a.
Coming to Ethnography from a Background in Teaching
Ben Rampton, King's College
London (ben.rampton@kcl.ac.uk)
What difference does it make to
an educational ethnography if the researcher has been a teacher? And what
if s/he hasn't? Compared with, say, an anthropologist who's studying
education, is an ex-school teacher more likely to
* associate 'macro-processes'
more with policy than history, and to limit their generalisations to particular
institutions?
* be driven by frustration and
impatience rather than just a 'contrastive insight', and to worry more about
irrelevance to real-world practice than disciplinary validity/recognition?
* over-privilege agency (drawing
on a deeply ingrained optimism about the potential productivity of (pedagogic)
interaction)?
* mix up 'ought' and 'is'
(prescription & description), and take notions like 'the negotiation of
meaning' and 'dialogicality' as phenomena to be measured/assessed empirically
rather than as philosophical assumptions?
How far are tendencies like
these endemic to a linguistic ethnography (LE) based in applied linguistics (AL)
rather than sociology or anthropology? Or do they instead tune to the
post-structuralist/post-modern moment, where old boundaries between paradigms
and between theory-and-practice are falling away? AL-based LE
might look might look hybrid compared with (certain kinds of) anthropology, but
what if it's set next to cultural studies?
b. The
potential contribution of Linguistic Ethnography to Vygotskian studies of talk
and learning in school.
Janet Maybin, Open University (j.maybin@open.ac.uk)
In this paper I shall revisit a
number of Vygotskian and neo-Vygotskian concepts which have been influential in
the study of language and learning in classrooms, and argue that Linguistic
Ethnography can be used together with these concepts to extend, augment and
deepen understanding of the role of talk in the development of students'
knowledge and understanding. Vygotsky's
placing of 'the word' at the centre of the dialectical process between inner
consciousness and the outer social world suggests that processes of mental
learning mediated through language are also processes of enculturation into, and
action upon, a particular socio-cultural context. Thus the 'zone of
proximal development' has been described as the place where culture and
cognition create each other (Cole 1985). However, while the close connection
between culture and language has been examined in studies of language
acquisition in young children, the application of neo-Vygotskian concepts such
as appropriation and scaffolding in studies of talk in the classroom has tended
to be tightly framed by specific pedagogic criteria and educationally
institutionalised notions of competence. I shall argue that approaches from
linguistic ethnography can be used within a broad Vygotskian framework to
develop a more complex and comprehensive understanding of the role of context
and the influence of wider social struggles on local activities within the
classroom. Linguistic ethnography can also be used to develop a deeper
understanding of the meaning of classroom interactions for the different
participants and a clearer sense of the emic perspectives of students and their
motivations and understandings in relation to educational and other activities
in school.
Cole, M. (1985) 'The zone of
proximal development: where culture and cognition create each other' in Wertsch,
J. (ed) Culture, Communication and Cognition: Vygotskian perspectives.
Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
c.
Interface? What interface? Reflexivity in linguistics research in multicultural
classrooms
Richard Barwell, University of
Bristol (richard.barwell@bristol.ac.uk)
My research concerns the
participation of bilingual, bicultural students in mainstream classrooms in the
UK. This work involves students from South Asian, East Asian and East African
backgrounds. I have focused on the discursive practices available to such
students in taking part in mathematics classroom interaction. Through the course
of my research, I have become interested in the interface between
me-as-researcher and the students-as-researched. This interface includes the
meeting of diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds within the research
setting. Johnson
(1977, p. 172) defines reflexivity as "the mutual interdependence of
observer or knower to what is seen or known". Such interdependence leads to
methodological questions. If my observations of students and their interaction
are interdependent with me and my prior experience of the world, what is the
status of the claims I then make? How can I investigate the discursive practices
of students, when any such investigation and any report of such an investigation
are themselves constituted by discursive practices of their own? My experience
of discursive practices associated with Asian identity, for example, is likely
to be very different from that of the students involved in my research.
