Methodological Developments in Ethnography, Volume 12 (Studies in Educational Ethnography)

PREFACE Ethnography has become one of the major methods of researching educational settings. Its key strength is its e...

Author: Geoffrey Walford

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PREFACE

Ethnography has become one of the major methods of researching educational settings. Its key strength is its emphasis on understanding the perceptions and cultures of the people and organisations studied. Through prolonged involvement with those who are being studied, the ethnographic researcher is able gradually to enter their world and gain an understanding of their lives. Each volume of Studies in Educational Ethnography focuses on a particular theme relating to the ethnographic investigation of education. Most of the volumes have been closely linked to an annual 2-day residential conference which explores various elements of ethnography and its application to education and schooling. The series of Ethnography and Education conferences began in the late 1970s, and was originally held at St. Hilda’s College, Oxford University. The series later moved to Warwick University, back to the Department of Educational Studies, University of Oxford in 1996, and ﬁnally returning to St. Hilda’s College in 2004. Unusually, this present volume collects together papers that were specially commissioned rather than being presented at this annual conference. They are selected on the basis of their high quality, their coherence as a group and their contribution they make to debates about ethnographic methodology. They do not present one coherent view of how ethnography should be conducted but, rather, present a range of sometimes competing arguments and developments. The series recognises that the nature of ethnography is contested, and this is taken to be a sign of its strength and vitality. While the idea that the term can be taken to be almost synonymous with qualitative research is rejected, chapters are included that draw upon a broad range of methodologies that are embedded within a long and detailed engagement with those people and organisations studied. Geoffrey Walford

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INTRODUCTION What counts as ethnography and what counts as good ethnographic methodology are both highly contested. This volume brings together chapters presenting a diversity of views on some of the current debates and developments in ethnographic methodology. It does not try to present a single coherent view but, through its heterogeneity, illustrates the strength and impact of debate. In the ﬁrst chapter, Amar Dhand addresses the problem of access from a learning theory perspective. It suggests that Lave and Wenger’s ‘legitimate peripheral participation’ is a suitable lens to understand the interpersonal dynamics when a researcher enters a site and attempts to gain an inside perspective. Basing his discussion on his own research of a group of heroin addicts in India, he proposes that on ﬁrst arrival the ethnographer is assigned to designated roles that are salient to participants. Subsequently, through a negotiation of identity meanings, the ethnographer and participants create ‘new’ roles that are legitimatized to the group. Finally, with key informants, the ethnographer and informant engage in mutual educative processes where each can ‘read’ and teach the other. While he acknowledges the limitations of applying the concept of legitimate peripheral participation to questions of access, he argues that the theory offers a unique insight to processes that are at the core of the ethnographic experience. Harry Wolcott’s short chapter delves deeper into one of the commonly accepted attributes of ethnography – the criterion of ‘intimate, long-term acquaintance’. Basing his discussion on his well-known experience and account of ‘the sneaky kid’, he asks: ‘In ethnographic ﬁeldwork, just how intimate is intimate?’ In the next chapter, Susan James argues that participant observation as a data collection technique provides for a rich encounter and that the potential to meet people and learn about their lives and experiences knows no bounds. This chapter focuses on the experiences of a researcher working as an apprentice in three different kitchens for a doctoral study. The decision to be a participant observer rather than a nonparticipant observer when researching learning in the workplace is discussed and the dichotomy of researcher and worker is highlighted. Anecdotes are provided to explain the experiences of participant observation in terms of identity, language, ix

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uniform, acceptance, and initiation procedures while conducting research on learning in the workplace. Nick Hopwood’s chapter explores the different roles researchers can adopt in their ﬁeldwork, making speciﬁc reference to a school-based ethnographic study. The concept of territories is introduced, demonstrating that research sites may comprise a number spatially, temporally, and/or socially deﬁned settings. He argues that different roles may be appropriate in these various settings; ethnographic research will be strengthened by an understanding of the complex combinations of and ﬂux between roles that may occur within short periods of time in a single research site. Martin Forsey’s chapter explores the tendency for critical educational ethnographers to produce accounts of schooling in which teachers either disappear or are represented as mere cardboard cutout ﬁgures. There are three main aims for this chapter: (1) explaining the relative lack of attention to teachers in criticalist accounts of schooling; (2) exploring the implications of these oversights for qualitative research in schools; and (3) suggesting ways in which the researcher’s mindset might shift to address the issues arising from our currently ‘averted gaze’. Advocating a mindset attuned to the critical appreciation of social life, Forsey suggest a need to heighten the importance of clear and precise documentation of the power-ﬁlled social relations characterizing educational settings as an important element of the criticalist project. Further to this, he argues for the need to position ourselves in ways that allow us to better see, feel, and evaluate some of the multitude of interactions that take place in schools and their surrounds. The chapter by Sue Walters sets out the differences that she sees between ‘ethnography’ and ‘case study’ and the reasons for choosing to do case studies using ‘ethnographic methods’ for a recent research study. After considering the bewildering number of ways in which ‘ethnography’ and ‘case study’ have been deﬁned and differentiated and how these differing deﬁnitions were resolved for the purposes of describing and reporting her own research, she explores what ethnographic methods can bring to a case study and why doing case studies of particular pupils rather than of particular classrooms is an important research decision. She then discuss how a single ethnographic case study (or a set of single ethnographic case studies) can be of use outside of the speciﬁc micro settings of their production, thus addressing concerns about the generalizability and usefulness of ethnographic case study research. The next chapter by Eric Tucker puts forward a new role for ethnography in social and educational research. He argues that abstract measurement is at the center of much educational research, from tests, to observational scales, to questionnaires. Contemporary psychometrics and related

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statistical techniques are the preeminent methodological approaches with regard to the development of measurement instruments. Yet, in recent years, the variety and intensity of the demands social scientists and policy makers place on indicators have grown dramatically. Furthermore, researchers are beginning to describe instances where there seems to exist a substantial gap between established measurement instruments and the social phenomena they intend to measure. This article contends that the most prominent existing procedures to secure valid indicators tend to overemphasize veriﬁcation and correspondingly de-emphasize empirical research that aims toward generation and modiﬁcation. It proceeds to make the case that the features and strengths of ethnography speciﬁcally, and qualitative research more generally, make it uniquely suited to contribute to the development of new indicators and the improvement of existing indicators. To provide some warrants for these arguments, this paper ﬁrst offers a brief reading of the state of the practice of social science empirical research on measurement. It then turns to a speciﬁc example of this author’s ethnographic research project that aims to improve indicators of social capital formation, in the hopes of providing an exemplary instance of how ethnographic methodologies might contribute to the generation and modiﬁcation of new, quality measurement instruments. Kristen H. Perry’s chapter raises many important questions about the ways in which ethical Institutional Review Boards control what and how it is possible to research. She focuses on the particular problem of anonymity, which is seen as the default option by most Institutional Review Boards, yet is highly problematic in practice. Not only are there many difﬁculties in maintaining anonymity in an increasingly electronic information age, but also some participants actually want to have their names included in the research reports. She argues that the model of research enshrined within Institutional Review Boards’ beliefs and procedures is outdated and inappropriate for much qualitative research. She draws on her own research among Southern Sudanese refugees to illustrate her argument. Geoffrey Walford’s chapter returns to the old problem of generalization and ethnographic studies. He argues that the overgeneralization of ethnographic case studies has been to disadvantage of the development of ethnography as a methodology and ﬁeld of study within education, and that ethnographers should avoid attempts to generalize. He describes and discusses some of his own studies and argues that their utility and merit (to the extent that they might have both) depends on their uniqueness rather than their wider applicability. He further argues that authors should name their research sites wherever possible to try to ensure that readers do not overgeneralize.

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The chapter by Dalia Aralas focuses on the need for the ethnographic eye to broaden its ﬁeld of vision in grappling with particular issues in some kinds of qualitative research. Speciﬁcally, Aralas argues for the considerable value of an approach that differs from but complements conventional video ethnographic approaches. To illustrate, she discusses a study which adopted a different video ethnographic approach to pursue its objective of investigating the nature of mathematical imagination. This made possible the generation of different kinds of data that, in turn, facilitated an intensive interrogation of the initial framework of the study. It is argued that the resultant data analysis opened up opportunities for a continuous reconstruction of a more layered alternative framework that led to a reconﬁguration of the phenomenon under study. She argues that while extending video approaches might be seen to partially undermine prevailing views, the consequent production of alternative accounts and frameworks make worthwhile contributions to our understanding. Gretar Marino´sson’s chapter is unusual in that it is based upon an ethnographic study of one school conducted by an educational psychologist. Marino´sson reﬂects on these different ways of doing educational research and describes his own procedures. He follows a grounded theory approach and argues that it is possible to unearth the ground rules of education through ethnography using methods of data generation based on a reciprocal relationship between the whole and its parts. The behavior of individuals thus bears witness to these ground rules and the institution’s structure and classiﬁcation activity. In this way it might be said that the drop merges into the ocean and vice versa. Heewon Chang’s chapter focuses on how to conduct rigorous autoethnographies. Autoethnography is an ethnographic inquiry that utilizes the autobiographic materials of the researcher as the primary data. Chang is keen to emphasize that autoethnography is different from other selfnarrative writings such as autobiography and memoir, in that it is based on cultural analysis and interpretation of the researcher’s behaviors, thoughts, and experiences in relation to others in society. She argues that autoethnography should be ethnographical in its methodological orientation, cultural in its interpretive orientation, and autobiographical in its content orientation. She discusses the deﬁnition of this inquiry method, methodology, and beneﬁts of autoethnography as well as some of the pitfalls to avoid when doing autoethnography. Geoffrey Walford Editor

USING LEARNING THEORY TO UNDERSTAND ACCESS IN ETHNOGRAPHIC RESEARCH Amar Dhand INTRODUCTION This paper addresses the problem of access in ethnographic research from a learning theory perspective. It extends a recent symbolic interactionist approach to the problem (Harrington, 2003) by conceptualizing access as a process of ‘legitimate peripheral participation’, broadly understood as the processes that enable ‘newcomers’ to become part of the sociocultural practices of a community (Lave & Wenger, 1991). I present evidence from my journey of gaining access to three social structures of a group of heroin addicts in India: a non-governmental organization (NGO), a small group of ‘brothers’, and a friendship with a key informant. Using this evidence, I argue that the ethnographer negotiates identity roles, acquires an understanding of the ‘rules’ of interaction, and engages in educative processes that make him or her a legitimate peripheral participant. Harrington (2003) deﬁnes access as ‘the process by which researchers gather data via interpersonal relationships with participants’ (p. 593). Her review of the methodology literature reveals a fragmented understanding of the processes, and she attempts to integrate the formulations with a symbolic interactionist framework. With particular emphasis on social identity Methodological Developments in Ethnography Studies in Educational Ethnography, Volume 12, 1–25 Copyright r 2007 by Elsevier Ltd. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 1529-210X/doi:10.1016/S1529-210X(06)12001-X

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and self-presentation theories, she reveals four relationship patterns in the access process: (1) Ethnographers are initially deﬁned according to categories salient to participants; (2) Ethnographers attempt to share and enhance similarities; (3) Participants must validate the ethnographers’ identity claims; (4) The extent of difference between the identities of the ethnographers and participants determines the need for inside informants or covert strategies. Lave and Wenger’s (1991) thinking is useful because it conceives changes in Harrington’s ‘interpersonal relationships’ as a social learning process. They suggest that social relations change during direct involvement in activities (p. 94). Moreover, embedded within these activities and its constituent relationships is the ‘place of knowledge’ or the ‘learning curriculum’ that is only mastered through participation in the activities and engagement in the relationships. This leads them to the assertion that ‘learning occurs through centripetal participation in the learning curriculum of the ambient community’ (p. 100). Such a notion of knowledge acquisition through participation is helpful because it provides insight to the acquisition process (‘access’) and the knowledge acquired (‘data’) by ethnographers as they become participant observers. The ethnographer’s journey and knowledge has a relationship to the journey and knowledge of a ‘newcomer’ or ‘apprentice’ who is learning to participate: From a broadly peripheral perspective, apprentices gradually assemble a general idea of what constitutes the practice of the community. This uneven sketch of the enterprise (available if there is legitimate access) might include who is involved; what they do; what everyday life is like; how masters talk, walk, work, and generally conduct their lives; how people who are not part of the community of practice interact with it; what other learners are doing; and what learners need to learn to become full practitioners. It includes an increasing understanding of how, when, and about what old-timers collaborate, collude, and collide, and what they enjoy, dislike, respect, and admire (p. 95).

As is indicated by the qualiﬁcation ‘(available if there is legitimate access)’, Lave and Wenger are also interested in access, but from a different perspective. As one of their central issues (pp. 100–105), they explore access in terms of transparency of the community’s activities and sequestration of the ‘newcomer’. In their analysis, the focus is on the community enabling or limiting access; the ‘newcomer’ negotiating or creating opportunities for access is relatively unexplored. Such inherent ‘barrier’ mechanisms are relevant to ethnographic access, but this paper focuses on the ethnographer’s negotiation of those ‘barriers’. Other methodology literature has not been unmindful of this direction of thinking. ‘Apprenticeship as a ﬁeld method’ (Coy, 1989; Downey, 2005) and

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‘learning the ropes’ (Shafﬁr & Stebbins, 1991) have received some attention. Murray Wax (1967) is particularly articulate about such ideas: y the student begins ‘outside’ the interaction, confronting behaviors he ﬁnds bewildering and inexplicable: the actors are oriented to a world of meanings that the observer does not grasp. Thus, with a strange language, at ﬁrst all is mumbo-jumbo, then patterns begin to emerge, and the student proceeds from halting discourse (stumbling over new phonemes and translating inwardly from his mother tongue) to the ﬂuency of one increasingly at home in the language and situation y gradually he comes to be able to categorize peoples (or relationships) and events y (p. 325).

However, the apprenticeship literature tends to focus on the ethnographer taking the role of an ‘apprentice’ usually in an organized situation (weaving, shamanism, dance classes, etc.). It does not consider a more diverse set of roles in informal, non-organized contexts. Moreover, the ‘learning the ropes’ accounts, including Wax’s comments, usually do not utilize learning theories and remain more anecdotal, as Harrington has also identiﬁed. Although primarily focused on access, this paper also offers a unique commentary on ‘legitimate peripheral participation’. Ethnographers are distinctive ‘newcomers’ because they are more cognizant and reﬂexive of their journey. Therefore, they chronicle the experience of ‘centripetal participation’ more directly. In this way, my journey has illuminated some points for consideration in Lave and Wenger’s theory. First, the theory may be strengthened by exploring the robust reciprocal effects of the researcher or ‘newcomer’ on the current ‘old-timers’, a suggestion recently supported in the literature (Davies, 2005; Fuller, Hodkinson, Hodkinson, & Unwin, 2005). Second, the theory should be considerate of the diversity of journeys that ‘newcomers’ may experience. For instance, the journey of the researcher to become a ‘full participant’ (and not a ‘complete participant’ as understood in the methodology literature) is quite different from the journey of other ‘newcomers’ in this social context. This paper ﬁrst provides some contextual details of the general ﬁeld methods, setting, and participants. It then describes my journey of gaining access through exploring relationships with NGO staff members, ‘brothers’ from a small group, and a key informant. Finally, I discuss some of the insight gleaned from these data in relation to Harrington’s suggested relationship patterns, and the suitability of implicating Lave and Wenger’s learning theories to those patterns.

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GENERAL FIELD METHODS This paper derives from a seven-month ethnography involving three ﬁeldwork periods over a span of 12 months. The ethnography explored organized (Dhand, 2006b) and naturalistic peer learning patterns (Dhand, 2006a) among a group of heroin addicts in Yamuna Bazaar, New Delhi. I choose to name the site to prevent results from being falsely generalized (Walford, 2002). The principal methods were participant observation and semi-structured interviews. All ﬁeldwork was conducted in Hindi and English without an interpreter. A native Hindi speaker transliterated and transcribed all Hindi tape recordings into Roman Hindi. A different native Hindi speaker was consulted in translating quotations for this paper. Analysis for this paper was aided by the use of a qualitative software program called TamsAnalyzer (Weinstein, 2004). Sections from ﬁeldnotes and transcripts were ﬁrst selected and coded with the code methodology. Then, segments relating to inter-relationships important for data generation were recoded as methodology > access. These data were then organized into three groups representing relationships with different social structures in the group and recoded as methodology > access > NGO, methodology > access > brothers, and methodology > access > Baba. These categories were then analyzed manually for more detailed discrimination and ﬁner analysis of emergent themes. Items constituting similar themes were then placed together and compared using the cut and paste function of a word processor. This led to a consolidation of the ﬁnal thematic structure in each of the three major categories.

SETTING Yamuna Bazaar was a lively market area in Old Delhi, centred upon mostly Hindu religious activities. The area was home to one of India’s most sacred temples (Hanuman Mandir) and its largest crematorium (Nigam Bodh Ghat). Believed to be referenced in the 300 BC epic poem Mahabharata, both places were located on the sacred Yamuna River and had deep cultural meanings of piety, charity, and the end of life. This religious milieu deﬁned many of the social activities including parading dead bodies down the main road for cremation, giving food and money to the poor after prayer routines in the temples, and conducting auspicious rituals on the Yamuna River. The ancient area, however, was also undergoing modern development. The construction of the Kashmiri Gate metro station and bridge intersecting

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main commuter lines had caused widespread urban advancements. The Yamuna Pusta, a large illegal colony known for its high criminal and drug activity, had recently been destroyed with all residents forcefully relocated. Roads were being remade, parks were being cleaned up, and local police were more strictly displacing homeless people from the footpaths. For heroin addicts, the clash of ancient religious elements with modern development dynamics offered both support and brutality. They were aided by free food, shelter options, and health services from a multitude of religious and non-proﬁt organizations. Conversely, they were often the victims of high criminal activity, police abuse, and stigmatization. Survival, therefore, required learning how to take advantage of the supportive services without falling prey to constant threats and hardships.

PARTICIPANTS The participants were a group of active, rehabilitating, and rehabilitated heroin addicts associated to the SHARAN NGO in Yamuna Bazaar. Within this group, there was an internal structure of NGO staff members, small ‘brotherhoods’ of active heroin addicts, and dyad relationships between addicts. This paper describes gaining access to each of these internal structures by exploring the interpersonal relationships with approximately 50 NGO staff members, a 6-member ‘brotherhood’, and 1 key informant. The NGO staff members constituted most of the rehabilitating and rehabilitated addicts who were formerly street users in the area. The demographics of the NGO staff were, therefore, similar to the active addicts in terms of the following characteristics: mostly male, mean age of 30-years old (ranging from 15 to 60 years old), 3:1 Hindu to Muslim ratio, mostly migrated from neighbouring villages but have lived in Delhi for approximately 5 years, live temporarily in local shelters or shared quarters, and mostly unmarried and estranged from family. The active addicts were different from the staff in terms of being regular users, usually homeless, working as trash/paper collectors, rickshaw drivers, or odd job helpers, involved in both organized and random stealing, and commonly in and out of jail. Most of the participants were experienced poly-drug addicts who had a history of using substances for at least ﬁve years. The two major heroinbased drugs were (1) brown sugar/smack, an unreﬁned powdered form smoked on tin-foil and available from street dealers, and (2) injection, an intravenously administered cocktail of drugs labelled ‘norphine’, ‘avil’, and ‘diazepam’ (opioid alkaloid, anti-histamine, and CNS depressant), and

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available at local pharmacies. A using addict would not utilize both concurrently, but would readily switch based on cost. Most using addicts ‘chased’ or ‘ﬁxed’ at least two times per day, usually at the expense of food, shelter, and clothing. The more ‘recreational’ substances used concurrently or during intervals in between major drugs were solotion (solvents), ganja (marijuana), charas (chewing marijuana), nitrazepam tablets (CNS depressant), and daaru (alcohol), although this was not a complete list.

PLAYING A PART IN THE NGO The process of accessing this group of heroin addicts began by establishing a role in the NGO that provided services for the participants. In this section, I describe the evolution of identities that I performed from ‘international guest’ to ‘NGO worker’ to ‘interviewer’ and ‘observer’. Each transition in this process was marked by disagreement with my performance and the role’s associated expectations. This dissonance led to a re-negotiation of my identity in which individuals legitimized my new position. Interestingly, in the course of co-constructing and legitimizing the ‘interviewer’ and ‘observer’ roles, participants began to enact their renditions of these roles and discussed their ‘ﬁndings’ with me. Although a key stage in gaining access, the NGO-associated roles also limited access to relationships that were important to my research questions. Therefore, over time, I began with transition into roles with other group structures. During my pilot study in March 2004, I navigated the network of NGOs in Delhi to learn about target populations and the offered services. I searched the Internet and directories, contacted leaders through e-mail, and visited various centres and events. At one of the events sponsored by POND (Partnership of NGOs in Delhi), I met Derek, one of the leaders of SHARAN, who invited me to observe the harm reduction services for heroin addicts in Yamuna Bazaar. When I visited the SHARAN Dropin Centre, I was an ‘international guest’, a role to which the participants were adapted. Because the organization received international funding, and conducted research in collaboration with Johns Hopkins University, the members were used to visitors inspecting the services. My host, Derek, spent half-a-day introducing me to their programs and staff members. He gave me a tour of the facility, explained the services in English, enabled me to observe an education session, and led me through the surrounding parks where I watched addicts actively injecting. He also enabled me to take pictures of the drug sets and equipment by explaining to the addicts that

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I would not photograph them, just their drugs (FN 03.29.04). At this point, my presence was not unusual for the participants. I was another Western voyeur who was being escorted by the leader, perhaps in an attempt to secure funding or programmatic assistance. There was no need to further investigate this short-term visitor. When I returned to the centre in December 2004, Derek and the staff were surprised to see me. Derek stated, ‘Although you had said you would come back, I didn’t think you actually would’. I was no longer following the expectations of a guest: I returned to the site; I was hanging around for full days without the leader, and I was speaking Hindi with the staff and clients. This discordance with role expectations led to a ﬂurry of questions that aimed to re-position me into a meaningful role. Although my responses to these questions aimed to establish a researcher’s identity, my efforts were thwarted by more pervasive ideas about identities and motives. For example, when I attempted to explain that I was doing research on how friends learn from each other to a group of staff, one of the members announced to the group: ‘He’s thinking about setting up a new Centre in his country and came here to get ideas’. The other members nodded in agreement with the statement (FN 12.21.04). Similarly, when I attempted to explain that I was born in Canada, but my parents were from India, this was interpreted as: ‘He’s an Indian who left India and is living in Canada’ (FN 12.21.04). As this statement reveals, there were some intrinsic characteristics that also contributed to my role designations. Speciﬁcally, my Indian origin and appearance (mid-twenties age, male sex, foreign Hindi accent, single marital status) were a unique set of characteristics that needed interpretation. One such justiﬁcation was that I was ‘an Indian living abroad who had returned to look for an Indian wife’. My intrinsic qualities for the most part, however, could not explain my presence in Yamuna Bazaar socializing with heroin addicts. Although one participant mentioned that he initially thought that I was an addict (FN 02.03.05), most participants explained my membership as an ‘NGO worker’, especially the non-addict, middle-class type who worked with the computers in the back room. This assignment as a ‘worker’ was initially troubling for me because it had interventionist expectations – that I would be providing services for clients on a daily basis. I believed, however, that to force a researcher’s role designation at this stage was neither tactical nor natural, although I would continually remind participants of my research even though they may re-interpret it. Therefore, I accepted the status of an ‘NGO worker’ as one of my roles, and contributed by providing feedback to the staff. As an ‘NGO worker’ without any ofﬁcial responsibilities, my activities included accompanying peer educators on outreach in the surrounding

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areas, sitting with staff members as they provided services at the centre, and participating in idle ‘time pass’ routines such as drinking tea, conversing about daily happenings with addicts, and simply watching and listening to participants. My only informal responsibility was to provide feedback, or commentary, on services. For instance, NGO leaders such as Derek would request my input on educational materials such as new booklets, posters, and videos. They would look for advice and insight from my experience, which I tried to emphasize was very little in the NGO arena. On one occasion, however, I intervened after observing NGO barbers not cleaning shaving equipment or changing blades during their services with the clients (FN 12.27.04). My actions included informing on-duty NGO leaders, researching, and explaining the literature on contracting blood-borne viruses to Derek, and conducting a 10-min presentation on the topic for the staff upon his request (FN 12.28.04). Following this instance, which I felt I had both a role and an ethical obligation to act upon, I did not make any more presentations. Rather, my feedback came in more discreet conversations with individual members. For example, when a worker publicly disclosed the HIV status of a client, I took him aside and explained why that may not be a good idea (FN 02.17.05). Over time, it became clear that there was discordance with my role as an ‘NGO worker’ and its associated expectations: I spent little time in the back room with the computers; I would not keep a regular schedule, and I was more interested in listening and talking to active users than most NGO workers. My anthropological tools, including my notepad and tape recorder, also became identifying symbols. Participants became interested in what I was writing down or why their recordings would be useful. With new inspiration, I began to explain that I was writing down stories so that I could understand what was happening and then describe it to people in my country. Similarly, I would explain how I would listen to the recordings, think about them, and then ‘play’ certain parts for the outside world. Some participants became excited about the possibility of being recorded for an outside audience. My topic of ‘learning’, however, remained a mystery to most participants who would again re-interpret my statements into constructs such as ‘he is watching how drug users live’. Nonetheless, my positions as ‘observer’ and ‘interviewer’ were becoming consolidated through these interactions. Some of the peer educators who were keen observers of my activities began to validate and legitimize my presence and actions. In one instance, a peer educator explained to an addict: ‘He has come from Canada to listen to us, and because he is from so far away, your stories are safe with him and will not get to the police’ (FN 01.21.05). Similarly, prior to my ﬁrst

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recorded interview, two peer educators gained the participant’s permission by endorsing me as a person from ‘outside’ who has come to talk to clients and learn about SHARAN’s services (FN 12.29.04). As these examples reveal, speciﬁc supporters began to legitimize my questions as benign and conﬁdential, and my identity as deserving openness and, perhaps, respect. Additionally, in the process of facilitating my research, some participants were beginning to play the role of ‘co-investigators’. Participants who were co-constructing the roles of ‘interviewer’ and ‘observer’ with me also began enacting these researcher roles. For example, one staff member devised strategies about how to collect data: 1) Observe before 8am to see addicts before and after their ﬁrst ﬁx; 2) Listen to conversations at the night shelter where there is a more relaxed atmosphere; 3) Follow some of the ‘smarter’ clients to see how they talk to their friends (FN 12.22.04).

Similarly, in a number of instances including my ﬁrst recorded interview, participants would ask questions and, occasionally, conduct full ‘interviews’ for my beneﬁt: Rohit and a self-appointed ‘translator’ began asking questions like when did you start, what did you use, and where do you inject as if these were the questions that I would be interested in. There is no doubt that I am but it’s funny that they assume that this is my project and they are asking on my behalf. It’s also interesting that these interactions automatically become interview interrogations of one or two users (FN 12.30.04).

One participant also became an ‘observer’ who reported his ‘ﬁndings’ in connection with my current research aims: After I described my current project of observing the switch [from smoking to injecting] in the park, Derek said he observed a peer interaction in which one user was really looking for an injection cocktail but couldn’t ﬁnd one for the set price. Another drug user then said, ‘I’ll take you there’. The man said, ‘No, you’ll give me today and then what will happen tomorrow’. Derek thinks he said this because he and others were present and listening (FN 03.02.05).

It is important to note that none of these instances were coordinated or encouraged by me prior to the event; I did not recruit ‘interviewers’ or ‘observers’ for my research. Rather, in the process of co-constructing my roles with the participants, the members themselves began naturally to enact those roles. These instances, therefore, suggest that the legitimacy process causes shifts in not only the researcher’s role, but also the participants’ roles. Although the role of a liberal ‘NGO worker’ with a co-constructed ‘team of research partners’ was advantageous on multiple levels, there were drawbacks as well. First, as I have reported elsewhere (Dhand, 2006b), peer educators needed to sustain a professional distance from active users to

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maintain a reputation of a ‘clean’ ex-user. I found that this distance was being transferred into my relationship with active users as well. Second, because of expectations that I should only be present with my other ‘colleagues’, I found that I did not ‘ﬁt in’ so well to the context during nonworking hours (FN 08.14.05). Most importantly, I found that my research questions, which were interested in naturalistic learning among active addicts, required a different set of roles than were available with my current identity. Therefore, I underwent a transition period that involved changes in spaces where I spent time, activities that I participated in, and relationships that I fostered. I began to spend less time at the centre, limited my involvement in services such as outreach, and became less connected with staff members. Instead, I became more of a regular in the ‘backstage’ park, played card games, and built friendships with a small group of addicts who began to legitimize my presence as a ‘brother’.

BECOMING A ‘BROTHER’ Small groups of ﬁve to seven addicts would spend idle time together, sleep in the same area, generate income, gather food, and usually, but not always, use drugs together. They would call each other ‘brothers’, occasionally with adjectives such as ‘big brother’ or ‘little brother’. Through a series of legitimizing activities, I began an enculturation process of becoming a ‘brother’ in one small group. This section describes this process highlighting my activities with the participants, knowledge acquired, boundaries of my particular role, justiﬁcation and validation of those boundaries, and legitimacy that participants gained from me. To use Goffman’s (1959) term, the ‘backstage’ area was a public park adjacent to the ‘frontstage’ SHARAN Centre. In this space, addicts congregated, relaxed, socialized, gambled, and used various substances in concealed corners on the periphery. Near the beginning of my ﬁeldwork, my access to the area was limited. The NGO staff typically stayed in the ‘frontstage’ space because it was important for maintaining professional standards including a reputation of being ‘clean’. Therefore, through association, my initial attempts to enter the ‘backstage’ was met with disapproving comments by the staff and curious stares by the addicts. Any attempt to strike up conversations with the addicts was awkward and uncomfortable. A breakthrough occurred when a key informant, with whom I built a friendship in the NGO space, was playing cards in the park one day. I got his attention from the outside railing and asked whether he could teach me

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the game. He agreed and invited me to join the group. After introducing the basic rules to the four-player game called seep, the key informant made me hold his dealt hand of cards. Initially, he would gesture towards a card and instruct me to place it on a particular pile or open space in the middle playing area. Eventually, I would begin to gesture to a card and he would nod afﬁrmatively or negatively, with occasional explanations without tipping off the other players (FN 02.17.05). Although I did not become extremely competent at the game, the apprenticeship activity began to legitimize my presence in the park. My actions of sitting with a small group, watching the card game, and occasionally playing became accepted as part of the social life of the environment. Furthermore, as the participants’ curiosity of me lessened, the activity became an ideal vantage point to observe interactions and activities in the area. As I learned about the range of activities that occurred in the park, I began to participate in as many non-drug related ones as possible: I played cricket with the addicts and street children; I listened to disagreements and verbal ﬁghts that absorbed everyone’s attention, and I participated in ‘gossip’ about daily happenings. Of course, during the ‘gossiping’ sessions, I could not help but ask a few more questions than the others, but I attempted to refrain from disrupting the natural path of the conversation. The topics of these ‘chats’ ranged from complaints about NGO services to health problems of a particular addict to even jokes or stories for entertainment. Topics that were relatively hidden from me at this time, probably because of my lack of participation in drug-related activities, were conversations about illegal income generation and drug-procurement procedures. These topics would cause addicts to use a lower voice or to adjust their body position. Importantly, my presence was not unnoticed by the group: many conversations would be about me. Groups of addicts would ask numerous questions and engage in lengthy dialogue about my comments. In many ways, I embraced this process and answered questions enthusiastically because the sorts of queries and their responses to my answers provided me with insight into the types of issues that were important to the group. Similar to the NGO staff members, questions about my origin, family, and marital status were some of the initial questions. However, unlike the staff, these participants were also interested in street-related aspects of my country such as whether ﬁghts occur between Muslims and Hindus, the degree of cleanliness compared to India, and the variety and effects of the drugs (FN 02.09.05). For many of these questions such as the drugs in my country, I could not provide experience-based answers that satisﬁed the crowd. This would lead to theorizing about the life and culture on the streets of Canada. One

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member explained the use of a drug called ‘crack’ that is placed on the top of the head causing the body to freeze like a statue, which he demonstrated (FN 01.20.05). Over time, I learned about the daily routine that extended past NGO work hours. Once the sun went down, mosquitoes would make the park uninhabitable, so participants would co-ordinate to meet in other places where they would have tea or continue their game. After receiving a few invitations and making safety arrangements, such as having my rickshaw driver parked in the area, I began to join members for tea. During my ﬁrst night visit, I met Imran, a 38-year-old addict who had been in Yamuna Bazaar for 20 years. Immediately, he struck me as a respected senior in the group who was insightful of events and issues. During our conversation, he described criminal activity under the bridge while addicts sleep, the methods of two men in front of us who were planning to steal supplies from the back of rickshaws, and the way that he and his friends removed a dead body from the river one hour ago at the request of the police (FN 08.31.05). My presence with him also stimulated other addicts to approach us and talk about events openly and honestly. One participant communicated that the reason he came to Delhi was to pickpocket to make money to survive (FN 08.31.05). The openness and richness in stories were unparalleled in the study thus far. Participants were discussing topics that were previously off-limits with me. Additionally, on repeated encounters with Imran at the tea stand and the park, I began to notice a consistency to the addicts that gravitated around him, and they began to welcome my company. Through the initial connection with Imran, I began to spend leisurely time with his small group of ‘brothers’ on a regular basis. I would seek out the group in both the park and the tea stand and sit with them, drink tea, watch card games, listen to the radio, and engage in daily conversations. I learned that the ‘brotherhood’ consisted of ﬁve core street addicts and one or two ﬂuctuating ones. All the ‘brothers’ were Muslim, although two, including Imran, had spent many years as Hindu Babas, or holy men, travelling to pilgrimages across India. Although he was not much older than the rest, Imran was referred to as the ‘big brother’ in the group and usually made decisions about activities, timings, and drug use. In addition to the activities that I mentioned above, the group would sleep in the same area and smoke ganja (marijuana) together. The group, however, never used smack as a group, which a member said was because Imran advised against it, although members would do it ‘quietly’ outside of the group (FN 10.10.05). The ‘brotherhood’, therefore, served as a drug deterrent, but was probably

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tolerant of private use by individuals. Throughout my time with the ‘brotherhood’, I retained a privileged status: my tea was always paid for by Imran or other members; my arrival was acknowledged with respectful greetings; individuals became quiet when I talked and never argued with me as they did with each other, and members would admonish any addicts who would ask me for favours or money. The group’s special treatment was complemented with a legitimization of my participation boundaries and eccentric qualities. Most of the ‘brothers’ celebrated my lack of drug use including not taking cigarettes by openly announcing it to curious bystanders. One of the ‘brothers’, named Veer, was particularly vocal in my defence. He explained to another addict in my presence that I do not play cards, smoke ganja, or drink with the ‘brothers’ because I probably do that with ‘brothers’ in my country, but cannot do it here (FN 10.10.05). Similarly, in an admonishment of an addict asking me to help him with NGO services, Veer stated: He is here to meet brothers because of love. He comes here on his own accord to hang out and meet with brothers. He will then tell his brothers [in his country] about the brothers here and how there are good people in Delhi (FN 10.24.05).

These examples illustrate that key limitations of my involvement, namely my non-drug use and inability to provide services, were justiﬁed in local explanations to legitimize my unique role in the group. Similarly, my constant notetaking, which many participants outside of the group associated with police recordkeeping, was interpreted as beneﬁcial for the ‘brothers’: ‘I think this, that our brother writes for our beneﬁt. He does not write to harm us’ (Veer 10.10.05). Moreover, Veer appeared to even understand my research procedures: Veer: You do this: you write down all of our conversations and go home at night. When you write down from here, then at home you go at night, alone, you do it, you write. That my brother did this today. Today, he did this and this. So you write all of it when you go there. And that makes us happy. AD: How did you ﬁgure this out? Veer: You sit with us, get up with us, and you are always writing. So from this I deciphered it. Yes, that our brother writes for us (Veer 10.10.05).

The legitimization process also had reciprocal qualities: the ‘brothers’ seemed to gain legitimacy through my presence with them. Sentiments of love, happiness, and even pride were expressed when the ‘brothers’ described my involvement with them. More than one ‘brother’

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celebrated my connection with their group. During an interview, Veer described how he felt about my presence: That our brother has come close to us from a foreign land. He will do something or other for us, our brother. For this reason, we get happy, by seeing you. It feels good to us. That our brother has come to us from a foreign land. He sits here with us. Because we have seen those types of people, who don’t stand, let alone sit. But you sit and stand with us. It feels good to us. He is our brother. He is also one (Veer 10.10.05).

Acknowledgement of my participation in their lives was also accompanied by an appreciation of my studies and pride for my future potential. Veer continued: When you go home, then our big brother Imran, he remembers you. So following him, we also begin to remember you. This brother tells us that our brother is doing his studies there. He is doing great studies. One day, he will become a good man, a very big man he will become. So we also get happy, that our brother had come close to us at one time. He is doing some good work. We are addicts. But our brother, he is one good man, sure a great man. So, we remember you. So it makes us happy, when our big brother tells us (Veer 10.10.05).

Although it was important for me to gain legitimacy from the group to secure access, my scholarly accomplishments and potential for success seemed to provide legitimacy or even hope for Veer and, perhaps, other members of the group. It was probably the ﬁrst time that they could associate as a ‘brother’ with a person who was not tragically ﬁxed in a world of poverty and addiction. Perhaps through documenting and presenting their lives to ‘brothers’ in my country, I was a vehicle for a type of transcendence for them. Becoming a brother was a gradual process of gaining access to the ‘backstage’ regions, building relationships with key informants such as Imran, and spending copious amounts of leisurely time with one small group of ‘brothers’. In so doing, the ‘brothers’ became advocates of my unique qualities and actions, and, in turn, I became a legitimizing presence for their lives as well.

A FRIENDSHIP WITH BABA Baba was a 33-year-old street addict who became a key informant in the study. My relationship with him was an important means of experiencing and understanding events and issues. Our relationship, therefore, not only provided physical access, but also interpretive access to underlying meanings that were often implicit and subsumed in everyday life. This section will

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describe these aspects of access by delineating the development of our relationship and how it gained interpretive functionality. It highlights initial role-plays of a ‘guide’–‘follower’ where Baba facilitated my viewing and experiencing of events. It follows with descriptions of how we coordinated our daily lives and created new communication strategies to teach and learn from each other. Lastly, it recounts the formation of ‘big brother’–’little brother’ dynamics including protection and planning instances that both facilitated and impeded access to data. Baba was a holy man in appearance. He had a beard and wore a creamcoloured turban, saffron kurta (traditional loose ﬁtting shirt), white dhoti (wrap-around cloth around his waist and legs), beads around his neck, and colourful rings on his deformed ﬁngers. I was, therefore, interested in his reaction to an exorcism that was taking place on the banks of the Yumuna River during the ﬁrst days of my ﬁeldwork. However, our initial attempts at communicating were frustrating: he would speak in a rough street Hindi dialect that I could not understand, and I would reply in formal Hindi that would humour him. Therefore, I chose to stand next to NGO staff members and listen to their commentary instead. However, when the exorcism group returned from the other side of the river on a boat and banked slightly downstream from our ghat (steps leading into the water), Baba gestured to me: Baba follows, looks back at me and nods at me, motioning me to come forward. I don’t know if this is a good idea but I move behind him. We navigate some tight alleys. I catch up to him and he says, ‘look at what they did to her’. We walk up the stairs and down to the main road where we see two auto rickshaws waiting y Baba leads me to the street and tells me to write down the number of the rickshaw (FN 12.27.04).

Baba facilitated an extended observation of the event. He had navigational knowledge about the alleys and cultural understanding about how close to follow and watch the events, all of which he used for my beneﬁt. Moreover, his facilitation of accessing these data was not through verbal explanation, but through silent direction. He became a ‘guide’ and I became a ‘follower’. In subsequent months, Baba guided me through a number of experiences that were difﬁcult and, occasionally, dangerous without his help. In the one instance that I assumed an ambiguous identity, he led me through an observation of how drug cocktails were acquired by injecting drug users. Drug cocktails were ampoules of injection drugs sold by local pharmacies for inﬂated prices to street addicts. I had heard the name and location of one such pharmacy and I wanted to observe the interactions. When I asked Baba for directions, he recognized the naivety of my plans and decided to

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take me. On our way, he reprimanded me for arranging to complete the observation by myself. He explained that I could not go to the shop by myself and just watch. The addicts or the storeowners may suspect me, and then I would be in danger. Subsequently, Baba organized the operation: he recruited a middleman who was a ‘regular’ and would be trusted by the pharmacist; he instructed the middleman on the drugs to purchase and the procedures to use, and he assembled our relative positions so that the middleman would not run away and I would have a good view of the transaction. He then lectured to me about the ‘rules’ that I must follow to observe the drug procurement. His directions were speciﬁc and repeated multiple times with illustrative analogies, examples, gestures, and signals. In total, he gave me the following ‘rules’: 1. Don’t go to the shop by yourself. 2. Don’t let anyone know that we are doing this just for knowledge. 3. Keep quiet during the negotiation with the middleman. 4. Watch your pockets (Baba slapped my hand when I took something out of my pocket and a 10 rupee bill fell on the ground). 5. Follow the middleman and keep walking (to make sure he doesn’t run away). 6. Don’t show your notebook. 7. Don’t let them think you are an undercover cop. 8. Don’t show the ampoules too much. 9. (Through gestures like stepping on my foot) Walk away from the middleman and don’t talk to him too much. 10. Pretend you are a user who uses at home (FN 03.02.05).

These ‘rules’ were the implicit protocols for assuming an indigenous identity in this situation. Baba was providing me with cultural knowledge about interactions, motivations, and dangers that he probably acquired through experience (in dealing drugs as I later learned). Moreover, he had tailored his ‘rules’ to accommodate my unique qualities and motives: he would probably not tell other ‘novices’ to hide their notebooks. Through ‘insider’ knowledge and an understanding of my traits, Baba enabled me to be legitimate and peripheral in the social context, thereby securing access not only physically, but also in terms of interpretation of events and personalities. Baba used to describe our relationship as ‘two guys walking together’ (FN 03.02.05). There was coordination in our daily activities. We created our own traditions such as buying a half litre of whole milk and sharing a kettle

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of dood ka chai (tea with extra milk), exploring hidden markets of Old Delhi, and walking together to my rickshaw at the end of the day. Baba would also emphasize our shared Kshatriyas caste heritage and suggested that we follow the traditional schedule of our ancestors including waking up at 4:00 am, working from 6:00 am to 12:30 pm, napping from 1:30 to 3:00 pm, working again from 3:00 to 9:00 pm, eating dinner and sleeping at 11:30 pm (FN 02.17.05). During this and other suggestions such as playing the role of ‘street doctor’ which he did often and I was not comfortable doing, I had to set a limit to our joint participation. Such boundaries were usually accepted, although occasionally they would lead to curt disagreements. Our negotiated co-ordination led to the development of new communication mechanisms that bridged the comprehension gap that was initially present. During our conversations, he would frequently interrupt himself and ask: ‘Do you understand what I mean?’ Whenever I would say yes, occasionally he would test me by saying: ‘Okay what? Explain’ (FN 09.15.05). Additionally, he would reiterate some of my incorrectly pronounced words in better forms to both understand what I meant, and to help me learn the ‘lingo’. Interestingly, he also began to detect when I would use my language difﬁculty to act naive with him or other participants; he would joke that I played dumb so that others would give me more information (FN 08.20.05). Outside of language scaffolding, we also drew diagrams and used demonstrations to convey our meanings. Diagrams such as maps of places for exploration were drawn in my notebook or in the dirt with both of us contributing scribbles to make points as we talked. Demonstrations such as common pick-pocketing strategies in crowded areas (FN 08.30.05) would involve both of us using bodily movements to understand each other. The co-constructed process of designing specialized communication mechanisms produced educative interactions that were reciprocal. As we began developing these unique conveyance devices, much of our time was spent teaching and learning from each other. Perhaps, we both became excited about the ‘foreign’ information that each of us could gather from the other person. Baba taught me a great diversity of topics. Nearly every area that I was interested in received some commentary and interpretation from him. He was particularly important in understanding core religious and cultural values, health beliefs, and different relationship structures. He would illustrate his points with experiences from his roles as a ‘holy man’, ‘street doctor’, ‘drug dealer’, and ‘son’ in a ‘father’–‘son’ relationship with another street dweller. For example, he would explain the causes of ‘cancer’ in the lungs by drawing a diagram in my notebook (Fig. 1) depicting alcohol going into the lungs and damaging them (Fig. 2). On another occasion, he described the

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Fig. 1.

