Community-Based Ethnography

Breaking Traditional Boundaries of Research, Teaching, and Learning

Ernest T. Stringer, Mary Frances Agnello, Sheila Conant Baldwin, Lois McFayden Christensen, Deana Lee Philb Henry

• Editorial: Psychology Press
• Año: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317778936
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Didattica
• Categoría: Ricerca nella didattica

Co-written by a professor and 10 students, this book explores their attempts to come to grips with fundamental issues related to writing narrative accounts purporting to represent aspects of people's lives. The fundamental project, around which their explorations in writing textual accounts turned, derived from the editor's initial ethnographic question: "Tell me about the [previous] class we did together?" This proved to be a particularly rich exercise, bringing into the arena all of the problems related to choice of data, analysis of data, the structure of the account, the stance of the author, tense, and case, the adequacy of the account, and more. As participants shared versions of their accounts and struggled to analyze the wealth of data they had accumulated in the previous classes -- the products of in-class practice of observation and interview -- they became aware of the ephemeral nature of narrative accounts. Reality, as written in textual form, cannot capture the immense depth, breadth, and complexity of an actual lived experience and can only be an incomplete representation that derives from the interpretive imagination of the author. The final chapter results from a number of discussions during which each contributing author briefly revisited the text and -- through dialogue with others and/or the editor -- identified the elements that would provide an overall framework that represents "the big message" of the book. In this way, the contributors attempted to provide a conceptual context that would indicate ways in which their private experiences could be seen to be relevant to the broader public arenas in which education and research is engaged. In its entirety, the book presents an interpretive study of teaching and learning. It provides a multi-voiced account that reveals how problematic, turning-point experiences in a university class are perceived, organized, constructed, and given meaning by a group of interacting individuals.

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Reinterpreting Teaching

Ernie Stringer

Conventional instruction is based on the premise that knowledge can be transmitted and contrasts strikingly with Dewey’s (1916/1966) description of an effective learning environment: “Any social arrangement that remains vitally social, or vitally shared, is educative to those who participate in it.”

—Lois McFayden Christensen, chapter 4

Disciplined by the educational system, we internalize the concept of success and how success is often defined in the educational institution, i.e., connected with negative concepts of power such as domination, control, and competition, and with the subsequent encoded desire to reproduce these models.

—Vicky Newman, chapter 9

Our system of schooling perpetuates [the view of] teacher as transmitter of knowledge to students whose perspectives are rarely considered.

—Shelia Conant Baldwin, chapter 10

This university is too traditional, structured. It is like stuffed shirt city. … I like helping people take action, empowerment, helping them help themselves.

—Lois McFayden Christensen, in Deana Lee Philbrook Henry, chapter 8

Older, authoritarian styles of leadership are being replaced by participatory, democratic processes … so that there is more discussion about shared authority … that complements a continuing debate in education about the efficacy or desirability of collaborative and constructivist approaches to research and learning.

—Deana Lee Philbrook Henry, chapter 8

The group research processes encountered in a graduate research class proved to be different from the sterile, text-bound and solitary experiences graduate students often encounter in their educational careers.

—Mary Francis Agnello, chapter 7

I [was] able to stand my ground when confronted by the bureaucrats who arrived at my classroom door with the truth carved in curriculum documents of stone. My professional life fluctuated between the incredible power and excitement in my classroom … as I watched children learn in ways perceived to be blasphemous. [I also felt] incredible frustration and mounting anger at my professional peers, who believed they had discovered the truth about ways to teach children and were ordering me to be faithful to the canon.

—Terresa Payne Katt, chapter 12

Universities and schools in general teach the learner that collaboration is cheating, unprofitable, unfair and unproductive.

—Patricia Gathman Nason, chapter 6

PERSPECTIVES ON TEACHING AND LEARNING

We commenced writing this book as part of a process of inquiry initiated in a graduate research methods class. Although the initial focus of our investigation was unclear, it became apparent that although each of us was talking about different things, an area of commonality pervaded our reflections and our writing. Some of us were talking about writing the text, the seemingly simple process of narrative production that turns out to be a rather unwieldy instrument for capturing human experience. Others were talking about research, a process of exploration and discovery that enables people to understand the problems they are experiencing. Yet others of us were directly engaged with the problems of teaching and learning in classroom environments; still others explored the implications of our research experiences for the corporate world or for community development work.

