [the ear’oles] remember of their school life? What will they look back on? Sitting in a classroom, sweating their bollocks off, you know, while we’ve been … I mean look at the things we [the Lads] can look back on … Some of the things we’ve done on teachers, it will be a laugh when we look back on it.’ (Willis, 1977, 14)
Whilst the first forty pages of Learning to Labour may feel as if it somehow offers a ‘raw’ and unedited ethnographic account to which debates in Althusserian theory can then be applied, this is somewhat of a rhetorical trick. Ethnographic writing is a craft, but often highly strategic. Vignettes and imageries are deployed for a purpose, as the next extract shows:
In the corridors there is foot-dragging walk, an overfriendly hello or sudden silence as the deputy passes. Derisive or insane laughter erupts which might or might not be about someone who has just passed. It is as demeaning to stop as it is to carry on. There is a way of standing collectively down the sides of the corridor to form an Indian gauntlet run – though this can never be proved: ‘We’re just waiting for Spanksy, sir.’
After vividly evoking this submerged tension, the tone immediately shifts:
Of course individual situations differ, and different kinds of teaching style are more or less able to control or suppress this expressive opposition, But the school conformists – or the ‘ear’oles’ for the lads – have a visibly different orientation. It is not so much that they support teachers, rather they support the idea of teachers. Having invested something of their own identities in the formal aims of education and support the school institution – in a certain sense having forgone their own right to have a ‘laff’ – they demand that teachers should at least respect the same authority. There are none like the faithful for reminding the shepherd of his duty.
Note how quickly Willis’s writing, even in the ‘Ethnography’ section of the book, moves to a theoretical register. We go from being jostled in the corridor outside the classroom to far-reaching statements about educational authority. He makes a generalisation about the behaviour of the ear’oles compared with the lads, musing on the nature of authority and student identity, before signing off with a quasi-religious metaphor. This ability to shift gear, to jolt the reader, and to combine ‘thick description’ and sharp analysis, is a mark of some of the best ethnographic writing. As Willis puts it, ‘theoretical imaginings of the social sciences are always best shaped in close tension with observational data’ (Willis 2000, xi).
It is an argumentative and analytical style that seeks to stay close to the ethnographic data whilst using the vividness of experience as a springboard from which to open up much broader debates. As a genre it relies on telling juxtapositions, jarring the reader into seeing how one can bring together the very different concerns of those being written about and those being written for. Willis himself writes vividly about this process, suggesting that we should see the ‘ethnographic as conditioning, grounding and setting the range of imaginative meanings within social thought … ethnography is the eye of the needle through which the threads of imagination must pass’ (2000, xii). The biblical metaphor conveys something of the existential struggle that many ethnographers go through. Relative...
Table of contents
Cover Page
Title
Copyright
Contents
Acknowledgements
About the authors
Introduction: schooling the imagination
1 Reading ethnography, writing ethnography
2 Ethnography by design, ethnography by accident
3 Into the educational ‘field’: relationships, reciprocities and responsibilities