AMAR DHAND

Baba (Right-Hand Side) Drawing a Diagram for the Ethnographer (LeftHand Side) (FN 09.15.05).

players involved in drug dealing by adding arrows to the English labels that I wrote in my notebook (FN 09.14.05). Importantly, his comments would be couched in elements of our new ‘language’ that began to ring with clarity. Our collaborative tools were able to expose and unravel difﬁcult concepts providing an unparalleled access to signiﬁcant meanings and processes. This educative utility was also reciprocal. Baba would ask me to read English instructions on drug labels and explain them to him (FN 02.04.05). I would also conduct basic English speech and writing lessons as well as participate in mental math games that he would usually win. On occasion, he would playfully call me his ‘master’ in reference to a principal in a school. As much as we were collaborators in gaining understanding from each other, Baba and I also constructed a ‘big brother’–‘little brother’ dynamic.

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Fig. 2.

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Baba’s Illustration in the Ethnographer’s Notebook Depicting How Alcohol Goes into the Lungs and Causes ‘Cancer’ (FN 09.15.05).

On multiple occasions, Baba would nurture and protect me. For example, during my interviews with other addicts, he would occasionally leave a cup of tea on a ledge behind me. Moreover, the speciﬁcity of his ‘rules’ during our observations and explorations were largely to ensure my safety.

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Following his pick-pocketing demonstration, he emphasized that I should learn this so that I do not become a victim. During the ﬁnal months of my ﬁeldwork, he also became very interested in giving advice for my future. He recommended that I should open a hospital with a pharmacy on the side to treat patients and make money from drugs as well. He also suggested getting married quickly, having one boy and one girl, and taking care of my mother and father (FN 09.18.05). Such notions of ‘settling down’ seemed to taint his perspective of my research. As I was watching a card game in the park with Baba, Imran, and the brothers, the following dialogue occurred: Baba then says, ‘Amar Singh, settle down.’ Imran returns the comment and says, ‘Worry about yourself.’ Baba continues, ‘I look at him and I y don’t like it y sitting with drug addicts. Open a store. Sitting with these men, and you will one day y [use drugs?]’ (FN 10.08.05)

In some ways, Baba wanted to save me from becoming like him. In his ‘big brother’ role, he was not a ‘role model’ but rather a person who encouraged me to live a traditional healthy life, and perhaps even unlearn the ‘tragic knowledge’ that he had taught me. Although such tactics of nurturing, protecting, and planning were important for access, they also impeded access and data generation in signiﬁcant ways. Baba would get frustrated with seeing me spend idle time with the ‘brothers’. Moreover, he would admonish me for walking alone in some areas, coming at night, or talking to particular people. Balancing these concerns with my objectives as a researcher took negotiation and, at times, distancing from my key informant. Baba provided access to core meanings and implicit knowledge of a street addict’s life. Our relationship involved guidance through everyday activities, sharing daily rituals, creating new communication tools, and using these tools to teach and learn from each other. Through our friendship, he enabled me to be a researcher that was physically present in, and cognizant of, some key moments in an addict’s everyday routine.

DISCUSSION Access in ethnographic research is the participation in negotiated interpersonal relationships or ‘role-plays’ that enables the ethnographer to become a legitimate peripheral participant in the socio-cultural context. The element of negotiated interpersonal relationships is handled by Harrington (2003), and is supported by these data. This analysis, however, reveals the importance of acknowledging the social learning processes involved in access, and

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suggests the utility of Lave and Wenger’s (1991) ‘legitimate peripheral participation’ in understanding these processes. In applying Lave and Wenger’s thinking to the situation of access, some implications for theory development are also revealed. Following a literature review and analysis of the access problem, Harrington (2003) arrives at four relationship regularities that occur during the process of access in ethnographic research: When ethnographers approach a research site, they will be deﬁned in terms of social identity categories salient to participants (p. 607). Ethnographers gain access to information to the extent that they are categorized as sharing a valued social identity with participants or as enhancing that identity through their research (p. 609). Ethnographers’ identity claims must be validated by participants in order for researchers to gain access to information (p. 611). The more that ethnographers’ social identities differ from those of participants, the more likely that access will involve the use of insider informants or deception as self-presentation strategies (p. 612).

All four patterns have some resonance with the data presented in this paper. In support of the ﬁrst point, the NGO staff initially categorized me as an ‘international guest’, ‘a person who was thinking about setting up a new centre in his country’, and an ‘NGO worker’. These identities were meaningful to the participants, and they were assigned to me to make sense of my presence. The second pattern was applicable in the processes involving co-ordination of daily activities with participants. For instance, my positions as a ‘brother’ in the ‘brotherhood’ and ‘guy who walks with me’ to Baba became viable roles when the participants and I shared time together, and we began to recognize and enhance our joint similarities. The third regularity was relevant during instances of the co-construction of roles (e.g. ‘observer’ and ‘interviewer’) and the legitimization and defence of my intrinsic characteristics (e.g. Veer’s comments). The ﬁnal assertion reﬂects the necessity of Baba to enable experiences and unlock everyday meanings for my comprehension. Although Harrington appropriately focuses on the interpersonal relationships, she fails to illuminate the enabling mechanisms underpinning the patterns. Especially for points two, three, and four, the following questions arise: How do ethnographers become aware of which identity elements to share and enhance, and how that sharing should take place? How do researchers create opportunities in which their identity claims will be validated? How do investigators align perspectives and goals with insider

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informants so the informants become meaningful access-points and interpreters? My argument is that the answers to these questions involve learning processes that are theoretically grounded in ‘legitimate peripheral participation’ (Lave & Wenger, 1991). Through participating in daily interactions, ethnographers begin in designated roles on the periphery. From here, they examine other roles, recognize meaningful identity elements, and become reﬂexive about which of their qualities best ‘mesh’ with established identities. They then spend time in joint activities (e.g. card games), appreciating the ‘rules’ of conduct, and testing different ‘self-presentations’ with the participants. Slowly, they enable participants to relate to their work in ways that are understood locally, and concurrently involve them in co-creating legitimate positions that make ‘sense’, and may be articulated to others. Lastly, with those members who become particularly helpful, ethnographers co-create communication devices and teaching tools with the informants that enable both parties to ‘read’ and teach each other in meaningful ways. Through this process of participating in activities and engaging in dynamic relationships, ethnographers are penetrating the ‘learning curriculum’ of ambient community life. They become recipients and contributors to ‘knowledge’ that is constantly being created, modiﬁed, and stored in the course of socio-cultural evolution. The acquisition artifacts such as skills and information that serve as indicators of having ‘learned’ something are absorbed along the way in a ‘subsumed’ manner. In many cases, researchers may not even notice when or how they acquired the ability to participate appropriately or make the correct judgements. Unbeknown to them, their instincts become tuned to what to do in certain circumstances, who to talk to about speciﬁc topics, and how to ask the right questions. During these instinctual moments, reﬂexive ethnographers may inquire about why or how they ‘guessed right’ about a person or situation. Only then will they appreciate the social learning processes that have enabled them to gain access to this level of insight. There are some qualiﬁcations to the described process. First, the legitimate roles that are constructed do not need to be identities that have a history with the group (e.g. ‘addict’ or ‘apprentice’). Some of the constructed roles may be quite unique or ‘new’ to the context, and still be legitimate (e.g. ‘observer’ and ‘brother who does not smoke with us’). Second, as an elaboration of the ﬁrst point, ‘full participation’, which Lave and Wenger argue is where peripheral participation leads, need not be ‘complete participation’ (Gold, 1958). An ethnographer can become a ‘full participant’ without resorting to covert research: ‘full participation’ in a diversity of roles including one akin to ‘researcher’ can be legitimized.

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Lastly, because of its negotiated nature, the learning process has reciprocal elements. Access is successful only when the participants engage in learning about the researcher as well. Only then will research goals be understood and incorporated into legitimate roles and activities. This ﬁnal point reveals the unique commentary that the journey of the ethnographer may offer to theoretical development of ‘legitimate peripheral participation’. Although Wenger (1998) acknowledges the concept of ‘brokering’ or the ‘use of membership to transfer some element of one practice into another’ (p. 109), there is limited consideration for the extent and complexity of reciprocal effects (Davies, 2005). These data reveal that as participants (‘old-timers’) learn about researchers (‘newcomers’) and coconstruct meanings with them, they may participate differently and shift the types of roles that they perform in the community (e.g. ‘observer’ and ‘interviewer’). Fuller et al. (2005) have also reported that novices may play educational roles in relation to experienced workers in contemporary workplace settings: For example, our research has demonstrated that experienced workers are also learning through their engagement with novices, and that part of the process of legitimate peripheral participation for many novices is to help other workers to learn. This insight is of signiﬁcance as it helps undermine the view of communities of practice as unchanging (p. 64).

These ﬁndings, therefore, suggest that understanding how ‘old-timers’ learn in relation to ‘newcomers’, and how that learning affects the legitimization process may be valuable avenues for inquiry. A second point for consideration is the diversity of journeys that different ‘newcomers’ may experience. The original theory recognizes that there is a ‘diversity of relations involved in varying forms of community membership’ (Lave & Wenger, 1991, p. 37). However, it may be useful to consider the extent of difference between my journey and the journey of an experienced addict who has just moved into the area. To account for the variety of experiences of such dissimilar ‘newcomers’ may be beyond the applicable boundaries of the theory. However, exploration of the potential range of differences in journeys, and how that range relates to the initial characteristics of ‘newcomer’ or other variables such as time or signiﬁcant events, seems to be an intriguing line of research.

CONCLUSION This paper has attempted to provide a theoretical addition to conceptualizations of access in ethnographic research. It argues that access is not only

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the researcher’s interpersonal relationships with the participants, but also the process of becoming a legitimate peripheral participant in the sociocultural context. The analysis has revealed that the process of engaging with the ambient community’s ‘learning curriculum’ may be strategic and negotiated, but also quite subtle and implicit in nature. Therefore, careful and reﬂexive accounts of access journeys with consideration of social learning processes are needed to provide further insight into the phenomenon. Because of the unique position of the ethnographer as a cognizant ‘newcomer’, such an approach may also be of value to the theoretical development of Lave and Wenger’s prominent ideas.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Mr. Francis Joseph transcribed and transliterated the tape recordings. I am grateful to my advisor Professor Geoffrey Walford for his probing questions, and the staff of SHARAN and SAHARA for their co-operation and friendship. This research was supported by the Rhodes Trust.

REFERENCES Coy, M. W. (Ed.) (1989). Apprenticeship: From theory to method and back again. Albany: State University of New York Press. Davies, B. (2005). Communities of practice: Legitimacy not choice. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 9(4), 557–581. Dhand, A. (2006a). The practice of poetry among a group of heroin addicts in India: Naturalistic peer learning. Ethnography and Education, 1(1), 125–141. Dhand, A. (2006b). The roles performed by peer educators during outreach among heroin addicts in India: Ethnographic insights. Social Science and Medicine, 63(10), 2674–2685. Downey, G. (2005). Learning Capoeira: Lessons in cunning from an Afro-Brazilian art. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fuller, A., Hodkinson, H., Hodkinson, P., & Unwin, L. (2005). Learning as peripheral participation in communities of practice: A reassessment of key concepts in workplace learning. British Educational Research Journal, 31(1), 49–68. Goffman, E. (1959). The presentation of self in everyday life. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Gold, R. L. (1958). Roles in sociological ﬁeld observations. Social Forces, 36(3), 217–223. Harrington, B. (2003). The social psychology of access in ethnographic research. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 32(5), 592–625. Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shafﬁr, W. B., & Stebbins, R. A. (Eds) (1991). Experiencing fieldwork: An inside view of qualitative research. Newbury Park, CA: Sage.

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Walford, G. (2002). Why don’t researchers name their research sites? In: G. Walford (Ed.), Debates and developments in ethnographic methodology (pp. 95–107). Amsterdam, London: JAI. Wax, M. L. (1967). On misunderstanding Verstehen: A reply to Abel. Sociology and Social Research, 51(3), 323–333. Weinstein, M. (2004). TamsAnalyzer: A qualitative research tool (Version 2.49b7). Boston, MA: Free Foundation. Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of practice: Learning, meaning, and identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

THE QUESTION OF INTIMACY IN ETHNOGRAPHY$ Harry F. Wolcott I have many friends who are ethnographers, but most of my friends and colleagues are not ethnographers. So I look for ways to explain ethnography to them without inadvertently giving a lecture or seeming too pedantic. Yet I do not want to shortchange my response or forego an opportunity to inform someone of what ethnography means to me and the kind of person-centered approach that I take. So throughout my career I have watched for deﬁnitions or descriptions or even catch-all phrases that one can use to convey the essence of ethnography. ‘Participant observation’ is of some help, but it hardly explains why someone might spend a year or two among a group of total strangers, another year writing about them, and then expecting to ﬁnd an audience eager to read the report. Nor could I ﬁnd a way to explain why no two ethnographies ever seemed to look exactly the same. Most recently, I have turned my search to see if I can identify for myself a set of conditions that all ethnographies seem to fulﬁll. It is easy to construct such a list, but I always ﬁnd that as soon as I begin to elaborate, I run into exceptions, conditions that are NOT met by each and every ethnography.

$

An abridged version of this paper was presented at the meetings of the eleventh annual Interamerican Symposium on Ethnographic Educational Research held in Buenos Aires, Argentina, on 22 March 2006.

Methodological Developments in Ethnography Studies in Educational Ethnography, Volume 12, 27–33 Copyright r 2007 by Elsevier Ltd. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 1529-210X/doi:10.1016/S1529-210X(06)12002-1

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Most of the conditions that I found are met in most ethnographies most of the time, but no one set of conditions seems to hold in every case. Here was my beginning list. I concluded that ethnography is: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

holistic cross-cultural comparative based on ﬁrst-hand experience conducted in natural settings the result of intimate, long-term acquaintance non-evaluative basically descriptive speciﬁc ﬂexible and adaptive corroborative idiosyncratic and individualistic

Developing this list was fun and a challenge. Of course there could be any number of items on it – 12 just seemed about right for my purposes. But I wondered if every facet that I identiﬁed really had to be present every time. Can the mix vary from one ethnographer, or one ethnography, to another? I came up with the idea that writing an ethnography is somewhat like baking a loaf of bread. No two recipes or loaves need ever be quite the same, and there is no absolute set of ingredients that goes into the mix. Yeast, sugar, salt, and fat are usually added to ﬂours ground from wheat and other starchy seeds, but buckwheat and quinoa, for example – both of which can be used in bread making – are not members of the grass family. Nor does what passes for a loaf of bread necessarily look the same the world over. I note only that loaves of bread usually bear strong resemblance to the variety of breads made by others in the same region. If you are baking a loaf, or writing an ethnography, you want yours to look like the ones made by those around you who claim to be doing something similar. It is not only the ingredients but what is done with them – how they are selected, and how they are combined – that makes the differences we observe. The basic materials are essentially the same. Like the world’s breadmakers, qualitative researchers everywhere draw from the same source – in this case, human social behavior – to obtain their raw material. It is their choice of ingredients and how they choose to combine and work them that make the difference, I cannot help wondering if distinctions that we pride ourselves on do not seem nearly as important to those

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outside our own circles. For example, North American ethnographers usually combine their materials with a healthy dose of culture. ‘Culture’ is not something one sees on the ground as an observer; it is something the ethnographer puts there to make data workable from an ethnographic point of view. But if it is not culture, some other organizer – for instance, community, institution, social structure – helps render the analysis, giving some characteristic way of ‘marking’ one’s work, so it looks like what it is supposed to look like.

A TEST OF THE ATTRIBUTES LIST I cannot subject listeners to such a long list. At my age I cannot always remember all 12 items myself. But I keep them in mind as a guide for discussions about ethnography, especially for assessing works that seem to be questionably ethnographic, that is, works that claim to be ethnographic but are suspect in that regard. I do not think that whether one meets these conditions is necessarily that important, except that recognizing what ought to be included to warrant the label ‘ethnography’ serves as a convenient shorthand for describing a study and judging its contribution. My last ﬁeld-based study presents a case in point. It was based on original ﬁeldwork. It started out as what anthropologist Stanley Brandes has described as an ‘ethnographic autobiography’ (see a discussion in Wolcott, 2004). It is a life story of a young man whom I called ‘Sneaky Kid,’ an unfortunate choice of names since it made him seem far younger than he was. I ‘found’ Sneaky Kid living on my place – I live in the country on the side of a hill with some steep forested terrain. He had constructed a cabin out of sapling trees when I discovered him. He was a 19-year-old youth at the time, had spent some part of his life in the local community, had long been out of school, had never been regularly employed, and admitted to having recently spent time in ‘reform school.’ Since he was on private property, he asked if he could stay. As long as he did not burn down the forest, he was not going to hurt anything, so I let him stay. He stayed far longer than I ever imagined – two years! When I needed to do a major construction project, digging a new water line to my house from a spring on the hill, he asked if he could do the work rather than my hiring it out. We began working together. I found myself growing increasingly attracted to him, at ﬁrst psychologically, then physically. I was fascinated with his ability to eke out a living for himself and survive the winter months in cold, damp weather. Given what seemed to be our mutual inclination, we eventually became physically involved as well.

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Then the thought occurred that here was the very kind of person I had hoped to ﬁnd for studying cultural acquisition. With our newfound intimacy, I assumed that he could and would talk about any aspect of his life. He agreed to some interviewing, and I began to tape sessions with him to recreate his life story. Eventually, I prepared a draft that he read and approved while still living on my property. Toward the end of his second year, however, things started to go awry. He began acting strangely, and one day he suddenly announced his decision to leave. We both knew he had no particular place to go, but he had become dissatisﬁed that his life was not leading anywhere. We parted as friends. Frankly, I thought he might be back in a matter of weeks, if not days. I knew I would miss him. I tried contacting him. He had promised to keep in touch, but I heard from him only once after he left. His travels of several months terminated at the home of his mother in Southern California, a thousand miles away. On the telephone he seemed quite animated. He told me that his mother had committed him brieﬂy to a mental health facility. Then I totally lost track of him y until he returned two and a half years later to burn my house to the ground and seriously attempt to harm me. There followed a trial, after which he spent some time in prison. I have never seen him since. It is a tragic story, but that is not my point. My publisher encouraged me to write more, beginning with the original life story but extending it now to describe his surprising return and all that had transpired, both before and after the ﬁre. I accepted the publisher’s challenge. That is the account that I have provided in Sneaky Kid and Its Aftermath: Ethics and Intimacy in Fieldwork (Wolcott, 2002). But there were two of us in the story now, and the new part read more like a memoir. So the question for me became: Where does ethnography stop and the account become something else? And does it matter? I assume there are certain cautions concerning any group of people with whom we intend to conduct ethnography. I am not sure what particular precautions apply to dealing with a 20-year-old streetwise youth who had undergone police interrogation but was not used to ethnographic interviewing. We began with questions about where he had lived and how he had gone about selecting a site and constructing both his cabin and his life. He never did talk as freely as I assumed he would, in spite of our perceived intimacy. I was never sure if some of the stories he told about others were really about himself – there were parts that I simply could not corroborate. Nor did I have to. My account starts with his story, in his words – until it

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became our story, mostly in my words. The account has coherence, and his part had his approval. But, is the account ethnography? Let me evaluate it against my list of criteria. The account is holistic, based on the experience of the full two years he spent in my place. I am sure I was the only person with whom he regularly conversed. Our formal interviews could not have been conducted in more natural settings – I took the tape recorder up to his cabin and we talked in the sunshine of Oregon mornings. But we also talked all the time outside the formal interviews – at least as much as a reticent youth will talk. Our conversations were always speciﬁc: about him and his life, both as he had experienced it and as he sometimes liked to imagine it. Of necessity, my stance was non-evaluative – I had to turn a blind eye to some of the experiences he recounted (such as his attempt to rob a convenience store) as well as to how he had procured some of the things that now graced his cabin and his life – stolen bicycles topping the list. Oddly enough, he was not into drugs except for his sporadic use of marijuana. His plan to grow a few plants of his own suffered from his failure to water them consistently. This absence of heavy drugs is the most dramatic contrast with anthropologist Juan Gamella’s strikingly parallel account of a similar-aged youth in Madrid conducted during the same years and published there, La Historia de Julia´n, memorias de heroina y delincuencia, currently in its fourth edition (See Gamella, 1990). My study is as ﬂexible and as adaptive as I could allow myself to be in doing it, for I had literally stumbled upon my subject in my own backyard. I was slow to see the possibilities for preparing an account contrasting schooling and education, but here was a golden opportunity. What may seem missing are qualities of being cross-cultural and comparative, but in this case – learning about a person from the same community – I brought those qualities to the study myself from previous ﬁeldwork as an anthropologist. I have long insisted that we need to make better use of anthropology in everything we do under the banner ‘anthropology and education.’ In this case, I introduced a cross-cultural perspective by contrasting what I called Sneaky Kid’s cultural alternatives with my own patently middle-class career alternatives. When he decided to leave, we talked about the possibilities he was considering as an emerging adult. They were remarkably different from the ones I would have considered under similar circumstances. He tried enlisting in the armed services, just as Julia´n in Gamella’s account had done – until he discovered that he had not completed enough years of schooling to qualify for enlistment. The other alternatives he mentioned included the unlikely possibility of committing suicide, going permanently on welfare

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(off and on he had been the recipient of food stamps), getting locked up in jail or prison, being institutionalized as a crazy person – an attractive alternative to him – or going ‘home.’ Home, his least favorite possibility, was the option he ﬁnally had to settle for, although he had not been a welcome guest in either of his divorced parents’ homes for years. To return to the ‘tricky part,’ let me say more about ethnography as the result of intimate, long-term acquaintance. What is ‘intimate enough?’ And how intimate is too intimate? I remind you that Sneaky Kid and I were into a sexual relationship before he became my informant. It was the very nature of our relationship that prompted my asking if he would share his life story. (It might be more accurate to say that he agreed to let me draw his life story out of him. He originally estimated that his story would take a total of about 12 h to tell. In fact, when we started the interviews, he spoke non-stop for about 12 min, concluding with ‘and so I decided to come up here and give it a try.’ After that, it was entirely up to me.) Not much has ever been said about being involved with an informant, particularly a younger one of the same gender. Although I have tried to open things up a bit by addressing this issue in the book, my experience is that not much is ever going to be said. Nor do I recommend that anyone attempt to advance the frontiers of ‘anthropology and education’ by working on this angle. But we are human beings, and these things happen. When they do, I think we are better off to be forthright about them than to pretend they never occur. Your readers expect to learn about the people you have been learning about, but they also want to know something about YOU, their storyteller. Working with what we recognize as vulnerable age groups – children and youth – our personal feelings about them can inspire or impede us. I am always interested in learning all I can about those who want to inform me about children and youth. To this point, I have presented the problem of intimacy in ﬁeldwork as being mine. Now I would like to make it yours, as well. Of all the terms on my list of conditions for ethnography, when I say that ethnography is ‘the result of intimate, long-term acquaintance,’ I think I have pointed to ethnography’s single-most telling aspect, the one that sets it apart from all other qualitative approaches. And so I ask again, ‘How intimate is intimate?’ And, when you work with children and young people, where do you draw the line? Years ago, an American anthropologist posed a rhetorical question: What kind of Hopi or Kwakiutl Indian will tell his story to a White man? I now pose a parallel question: What kind of adolescent will tell his story to an ethnographer? Or we might turn the question around to ask, ‘What kind of story is an adolescent willing to tell a researcher?’

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I am all for using ethnographic techniques in learning about young people. I know I learned a lot from and about Sneaky Kid, and I doubt if I will ever understand all that I did NOT learn about him. But, as Clifford Geertz reminded us years ago, ‘it is not necessary to know everything in order to understand something’ (Geertz, 1973, p. 20). So, what exactly is it that we as ethnographers wish to know? And how likely are we to ﬁnd out?

REFERENCES Gamella, J. (1990). La Historia de Julia´n: memorias de heriona y delincuencia. (4th ed. 2003). Madrid: Espan˜a. Geertz, C. (1973). Thick description: Toward an interpretive theory of culture. In: C. Geertz (Ed.), The interpretation of cultures. New York: Basic Books. Wolcott, H. F. (2002). Sneaky kid and its aftermath: Ethics and intimacy in fieldwork. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press. Wolcott, H. F. (2004). The ethnographic autobiography. Auto/Biography, 12(2), 93–106.

TO COOK OR NOT TO COOK: PARTICIPANT OBSERVATION AS A DATA COLLECTION TECHNIQUE Susan James INTRODUCTION As I sit here typing, I take a long, hard, registering look at my hands. I see them as someone else would: dirt embedded in cracked, dry, stained skin, with small cuts, some covered in bright blue waterproof plasters, others healing nicely. Hands that, as a child, I imagined belonged to the wicked witch of the west or hands a gardener or other craftsperson may be proud of y (Diary notes, 20 May 2002)

The reasons my hands looked this way were the 50 kg of potatoes I had peeled in the 2 weeks prior to the diary entry, the 40 kg of onions I removed the paper shells from and the 10 kg of Jerusalem artichokes I separated their skins in the kitchen of a local restaurant. These tasks were undertaken in the endeavour to understand how an apprentice constructs knowledge and skill in the workplace. In recent years there has been a renewed focus on learning in the workplace (Billett, 2001; Hawke, 1998) and the literature is extensive and rapidly increasing (for example, Billett, 1995, 1996, 2001, 2002; Boud & Garrick, 1999; Eraut, 2000a, 2000b, 2001; Eraut, Alderton, Cole, & Senker, 1998; Fuller & Unwin, 2003a, 2003b; Fuller, Hodkinson, Hodkinson, & Unwin., Methodological Developments in Ethnography Studies in Educational Ethnography, Volume 12, 35–50 Copyright r 2007 by Elsevier Ltd. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 1529-210X/doi:10.1016/S1529-210X(06)12003-3

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2005; Hodkinson, 2004 among others), but regardless of your epistemological belief, ‘one broadly established truth y is that learning at work cannot be separated out from the everyday working practices of the workplace’ (Hodkinson, 2004, p. 12): Learning is no longer a separate activity that occurs either before one enters the workplace or in remote classroom settings. y The behaviours that deﬁne learning and behaviours that deﬁne being productive are one and the same. Learning is not something that requires time out from being engaged in productive activity; learning is the heart of productive activity. (Zuboff, 1988, p. 395)

Consequently, to understand how elements of the workplace provide affordances (Billett, 2001) for the construction of knowledge and skill it was necessary to understand the activity of the workplace. The diary entry at the beginning of this chapter indicates I took a very hands-on approach: participant observation. The list of tools and methods available to a researcher is extensive, so why did I consciously choose a method, which, considering my ﬁeld research sites, was bound to end up with some form of physical punishment? It could be said that participant observation chose me. The purpose of this chapter attempts to explain the experiences of a researcher beginning her ﬁeld research and putting into action the results of the decision-making processes from the ﬁrst 18 months of a doctoral study, paying particular attention to the use of participant observation techniques – a method that has shaped the project and the researcher irrevocably – as a data collection tool rather than non-participant observation, which seems to be the norm in researching and learning in the workplace.

THE CONTEXT The aim of the research was to understand how elements of the workplace provided affordances (Billett, 2001) for the processes of knowledge and skill construction. To do this, young people training to be chefs were the focus to illustrate how knowledge and skill is constructed during apprenticeship on the trajectory towards becoming a chef. Apprentice chefs were chosen for ﬁve reasons: 1. Labour is a key type of goal-directed activity, and it is through labour that a kitchen functions to produce objects (meals), on time and within budget, achieving the desired outcomes of satisﬁed customers and proﬁt. Observing apprentice chefs while they completed various tasks in the production environment of a kitchen provided the potential to

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3.

4.

5.

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understand how learning is experienced and to identify the processes involved in constructing knowledge and skill in the workplace; Apprenticeship provided the opportunity to study an apprentice’s on-thejob learning within an activity system (Engestrom, 1987) through direct and indirect guidance (Billett, 2001); The apprentice chefs in this study were all completing a Foundation Modern Apprenticeship, which requires the completion of a National Vocational Qualiﬁcation (NVQ) at Level 2. NVQs can be completed through a Private Training Provider (PTP) or through a day release programme at a College of Further Education (F.E. College) consequently the opportunity existed to examine off-the-job learning in another activity system: a F.E. College. Traditional apprenticeship was the only route to becoming a chef until the Modern Apprenticeship programme was introduced in 1994. In researching how apprentice chefs learn, the history of apprenticeship is of signiﬁcance with regard to the opportunities afforded the apprentice in constructing his or her knowledge and skill; and My background provided phenomenological validity to the study. I have worked in the hospitality industry for a number of years and have taught this subject in secondary schools in Australia; therefore this background knowledge provided me with invaluable insight. My experience also provided me with a signiﬁcant resource in negotiating access to sites: in times of economic hardship, what chef is willing to turn down the prospect of a month of free labour, while I work alongside the apprentice?

THE DECISION-MAKING PROCESS Some of the most well-known research into learning in the workplace is Lave and Wenger’s (1991) study of West African tailors whereby they argue the tailors learn their trade by gradually becoming participants able to engage fully as members of an existing community of practise. Similar work on learning to move from a novice to an expert has been conducted by Billett (1995a, 2001) focusing on hairdressers knowledge and skill construction, Scribner’s (1999) work on dairy worker’s social construction of knowledge, and Hutchin’s (1993) research into navigator’s learning their profession. All these studies were conducted using non-participant observation techniques combined with interviews or, in the case of Felstead et al. (2005) augmenting case study work with a survey which highlights smaller, perhaps less

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signiﬁcant but no less important, changes in capability or understanding in learning at work. Consequently, to understand how learning is experienced in the workplace, an initial methodology was constructed that was inﬂuenced by, aligned with, and built upon previous research conducted by Billett (1995) and Moore (1981). Billett’s research on how hairdressers structure their knowledge through authentic activities in hairdressing salons using ethnographic techniques in four case study sites greatly inﬂuenced my initial thinking and planning. He used non-participant observation, semistructured interviews, a client survey and an activity-sheet to collect data to investigate the social and situational effects of knowledge construction in the workplace. Moore and his team worked in The School for Experiential Learning (SEL) to ‘develop a systematic approach to locating the pedagogy and curriculum of experiential education’ (Moore, 1981, p. ii). The purpose of the study was ‘to examine these various experiences and try to ﬁgure out a way to analyse them in terms of education’ (Moore, 1981, p. 13) and involved 3 years of participant observation in over 35 sites where the students of the SEL were placed as ‘apprentices’ and ‘interns’ over a set period of time, while also spending a small portion of time attending ‘seminars’ and ‘inhouse’ courses at the school. From reading Moore’s report, I decided that in order to understand the knowledge and skills an apprentice chef constructs, I would need to analyse the speciﬁc tasks assigned and completed by him/her. For ultimately, the apprentice constructs his/her knowledge and skills by performing and experiencing the various duties given by the other chefs in the kitchen, and the conversations he/she is involved in. Furthermore, to understand the processes involved in an apprentice’s construction of knowledge and skill, it is necessary to understand the workplace as a whole, and the apprentice’s place within this establishment. Therefore, in order to see the apprentice fulﬁlling his/her responsibilities, I would need to spend a lot of time with the apprentice in the workplace.

THE PILOT STUDY Access was negotiated with Rob, the head chef at The Hutch. The research was explained to Rob and later to Nat, the apprentice, after which it was agreed that I could spend a week observing the action in the kitchen. The other chefs were informed of my presence in the kitchen, why I was

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observing their work, and gave informed consent to be involved in the research. The ﬁrst few days of the week were spent honing my observation skills, making decisions on what should be observed and trying to gain a feel for the kitchen. I was able to make copious notes of the activity in front of me as I stood in my corner of the kitchen. However, as the week wore on I began to seriously question the authenticity of the working day I observed. It is very unusual to have someone standing or sitting around in a kitchen (Ruhlman, 1997, 2001). From having worked in kitchens before – my phenomenological validity – I was aware that kitchens are hectic, hot places fraught with tension that was more often than not relieved through swearing, practical jokes and a lot of yelling (see also Bourdain, 2000). In the ﬁrst 3 days at The Hutch, I had not once seen any of this tension relief. I needed to test my hypothesis as it was becoming increasingly evident how painfully aware everybody in the kitchen was of my presence, particularly my note-taking. Generally, the only people who enter a kitchen to take notes are health and hygiene inspectors or assessors of some kind. I needed the chefs to see me as part of the kitchen as opposed to an outsider. Jeffrey and Troman (2004) believe ethnographic research depends entirely on the focus and site of the research and adhere to three ethnographic principles: 1. research taking place over time to allow a fuller range of empirical situations to be observed and analysed and to allow for the emergence of contradictory behaviours and perspectives. Time in the ﬁeld, alongside time for analysis and interpretation, allows continuous reﬂections concerning the complexity of human contexts; 2. considering relations between the appropriate cultural, political and social levels of the research site and the individual’s and group’s/community’s agency at the research site; and 3. including theoretical perspectives in order to: ‘sensitise’ ﬁeld research and analysis: provide an opportunity to use empirical ethnographic research for the interrogation of macro and middle range theories; and to develop new theory. Using non-participant observation techniques at The Hutch was not allowing me to adhere to any of the three principles. Consequently, I made the decision to spend the second week of the pilot study as a participant observer. Of course, I could have stayed for longer than a month. Feasibly, how long could they have kept up this facade? Jeffrey and Troman (2004) call this ‘compressed time mode’ and believe that, while this type of shorter

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time-span ethnography provides a snapshot of what is happening, it does not uncover much of what is really occurring. I do not agree and this will be discussed further below but for now, more pertinently, my research timetable did not allow more time to be spent in the ﬁeld research sites to ﬁnd out whether it was a facade. In the second week there was a noticeable difference in the atmosphere of the kitchen such as yelling, swearing and practical jokes, which had not occurred the week before. Although the data was not as detailed as in the previous week (because I was unable to record exact conversations), it was a more accurate reﬂection of the daily experiences of the people working in the kitchen. What is lost in detail is gained in validity because the data collected using participant observation techniques provides a more accurate account of the kitchens and the workers in it. Furthermore, working collaboratively on tasks proved more conducive to conversations with the apprentice and was a way of gleaning data that might otherwise have stayed under the surface if using non-participant techniques. As Robson (1993, p. 197, emphasis in original) states, The fact that an observer is an observer is made clear from the start. The observer then tries to establish close relationships with members of the group. This stance means that as well as observing through participating in activities, the observer can ask members to explain various aspects of what is going on. It is important to get the trust of key members of the group (key either because of their position or because of personal qualities such as openness or interest in the ways of the group).

During the time spent working as a participant observer with the apprentices, I asked questions regarding the tasks rather than ‘just getting on with it’. The questions asked were used to ascertain how the tasks inﬂuenced and promoted learning on the progression towards becoming a chef. These questions helped to make the process of knowledge and skill acquisition more explicit (Eraut, 2001). Having the apprentices primarily as key informants rather than subjects to be observed – although on occasions the apprentices were this also – is an important aspect to the validity of this research (Hammersley & Atkinson, 1995, pp. 140–141) as the data is enriched by the apprentices’ input as key informants (Robson, 1993, p. 197; Taylor, 1998, pp. 53–66) and not just subjects to be interviewed. The key informants in each of the kitchens are presented in Table 1. Moreover, not only did participant observation allow me to collect data on the tasks the apprentice completed and his/her wider role and experiences in the activity of the kitchen, it also allowed my own experiences in the kitchen to enhance the data collected because, for all intents and purposes, I was treated as an apprentice. For example, I had to peel 50 kg of potatoes

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Table 1.

Key Informants.

Kitchen

Key Informants

The Hutch Chives

Nat – 1st year apprentice Jack – 2nd year apprentice Daniel – 1st year apprentice Lawrence – 1st year apprentice Clint – 1st year apprentice

Gastronomique Sebs

during my ﬁrst week at Gastronomique. The other chefs laughed at the brown colour of my hands from all the dirt. Barry, the head chef, walked past and mumbled, ‘‘The same task I did in my ﬁrst week as an apprentice and the same task Lawrence did when he ﬁrst started here.’’ My acceptance into the kitchens was also exempliﬁed by the hat I wore while working at Chives, which was required by all the chefs for health and hygiene purposes. The hats were used as a semiotic tool; the colour of the cap signiﬁes one’s status in the kitchen: the head chef had a black cap, sous chefs wore blue caps, a chef de partie would wear a purple hat, and second year apprentices wore red and white checked caps. To me, the fact I was given a yellow cap – the same colour a ﬁrst year apprentice wore – signiﬁed authenticity, especially as work experience students were given paper hats! The decision to continue as a participant observer was an easy one; as I said earlier, it chose me. The kitchen came alive in the second week of the pilot study and as I was going to be in my next three sites for a month each, working 6 days a week on the same shifts as the apprentice, I needed the kitchens and the workers in them to be as natural as possible. Jeffrey and Troman (2004) may think a month is not long enough, but 4 weeks in a stilted environment, with people not being as they normally would be, would feel like an eternity. I also felt that one month would be enough time to begin to understand the routines and patterns of the workplace, to feel the tempo and workﬂow of a shift while also preventing me from becoming too familiar and just another worker. As a participant observer, the dichotomy between my dual roles of worker and researcher (Spadley, 1980, pp. 54–58) became apparent during the time I spent in the ﬁeld research sites. On a number of occasions the role I played was decided for me, but there were many times when I was making the choice to be one or the other: a researcher or a worker. Often this was a difﬁcult choice: do I let the conversation continue as merely a co-worker and see what is unearthed; or do I intervene as a researcher with a question to elicit a response? There were times when both situations occurred – when I intervened and when I did not

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– but I can never be sure as to whether the most appropriate choice was made, as the data I collected is only going to reﬂect the decision made in that instance. As Hammersley and Atkinson (1995, p. 227) argue, One must be aware of the possible effects of social location on all kinds of data, including ethnographers’ own observational reports: we too occupy particular locations and what we observe, what we record, and how we interpret it will be inﬂuenced by these.

Being aware of the distinct yet problematic line between worker and researcher made prioritising my roles easier in the second and third ﬁeld research sites: as much as I was a worker in the kitchens, I was ﬁrst and foremost a researcher who frequently had to interrupt conversations and ask questions. However, while the decision to be a participant observer had been an easy one the actual experience was not.

PARTICIPANT OBSERVATION: THE EXPERIENCE Although I had worked in kitchens before, it had been several years, and certainly not with research motives and goals in mind. No amount of reading of the participant observation literature could have prepared me fully for what I was about to experience. Participant observation means so many different things in ‘real life’. There is much literature on being a participant observer (e.g., Bogdewic, 1999; Burgess, 1984; Delamont, 2005; Friedrichs & Ludtke, 1975; Hodkinson, 2004; May, 1993; Parker, 2002; Taylor & Bogdan, 1998), particularly in relation to schools and educational institutions (e.g., Delamont, 1992; Eisner & Peshkin, 1990; Holmes, 1998; Massey & Walford, 1998, 1999; Woods, 1986), and while this literature provided some valuable information, often the practicalities and logistics of being a participant observer are not discussed. And, as mentioned, participant observation does not seem to be a method favoured by researchers of workplace learning. Identity I spent 1 month in each site. By my calculations, this amount of time would allow the routines and rhythm of the workplace to surface. After the ﬁrst few days, a feeling of ‘never having been anywhere else’ began to settle: routines and layout were learned, and I did settle into the rhythm of the workplace. This is deceptive. It allows one a familiarity that it should not as it allows one to forget the purpose of being in the ﬁeld and to think of oneself as a chef, and nothing could be further from the truth. For example,

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having been at Chives for a week, I was asked to do a job with one of the apprentices. Neither of us fully understood what was required but rather than ask for clariﬁcation, something I would do as a researcher, the apprentice and I went ahead and completed what we assumed was required because we did not want to be yelled at. Although the food produced was ﬁne, it was a variation on what we had been told to do, and consequently a tirade of abuse followed. The majority of this diatribe was aimed at the apprentice but the full force of what was being said was felt by both of us! My identity as an apprentice had overtaken my identity as a researcher and manifested itself by not having the gumption to ask for clariﬁcation. Although it was generally forgotten by those in the kitchen that I was ﬁrst and foremost a researcher (or perhaps, more accurately, it was kept in the backs of their minds), my role as a researcher did come to the fore on various occasions. During the course of the shift, I would ask the apprentice a number of questions regarding the tasks. Sometimes an immediate answer, with what seemed to be very little thought, was given. Other times, the apprentice stopped and looked, pondering the question, making him/her step away from the task at hand and aware of the situation from my perspective. The act of the apprentice thinking of an answer, rather than giving an automatic reaction, brought my role to the fore. Occasionally comments would be made such as ‘will you write that in your book?’ and ‘no one else asks questions like that’ or the question would need to be re-worded for comprehension, immediately re-establishing my role as a researcher. For example, the head chef had spent quite some time with Lawrence, the apprentice at Gastronomique, and me showing us how to make a risotto. It was a particularly interesting example of instruction for my research. Afterwards I asked Lawrence about the ‘fusion’ of two particular ingredients in a risotto he was shown to make. I then needed to explain the word fusion. On many of these occasions, the incident brought back to my mind the role I was there to play, as I forgot also. When I was immersed in the middle of a busy service in a hot environment churning out meals it was easy to forget the main purpose of my presence. During such times there is no room for error and even less for reﬂection (Delamont, 2005), a disadvantage of participant observation. Reﬂection needs to take place after the shift. As desirable as a notebook would be, and I did carry a small one in my pocket, the risk of burnt food compared to time out for note-taking was too high. The feeling of involvement that familiarity breeds resulted in another mistake. It is one thing for a chef to criticise an apprentice, but an entirely different story for a pseudo-chef to ‘go native’. After a week of working with

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Daniel at Chives (there are seven apprentices at this site) I was becoming more and more frustrated with his lax attitude and frequent wandering, leaving me to complete the task at hand. Service was complete, the cleaning had been done and a few of us were standing around joking and laughing, analysing the day, waiting for that big hand to hit 12. The apprentice, Daniel, was trying to defend his actions from an incident earlier in the day and comments were ﬂying from every which way. This apparently was de rigueur until I made a comment about the apprentices ﬁnely honed ability to walk off at crucial times leaving me to complete his tasks. A few laughs went around but also some raised eyebrows and looks. In those 10 seconds, I was reminded that I was not fully an apprentice and quickly learned a very important lesson if I was going to be able to continue to listen to conversations such as these: in certain instances keep my mouth shut! Language This topic has two aspects. I will refer to the ﬁrst as ‘professional language’ and the second as ‘colourful language’.1 Professional language is two-fold: the professional language of a chef, and my professional language as a researcher. The language of a chef is riddled with French words and also industry speciﬁc words, which contain absolutely no meaning outside of a kitchen. For example, ‘the Hobart’ is the mixer – Hobart is the actual brand of manufacturer. Lucky for me, I was au fait with the majority of the words from my previous experience in the industry. I say lucky because I do believe that this could have been a point of continuous ridicule throughout my stay in these kitchens had I not been up-to-date. Of course, as an ‘apprentice’ the odd (very few and far between!) query is allowed and I do have to admit to listening carefully to the apprentices when they asked for clariﬁcation. The second aspect of professional language is my own professional language: the language of a researcher. As technical as the language of a chef may be, chefs do not tend to use words that are considered essential to an academic (or an apprentice academic as the case may be). The work in the kitchen may be going along ﬁne until I asked a question and the person I asked would look at me blankly and say ‘‘What does that mean? Speak English woman’’ or ‘‘You can tell who has been to university’’. Naturally this would be said loudly so all others around could hear and I was immediately differentiated. Time would need to be taken before I was ‘one of the workers’ again. I soon learned to curb my professional language and it was amazing how much more credible I became when I also sprinkled my conversation with a few choice ‘colourful’ words.