The eventual transition of this text to an exploration of teaching and learning, therefore, takes into account our various perspectives. Although we all have significantly transformed our thinking about the processes of teaching and learning, we each apply the thinking in different ways, according to the particular arenas in which we work. This book tends to focus on institutionalized educational contexts like schools and universities, but teaching is an activity that must be broadly conceived as a process of facilitating learning, an activity that occurs in a variety of ways in a variety of contexts. Parents can be seen as teachers of their children, researchers as teachers of the research audiences, organizational development consultants as teachers of their client organizations, and community development workers as teachers of the communities in which they carry out their work.

Our focus on teaching, therefore, must be read with these contexts in mind, for our explorations of teaching in a university research class led us to understand it in a very different way. As dedicated professionals we now experience teaching as something more akin to a calling. This notion refers to an era when teaching was less subject to the intense, objective scrutiny of positivistic science and was defined more broadly than is possible within the strictures and processes of the contemporary approach to knowledge production. We do not wish to deny the utility of such an approach, but our writing has been constructed through a rather different method of investigation. As becomes clearer as the text progresses, the perspectives revealed in this book are derived from thorough, rigorous, reflective processes of investigation, which are themselves the product of teaching—a process of facilitating learning.

IS THERE A PROBLEM WITH TEACHING?

We write at a time when schools and other educational institutions are almost in a state of siege. Education systems in many parts of the world have been subject to a continuous series of attacks for several decades. In the United States education has been blamed for the nation’s failure to place a satellite in space ahead of the Soviet Union, for national economic decline, rising crime rates, increasing poverty, teenage pregnancies, unemployment, drug abuse, the decline of the family, and a host of other ills that accompany modern social, economic, and political change. Political pressures to hold educational institutions accountable for these widespread changes in the social fabric of modern societies have led to an almost continuous procession of reports and papers on the organization and operation of schools, the structures of educational funding, the processes of teacher education, and so on.

As a central component of the educational process, teaching has been subject to intense scrutiny. The research literature on teaching is now voluminous and ranges from an extensive overview provided by the massive Handbook of Research on Teaching, through many volumes of academic texts about teaching, to a veritable mountain of journal articles that speak to various aspects of the profession. Most literature is drawn from experimental studies that, especially in recent decades, endeavor to determine which elusive qualities might reveal the “best” or “exemplary” teaching practices. The outcomes of the search for the “foundational assumptions” of teaching have been neither unequivocal nor fruitful, to judge from the conflicting outcomes of experimental literature or the public perceptions of schooling and teaching. Education today is perceived to be more problematic than ever, and academic investigations, legislative inquiries, and media reports continue to decry the quality of teaching.

In a social context that valorizes “accountability” and “performance targets,” there are increasing pressures to specify the characteristics of the good teacher and, in some instances, to legislatively mandate that these characteristics be included in teacher education programs. Attempts to reduce teaching to a fixed set of testable competencies have been accompanied by an increasing tendency to monitor the outcomes of the teaching process through state and national tests that have the well-meant but misplaced intent to insure that all children get a “good education.” In response to these pressures, many teachers tend to rely on mechanistic, repetitive, teach-to-the-test approaches to learning, which merely reinscribe the very real educational problems inherent in school life.

Part of the problem probably lies in unrealistic expectations about the outcomes of schooling. Schools cannot compensate for large-scale movements in redistribution of wealth or modes of production on national or international scales. Nor can schools be held totally responsible for the radical social and cultural changes that accompany economic and political changes related to technological production and ideological conflict, although all these processes are intimately related. Schools are sites where social, economic, and political movements are manifested, but they remain educational institutions. This book, therefore, focuses on the educational functions of teaching. All the authors have a commitment to schooling as a means to enhance people’s social and economic prospects, and believe that this commitment is most readily accomplished in the ambit of a truly educational environment. What is wrong with schools and teaching might be revealed more effectively by closely examinating of the real-life experience of people in educational settings and by focusing on the quality of the teaching-learning activities therein.

We do not intend by these words to add our voices to the “ain’t it horrible” genre of criticism that has recently targeted schools. Nor do we seek to denigrate the many dedicated, creative teachers, professors, and community educators who bring joy to the lives of their students and colleagues or the schools that actively enrich the lives of the communities they serve. Our assumption is not that schools are defective or that teachers are inadequate, but that they often fail to reach their full educational potential by remaining trapped within the boundaries of conventional or customary practice. Our accounts suggest that relatively minor modifications to the style, structure, and organization of school and classroom life might dramatically enhance students’ educational experience and teachers’ professional lives. A community-based, reflective approach to teaching promises to open people to their full human potential and to provide an education that enhances the quality of life in a truly democratic community.