Furthermore, in producing any account of an investigation of Asian identity,
readers of that account will bring their own histories to their interpretation.
Reflexivity, therefore, also concerns an interface between the researcher and
the readers of their research.
In this paper, I draw on an
extract from a transcript in which two students work on a mathematics classroom
task. During the extract, issues of identity become salient, for me and for the
participants. Through a discussion of the role of identity in the interaction in
and around the transcript extract, I explore how the reflexive
inter-relationship between the various participants (including conference
delegates) blurs the interface between researcher and researched.
Johnson, J. M. (1977)
Ethnomethodology and existential sociology. In Douglas, J. D. and Johnson, J. M.
(Eds.) Existential Sociology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
d.
Challenging family literacy pedagogy through linguistic ethnography
Kate Pahl, University of
Sheffield (k.pahl@sheffield.ac.uk)
Family literacy in the UK is
connected to a particular pedagogical model of literacy which has sometimes been
critiqued (Pitt 2000). In England, it has not been strongly linked to
ethnographies of literacy practices, unlike in Scotland where there is a
stronger connection between research on literacy practices and educational
practice (Heywood 2000). This presentation explores the interface between family
literacy programmes, which in England are funded through the Basic Skills
Agency, often set in schools and developed with parents and young children, and
linguistic ethnography with families, often conducted in out of school, home and
community settings. The presentation asked whether it is useful to work at that
interface, and who benefits from the experience. Drawing on a two-year study of
communicative practices in families, and on the researcher's experience as a
family literacy tutor, the presentation argues that the ethnographic imagination
can offer a challenge to the pedagogy of family literacy as taught in English
school settings. Data from both family literacy and out of school settings will
be explored using contextual frameworks from both family literacy pedagogy and
ethnographic work in homes. By situating the focus of the presentation on the
interface between pedagogy and ethnography, the relationship between the two can
be explored. The presentation will ask how useful the 'lens' of the practitioner
is to the 'lens' of the researcher, (and vice versa) and how this benefits
research informants and family literacy students. It will argue that it is
possible to look both ways - to have a simultaneous vision which both accounts
for the ethnographic lens and develops pedagogy and practice.
Pitt, K. (2000) 'Family
Literacy: a Pedagogy for the Future?' in Barton, D., Hamilton M., and Ivanic, R.
Situated Literacies: Reading and Writing in Context London: Routledge.
Heywood, J. (2000) Involving
Parents in Early Literacy. Edinburgh: City of Edinburgh Council
Part 2: 50 minute workshop led
by 20 minute paper (abstract below)
Issues in
research training for linguistic ethnography: Training for practitioner
researchers in an ethnographic research project
Rachel Hodge and Karin Tusting,
Lancaster University
Over the past year, we have been
working with the "Adult Learner's Lives" (ALL) project, one of the
research projects funded by the National Research and Development Centre for
Adult Literacy, Numeracy and ESOL. The ALL Project is an ethnographic
study which brings together detailed work with adult learners about the meanings
of learning adult literacy, numeracy and ESOL in their lives, with analysis of
audio- and video-recorded data on teaching and learning events.
A key part of the process has
been working with six teacher-researcher fellows, who were appointed to work
with the project for one day a week over
a period of a year. They have each engaged in research projects related to
their own interests and professional concerns, under the broad umbrella of the
ALL project.
The fellowship has involved
research training of two kinds: participation in a distance learning diploma in
research and evaluation in adult basic education, coupled with a partnership and
apprenticeship model where teacher-researchers met regularly with one of the
three full-time ethnographers on the project, to discuss the progress of their
own work and to contribute to the development of the Adult Learners' Lives
project more generally.
In this session we will talk
about our experiences with working in this way and the issues that have been
raised through engaging in this process. We feel this will stimulate
discussion about what is necessary and what is useful for research training in
linguistic ethnography, particularly by bringing to light similarities and
differences with research training in more conventional academic settings, such
as postgraduate courses.
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