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In a kitchen, swear words seem to be used as nouns, verbs, adjectives and even prepositions on occasion. It was expected to pepper one’s vocabulary with as much colourful language as possible. By eventually joining in, the doorway into the kitchen and its activity seemed to open just that little bit wider. In fact, at Chives, I was informed that a bet had been taking place as to when I would crack and swear for the ﬁrst time. This was very reminiscent of school playground games, but nonetheless important to my being a participant observer and accepted in the workplace. Uniform In the pilot site I was lent a pair of chef’s trousers to wear during my time in the kitchen. Apart from being very comfortable, the trousers had a big, black check pattern on them. The trousers were the same as the ones worn by everyone else in the kitchen. Due to this similarity I did not think anything of it. At Chives (the ﬁrst ﬁeld research site after the pilot study) I was informed by the administrator (not the head chef) when negotiating access that I would be required to provide my own uniform. Not a problem I thought. I looked in the yellow pages for a supplier, made a phone call and ordered a chef’s jacket and trousers, feeling very excited at having my own uniform. The lady on the other end of the telephone inquired as to what type of trousers I would like. I asked her to explain and she rattled off a number of different styles. I vaguely remembered seeing the head chef wearing blue and white but could not be sure. I decided on blue and white large check trousers. Turning up on my ﬁrst day I was shown the female change room. As I emerged all the other chefs stared. I froze: what was wrong, why were they looking at me like that? One of the chefs said ‘‘Look, it’s Jamie Oliver!’’ I then realized they were all wearing SMALL blue and white checked trousers. For the next 2 days I ﬁelded questions on my choice of apparel. Thankfully, after a couple of days the jokes died down BUT it was still one thing that I did not need to deal with and could have potentially averted if I had been more aware. I have since read Linda Measor’s (1985) article, ‘Interviewing: a strategy in Qualitative Research’ whereby she does discuss the different clothes she wore when interviewing teachers and students. Why, oh why, had I not read it earlier? Acceptance As a participant observer one wants, as much as possible, to be a part of what is happening, to try to understand all that is occurring and the only

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way to be a part of all that is happening is to be accepted. If I was to try to gain a true understanding of what an apprentice learns, how he/she becomes a chef through constructing knowledge and skill and what it means to be a chef, I needed to be accepted to the fullest extent possible. Jack, one of the apprentices at Chives, accepted me immediately. He explained the goings on and seemed to revel in his teacher role. This allowed me to be accepted by the other chefs much more readily as they could see how well we were working together. However, there was one chef at Chives who did not begin to speak to me until the ﬁfth day. This was difﬁcult considering on three of these days I was working with Daniel, another apprentice in this kitchen, and we were under that particular chef’s direction. He communicated to me via Daniel. Eventually this changed and by the end of the second week full communication was occurring. I did ask him why he had taken so long to speak to me and his gruff reply was ‘I needed to be sure of what you are about’. Indeed, he went on to become one of the most helpful chefs in that kitchen. Generally though, within the ﬁrst few days of being in the kitchens, once the other chefs were sure of why I was there and were comfortable with the fact that I was not judging them or their work in any way, tension dissolved. I believe this was aided by the fact that I was clear from the start that the chefs were able to ask me questions. Also, on the second day in each kitchen, I took my ﬁeld notes in from the ﬁrst day to show the apprentice, to gauge his impression of the day and whether our conclusions of the day were the same. This was a particularly interesting form of collaboration with my key informants and, I believe, helped to aid the reliability and validity of my study as I was trying to ensure the data was as accurate as possible. A few of the other chefs had a look and asked questions. I had my notes on subsequent days but no one except the apprentice was interested after the ﬁrst day. Participant observation allows the researcher an authenticity to the phenomena that is incalculable. As previously mentioned, I felt the quality of the data I collected was greatly improved in the pilot site once my position moved from non-participant observer to participant observer. Evidence for this is the fact that in Chives and Gastronomique I was yelled at, joked about, ridiculed, given and shown tasks, just as the apprentice was. One example illustrates this point perfectly. My knife skills were rather rusty. Consequently, by the end of the ﬁrst week at Chives I had blue water proof plasters on three of my ﬁngers. For the next 2 days I had the ‘blue plaster song’, a song made up by the chefs in that kitchen, sung (taunted) to me when I entered the kitchen. I was, for all intents and purposes, treated as an apprentice.

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Initiation procedures Undoubtedly, part of being accepted was the initiation procedures I had to pass. One of these, I believe, was the colourful language aspect already mentioned. Another was being the butt of many jokes in the ﬁrst few days and not rising to take the bait. Although more females are appearing in kitchens, these workplaces are still very male dominated areas. Testosterone was abundant, as one would expect with the chefs all vying for a place on the pecking order and letting their place be known. Tolerating sexist jokes was an aspect that had to be endured for ultimately my dual role of researcher/ chef was tenuous. One false move and I could very easily have been asked to leave. Unfortunately, this meant smiling at tasteless comments and putting my usually forthright demeanour on the backburner. A far more physically painful test was the slicing of lemons, limes and oranges into garnishes when it was common knowledge that I had a lot of nicks and cuts on my hands. The chefs in these kitchens needed to test me. I was encroaching on their territory and although they knew to a certain extent what I was about, I was learning, or was about to learn, a lot more regarding them and their work lives than these chefs were going to learn about me. I needed to earn their trust and the most suitable way for the chefs was through these tests. The 50 kg of potatoes mentioned earlier was a test: did she have enough stamina and patience to peel her way through them all? Could she be trusted to perform other tasks in the kitchen and ultimately enter our/their domain?

TO COOK OR NOT TO COOK? These areas I have highlighted are those that I was least prepared for in fulﬁlling my role as a participant observer: knowing where boundaries for my participation in conversations were, the way my identity as a chef and researcher would develop, being accepted and belonging (or not), language, initiation tests, and my trousers. It could be argued that these issues are situation speciﬁc: a researcher conducting ﬁeld research in a school would not have to face these matters. Yes, to a certain extent the researcher in an educational institution may not be faced with these speciﬁc challenges but there would be issues of language, working out in one’s own mind their position as participant observer, issues of acceptance, and uniform among others. The words of Sarah Delamont (2005, p. 310) ring in my mind:

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Delamont (2005), along with Becker (1971) and Wolcott (1981), have long argued that educational research needs challenges to its familiarity and I agree with them. Being a participant observer provided many challenges, as outlined above, and participant observation, by its very nature of course, will not be suitable in all research situations as Jeffrey and Troman (2004) suggest but it should not be readily dismissed as time-consuming, being possibly most suitable for doctoral research (Walford, 2002). So much of the learning that occurs in workplaces, and the knowledge and skill that is constructed through the everyday practices of work, becomes implicit and tacit (Eraut, 2000a, 2000b, 2001). Using participant observation techniques can help to make our understanding more explicit and need not take more time than non-participant observation but can provide much more rewarding results for the research and the researcher.

NOTE 1. Colourful language is the term I use to describe the ubiquitous swearing.

REFERENCES Becker, H. (1971). Sociological work: method and substance. London: Allen Lane. Billett, S. (1995). Structuring knowledge through authentic activities. Brisbane: Grifﬁth University. Billett, S. (1996). Constructing vocational knowledge: History, communities and ontogeny. Journal of Vocational Education and Training, 48(2), 141–154. Billett, S. (2001). Learning in the workplace: Strategies for effective practice. Crows Nest, NSW: Allen & Unwin. Billett, S. (2002). Workplace pedagogic practices: Co-participation and learning. British Journal of Educational Studies, 50(4), 457–481. Bogdewic, S. (1999). Participant observation. In: B. Crabtree & W. Miller (Eds), Doing qualitative research. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Boud, D., & Garrick, J. (Eds). (1999). Understanding learning at work. London: Routledge. Bourdain, A. (2000). Kitchen confidential. London: Bloomsbury Publishing. Burgess, R. (1984). Methods of ﬁeld Research 1: Participant observation. In: R. Burgess (Ed.), In the field. London: Allen & Unwin.

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Delamont, S. (1992). Fieldwork in educational settings: Methods, pitfalls and perspectives. Lewes: Falmer Press. Delamont, S. (2005). No place for women among them? Reﬂections on the axe´ of ﬁeldwork. Sport, Education and Society, 10(3), 305–320. Eisner, E., & Peshkin, I. (Eds). (1990). Qualitative enquiry in education. The continuing debate. New York: Teachers College Press. Engestro¨m, Y. (1987). Learning by expanding. An activity-theoretical approach to developmental research. Helsinki: Orienta-Konsultit. Eraut, M. (2000a). Non-formal learning and tacit knowledge in professional work. British Journal of Educational Psychology, 70, 113–136. Eraut, M. (2000b). The dangers of managing with an inadequate view of knowledge. turning knowledge management downside up. Sao Paulo: 3rd International Conference for Sociocultural Research. Eraut, M. (2001). Transfer of learning between education and workplace settings. Northampton: TLRP International Workshop, University College. Eraut, M., Alderton, J., Cole, G., & Senker, P. (1998). Development of knowledge and skills in employment. Brighton: Institute of Education, University of Sussex. Felstead, A., Fuller, A., Unwin, L., Aston, D., Butler, P., & Lee, T. (2005). Survey the scene: Learning metaphors, survey design and the workplace context. Journal of Education and Work, 18(4), 359–383. Friedrichs, J., & Ludtke, H. (1975). Participant observation. Farnborough: Saxon House. Fuller, A., & Unwin, L. (2003a). Learning as apprentices in the contemporary UK workplace: Creating and managing expansive and restrictive participation. Journal of Education and Work, 16(4), 407–426. Fuller, A., & Unwin, L. (2003b). Creating a ‘Modern Apprenticeship’: A critique of the UK’s multi-sector, social inclusion approach. Journal of Education and Work, 16(1), 5–25. Fuller, A., Hodkinson, H., Hodkinson, P., & Unwin., L. (2005). Learning as peripheral participation in communities of practice: A reassessment of key concepts in workplace learning. British Educational Research Journal, 31(1), 49–68. Hammersley, M., & Atkinson, P. (1995). Ethnography: Principles in practice. London: Routledge. Hawke, G. (1998). Learning, workplaces and public policy. Sydney: 1st Annual Conference of AVETRA. Hodkinson, P. (2004). Research as a form of work: Expertise, community and methodological objectivity. British Educational Research Journal, 30(1), 9–26. Holmes, R. (1998). Fieldwork with children. London: Sage. Hutchins, L. (1993). Learning to navigate. In: S. Chaiklin & J. Lave (Eds), Understanding practice: Perspectives on activity and context (pp. 35–63). Toronto: Cambridge University Press. Jeffrey, B., & Troman, V. (2004). Time for ethnography. British Educational Research Journal, 30(4), 535–548. Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Massey, A., & Walford, G., (Eds). (1998). Children learning in context, studies in educational ethnography vol. 1. Stamford, CT: JAI Press. Massey, A., Walford, G. (Eds). (1999). Explorations in methodology, Studies in educational ethnography vol. 2. Stamford, CT: JAI Press.

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May, T. (1993). Social research. Issues, methods and process. Buckingham: Open University Press. Measor, L. (1985). Interviewing: A strategy in qualitative research. In: R. Burgess (Ed.), Strategies of educational research. London: Falmer Press. Moore, D. (1981). The social organisation of educational encounters in nonschool settings. Chicago: Centre for New Schools. Parker, A. (2002). Pressures, problems and the PhD process. In: G. Walford (Ed.), Doing a doctorate in educational ethnography. London: JAI. Robson, C. (1993). Real world research. Oxford: Blackwell. Ruhlman, M. (1997). The making of a chef: Mastering heat at the Culinary Institute of America. New York: Henry Holt and Company. Ruhlman, M. (2001). The soul of a chef. New York: Penguin. Scribner, S. (1999). Knowledge at work. In: R. McCormick & C. Paechter (Eds), Learning and knowledge. London: Paul Chapman Publishing. Spadley, J. (1980). Participant observation. London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Taylor, S. (1998). Introduction to qualitative research methods. A guidebook and resource. New York: Wiley. Walford, G. (Ed.) (2002), Doing a doctorate in educational ethnography, Studies in Educational Ethnography (Vol. 7). Oxford: JAI Press. Woods, P. (1986). Inside schools. Ethnography in educational research. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Zuboff, S. (1988). In the age of the smart machine: the future of work and power. Oxford: Heinemann Professional.

RESEARCHER ROLES IN A SCHOOL-BASED ETHNOGRAPHY Nick Hopwood INTRODUCTION The roles that ethnographers adopt in their ﬁeldwork are ‘‘perhaps the single most important determinant of what he [or she] will be able to learn’’ (McCall & Simmons, 1969, p. 29). My purpose in this paper is to demonstrate that these roles can be in a state of rapid ﬂux, depending not only on who the researcher is interacting with, but also on a complex system of constantly changing settings for those interactions. To this end I explore different ‘territories’ associated with my own schoolbased ethnographic research, each constituting a particular setting in which I adopted speciﬁc roles. Territories are not simply spatial areas, although location is often an important factor in determining which roles are appropriate. Particular places are often used in different ways by different people at different times in schools, and this has implications for the sorts of roles researchers can or should adopt. The concept of territories as temporally, socially and spatially deﬁned settings can be used as a lens to explore detailed aspects of the nature of research sites, providing a fresh understanding of the roles ethnographers adopt in their ﬁeldwork. I provide contextual information about my research before considering existing frameworks for understanding roles in ethnographic research. The main body of this paper is then devoted to exploring in detail the roles I Methodological Developments in Ethnography Studies in Educational Ethnography, Volume 12, 51–68 Copyright r 2007 by Elsevier Ltd. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 1529-210X/doi:10.1016/S1529-210X(06)12004-5

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adopted in each of ﬁve different territories in school. Finally, I suggest that the process of examining the territories of research sites has considerable potential for enabling ethnographers to explore and exploit researcher roles as means to access information.

CONTEXT This paper draws on a study of how English year nine pupils (aged 13–14) experience and conceive school geography. Fieldwork began with three months of piloting, during which I visited the same school two or three days per week, observing geography lessons, spending time in the playground, staffroom and geography ofﬁce, and talking to pupils about geography. I observed over 70 lessons, taught by several different teachers, and spent over 240 hours in school just in this period of piloting. Formal ﬁeldwork was conducted (between April 2004 and June 2005) in three different secondary (11–18) co-educational comprehensive schools within a 25-mile radius of Oxford. Each consecutive period of ﬁeldwork lasted over three months, with two or three visits per week, most of which took a full day. My activities were more structured than during piloting, and in each school over 30 lessons attended by the same class and taught by the same teacher were formally observed. Selected pupils were interviewed about these lessons, and participated in four additional techniques: two photo-elicitation interviews (for one of which pupils took photographs themselves), a concept mapping exercise, and a structured interaction in which pupils talked about a series of questions and how they relate to school geography. Surrounding these targeted methods of data generation were a series of less tightly focused activities, including varying degrees of participation in and observation of geography ofﬁces (departmental staff rooms) and areas open to pupils during recreation (including classrooms). These wider ethnographic features offered opportunities for both data generation and for developing rapport with participants, which then supported my more focused activities. On each school visit I would normally participate in at least two lessons in addition to the one that was the focus of my research for the day, adopting a role that can be generally described as a classroom assistant (as was appropriate given that I am not a qualiﬁed teacher). In between lessons I would generally sit in the geography ofﬁce, but also spent some time in classrooms, dining halls and playgrounds.

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During this formal ﬁeldwork I spent a further 700 hours in school. Interactions with people from the schools extended beyond school hours either through my getting a lift to and from school with a teacher, or through walking to the bus stop and taking a bus with pupils. The boundaries of my research were further blurred because I have lived with one or more teachers throughout the three years of this study and learned a lot about schools, teachers, pupils, teaching and learning by listening to (or sometimes trying to ignore) my housemates’ frequent complaints, moans and general verbal purging of aspects of their working lives.

RESEARCHER ROLES IN ETHNOGRAPHY Gold (1958) describes the roles adopted in the ﬁeld as, simultaneously, devices for securing information and sets of behaviours in which the researcher him- or herself is involved. Such an understanding of research roles as both crucial to data generation and highly personal forms of engagement in research sites underpins the argument of this paper. While roles are undoubtedly signiﬁcant in many forms of social research, they are particularly important in ethnography, wherein the researcher is typically involved in ﬁeldwork settings for a greater period of time, and often more deeply than in other methodologies. The endurance of ethnography offers opportunities for ethnographers to adopt a broad range of roles, many of which may be dependent on levels of trust and familiarity, which often require and result from sustained presence in the ﬁeld. Notions of endurance are also relevant to the ethnographer’s experience: ethnography is highly intensive and demanding because roles are often hard to understand, difﬁcult to enact, and at the same time crucial to the research endeavour. For several decades ethnographer’s roles have been considered and theorised in the context of perceived shortcomings in our understanding of different roles. The aim of this paper is to offer a new way of thinking about ﬁeld roles in ethnographic research that avoids some of the limitations associated with existing frameworks. Gold (1958) and Junker (1960) discuss the different sorts of roles that ethnographers might adopt in the ﬁeld in terms of a fourfold typology: complete observer, participant as observer, observer as participant, and complete participant. Although these ideas are useful in the way they signpost a range of roles and encourage researchers to think carefully about

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which roles are most appropriate given different settings and purposes, they have been subject to criticism. Janes (1961) suggests that ethnographers’ roles are not static but can change over time, and within the general descriptor of ‘participant observer’, he charted a sequence with increasing degrees of acceptance from newcomer to imminent immigrant. Notions of gradual shifts in researcher roles over time proved popular, and Oleson and Whittaker (1967; cited in Walford, 1987) use this principle to describe evolving forms of exchange between researchers and participants. While introducing ideas that roles can change over time, these frameworks focus on long-term linear changes, and imply that at any one time the ethnographer’s role can be characterised by one particular form of interaction in a ﬁeld site. Despite these limitations, Walford (1987) notes that such simplistic understandings of roles have had a strong legacy. Gold’s (1958) typology has been used by Punch (1998) and Robson (1993) to describe the range of indepth qualitative ﬁeld roles, while Burgess (1984) describes his roles in school-based research in terms of Janes’ (1961) framework. Snow, Benford, and Anderson (1986) offer a different typology of ﬁeld roles (controlled skeptic, ardent activist, buddy-researcher, credential expert), each of which they associate with particular strengths and weaknesses with respect to data acquisition or ‘informational yield’. They, like Gold and Junker, suggest that researchers adopt one role in a particular project (their typology is derived from their own experiences of doing ethnographic research), and do not accommodate either the possibility that researchers’ roles can change (develop) over time, or that researchers can adopt a variety of roles and switch between them rapidly. Goffman (1959) provides one of the earliest examples of a more subtle analysis of researcher roles. Rather than suggesting that researchers adopt monolithic roles depending on the research site, or that roles follow a linear evolution over time, he examines the nature of ﬁeldwork sites. From this he suggests that researchers might have to adopt different roles in order to access the different social activities and settings that co-exist within the ﬁeld site. Of particular note is the distinction he makes between ‘frontstage’ and ‘backstage’ settings. This paper builds on Goffman’s (1959) ideas that social activities are often separated temporally or spatially, and I will show that research sites may incorporate multiple frontstage and backstage arenas within a complex collection of territories. Walford (1986, 1987) describes a range of roles that he adopted within his school-based ethnographic research. He notes for example how the role of

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‘observer’ functioned well in lessons, but was ‘‘only acceptable within tightly deﬁned circumstances’’ (p. 60), notably not around the playground or quadrangle. He also discusses different roles he negotiated with pupils, and a further set of roles with teachers, and it is clear that his roles changed depending on location, time and social setting. The Junior Common Room presented challenges by virtue of its pupil-dominated quality, while informal activities with teachers such as dinner parties or pub visits offered opportunities for different forms of interaction. Different roles permitted occasional forays into more subversive aspects of school life, for example joining pupils in using a stolen key to ‘break in’ to out-of-bounds areas in the middle of the night (Walford, 1986). However, the thrust of Walford’s (1987) argument was to demonstrate the weakness of existing thinking about ﬁeld roles in terms of their tendency to portray them as something that researchers are the sole determinants of. He concludes: The roles open to me were severely restricted by the expectations of those being researched. Moreover throughout the time at the schools I felt obliged to present an ‘overarching role’ which was somewhat in conﬂict with my own feelings. (p. 62)

Unlike Walford I did not ﬁnd that my role-taking was severely restricted, and I felt no obligation to present an overarching role, indeed both teachers and pupils treated me in different ways at different times, offering me ways to diversify the roles I undertook. This paper considers the association between roles and territories in my own experience of doing ethnographic research in schools. The aim is to describe the concept of research territories and to illustrate its utility as a framework for understanding ﬁeldwork roles such that other ethnographers might be encouraged to think through the nature of their research sites and the implications this might have for the roles they adopt, and ultimately, the information they acquire.

THE TERRITORIES OF RESEARCH IN SCHOOLS In the following sections I discuss ﬁve different territories I have identiﬁed with respect to my research, each of which can be deﬁned in terms of spatial, temporal and/or social characteristics. I consider my interactions with teachers ﬁrst, pupils second, although my interactions with these two groups were complicated because: (i) Teachers and pupils were not always separated, and I was often in situations where I was interacting simultaneously with both.

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(ii) The ways one group perceived my interactions with the other group may have inﬂuenced the way they engaged with me as a participant in different aspects of their school lives. The ﬁve territories considered below are as follows: (1) interactions with teachers in the geography ofﬁce; (2) interactions with teachers in the classroom during formal lesson time; (3) interactions with pupils in the classroom during formal lesson time; (4) interactions with pupils in the classroom during fringe time; and (5) formal researcher-initiated structured interactions with pupils. This is not an exhaustive account of all the territories I encountered (I might add playgrounds, buses, car journeys), but it is sufﬁcient to illustrate both the limitations of existing writing about ethnographic roles and the utility of territories as a conceptual lens through which to explore these issues.

Territory 1 – Interactions with Teachers in the Geography Office In each school the geography teachers shared an ofﬁce in which they spent considerable amounts of time. These teacher-only spaces were characterised by rapidly changing activities and forms social interaction, switching almost instantly from a backstage feel (informal, private chatter) to behaviours more suggestive of a formal frontstage setting. During break times, pupils would often knock on the door with problems (lost detention slips, books, coursework, shoes), requests (rescheduling of detentions, extensions to deadlines) or documents (parental reply slips, report cards). The opening of the door to a pupil would often trigger a noticeable change in the atmosphere of the ofﬁce and the behaviour of teachers. They would refer to each other as Mr or Miss X, and would curtail any conversations or activities that might undermine a formal (frontstage) appearance to pupils. Once the door was closed and pupils shut out, activities quickly regained their backstage character, signiﬁed by the continuation of gossip or moaning about pupils from the point at which they had been interrupted. Even this small, physically bounded space, with its clear social boundaries (the exclusion of pupils) was thus host to a variety of social practices which required me to adopt a range of roles as and when appropriate. Experience of piloting taught me that doing nothing in these contexts was out of character and while not the cause of friction, served to distance me

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from teachers. Walford (1987) notes: I realised that it was important to ensure that staff and pupils knew that I was actually keeping myself busy. Most ethnographic ﬁeldwork techniques which involve simply talking, observing and listening to people y were simply not seen as work by others. (p. 56)

While doing nothing, or appearing to do nothing was not an option, sitting notebook in hand, avidly scribbling notes, seemed to make teachers uncomfortable and create a stilted atmosphere. I learned that the most appropriate and effective form of engagement in these contexts involved my doing some activity (perhaps reading and making notes from a journal paper and occasionally scribbling short ﬁeld notes) that kept up norms of busy-ness but which also maintained my position as available to join in conversations and/or ready to help a teacher out. In this way my roles ﬁtted ongoing practices – I was busy working or busy gossiping, whichever matched the general activity of the ofﬁce at a particular moment. Shifting from one role to another involved partial detachment from those roles and being aware of changes in interactions between teachers that warranted a change in my behaviour. These were sometimes obvious switches between formal and informal (front/backstage) behaviours, but were also more subtle, involving an unannounced consensus that, for example, gossip had come to an end and it was time to get some serious marking done. Gossiping with teachers had both beneﬁts and drawbacks. It was a key facilitator of interactions which led to the development of rapport between me and staff, and particularly between me and the teacher whose classes formed the focus of my research. Informal chatter had a positive feedback mechanism in that the more I came to know about the schools (the difference between a blue and green slip) and members of staff (their good days, bad days, good sets, bad sets, general gripes and so on), the more easily I could engage in ofﬁce discourse. In these moments my role was close to that described by Gold (1958) as ‘participant as observer’, in that I sought to gain the trust of teachers, and although never actually adopting the role of teacher, my role increasingly appeared in many respects to be more that of colleague rather than outsider. I reminded teachers of my status as researcher, by taking out my notebook from time to time, or by explicitly raising issues relating to my research (such as negotiating a space for me to conduct interviews at lunchtime). In order to become more colleague and less outsider I seized opportunities to ‘side’ with teachers. I might agree with a teacher that pupils had been very

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well behaved in one lesson, or that a particular pupil had demonstrated impressive thinking skills. I might also share his or her frustrations with the prospect of a year 7 class on a windy Friday afternoon. This enabled me to develop a shared and valued social identity within the geography ofﬁce context. It was here that I drew strongly on what I had learned from living with teachers for several years, and made up the deﬁcit in my understanding of schools that results from my status as a non-teacher. Having long endured the blow-by-blow accounts of particular lessons freely offered on a daily basis by my housemates, I was armed with some knowledge of the issues teachers think are important, an understanding of the pressures and frustrations of school life, and a sense of how to say the right things. Everyone (i.e. all teachers) knows that year 7s can’t be expected to concentrate for more than a couple of minutes in the afternoons, everyone knows that Fridays are the worst in this respect, and everyone understands the hyperactivity-inducing effect of windy weather on younger pupils. The longer I remained in each school, the more involved I became in various different activities and practices. This evolution of practice was documented in my ﬁeld notes: as I became a familiar face and teachers got to know me I’d be asked to run off some photocopies before a lesson, carry exercise books from room to room, ﬁnd a particular video, make the tea, or go to the shop to buy biscuits. In some cases I added up pupils’ coursework marks, entered data, and even helped develop resources for teaching and learning. Thus, I do not wish to challenge the arguments (discussed above) that researcher roles can evolve over time. What I hope to demonstrate is that a picture of a single role following a linear trajectory may be an oversimpliﬁcation. While changes in roles are typically considered as attrition-like shifts that reﬂect the gradual building up of trust and rapport, I experienced particular moments after which my roles dramatically changed. This may be illustrated by considering a day when the geography staff in one school learned that their ofﬁce was to become a classroom and they had to move everything that afternoon to what had previously been the storeroom. Not only did I spend several hours carting boxes, but as the only person who wasn’t teaching, I became the only person who knew exactly where everything was. From then on when things couldn’t be found the default option was ‘‘ask Nick’’, a repeated practice that solidiﬁed my rapport with teachers and signiﬁcantly altered the roles I adopted thereafter (essentially even more free-ﬂowing gossip). I was constantly conscious of the ethical implications of my role in geography ofﬁce life, and of the boundaries that this imposed on forms of

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practice I could adopt. Ofﬁce gossip had a tricky characteristic of changing rapidly from relatively benign subjects to others, which were more personal, conﬁdential and even insulting. While I jumped at some chances to side with teachers, at other times this was less appropriate: I could not agree that Ben was ‘‘the thickest person I’ve ever met’’ that Dom’s parents ‘‘should never have been allowed to have children’’, or that the head is a ‘‘pathetic’’ man, and the safest practice was to avoid entry into such discussions, either by changing the subject of conversation, or by remaining busy-in-work rather than becoming busy-in-gossip. My actions and comments in the geography ofﬁces were carefully bounded in other ways. As well as setting myself rules as to what I would and wouldn’t discuss, I was clear with teachers and myself about what I would or wouldn’t do. I explained that I did not want to become involved in formal administration (dealing with detention slips, for example), or to be set up as a user on the computer system (computers were rare enough in these rooms and I felt they should be left for teachers). I did, however, agree to answer the phone, and on occasion, meet teachers’ requests to say they weren’t present so that they wouldn’t be disturbed. The geography ofﬁce constituted a challenging territory because interactions with teachers within this small space were complicated by the constantly changing nature of the forms of behaviour and social interaction the teachers themselves were engaging in. My associated adoption of different roles, and my rapid shifting between them strike at the heart of my argument that ethnographic ﬁeld roles should be considered with greater sensitivity than is typical in the literature. The next section shows how I adopted other roles in interacting with the same group of people in a formal classroom setting.

Territory 2 – Interactions with Teachers in the Classroom During Formal Lesson Time While the geography ofﬁce was a space in which teachers could (sometimes) let their guard down, in the classroom teachers were always ‘in role’, and formal lesson time was always a frontstage setting. It was also frontstage for me, as I was a visible ‘other’ in the classroom, subject to the gaze and expectations (whether I met them or not) of teachers and pupils. Maintaining existing codes of practice, I referred to teachers as Mr or Miss X, rather than on ﬁrst name terms as I would in the geography ofﬁce. There were obvious limitations to both the extent and format of interactions

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between myself and teachers during formal lesson time, as the teachers’ priority was, of course, to structure and guide pupils’ learning and behaviour rather than to talk to me. Interactions between us were almost always short and of a formal nature. For example, I might ask quick points of clariﬁcation about a task, or a teacher might ask me to close a blind. Teachers also held quiet conversations with me about particular pupils or their work, but very few of these interactions could be deemed closed in the sense that there were always pupils nearby, and I remembered from my own experiences as a teenager that pupils can choose to acquire acute hearing skills when they judge that teachers are trying to be discrete. This illustrates points (i) and (ii) made above about the complexity attendant with the simultaneous presence of two social groups and the perceptions that one has of the other. Many aspects of my roles in formal lesson time involved interaction with pupils (discussed below), but my participation in classroom life was often initiated by teachers and conducted in a way that, within the existing social hierarchy of the school, distinguished me from pupils, and rendered the roles I adopted closer in feel to those of a classroom assistant. I explained to teachers that my aim was to be as helpful as possible in lessons. One took this on board immediately and on my ﬁrst day in school asked me to act as ‘dragon’ in a lesson based on the TV programme Dragon’s Den. This was an ideal opportunity to show shared values with the teacher and demonstrate the sort of practices I might undertake as a researcher in their school. This illustrates the way teachers frequently engineered my role in lessons in ways that suited them. I often undertook menial tasks that enabled the teacher to concentrate on teaching and pupils on learning. I distributed and collected worksheets and atlases, helped pupils fold and unfold OS maps, and gave out the glue. More infrequently I became involved in the substantive activities of the lesson; for example, being ‘banker’ in a trading game or ‘Chris Tarrant’ in a Who Wants to be a Millionaire? plenary task. These instances of my involvement in formal classroom activities involve elements of what Snow et al. (1986) call an ‘ardent activist’ role. While neither my research sites nor questions were highly politicised, this idea is relevant insofar as I embraced the ideology, goals and rhetoric of existing classroom practice (it seemed reasonable to share the teachers’ concerns for pupils’ learning). The voluntary assumption of responsibilities (although minor in my case) and intensive participation are also among the activities listed by Snow et al. in describing this role. As in the geography ofﬁce, my roles in formal lesson time were carefully bounded. I never led lessons or aspects of them, and I ﬁrmly requested with

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each teacher that I not be directly involved in behaviour management or maintenance of discipline in lessons. I did not report off-task behaviour to teachers and did not overtly engage in corrective or positive behaviour management. On occasions when teachers addressed the whole class or particular pupils with regards to discipline I avoided eye contact with pupils and stood at the back of the classroom. This non-disciplinarian boundary was less about my relationship with the teacher (although I believe it was important to set out clear areas of territory in which the teacher’s authority and roles were maintained), and more about my relationship with pupils. Other researchers have reported feeling restricted in the roles they can adopt, particularly in formal settings, and I did expect some resistance from teachers with respect to my non-disciplinary role, especially as it evolved into active participation in subversive classroom life (see below). Fortunately my experience was less problematic, and I was able to adopt the roles I felt were most appropriate and likely to help generate useful data. In negotiations with teachers I emphasised my lack of teaching qualiﬁcations, and in practice I exercised caution by avoiding certain forms of interaction with pupils that teachers might embrace less readily until I had been around for some time and was better able to judge where the boundaries around my roles with pupils should lie.

Territory 3 – Interactions with Pupils in the Classroom During Formal Lesson Time My roles in formal lesson time were not conﬁned to interactions with teachers, indeed a signiﬁcant aspect of being in geography lessons related to adopting appropriate roles in interaction with pupils. When teachers were addressing the whole class I typically sat at the back of the room (usually on a window ledge or table) making ﬁeld notes in a school exercise book. This role of detached observer (Anderson & Burns, 1989) was appropriate at these times as it allowed the teachers to maintain primary authority in the classroom, and gave clear signals to pupils that I was not a teacher. When pupils were on task I engaged in numerous spontaneous interactions with pupils. These could involve approaching a pupil who had their hand up, clarifying instructions or giving them resources they needed to complete a task (such as paper if they had forgotten or lost their books). Some pupils made it clear that they didn’t want assistance from me (either by telling me, or by turning away when I approached them and calling for

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the teacher), but most actively sought my attention, some seeming simply to enjoy showing me what they’d done. I initiated some interactions by asking pupils to tell me what they were doing, or explain something about their work to me. In addition to these ‘on-task’ interactions, I also adopted more subversive roles, although these were subject to carefully constructed boundaries. Often rapport could be developed with pupils simply by making it obvious that I’d seen them misbehaving but making it equally obvious that I wasn’t going to do anything about it. This seemed to render me complicit in pupils’ subversive actions in their perceptions, and was often returned with a subtle gesture that signalled their appreciation. Misdemeanours could involve anything from chewing gum, ﬂicking rubbers, passing messages on bits of paper, trading football cards, leaning back on a chair, or temporarily ‘stealing’ other pupils’ equipment. Although on initial visits some students would report other pupils’ misbehaviour to me, expecting some sort of reprimand or sanction, they soon stopped doing this, realising that I wasn’t going to do anything about it, and even started actively trying to involve me in off-task or disruptive behaviours. This I did (within limits) judging that it would not have unwarranted detrimental affects, but might help solidify my relationships with pupils, and thus lead to enhanced data acquisition later on. I passed notes from one pupil to another, and engaged in off-task conversations, answering pupils’ questions relating to my marital status, preferred football teams and television viewing habits. I often found that brief off-task interactions with pupils tended to be followed by a period of more focused activity on their part. It was sometimes quicker and less disruptive for me to pass a love note than for other pupils to throw it or leave their seats. Similarly, I found that pupils could be quite persistent in asking me personal questions, and my failure to respond to them seemed to make the prospect of discovery more alluring and occupy pupils’ attention even further. By reacting in a friendly and brief manner I satisﬁed pupils’ curiosity, and often reduced rather than augmented off-task behaviour. However, this maintained the appearance of a subversive role, and it was this appearance that was so important in developing rapport with some pupils. On some occasions teachers commented that by engaging in short informal conversations with pupils I helped reduce the likelihood of off-task behaviour escalating into something more serious or disruptive to other pupils. These roles were subject to clearly deﬁned, self-imposed boundaries, but I was fortunate that no serious incidents arose whereby my non-disciplinarian form of practice had to be abandoned.

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This engagement in more subversive elements of formal lesson time fed directly into the roles I adopted with pupils in classroom ‘fringe’ time.

Territory 4 – Interactions with Pupils in the Classroom Curing Fringe Time I refer to break and lunch times, and the beginning and end of lessons when no formal teaching is taking place as ‘fringe’ time. Fringe time also incorporated interactions with pupils on playgrounds and out of school (on buses etc.) – my focus on classrooms here illustrates how the same space can be intersected with temporal distinctions and associated shifts in the forms of social interaction which occur. As pupils were entering and leaving a class for a lesson I chatted informally with pupils about school and home life. At break and lunch times I sometimes hung around in classrooms that were open to pupils although I limited this because I felt it was important to maintain some spaces as adultfree. I would describe this setting as both frontstage and backstage. It is frontstage in that pupils remained very much on show to their peers and it seemed, actively aware of their peer-group hierarchies and behaviour norms; it is backstage in that it was characterised by informal interactions that were not supervised or structured by teachers, and not typically accessed by adults. Pupils often used these opportunities to ask me personal questions (Do I fancy Miss X? Am I a virgin?) and other more general questions (Did I watch Little Britain?), but were also keen to tell me about themselves. Pupils seemed to learn quite quickly that I wouldn’t comment about teachers or other pupils, but that I wouldn’t reprimand them for expressing their views. Their narratives about themselves or their peers were colourful, sometimes implausible, occasionally inappropriate, and I had to make on-the-spot judgements about appropriate boundaries to my roles in this setting, sometimes pretending not to hear or simply by ﬁnding an excuse to leave the room. I was sometimes called upon to be an arbitrator in disputes between pupils, and often treated as a venting post for pupils to moan about teachers, homework, detentions and the like. I heard juicy details about a ﬁght between pupils, although I had to be careful not to reciprocate when pupils pried about a stabbing event – I knew more than they did (i.e. who had stabbed who) but wasn’t in a position to reveal this information.

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Many of my lunch times, however, were spent preparing for and carrying out structured data generation activities with particular pupils.

Territory 5 – Formal researcher-initiated structured interactions with pupils This territory was less spatially speciﬁc than the others, incorporating a variety of classroom, corridor, staff-room and storeroom locations. I am referring here to contexts in which I invited particular pupils to meet me at lunch times and participate in audio-recorded, structured activities (either interviews about lessons, or the four techniques mentioned in the context section above). While all my interactions with pupils were part of my broad research agenda and atypical in the sense that pupils would not normally interact with a doctoral student, these formal interactions were different, and involved different ﬁeldwork roles. The quality of data generated through these interactions depended largely on the rapport developed with pupils through my roles in formal lesson time and fringe time. I asked a lot of questions to some pupils (up to 15 separate recorded interviews with an individual), and their willingness to give up their time may reﬂect to an extent the shared values that I had displayed through talking to them about things they were interested in and/or my non-disciplinarian (partially subversive) classroom roles. An important feature of all recorded interviews was that they began and ended with an unfocused question about how pupils were feeling or how their day was going. I participated not just as researcher needing data, but as adult interested in children (Mayall, 2000). Cooper and McIntyre (1996) argue that young people are unqualiﬁed experts in their own ﬁelds (i.e. in matters relating to their ideas, opinions and experiences), and in these instances I called participating pupils ‘experts’ and gave them a sheet explaining why I considered them so. Many aspects of my roles in these interactions were aimed at enabling pupils to participate actively in the study rather than as passive objects of research. Such practices included asking pupils to choose names to be used in writing about them (one pair chose the names Bart and Lisa which inevitably meant I used the pseudonym ‘Springﬁeld school’). I also asked pupils to switch the mini-disc recorder and microphone off and on and do things like check the write protect button wasn’t pressed. One technique in particular involved me ‘letting go’ of some control in my research and passing responsibility for creating stimulus materials to pupils. I gave pupils disposable cameras and asked them to take pictures showing

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what they thought geography was about.1 I asked them to take between six and ten for me, and to use the rest of the ﬁlm as they wished. The cameras came with free processing coupons, and so pupils got the pictures developed themselves and brought in copies of those that were relevant to my study. Pupils seemed to enjoy this task – photographs were taken from aeroplanes, ferries, and cars (signalling the fact that pupils carried the cameras away with them on holidays). They also seemed to enjoy talking about their pictures and seemed quite proud of them, if perhaps surprised that someone like me was so interested in them. During these formal recorded interactions with pupils, I also adopted roles that were more rehearsed and more speciﬁcally attuned to my own research agenda than the other roles I have described above. All interviews were semi-structured in nature, and I had remits to follow my interview guide, steer pupils’ comments so they remained relevant, and actively listen to their responses in order to pose follow-up questions or probe for further clariﬁcation. The conduct of interviews in social research is well documented, and my purpose here is not to suggest that my roles in these contexts were unique. Rather the discussion of this ﬁfth territory serves to demonstrate more fully the range of roles that researchers can adopt in interaction with particular groups of participants, and to illustrate that the different territories in which research takes place are not purely properties of ﬁeld sites, but can be actively constructed by researchers themselves.

CONCLUSIONS Walford (1987) notes that it is inappropriate to consider ethnographic research in terms of single roles because ‘‘a variety of roles must be adopted which will vary with the different individuals with whom the researcher interacts’’ (p. 45). In this paper, I have explored the range of roles I adopted in a school-based ethnographic study, and have shown that different roles cannot be straightforwardly associated with particular people, times, or places, or people. I have introduced the concept of territories as settings for interaction between researchers and participants which are deﬁned in terms of spatial, temporal and social dimensions. This concept is helpful in understanding the complex nature of research sites, and the resulting insight can help researchers consider the roles they adopt in the ﬁeld.

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To consider a research site territorially is to think through the different contexts in which researchers ﬁnd themselves, the forms of activity and social interaction which characterise those contexts, and the ways in which these settings can be demarcated. Rather than simply distinguishing between the frontstage and backstage, or different groups of people, researchers can begin to explore ways in which the same place is host to a range of social practices, and how these practices can change in predictable, structured ways (as with a classroom and a school timetable) or as part of a less predictable, dynamic setting (as with the geography ofﬁces). As well as elucidating the way the social nature of particular places can change over time, the process of considering the different territories within a research site can also highlight the variety of roles that researchers adopt in interaction with particular participants or groups of participants. I have illustrated this by describing my participation in the gossip of the geography ofﬁce, my role as classroom assistant in formal lesson times, my informal chats with pupils in fringe time, and my role as instigator and manager of formal interviews with pupils. Such a description of research roles is strikingly different from the typologies offered by Gold (1958) and Junker (1960). It seems that the very nature of ethnography (extended periods of ﬁeldwork involving a range of techniques and interaction with a variety of participants) lends itself to the adoption of multiple different roles. Furthermore Snow et al. (1986) suggest that as different ﬁeldwork roles yield different types and degrees of information, a variety of roles should be utilised in any one project. However, they conclude that with few exceptions this means that research should be conducted by teams, with each individual adopting a role best ﬁtting his or her strengths, rather than by a ‘lone ranger’. In this paper I have shown, as did Walford (1987), that researchers need not be conﬁned to one role. However, I hope to have additionally provided researchers with a framework for making sense of the extremely complex contexts in which ethnographers conduct ﬁeldwork and of the variety of roles that they adopt. The process of considering different territories offers a conceptual tool, which may be applied to a variety of settings, and may prove useful in providing more nuanced understandings of the nature of research sites and hence ﬁeld roles. I have not described the roles I adopted in terms of a linear evolution over time, although I have indicated both instances where ideas of gradual shifts in relationships and roles are appropriate, and moments of more abrupt change. My purpose is not to refute the utility of a longitudinal trajectory in

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thinking about ethnographic ﬁeld roles, but rather to situate it within a different, more multi-faceted, form of understanding that accommodates notions of longer term progression and rapid ﬂux. Similarly, I hope to show that while the concept of frontstage and backstage settings can be helpful, it may be more useful to incorporate this distinction into a more subtle analysis of ﬁeld sites, such that more than one frontstage and backstage may be identiﬁed. The examples I have provided all relate to three English secondary schools, and it seems reasonable to suggest that similar territories might be encountered in other English secondary school sites, although of course researchers may adopt quite different roles within them depending on their purposes and personality. What I hope to offer readers more generally is not an understanding of researcher roles or ﬁeld sites that can be simply lifted or transplanted from one context to another, but rather the idea of thinking in terms of territories and being open to the multiple roles that researchers may adopt in particular spatially, temporally and socially deﬁned territories within a research site.

NOTE 1. The practice of giving participants cameras in research is now referred to as ‘self-directed photography’, and the earliest use of this technique was by Collier (1957, 1967). The use of photographs and discussions about them in ethnographic and social research has been explored by Prosser (1992) and Prosser and Schwartz (1998).