We begin this book, then, with the proposition that people can enrich their understanding of teaching by reconceptualizing how they think about processes of learning. The interpretations in this book emerge from our own classroom experiences and are encompassed in narratives that describe how new ways of thinking about teaching emerged from processes of reflection and discovery incorporated into a community-based research class. The narratives reveal how we came to see as educationally problematic what we had previously experienced as ordinary and how we came to articulate a model of teaching that was not only rewarding in a personal sense, but also provided possibilities for renewing and revitalizing our own professional practice. These new ways of portraying teaching, we believe, are not only germane to educational institutions, but are significant in the broader contexts of community and corporate practice.

REVISITING THE EVERYDAY LIFE OF SCHOOLS

The everyday life of schools is such an ordinary part of social life that people tend to accept what goes on there unquestioningly. Problems are usually interpreted as personal problems relevant to individuals or their particular situations. What is rarely understood is that many problems arise from the inbuilt complexities of social life, are part of the very fabric of institutional life, and are rarely apprehended because they are so ordinary.

Teaching as a profession has evolved in response to the demands of modern societies to educate their citizenry. The modern school is so pervasive an institution that its basic forms are readily recognizable in almost any social context. From the Arctic to the tropics, on any continent, the traditional processes of schooling are a taken-for-granted part of modern social life. Not only do schools exist for the purposes of education, but the forms in which schooling is enacted are so insitutionalized, so heavily ritualized, that they pass without comment. Schools organize groups of like-aged children into classes meeting at specific times, under the direction of an adult teacher who arranges a curriculum and ensures that students learn its content. Education takes place, in other words, in specific, time-honored ways that were laid down when mass education, designed for small children, was instituted in the 18th and 19th centuries. Teachers control what is to be learned, how it is to be learned, by whom, when, and where. Students learn what is given to them and are tested and ranked according to their performance. Parents have a great deal of interest in this ranking procedure, which affects the future life chances of their progeny.

On the surface these processes of teaching and learning are relatively unproblematic and require teachers merely to organize sets of knowledge, plan learning processes that enable learners to acquire knowledge, and use assessment procedures to evaluate the learning. At one level, the problems of teaching focus on ways that individuals who do not learn may be led or made to learn. The apparent simplicity of these processes, however, masks an intricate and complex web of issues that are characteristic of any social activity. Not only must teachers deal with large numbers of students with diverse individual personalities and cultural characteristics, for instance, but the education they provide is enmeshed in the massively complex administrative machinery that makes up the education system.

To deal with this complexity, education, or more correctly, schooling, has become enshrined in a relatively simple set of teaching-learning procedures and fairly predictable patterns of organization. Administrators, teachers, parents, and children enact schooling in traditional ways generally accepted as right and proper. The organizational machinery of the school maintains the cycles of activity in forms that fit the ongoing demands of modern social life. Courses, classes, timetables, tests, examinations, grades, and graduation mesh with occupational credentials, child-care facilities, parental occupations, national holidays, state legislation, and so on. In these circumstances teachers often feel tightly bound to the ongoing conventions of school life and continue to arrange their classrooms accordingly, even when they experience discomfort and discontent. To the extent that they feel bound by the system, they experience stress and frustration and fail to realize the potential of their professional lives.

When schooling or education is described in the academic or professional literature it is usually embodied in terms that focus attention on social and technical functions—providing educational credentials, ranking students according to merit, preparing people for the occupational world, socialization, skills development. This emphasis tends to restrict the practice of education to its more functional, technical dimensions. Teaching can become achingly boring when there is an overemphasis on these features of educational life. Teachers spend many hours of mindless grading in order to “assess” student “performance” and rank students according to their “achievements. ” They can also engage in mind-numbingly repetitive presentations that cover the same material, class after class, year after year. Teaching can be a problematic activity.

REORIENTING THE WAY WE THINK ABOUT TEACHING

As many experienced and dedicated teachers know, however, teaching is much more than a mechanical routine. Teaching can be a dynamic process that encompasses the broad dimensions of human experience related to community life and to the “whole person. ” In recent times some scholars have pointed to the need to reorient the way people think and write about teaching so that language and thought encompass this broader perspective.

Aoki (1992), for instance, questioned his own understanding of teaching: “I have become more sensitive to the seductive hold of the scientific, technological ethos that enframes education, and thereby our understandings of teaching … [and] to seek a way to be more properly attuned, not only to see but also to hear more deeply and fully the silent call of our vocation, teaching (p. 17).”

Aoki wrote of the need to move past layers of understanding that identifies teaching solely in terms of its outcomes or that engages theoretic and scientific views focused solely on teaching techniques, strategies, and skills. He discussed of the need to refle...