REFERENCES Anderson, L. W., & Burn, R. B. (1989). Research in Classrooms. Oxford: Pergamon. Burgess, R. (1984). In the field: An introduction to field research. London: Allen & Unwin. Collier, J. (1957). Photography in anthropology: A report on two experiments. American Anthropologist, 59, 843–859. Collier, J. (1967). Visual anthropology: Photography as a research method. London: Holt, Rinehart & Winston. Cooper, P., & McIntyre, D. (1996). Effective teaching and learning: Teachers’ and students’ perspectives. Buckingham: Open University Press. Goffman, E. (1959). The presentation of self in everyday life. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Gold, R. L. (1958). Roles in sociological ﬁeld observations. Social Forces, 36, 217–223. (Reprinted) In: A. Bryman (Ed.) (2001) Ethnography: Volume II (pp. 141–149). London: Sage.

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Janes, R. W. (1961). A note on the phases of the community role of the participant observer. American Sociological Review, 26(3), 446–450. Junker, B. H. (1960). Field research: An introduction to the social sciences. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Mayall, B. (2000). Conversations with children: Working with generational issues. In: P. Christensen & A. James (Eds), Research with children. London: Falmer. McCall, G. J., & Simmons, J. L. (1969). Issues in participant observation: A text and reader. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. Oleson, V., & Whittaker, E. (1967). Role-making in participant observation: Processes in the researcher-actor relationship. Human Organisations, 26(4), 273–281. Prosser, J. (1992). Personal reﬂections on the use of photography in an ethnographic case study. British Educational Research Journal, 18(4), 397–411. Prosser, J., & Schwartz, D. (1998). Photographs within the sociological research process. In: J. Prosser & D. Schwartz (Eds), Image-based research: A sourcebook for qualitative researchers. London: Falmer. Punch, K. (1998). Introduction to social research: Quantitative and qualitative approaches. London: Sage. Robson, C. (1993). Real world research. Oxford: Blackwell. Snow, D., Benford, R., & Anderson, L. (1986). Fieldwork roles and informational yield: A comparison of alternative settings and roles. Urban life 14(4), 377–408. (Reprinted) In: A. Bryman (Ed.) (2001). Ethnography: Volume II. London: Sage, pp. 150–169. Walford, G. (1986). Life in public schools. London: Methuen. Walford, G. (1987). Research role conﬂicts and compromises in public schools. In: G. Walford (Ed.), Doing sociology of education. London: Falmer.

THE STRANGE CASE OF THE DISAPPEARING TEACHERS: CRITICAL ETHNOGRAPHY AND THE IMPORTANCE OF STUDYING IN-BETWEEN Martin Forsey In this all too unequal world the orientation of many social scientists towards redressing the imbalances is not at all surprising. Indeed, I began my study of schooling in Western Australia in 1997 very deliberately orientating myself in this direction by reading Carspecken’s (1996) guide to critical ethnography in educational research. Carspecken refers to what he calls the ‘criticalist’ approach as one that is underpinned by a shared concern about social inequalities, and a desire to ‘work toward positive social change’ (p. 3). The emphasis on social justice, and the desire to not only ameliorate but also ﬁght the sometimes brutal conditions imposed on particular groups of people by the capitalist system, articulates a research stance congruent with my preferred standpoint. But as I will show in this paper, the criticalist project is not without its problems. For a stance that is overtly committed to addressing unequal distributions of power it seems remarkably unprepared for dealing with this issue as a research objective. As Ortner (1995, p. 176) suggests of criticalist researchers, especially those focused on resistance, they

Methodological Developments in Ethnography Studies in Educational Ethnography, Volume 12, 69–88 Copyright r 2007 by Elsevier Ltd. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 1529-210X/doi:10.1016/S1529-210X(06)12005-7

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tend to glide over the complex and contradictory political realities of the social groups they portray. The major problem explored in this paper arises out of the tendency for critical educational ethnographers to produce accounts of schooling in which teachers either disappear or are represented as mere cardboard cutout ﬁgures (Forsey, 2000). This particular form of ethnographic ‘thinness’ (Ortner, 1995) is attributable to the simplistic positioning of teachers as members of the dominant group in the resistance scripts critical ethnographers appear to carry with them upon entering schools. When ethnographers of schooling disassociate themselves from a notable group in their ﬁeld as a means of gaining the trust of their preferred subjects, which for critical researchers are almost inevitably marginalized students (Anderson, 1989; Reed-Danahay, 1996), all too often the result is a simplistic portrayal of teachers ‘acting on behalf of a class power not their own’ (Connell, 1995, p. 91). Such portraits undermine the broader research enterprise in which those of us who identify as critical educational anthropologists/ethnographers are engaged. There are three main aims for this chapter: (1) explaining the relative lack of attention to teachers in criticalist accounts of schooling; (2) exploring the implications of these oversights for qualitative research in schools; and (3) suggesting ways in which the researcher’s mindset might shift to address the issues arising from our currently ‘averted gaze’ (Wisniewski, 2000). Advocating a mindset attuned to the critical appreciation of social life, I suggest a need to heighten the importance of clear and precise documentation of the power-ﬁlled social relations characterizing educational settings as an important element of the criticalist project. Further to this, I argue for the need to position ourselves in ways that allow us to better see, feel and evaluate some of the multitude of interactions that take place in schools and their surroundings. This differs somewhat with recent pronouncements that have appeared in Anthropology and Education Quarterly (AEQ), the ﬂagship journal of the American Anthropological Association’s Council of Anthropology and Education, declaring the need to heed Nader’s (1974) relatively ancient call to ‘study up’ (Priyadharshini, 2003; Hamann, 2003). While I think it is important that educational ethnographers shift what sometimes seems like an exclusive focus on subaltern groups, it is not enough to simply change the direction of our gaze. We need to pay attention to standing and moving in the ‘in-between’ spaces occupied by social groups. Such positioning can allow us to reﬂect upon the complex of horizontal, vertical, and perhaps even diagonal, relationships that constitute the social formations we call schools. Such positioning offers far more

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productive angles from which to explore the ways in which power is conﬁgured and impacts on people. Like Ortner (1995, p. 173), I view ethnographic positioning as not just a corporal act; it is also intellectual and moral in its intent and practice. Ortner’s thoughts on the ‘ethnographic refusals’ she associates with critical ethnography are of great importance to the arguments I am pursuing here. She describes such refusals as an avoidance of the anthropological commitment to ‘thickness’, by which she is referring to the ways in which Geertz has stressed the need for ‘richness, texture and detail’ in ethnographic portrayal (Ortner, 1995, p. 174). These ideas are pursued later in the paper; I ﬁrst want to provide a brief overview of some of the developments of a critical ethnography as applied to education and to uncover some of the major strands of thought and practice in the social sciences contributing to the development of this particular research approach.

CRITICAL ETHNOGRAPHY AND EDUCATIONAL ANTHROPOLOGY Critical ethnography ﬁrst emerged as a distinctive research approach in education studies in the late 1960s (Anderson, 1989, p. 250). It has now achieved a degree of respectability and has taken its place as part of the qualitative tradition in universities (Jordan & Yeomans, 1995, p. 399). Critical ethnography reﬂects what Geertz (1983) identiﬁed as a ‘blurring of genres’. As the name suggests, it is marked by a conﬂuence of interpretivist ﬁeld studies and critical streams of thought (Goodman, 1998, p. 51). These converging streams, arising from a variety of sources and pushed along by the currents of Marxist, neo-Marxist and feminist social theory, swirl together into a dynamically enriched mixture of the methods and theories of anthropology, sociology and education. Not surprisingly the streams formed in different parts of the globe, while composed of all of the elements just named, are conﬁgured slightly differently. As Priyadharshini (2003, p. 421) recently noted in comparing British and American strands of educational ethnography, the Western side of the Atlantic is marked by a much stronger tradition of educational anthropology than in the UK. And these differences make a difference. I write from Australia where educational anthropology barely forms a trickle. Nevertheless, I write as one who was trained primarily as an anthropologist and has applied this training to the study of schools and

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schooling. True to the swirling realities just described, I readily acknowledge the inﬂuences of sociologists and educationalists, among others, on my research and writing. I am certainly not arguing that there is a pure, or entirely distinctive, anthropology. However, when addressing educational ethnographers, which I imagine I am mainly doing here, I think it is useful to call attention to the centrality for anthropologists of ethnographic studies based on participant observation. Priyadharshini (2003, p. 426) in the same paper in which she alerts us to the differences between North American and British educational ethnography, also makes this point, or at least she does for an earlier era. Drawing on the writing of Nader (1974) and Marcus and Fischer (1986), she asserts that the self-image of anthropologists was severely disturbed if they could not ‘participant-observe’. According to Priyadharshini, things have moved on from what was apparently the case in the 1970s. In the current era, she argues, ethnographers draw upon a wide variety of techniques; thus, their research identity is no longer deﬁned by a speciﬁc method. I beg to differ; at least as far as anthropology is concerned. Ethnography remains the signature method of anthropology, and the self-image of the majority of anthropologists remains ﬁrmly tied to participant observation in ways that I am sure is not the case for my colleagues in sociology and education departments. One can easily imagine being a sociologist or educationalist without being an ethnographer. This is simply not possible for most social and cultural anthropologists. Having indicated the impossibility of conceptualizing an educational anthropology that is distinct from other disciplinary traditions, I take it as given that anthropology has had an impact on the broader ﬁeld. Therefore while this chapter focuses on critical educational ethnography in general, I pay particular attention to the ways in which anthropological ideals and ideas have inﬂuenced contemporary formations of critical thought and ethnographic practice; they help explain why teachers tend to disappear in critical ethnographic accounts of schools and schooling.

THE SUBALTERN GAZE AND DISAPPEARING TEACHERS Predictably enough, Willis’s (1977) enormously inﬂuential report of the ways in which ‘the lads’ he followed at ‘Hammertown Boys’ learned how to get working-class jobs was one of the ﬁrst criticalist ethnographies I read. While I was intrigued by his account of the ways in which the rebellious

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‘lads’ of ‘Hammertown Boys’ penetrated the meritocratic veneer of schooling and ‘the role of labour in the modern structure of capitalist production’ (p. 133), I was disappointed by Willis’s treatment of the teachers in the school. This feeling was to accompany me in my reading of other critical ethnographies of schooling (Forsey, 2000). Willis reports conducting interviews with many of Hammertown Boys’ teachers, readily acknowledging them as ‘dedicated, honest and forthright y doing an exacting job with patience and humanity’ (p. 67); yet their presence in the text is slight. Anticipating this sort of criticism, Willis wisely asserts that he could not concern himself with every variety of student culture and teaching relationship. Rather, he suggests it is the role of other practitioners ‘to test reality with the concepts outlined; to contextualize; to see what role different fundamental processes play at different strengths in different situations at different times’ (p. 85). Having one of the most inﬂuential educational ethnographers suggest that the responsibility for holism lies not with the individual researcher but rather with all who are involved in the research enterprise is a productive and potentially liberating idea. Yet, the implied widening of the agenda, aimed at ﬁlling in the gaps apparent in Learning to Labour, has happened only to a limited extent. Attention was eventually given to young women and girls in the ethnographic corpus. This helped shift attention away from what one of the pioneers of this movement calls ‘boys’ own ethnography’ (Grifﬁn, 1987, p. 87; see also Quantz, 1992, p. 456; Grifﬁn, 1985). Ethnic minorities also became a key locus of study, a fact reﬂected in my, somewhat cursory, survey of recent editions of AEQ where 71% of the published articles over the 6-year period survey (2000–2006) focused primarily on ethnic minority groups.1 While some of the articles included in the count of ‘minority studies’ were written about students from White working-class backgrounds, most converged on students of similar socio-economic status from Latino, Black, Asian and Hispanic origins. Such data help support recent assertions regarding the pervasive nature of the downward focus of educational anthropology (Emihovich, 1999; Wisniewski, 2000; Priyadharshini, 2003; Hamann, 2003). This ‘subaltern gaze’ (Marcus, 1998) has a double movement associated with it, as not only do researchers give most of their attention to marginalized groups in schools (and the vast majority of the articles surveyed reported on research conducted in and around schools), they also tend to concentrate mainly on students. Just over half of the articles were written about students or youth. When those featuring relationships between students and/or teachers and parents are considered, this ﬁgure rises to 76%. Only 20% of the research featured teachers as the

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major interlocutors. Some of the reasons for these patterns are located in the various theoretical, methodological and epistemological developments in the anthropological ﬁeld that are discussed below.

ETHNOGRAPHIC REFUSALS IN SCHOOLS Ortner’s notion of ‘ethnographic refusal’ offers some important insights on problems associated with subaltern studies. She brings together the anthropological ideals of thickness and holism under the rubric of contextualization, all of which she suggests lie at the heart of the ‘ethnographic stance’ (p. 174). The refusal of which she writes is marked by an unwillingness to explore a ﬁeld site in all of its richness. There is a baulking at thickness and holism, resulting in the sanitizing of politics, a thinning of culture and the dissolving of actors (p. 176). At risk of oversimplifying the argument, ethnographic refusal can be summarized as a failure to take seriously the complex realities that shape, and are in turn shaped by, the collective actuality of individual lives. Ortner correlates ethnographic refusal to the study of resistance among subaltern groups, and as she describes the situation (p. 190) such studies are often unnecessarily ‘thin’. They skate over the politics of dominated groups as well as the cultural richness of those groups and the intentions, desires, fears and projects that comprise the subjectivity of social actors. Ortner’s critique can certainly be used very productively in reﬁning criticalist studies of schooling, and help show the ambivalent, ambiguous nature of resistance in educational settings (p. 190). However, I want to call into question the standard anthropological line that Ortner appears to follow in acknowledging the downward gaze to be the most appropriate intention of ethnographic study (see p. 188). While I have no argument with her proposition that we should be moving beyond the politics of representation and the associated fears that arise about questioning and discussing the internal politics of dominated groups (p. 190), I also think that we have to widen our perspectives. Unless we pay attention to documenting and analysing other parts of the whole social ﬁeld, we are doomed to another level of ethnographic refusal, one that prevents us from understanding the complexities of power as well as the ambivalences and contradictions of subordinate positions identiﬁed so cogently by Ortner (1995, p. 175). I argue that ethnographic refusal is evident in many school ethnographies and is most readily visible in the failure of critical ethnographers to pay close attention to the worldview of the teachers in the school. Thickness and

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holism are not taken seriously enough by many, probably because of particular biases against the so-called middle class, bourgeois lifestyles. Part of the refusal possibly lies in not wanting to be seen to legitimize such a way of life, or perhaps because the impetus for change for a more just, socialist society are not thought to lie with that particular group (Davies, 1995). Two relatively recent and inﬂuential examples of ethnographic accounts of schooling help illustrate the points I am making here: Fordham’s (1996) account of ‘‘Dilemmas of race, identity, and success at Capital High’’ in Washington, DC; and Reed-Danahay’s (1996) portrayal of assertions of local identity and resistance of state power by parents and students involved with an elementary school in rural France (see Forsey, 2000). Both offer powerful examples of how to do critical ethnography in schools and are exemplary in many ways. However, insofar as they fail to take seriously the worldview of teachers, they also offer examples of some of the problems currently evident in the practice of critical ethnography in schools. Reed-Danahay describes various arenas of struggle between the villagers and Henri and Lilianne Juillard, the teachers who ran the two-room primary school in her research site of Lavialle. She succeeds in portraying the teachers ‘as young suburbanites’, who drew varying levels of disquiet and resistance from the parents associated with the school. One of the arenas of ‘dispute between parents and teachers’ to which she pays particular attention is the school lunchroom (p. 175). Reed-Danahay describes how the teachers organize the eating of lunch according to the protocols of an idealized uppermiddle class ‘bourgeois’ household. Exemplifying the tendency for criticalist accounts of schooling to present teachers as ‘disvoiced bodies’ (Forsey, 2000), Henri Juillard is portrayed as a stern and distant patriarch and Liliane as the household manager who upholds patriarchal authority (Reed-Danahay, 1996, pp. 199–200). While this is probably a valid and useful interpretation of ‘what the ethnographer saw’, there is no evidence in Reed-Danahay’s ethnography of her ever asking the teachers why they acted in this way. At no point do we ‘hear’ from them. Any one who has conducted research in schools knows the importance of maintaining relationships with teachers and administrators. Reed-Danahay is no exception and she informs her readers that she had established cordial relations with the Juillards. Why then do we not read of an interview, or informal questions probing the worldview of the teachers and their reasons for behaving as they did in the lunchroom? Not only would it be more ethically satisfying to read about these viewpoints, exploring the motivations of the teachers would greatly enhance our understanding of how the school works and deepen our appreciation of the ways in which power is actually exercised in social settings.

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Fordham’s ethnography is set in a high school where the vast majority of students are Black. The author aims at ‘a culturally sensitive representation of the factors y implicated in the success of Black adolescents’ (1996, p. 23). Opening with a passionately eloquent discussion of the importance of reﬂexive engagements by ethnographers on the power-ﬁlled representations they make, Fordham alerts her reader to the dependence of the consumers of anthropological knowledge upon the ethnographer’s interpretations and subsequent representations. Unlike the Juillards in Lavialle, the Washington teachers are given a voice, but, in an act of ethnographic ventriloquy, they emphasize the points that Fordham wishes to make. There is no evidence I can see of the teachers being invited into dialogue with Fordham about the representations she makes of them, representations that are consistent with the criticalist tradition of painting teachers and ofﬁcials as agents of the dominant, usually ruling class, bourgeois ‘other’, who are removed from the students and lack understanding of their struggle (Connell, 1995). Despite most of the teachers at Capital High being Black women, they also said to represent an assimilating ‘whiteness’ (p. 191). The teachers are portrayed as resisting the dehumanizing effects of White culture by conforming to the rules and norms of this dominant culture. Their apparent aim is to become ‘acceptable professionals’ (p. 202), or ‘foreign sages’, as Fordham insists on calling the teachers. While Fordham reports that the principal went out of her way to make her feel welcome at the school, and a number of the teachers did the same, at no point does Fordham report inviting teachers into discussion with her about the classiﬁcatory tools she uses to describe them. Instead, she seems content to follow a trend evident in many critical accounts of schooling in maintaining throughout her text a certain ironic and critical distance from these key social actors.

ETHNOGRAPHIC DISTANCING In their important introductory review of critical approaches to the ethnographic study of schooling, Levinson and Holland (1996, p. 19) offer some explanations for this ethnographic distancing. They point to the signiﬁcant ethical and methodological difﬁculties presented by school-based research and proffer three main problems for those conducting research in schools. Firstly, ‘schools have gatekeepers from whom permission must be obtained and of course maintained’. Secondly, the research requires sustained observations and interviewing. Thirdly, ‘the ﬁnished product of the research may

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very likely involve a critique of the very people who made the research possible’. While claiming such difﬁculties to be unique to school-based research is debatable, they do alert educational researchers to some important, and oft ignored, issues. Yet, they immediately smooth down the important threads they unpicked by asserting that, ‘a critical school ethnography cannot help but scrutinize the actions of school ofﬁcials, even if they are not our primary research subjects’. This is true, and as I hope is abundantly clear, not for one moment am I suggesting that the actions of teachers and administrators should not be subject to critical scrutiny. What I am suggesting is that critique is simply not enough and that if the critical stance does create the sorts of ethical, methodological and epistemological dilemmas Levinson and Holland allude to, then we need to think about the implications of this far more than we currently appear to be doing. In a later essay, exploring the reasons why schooling is ignored so consistently by ‘mainstream’ anthropology, Levinson (1999, p. 599) expands on the point he made in tandem with Holland by suggesting that the problems associated with studying schools lie in the often ‘difﬁcult negotiation of structurally opposed interests and alliances’ encountered by the researcher. While he does not inform the reader about who exactly comprises the oppositional alliances and what the various parties are ﬁghting over, it is reasonable to surmise that the conﬂict centres on defence and critique of a hierarchical status quo. I am arguing that teachers are rarely the main subjects of critical accounts of schooling, because they tend to be viewed as protectors of the status quo. They are simplistically portrayed as perpetrators of a system that oppresses and undermines students, particularly those from working class and minority backgrounds. While this is the case in many instances, and critical ethnography has done a great service in showing this, it is time to expand our understandings of how this happens. Very few teachers that I know deliberately set out to become oppressors of minority groups; indeed as Connell (1995) suggests, teachers as a group have an enormous commitment to an ethic of care and concern for injustice. In order to understand how educational practices are produced and reproduced real engagement with teachers and administrators should be a vital part of the critical ethnographic project over the coming years. I hasten to add that this should not be done as a means of ‘getting the goods’ on teachers (Marcus, 1998), but rather as a genuine attempt to understand the practice of power from the purview of key players in the social dramas with which we engage as participant observers. This theme is explored further in the next section.

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THE SUBALTERN GAZE IN CRITICAL ETHNOGRAPHY In their seminal account of the ways in which social and cultural anthropology has developed into a form of ‘cultural critique’ Marcus and Fischer (1986, p. 1) argue that anthropologists promised their largely Western readership enlightenment on two fronts: 1. The salvaging of distinct cultural forms of life from a process of rampant Westernisation; and 2. A form of cultural critique of and for this Western readership. Later, they turn their attention to the ways in which anthropologists shifted their attention away from small-scale societies in former European colonies, towards studies ‘at home’ in the so-called Western societies. Referring to this process as ‘repatriation’, Marcus and Fischer make a telling observation: y as they have written detailed descriptions and analyses of other cultures, ethnographers have simultaneously had a marginal or hidden agenda of critique of their own culture, namely the bourgeois, middle-class life of mass liberal societies, which industrial capitalism has produced (p. 111).

Nader (1974) asserts that anthropologists tend to favour the underdog, a positioning she describes using the ocular metaphor of ‘studying down’, and which Marcus (1998) names as ‘the subaltern gaze’. Such preoccupations are certainly not exclusive to anthropology, as Bell (1978) noted nearly 30 years ago, sociology is also replete with top-down perspectives. However, it is quite probably the case that anthropologists by personal inclination and training are more likely to be dismissive of Western cultural formations than are sociologists and educationalists. Helping to support this assertion, Priyadharshini (2003, p. 420) notes that while social scientists in general have increasingly shifted their attention upwards, the subaltern gaze is still very evident among educational anthropologists (see also Hamann, 2003). The cultural imperatives that push and prod anthropologists towards critique of bourgeois lifestyles help explain the lack of attention to teachers in anthropological accounts of schooling. But, as Priyadharshini (2003, pp. 423–425) also shows, a lack of sympathy with middle-class existence is not the exclusive domain of anthropologists. Her PhD research, which involved a critical ethnographic study of MBA programs at Indian universities, caused a degree of consternation among her research colleagues. Priyadharshini reports that fellow social scientists often interrogate her

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about her values and theoretical stance. Linking this curiosity to her interests in a pedagogical practice (the MBA) that in the view of many ‘supplied managers for exploitative, undemocratic and corrupt multinational corporations’ (p. 424), she argues that her colleagues puzzlement arises from assumptions about qualitative researchers needing to develop a close rapport with those they study. Priyadharshini’s experiences echo concerns Marcus has been raising for more than two decades. In conjunction with Fischer (1986), he suggests that commitments to the cultural critique of bourgeois existence push social researchers towards ﬁnding and emphasizing the negative or the absurd when investigating the worldviews of middle-class people. In an earlier work, drawing our attention to the problems raised by ethnographic studies among elites, Marcus (1983) points to the methodological difﬁculties posed by ‘ideological distancing from one’s subjects to the point of disapproval’ (p. 23). Importantly, he links the failure to engage with elite subjects to a fear on the part of the researcher to charges of elitism, a situation which he persuasively argues arises from confusion between working empathy and ideological empathy with one’s research subjects. More recently, Marcus (1998, p. 27) has issued a timely warning against research approaches committed to ‘getting the goods’ about elite groups, and ‘probing the interior dynamics of how power shapes [the subjects] lives and is produced by them so that they can be opposed’. Social researchers are obliged to interrogate as thoroughly as possible their motivations for carrying out their research. This is not only an ethical issue; it is methodological and epistemological as well. Understanding and comprehending how people come to grips with their particular social location and realities, no matter where they are positioned in social hierarchies, is surely a key component of our jobs as social researchers. It is helpful to recognize that criticism is usually the easy part of our project, one that is often taken up all too quickly by criticalist researchers (Goodman, 1998). This ‘race to theory’ (Christian, 1987) tends to undermine what should be the primary challenge of social research – understanding social formations in all of their imperfect glory. While many of the teachers I know would ﬁnd laughable any suggestions that they are part of society’s elite, especially when they compare their salaries with those of other university graduates, obviously one’s social standing is always a relative concept. This relativism helps explain why a number of critical ethnographic accounts of schooling treat teachers as part of a local elite, with all of the ideological distancing of which Marcus writes so cogently. At a time when the calls for deeper, richer, ‘thicker’, more

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nuanced understandings of power and its social effects are being issued (Abu-Lughod, 1990; Ortner, 1995), those drawn to a critique of the power relations produced by industrial capitalism often miss important opportunities to deepen their understanding of the complexities of power. Indeed, in so far as those of us committed to a politically engaged and critical anthropology of schooling ignore teachers and their formative relationships with students’ parents and administrators, we condemn ourselves to ‘ethnographic thinness’ (Ortner, 1995), and a concomitant theoretical and epistemological impoverishment.

THE PROBLEMS WITH REPRODUCTION AND RESISTANCE Critiques of the status quo mark some of the most important contributions of critical research. This is not the place to replay the development of critical thought as applied to the evaluation of schooling, but the key trope of reproduction is worth exploring because of the way in which it directs social researchers towards investigations of the beliefs and values of all social actors and their interactions with the social systems they are subject to. Initial uncovering of the ways in which schooling induces worker powerlessness that emerged in reproductionist arguments in the 1970s, and the idea that schools reproduced rather than ameliorated iniquitous social structures, offered an important corrective to liberal fantasies of education as an unproblematic ‘springboard for upward mobility’ (Levinson & Holland, 1996, p. 5; see also Althusser, 1971; Bowles & Gintis, 1976; Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977). It helps shift blame away from the victims of such structures to the system that produced them (Connell, Ashenden, Kessler, & Dowsett, 1982, p. 28). However, the trap of overdeterminism that plagues reproductionist accounts of schooling is now well recognized by most social researchers (Anderson, 1989; Davies, 1995; Levinson & Holland, 1996). Willis (1977) is often acclaimed as the one who shattered ‘the image of the passive, malleable student implicit in reproduction theory’ (Levinson & Holland, 1996, p. 9). It was the rebellious ‘lads’ of ‘Hammertown Boys’, and their penetration of the meritocratic veneer of schooling and ‘the role of labour in the modern structure of capitalist production’ (Willis, 1977, p. 133) that helped critical analysts to escape their own deterministic trap (Anderson, 1989, p. 251). Resistance emerged as the key theoretical trope of such approaches, with Willis’s ‘grounded version of resistance theory’

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becoming the touchstone work for critical ethnographers seeking to marry phenomenological concerns about human agency to Marxist preoccupations with social structure (Anderson, 1989, pp. 255–256). Resistance became synonymous with agency in many ethnographic accounts of schooling written in the criticalist paradigm, apparently providing the ethnographer with the means to move beyond static, deterministic explanations of human behaviour insinuated in cultural reproduction theories (Hoffman, 1999, p. 675). While Willis’s Learning to Labour was, and remains, an important text, especially for the way in which it allowed subsequent researchers to think beyond the traps set by an overly neat and impenetrable set of structures (p. 175), its privileging of resistance helped create a new set of conceptual problems. Resistance approaches have become hegemonic in many parts of the educational research corpus, partly because of their promise of locating agency among the subjects of the ethnographer’s downward gaze. Willis is clearly not to ‘blame’ for this, but his inﬂuence is profound and undoubtedly helped set the agenda for many a critical researcher. The problem I have with Learning to Labour lies not only in Willis’ representation of the teachers at Hammertown Boys, but also with those dismissed by the resistant ‘lads’ as the ‘ear’oles’, the complicit ‘prats’ with ‘ﬁve As and one B’ on their report (Willis, 1977, p. 14). These ‘conformists’, who display a relatively high acceptance of the authority of the school (pp. 98–99), receive scant, almost dismissive, treatment from Willis. His ethnography is thin in various directions. Responding to later criticisms about this, Willis (1981) implores his readers to recognize that his inattention to the ‘ear’oles’ does not mean that he denies their involvement in cultural production: ‘it seems hard to assume that I would forget in one instance what I’d been at pains to emphasize in another’ (p. 61). That said he then goes on to admit that the ‘ear’oles’ were presented as a foil for ‘the lads’, as a stylistic device rather than a theoretical necessity (p. 62). As such, the conformity of the ‘ear’oles’ has a pejorative ring to it, probably because their lack of resistance qua agency means that they have no role to play in the critique of capitalism (Shweder, 2001). There is apparently no potential for ‘a working-class movement with leftist undertones’ in this group (Davies, 1995). If it is true that for many critical researchers agency is usually, to be found in resistant behaviours, then, intentional or not, this equation is problematic. Such readings of the world render conformity as a form of submission to dominant structures. The agency of the conformist is denied; they become cogs in the wheel, mere ghosts in the machine. Yet, as Walford (1986, p. 23) astutely observes of the ‘ear ‘oles’, by virtue of their being able to transcend

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their own working class backgrounds, they may well have been more active and creative producers of original cultural forms than ‘the lads’ were. This dichotomous typology of ‘resistant’ and ‘conformist’ individuals, no matter how ideal these types might be, is too simplistic. It misses all of the subtle nuances in the ‘tender interval’ between structure and agency (Deeds-Ermath, 2001, p. 44). For it is a delicate space, difﬁcult, if not impossible, to discern. As Deeds-Ermath (2001, p. 44) argues, we need to move away from dualistic representations as ‘such either/or formulae hamper language’s capacity for both/and’. As I discuss in the next section, this movement away from simple binaries into more complex dimensions that pay attention to what exists on the continuum between domination and cooperation, allows social researchers to position themselves not only in more interesting places, they are probably more productive as well.

STUDYING UP, STUDYING THROUGH In the vibrant American anthropology of education scene over recent years there have been a number of contributors to the Anthropology and Education Quarterly advocating the need to heed more closely Nader’s (1972) exhortation for anthropologists to ‘study up’. Emihovich (1999, p. 483) argued the need to ‘confront issues of power and hierarchy in all forms of educational setting’. Wisniewski (2000, p. 8) identiﬁed the need to conduct thick ethnographic research of university academics, while Priyadharshini (2003) and Hamann (2003) explore Nader’s ideas in some depth. Hamann asserts that Nader’s research agenda offers an opportunity to ‘revitalise and guide the anthropology of education’ (p. 438) and Priyadharshini uses Nader’s ideas more critically as a means of illuminating some of the obstacles faced by those choosing to study those ensconced in powerfully lofty positions. ‘Studying through’ is how Shore and Wright (1997, pp. 14–15) in their overview of anthropological research of policy name what they see as being the most useful way of approaching the study of organisations. They emphasize the importance of recognizing ‘policy communities’ as ‘contested political spaces’, of producing multisited ethnographies that ‘trace policy connections between different organizational and everyday worlds’, and of addressing questions about how particular discourses become prominent and whose voices prevail in the policy setting. Taking a lead from Shore and Wright, as well as Deeds-Ermath (2001, p. 44), I argue here the need to move away from the either/or formulae of dualistic representations of social life implied in Nader’s up and down dichotomy towards a ‘both/and’

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commitment to research conducted in the in-between spaces that help structure our social world. Priyadharshini (2003) reaches some similar conclusions, and in so doing advocates a move away from adversarial research. However, her ﬁnal comment, that an inquisitorial approach to power offers ‘an opportunity for critique from within that may not be available otherwise’ (p. 434), helps illustrate how difﬁcult it can be for social researchers to escape the oppositional imperatives that seem to guide so much of the anthropological project in educational settings. Critique is important, but, as Goodman (1998, p. 55) argues, emancipatory ideology regularly replaces portrayal as the central purpose of ethnographic research: All of us are simply trying as best we can to make sense of the experience of living y [so] clear, authentic ethnographic portrayal will likely be more educative than the ideological insights of the researcher who made the observations in the ﬁrst place (pp. 56–57).

CULTURAL RELATIVISM, CRITICAL APPRECIATION AND THE IMPORTANCE OF STUDYING ‘IN BETWEEN’ British sociologist of education, Maı´ rtı´ n Mac an Ghaill (1996) is one criticalist researcher who has engaged in extensive ethnographic research project among teachers. The teachers in his research site were experiencing tumultuous change in their working lives and conditions and, based on their responses to the neo-liberalist organisational changes taking place, Mac an Ghaill identiﬁed three broad groups of teachers: Professionals; Old Collectivists; and New Entrepreneurs. His sympathies clearly lay with the two former groups in their struggle against the ascendant New Entrepreneurs. Expressing his awareness that educational researchers tend to ‘caricature social actors in terms of goodies and baddies’ (p. 184), he attributes his apparent favouring of two groups over the other to the unintended effects of using ideal types. Interestingly, he does not entertain the possibility that his dualistic portrayal is reﬂected in, rather than explained by, the conceptualisation of ideal types. However, it is in the next sentence, in which Mac an Ghaill distances his thinking from ‘the adoption of a relativist position’ (p. 184, my emphasis), where the tendency to caricature social actors in terms of ‘goodies’ and ‘baddies’ really lies. Mac an Ghaill’s rejection of relativism was very evident in a lecture he delivered to the Western Australian Institute for Educational Research in August 1998. Responding to a question about power and the researcher, he

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made the disarmingly candid observation that: ‘When I am with students, I hate teachers. When I am with teachers, I hate administrators. When I’m with principals y well who can you hate?’ Along with most of my fellow audience members, I laughed at this comment. It resonated strongly with me. But the laughter in part reﬂects a failure on the part of many critical ethnographers to take seriously the views of those we oppose. Mac an Ghaill’s comment reﬂects a privileging of the subaltern that characterizes much of the educational research enterprise. Coupled with rejection of relativism, the almost permanently downward focus of the ethnographic gaze has the unfortunate epistemological consequence of limiting the researcher’s abilities to comprehend what many criticalist researchers are surely all too aware of, that power is marked by complex relationships between similar and different groups located in various sections of the social hierarchy. As Ortner (1995, p. 175) argues, subaltern groups are never singular or unitary and their relationships with dominant groups are always characterized by some degree of ambivalence. After all, ‘in a relationship of power, the dominant often has something to offer, and sometimes a great deal’. Unless we ﬁnd ways of positioning ourselves, physically, emotionally and theoretically, in the spaces between these sometime oppositional groups, we may never come to recognize these sorts of realities. We condemn ourselves to the sorts of ethnographic thinness and the concomitant failure to really grapple with, and reach, deeper understandings of the practice of power. Social researchers, especially those studying so-called Western societies, often conﬂate cultural relativism with moral relativism (Fernandez, 1990). For anthropologists at least, cultural relativism in the main seems reserved for study of ‘the other’; yet it is arguably more important in so-called home settings. I argue that ethnographers researching middle-class people need to suspend their political critique for at least a little while, learning instead to understand the people they work with and their particular life path. In other words, in the search for a rigorous cultural relativism, researchers of social spheres that incorporate people from elite and middle class walks of life need to develop a mindset attuned to critical appreciation of their research sites and the people in them. While criticism is vastly more fashionable than appreciation in analyses of industrial capitalist societies, with the former term carrying an air of gritty realism in opposition to appreciation’s wide-eyed, functionalist innocence, they have the potential to interlock. Considering the words side by side, they interweave as different threads of the same tapestry. Committing myself to appreciating peoples lived experience, no matter what their social situation, is not to naively accept all that they believe and do. Rather, it helps create

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a mindset attuned to giving social settings and the people living in them their due value. Critique clearly has the potential to perform this analytical role, but not in the way it currently shapes social thought. Social researchers entering so-called middle class settings are encouraged to ﬁnd and emphasize the negative or the absurd (Marcus & Fischer, 1986; Goodman, 1998), paying little heed to the fact that, as with villagers on remote islands, we are observing ways in which people come to grips with their lives in the particular historical and social moments in which they ﬁnd themselves. For those researchers committed to social justice and evoking subaltern voices, such a stance can feel very awkward, perhaps even unnatural and unethical. However, if we are to heed the earlier mentioned calls for deeper, richer, ‘thicker’, more nuanced understandings of power and its social effects, a commitment to critical appreciation of all aspects of social life is vital. Sympathetic downward gazes, punctuated by highly critical upward glances, may be emotionally and ideologically satisfying, but this does not necessarily make for a satisfactory research process. Haraway’s (1991) inﬂuential ideas on ‘situated knowledges’ alert us to the need for social researchers to position themselves in methodologically and epistemologically useful spaces. Problematizing the premium so often placed on ‘establishing the capacity to see from the peripheries and the depths’ (p. 191), she argues for ‘passionate detachment’ and ‘mobile positioning’ as the most useful response to ‘the impossibility of innocent identity politics and epistemologies as strategies for seeing from the standpoints of the subjugated in order to see well’ (p. 192). Drawing on scientiﬁc metaphors to make her case, Haraway argues that, ‘One cannot ‘‘be’’ either a cell or molecule – or a woman, colonized person, labourer, and so on – if one intends to see and see from these positions critically. ‘‘Being’’ is much more problematic and contingent’ (p. 192). Studying ‘in-between’, in the interstices of social life is what I am advocating (see Mulcock, 2001; Forsey, 2004). It is easy to say or write of course, but not so easy to operationalize. What I am calling for in the shift in mindset from critique to critical appreciation is a commitment to rich, thick portrayal of the complexities of the social sites we ﬁnd ourselves in and a preparedness to report the views of a variety of social actors with tough minded fairness (see Herskovits, 1977). In other words, we need to try to see the social world from a variety of perspectives. More especially we need to be prepared to stand in spaces that allow us to view our research sites from directions towards which we are perhaps not naturally inclined. There is nothing radical in these proposals of course; most would recognize what I am suggesting as solid methodological practice for any

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ethnographer. For a variety of reasons, however, many criticalists seem to have forgotten this when it comes to portraying schools. One obvious consequence of this is that the teachers tend to disappear from critical ethnographies of schooling, and our collective understanding of these important sites of social action is the poorer for it. As Nader argued all those years ago, it is time to shift our points of focus.

NOTE 1. Included in the count is issue 1 of the 2006 volume. Number 3 of the 2002 volume was excluded because it was a special issue focused on an exceptional topic – the aftermath of the September 11 attack on the World Trade Centre.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS My thanks to Bradley Levinson, Jane Mulcock and Geoffrey Walford for their perceptive comments on earlier versions of this paper.

REFERENCES Abu-Lughod, L. (1990). The romance of resistance: Tracing transformations of power through Bedouin women. American Ethnologist, 17(1), 41–55. Althusser, L. (1971). In: B. Brewster (Trans.), Lenin and philosophy, and other essays. New York: Monthly Review Press. Anderson, G. L. (1989). Critical ethnography in education: Origins, current status, and new directions. Review of Educational Research, 59(3), 249–270. Bell, C. (1978). Studying the locally powerful. In: C. Bell & S. Encel (Eds), Inside the whale. Sydney: Pergamon. Bourdieu, P., & Passeron, J.-C. (1977). Reproduction: In education, society, and culture. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. Bowles, S., & Gintis, H. (1976). Schooling in capitalist America: Educational reform and the contradictions of economic life. New York: Basic Books. Carspecken, P. F. (1996). Critical ethnography in educational research: A theoretical and practical guide. New York: Routledge. Christian, B. (1987). The race for theory. Cultural Critique, 6(1), 51–63. Connell, R. W. (1995). Transformative labour: Theorizing the politics of teachers work. In: M. Ginsberg (Ed.), The politics of educators’ work and lives. New York: Garland Publishing. Connell, R. W., Ashenden, D. J., Kessler, S., & Dowsett, G. W. (1982). Making the difference: Schools, families and social division. Sydney: George Allan & Unwin.

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Davies, S. (1995). Leaps of faith: Shifting currents in critical sociology of education. American Journal of Sociology, 100(6), 1448–1478. Deeds-Ermath, E. (2001). Agency in the discursive condition. History and Theory Theme Issue, 40(December), 34–58. Emihovich, C. (1999). Studying schools, studying ourselves: Ethnographic perspectives on educational reform. Anthropology and Education Quarterly, 30(4), 477–483. Fernandez, J. W. (1990). Tolerance in a repugnant world and other dilemmas in the cultural relativism of Melville J Herskovits. Ethos, 18, 140–164. Fischer, A. (1969). The personality and subculture of anthropologists and their study of U.S. Negroes. In: S. Tyler (Ed.), Concepts and assumptions in contemporary anthropology. Proceedings of the Southern Anthropological Society (3), 12–17. Fordham, S. (1996). Blacked out: Dilemmas of race, identity, and success at capital high. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Forsey, M. (2004). ‘‘He’s not a spy, He’s one of us’’: Ethnographic positioning in a middle-class setting. In: L. Hulme, & J. Mulcock (Eds), Ethics, engagement and ethnography: Anthropologists confront the field, New York: Columbia University Press. Forsey, M. (2000). The anthropology of education: Cultural critique or ethnographic refusal? Anthropological Forum, 10(2), 201–221. Geertz, C. (1983). Local knowledge. New York: Basic Books. Goodman, J. (1998). Ideology and critical research. In: J. Smyth, & G. Shacklock (Eds), Being reflexive in critical educational and social research (pp. 50–66). London: Falmer. Grifﬁn, C. (1987). Review symposium – ‘schooling as a ritual performance’. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 8(1), 87–90. Grifﬁn, C. (1985). Typical girls: Young women from school to the job market. London: Routledge. Hamann, E. T. (2003). Imagining the future of anthropology of education if we take Laura Nader seriously. Anthropology and Education Quarterly, 34(4), 438–449. Haraway, D. J. (1991). Simians, Cyborgs and women: The reinvention of nature. New York: Routledge. Herskovits, M. J. (1977). Cultural relativism: Perspectives in cultural pluralism. New York: Random House. Hoffman, D. (1999). Turning power inside out: Reﬂections on resistance from the (anthropological) ﬁeld. Qualitative Studies in Education, 12(6), 671–687. Jordan, S., & Yeomans, D. (1995). Critical ethnography: Problems in contemporary theory and practice. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 16(3), 389–408. Levinson, B. A. (1999). Resituating the place of educational discourse in anthropology. American Anthropologist, 101(3), 594–604. Levinson, B., Holland, D. (1996). The cultural production of the educated person: An introduction. In: B. Levinson, D. Foley, & D. Holland, (Eds), The cultural production of the educated person: Critical ethnographies of schooling. New York: State University of New York Press. Mac an Ghaill, M. (1996). Sociology of education, state schooling and social class: Beyond critiques of the new right hegemony. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 17(2), 163–176. Marcus, G. (1998). Ethnography through thick and thin. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Marcus, G. E. (1983). Elite as a concept, theory and research tradition. In: G. Marcus (Ed.), Elites: Ethnographic issues. University of New Mexico Press: Alberquerque.

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Marcus, G. E., & Fischer, M. M. (1986). Anthropology as cultural critique: An experimental moment in the human sciences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mulcock, J. (2001). Ethnography in awkward spaces: An anthropology of cultural borrowing. Practicing Anthropology, 23(1), 38–42. Nader, L. (1974). Up the anthropologist – perspectives from studying up. In: D. Hymes (Ed.), Reinventing anthropology. New York: Vintage Books. Ortner, S. B. (1995). Resistance and the problem of ethnographic refusal. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 37, 173–193. Priyadharshini, E. (2003). Coming unstuck: Thinking otherwise about ‘‘studying up’’. Anthropology and Education Quarterly, 34(4), 420–437. Quantz, R.A., (1992). On critical ethnography (with some postmodern considerations). In: M. LeCompte, W. Millroy, & J. Preissle, (Eds), The handbook of qualitative research in education (pp. 447–505). San Diego: Academic Press. Reed-Danahay, D. (1996). Education and identity in rural France: The politics of schooling. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shore, C., Wright, S. (1997). Policy: A new ﬁeld of anthropology. In: C. Shore, & S. Wright (Eds), Anthropology of policy: Critical perspectives on governance and power (pp. 3–39). London: Routledge. Shweder, R. A. (2001). Rethinking the object of anthropology and ending up where Kroeber and Kluckhohn began. American Anthropologist, 103(2), 437–440. Walford, G. (1986). Life in public schools. London: Methuen. Willis, P. (1981). Cultural production is different from cultural reproduction is different from social reproduction is different from reproduction. Interchange, 12(2–3), 48–67. Willis, P. E. (1977). Learning to labour: How working class kids get working class jobs. Aldershot, Hampshire: Gower. Wisniewski, R. (2000). The averted gaze. Anthropology and Education Quarterly, 31(1), 253–274.

‘CASE STUDY’ OR ‘ETHNOGRAPHY’? DEFINING TERMS, MAKING CHOICES AND DEFENDING THE WORTH OF A CASE Sue Walters There is often a lack of clarity about the terms ‘ethnography’ and ‘case study’ and what differentiates them as research terms. This is acknowledged by many (e.g., Burns, 2000, p. 459; Hammersley, 1992, p. 183; 1998, p. 1; Punch, 1998, pp. 152, 162; Yin, 2003, pp. 12–13; Platt, 1992, p. 46 cited in Yin, 2003). The lack of clarity arises partly because the terms ‘ethnography’ and ‘case study’ can be used to describe a research strategy, a research focus (the choice of phenomena to be studied), the research methods (or procedures) used and/or the results of a research study. For a new researcher, particularly those preparing, conducting and writing up their ﬁrst qualitative study, the research literature available, and I am thinking here of those books that introduce or discuss research methodology (and are aimed at research methods course reading lists), can be bewildering. In my own research into the educational experiences of a small group of early years Bangladeshi pupils at school in the east of England, searching for the correct way to describe my study, I found that different authors deﬁned

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he terms I was encouraged to use, ‘ethnography’ and ‘case study’, in profoundly different ways. There was a lack of clarity across and within texts about what differentiated these terms and even whether the terms referred to methods of data collection, research strategies, objects of study or the ﬁnal product of research. While the different uses of the terms may reﬂect a healthy dynamic engagement with the emerging and ﬂuid forms of qualitative research work, or point to the contested nature of research terms, they can also create great confusion to new researchers starting to work in the qualitative ﬁeld. Mindful of Daniels and Akehurst’s comment that ‘learning to be a researcher is like learning to speak a language’ (in Birbili, 2001) I start by detailing the thinking that went into sorting out the way to describe and document my research study. I brieﬂy consider how the terms ‘ethnography’ and ‘case study’ were used in the available literature and how I went on to develop clear and workable deﬁnitions in order to present my work. I am not here describing the process of creating an appropriate research design; I knew what I wanted to do, how to do it and why. I am discussing the process I went through to ﬁnd a way of talking about and representing my research, in order to decide which words to use when the words on offer could potentially mean many different things. What is outlined here is my process of working out how to name and describe what I was doing. I then turn to a consideration of, ﬁrst, the importance in my research of conducting ethnographic case studies of individual children and not of classrooms and second, of how, what I came to term, ‘ethnographic case study’ can be of use outside of the speciﬁc micro setting of its production, thus addressing concerns about the generalizability and usefulness of this kind of research.

RESEARCH LITERATURE: DEFINITIONS AND DISCUSSIONS1 Writers present very different descriptions of what constitutes ‘ethnography’ and ‘case study’. While not attempting to review the literature, nor to comment on or endorse the overall quality of argument and presentation of research methodology made by each of the authors considered here, the following demonstrates how different the explanations and deﬁnitions offered can be. Cresswell deﬁnes ethnography as ‘a description and interpretation of a cultural or social group or system’ in which the researcher studies the

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Ethnography A social group or entire cultural or social system

Case Study A bounded system (a programme, an event an activity, or individuals but not a system of people)

A Method of Research Study (Approach/Process)

Prolonged observation of the group, typically through participant observation and one-to-one interviews (using anthropological concepts) – always qualitative.

Can use different methods that focus on the collection of in-depth data from multiple sources rich in context documents, archieval records, interviews, direct and/or participant observation, physical artefacts - can include quantitative methods and analysis (may or may not use anthropological concepts)

A Product of Research Study (Outcome)

A holistic portrait of a group or system

Can result in very different products - an in-depth analysis of a programme, an event, an activity or individuals

With the Aim Of

Understanding the way a group or social system works, the meanings it gives to actions, artefacts and so on. Ethnography investigates people in interaction in ordinary settings, it looks for patterns of daily living (culture), what people do, say and use to find out what a stranger would have to know in order to be able to take part in the group or society in a meaningful way.

Understanding the uniqueness of a case or to providing an illustration of an issue.

An Object of Research Study

Fig. 1.

A Summary of Cresswell’s Delineation of ‘Ethnography’ and ‘Case Study’.

meanings of behaviour, language and interactions of the culture sharing group (Cresswell, 1998, p. 58) case study as an ‘exploration of a bounded system y over time’ (Cresswell, 1998, p. 61) and understands them as trying to accomplish different things: see Fig. 1. While Cresswell’s notion of the ﬁve traditions, within which ‘ethnography’ and ‘case study’ are placed, seems ﬂawed, his discussion of the two terms helpfully highlights the fact that, in his view, while ethnography is both an object of study (that object being a cultural or social group or a system); a method (a research approach or process) and a product of research (a holistic portrait) and cannot be quantitative, case study can utilize ‘multiple sources of information’, it can result in very different products (outcomes) but it has a speciﬁc object of study (a bounded system). Such a differentiation between the two terms seemed a good working deﬁnition (and Cresswell himself notes the potential overlap between ‘ethnography’ and ‘case study’ when researchers study a system). He further differentiates the terms by stating that in an ‘ethnography’ the entire

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cultural or social system is the focus of attention, whereas in ‘case study’ a system of people ‘is typically not the case’ (Cresswell, 1998, p. 66). However, Hammersley (1992, p. 183; 1998, p. 1), while acknowledging the overlap and ﬂuidity in the meanings of the two terms uses ‘ethnography’ to mean the much broader ‘qualitative method’ and ‘case study’ becomes ‘a selection strategy’ alongside ‘experiment’ and ‘survey’. A case being ‘the phenomenon (located in space/time) about which data are collected and/or analysed and that corresponds to the type of phenomena to which the main claims of a study relate’ (Hammersley, 1992, p. 184). Similarly, for Silverman (2005, p. 126), the term ‘case study’ refers simply to the particular topic or phenomena the research sets out to study. In this respect every research study is a study of a case. Along similar lines, Brewer, like both Hammersley and Silverman in writing about qualitative research, states that ‘While not all case studies are qualitative, all ethnographic research involves case study’ (Brewer, 2000, p. 77). Stake (1995, p. 86) prefers to take the line that case study is a choice of what is to be studied rather than being a methodological choice and, like Cresswell, that what distinguishes case study is its focus on a bounded system. Merriam follows this by deﬁning ‘case study’ as ‘an examination of a speciﬁc phenomenon, such as a programme, an event, a person, a process, an institution or a social group using both qualitative and quantitative methods’ (Merriam, 1988, p. 9). She deﬁnes ‘ethnography’ as a set of methods used to collect data, and as a written record, but not as an object of study (Merriam, 1988, p. 23). This makes her deﬁnition different to Cresswell’s. Travers entitles his book Qualitative Research Through Case Studies but ‘case study’ does not appear in the index nor in the contents page and is used in the Preface to refer to research studies that are used as an ‘example’ to illuminate a particular research approach (Travers, 2001, p. viii). Yin, while also acknowledging that ‘case study’ is often confused with ‘ethnography’ (Yin, 2003, p. 12), deﬁnes ‘case study’ as ‘an empirical inquiry that investigates a contemporary phenomenon within its real life context, especially when the boundaries between phenomenon and context are not clearly evident’ (Yin, 2003, p. 13 my emphasis). Presented with so many differing or overlapping deﬁnitions and descriptions I was unable to simply utilize the terms to describe my research design and methodology without thinking deeply about the delineations I was offered and how I intended to use the terms in my work. What follows is an outline of my thinking and how I developed workable deﬁnitions as I ‘learnt to speak the language’ of contemporary research methods.

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DEFINING TERMS For the sake of clarity I chose to follow Stake who, as we have noted, presents ‘case study’ as not a methodological choice but a choice of object to be studied (Stake, 1995, p. 86). I took as the choice of object to be studied in an ‘ethnography’ a social or cultural group or system and the aims of ‘ethnography’ as understanding the way a group or social system works, the meanings it gives to actions, artefacts and so on. ‘Ethnography’, thus, investigates people in interaction in ordinary settings, it looks for patterns of daily living (culture), what people do, say and use in order to ﬁnd out what a stranger would have to know in order to be able to take part in the group or society in a meaningful way. This results in a holistic cultural portrait of the social group (taken from Cresswell, 1998, pp. 58–60). ‘Case study’ on the other hand, following Stake, takes as the focus of its study a bounded system of some kind. This can be an individual, an event, an organization or a cultural group (or a number of these). Thus I began to conceive of the difference between the terms as this: ‘case study’ does not ignore context but it focuses on the case situated within a context. The emphasis of the investigation is on the case. Thus, in this view, ‘ethnography’ provides a holistic view of a social group or culture, ‘case study’ an in-depth study of a bounded system or case or set of cases. ‘Case study’ is able to explore a range of topics, while (traditionally) ‘ethnography’ focuses on cultural behaviour, practices and artefacts. In this way ‘case study’ differs from ‘ethnography’ in that it is not seeking to understand a social group or system (unless a group is taken as a case) it is seeking to understand a case within an acknowledged social system. This can be represented in the following manner. social group or culture or social system

social group or culture or social system (context)

Ethnography

the case

Case Study

MAKING A CHOICE Either choice of study would have been appropriate for my study of the experiences of Bangladeshi pupils in school in the context of their perceived

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underachievement. I was interested in exploring the experiences of a small group of Bangladeshi pupils in school in order to understand what was helping and hindering them in their learning. Previous statistical research had highlighted the fact that Bangladeshi pupils as a group were underachieving in the school system (e.g., Kysel, 1988; Nuttall & Varlaam, 1990; MacIntyre, Bhatti, & Fuller, 1993; Demack, Drew, & Grimsley, 2000; Pathak, 2000) but was unable to properly account for why this might be so. Various qualitative studies in the 1980s and 1990s had considered the learning experiences of minority ethnic pupils and concluded that such pupil’s poor achievement could be accounted for in terms of the different amounts or kinds of attention that different (ethnically deﬁned) groups of pupils received from their teachers or that setting and banding arrangements in schools were key in creating disadvantage for certain minority ethnic groups (e.g., Wright, 1992; Gillborn, 1990; Troyna, 1991; Connolly, 1998a, 1998b). However, none of these studies had focused on Bangladeshi pupils and their ﬁndings did little to illuminate what might be happening for Bangladeshi pupils in terms of their learning and achievement. I could therefore have chosen to conduct what I have deﬁned above as an ‘ethnography’ of a school or classroom, looking, like previous qualitative researchers, at the complex interactions, behaviours and meaning making of teachers, pupils and so on but focusing on Bangladeshi pupils in order to understand something of the ways in which pupils were supported or hindered in their learning and achievement. Or I could have chosen to conduct a number of what I have deﬁned above as ‘case studies’ of individual Bangladeshi pupils with the same ends in sight. A choice of study that focused speciﬁcally on a child, or a number of children, rather than on the social group or the social system of a classroom seemed a more appropriate focus for understanding what the experiences of being a pupil in a classroom and of learning and taking part in the classroom were like. I was not intending to get a holistic view of a classroom, or a number of classrooms or school cultures but I did want to get at the experiences of speciﬁc children in the context of the classroom. The previous qualitative research noted above, which had considered minority ethnic children in the classroom, had started with the social system, the culture of the classroom and through that had shown how identities were produced and resources subsequently allocated to pupils. I wanted to look ‘right up close’ at speciﬁc children’s experiences of being in the classroom by starting with a speciﬁc child or number of identiﬁed children and seeing what was happening to them in speciﬁc groups and locations rather than exploring the dynamics of particular classrooms. The starting point for the study would be a speciﬁc child or a group of children

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not classrooms. In this respect I decided that my research would be called ‘case study’. Case study as a research strategy allows the researcher to undertake a single case study or a number of case studies. I decided to undertake a number of case studies rather than a single case study so that I would have a range of ‘portraits’ to illustrate the experiences of Bangladeshi pupils.2 An important aspect of the research was to consider the differing experiences Bangladeshi pupils might have in relation to each other and to get away from the notion that children, once ascribed to an ethnic group, must have much the same experience and needs in the classroom. In this respect, choosing to use ‘case study’ rather than ‘ethnography’ as my research strategy was an important research decision. In addition to this, a number of case studies of individual children would allow me to carry out ‘within-case analysis’ (a detailed description of each case and themes within the case) followed by a cross-case analysis (a thematic analysis across the cases) (Cresswell, 1998, p. 63) and a discussion of ‘lessons learnt’ (Lincoln & Guba, 1985). By being able to do ‘within-case analysis’ I would be able to avoid the danger of only considering Bangladeshi pupils in relation to each other and be able to consider them as individual pupils in a classroom. Combining ‘within case analysis’ with ‘cross-case analysis’ would allow for a level of depth as there would be the opportunity, later in the research, to explore any emerging themes or patterns or dissimilarities. In this respect, conducting the research as a number of case studies rather than as an ethnography was an important research decision. However, before turning to the issue of the use of a small number of portraits of individual pupils as a means of contributing to knowledge about Bangladeshi pupils’ schooling experience and the issue of underachievement it is necessary to say why I chose to describe my research strategy as ethnographic case study rather than simply as ‘case study’ or ‘qualitative case study’.

ETHNOGRAPHIC CASE STUDY AND MOVING BEYOND NOTIONS OF ‘BOUNDEDNESS’ At the heart of the deﬁnition of case study I chose to adopt (Stake, 1998, p. 86) there is an emphasis on the notion of ‘boundedness’ with which I was uncomfortable (Stake, 1995, p. 9; Cresswell, 1998, p. 61). Stake speaks of the aim of case study being ‘to thoroughly understand the bounded case’ (Stake, 1995, p. 9) and goes on to say that a child can constitute a case because s/he is ‘a working combination of physiological, psychological,

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cultural, aesthetic and other forces’ (Stake, 1995, p. 436). Although indeed a child could be considered to be a bounded unit, I am in favour of seeing children in context and in interaction, as created in and by the social processes in which they take part and not as separated, bounded identities (Yon, 2000). Case study, as deﬁned by Stake, would seem to have an unspoken afﬁnity with modernist conceptions of subjectivity which do not sit easily with my approach to understanding identity and subjectivity as multiple and ﬂuid. In the light of this I chose to think of my research strategy as case study because the phenomena that the research was investigating was the child or the children rather than the classroom or the school and as ethnographic because I did not consider the child or children to be bracketed off from the culture, the interactions and the context around them. Case study, as presented by Stake, does recognize the importance of context, but for my study I wanted to be clear that context was not some kind of background scenery or ‘noise’ but was an integral part in constituting who and what the child, or children, were. In this respect using the term ‘ethnographic’ with ‘case study’ signals that the social system or cultural group that the child studied was part of was an important part of constituting who and what that child was and could be. This understanding of ethnographic case study could therefore be represented in the following way (where I have taken the previous elements of ethnography and case study and combined them). social group or culture or social system

the case

Ethnographic Case Study

I also chose to term my research strategy ‘ethnographic case study’ because my research focus required me to use many of the same research methods as an ethnographer, these being: the need to enter into a close and relatively prolonged interaction with people in their everyday lives (Tedlock, 2000) and actively participating as a member of the social group (Emerson, Fretz, & Shaw, 1995); suspending premature judgements about what should be selected as data, creating analytical frameworks from interactions with informants and allowing for new questions and avenues to be explored to emerge from the

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ﬁeldwork (Walford & Massey, 1998, pp. 5–9; Stake, 1995, pp. 3, 9, 22, 33; Spradley, 1980, p. 29); looking at the research situation from many perspectives by gathering data from many sources and in a variety of forms (Walford & Massey, 1998, pp. 5–9; Merriam, 1988, p. 69) thus capturing multiple realities (Stake, 1995; Adelman, Kemmis, & Jenkins, 1980); and paying attention to subtlety, complexity and embeddedness (Adelman et al., 1980). and because the ﬁnal outcome of the study would share a lot with the outcomes of an ethnographic study, namely, an account of processes, practices and experiences and what happens over a period of time through which phenomena and processes can be understood within their particular social, historical and spatial contexts. Such an outcome would include a richness of detail rather than the ‘forgetting’ of statistical research (Keith, 1993) and provide an account of ‘the values, practices, relationships and identiﬁcations of people’ and explain ‘What is going on here? How does this work? How do people do this? (Walford & Massey, 1998, p. 5) although presented as a series of case studies.

A SINGLE CASE, MULTIPLE CASES AND THEIR WORTH A criticism of ‘case study’, one that has an important bearing on my own study, is that ﬁndings cannot be generalized or applied to other settings and because of this they are of little use to policy and practice and to wider understandings of social phenomenon (e.g., educational achievement). Case study and qualitative research in general, including ‘ethnography’, have been defended from this criticism in a number of ways. These can be grouped as follows, running from defences which claim that such research need not be generalizable in and of itself, through those that say it can be generalizable in ways that are different to survey and quantitative work to those that claim that ‘case study’ research is generalizable in the same way as these forms of research.

1. Exploratory This defence of the importance of ‘case study’ and other forms of qualitative research sees the ﬁndings of such work important in providing insights,

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language and categories that can be utilized in the design of other, usually, quantitative studies. For example, such a study can reveal important aspects of a person or group of people’s experiences and the language that they use in order to talk about these experiences. These experiences and the language used can then be incorporated into the design of a survey, which is then administered to a large, statistically sampled group. In this respect, such a case has an important exploratory role to play in advance of another study.

2. Particularity Some researchers have defended ethnography and qualitative case study by speaking of the importance and necessity of having things depicted in their particularity (Stake, 1995; Keith, 1993). Connolly (1998a, 1998b) claims that it is a mistake to expect to be able to generalize from ethnographic research and, like Stake and Keith, he defends the remit of such work as being concerned with identifying and understanding particular social processes and practices. Sharrock and Anderson (1982, pp. 172–173) defend their research on these grounds too.

3. ‘Naturalistic Generalization’ Related to this focus on particularity, Stake and Donmoyer have both defended ‘case study’ by claiming that such work can have a ‘general relevance’ (Stake, 1995) through the manner in which it is consumed by its readers and how such a study becomes part of a reader’s knowledge of the world. Stake refers to this as a process of ‘naturalistic generalization’. According to Stake, such studies provide ‘vicarious experience’ in the form of a ‘full and thorough knowledge of the particular’ and in this way facilitate ‘naturalistic generalization’ (Gomm, Hammersley, & Foster, 2000, p. 7). Through reading a case study, people are able to build up a body of tacit knowledge on the basis of which they can act. This depends on the case study being described properly ‘in a way that captures its unique features’ (Gomm et al., 2000, p. 7). Donmoyer bases his approach to generalization, like Stake, on ‘experiential knowledge’ (Donmoyer, 2000, p. 55). He sees case study as able to facilitate learning in the reader by substituting for ﬁrst hand experience (Gomm et al., 2000, p. 9). The reader consumes a case study through assimilating and accommodating what is read and integrating and/or differentiating this with what is already known (Donmoyer, 2000, pp. 59–61).

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4. Transferability Lincoln and Guba (2000) claim that there are ways of stating conclusions arising from the study of one case or context that might hold in another case or context. For them, case study research produces ‘working hypotheses’ a term they take from Cronbach (Lincoln & Guba, 2000, p. 39). The transferability of conclusions from one case to another is a function of the ‘ﬁt’ between the two contexts. Therefore, case study researchers have to provide ‘thick descriptions’ of their research case, particularly of the context of the case, for this to be possible (Gomm et al., 2000, p. 8). This differs from Donmoyer and Stake in that ‘transferability’ as deﬁned here can only be made if the settings and contexts of the studies are similar. Punch also chooses to talk of ‘transferability’ rather than ‘generalization’, researchers needing to be mindful of sampling, the concepts used in data analysis and of describing the context in enough detail for the reader to be able to judge whether the ﬁndings are transferable to other settings (Punch, 1995, pp. 255–256).

5. Fuzzy Generalization Bassey defends qualitative case study against the criticism that one cannot generalize from it by claiming that case study can make ‘fuzzy generalizations’, by this he means ‘the kind of statement which makes no claim to knowledge, but which hedges its claim with uncertainties y in some cases it may be found that y .’ (Bassey, 1999, p. 12).

6. Analytical Generalization This defence argues that while a case study cannot be used to generalize to a wider populations (through statistical generalization) it can be used to generalize to theoretical propositions i.e., case studies can be used to contribute to or expand on current explanations in relation to social issues (Yin, 2003, p. 10). ‘Whilst survey research relies on statistical generalization, case study research and experiments rely on analytical generalization where the researcher is striving to generalize a particular set of results to some broader theory’ (Yin, 2003, p. 37). However, a case study, just like an experiment, has to be replicated in order for generalizations to be made.

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7. Empirical Generalization Some defend case study by claiming that it is possible to make generalizations from case study in the same way that it is possible to make generalizations from survey research (Gomm et al., 2000, pp. 5, 9). Starting with an acceptance that a great deal of everyday knowledge building consists of ‘naturalistic generalization’, Gomm, Hammersley, and Foster note that such generalization is subject to a great deal of error when considered alongside ‘statistical generalization’ (Gomm et al., 2000, p. 104). They suggest that case study researchers can improve on ‘naturalistic generalization’, and therefore on the accuracy of their informal empirical generalizations, by taking account of the relevant heterogeneity within the population with which they are concerned (Gomm et al., 2000, p. 105) and consider the typicality or non-typicality of the case that is to be studied in relation to the relevant population. ‘In short, it is necessary to compare the characteristics of the case(s) being studied with available information about the population to which generalization is intended’ (Gomm et al., 2000, p. 105). They also suggest that case study researchers, instead of focusing on a case, or cases, that are typical, can choose to study a small number of cases that are atypical and at the extreme ends of the range of heterogeneity identiﬁed in the relevant population (Gomm et al., 2000, p. 107). They argue that there are two strategies, used by experimental and survey researchers, for drawing conclusions from the case, or cases, to the larger population these being ‘theoretical inference’ and ‘empirical generalization’ (Gomm et al., 2000, p. 102). Key to this form of ‘empirical generalization’ is the need to know as much as possible about the relevant wider population that the case or cases represent and to select and present the case or cases carefully in the light of this knowledge.

8. ‘Holographic Generalization’ Using the metaphor of holographic ﬁlm, Lincoln and Guba suggest that, as with the ﬁlm, which if cut into pieces each piece will contain within itself all of the information and image stored on the whole ﬁlm, ‘the full information about a whole is stored in its parts’ (Lincoln & Guba, 2000, p. 43). Thus, in case study research ‘samples need not be representative in the usual statistical sense to render generalizations warrantable; any part or component is a ‘perfect’ sample in the sense that it contains all of the information about the whole that one might ever hope to obtain’ (Lincoln & Guba, 2000, p. 43). It is worth noting that some of the defences above refer to the importance of the writing up of the case so that the reader can gain ‘vicarious

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experience’ (Stake) or ‘transfer’ knowledge (Lincoln and Guba; Punch) or ‘learn’ (Donmoyer) yet these comments tend not to develop issues concerning the writing and reading of research. First, there is an assumption that research writing acts as a straightforward conduit carrying what happened and what was said ‘in the ﬁeld’ directly (and untainted) into the reader’s mind. Yet writing, by its very nature, is restricted by its generic forms and styles; what one writes on the page is an act of framing, editing and presentation just as the way a photograph brings its own styling, framing, editing, focusing and ‘leaving out’ to the image that is consumed. Neither a written case study, nor a photograph, is neutral; both have contributed to and construct the vision ‘seen’ by the consumer, the reader. In a similar manner, while Stake and Donmoyer have considered how a reader ‘deals’ with reading a piece of case study research (through integrating what they read with what they already know or have experienced), other writers do not address how case study research is read and consumed, i.e., what readers do with case study research descriptions. The defences of case study as outlined above also need to be considered in relation to understandings of the social world. The writers who argue that one can generalize from case study research as from survey research or by using the strategy of ‘theoretical inference’ (Gomm et al., 2000, p. 102) are working within a view of the social world that can conﬁdently expect case study researchers to be able to work with notions of universality, known and ﬁxed populations and so on, while many writers, including this one, do not share this epistemological stance. For post-positivist researchers (those that reject universality and the notion of a reality beyond a socially produced one) these defences are less acceptable ones. Rather they will defend case study and its usefulness on other grounds (including some of those noted above) as I do here.

DEFENDING THE WORTH OF CASE STUDY: AN EXAMPLE In order to consider how a case study can be of use outside of its setting, I present a brief overview here of one of the case studies from my research study. There were six case studies in total all conducted at the same time during the course of one academic year. The six pupils were the total population of Bangladeshi pupils in Year 3 in the county, attending three different schools in the city. The children lived in various parts of the city

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with their immediate families. Fathers were the main breadwinners and were all working in the restaurant trade. The children’s mothers were all housewives. Rahul3 the subject of this case study, was one of the two boys in the study. Rahul’s case study was structured to present Rahul in relation to the following headings: as a learner, as a reader, as a pupil taking part in classroom interactions, as a multi-lingual language user, as a social member of his class, at home and at school and teachers’ response to Rahul as a pupil. The headings reﬂected the manner in which the data was analysed and arose out of the initial readings of the data. (The same headings were used for all of the case studies.) Through these headings Rahul’s case study depicted the spaces and the opportunities provided by the curriculum and by the teacher for pupils to ‘take part’ in classroom interactions, how Rahul ‘took part’, his needs as a learner and as a bilingual pupil, the manner in which his teachers’ assessed his needs and the support that he was subsequently provided with and how Rahul subsequently became positioned as a particular kind of pupil, one unlikely to be a successful achieving pupil. A brief summary of what is described in Rahul’s case study is provided below. Rahul was a seven-year-old Bangladeshi boy who, because of a number of long absences from school in the ﬁrst two years of his schooling was beginning Year 3 of primary school with a little knowledge of spoken English and a very limited experience of the curriculum and of the English that he encountered in his classroom. The three Year 3 classrooms I conducted my research in all followed a very similar use of space in the classroom and in Rahul’s classroom, like the others, introductions to the different subjects such as Literacy, Numeracy, History and so on were conducted by the teacher with the children sitting before her on a carpet in a corner of the classroom. Rahul’s teacher would introduce a topic and build into her talk questions to the children that the children had to raise their hands to answer. After this ‘introduction’, which in Rahul’s classroom usually lasted between twenty minutes and half an hour, the children would be sent to work in their groups at desks in order to undertake a piece of work set by the teacher and explained during the introductory talk. Rahul’s teacher used a lot of talk and very little visual demonstration or example of what she was talking about at these times and the amount and level of English language in use in the classroom was well beyond Rahul’s experience and understanding. Rahul presented himself during these times as a very disengaged pupil. After about ﬁve minutes of teacher talk he would ‘switch off’ and slide to the back of the group of children. He did not raise his hand to answer questions and he ceased to look at the teacher. Whilst aware of Rahul’s beginner bilingual status, Rahul’s teacher came to understand and assess Rahul as a lazy pupil who couldn’t be bothered to make an effort to follow what was happening in class. Her early efforts to support him by holding spaces for him in class discussions and encouraging him to answer in any way he could, changed to simply supporting him by asking him at the end of every introductory session if he knew what he had to do when he left the carpet and went to his desk. The teacher usually found that Rahul did not know

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what he was expected to do and so she went through the instructions for the task with him before sending him off to his seat. Rahul’s teacher also attempted to support him as a learner by placing him in the lower ‘ability’ Literacy and Numeracy groups in the classroom as she worked with these groups more often than with others and she felt that she could offer Rahul more support in this way. However, the teacher was frequently distracted and ‘taken away’ from her work with these groups by the demands of other children or the demands of particular children in these groups and Rahul did not gain much personalised support at these times. Later in the school year when Rahul’s reading had improved and he would, by the teacher’s own admission, have been better served by moving up into a higher Literacy group, he was forced to stay in the low level group he had been placed in because of a school policy – the next group up was funded for a particular category of pupil to which Rahul did not belong. Thus Rahul became stuck in a low group for Literacy to which he no longer really belonged and which was not able to stretch him sufﬁciently. Rahul’s teacher and other school adults lacked speciﬁc training in working with bilingual pupils and so made judgements about bilingual children’s level and competence in English based on the children’s social ﬂuency in English. As Rahul began to speak and use English in social situations more frequently his teacher thus judged that his English was developing enough for him to deal with the English that he was hearing and expected to work with in the classroom. As a result of this Rahul’s teacher did not think that he required very much additional support from the specialist peripatetic English as an Additional Language teacher that visited the school once a week, except for some additional reading. She and the other school adults also thought that Rahul’s sister in the class below was more in need of support from this teacher because ‘she doesn’t get as much as Rahul at home’. Thus Rahul received very little support for his English and learning from this service and when he did the manner in which such support was delivered meant that Rahul was taken out of the classroom by the visiting teacher half way through an introductory session and returned when the children were at their desks half way through completing the task they had been set. This also happened when the classroom assistant was asked to provide some additional support by hearing Rahul read. At these times Rahul who had missed the full introduction to what was being done, the instructions about what was to be done and a good deal of the time allotted to completing the task, became very frustrated at not being able to complete his work alongside the other children. As part of the research I was able to document in great detail how Rahul’s school day became an extremely fragmented day as he moved in and out of the classroom as part of the support that was provided to him. Over the course of the year the case study depicts how Rahul’s teachers increasingly come to describe him as a ‘lazy’ pupil, reading his disengagement as a lack of motivation rather than as a difﬁculty with working with the English of the classroom and with the fragmented nature of his school day. It also documents how Rahul came to receive little appropriate support. The case study was also able to show how Rahul’s isolation from other children, he had few friends in the class, and his lack of opportunities to use and practice his English, affected his development of English. It was also able to show his isolation outside school, he did not see very much of his few relatives that lived on the other side of the city and did not often play with other children, except his sister. It was able to show the differences between the kind of support that Rahul had from his parents in relation to learning in his English school and that of his class peers whose parents were usually more richly

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resourced in the ways of the English education system and time available. Through the case study, which followed Rahul through a year of his schooling, it became possible to see the subtle and complex ways in which Rahul became positioned as a potentially underachieving pupil.

Using Rahul’s case study as an example I want to argue that this case study has worth and can be useful outside of its setting for the following reasons: It can provide concepts, language to other studies. It allows other researchers to see issues that need to be included in other studies (as issues or variables) for example, teachers’ decision-making about their pupils and their needs, teachers’ tacit ways of assessing pupils. It can raise new questions and areas for study. (This can be linked back to the defence of case study and qualitative work discussed under the heading of Exploratory above. For each of the reasons that follow I provide, in brackets at the end, this link back to the previous discussion). It gives and account of the processes of everyday life for a pupil in a classroom in all their subtlety. It presents the reader with a description of practices of a classroom, how the teachers, pupils and Rahul understand, make meaning and accomplish tasks. It provides a thorough account of Rahul’s experiences during his Year 3 (and those of his teachers, peers, parents and siblings that pertain to Rahul as a pupil) in this way illuminating the key processes and practices that Rahul’s experience is embedded in. In this way, policy and practitioners can deepen their understanding of how underachievement can come to be played out in a classroom, how national and school policy can play a part in this (for example, setting arrangements, the curriculum, teachers’ training, EAL support, policy and assessment). It also, through its placement alongside ﬁve other case studies of Bangladeshi pupils of the same age and attending school in the same area, challenges the assumption that all Bangladeshi pupils have the same learning needs. (Particularity) Readers of the case study are asked to what extent, if any, it ﬁts with what they already know or think/believe. Does it challenge what they already know? Reading the study and how it depicts Rahul will raise issues and questions in relation to what the reader already knows or has read (and which the reader will go on to read or experience for themselves) even if it is only to disagree. The study raises sensitivities or questions that a person might take with them into another setting after reading the case study and its presentation of Rahul. (Naturalistic Generalization and Transferability) The case study, and its presentation of Rahul, makes a case for certain theoretical issues to be included or accepted in other research. For

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example, it asks for the manner in which the positioning of pupils, the spaces they are offered by teachers, the curriculum and by the sociospatial organization of the school in which to show who they are and what they can do, to be considered in other research and in policy and practice. It makes a case for looking at things in a particular way and demonstrates how this can be illuminating and useful. (Analytical Generalization) The case study’s presentation of Rahul provides a description of a situation and the study can thus be of use in thinking about this situation and what action can be taken by policy makers and practitioners in relation to Rahul’s opportunities as a learner and achieving pupil. In this way, the study can be used as a learning tool in professional training and in policy discussions (much as case studies are used in the management, medical and legal worlds). It is a way of presenting a scenario and asking trainees, professionals and policy makers how they could work with the situation presented – and how they understand it. It can at the same time be used to encourage ‘critical’ readings of research accounts through asking what is missing from the account and how the account (re)disposes the reader to certain understandings and leads them away from others. This last reason is not covered in the earlier discussion of the ways in which case study and qualitative research can be defended from the criticism that it is of little use to policy and practice because of its lack of generalizability. The defences of ‘particularity’, ‘naturalistic generalization’ and ‘transferability’ are certainly applicable but I prefer to refer to this understanding of the worth of case study as ‘pragmatic insight’. I take the use of the term ‘pragmatic’ in relation to case study work from Kenny and Grotelueschen (1980, p. 11, cited in Merriam, 1988, p. 20). They use the term to emphasize the applied nature of case study research and I choose to use it because it highlights the practical use of case study research to policy and practice. In addition to this, I see as integral to the usefulness of case study work the opportunities it offers for engagement with how the case is presented and for critical readings of what is and is not included in the account.

CONCLUSION In this chapter, I have outlined the process I went through in order to ﬁnd a way of talking about and representing my research. I have discussed the process and importance of ‘deﬁning terms’ so that it was possible to describe my research design and process despite the range of competing and differing

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deﬁnitions and delineations of ‘case study’ and ‘ethnography’ on offer. At the same time, following from this initial emphasis on deﬁning terms, I have emphasized the importance of research design choices and how these have an impact not only on how something is to be studied but also on the kinds of ﬁndings that are possible. Finally, I have considered how case study work can be defended from criticisms that it is of very little use outside of the micro settings of its own production. I have discussed a variety of ways in which case study has been and can be defended, related these to one of the case studies that emerged from my own study, and have argued for an additional defence of case study research which I have termed ‘pragmatic insight’.

NOTES 1. This is by no means an exhaustive review of the literature. The books discussed here are the ones I was directed to at the time and the books that I commonly ﬁnd shelved under ‘Research Methods’ in bookshops and libraries. They cover a range of publication dates and a number are second editions, which suggests something of their popularity and use. 2. In introducing the study a great deal of care was taken with the terms that were used to describe pupils. Using the term ‘Bangladeshi’ covers up the fact that the children themselves may not name themselves in this way and may refer to themselves as British or Muslim. This was explored in the study. For the purposes of clarity in writing up the research, but with the above proviso in mind, I used the term ‘Bangladeshi’ to describe those pupils at the centre of the study who were born in England but whose parents had been born in Bangladesh and had moved to England when they were teenagers or adults (see Walters, 2003). 3. The pupil’s name has been changed.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT The research study referred to above was funded by a much-appreciated studentship from the ESRC between 1999 and 2003.

REFERENCES Adelman, C., Kemmis, S., & Jenkins, D. (1980). Rethinking case study: Notes from the second Cambridge conference. In: H. Simons (Ed.), Towards a science of the singular: Essays about case study in educational research and evaluation (pp. 45–61). UEA: Centre for Applied Research in Education.

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Bassey, M. (1999). Case Study Research in Educational Settings. Buckingham: Open University Press. Birbili, M. (2001). Teaching educational research methods. Available at http://www.escalate.ac.uk/exchange/EdResMethods/. Brewer, J. D. (2000). Ethnography. Buckingham: Open University Press. Burns, R. B. (2000). Introduction to research methods (4th ed.). London: Sage. Connolly, P. (1998a). ‘Dancing to the wrong tune’: Ethnography, generalization and research on racism in schools. In: P. Connolly & B. Troyna (Eds), Researching racism in education: Politics, theory and practice. Buckingham: Open University Press. Connolly, P. (1998b). Racism, gender identities and young children: Social relations in a multiethnic, Inner City Primary School. London: Routledge. Cresswell, J. W. (1998). Qualitative inquiry and research design: Choosing among five traditions. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Donmoyer, R. (2000). Generalizability and the single-case study. In: R. Gomm, M. Hammersley & P. Foster (Eds), Case study method: Key issues, key texts. London: Sage. Demack, S., Drew, D., & Grimsley, M. (2000). Minding the gap: Ethnic, gender and social class differences in attainment at sixteen, 1988–95. Race, Ethnicity and Education, 3, 117–143. Emerson, R., Fretz, R., & Shaw, L. (1995). Writing ethnographic fieldnotes. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Gillborn, D. (1990). ‘Race’, ethnicity and education: Teaching and learning in multi-ethnic schools. London: Unwin Hyman. Gomm, R., Hammersley, M., & Foster, P. (Eds). (2000). Case study and generalization. In: Case study method: Key issues, key texts. London: Sage. Hammersley, M. (1992). What’s wrong with ethnography? Methodological explorations. London: Routledge. Hammersley, M. (1998). Reading ethnographic research (2nd ed.). Harlow: Longman. Keith, M. (1993). Race, riots and policing: Lore and disorder in a multi-racist society. Occasion London: UCL Press. Kenny, W. R., & Grotelueschen, A. D. (1980). Making the case for case study. Occasion Paper, Ofﬁce for the Study of Continuing Professional Education. College of Education, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Kysel, E. (1988). Ethnic background and examination results. Educational Research, 30, 83–89. Lincoln, Y. S., & Guba, E. G. (1985). But is it rigorous. Trustworthiness and authenticity in naturalistic evaluation. In: D. D. Williams (Ed.) Naturalistic Evaluation. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Lincoln, Y. S., & Guba, E. G. (2000). The only generalization is: There is no generalization. In: R. Gomm, M. Hammersley & P. Foster (Eds), Case study method: Key issues, key texts (pp. 27–44). London: Sage. MacIntyre, D., Bhatti, G., & Fuller, M. (1993). Educational experiences of ethnic minority students in the City of Oxford. Oxford: Oxford University Department of Educational Studies. Merriam, S. (1988). Case study research in education: A qualitative approach. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Nuttall, D., & Varlaam, A. (1990). Differences in examination performance. London: Inner London Education Authority Research and Statistics Branch. Pathak, S. (2000). Research topic paper: Race research for the future, ethnicity in education, training and the labour market. London: DEE.

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Platt, J. (1992). Cases of casesyof cases. In C. C. Ragin & H. S. Becker (Eds.) What is a case? New York: Cambridge University Press. Punch, K. (1998). Introduction to social research: Quantitative and qualitative approaches. London: Sage. Silverman, D. (2005). Doing qualitative research: A practical handbook (2nd ed.). London: Sage. Sharrock, W., & Anderson, B. (1982). Talking and teaching: Reﬂective comments on in-classroom activities. In: G. C. F. Payne & E. C. Cuff (Eds), Doing teaching: The practical management of classrooms. Worcester: Billing and Son. Spradley, J. P. (1980). Participant observation. New York: Holt Rinehart & Winston. Stake, R. E. (1995). The art of case study research. London: Sage. Tedlock, B. (2000). Ethnography and ethnographic representation. In: N. Denzin & Y. Lincoln (Eds), Handbook of qualitative research. London: Sage. Travers, M. (2001). Qualitative research through case study. London: Sage. Troyna, B. (1991). Underachievers or underrated? The experience of pupils of South Asian origin in secondary schools. British Educational Research Journal, 17, 361–376. Walford, G., & Massey, A. (1998). Studies in educational ethnography: Children learning in context. London: JAI Press. Walters, S. (2003). Bangladeshi pupils: Experiences, identity and achievement. Unpublished DPhil thesis, University of Oxford. Wright, C. (1992). Race relations in primary school. London: David Fulton. Yin, R. K. (2003). Case study research: Design and methods (3rd ed.). London: Sage. Yon, D. A. (2000). Elusive culture: Schooling, race and identity in global times. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.

MEASUREMENT AS A RIGOROUS SCIENCE: HOW ETHNOGRAPHIC RESEARCH METHODS CAN CONTRIBUTE TO THE GENERATION AND MODIFICATION OF INDICATORS Eric Tucker INTRODUCTION This article begins with a brief reading of the state of the practice of empirical social science research on measurement before proceeding to the discussion of an exemplary instance of this researcher’s ethnographic effort to improve indicators of social capital formation. Given the central role measurement plays in social science research, it is appropriate, that a volume on methodological innovations in ethnography would contain a chapter about the relationship of ethnography to measure development. However, it is worth acknowledging that the line of argumentation advanced in this chapter is unconventional. The central tenant of this chapter – that ethnography has much to offer to the ﬁeld of measurement and that ethnographers ought to take the contribution that they have the potential to Methodological Developments in Ethnography Studies in Educational Ethnography, Volume 12, 109–135 Copyright r 2007 by Elsevier Ltd. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 1529-210X/doi:10.1016/S1529-210X(06)12007-0

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make to the ﬁeld of measurement seriously – at present might be thought to have little agreement either among those researchers whose primary focus is measurement or among ethnographers. This chapter contends that the features and strengths of ethnography speciﬁcally, and qualitative research more generally, makes it uniquely suited to contribute to the development of new indicators and the improvement of existing indicators. This chapter modestly hopes to encourage discussion of this contention and illustrate how this author sees his own ethnographic research into indicators of social capital formation as an attempt to address a pressing methodological dilemma within the ﬁeld, more general of social scientiﬁc measure development. Measurement is at the centre of much educational research, from tests to observational scales, to questionnaires. A concern to develop and improve measurement exists in each social scientiﬁc discipline. Indeed, measure development is a continual focus of academic debate. The ﬁrst part of this chapter locates a number of relevant streams within the ﬁeld of measurement. The second half attempts to situate my own research enquiry into indicators of social capital formation within these streams. In the case of social capital, the need to develop new, valid, and rigorous indicators emerged both when the concept was born and on an ongoing basis as the demands placed on the concept’s performance changed. Indeed, these factors inﬂuence demand for quality indicators more generally. Unfortunately, the method for such systematic, purposeful generation of indicators and measures is insufﬁciently understood.

THE CHALLENGES ARISING FROM THE CONTEXTS OF MEASUREMENT This article rests on the assumption that, in recent years, the variety and intensity of the demands social scientists and policymakers place on indicators have grown dramatically. The main argument that supports this claim is that measurement instruments increasingly must respond to the newly global reach of social science and the diversity of cultures, contexts, users, and participants this brings. Globalisation demands a social science that is ﬂuent in comparative and international measurement, capable of exploring the challenging nature of the problems and issues faced by researchers across cultures and nations, and eager to test the robustness of indicators in different contexts within a broad comparative framework.

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Researchers increasingly ask themselves: What steps can be taken to incorporate cultural perspective and difference into the process of measure development, validation, and use? How can researchers develop rigorous measures with minimal error when used in diverse cultural and language communities? When working across space and time, what must researchers do to enhance measure quality? An increased focus on measurement is necessary, given the explosion of research needs, agendas, and sites. Measurement tools should be applicable for a range of times, spaces, contexts, and users. The economist Angus Maddison (1995a, 1995b, 2001, 2003) addresses the question of how to measure across vast expanses of time and space – a topic with which the social sciences must increasingly grapple. Meanwhile, researchers such as Bill Hillier (1996) have taken on the theorisation and operationalisation of particular notions of the social use of urban space – causing the development of measures that capture aspects of peoples’ perceptions and uses of space. The context within which a measurement instrument is used also inﬂuences what gets measured. Sometimes the context is inhibiting or reactive. For instance, Strange, Forest, and Oakley (2003) look at the use of surveys with youth in schools, teasing out the inﬂuence of the social context on the self-completion of questionnaires. The context of collection may also differ from the context of development in ways that skew the validity and appropriateness of the instrument (Allalouf & Ben-Shakhar, 1998). Context changes when participants have distinct characteristics and traits (for instance, see Maller & French, 2004). A range of papers have explored the importance of measurement capable of navigating gender-related variation (e.g. Ben-Shakhar & Sinai 1991; Bolger & Kellaghan, 1990; Lowe & Reynolds, 2005; and Fletcher & Hattie, 2005). Gender differentials with regard to item-response tendency and concept dimensionality remind us that who the participants’ subjected to measurement matters. The signiﬁcance of gender reminds one about the issue of measuring attributes, attitudes, and behaviour within sub-populations more generally. For instance, sometimes items have differential functioning for sub-populations (Sehmitt & Dorans, 1990; Stevens & Tallent-Runnels, 2004; Davis, Capobianco, & Kraus, 2004). In addition, translations of instruments to new language contexts and assessments of the validity of measurement across languages deserve mention. The development and validation of translated scales is an issue addressed throughout the literature (for instance, Collazo, 2005; Boles, Yoo, Ebacher, Lee, & Ashton, 2004; Hong & Wong, 2005; Moneta & Yip, 2004; Gre´goire, 2004; Sireci, 1997). Differences of gender, race, ethnicity, language, and culture of the research participants complicate measurement.

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The variety of contexts of measurement has increased the expectations placed on measurement instruments. These raising expectations have emerged in tandem with a concern among some researchers that in certain instances there seems to exist a gap between established measurement instruments and the social phenomena they intend to measure.

THE DEMAND FOR HIGH QUALITY INDICATORS: UNDERSTANDING AND MINIMISING MEASUREMENT ERROR BY SECURING VALIDITY AND RELIABILITY I have established that the demands placed on measures have been increasing in recent years. Before discussing the widening gap between the social world and the instruments we use to capture them, I will discuss social scientists’ demand for high-quality indicators. The consensus view of social scientists today might be thought to deﬁne an indicator as high quality when its validity and reliability have been adequately established. The prominence of psychometric approaches to securing validity and reliability can be seen through even a casual perusal of the measurement literature. A ﬁrst group of literature is methodological in bent, and uses speciﬁc issues to raise general concerns about measurement. For instance, Clarke (2002) writes about falsely precise scores. McGuckin and Peck (1993) demonstrate how construct integrity is inﬂuenced by social change. Hogan and Agnello (2004) take empirical stock of the degree to which established psychological instruments are validated. Howrey (1996) discusses how measurement error plagues certain types of data. A second group seeks to identify and reduce measurement error for particular instruments. For instance, Fortunato (2004), Clapham (2004), DeCarlo (2005), and Fleming, Jordan, and Lang (1996) Fleming et al. (1996), are a few articles out of the hundreds that use psychometrics to minimise the measurement error of instruments. Researchers discuss this issue generally and offer methodological, deﬁnitional, and practical solutions to measurement error. Viswanathan (2005), advancing a cornerstone contribution to the ﬁeld, proposes that measurement error should be at the centre of discussions of measure design. He argues that the ‘measure development process consists of a series of steps to develop reliable and valid measures. Rather than proceed directly from an abstract construct to its concrete measurement, the distance between the conceptual and the operational has to be

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traversed carefully and iteratively. Measure development ideally should combine empirical assessment with conceptual examination’ (p. 383). This means that ‘measurement error should be understood in each stage of developing measures and their use.’ He continues, ‘errors in developing and using measures are closely interrelated’ (Viswanathan, 2005, p. 386). This insight is crucial to methodological writing on measurement. Researchers and methodologists alike, Viswanathan suggests, must reﬂect on the speciﬁc threats to validity and reliability that they encounter, and offer a nuts and bolts discussion of how to develop indicators that are correct for measurement. The gap between established measurement instruments and the social world raises acute concerns, precisely because social scientists and policymakers demand high-quality indicators and it is unclear whether existing development procedures have allowed the research community to keep pace with demand. Next, I discuss the potential objectives of generating valid indicators to the broader challenges faced by the social and applied sciences. Rather than offering partisan advocacy for these positions, I merely offer a synthesis of academic and policy perspectives on the need and utility of high-quality indicators. Although I do not defend each of these positions, it is worth noting that a variety of reasons are offered to support the contention that quality measures matter. First, indicators facilitate learning and information exchange, allowing researchers to collect, organise, and present information on a jurisdiction’s assets and vulnerabilities. Second, indicators raise the proﬁle and comprehensibility of certain social phenomena (Mills, 1980). For instance, I would argue that the decision to measure domestic violence as a ‘crime’ put the issue on the radar screen and facilitated social investment. Third, indicators suggest social trends and allow researchers to monitor the direction a jurisdiction is moving (Kiuranov, 1982). Fourth, indicators help identify gaps in understanding about social issues. For instance, Sen (1999, 2002) demonstrated that Gross Domestic Product was not a sufﬁcient indicator for social well-being and economic development – and thus increased the understanding of the role of health care, education, and compensation in measuring progress towards development. Fifth, indicators improve policy decision making by facilitating planning and enhancing evidence-based consensus (Archer, Kelly, & Bisch, 1984). They are useful for monitoring and reporting, but also for social engineering, program evaluation, social accounting, and goal setting (Smith, 1981). Sixth, quality indicators allow analysis and facilitate the development of models. Finally, quality indicators enhance intervention design, evaluation, and performance.

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THE GAP BETWEEN ESTABLISHED MEASUREMENT INSTRUMENTS AND THE SOCIAL WORLD A number of small-scale studies have begun to suggest that in certain areas, substantial gaps exist between social scientists and decision makers’ desire to understand the world and the capacity of existing indicators to approximate the quantity of the phenomena consistently and accurately. If these studies are taken seriously, then it appears as though many arenas of the social sciences have a real need for better measurement tools as many extant indicators are of rather low quality. This gap between our desire to understand the social world and the quality of established measures provides perhaps the primary rationale for the use of ethnographic research methods. Several factors inform this conclusion. First, many researchers have an expressed preference towards using existing measures. Given that a signiﬁcant number of researchers narrowly focus on what is currently measured in administrative data sets, I suggest that ethnographic research into how a given concept should be operationalised will beneﬁcially broaden the conversation. Second, the use of indicators that do not ﬁt, work, or produce quality data raises the risk of misinterpretation, misinformation, and unintended errors. Ethnographic enquiry into how ﬁtting and workable existing indicators are can result in steps to modify and improve those instruments. Third, I contend that the development of robust measures will result from the exploration of a broad number of speciﬁcally selected case studies to generate indicators that better capture particular concepts. Measure development is more innovative and open when it identiﬁes, acknowledges, and grapples with the gap between the social world and established indicators. The notion of a gap between established instruments and the social world has been posited within disciplines across the social sciences. The ﬁeld of measurement regularly identiﬁes areas where the quality of established measures is low. Some examples may illustrate the nature of gaps between indicators and the social world. For instance, Whiting and Harper (2003, p. 14) use qualitative research to argue that existing indicators of social capital are not relevant for young people – that voting and sitting on the executive committee of a charity are bad measures of youth engagement in political and social life. Shriver (1995) discusses how the measurement of current cost data in ﬁnancial accounting has a systematic overstatement bias. Powers, Fowles, Farnum, and Ramsey (1994) study how typed replicas of handwritten essays receive lower average scores, demonstrating the challenge of using written essays as an indicator of writing skill. Frisbie and Cantor

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(1995) look at the validity of alternative methods for assessing spelling ability ﬁnding differential outcomes for different instruments. Potenza and Stocking (1997) explore the challenge of dealing with ﬂawed questions on tests, which intend to capture a particular skill but fail. Galvez and McLarty (1996) work around the limitations of demographic indicators that omit temporary residents. Whether we talk about social capital, current costs, handwriting, spelling, ﬂawed questions, or temporary residents – the gap between the reality of a social phenomena and what the indicator captures is a recurring challenge in measurement.

RESEARCH FOCUSED ON THE GENERATION AND MODIFICATION OF INDICATORS I have demonstrated both the increasing demands placed on indicators and existence of a gap between certain established measurement instruments and the social phenomena they intend to measure. I will now make the argument that the ﬁeld of measurement tends to over-emphasise veriﬁcation and correspondingly de-emphasise empirical research that aims towards generation and modiﬁcation. Although I suggest the real need for measurement literature that speaks to the process of generating and modifying new indicators, I also argue that this gap in the literature does not reﬂect contemporary innovations in measure design. Researchers involved in cutting-edge research in ﬁelds ranging from psychology and economics to environmental policy and city planning are developing novel approaches to measurement within their particular domain of social science. Published measurement methodologies thus lag behind measurement practice, and there is a need for research highlighting the researchers’ perspectives on important methodological considerations, theoretical insights, and pervasive challenges in measurement design. The goal is a body of methodological literature that takes the purposeful systematic generation and modiﬁcation of indicators seriously. When researchers get it right, they do not begin with an indicator and then establish its validity; they conduct empirical research to generate and modify indicators that are faithful to and illuminate the concepts and phenomena under study. Developing new measures for constructs should be an ongoing priority for the social sciences. Examples of researchers who aim to generate and modify new indicators abound. Putnam (1993, 2000), Florida (2002, 2005), Laumann (1994), and Sen (1973, 1987, 1999, 2002) represent ﬁgures at the

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top of their ﬁeld who take this challenge seriously. But across the social sciences, operationalising concepts stand as a priority. For example, the design of the Human Development Index of well-being (which grew from Sen’s writings) has spurred a robust research community focused on modifying the computation process (see Gormely, 1995; Acharya & Wall, 1994). Noble et al. (2004) describes the development and reﬁnement of a scale to assess attitudes towards working single parents. Le, Casillas, Robbins, and Langley (2005) construct a student readiness inventory that measures the psychosocial and academic-related skills that predict university’s academic performance and retention. These examples represent larger trends regarding the generation of new indicators and scales across the social sciences.

CONDUCTING RESEARCH TO DESIGN AND IMPROVE INDICATORS The ﬁeld of measurement places high priority on the statistical validation of indicators. However, indicators themselves are often based on logical deduction, assertion, and speculation, rather than upon rigorous scientiﬁc research. Empirical research that aims to improve the design and enhance the quality of an indicator is a small fraction of published work. Journals of measurement print few articles reporting on research geared towards empirical generation and modiﬁcation of indicators. Instead, scales are conceived of as ‘already always’ existent and in need of subjection to statistical veriﬁcation. Social scientists, it seems, spend little time tackling the question of how to operationalise constructs through concept deﬁnition, domain delineation, item generation, scale development, and modiﬁcation. They focus on running statistical tests to secure validity and reliability. Examples of articles that focus on how constructs are conceptualised and then developed represent one strand of current research to design and improve indicators. Stevenson and Evans (1994) write about the conceptualisation and measurement of Cognitive Holding Power. In the article, theory and research inform the conceptualisation, two dimensions of holding power are distinguished, an instrument is developed, and then the reliability, validity, and factor structures are examined. Giancarlo, Blohm, and Urdan (2004) report on the development of a new instrument to measure mental motivation. Dowson and McInerney (2004) write about the development and validation of the Goal Oriented and Learning Strategies survey, which measures student motivational goal orientation and metacognitive

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strategies. Asher, Deﬁna, and Robert (1995) examine the shortcomings of measures of income inequality that relate to age–income proﬁles and propose improvements. Wolfe, Ray, and Harris (2004) compare the quality of three scales of measures of teacher perception of instructional environments. Articles describing the design and improvement of indicators abound. A distinct body of qualitative research aims to improve the design of items and scales. Pearce (2002) discusses how the salience of ﬁndings can be enhanced by combining survey research with ethnographic methods. She uses ethnographic methods iteratively to improve measurement of the inﬂuence of religion on childbearing preference in Nepal. Farrall (2004) calls into question a range of studies showing a majority of citizens in European and North American countries report experiencing ‘fear’ or feeling ‘angry’ about the possibility of criminal victimisation ‘all the time.’ He uses ethnographic and qualitative data to suggest that fear and anger are less common and that the inappropriate use of survey indicators has systematically exaggerated the emotional response. These articles represent the conduct of qualitative research to improve measurement.

MY RESEARCH AS AN EXEMPLARY INSTANCE OF ETHNOGRAPHIC RESEARCH THAT AIMS TO DEVELOP AND IMPROVE INDICATORS In this second half of the paper, I make the case that the features and strengths of ethnography speciﬁcally, and qualitative research more generally, make it uniquely suited to contribute to the development of new indicators and the improvement of existing indicators. I accomplish this by turning to one speciﬁc example of this author’s ethnographic research project that aims to improve indicators of social capital formation, in the hopes of providing an exemplary instance of how ethnographic methodologies might contribute to the generation and modiﬁcation of new, quality measurement instruments. Thus, rather than making a global appeal, I embed my argument that ethnographic methodologies have unique features and strengths that make it well suited to contribute to the development of new indicators within a discussion of the particular methodology I employed in a particular research project. This section thus outlines the research methodological perspective and approach employed in this education research project. The data generation, analysis, and discussion in this account were derived from two compressed ethnographic case studies exploiting two substantially

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different programmes analytically linked by their ability to illuminate aspects of the types of social practices that contribute to the formation of social capital. The ethnographic research strategy and design, the theoretical approach to sampling and case selection, the two-phased data collection, and the three-tiered data analysis allowed me to move from the generation of comprehensive, synthetic structural and textural descriptions of the programme to the subsequent solicitation of practitioner and expert review and culminating in the generation and modiﬁcation of categories. The rest of this chapter describes and justiﬁes the methodological conduct of my investigation. In the empirical domain, my research project asked: What are some of the major categories, generated from the analysis of each set of case study data, which describe the social practices that potentially contribute to the formation or deformation of social capital? Such categories, it was hoped, would illuminate potentially operable dimensions of the concept and be suggestive of features that merit further consideration. Methodologically, I departed from the contemporary emphasis on veriﬁcation as the primary mechanism to secure the validity and reliability of measures. I contended that minimising measurement error might best be achieved by a greater emphasis on the generation and modiﬁcation phases of measure development as complementary to veriﬁcation efforts. In other words, I called for a greater emphasis on empirical social research that focuses upon the generation and modiﬁcation, in addition to the veriﬁcation, of indicators. I thus used the empirical work to justify the case that ethnographic research methods, and other ﬂexible and emergent approaches, might be used to generate more thorough understandings of the particular social phenomena, which might in turn be used to develop higher quality indicators.

MY RESEARCH STRATEGY AND DESIGN Broadly speaking, the research strategy I embraced with regard to the selection of questions, settings, cases, sampling procedures, and data-generation methods was an ethnographic case study. My data generation, analysis, and discussion thus emerged from two compressed ethnographic cases (Walford, 2001) exploiting two substantially different programmes analytically linked by their potential to illuminate aspects of the types of social practices that contribute to the formation of social capital. This ethnographic approach contrasts with experimental or survey research in that I collected in-depth,

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unstructured data from the existing social settings to describe some of the unique, sensitising aspects of each case that lay bare potentially essential features of the relevant social phenomena. This project employed a case study approach, in that there are two cases examined and a signiﬁcant amount of detailed information from a number of sources has been collected for a range of dimensions for each case (Gomm, Hammersley, & Foster, 2000). In this sense, the case study approach was aligned with the research questions in that it facilitates description, understanding, and explanation in a thorough, open-ended manner. Although I do not see the case study approach more generally as embodying a particular research paradigm (Gomm et al., 2000, p. 5), the belief that in-depth qualitative enquiry into a case can be used to generate more thorough understandings of the particular social phenomena, which might in turn be used to develop higher quality indicators, seems supportable. What was the relationship between my ‘research strategy’ and the actual research I conducted? The research strategy was, I suggest, the ‘scaffold’ that organised and supported the investigation, and kept me from straying too far off the path of the question and the compressed ethnographic methodology driving the project. Here, I echo McKenzie’s (2000) use of the term ‘scaffolding’ within the context of education. He deﬁnes scaffolding, saying, it conventionally refers to structures put in place to aid construction. ‘Scaffolding,’ as I use it here, might thus be said to provide a clear structure and precisely stated expectations, without a methodological straight jacket that destroys initiative and resourcefulness. By analogy, scaffolding (i.e. the research strategy) is not the research project itself, but simply the supporting structure. McKenzie argues that ‘scaffolding,’ ‘provides clear directions,’ ‘clariﬁes purpose,’ keeps one on task, ‘points towards worthy sources’ (in this case of methodological texts), reduces disappointment by maximising learning and efﬁciency, and ‘creates momentum.’ These features of ‘scaffolding’ mirror role that the compressed ethnographic case study strategy played in this research project.

THE NATURE OF ETHNOGRAPHIC ENQUIRY To win the argument that ethnographic research methods have the potential to contribute to the development of measurement instruments, I will offer a deﬁnition of ethnography. In doing so, I hope to outline the foundation for the argument that runs through the second half of the chapter: ethnographic

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methods can be used to generate more thorough understandings of the particular social phenomena, which might in turn be used to develop higher quality indicators. Walford writes that, ‘(t)hrough prolonged involved with those who are being studied, the ethnographic researcher is able gradually to enter their world and gain an understanding of their lives’ (Walford, 2002, p. VII). I reject the notion that ethnography is synonymous with qualitative research more broadly. Still, ethnographic researchers have drawn upon a broad range of theoretical lenses, data-collection tactics, and data-analysis methodologies. As Hammersley and Atkinson point out, some authors offer a liberal interpretation of the deﬁnition of ethnography. My research ﬁts within such a broad interpretation. For Hammersley and Atkinson, this refers to participating ‘in people’s daily lives for an extend period of time, watching what happens, listening to what is said, asking questions – in fact, collecting whatever data are available to through light on the issues that are a focus of the research’ (Hammersley & Atkinson, 1995, p. 1). My research was designed and conducted in a manner that prioritised participant subjective experience – how they perceived and gave meaning to their participation. What constitutes ethnographic research? Walford (2001) offers a compelling broad outline, suggesting ethnographers to ask: What is going on here? How does this work? How do people do this? How are things done around here? He suggests elements of ethnographic research worth reference. First, ethnography studies culture, stresses that humans move within social worlds, and ‘balances attention to the sometimes minute everyday detail of individual lives with wider social structures.’ A culture, for Walford, is ‘made up of certain values, practices, relationships and identiﬁcations’ (p. 7). Second, ethnography is constituted of multiple methods and diverse forms of data. He writes that to ‘gain a multidimensional appreciation of the setting, the ethnographer must be prepared to consider many different types of data’ (p. 8). Third, ethnography entails engagement and observation in the situation where the activity actually occurs. This requires, ‘human connection with participants, and an investment of time (p. 8). Fourth, in ethnography the researcher is the instrument and the primary source of data. The researcher’s subjectivity is seen as an inevitable aspect of research. When rigorous, the researcher reﬂects upon why particular decisions were made, ‘why certain questions were asked or not asked, why data were generated a particular way and so on.’ Walford cites Dey (1993) who argues that ‘The danger lies not in having assumptions but in not being aware of them’ (p. 8). Fifth, in ethnography, participant accounts

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have a high status. Interactions with informants are used to generate and create the analytical frameworks used to understand and portray the phenomena under study. Sixth, ethnography proposes a cycle of hypothesis and theory building. Walford describes this as the ‘ethnographer’s constant commitment to modify hypotheses and theories in light of further data.’ This process of formulation, testing, reformulation, retesting, means that ‘what needs to be looked at and reported on may change and explanations of what is going on may be supplanted by ones which seem to ﬁt better’ (p. 8). In this sense, ethnography is emergent and ﬂexible. Seventh, the ethnographer aims ‘to discover how people in the study area classify or label each other, how they ﬁnd meaning in activities they care about in life, and how they engage in processes in which they individually and collectively deﬁne (antecedents and consequences of) their situations’ (p. 8). It enquires into how participants perceive and give meaning to the situation. Walford does not offer an exhaustive description, but these seven elements distinguish ethnography from qualitative work more generally.

THE LENS OF EMPIRICAL PHENOMENOLOGICAL RESEARCH Epistemic orientations are connected to methodologies and types of evidence that stem naturally from the type of knowing postulated. One lens I brought to this investigation is that of empirical phenomenological data analysis. It is both a particular approach to ethnography and a research tradition that did much to inspire the emergence of ethnographic methodologies more generally. Phenomenology is a direction of inquiry, what I call an epistemic orientation (Husserl, 1960). Through this approach, empirical phenomenological analysis attempts to strike at some of the essential similarities between participants’ descriptions of experiences without diminishing the signiﬁcance of variance. It aims to give credence to the direct experience of participants, experience that is necessarily relative to their position in the midst of the world. In Merleau-Ponty’s (1962, p. xix) words, ‘to say that there exists rationality is to say that perspectives blend, perceptions conﬁrm each other, a meaning emerges.’ Inspired by some of the pioneering insights of Husserl, empirical phenomenological approaches hope to discover insights ‘by reference to the things and facts themselves, as these are given in actual experience and intuition’ (Moustakas, 1994, p. 47). Moustakas (1994, p. 47) assures us that

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empirical phenomenology attempts to provide ‘a logical, systematic, and coherent resource for carrying out the analysis needed to arrive at essential descriptions of experience.’ Farber describes phenomenology, with regard to social science research, as seeking to ‘‘identify presuppositions and ‘put them out of play;’’’ concerning itself not with matters of fact but with determining meanings; and dealing with and offering direct insight into real essences and ‘possible’ essences (cited in Moustakas, 1994, p. 49). The social scientist inspired by empirical phenomenology might thus set out to explicate the constituent components and meanings of phenomena, discerning features of consciousness, and types of experience. Empirical phenomenology as an orientation and a lens, is geared towards the development of ideal types. In this case, that would mean categories that refer to social practices that may tend to contribute to the formation or deformation of social capital. Types are ideal in the sense of a non-real model that is ‘limited but useful for the purpose of inquiry.’ Types approximate ‘reality sufﬁciently for the purpose of interpreting and understanding reality, but never as the sum-total of reality’ (Gordon, 1995, p. 55). Take the example of a trigonometry class, where triangles are used as visual aids to illustrate the range of potential trilaterals. The construction paper ﬁgures are ‘tokens for the types that constitute triangles.’ Cut-outs, as things (tokens) can be counted. However, it is ‘incoherent to ask how many types of right triangle are there.’ Types are unique. They are eidetic essences. The search for types faces the problem of ‘identifying social phenomena without reducing them solely to their singular identiﬁcations’ (Gordon, 1995, p. 56). Typiﬁcation (the search for essence) constitutes a fundamental feature of human science. Phenomenologically inspired enquiry, I suggest, is well suited to the task of generating and modifying indicators of social phenomena for several reasons: 1. Empirical phenomenological analysis attempts to focus on units of meaning. Developing valid indicators of social phenomena often requires interpreting the meaning of people’s experiences. The same action may mean and ‘indicate different things for different people.’ Empirical phenomenological analysis has the potential to help access phenomena through the eyes of respondents, learning from their concerns and ways of understanding. Empirical phenomenological analysis asks data (indeed people) directly ‘why they behave in a particular way or why they express a particular attitude’ (De Vaus, 1995, pp. 57–58). Although informants are not always aware of the reason, answers provide valuable insights regarding the structure of the phenomenon.

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2. Empirical phenomenological analysis seeks to return to the phenomena themselves. Too often, the development of indicators simply refers to existing measurement indices. Empirical phenomenological analysis returns to the things themselves and focuses on the social world as it is given. It brackets everyday routines, assumptions, and biases. This is crucial for the task of generation. 3. Empirical phenomenological analysis seeks to identify essential features of phenomena. The research undertakes reﬂective analysis and interpretation of descriptions with the aim of providing a comprehensive description of the general meanings derived – in other words, the essences or structures of the experience. The phenomenological approach employed here relates back to the effort to identify the types, to provide a portrayal of the phenomenon that is vital, rich, and layered (Moustakas, 1994). By describing the potential beneﬁts of empirical phenomenology as a theoretical lens, I am not assuming the burden of defending the entire history and trajectory of phenomenology as a tradition. By sharing the lenses and orientations that inﬂuenced how I approached this particular ethnographic research project, the hope is to support the relevance of that small corner of the tradition that directly applies to my research project as one exemplary instance of how ethnographic methodologies might contribute to the generation and modiﬁcation of new, quality measurement instruments.

MY APPROACH TO SAMPLING AND CASE SELECTION My approach to sampling and case selection was aligned with my effort to generate evidence and understanding that would facilitate the development of new measurement instruments. In my research project, I employed theoretical sampling to inform case selection and data collection oriented as it is towards category development. As such, selection of cases and identiﬁcation of discrete data sources was purposive and ongoing (Glaser & Strauss, 1967, p. 45). Glaser and Strauss (p. 49) argue that with theoretical sampling, the ‘researcher chooses any groups that will help generate, to the fullest extent, as many properties of the categories as possible, and that will help relate categories to each other and to their properties.’ Initial enquiry inspired subsequent selection of research sites, cases, and informants geared towards the generation of data that facilitates comparisons that build categories.

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In selecting cases, sites, and data sources, I did not aim to capture a representative slice of the phenomena. Instead, samples were selected in an effort to arrive at a deeper understanding of categories and dimensions of constructs. I tapped into veins of data in an iterative, progressive manner. This approach to data collection is deliberatively emergent and avoids the embrace of a pre-conceived framework. I used theoretical sampling to facilitate category development, modiﬁcation, reﬁnement, and solidiﬁcation. In other words, the clarity, parsimoniousness, workability, ﬁt, and level of abstraction and relevance of categories developed over time – and the modiﬁcation and reﬁnement of these categories guided the selection of additional sites and data sources. During initial data collection for each case signiﬁcant categories began to emerge. Subsequent data were collected to develop these categories and better understand their properties and function. On the basis of the data analysis of that case, the second, complementary case was selected to test and extend the proposed categories (Strauss & Corbin, 1990, p. 192). Yin speciﬁes the purposes of case selection within theoretical sampling, identifying the appropriateness of choosing a case to: (a) ﬁll theoretical categories, (b) test the emerging categories, (c) select a case that is the opposite to raise contrary perspectives. (Yin, 1994, pp. 53–54). Glaser and Strauss (1967) suggest that theoretical selection of comparison groups provides ‘simultaneous maximization or minimization of both the differences and the similarities of data that bear on the categories being studied’ (p. 55). Cases reveal common factors and relevant differences. Maximising differences between cases, accordingly ‘increases the probability that the researcher will collect different and varied data bearing on a category, while yet ﬁnding strategic similarities among the groups’ (p. 56). I maximised differences between cases to cover a range of types, variations, conditions, relationships, processes, mechanisms, etc. By studying new organisations, regions, cities, or nations, I saw differences and similarities which lent insight into the categories originally developed (p. 57). Categories were thus crafted by handling a multiplicity of groups and situations. My research’s sampling approach entailed collecting a variety of ‘slices of data,’ echoing the approach advocated by Glaser and Strauss (1967, p. 65) who state: In theoretical sampling, no one kind of data on a category nor technique for data collection is necessarily appropriate. Different kinds of data give the analyst different views or vantage points from which to understand a category and to develop its properties; these different views we have called slices of data. While the [researcher] may use one technique of data collection primarily, theoretical sampling for saturation of a

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category allows a multifaceted investigation, in which there are no limits to the techniques of data collection, the way they are used, or the types of data acquired.

Rigorous data collection occurred simultaneously to data analysis. Collection and analysis were iterative and mutually informing.

DATA COLLECTION PHASE ONE: INNOVATIVE AND ESSENTIAL PRACTICE EVALUATION In each case, my phase of data collection was to conduct an innovative and essential practice evaluation (IEPE). IEPE is a phrase I coined to capture what amounts to a speciﬁc approach to process evaluation. As such the term IEPE does not represent a methodological innovation, but denotes my approach to dealing with questions such as what activities are essential, when and where they occur, and who delivers them. It examines whether or not the programme is delivered as intended to the target population. According to Rossi, Lipsey, and Freeman (2004), ‘program process monitoring is the systematic and continual documentation of program performance that assesses whether the program is operating as intended or according to some appropriate standard y’ (p. 171). It asks how the program is intended to be delivered, and if it is delivered as intended. I deﬁne IEPE as a systematic investigation into programmatic implementation, as an effort to identify and map the core features and approaches of programming. IEPE is an exploratory and systematic analysis of the characteristics of the organisation under study and an account of the factors that variously contribute to organisational health and sickness. Esman and Uphoff (1984) offer questions that IEPE takes on board, including the types and level of performance, the environments within which an organisation operates, the structure of the organisation, the type and extent of member participation, and its overall performance. Rossi et al. (2004, 7th edition, p. 171) also inspired my approach, calling for description, identiﬁcation, and speciﬁcation of the need for a programme, the programmatic theory, the issue to be addressed, the targets of the programme, and the target population. IEPE grew from my training in so called ‘innovative practice’ education policy research (Bardach, 2000; Stokey & Zeckhauser, 1978; Weimer & Vining, 1999; MacRae & Whittington, 1997). ‘Innovative practice’ research aims to distinguish between elements that are essential and those are merely supportive and optional, to distinguish general vulnerabilities, and allow for variation and complexity (Bardach, 2000).

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In Phase 1, I conducted ongoing participant observations amounting to a compressed ethnography. This included time in the ﬁeld documenting observations, chance conversations, overheard remarks, and informal interviews. The review of tens of thousands of pages of primary documents provided a complementary, unobtrusive method of gaining insight into the values, actions, and beliefs of community participants (Marshall & Rossman, 1995, p. 85). Robson (2002) suggests that archived documents have the advantage of being subject to reanalysis, providing documentation over time and from a range of contexts. IEPE might be thought of as attempting to improve the validity of indicators teased out of interview data. Walford (2001, p. 89) indicts interview data, urging researchers to see it as only one of several ways to generate data rather than as automatically reliable, ‘hard,’ or sufﬁcient. As precursor to interviews, process evaluation has advantages similar to two-phase, mixedmethod research. First, the consistencies between interviews and observational data can be triangulated. Second, process evaluation ﬁndings can clarify and illustrate interview ﬁndings complementarily. Third, interview questions and focus are developed, and new lines of questioning initiated. Fourth, evaluation data provides richness and detail of understanding, expanding the quality of interviews (Green, Caracelli, & Graham, 1989; Green & Caracelli, 1997; Kidder & Fine, 1987).

DATA-COLLECTION PHASE TWO: IN-DEPTH INTERVIEWS The accounts offered by informants of how they perceive and give meaning to their actions are the most important source of data. Actions are acts of human consciousness – enacted in the midst of structures, memories, goals, values, and oppression. I encouraged participants to consider the questions as my equal and mutual investigator, and treated them as an expert with rich stores of experience relevant to the research question. Many interviews were repeated/multi-event encounters. I conducted interviews as an informal, interactive process. Open-ended questions and comments were used to solicit feedback from respondents. I prepared an interview guide containing a series of questions ‘aimed at evoking a comprehensive account of the person’s experience’ (Moustakas, 1994, p. 114). These interview questions formed the research protocol and focused interviews on ‘the experience of a situation’ (Von Eckartsberg,

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1998). Efforts were made to build relationships with informants through extensive informal contact before commencing or even suggesting an interview. Interviews often ‘began’ with social conversation over several weeks, building trust and creating a relaxed atmosphere to establish a rapport with the research participant, making him or her comfortable enough to answer questions honestly and in detail. Questions were altered (or not asked at all) when appropriate. Sometimes, interviews focused on a particular question or set of questions to the exclusion of others. The individuals were selected for interviews purposively, in accordance with the following priorities (which are similar to those upon which the two cases were selected). The selection process for interviewees was inﬂuenced by the following priorities. Interviews Helped ‘ﬂesh out’ existing hypothesis by seeking individuals who can offer a ‘full account’ of a particular viewpoint. Sought insights that helped tease out why emerging data and themes disagree with established understanding. Sought interviews that helped to develop categories, map dimensions, and explore similarities and differences, coherence and incoherence, and the relative importance of a given category. Sought negative instances and dis-conﬁrmatory examples to mitigate the risk of bias. Sought conﬁrmatory evidence by checking and re-checking categories and exploring possible rival hypothesis. Sought guidance from ‘experts’ in the ﬁeld by asking critical informants about categories and concepts under development. In addition, for both cases, I used Internet-based text communications as an object of analysis and used the Internet to collect data from individuals (Bryman, 2004, p. 457). This was uniquely appropriate because within both case studies, Internet-based communication was central to network activity. Web-data generation involving website, webpage, blog post, electronic article, bulletin board, and listserv post-related sources of data as the object of analysis. Materials were identiﬁed and archived. In addition to my broader orientation to data analysis, with e-data I prioritised analysis through the following lenses: Examination of material as embodying a dimension of the networking and connection between group participants. Examination of content as an expression of the types of social practices that occur in the network.

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Examination of e-material as participant engagement in a conversation relevant to the themes, categories, and research questions of this study.

THREE TIERS OF DATA ANALYSIS The ﬁrst tier of data analysis was my effort to generate comprehensive, synthetic, structural, and textural descriptions of case activities. I conducted data analysis with an empirical phenomenological orientation. I will not describe the procedures in detail. With the transcripts of interviews, observation notes, primary documents, innovative and essential practice evaluation related documents, blog data, and case-relevant literature, I conducted a recursive comparative analysis: I took a sample of interviews, read them, and developed concepts and categories; and then checked these categories against another pile of transcripts, making necessary adjustments. I sorted through physical stacks of interview data, echoing Dey’s (1993) proposals to split and splice piles, dividing and combining evidence until piles and categories genuinely cohere. The speciﬁc data-analysis procedure I conducted was an expanded and modiﬁed version of the empirical phenomenologically informed analysis process proposed by Moustakas (1994). The result of Tier 1 was several comprehensive, synthetic IEPE Reports. As outlined above, these reports: Charted the dimensions of the programme, including essential features and relevant innovations. Sought to capture programmatic and experiential variance and complexity while omitting the purely idiosyncratic or particular. Sought to describe how participants understood and perceived what was attempted, what happened, and how it happened. These comprehensive, synthetic reports are an end product in and of themselves. In some minds’ research projects, these reports would be the end product of an ethnographic research process. However, because the aim is not to describe case-related phenomena, but to develop categories that aim to operationalise concepts with minimal measurement error – these reports were only the ﬁrst step. In the second tier, I presented practitioners in the ﬁeld with comprehensive, synthetic descriptions of the innovative and essential features of the case activities. I solicited practitioner commentary and analysis with regard to whether the synthesis offered ‘ﬁt,’ was accurate, and was comprehensive.

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Glaser and Strauss emphasise the importance of joint coding and joint analysis as a mechanism to arrive at accurate approximations of the context being studied. It was in this spirit that I solicited feedback from relevant practitioners. Glaser (1992) might argue that reviewers add social sensitivity and the ability to offer feedback that maintains analytic distance while drawing upon experience to suggest modiﬁcations and validate asserting. Glaser and Strauss (1967, p. 27) might contend that this approach allowed me to ‘check out’ the ‘emergent set of propositions’ represented by the report. They might also contend that the process is conﬁrmatory, adding a ‘purposeful’ and ‘systematic’ character to the analysis (p. 28). Glaser and Strauss might further make the case for practitioner response as allowing descriptions that are ‘quite rich, complex, and dense’ to develop further and become more ﬁtting and relevant (p. 32). On the basis of the ongoing feedback and review from these practitioners, I ﬁnalised the descriptive, synthetic reports. These reports served as the foundational data set for Tier 3, Category Generation and Modiﬁcation. It is in this sense that I have a genuinely multiple-tiered process of data analysis. The third tier involved the generation of categories of social practices that may contribute to the formation of social capital. A category is a speciﬁcally deﬁned dimension of concept, a portion of a system of classiﬁcation of the divisions articulated in a schematic framework. Social capital can be deﬁned as the relationships and networks that facilitate collective action and access to resource. My project proposed the use of social scientiﬁc research to distinguish this concept’s categories, in other words, an empirical approach to the delineation of this concept’s dimensions. Concepts are descriptive and explanatory devices designed to facilitate communication. Indicators operationalise concepts. A category stands by itself as a conceptual element of a concept, and as a necessary stage for indicator development. The best approach to category development, I argue, is the systematic discovery of categories that emerge from social scientiﬁc evidence. Categories are simply a classiﬁcatory structural unit of a concept that social scientists distinguish to aid the development of indicators. I sought categories for indicators that will ﬁt the concept and the situation being researched and work when put into use through measurement. Following Glaser and Strauss, by ‘‘‘ﬁt’ I mean that the categories must be readily (not forcibly) applicable to and indicated by the data under study; by ‘work’ I mean that they must be meaningfully relevant to and be able to explain the behavior under study’’ (1967, p. 3). Categories, I argue, must be clear enough to be readily operationalised. They should also be coherent and

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clear to other social scientists and to signiﬁcant laypersons. One caveat should be made. Despite the fact that categories should ﬁt both the concept and the situation being researched, they should aim for wide applicability. Categories are generated from the data but entail a degree of conceptual abstraction.

CONCLUSION: TOWARDS A GROUNDEDINDICATOR APPROACH This essay proposes the development of a ‘grounded-indicator approach’ to public policy research. In coining the term, this essay deﬁnes a ‘groundedindicator approach’ as an approach that entails grounding indicators in social research (i.e. the purposeful systematic generation of indicators from the data collected in the ﬁeld). A grounded-indicator approach derives indicators from the study of phenomena the concept represents. Grounded indicators are discovered, developed, and provisionally veriﬁed through systematic collection and analysis of data that pertain to those phenomena. The developer of grounded indicators does not begin with an indicator and then establish its validity. Rather, he or she begins with ﬁeldwork and allows relevant insights to emerge. The purpose of a grounded-indicator approach is to generate indicators that are faithful to and illuminate the concepts and phenomena under study. Researchers measuring social capital formation with standard indicators often feel as though they are ﬁtting an indicator from an unrelated theory to the phenomenon being studied; or, ‘‘forcing ‘round data’ into ‘square categories’’’ (Glaser & Strauss, 1967, p. 37). To ground indicators researchers tease out why emerging data disagrees with established understanding, allowing measures to develop gradually as data and interpretations accumulate. This means continually redesigning and reintegrating indicator-related notions and constantly checking out tentative indicators as data pour in. Because current understanding of many social phenomena is not at a point of theoretical saturation, researchers should aim to collect data to develop categories, map dimensions, and explore similarities and differences, coherence and incoherence, and the relative importance of a given measure. Grounded indicators, when put into practice, provide us with relevant predictions, explanations, interpretations, and applications. In addition to the extant standards for veriﬁcation of indicator validity, common grounds for assessing indicator quality exist: consistency, clarity, ﬁt, integration,

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parsimony, scope, and workability. Grounded indicators additionally aim to be usable in practical applications, describe accurately and thoroughly, enable prediction and explanation, provide a novel perspective on action and behaviour, and facilitate theoretical advances. Put another way, grounded indicators seek to be both analytic (designating characteristics of entities) and sensitising (illuminating the phenomena and yielding a ‘meaningful’ picture). As noted at the beginning, measurement is at the centre of much educational research. Yet researchers are beginning to describe instances where there seems to exist a substantial gap between established measurement instruments and the social phenomena they intend to measure. This chapter argued that the most prominent existing procedures to secure valid indicators tend to over-emphasise veriﬁcation and correspondingly de-emphasise empirical research that aims towards generation and modiﬁcation. It proceeded to make the case that the features and strengths of ethnography speciﬁcally, and qualitative research more generally, make it uniquely suited to contribute to the development of new indicators and the improvement of existing indicators. To provide some warrants for these arguments, this paper ﬁrst offered a brief reading of the state of the practice of social science empirical research on measurement. It then turned to a speciﬁc example of this author’s ethnographic research project that aims to improve indicators of social capital formation, in the hopes of providing an exemplary instance of how ethnographic methodologies might contribute to the generation and modiﬁcation of new, quality measurement instruments. In concluding with a proposal for a ‘grounded-indicator approach’ to social science, I acknowledge that my thinking on this topic is still tentative. If the idea of a ‘grounded-indicator approach’ proves feasible, however, I hope to strengthen the mandate for generating grounded indicators, broadening the picture of what ethnographers, among others, do with their efforts and contribute to public policy research.

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‘I WANT THE WORLD TO KNOW’: THE ETHICS OF ANONYMITY IN ETHNOGRAPHIC LITERACY RESEARCH Kristen H. Perry When I ﬁrst began exploring literacy practices among Sudanese refugees three years ago, I approached several orphaned refugee youth – commonly referred to as the ‘Lost Boys’ – in the state of Michigan in the US. Many of these young men were quite happy to share their stories with me, to open their lives to examination. I explained to these youth that I would be changing their names to protect their identities, in line with the research requirements agreed upon by my university’s Institutional Review Board (IRB). One young man, however, questioned why I needed to change his name. I explained that this was the standard procedure, and that it was done to protect research participants from discrimination, persecution, or other harm that might befall them if someone recognized their identities as a result of my research. I explained that I really had no choice, given the nature of the IRB approval our project had received. This young man then told me that he was not willing to participate in my study if I was going to change his name. He said, ‘I have something important to say, and I want the world to know that I am the one who said it.’ We parted ways, and I found other

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refugee youth who were willing to participate anonymously (see Perry, 2005a, 2005b, 2006). This Sudanese young man’s refusal to participate in my study bothered me greatly, for two reasons. First, this particular individual was a community leader among the refugee youth in the area; he did indeed have interesting and important things to say, and I was saddened that I would not be able to include his voice in my study, even if anonymously. More importantly, however, the young man’s words caused me to question the common practice of changing participants’ names in research – particularly in ethnographic studies and other deeply personal qualitative methodologies. Why is anonymity the ‘default’ assumption in research? What is privacy, and who really is being protected by current guidelines for anonymity? What does it mean to ‘protect’ participants? When is anonymity truly necessary, and when does it actually silence participants’ voices? When, and why, should participants’ real names be used? Who should have control over issues of naming and anonymity in research – researchers, IRBs, or the participants themselves? Do participants fully understand the implications of this decision? For that matter, do researchers or IRBs?1

THE TRADITION OF ANONYMITY IN RESEARCH Current practice, reiﬁed through typical IRB guidelines, has its roots in traditional positivist frameworks about research. The positivist research paradigm is traceable back to Enlightenment epistemologies, which emphasized the fact-based, value-free nature of knowledge (Christians, 2000; Cunningham & Fitzgerald, 1996; Howe & Moses, 1999; Muchmore, 2000). Christians (2000) suggests that researchers who were grounded in positivist approaches used utilitarian perspectives on research ethics. The utilitarian approach suggested that a single set of moral considerations could guide all inquiry; these considerations were outlined in a generally accepted code of ethics that emphasized informed consent, privacy/conﬁdentiality, and accuracy, and that opposed deception in research. Many of these conventions were codiﬁed in national legislation in the USA beginning in 1974, in response to several experiments that had mistreated research participants (Hecht, 1995; UCRIHS, 2004). According to Christians (2000), ‘Three principles, published in what became known as the Belmont Report, were said to constitute the moral standards for research involving human subjects: respect for persons, beneﬁcence, and justice’ (p. 140). These principles were intended to ensure that people participated in research voluntarily and

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anonymously; that researchers protected the well-being of their participants; and that both the beneﬁts and the burdens of research be distributed equitably (Christians, 2000). This legislation established requirements for IRBs that would review and monitor federally funded research conducted by universities and other institutions. Most universities and other researchconducting institutions have since expanded the purview of their IRBs to monitor all institutional research – not just that which is federally funded (Hecht, 1995). Like the larger code of ethics, the speciﬁc belief that researchers must protect participants’ privacy and conﬁdentiality at all costs is deeply rooted in Enlightenment ideals. Christians (2000) suggests that these ideals reﬂected beliefs in the ‘nonnegotiable status’ of privacy and ‘a sacred innermost self ’ (p. 139). The positivist tradition, encoded in university IRBs, relies on safeguards to protect people’s identities and those of the research locations. Conﬁdentiality must be assured as the primary safeguard against unwanted exposure. All personal data ought to be secured or concealed and made public only behind a shield of anonymity. Professional etiquette uniformly concurs that no one deserves harm or embarrassment as a result of insensitive research practices (Christians, 2000, p. 139).

Although rooted in the Enlightenment, these ideals are held no less deeply today; current debates in the USA surrounding the tension between national security and individual rights to privacy reﬂect just how dearly Americans hold beliefs about privacy. However, certain beliefs about the nature and conduct of research are becoming less and less appropriate as ethnographers and other qualitative methodologists challenge the dominant positivist paradigm that shapes research in the human sciences. The issue of anonymity is one such research convention that must be re-examined in our postmodern, poststructuralist world.

CHALLENGING THE TRADITION Questions and challenges to the tradition of ‘protecting’ research participants by altering their identities have arisen from a variety of ﬁelds including anthropology, feminist studies, sociolinguistics, and sociology. While some American researchers have questioned the practice, much of the scholarly debate challenging anonymity comes from British researchers. Some challenges to the standard of anonymity raise practical questions: Is true anonymity even possible, particularly in this age of instant digital information? Other challenges stem from deeper epistemological, ethical, and critical

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methodological beliefs, particularly those held by feminist and other critical scholars. Practical Considerations: The Digital Revolution Many scholars have wondered whether true anonymity is even possible in research (Christians, 2000; Fine, 1990; Muchmore, 2000; Walford, 2005), particularly in the digital information age (Hecht, 1995). Even when researchers take great precautions to protect identities, pseudonyms and locations may be recognized (Christians, 2000; Walford, 2005). This is particularly true when researchers study highly speciﬁc communities or organizations. Fine (1990), for example, argues that ‘the group of apocalyptic ﬂying saucer cultists that Festinger, Riecken, and Schachter (1956) describe in such robust detail in When Prophesy Fails, can be linked to their mundane, real, and earthly existence by a search of Chicago-area newspapers of the period’ (p. 77). What was true for a study in 1956 is even more so for current and future research, as new digital technologies make information and identities highly accessible to anyone with an Internet connection and a Google search bar. Walford (2005) cites the example of Peshkin’s (2001) study of Edgewood Academy, the pseudonym of an elite private school in New Mexico. Using the Internet, Walford not only quickly identiﬁed the school as Albuquerque Academy, he even discovered that the school’s library web entry for Peshkin’s book announced that Peshkin had spent a year studying the academy for his book. So much for preserving anonymity! Not only do digital technologies make identifying sites and participants easier, but researchers themselves are increasingly using research technologies that are more likely to identify participants. A decade ago, Hecht (1995) argued that researchers had turned to new technologies – he named microcassette recorders, palm-sized camcorders, and tiny radio-transmitting microphones – in increasing numbers. As Hecht commented: The presentation of data is also changing, as researchers turn back to these new technologies for conveying the important messages gathered through their studies. It is not unusual to attend a regional or national meeting where a researcher no longer just reads the ﬁndings from his or her study but will display photographs, audio or video recordings, or electronic interactions as part of their presentations (p. 5).

A decade later, this is even more true, as data are increasingly recorded in digital formats that can be sent around the globe with the click of a mouse – or even via cell phone.

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Hecht (1995) rightly questions, ‘Can a subject remain truly anonymous, and what does it mean to insure a subject of his or her conﬁdentiality, given the expanding role of research technology?’ (p. 5). He also suggests that current legislation concerning research activities, and the IRB regulations that ensue, may not adequately account for this technological revolution in data gathering. While these standards may be somewhat behind the times in terms of technology, they are certainly outdated in relation to recent scholarship concerning power dynamics and the nature of the researcher–participant relationship, particularly in ethnographic and other qualitative methodologies.

Power and Research For the past 15 years or so, scholars – particularly those working within critical traditions – have considered issues of power within research. Many of the issues raised relate to concerns about respect, beneﬁcence, and justice, the same principles that Christians (2000) suggests guided the establishment of positivist-based research guidelines. However, when viewed through critical lenses, these principles take on different meanings and raise different questions. What does it mean to respect those who participate in research? How is respect embodied in the researcher–participant relationship? Who is beneﬁting from this research – and how can participants, both individuals and communities, share more equitably in the beneﬁts? How can research be designed so that it not only increases knowledge, but also furthers the cause of justice in the world? Researchers working within feminist perspectives have challenged assumptions that are based in a positivist framework for research (Christians, 2000; Powell & Takayoshi, 2003). Traditional research practices typically produce unequal power distributions between researchers and participants; in most studies, researchers hold most of the authority and control in the research relationship, and they also gain the most from the process (Cameron, Frazer, Harvey, Rampton, & Richardson, 1993). Christians (2000) describes the feminist communitarian model, where ‘participants have a say in how the research should be conducted and a hand in actually conducting it’ (p. 145). In contrast to positivist expectations of distance, objectivity, and anonymity, feminist researchers advocate empirical research that fosters reciprocity, collaboration, and the formation of meaningful relationships between researchers and participants (Powell & Takayoshi, 2003).

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Cameron et al. (1993) present three models of research – ethical, advocacy, and empowerment – and they label these ‘research on’, ‘research for’, and ‘research with’ participants. The authors suggest that the ethical model produces the most asymmetrical power distributions between researcher and researched; the advocacy model increases the likelihood that research participants may beneﬁt from the research study, but still positions them as objects of study. Only the empowerment model, according to the authors, actively seeks to more equitably redistribute power among participants and researchers. The authors describe several aspects of power that need to be considered in the empowerment model of research. One important power consideration involves determining how people are represented in a study. The authors argue that by sharing these decisions with participants, ‘the researcher maximizes their opportunities for deﬁning themselves in advance of being represented’ (p. 90). Likewise, when more reciprocal relationships are achieved in qualitative research, Christians (2000) suggests that ‘invasion of privacy, informed consent, and deception are nonissues’ (p. 149). Scholars also have questioned who beneﬁts most from research. Under typical frameworks – what Cameron et al. (1993) refer to as ethical models – researchers beneﬁt the most from the conduct and publication of research in the social sciences (Cameron et al., 1993; Fine, 1990). Fine argues, ‘Authors have a power that is rarely matched by the poor soul who is being depicted’ (p. 76). Of course, Fine’s choice of ‘poor soul’ to refer to research participants is interesting in itself, although he uses it to make a point about how participants are frequently depicted by researchers. Fine argues that because researchers hold all (or most) of the power in research relationships in typical models, they also therefore hold great responsibility to protect participants. However, Fine also suggests, that this process often denies participants proper credit for their contributions to the study and the production of knowledge – which are, of course, substantial. Walford (2005) even suggests that anonymity is more protection for the researcher than the researched: ‘Perhaps the idea of anonymity allows researchers to write their books and articles with less concern for absolute accuracy and to base their arguments on evidence which may not be as strong as desirable’ (p. 89). Critical scholars suggest that current practices and regulations are biased toward patriarchal structures and are paternalistic in nature (Christians, 2000; Grinyer, 2002). These practices and regulations assume that researchers and IRBs know – better than participants themselves – what the best interests of research participants are and how to protect them.

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Real Participation: Empowering Participants Paternalistic beliefs about research assume that all participants not only deserve protection, but that they desire to remain anonymous (Grinyer, 2002). This is clearly not always the case, as the young man who refused to participate in my study shows. Other researchers have encountered similar desires among participants to be named. Grinyer (2002), for example, conducted research among families of young adults who had been diagnosed with cancer; she found that three-quarters of her participants wished to use their own names in the study. In fact, Grinyer reports that one participant who elected to use a pseudonym later regretted it. This participant, Gabrielle, wrote a letter to Grinyer that explained her regret: Looking back I was very disappointed to not see Stephen’s and my name in print. Even though my words were there, I felt as though I had somehow lost ownership of them and had betrayed Stephen’s memory. That was entirely my own fault. I was also upset because my family and friends found it odd as well. They expected and wanted y our names too (Grinyer, 2002, p. 3).

Grinyer, like many critical scholars, concludes that it is problematic for researchers to ‘make judgements [sic] on behalf of others, however, well intentioned’ (p. 4). Others have also recognized the need to increase participants’ agency within the participant–researcher relationship. Powell and Takayoshi (2003) argue that qualitative researchers, particularly those who have developed or are developing reciprocal relationships with participants, must follow their instincts in designing and conducting research – even when these instincts challenge accepted practice. Powell and Takayoshi acknowledge that IRBs are important inﬂuences in the processes of designing and making decisions about research. However, they also argue that ‘what is ethical in the midst of the study might not necessarily fall within IRB guidelines governing the researcher’ (p. 418). In cases such as these, Powell and Takayoshi advocate what they term ‘informed disobedience’ (p. 418) on the part of the researcher, who likely knows better than the anonymous IRB reviewers what is ethical in the context of the research.

CASES FROM ETHNOGRAPHIC STUDIES Powell and Takayoshi (2003) suggest that ‘not enough of our scholarly reﬂection considers the potential complications of real people and real

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situations’ (p. 412). In order to look at real people and the situations that face them, I now present examples from ethnographic literacy research contexts, particularly from my own studies, that help to illustrate why anonymity is not always appropriate, and why participants might choose to reveal their identities.

Southern Sudanese Refugees My work with Southern Sudanese refugees began shortly after I returned from two years as a US Peace Corps Volunteer in Lesotho, Southern Africa. I learned about a local community of the so-called ‘Lost Boys’ who were seeking academic tutors, and I began working closely with three orphaned youth, one just entering college and the other two still in high school. After a year and a half of this work, one of my students asked me to serve on the board of the Southern Sudan Rescue and Relief Association, a local organization comprised of both Sudanese refugees and Americans. My close relationship with these young men also led to a study of how they practiced literacy in their everyday lives, particularly comparing their literacy lives in Africa with their literacy practices in the US and how these literacy practices compared to those of formal schooling. This work, and my deepening relationship with the local Sudanese community, led to my current research project, which involves examining the role of culture in the development of literacy practices of young children in intact Sudanese refugee families. Historical and Cultural Context The history of the Sudan is a troubling one, and it is also one that is coming to be increasingly prominent in both international news media and global politics. The Southern Sudanese are members of various tribes located in Southern Sudan; these southerners, typically black African Christians, have been engaged in a civil war against the northern-dominated Arab Muslim government for over 20 years.2 The war that displaced the Southern Sudanese was the result of centuries of deep ethnic and religious divisions. The country’s government is controlled by the North, and it has systematically worked to subjugate the African South by imposing Muslim sharia law, making Arabic the ofﬁcial national language, and turning a blind eye to the traditional practice of enslaving Southern Sudanese (Bok, 2003; Deng, 1995). In 1983, the Southern Sudanese rebelled against the atrocities of the northern-dominated government by creating the Sudanese People’s Liberation Movement and Army (SPLM/A), which engaged the government

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in a civil war that lasted over two decades. This war completely devastated Southern Sudan. At least two and a half million people have been killed since the beginning of the conﬂict, and ﬁve million people have been displaced as refugees. Militias bombed, pillaged and destroyed villages and crops, slaughtered families, raped women, and captured both women and children to be taken to the North, where they were kept as slaves and forced to convert to Islam (Bok, 2003; Yang, 2002). Like the current conﬂict in Darfur, the conﬂict in Southern Sudan caused a mass exodus of southerners, many of whom ended up as refugees in Egypt or other Middle Eastern nations or in the Kakuma Refugee Camp near Lake Turkana in Kenya. Southern Sudanese refugees typically spend many years in these nations of refuge. Many of these refugees are lucky enough to be granted asylum in countries such as the United States, Canada, Great Britain, and Australia, and these countries have made a particular effort to resettle the thousands of orphaned youth commonly known as the ‘Lost Boys’ (U.S. Department of State, 2001). These ‘Lost Boys’ are a special case among the Southern Sudanese refugees. Tens of thousands of Sudanese children, mainly boys, began a mass exodus from the south in 1987. The group was comprised mainly of boys for two primary reasons: First, boys ﬂed their villages in reaction to news that the armies on both sides were abducting boys and forcing them to ﬁght. Second, many young boys were away from home, tending to herds of animals in remote cattle camps, when militias descended upon their villages, destroying the villages and slaughtering their families (Yang, 2002). The orphaned youth began an arduous and dangerous journey of over 1,000 miles – entirely on foot. After a treacherous crossing of a crocodileinfested river, where thousands of boys drowned, approximately 33,000 Lost Boys reached refugee camps in Ethiopia, where they remained for nearly four years. Following a coup of the Ethiopian government, the refugees were forced back into the Sudan. Only 7,000 of the original group survived to reach the Kakuma Refugee Camp in Kenya in 1992 (Yang, 2002). In January of 2005 the Sudanese government and the SPLM signed a new peace accord that outlines an agreement for power-sharing between the North and the South and that makes provision for an eventual election where the South may determine whether or not to remain part of the Sudan (Embassy of the Republic of the Sudan, 2005). At that time, many Southern Sudanese expressed the hope that this accord will ﬁnally bring peace to the region. The sudden death of Dr. John Garang, the longtime leader of the SPLM and the newly instated vice-president of Sudan, in an airplane accident on July 30, 2005, along with the subsequent uprising of ethnic

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violence and the ongoing conﬂict in Darfur have signiﬁcantly dampened the optimism that accompanied the signing of the peace accord. The Research Projects Although my work with the orphaned youth and with the refugee families comprised two distinct studies, both projects were informed by a sociocultural perspective on literacy. Within this framework, literacy is a social practice shaped by social, cultural, economic, political, and ideological factors (Barton & Hamilton, 1998; Barton, Hamilton, & Ivanicˇ, 2000; Street, 2001). Researchers who study literacy practices shed light into the myriad ways in which individuals navigate and negotiate the various literacy landscapes and contexts that surround them, and they offer implications for the ways in which literacy instruction may be made more relevant to learners’ real-world lives. In the ‘Lost Boys’ study (Perry, in press, 2005a, 2005b), I sought to understand (1) the meaning of literacy to the refugees; (2) the life domains that contextualized their literacy practices; (3) how they used different languages across and within those domains; and (4) the extent to which school literacy practices aligned with the everyday literacy practices of these refugees. With my current and ongoing study of refugee families with young children (see Perry, 2005c), I am pursuing similar issues. In addition to the questions explored with the orphaned youth, I am exploring the ways that the refugee experience has shaped the literacy practices of the parents, as well as the ways in which the young children are appropriating, transforming, and otherwise making sense of the literacy worlds across the contexts of home, community, and formal schooling. For both studies, I used a fairly typical ethnographic case study methodology. Both studies relied heavily on participant-observation, various types of interviews, and the collection of different types of literacy artifacts. Participant-observation in both studies involved spending a great deal of time in participants’ homes; one way I gained access and fostered reciprocity with the participants was by offering academic tutoring and community mentoring or cultural broker services to the participants. Although I centered my study around focal participants and focal families in both studies, the research also involved a great deal of ‘hanging out’ at community events such as church services and traditional celebrations. In the study of refugee families, I also observed the focal children in their school classrooms. Interviews in both studies focused on ascertaining the types of texts and literacy practices that participants engaged with, both in their previous lives in Africa and in the USA, as well as collecting life histories and other important cultural information from focal participants. I collected a variety of

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literacy artifacts, including texts that were read and written by both focal participants and other community members, audio recordings of events such as church services, and photographs of literacy events and the literacy environments. Like most ethnographic studies, these methods had the potential to be highly invasive to participants’ lives. I not only spent a great deal of time with the participants, but I also asked them deeply personal questions that often led them to recount awful experiences or to reﬂect on the difﬁculties of their lives in the USA. Using photographs and audio recordings also had the potential to be invasive. In both studies, however, I found that instead of balking at a potentially invasive situation, participants actually welcomed the opportunity to talk about their experiences and to educate me (and, by extension, the larger world) about their people, their culture, and their history.

Anonymity Decisions In many cases, such as the study among families of young people diagnosed with cancer (Grinyer, 2002), revealing identities by using real names allows participants to retain ownership of their voices. As Fine (1990) suggests, it also helps to give credit where credit is due. While working with these refugees, I came to believe that using participants’ real identities not only would allow them to retain ownership and credit, but it might serve to empower them at the same time. Because of this belief – largely sparked by the young Sudanese man I described at the beginning of this chapter – I chose to challenge the practice of automatic anonymity in my study of the refugee families. Instead of telling participants that I would be automatically changing their names, I helped the families decide whether or not to use their real names or to remain as anonymous as possible. Although it is impossible for researchers to know the full extent of potential beneﬁts and risks in a study (Muchmore, 2000), I explained what I foresaw as possible beneﬁts, as well as the possible drawbacks of participation in my study. Much to my surprise, all three families clearly wanted to use their real identities in the project. I was surprised largely because I knew the histories of these families – their lives had not been easy, and they had sought refuge in the United States as a result of great oppression and violence in the Sudan. Although I believed it was important for participants to be given the choice about how they were represented, I expected that most would choose to protect their identities, given what they had endured. My earlier

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experience with the Sudanese youth should have taught me otherwise! Viola, one of the three mothers in my study, explained her decision: We don’t have any political problems or anything to hide our names. Our problems – we need people to know what is going on in our country and how we are suffering here. It’s not easy for new refugees here to be like American people. They struggle in many ways y We need them to know our culture, our tradition, because of our kids.

Viola’s words startled me – how could she claim that she did not have any political problems? Viola’s very existence in the USA was the result of political problems. Viola herself had told me about one of her relatives who still works for the Sudanese government, but who does underground work for Christian organizations in the Sudan; Viola explained that if the government found out about this, her relative likely would be assassinated. To me, this alone would be reason enough to wish to remain anonymous!3 Yet, this is precisely why researchers – let alone IRBs – should not make decisions about naming and anonymity on behalf of participants; my assumption would have been totally wrong. Viola’s words indicate that the naming issue directly relates to issues of identity and empowerment for her; she believed that using her real name would directly beneﬁt both her own children and the wider Sudanese community, who are resettling in this country in ever greater numbers. Viola’s desire to be identiﬁed may also be an attempt to retain her sense of who she is. Refugees, unlike other types of immigrants, typically settle in new countries not so much because they wish to, but because they have to – their very lives are often in danger in their native lands or in surrounding countries. Resettlement and the adjustment to a new place can be difﬁcult experiences, as Viola notes. Maintaining a voice and an identity may be a powerful way to cope with the challenges faced by refugees. Indeed, Francis Bok describes in his autobiography, Escape from Slavery (Bok, 2003), how he was captured by Arab northerners in the Sudan and forced into slavery as a young boy. After he left the Sudan, Bok was surprised that some refugees did not want to talk about their experiences. Bok felt differently: ‘My story, however, was all I had with me, the only remnant of my past’ (p. 105). In some cases, name-changing can be its own form of oppression. Forcing individuals to change their names has, in fact, been a common technique of oppression used in the Sudan. Bok’s captor forced him to convert to Islam and changed his name to Abdul Rahman; Bok reclaimed his own name after he escaped from slavery. In my research with the ‘Lost Boys’ – indeed, this term, while used by many of the youth to refer to themselves, was bestowed upon them by a Western journalist who compared them to the orphans in

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Peter Pan – Chol4 told me about a name-changing experience his uncle encountered while studying at a university in Khartoum, Sudan’s capital. Chol’s uncle continually found himself failing at the bottom of the class, although he studied hard and knew the material. When he complained about this, an acquaintance suggested he change his name to something more Arab-sounding; after Chol’s uncle changed his name, he suddenly found himself at the head of the class. Given these contexts, it is understandable why many Sudanese refugees might take a dim view toward having their names changed. Salvadoran Campesinos In other contexts, revealing participants’ true identities may actually offer them more protection than anonymity would. In their book, Now We Read, We See, We Speak (Purcell-Gates & Waterman, 2000), the authors conducted an ethnographic study among campesinos in El Salvador. The book focuses on eight poor rural women who were becoming literate after the brutal civil war in that country. In their book, the authors chose to reveal the women’s true identities – not only using their real names, but also including photographs of the women in the book. Purcell-Gates and Waterman believed that revealing the women’s true identities would actually offer them more protection than would pseudonyms; government reprisals against the women could actually have been easier to perpetrate if the women’s identities had been hidden from the world’s view. In addition, Purcell-Gates explained: ‘We also asked the women and people in the community which they would prefer and they all said they wanted their names attached to their stories. They had fought long and hard (in a very bloody civil war) for this and they wanted it out there!’ (personal communication, February 15, 2006).

CONCLUSION: NEED TO CHALLENGE STANDARD PRACTICE Qualitative researchers, particularly those who work within ethnographic and other deeply personal traditions, need to seriously rethink our research practices that accept anonymity as the norm. Allowing participants – not IRBs – to make informed decisions about how they are represented has many potential beneﬁts. The discussion and decision about naming versus

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anonymity can provide one step toward equalizing power relationships between researchers and participants, and it also helps researchers to understand that they cannot necessarily assume what their participants’ perspectives or best interests may be. Offering this choice to participants allows participants to retain ownership of their words, stories, and identities; it respects them as individuals rather than as ‘subjects of study’. In some extreme cases, naming participants may actually do more to protect them than anonymity would. Revealing identities also forces researchers to think even more carefully about how they represent their participants, what they choose to describe, and how they describe it (Walford, 2005). Although I believe that revealing participants’ real names may be important (and that offering participants that choice is imperative), I am in no way suggesting that researchers should always reveal participants’ identities. There are cases and contexts where it would be inappropriate – indeed, irresponsible – to do so, for example, while I know the name of Viola’s relative who does underground work in the Sudan, I cannot in good conscience put that person’s name in print. Many individuals and communities are vulnerable, and the threat of discrimination, persecution, or other harm is very real. However, researchers and IRBs cannot necessarily assume that they know ahead of time which individuals or communities may be threatened, as these cases illustrate. All of the cases described in this paper are potentially vulnerable populations – refugees, young children, the terminally ill, the rural poor who are becoming literate – yet, each group contained individuals who were eager to share their stories and their names. The issue of how we represent young children and who makes the decision about that representation is, I think, particularly complex. David, Edwards, and Alldred (2001) advocate for allowing children to have a greater role in the decision-making processes that accompany participating in research. However, the children who participated in their research were 10 years old and above, and it was relatively easy for these researchers to argue that the children had a good understanding of what was occurring in the research process. Researchers who, like me, work with children who are younger than seven may not be able to claim that these young participants fully understand the research process or the potential implications that may arise from their participation in the project. (Of course, it could also easily be argued that adults may not fully understand these implications, either!) Although I agree with David, Edwards, and Alldred that children should have a voice in the research process, I also must acknowledge that this belief is clearly situated in my White, middle-class, Enlightenment-based ‘progressive’ philosophies about individual rights and the nature of childhood.

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Most IRBs, in contrast, believe that children have the right to assent to participate, but that they cannot consent to participate (UCRIHS, 2004); thus, consent is left to parents. From an IRB’s perspective, therefore, children should not have the sole responsibility to make decisions about how they are represented in research. Likewise, many cultures, particularly nonWestern ones, believe that parents should have full control over any decisions made about their children’s lives – not only when the children are young, but as they reach adulthood, as well. For example, among the Sudanese refugees that I work with, not only is it common for parents to choose their children’s spouses, but it is also common for parents to choose their children’s careers. Viola, for example, explained to me that her father played a very traditional role in choosing her career – he decided that she would become a lawyer – but that he had been highly unusual in allowing Viola to choose her own spouse. In communities such as these, where parents exert a great deal of power in decision-making about children, allowing children to have the sole voice in deciding how they are represented likely would be a culturally foreign concept. For my study, I dealt with this issue by asking the family to discuss the issue and to come to a common understanding. In all three families, however, the parents made the ﬁnal decision. This cultural issue of children’s right to make decisions leads to a larger point, which is that different ethnic and cultural communities do not necessarily share the same European ideological history that shaped research ethics in Europe and the US. beliefs about privacy and individual rights are quite literally foreign to many communities. Anthropologists and cultural psychologists have demonstrated that the nature of the self, of individualism, and of community vary widely across cultures (see Markus & Kitayama, 1991; Nisbett, 2003; Oyserman, Coon, & Kemmelmeier, 2002). For example, Nisbett (2003) argues that the insistence on freedom of individual action and a strong belief in universal rules of proper behavior (e.g., that all research participants should be anonymous) are Western ideals that are not shared by cultures in other regions of the world. Many cultures, such as those found in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, tend toward more collective, interdependent belief systems, rather than individualistic ones (Markus & Kitayama, 1991; Oyserman et al., 2002). This may partly explain why the refugees that I work with or the campesinos described by Purcell-Gates and Waterman (2000) chose to use their real identities; for them, privacy or an individual’s ability to make an independent decision may not have been a prominent concern. And, as Viola’s rationale for using her real name illustrates, participants from communities such as these may

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feel that the ultimate beneﬁt to the larger community greatly outweighs any individual personal risk that they may face by participating in the research study. Each of the cases that I have described in this chapter therefore presents a strong argument for the consideration of cultural context when making decisions about how participants are represented in research. Questions to consider When should researchers use participants’ real names? There are no straightforward answers to this question; naming and anonymity must be negotiated on a case-by-case basis. Some situations, however, should lead researchers to strongly consider using participants’ own names. First and foremost, researchers clearly should seriously consider using participants’ own names whenever participants wish to be named. Researchers should also consider this when identifying participants either (1) empowers their voices, as in the cases of many of the Sudanese refugees described; or (2) affords them more protection than anonymity might, as in the example of Salvadoran campesinos. In the ideal future, IRBs will come up with a new set of standards and questions about participant identities in qualitative research, rather than requiring that ‘researchers must propose to protect human subjects’ rights with regard to privacy by using research designs that safeguard subjects’ privacy during the gathering and storage of data’ (UCRIHS, 2004). Until that time, researchers may ﬁnd it useful to use some questions, in conversation with participants, when determining whether or not to use participants’ names or to have them remain anonymous: What are the possible beneﬁts and risks of using participants’ real names? What are the possible beneﬁts and risks of using pseudonyms? How would using real names or anonymity empower participants (and their families/institutions/communities)? How would using real names or anonymity threaten them? With either decision, how can we ensure that participants are respected and represented fairly?

NOTES 1. Some researchers and IRBs distinguish between ‘conﬁdentiality’ and ‘anonymity’ (Walford, 2005). The Michigan State University IRB, for example, explains: ‘Anonymity means that no one, including the principal investigator, is able to associate responses or other data with individual subjects. Investigators may promise

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anonymity only under this condition. Data collection involving face-to-face or taped recording is not anonymous. Conﬁdentiality means that although subjects’ identities may be known to the investigator(s) and the research staff, subjects’ identities will be kept conﬁdential and reports of research ﬁndings will not permit associating subjects with speciﬁc responses or ﬁndings’ (UCRIHS, 2004). This deﬁnition is clearly grounded in a positivist, quantitative framework. For the purposes of this paper, therefore, I use the term ‘anonymity’ to refer to the practice of using pseudonyms to mask participants’ identities. 2. This conﬂict has existed far longer than the current conﬂict in Darfur, although the issues are similar in both conﬂicts. 3. This is also an excellent reason to keep this particular relative’s identity hidden. 4. ‘Chol’ is a pseudonym, as anonymity was required by the IRB approval agreement for that study.

REFERENCES Barton, D., & Hamilton, M. (1998). Local literacies: Reading and writing in one community. London: Routledge. Barton, D., Hamilton, M., & Ivanicˇ, R. (Eds) (2000). Situated literacies: Reading and writing in context. London: Routledge. Bok, F. (2003). Escape from slavery. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Cameron, D., Frazer, E., Harvey, P., Rampton, B., & Richardson, K. (1993). Ethics, advocacy and empowerment: Issues of method in researching language. Language and Communication, 13(2), 81–94. Christians, C. G. (2000). Ethics and politics in qualitative research. In: N. K. Denxin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds), Handbook of qualitative research, (2nd ed). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Cunningham, J. W., & Fitzgerald, J. (1996). Epistemology and reading. Reading Research Quarterly, 31(1), 36–60. David, M., Edwards, R., & Alldred, P. (2001). Children and school-based research: ‘Informed consent’ or ‘educated consent’? British Educational Research Journal, 27(3), 47–365. Deng, F. M. (1995). War of visions: Conflict of identities in the Sudan. Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution. Embassy of the Republic of the Sudan. (2005). Sudan government and SPLM/A sign a comprehensive peace agreement ending Africa’s longest conﬂict [Electronic version]. SudaNews, February–March. Festinger, L., Riecken, H., & Schachter, S. (1956). When prophesy fails. New York: Harper & Row. Fine, G. A. (1990). Credit and blame in ethnographic publishing. The American Sociologist, 21(1), 76–79. Grinyer, A. (2002). The anonymity of research participants: Assumptions, ethics, and practicalities [Electronic version]. University of Surrey Social Research Update, 36. Retrieved July 8, 2004, from http://www.soc.surrey.ac.uk/sru/SRU36.html Hecht, J. B. (1995). The Institutional Review Board in social science research. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Mid-Western Educational Research Association, Chicago, IL.

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Howe, K. R., & Moses, M. S. (1999). Ethics in educational research. Review of Research in Education, 24, 21–59. Markus, H. R., & Kitayama, S. (1991). Culture and the self: Implications for cognition, emotion, and motivation. Psychological Review, 98, 224–253. Muchmore, J. (2000). Methodological and ethical considerations in a life history study of teacher thinking. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, New Orleans, LA. Nisbett, R. E. (2003). The geography of thought: How Asians and Westerners think differently y and why. New York: The Free Press. Oyserman, D., Coon, H. M., & Kemmelmeier, M. (2002). Rethinking individualism and collectivism: Evaluation of theoretical assumptions and meta-analyses. Psychological Bulletin, 128, 3–72. Perry, K. (2005a). ‘Helping our people’: The role of literacies in mediating community among Sudanese refugees. Paper presented at the meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Montreal, Canada. Perry, K. (2005b). From storytelling to writing: Transforming literacy practices among Sudanese refugees. Paper presented at the 14th world congress of applied linguistics/international association of applied linguistics, Madison, WI. Perry, K. (2005c). Making sense of literacy landscapes: A case study of a Sudanese refugee child’s literacy practices in America. Paper presented at the meeting of the national reading conference, Miami, Florida. Perry, K. (2006). Sharing stories, linking lives: Literacy practices among Sudanese refugees. In: V. Purcell-Gates (Ed.), Cultural practices of literacy: Case studies of language, literacy, social practice, and power. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Peshkin, A. (2001). Permissible advantage? The moral consequences of elite schooling. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Powell, K. M., & Takayoshi, P. (2003). Accepting roles created for us: The ethics of reciprocity. College Composition & Communication, 54(3), 394–422. Purcell-Gates, V., & Waterman, R. (2000). Now we read, we see, we speak: Portrait of literacy development in an adult Freirean-based class. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Street, B. (2001). The new literacy studies. In: E. Cushman, G. R. Kintgen, B. M. Kroll & M. Rose (Eds), Literacy: A critical sourcebook (pp. 430–442). Boston: St. Martin’s Press. UCRIHS, Michigan State University. (2004). Instructions for completing the application for initial review of a project involving human subjects. Retrieved February 26, 2006, from http://www.humanresearch.msu.edu/applications/Initial_Application_Instructions.doc U.S. Dept of State. (2001). Fact sheet: Sudanese (Kakuma) youth, June 11. Retrieved February 28, 2004, from http://www.state.gov/g/prm/rls/fs/2001/3398.htm Walford, G. (2005). Research ethical guidelines and anonymity. International Journal of Research & Method in Education, 28(1), 83–93. Yang, D. C. (2002). Kakuma Turkana. St. Paul, MN: Pangaea.

EVERYONE GENERALIZES, BUT ETHNOGRAPHERS NEED TO RESIST DOING SO$ Geoffrey Walford During the early part of 2006 I attended two international conferences on ethnography and education. Both were large conferences with several parallel sessions, so the papers I attended may have been idiosyncratic and non-representative, but one issue that struck me was the frequency of citations to Paul Willis’ book Learning to Labour, ﬁrst published in 1977. I felt it was remarkable that this particular ethnography should still be so widely quoted, and it re-emphasized my view that, while it probably has been the most inﬂuential ethnography of education of the last half century, this particular ethnographic study’s success has much to do with over-generalization–both by the author and by readers. Further, that over-generalization of the experiences of some non-conformist lads has led to a lack of understanding (or even problematization) of why, at that time, the bulk of working-class boys actually did get working-class jobs. Of course, I am far from being alone in critiquing certain aspects of Learning to Labour. Soon after its original publication various authors criticized it for what was seen as its gloriﬁcation of laddish culture, its lack of consideration of ethnicity, its sexism and so on. Indeed, the amount of

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This chapter draws in part on extracts from Walford (2001, 2002, 2005).

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attention to it given by critics was probably one of the reasons it became recognized as a classic study. Few would agree with Durkheim’s conclusions in his classic study of Suicide, but the continued attention given to it, in part, acts to solidify its reputation. Similarly, the collection of papers linked to Willis’ work that was originally presented at a special session at the American Education Research Association’s Annual Conference in 2003, to mark the 25th anniversary of the book, and later published in book form served to reinforce the book’s classic reputation (Dolby, Dimitriadis, & Willis, 2004). My concern with the book is embodied within the subtitle of the book: ‘How working class kids get working class jobs’. For the book has been taken, and is still being taken by many ethnographers, as showing exactly this – how working-class young people (at best, restricted to boys and at that particular time in history) creatively constructed a culture that echoed in many ways the culture of the shop ﬂoor jobs that they eventually occupied. The cultural form that the lads created was seen to have within it a ‘partial penetration’ of the conditions of existence of its members and of their position within a class-based society. Their behaviour and attitudes towards school were seen as having a form of logic and rationality, yet, there is a moment ‘in working class culture when the manual giving of labour power represents both a freedom, election and transcendence, and a precise insertion into a system of exploitation and oppression of working class people’ (Willis, 1977 p. 120). It is worth brieﬂy examining another book that was published by Paul Willis (1978). While it was published a year after Learning to Labour (and actually by a far more prestigious publisher), his far less well-known Profane Culture had its genesis several years prior to it. Profane Culture was based on Willis’ doctoral thesis that was awarded in 1972. It presents the results of two separate ethnographic studies of two very different groups of young people who he calls ‘the motor-bike boys’ and ‘the hippies’. The ﬁrst group were located through contact with an unnamed motor-bike club linked to a church in an unnamed large English city. He conducted ﬁeld work and interviews over a nine-month period with a loose and variably numbered group which centred round one person and had a core of ﬁve people with another two who were often present. The second group were contacted through attendance at a public house in a large unnamed industrial city. Over a period of ﬁve months Willis spent time with three different small groups of three young people and interviewed them in their homes. Both of these studies were thus small scale – which is exactly what would be expected for a doctorate – and the book documents elements of the cultures of these two small groups of young people.

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But the book claims far more than is warranted. The introduction to the book states: This book presents two important cultures generated during the 1960s and still widely inﬂuential today - the motor-bike boys, sometimes known as rockers, and the hippies, sometimes known as heads or freaks. The form of the book is of two ethnographic accounts of the inner meanings, style and movement of these cultures, but the essential theme of the book is that oppressed, subordinate or minority groups can have a hand in the construction of their own vibrant cultures and are not merely dupes: the fall guys in a social system stacked overwhelmingly against them and dominated by capitalist media and commercial provision.

From two very limited case studies, the claims have moved to being about entire sub-cultures. From the small-scale and particular, claims about whole cultural phenomena are made. Of course, once a book is published the author has little control over how it is interpreted. Many of the ways in which Learning to Labour has been used to bolster arguments, ﬁnd little support in the actual text, and the book is far more nuanced than most readings suggest. However, the pattern started in Profane Culture is repeated in Learning to Labour. The larger study of which Learning to Labour was a part involved six separate groups of boys (mostly non-conformist boys) in ﬁve different schools, but the heart of the ethnography is a group of 12 non-academic (sometimes used synonymously with non-conformist) working-class young men at an unidentiﬁed secondary modern school in an unidentiﬁed town. The main school they attended was at the heart of an inter-war housing estate and had ‘substantial West Indian and Asian minorities’ (p. 4) which were not studied; the town itself had a population of about 60,000 but was part of a large industrial conurbation. On page 4 Willis states ‘I wanted to be as certain as possible that the group selected was typical of the working class in an industrial area’, but he also states that the 12 boys themselves (‘the lads’) were selected on the basis of friendship links and membership of some sort of oppositional culture within the school. These ‘lads’ were, in fact, deliberately selected to be not representative of the wider body of working-class boys in the school or of working-class boys in general; they were selected because they were perceived to be part of a particular oppositional school culture. Although we are not told how regular or extensive the contact was, these 12 were followed from the second term of their penultimate year in school, and through their ﬁnal year. The ‘lads’ and three other young men were then followed into work where they were observed for a short period and interviewed about their work. Teachers and parents were also interviewed.

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There is little reason to doubt the quality and quantity of data generated in this study or the depth of relationship between Willis and the lads; the problem is in the analysis of these data and the conclusions that are drawn. The problem of inappropriate generalization from the experiences of a small non-randomly selected sample of boys in one particular school is a central part of the text. The move from the particular culture of these 12 lads to the much more general ‘working-class culture’ is made continually, when all that can be realistically claimed is that this particular cultural form is one of the many possible working-class cultural forms that could be generated indeed, only one of the many possible non-conformist forms that could be generated. While the book does include some discussion of alternative cultures that some other working-class students develop in school, the reader is led to understand that it is only this particular form ‘created’ by the lads that has continuities with working-class jobs involving manual labour. The experiences and cultural forms created by the other boys are presented as the other end of a bipolar ‘lads’ and ‘ear’oles’ dichotomy. Of course, we all generalize. Everyday life requires it if we are to make our way through each day. Take the ﬁrst paragraph of this chapter for example. I state that I attended two large ethnography and education conferences and that I was surprised by the large number of times that Learning to Labour was cited. I give no indication of where these conferences were held, how many sessions I actually attended, or even what I mean by ‘large’. I also state that those papers that I saw might be idiosyncratic and unrepresentative, but my guess is that most readers were prepared to accept my claim that my experience supported the ‘classic’ nature of the book. We use anecdotes to try to generalize in everyday life, but ethnographers should be more careful. Indeed, I feel that we should make every attempt not to generalize but to bring out the speciﬁcs of each case that is studied.

THE DILEMMA OF GENERALIZATION Willis presents just one example of a fundamental and longstanding dilemma within qualitative and ethnographic research (Walford, 2001). The method requires a focus on a very small number of sites, yet there is often a desire to draw conclusions which have a wider applicability than just those single cases. Within the ethnographic literature about education there is a plethora of examples where schools, or particular groups of children or teachers within schools, are researched because they are seen as ‘typical’, or because they can offer ‘insights’ into what may be occurring in other

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schools. Thus, for example, we have many studies of single schools where racism and sexism has been shown to occur. Strictly, such studies can only show that events that have been interpreted as racist (usually by the researcher alone, but sometimes by those involved as well) occurred in that one particular school, with those particular teachers and students, at a time that is often many years before the publication of the academic article or book. Such studies cannot provide information about what might be happening now even in that same school and, most importantly, cannot provide any evidence about what is happening or what was happening in any other schools. There are several standard attempts to deal with this dilemma. The ﬁrst is to argue that, while strict generalizability is not possible in the statistical sense for one (or a small number of cases) cannot possibly be an adequate sample drawn from a wider population of schools or classrooms, ethnographic and qualitative studies can achieve ‘transferability’ through ‘thick description’. If the authors give full and detailed descriptions of the particular context studied, it is claimed that readers can make informed decisions about the applicability of the ﬁndings to their own or other situations. Broadly, although in different forms, this view is presented by authors such as Stake (1995), Becker (1990) and Lincoln and Guba (1985). However, in order to be able to judge whether a particular ﬁnding from an ethnographic study in one school is applicable in another, it is actually necessary to know as much about that second school as about the ﬁrst. While Agar (1996, p. 44) and Gomm, Hammersley, and Foster (2000) argue that it might be possible to use survey data to gain such information, this can only give the most general of statistical information and cannot give information on school cultures or other detailed school-speciﬁc features. Lincoln and Guba (1985, p. 316) follow their logic through and argue that this means that one cannot generalize from a case study to a wider population unless one makes unwarranted assumptions about the wider population. The second main way in which commentators have tried to deal with the problem of generalizability is to argue for theoretical generalization. Numerous authors (e.g. Bryman, 1988; Schoﬁeld, 1990; Silverman, 1993; Yin, 1994) have sought to move away from statistical or empirical generalization from case studies, and have proposed that the wider signiﬁcance of ﬁndings from a particular ethnographic study can be derived through the strength of logical argument for each case. A case is signiﬁcant only in the context of a particular theory, and logical inference replaces statistical inference. An extrapolation can be made between a particular case and a wider population only if there is a strong theoretical or logic connection between them. The

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strength of the theoretical reasoning is seen to be crucial. This means that the selection of the case to be studied is crucial. Rather than attempt to ﬁnd a school or classroom that is ‘typical’ or for which ‘there is no reason to believe it is untypical’, theoretical generalization requires a clear theoretical basics for the choice. This may be seen as a version of Glaser and Strauss’ (1967) theoretic sampling, applied here to the initial choice of research site rather than the individuals and situations to be sampled once the site has been chosen. However, the attempt to by-pass empirical generalization through the idea of ‘theoretic gereralization’ is, in the end, a failure. For there to be a convincing theoretical argument for extrapolation, there needs to be empirical evidence about the wider population. This requires a great deal of empirical work with the wider population as well as with the case study school. Indeed, one problem is usually deﬁning what any ‘wider population’ actually is in relation to the cases studied.

SOME PERSONAL EXAMPLES Much of my own ethnographic work has been dogged by considerations of generalizability. When I published my study of boys’ private boarding schools I still tried to argue that, while it was based on ethnographic research in just two schools, there were aspects that applied to a wider range of schools. I claimed that a limited generalizability was possible. Although the book was given the title of Life in Public Schools (Walford, 1984, 1986a, 1986b) I made it clear that any generalization could only be made to the limited wider population of the 29 schools then members of the Eton and Rugby groups of schools which I believed, shared many similarities. I explicitly excluded Eton, bringing the population down to 28, and argued that there was sufﬁcient information available on all of these 28 schools for me to be able to assess generalizability. I spent four weeks in one unidentiﬁed school and a term in another, made visits to several of the others in the two groups, and was able to interview members of staff who had previously been teachers in practically all of them. The frequent meetings between teachers within the two groups meant that all schools were well known to teachers in the others. I now believe that it would have been better to have restricted my account to the two schools and have made no further attempts at generalization. In contrast, my next major study was of a named institution – my own university at that time – Aston University in Birmingham (Walford, 1987). Aston was one of the universities most badly affected by the cuts in

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government funding implemented in 1981, and I recognized that there was an important story to tell about the ways in which the institution was being restructured. There was no question about generalization, as this was a study of the reactions within one particular university. Its wider interest was simply that the severity of the reductions in government funding were such that extreme changes were being made. It was an indication of what could happen, but not a prophesy of what would happen within other universities. My following ethnographic study was of a named school – the City Technology College, Kingshurst (Walford & Miller, 1991; Walford, 1991a, 1991b, 1991c). This ethnography was undertaken as part of a linked project to a wider study of the City Technology College (CTC) initiative (Whitty, Edwards, & Gewirtz, 1993) but, again, there was no intention of making generalizations about other CTCs from the study of this one. The school was important in itself, simply because it was the ﬁrst of this new type of school to be established and because it was at the centre of the initial controversy over funding and selection of children. I expected that there would be a wide audience for an account of selected aspects of ‘what it was like’. I had no desire to make any generalizations, but pressures were put on me by the publisher to make statements about the whole scheme and to draw general conclusions. In particular, they wished the book to be called City Technology Colleges and to include a detailed account of the wider initiative. I resisted the pressure, even though I might have led to higher sales, and stuck to the singular title, City Technology College, to emphasize the restricted nature of the study. More recent work, which has been qualitative but not ethnographic, has focussed on a group of small private evangelical Christian schools and their involvement as a pressure group in inﬂuencing government legislation (Walford, 1995a, 1995b). This was then followed by a somewhat similar linked study that examined the implementation of the particular aspects of the 1993 Education Act that made it possible to obtain state funding for some private schools (Walford, 1997, 2000). In both cases, the work involved visits to schools where interviews with headteachers, teachers and others were conducted and documentary material collected. Only 15 schools eventually beneﬁted from the legislation and achieved state funding, and the success of each school was widely publicized in both the local and national press. Each story was, in itself, worth telling. There was no temptation to make any generalizations beyond each school itself. Thus, my qualitative and ethnographic work is unusual in that most of it has dealt with named schools, for it was impossible and undesirable to conceal their identities. In most cases, the choice of site was made because

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these particular schools were of interest in themselves, and not because I had any expectation of being able to generalize from them.

THE IMPORTANCE OF NAMING I have argued elsewhere (Walford, 2005) that ethical guidelines produced by various organizations and university ethical review boards are misplaced in assuming that the default position with ethnographic research should be that sites are not named. There are various ethical reasons why such an assumption is open to question, but here I wish to consider the more practical issue of what the effects of not naming sites might be on authors and readers. There is little doubt that a major reason for not naming sites or people involved in ethnographic research is part of an access strategy. Most researchers probably believe that it is easier to obtain access if anonymity is promised, for it suggests that it is possible to reduce any possible harm by making it impossible for the site to be identiﬁed. It is open to severe question as to how reasonable any promise of anonymity actually is in practice, but reduction of possible harm to participants may not be the main reason for such pledges. Several authors have proposed further reasons for not naming sites or individuals. In a recent article, Scheper-Hughes reﬂects on her research in Ireland (1979) and her revisit after 20 years. She writes (Scheper-Hughes, 2000, p. 128): Still, were I to be writing the book for the ﬁrst time and with hindsight, of course there are things I would do differently. I would be inclined to avoid the ‘cute’ and ‘conventional’ use of pseudonyms. Nor would I attempt to scramble certain identifying features of the individuals portrayed on the naive assumption that these masks and disguises could not be rather easily decoded by the villagers themselves. I have come to see that the time-honoured practice of bestowing anonymity on ‘our’ communities and informants fools few and protects no one – save, perhaps, the anthropologist’s own skin. And I fear that the practice makes rogues of us all – too free with our pens, with the government of our tongues, and with our loose traditions and interpretations of village life. Anonymity makes us unmindful that we owe our anthropological subjects the same degree of courtesy, empathy, and friendship in writing as we generally extended to them face to face where they are not our ‘subjects’ but our book companions without whom we quite literally could not survive. Sacriﬁcing anonymity means we may have to write less poignant, more circumspect ethnographies, a high price for any writer to pay. But our version of the Hippocratic Oath – to do no harm, in so far as possible, to our informants – would seem to demand this.

In this article Scheper Hughes begins to suggest less altruistic reasons for why anonymity might be offered to participants and organisations that are

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involved in ethnographic research. It may beneﬁt the researcher more than the researched. Perhaps the idea of anonymity allows researchers to write their books and articles with less concern for absolute accuracy and to base their arguments on evidence which may not be as strong as desirable. If named schools and people are being discussed, the need for very strong evidence before claims are made becomes obvious. At the extreme, writers could be sued for libel in a way that is difﬁcult to do where names are not used. Researchers are able to hide poor evidence behind the pseudonyms without those researched being able to make a challenge. But there are further worrying possibilities. Jan Nespor (2000) sees anonymization as a representational strategy with interesting ontological and political implications, the most striking of which, he believes, have to do with the way anonymization naturalizes the decoupling of events from historically and geographically speciﬁc locations. In other words, the fact that we do not name a site gives the ﬁndings of the research a spurious generalizability. If we attempt to conceal details about a school, it becomes a more ‘general’ place – a school that ‘could be any school’, a school which is just one example of many. The pseudonyms selected by some authors often exaggerate this tendency (e.g. Anytown, Hightown, Beachside). Ethnographers thus implicitly invite readers to see their ﬁndings as being applicable to other situations. Yet, to be able to understand any school, readers really need to know the school’s history and geographical location, its physical facilities and appearance and the nature of the students it serves and the staff who teach there. Each school is unique in structure, culture and organization. The way it responds to change can only be understood in the context of its history and socio-cultural and political location. While, as readers, we intellectually accept the lack of generalizability of ethnographic work, we are seduced by the lack of speciﬁc details about the site and situation such that the signiﬁcance of particular pieces of research expands to ﬁll our general understanding of the issues. Thus Learning to Labour (Willis, 1977) has been widely taken to explain why ‘working class kids get working class jobs’, yet it is based mainly upon a study of only 12 young men in a single school in a particular social, political and economic context. For example, it is usually forgotten that these lads were actually in the ﬁrst year who were required to stay at school until 16 rather than 15. To be required to stay at school for a year more than any young people had been forced to stay before might well have had important consequences for the culture created by these particular working-class boys. Similarly, Beachside Comprehensive (Ball, 1981) is seen as giving information on the

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effects of banding and streaming in secondary schools, and Rebels without a Cause (Aggleton, 1987) is taken to explain some of the middle-class experiences of the transition from school to work. More recently, Jo Boaler’s (1997) work in two somewhat contrasting schools has been widely accepted as indicating the relationship between teaching styles, setting and gender and success in mathematics teaching, and Gillborn and Youdell’s (2000) ethnographic study of two schools is taken to have shown the nature of the ‘A-C economy’ in British secondary schools as a result of recent policy changes. As it is about mathematics, Boaler’s study is sometimes referenced as if it had relevance way beyond even its British context. The fact that none of the research schools is identiﬁed, implicitly gives the writer and reader the chance to broaden the ﬁndings of each study beyond the situation investigated. It gives a spurious generalizability of time and space to the results of speciﬁc studies. While giving the actual names of sites (and maybe of people involved) does not guarantee that readers will not generalize, it might act to reduce the more outlandish examples and it would certainly make writers more circumspect.

CONCLUSION Ethnography of education draws from two rather different origins – anthropology and sociology. In general, those who look more towards an anthropological justiﬁcation have few problems with the idea that single ethnographic studies cannot be generalizable, for example, the work by Stambach (2000) on a village school on Kilimanjaro or Foley’s (2004) account of schooling of Mesquakis from a Native American reservation. What is more, anthropologists usually name their sites and are more likely to see what they are doing as a straightforward ‘contribution to knowledge’. Their work may have both long- and short-term beneﬁts to the groups studied, but that is not seen as a primary purpose. Lack of generalizabilty should not be seen as a weakness. Named case studies have a major contribution to make. They can inform us about, and vicariously let us experience, settings to which we would normally have no access (Gomm et al., 2000, p. 61). They can take us to a school on Kilimanjaro, or on an Indian reservation, or to the ﬁrst of a new type of British school. They can allow us to appreciate the cultures created in each setting through someone else’s eyes. They can give us information about a wide diversity of cultures that it would be impossible for us to understand if we had to experience them by ourselves.

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My view is that ethnographic sites should be chosen because they or the activities in them are intrinsically interesting or important in themselves, for themselves. Generalization, whether it be empirical or theoretical, need not be the goal at all. It might be that particular cases are selected because they are important to understand in the light of their unique signiﬁcance. This might be, for example, their role within policy formulation and development. Or it might be that the site is selected because particular activities or cultural forms are known to be present. Learning to Labour has been damaging to the development of educational ethnography because Willis, and the readers of the book, made claims that went beyond those that could justiﬁably be made from the study. It generalized from close involvement with 12 lads in a particular school, in a particular social and physical location, at a particular time, such that it appeared to show how working-class young people created cultural forms where there were continuities between school and work. Both Willis and readers largely ignored the fact that many working-class boys failed to create cultures with these particular continuities. What was some of the diversity of cultural forms actually created by working-class young people? To what degree were there continuities and discontinuities between the cultures they created and the work they eventually took up? To what extent were the speciﬁcs of the school, economic situation, time and place related to the cultural forms? What are the limits to wider population that might have created similar cultural forms? It is very unlikely, of course, that these questions could all be answered, but it is of great importance that they are asked. To not do so is to simply accept the results of a small study as completely generalizable to an unknown wider population. Willis’ book set a precedent for very many books, theses and articles that followed to take a small-scale study and make exaggerated general claims. I would argue that it is better for ethnographers not to seek generalizabilty at all, but to study sites, groups and cultures for what they. A major advantage of naming any site is that it reduces the chance that either the author or the reader will be tempted to make spurious generalizations.

REFERENCES Agar, M. H. (1996). The professional stranger (2nd ed.). San Diego: Academic Press. Aggleton, P. (1987). Rebels without a cause. London: Falmer. Ball, S. J. (1981). Beachside comprehensive. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Becker, H. S. (1990). Generalising from case studies. In: E. Eisner & A. Peshkin (Eds), Qualitative inquiry in education. New York: Teachers College Press. Boaler, J. (1997). Experiencing school mathematics. London: Falmer. Bryman, A. (1988). Quantity and quality in social research. London: Unwin Hyman. Dolby, N., Dimitriadis, G., & Willis, P. (Eds) (2004). Learning to labor in new times. London: Routledge Falmer. Foley, D. E. (2004). The heartland chronicles (with 2nd epilogue). Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Gillborn, D., & Youdell, D. (2000). Rationing education. Buckingham: Open University Press. Glaser, B. G., & Strauss, A. L. (1967). The discovery of grounded theory. Chicago: Aldine. Gomm, R., Hammersley, M., & Foster, P. (2000). Case study and generalization. In: R. Gomm, M. Hammersley & P. Foster (Eds), Case study method. London: Sage. Lincoln, Y. S., & Guba, E. (1985). Naturalistic enquiry. Beverley Hills: Sage. Nespor, J. (2000). Anonymity and place. Qualitative Inquiry, 6(4), 564–569. Scheper-Hughes, N. (1979). Saints, scholars, and schizophrenics: Mental illness in rural Ireland. Berkeley: University of California Press. Scheper-Hughes, N. (2000). Ire in Ireland. Ethnography, 1(1), 117–140. Schoﬁeld, J. (1990). Increasing the generalizability of case study research. In: E. Eisner & A. Peshkin (Eds), Qualitative inquiry in education. New York: Teachers College Press. Silverman, D. (1993). Interpreting qualitative data. London: Sage. Stake, R. (1995). The art of case study. London: Sage. Stambach, A. (2000). Lessons from Mount Kilimanjaro. New York: Routledge. Walford, G. (1984). The changing professionalism of public school teachers. In: G. Walford (Ed.), British public schools: Policy and practice. Lewes: Falmer. Walford, G. (1986a). Life in public schools. London: Methuen. Walford, G. (1986b). Ruling-class classiﬁcation and framing. British Educational Research Journal, 12(2), 183–195. Walford, G. (1987). Restructuring universities: Politics and power in the management of change. Beckenham: Croom Helm. Walford, G. (1991a). Researching the City Technology College, Kingshurst. In: G. Walford (Ed.), Doing educational research. London: Routledge. Walford, G. (1991b). City Technology Colleges: A private magnetism? In: G. Walford (Ed.), Private schooling: Tradition, change and diversity. London: Paul Chapman. Walford, G. (1991c). Choice of school at the ﬁrst City Technology College. Educational Studies, 17(1), 65–75. Walford, G. (1995a). Faith-based grant-maintained schools: Selective international policy borrowing from The Netherlands. Journal of Education Policy, 10(2), 245–257. Walford, G. (1995b). The Christian Schools Campaign – a successful educational pressure group? British Educational Research Journal, 21(4), 451–464. Walford, G. (1997). Sponsored grant-maintained schools: Extending the franchise? Oxford Review of Education, 23(1), 31–44. Walford, G. (2000). Policy, politics and education – sponsored grant-maintained schools and religious diversity. Aldershot: Ashgate. Walford, G. (2001). Doing qualitative educational research. London: Continuum. Walford, G. (2002). Why don’t we name our research sites? In: G. Walford (Ed.), Educational ethnography and methodology. Amsterdam, New York, Oxford: Elsevier.

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Walford, G. (2005). Research ethical guidelines and anonymity. International Journal of Research and Method in Education, 28(1), 83–93. Walford, G., & Miller, H. (1991). City Technology College. Buckingham: Open University Press. Whitty, G., Edwards, T., & Gewirtz, S. (1993). Specialisation and choice in urban education. The City Technology College experiment. London: Routledge. Willis, P. E. (1977). Learning to labour. How working class kids get working class jobs. Farnborough: Saxon House. Willis, P. E. (1978). Profane culture. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Yin, R. K. (1994). Case study research (2nd ed.). London: Sage.

EXTENDING VIDEO ETHNOGRAPHIC APPROACHES Dalia Aralas The generation of insight for the advancement of ethnographic knowledge arises not only from the capacity of researchers to avail themselves of innovative mediational means in the pursuit of new research objectives in new research sites, but also it arises from the capacity of ethnographers to rethink and reconceptualize contemporary approaches, whether the objectives be new or old, the research sites familiar or exotic. This chapter focuses on the need for the ethnographic eye to broaden its ﬁeld of vision in grappling with particular issues in qualitative research. Speciﬁcally, it will argue for the considerable value of an approach that differs from but complements prevailing approaches in current usage; this approach argues for a re-viewing of directions within video-mediated research of an ethnographic orientation. The discussion will make reference to a study undertaken to investigate the nature of mathematical imagination within a classroom context at the upper secondary level in Sabah, Malaysia. This chapter discusses speciﬁc methodological questions related in particular to the use of video recordings; the substantive contribution of the research study is drawn upon to a limited extent for the purposes of the present discussion. The chapter comprises ﬁve parts. Part I argues for extending conventional approaches to the use of video recording, discussing considerations for the use of a different, complementary approach. Part II illustrates the approach of employing video recording to generate different data. Part III discusses some of the ways that

Methodological Developments in Ethnography Studies in Educational Ethnography, Volume 12, 169–184 Copyright r 2007 by Elsevier Ltd. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 1529-210X/doi:10.1016/S1529-210X(06)12010-0

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the different data generated made possible an intensive interrogation of the initial framework, leading to a different reframing of the phenomenon. Part IV emphasizes the drastic difference in result from the employment of a different approach, that is, a reconstruction of a more layered, alternative framework that leads to a reconﬁguration of views regarding the phenomenon under study, namely, a reconﬁguration of mathematical imagination. Part V concludes the chapter.

PART I Current ethnographic research is marked by an expanding variety of approaches that indicates not only the infusion of paradigmatic proliferation into the ﬁeld but also the expansion of technologies mediating ethnographic exploration as well as the growth in research agendas of educational research. Current researchers therefore have much to draw upon but the diversity of approaches indicates and presents major challenges (Walford, 2002). In particular, the double crisis of representation and legitimation that has become apparent in qualitative research has problematized the very possibility of valid/trustworthy/authentic/useful research. Thus, before an ethnographer even steps one foot, gingerly, in the research site, she would have had to grapple with weighty issues, such as the transparency of language, that have considerable bearing on the formulation of research questions and on the construction of an initial frame for her study. More importantly, the agency of the researcher, as well as the agency of her research subjects – vis-a`-vis the structural constraints of epistemic access to the nature of reality – has been cast into doubt, as has the capacity of the researcher and the research subjects to produce a meaningful, dare we say truthful, account of their ways of knowing. In connection with attempts to gain access to the nature of the world or of social realms, prevailing methodological wisdom emphasizes the necessity of unobtrusive methods of data collection, whether as alternatives to or in combination with direct elicitation methods. For example, Lee (2000) argues that the major problems that beset the act of direct eliciting of data by means such as interviews and questionnaires have been attributed to the researcher’s presence. Lee (2000) cites works by many researchers such as Webb for whom concerns about ‘researcher reactivity’ have prompted the search for ‘unobtrusive measures’ that are deemed ‘non-reactive’. It is in the current climate of advocacy of unobtrusive measures that video-mediated research has been conducted. The works of Lee (2000), Kelly and Lesh

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(2000), and Powell, Francisco, and Maher (2003) provide illustrations of works that emphasize the importance of unobtrusive methods in pursuit of the objectives of video-mediated research. To this end, the researchers adopted the following approaches: the study of naturally occurring phenomena, or the study of phenomena in naturalistic settings, or the use of methods that were deemed least intrusive or disruptive of the natural phenomena under observation. Unobtrusiveness is deemed desirable for the research seeks to uncover the nature of educational or social processes as they are, that is to say, in conditions that are either natural or in naturalistic settings (classrooms without the presence of the researcher) or in controlled conditions where the effects of signiﬁcant variables are amenable to measurement or be subject to conventional analysis in the production of research accounts of natural phenomena. For the purposes of this chapter, it is worth examining examples of such works to illustrate the high signiﬁcance conferred on unobtrusive videomediated approaches, without rejecting the worthwhile concerns raised about research quality. The review of Powell et al. (2003) on literature of ‘‘videotape methodology’’ indicated that there were deliberate strivings, made either explicitly or implicitly, in video-mediated research, in education and other ﬁelds, to maximize unobtrusiveness and minimize researcher reactivity. Examples included works from the 1950s that ‘‘involved the study of detailed transcripts of ‘cinema ﬁlm of naturally occurring interactions’’’ (Powell et al., 2003, p. 406). The authors also cited the TIMSS Videotape Classroom Study that had a ‘‘goal to understand how teachers construct and implement eighth-grade mathematics lessons in Germany, Japan and the United States’’. The review also cited studies by many researchers that raised concerns about and strove ‘‘to ameliorate the tendency of video images to falsely portray typicality’’ (Powell et al., 2003, p. 412). To explain the popularity of videotape as a ‘‘medium for capturing and archiving data’’ in many areas of research, Powell et al. (2003, p. 407) quoted Pirie (1996, p. 2) for whom videotaping, as a method for researching learning in classroom contexts, is ‘‘the least intrusive, yet most inclusive, way of studying the phenomenon’’. It is instructive to consider Pirie’s study which explicitly linked ‘‘all choices as to methods of data gathering y to one’s research questions’’ which were about ‘‘the phenomenon of ‘folding back’ and ‘collecting’ within the Pirie–Kieren theory of mathematical understanding’’ (Pirie, 1996, p. 2). Her research reﬂected concerns about obtrusiveness and researcher reactivity that are widespread in video-mediated research that purports to examine teaching experiments or relationships between teaching methods, pupil learning styles and pupil achievement. With regard

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to classroom observations, a researcher is instructed to guard against obtrusiveness by sticking strictly to the role of a ﬂy-on-the-wall, as it were; video recordings are to be made from distances deemed safely unobtrusive. In practice, this involves attaching video cameras to stationary stands at the back or sides of the classroom so as to not disrupt ‘normal’ classroom proceedings. In the less usual case where the attention shifts from classroom contexts or processes to the activities of focus groups, video cameras are still attached to stationary stands and the researcher strives to minimize reactivity. For example, Pirie (1996, p. 3) stated that she ‘‘chose to focus a ﬁxed camera’’ on ‘‘pre-selected groups of students’’ at a distance ‘‘close enough to carry the outline of what the students were writing, but not so close that I was not able to see all their faces and body language’’. The video camera is ﬁxed at a distance that enables visibility of facial expressions and bodily gestures and audibility (technically enhanced) of pupil utterances, but no closer. It is noteworthy too that Pirie discussed the merits of the use of the methods of ‘‘video-stimulated recall’’ and ‘‘thinkaloud’’ in terms of obtrusiveness; the value of such methods was deemed lessened to the degree they promoted changes in the pupils’ thinking processes (Pirie, 1996, pp. 6–7). These changes were deemed obstructive of the goal of studying natural phenomena. To summarize, on the whole, the literature indicates an explicit and implicit advocacy of the importance of unobtrusiveness. If there were any works that advocated the deliberate employment of obtrusive, disruptive methods, they do not appear on the research radar. The emphasis on unobtrusiveness is linked to concerns with validity or other measures of research quality. A higher degree of unobtrusiveness is deemed an indication of a higher degree of quality. The value of approaches that purposefully use obtrusiveness or disruption to generate data has been underplayed in mainstream research. Notable exceptions are works in the traditions of ethnomethodology by Garﬁnkel (1967) and to a lesser extent, ethnography. There is signiﬁcance in this, for both traditions do not place limitations on the study of naturally occurring phenomena by non-disruptive means in naturalistic milieu; both traditions go so far as to problematize the very nature of naturally occurring phenomena. In brief, there are differences in the value conferred upon unobtrusiveness and disruption in research approaches because there are not only differences in the purposes of particular studies. More importantly, the differences in valuing disruptive approaches are based upon different methodological considerations regarding the quality of research within fundamentally different perspectives about the nature of social reality itself.

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An ethnographer undertaking research that seeks to generate insight into the ways learners make sense of the world cannot ignore the possibilities that disruptive methods may afford. Contrary to prevailing wisdom in mainstream video-mediated research, an ethnographer must consider and make decisions in the ﬁeld to tolerate obtrusiveness and deliberately act to use disruption as one of the signiﬁcant means of generating different sorts of data if that were ethically justiﬁable and methodologically warrantable. Ethical considerations regarding the right to privacy, safety, psychical and emotional well-being of research participants were of central importance in my study and these were given due and proper attention. Further, ethical considerations in visual research are context speciﬁc (Banks, 2001) and are beyond the scope of this chapter. What is noteworthy here is that there are methodological considerations for a complementary approach, that is, a video-ethnographic approach that deliberately uses obtrusive means and capitalizes on disruption of the ‘natural’ ﬂow of phenomena for the generation of different data in pursuit of worthwhile research purposes. An important methodological consideration in support of such an approach pertains to the need to use methods that suit research purposes even in the face of contrary research wisdom. Hodkinson (2001) has taken issue with the apparent claim of the ‘‘new research orthodoxy in the United Kingdom’’ that ‘‘method can ensure objectivity in research’’. Walford (2001, p. 9) argued that the issue is not about ‘‘researcher subjectivity’’ which is ‘‘an inevitable feature of the research act’’. The question should rather be directed to warrants for methodological decisions. These considerations support the stance that ﬂexibility regarding research approaches, including the use of disruption, is not inherently unjustiﬁable. It may even be an imperative that ﬂexibility be warrantable in attempts to capture a social reality that is problematic in every which way, and which would be unwise to assume composed of structures possessed of an objectivity awaiting the researcher’s cold impassioned gaze. Flexibility and the use of more than one approach in a study, even if these approaches be contrary and lead not to triangulation of data but offer more complication, are worthwhile in that they generate all sorts of data that are important for the ethnographic objective of obtaining insight into the ways actors make sense of their social worlds in the very process of building such worlds. Furthermore, taking on different approaches generates alternative views of complex realities which may afford researchers opportunities for the construction of different, if contrary, models (Walford, 2001). This can only be positive for the growth of understanding regarding phenomena that given their complex nature are irreducible to any model within prevailing or existing perspectives. The

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necessity of interrogating theories and revising, building new frameworks give weight to the adoption of a complementary or alternative approach. The speciﬁcities of these considerations for the research study conducted into mathematical imagination are discussed below.

PART II My research study needed to seek different ways of seeing social worlds, not to replace conventional ways of seeing but to make additional layers to enrich such seeing. That is, it is imperative that a researcher seeks to extend the capacity of the study to address research questions in ways more powerful than might be, if prevalent restrictions were adopted. Thus, the research study used a combination of complementary approaches, but for the purposes of this chapter, the disruptive approach will be highlighted. Introductory remarks about the study are given to provide a context for the discussion. The research had been undertaken primarily to investigate the nature of mathematical imagination, with a view to explore and build an initial framework for the analysis of mathematical imagination; the analysis was to be informed by an interrogation of the interplay between theoretical and empirical works, where the latter was derived from a qualitative study primarily ethnographic in orientation. The data were generated mainly from the classroom observations of mathematics classes at upper secondary level (Year 10 and 11); the pupils were aged 16 on average and three-quarters of them lived in relatively disadvantaged areas. Four teachers, two of whom had been my former students as undergraduates, were involved in the study. The data generated included video- and audio recordings of classroom observations, informal conversations with pupils during and after such observations, pupil written work, informal teacher conversations and interviews before and after classroom observations and pupil and teacher questionnaires. The ﬁeldwork – conducted in four schools in three towns in different districts of Sabah – was undertaken in two phases in one year; the total time in the ﬁeld was six months. The length of time was deemed adequate in further consideration of my background as a mathematics educator, who has had extensive experience of observing similar classrooms in the course of my professional work. There was a large amount of data generated; this was by design. There has not been any previous research that has set out to study ‘mathematical imagination’ or ‘x imagination’, either of a community of learners or experts, that I could turn to for reference. It made

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sense then, for a study such as this was, to prepare as wide a ‘net’ as possible to ‘capture’ the dynamics of real-life mathematizing by pupils in classroom contexts. At the beginning of the ﬁeldwork, the following sub-questions (derived from the main research question pertaining to the nature of mathematical imagination) were asked: What pupil actions are potentially describable as acts of mathematical imagination? What does mathematical imagination involve? I had made a decision at the start of the study to focus on what I then called dialogical instances that might appear to indicate shifts in mathematical engagement. The study had begun with an initial framework that conferred central importance on dialogicality; this was continuously interrogated. The study adopted a methodological stance different from other studies in important ways. Notably, the study placed great importance on the assumption that the very concept of imagination implies a shift in engagement that is based on a rupture in the ﬂow of ways pupils made sense of situations. This implied an examination of discontinuity of action, of processes as well as shifts in engagement. Such notions were interrogated during analysis. Furthermore, with regards to the generation of data: whereas other studies that examine pupil learning in classroom situations take as given that data ought to be generated in a ‘naturalistic’ setting, the study argued for the addition of a different approach to generate different data in the following ways: ﬁrst, the employment of video recording by the researcher in close proximity to pupils and their work, second, the video recording (from both far and very close distances) of unusual set-ups involving unfamiliar mathematical situations that pupils initially found bewildering. The obtrusiveness of the approach adopted did not present difﬁculties and did not give rise to less useful data. On the contrary, the approach made available different data that served the purpose of studying the nature of mathematical imagination in greater depth. The richness of the data obtained thus allowed for a deeper analysis and afforded insights into a phenomenon in ways that were not anticipated and made possible the reconstruction of a richer model. It is noteworthy too that the approach did not cause pupils discomfort, largely due to the great rapport that had developed between the teachers, pupils and me. This aspect is discussed more fully in a forthcoming report. It sufﬁces here to say that the participants were excited that they were taking part in the ﬁrst ever video-mediated research of classrooms in Sabah. The pupils were sympathetic to my plight as a researcher that their teachers reminded them of frequently. The pupils gave their cooperation in ways that eased the generation of data and they showed eagerness to talk about, and to display their work.

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The researcher, with video camera held in her hands in free movements (with the video camera secured by means of strong straps around one of her arms) moved around the classroom freely, ﬁlming the whole class or groups or individual pupils or their work. Depending on the decisions made about the potential signiﬁcance of events that involved mathematical imagination in play, the researcher hovered above the pupils as they worked. The video camera was at times held very close to the pupils, just above their heads or sometimes even lower by their sides, as they grappled with the mathematical situations individually, in silence or as they conversed with their neighbours. The researcher recorded the pupils’ every move, as they wrote, gestured, spoke to themselves or their peers, as they used rulers, compasses, models; that is, as pupils employed all sorts of mediational means: material, imagistic and linguistic during their work. The researcher used the zoom lens to record every stroke of the pen or pencil as pupils made marks in their own books or the common worksheets sometimes given to groups to work on; the recordings included the pupils’ movements, utterances, hesitations and pauses. At times the pupils made modiﬁcations to their writings and their utterances, after some moments (perhaps on reﬂection) or after bursts of conversations with their neighbours or after seeing a neighbour’s work. It is noteworthy that the researcher recorded the pupils’ utterances not just with the video but with an audio tape recorder. When the pupils had seemingly completed a phase in the ways they grappled with situations, the researcher moved to make video recordings of other students. The researcher moved between the rows of desks of the pupils after video recordings of signiﬁcant phases. The researcher also used the zoom lens to capture, as closely as possible, pupils’ movements and writings, when they were asked to show their ‘working’ or to attempt a mathematical problem that they were required to solve at the blackboard in front of the classroom. It is important to note that by breaching the safe distance of unobtrusiveness deemed desirable in mainstream video research, the researcher was able to gain access to the inside of the very ‘space’ of origination and unfolding of pupil action, of the development of imaginative ways of pupil grappling with situations. Standing very close to the pupils and using the zoom lens, the researcher was able to access the precise forms of work produced by pupils in the very unfolding of the ways pupils made sense of the situations they confronted and invented or produced their own takes and solutions and remade the frames they used for grappling. As the pupils worked, the researcher recorded, in precise detail, the ways pupils began to form letters, numerals even as they began to formulate their utterances to themselves, to their peers or to their teachers, individually as well as

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collaboratively. The recordings were made moment-by-moment from the beginning of the formulation of the writings and sayings to the development and conclusion of these works, with the accompanying pupil gestures, utterances and hesitations about their work. These data are therefore seen in their very form, in the very ways they are formulated in the very moments of invention or production by the pupils. They are also available for a ‘genuine’ recall afterwards, to trace the development of the pupils’ movements, utterances, playful trials and submitted written work, for a variety of purposes. The latter include availability as a resource for the researcher, for further conversations with pupils (for further data generation) and equally importantly, availability as a resource for repeated re-viewing during data analysis.

PART III The use of complementary approaches, that is, the disruptive, intrusive approach detailed above, in conjunction with a conventional, unobtrusive approach where the researcher took the position of a ﬂy-on-the-wall, as it were, generated a collection of various sets of data. The collection of data, including sets of data different from those that would have been obtained using mainstream approaches, afforded an extension of the capacity of the study to pursue the chosen research purposes that were different from objectives of previous research. The variety of data availed the researcher of a different resource for analysis and interrogation of the initial framework and opened up opportunities for reinterpreting data, reconceptualizing analytical lenses for the examination of the phenomenon under study. The availability of a different collection of data has implications for the evaluation of the validity/authenticity/trustworthiness of the research, for it impacted on writing descriptions of classroom observations, on the initial stages of data analysis (initial coding, memoing, constant comparison) as well as on the constant interrogation, construction, revision and reconﬁguration of an analytical framework of mathematical imagination. This was made possible by undertaking a hyper-spiral research path. This comprises multiple reconstructions of cycles of looking at the research in a holistic way, at every cyclical stage rebuilding the initial framework after every run of data analysis. Such multiple cyclical reconstructions were therefore built layer by layer, wherein at each layer a holistic reframing is undertaken. There are many video-mediated research studies that make clear the ways they conducted analyses of video data; Powell et al. (2003) and Pirie (1996)

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are examples. The analysis conducted in the study clearly shared commonalities as well as differences with the analyses in the literature. This chapter focuses on analysis of the different sets of data generated in the study. At each cycle of the data analysis, the researcher made repeated re-viewings of video recordings with combinations of other data and previous analysis of previous ﬁndings at previous cycles. Here, the re-viewings of video recordings are discussed, for they are not repetitive (in a mechanistic way) but are substantially different. First, during re-viewings and re-analysis of data, further attempts were made to capture or revise particular relations of signiﬁcance between pupil action and spaces of action that did not ‘leap’ out immediately to me while in the classroom and were thus not recorded in my ﬁeld notes, or in previous visits during data analysis. The signiﬁcance of deferred judgements of relations is important. The signiﬁcance is heightened in the context of the hyper-spiral path undertaken in this study. The signiﬁcant data, relations among data, were not lost at a point during the ﬁeldwork path but had been made available as a resource at a further point along the research path, particularly during different cycles of analysis at different levels. Second, during repeated re-viewings and re-analysis of data the researcher traced the moment-by-moment twists and turns in the development of pupils’ convoluted actions. It was possible to form chains of connections between instances, episodes and events so that they were interpretable. The relations between action and spaces that shape or constrain would not have been describable (much less interpretable in meaningful ways) without recourse to a history of the development of the action, including the difﬁculties related to the shifts, ruptures, discontinuities and the development of spaces of action. During analysis, the researcher looked for chains of connections between movements, utterance; chains of connections between actions and spaces of origination of actions (difﬁculties or development of shifts, ruptures, discontinuities); chains of divergence, convergence, transformations of pupils’ works made possible descriptions as well as interpretations of mathematical imagination in play. Third, during reanalysis at different points of the hyper-spiral of cyclical revisions of analysis, the researcher added more details regarding different aspects of mathematical imagination made manifest, adding layer upon layer of insights from previous analyses based on previous viewings of the video and other data. Action was taken to revise and rename codes; reclassify, revise memos; revise chains of linkages; revise the themes generated. These actions made manifest the salience of relations that were not previously attended to. Fourth, the analysis was deepened by revisiting the review of literature. The ﬁndings generated, which were contrary to expectations, necessitated

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rethinking aspects of mathematical imagination. In this regard, the literature review that became increasingly more relevant as data analysis deepened were primarily the works of Ibn al-Arabi (Chittick, 1989; Coates, 2002), Wittgenstein (2001), Ernest (1998) and Kearney (1998). These works made available important resources on imagination and mathematics and signiﬁcant ways of seeing that resonated with the data, the analysis, the interpretations and the ﬁndings produced during the study. The creative use and extensions of the resources offered by the works of Ibn al-Arabi (Chittick, 1989; Coates, 2002), Wittgenstein (2001), Ernest (1998) and Kearney (1998) to the hyper-spiral path taken enabled the researcher to try on different perspectival lenses that were more appropriate to the data, analysis and interpretation. The different data generated, brought about ﬁndings that were contrary to expectations and made necessary alternative framings. In time, such multiple reframing enabled a rethinking of mathematical imagination in terms of an alternative view comprising different modalities and dimensions. The hyper-spiral path resulted in greater depth and breadth of seeing. It brought to the fore the signiﬁcance of many themes; the most important of these were the ﬁnal themes generated at the higher levels of analysis, themes that I called ‘‘creative agency’’, ‘‘creative intentionality’’ as well as themes related to ‘space of the origination of action (leading to different levels of transformation)’, namely ‘‘generative space’’. The pupils’ work evoked a notion of ‘‘mathematical poesies’’. In brief, the different data generated by the different approach made imperative the drastic reconceptualizing of the phenomenon of mathematical imagination. The data analysis in the study generated three main forms of mathematical imagination.

PART IV To begin exploration, I had prepared a skeletal framework which posited a notion of mathematical imagination as a form of mediated action, drawing on a notion of mediated action as theorized by Wertsch (1998). There was a variety of possible foci in classroom observations. At the start of the study, I made a decision to focus on what I then called dialogical instances that might appear to indicate shifts in mathematical engagement. An important assumption that I had built into my initial working framework had been a notion of dialogicality that focussed on utterances, deemed to be of the utmost importance in the development of mental functioning (Bakhtin, 1981). The primary stress on dialogicality was largely derived from my

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reading of the literature, mainly of socio-cultural orientation, related to views of learning. Another assumption that I had built into my working framework was an emphasis on the conceptual dimension of mathematical imagination. This too was largely derived from my reading of the literature, in the vein of analytical philosophy, related to views of imagination. Speciﬁcally, I had drawn on a formulation of imagination provided by White (1990). White, unfazed by centuries of complex, if convoluted, literature on imagination, had deﬁned imagination in terms of a singular dimension. His analysis severed imagination from imagery and visualization; imagination referred primarily to the capacity of persons to imagine. For White (1990), ‘‘to imagine something is to think of it as possibly being so’’ (p. 184). White’s analysis became the point of departure for my study. Drawing upon these considerations, the initial framework postulated a notion of mathematical imagination as a form of mediated action, the generation of possibilities, mainly in terms of a singular, conceptual dimension; the development of mathematical imagination was assumed to be mainly a processual function of dialogicality. These assumptions were challenged during the course of the study. The data generated, in particular the sets of data generated through the different, disruptive approach, provided a collection of data that threw up ﬁndings that undermined the central assumptions of the skeletal framework. It was necessary not only to revise the initial framework in the sense of fortifying it, but drastic changes were required to take account of the unexpected ﬁndings that were building up, indicating the necessity of rethinking the basis of the framework. The hyper-spiral path – of continuous cycles of rebuilding of the framework, on layer upon layer of cycles of analysis, interpretation, reframing after wave upon wave of data that were contrary to my initial expectations – brought forth a framework that bears scant resemblance to that with which the study began. However, perhaps because the data generated from the different video ethnographic approach adopted in this study was so surprising, to me as to others, it has not been easily accepted. Different approaches generate different data. In fairness to these data, frameworks must be reconceptualized. I had anticipated examining in greater depth the processes by which dialogicality shaped the genesis and/or the development of mathematical imagination. But the data did not support the centrality of dialogicality for the study. I had anticipated examining the nature of the conceptual basis of mathematical imagination and the links of this basis with some particular mediational means. Yet because the approach breached the safe distance of prevailing video research, it gained access to

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the very spaces of origination of pupil action and generated sets of data that, upon analysis, could not offer interpretations and ﬁndings in support of the central assumptions of my study. The approach offered a window into the constraints of particular spaces wherein actors struggle to make sense of the world in ways that their customary communities have not accustomed them to. It made possible to trace the variety of ways that pupils sought to mathematize situations that were initially meaningless or bewildering, the nature of the divergent ways pupils take as well as the ways such divergence is brought about. The resultant analysis made clear that for pupils to make sense of situations in innovative ways, in their struggle to become ﬂedgling mathematicians, they had to co-construct an alternative space of mediated action. That involved resistance and disruptions of ‘‘customary space’’. It called forth the ‘‘creative agency’’ of the pupils in collaborative acts of co-constructing a generative space that affords them the possibility of mathematical imagination. The pupils produced inventive mathematical subsystems of their own. The data that was generated using the different video ethnographic approach made manifest mathematical imagination in play. However, data from unfamiliar approaches are themselves unfamiliar and also require immersion and multiple cycles of viewings and analysis and interrogation and revisions and reconceptualizations of the ways we make sense of phenomena. Such data are not easily acceptable, much less interpretations of such data and lesser still frameworks based on interpretations of such data. It is unheard of, at least at present, to confer on ordinary pupils, struggling to make sense of mathematics, with fancy notions such as creative agency and creative intentionality. The framework that will be in my forthcoming report will discuss four dimensions. It is worth mentioning that pupils’ works were the focus of early conference presentations of the study (Aralas, 2003, 2004). That is, a research study that adopts a different video ethnographic approach in pursuit of particular research objectives will generate different kinds of data that lead to the production of different accounts and models. Such differences make for results that may be so different or contrary so as to be unacceptable. It is instructive to discuss a presentation of some of the data generated in the study at a BSRLM (British Society for Research into Learning Mathematics) conference in 2003. Some samples of pupils’ work which, on analysis, were inventive and formed coherent (if unusual) subsystems, were displayed for discussion. The mathematics educators there opined that the pupils’ solutions were incorrect and that this indicated a lack of mathematical ability on the part of the pupils who produced such work.

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The educators made references to literature on mathematical ability. These responses are not unrepresentative of prevailing views on pupil learning. Pupils have been evaluated for the longest time in terms of ‘mathematical ability’; their work has been judged in terms of correct or incorrect mathematical reasoning. This state of affairs is explicable in view of some considerations. One signiﬁcant consideration is that the prevailing perspectives of learning are dominated by two metaphors: ﬁrst, ‘‘acquisition’’ and second, ‘‘participation’’ (Sfard, 1998). That is, the ﬁrst prevalent view stresses the acquisition of correct knowledge in correct ways by pupils, whether these ways be algorithmic or dialectical reasoning. The second prevalent view emphasizes the importance of ‘legitimate peripheral participation’ of pupils in communities of practice. It may be that research that offers data or analysis that are unfamiliar or differ markedly from expectations based on prevalent views are not acceptable. The notion that pupils may themselves act with creative agency to generate subsystems that may be genuine forms of knowledge, mathematical poesies, albeit idiosyncratic or quirky ones, is an unfamiliar notion. In fairness, the signiﬁcance of creative agency on the part of pupils is not remarkably easy to infer. Conceivably a charge could be levelled against the notion of creative agency in that it may be as much a construct as it is a real attribute of pupils. Certainly, creative agency is not a ‘solid’ attribute of pupils as the colour of their hair, nor is it as easily inferable as familiar concepts such as dispositions or habits or correct/incorrect ways of ‘doing’ mathematics or other sorts of learning. However, the authenticity or usefulness of concepts such as creative agency lies in their explanatory effectiveness (as a part of a framework that makes explicable pupil action and furthers understanding of pupil ways of grappling with the world), not in the ‘solidity’ or ‘visibility’ of such concepts. Different perspectives, the result of different sorts of research using different approaches, make ‘visible’ (and if prevalent, make familiar) different notions, for they engage with the world in different ways. The important point is that creative agency is a notion that is abstract. It is ephemeral in nature. Its ephemerality is a source of difﬁculty for the purposes of research. It was however, abstracted in the course of the research undertaken, signiﬁcantly at the stage of data analysis from the data generated. That it was possible to abstract the notion despite its ephemerality derives from the advantageous resources (a collection of different sets of data) that arose from the use of a different video ethnographic approach that broke away from conventional research practice.

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PART V The research study would not have been possible to conduct in its complementary wholeness if the researcher had not availed herself of the different video ethnographic approach described above. It would not have been possible to undertake an effective investigation of the nature of mathematical imagination with the restrictions imposed by conventional video-mediated research to conduct observations of naturally occurring phenomena in normal contexts in unobtrusive, non-disruptive ways. The chapter has discussed the way that a different video ethnographic approach, as described, made possible a different sort of research that required answers to speciﬁc research questions that had not been the subject of research before. The research made possible the generation of different data with consequences for the generation of deeper insights. These were that there is an interplay of agency and a diversity of ways and means of grappling with, enacting and establishing the world (comprising multiple realms), within a complex of cultural spaces that are infused with socio-historical contingencies, with consequences for analytical framing and reconﬁguration. For these insights, which led to the development of theoretical framework that is, in turn, deemed useful in the ways we may understand the phenomenon of mathematical imagination in play, the research was worthwhile. It was made possible by extending video ethnographic approaches. To conclude, extending video approaches may undermine prevailing views but the consequent production of alternative accounts and frameworks of phenomena under study do make worthwhile contribution to the advancement of ethnographic knowledge.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT I am deeply grateful to Professor Geoffrey Walford for his critical comments on drafts of this chapter. I owe him a tremendous debt of gratitude for his supervision of the research study on which this chapter is based.

REFERENCES Aralas, D. (2003). Mathematics and rules: pupil constructed rules. Unpublished, Conference of British Society for Research into Learning Mathematics (BSRLM), 6–7 June, University of Oxford.

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Aralas, D. (2004). Investigating mathematical imagination. Poster 45 and Round Table Discussion at the Tenth International Congress on Mathematical Education (ICME-10), 4–11 July, DTU Technical University of Denmark, Copenhagen. Bakhtin, M. M. (1981). The dialogic imagination: Four essays. In: M. Holquist (Ed.), C. Emerson and M. Holquist (Trans.). Austin: University of Texas Press. Banks, M. (2001). Visual methods in social research. London: Sage. Chittick, W. C. (1989). The Sufi path of knowledge: Ibn al-Arabi’s metaphysics of imagination. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Coates, P. (2002). Ibn ‘Arabi and modern thought. Oxford: Anqa. Ernest, P. (1998). Social constructivism as a philosophy of mathematics. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Garﬁnkel, H. (1967). Studies in ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Hodkinson, P. (2001). The contested ﬁeld of educational research: The new research orthodoxy and the limits of objectivity. Paper presented to the British Educational Research Association Annual Conference, University of Leeds, 13–15 September 2001. http:// www.leeds.ac.uk/educol/documents/00001875.doc. Kearney, R. (1998). Poetics of imagining: Modern to postmodern. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Kelly, A. E., & Lesh, R. A. (2000). Handbook of research design in mathematics and science education. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Lee, R. M. (2000). Unobtrusive methods in social research. Buckingham: Open University Press. Pirie, S. E. B. (1996). Classroom video-recording: When, why and how does it offer a valuable data source for qualitative research? paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the North American Chapter of the International Group for the Psychology of Mathematics Education. Panama City, Florida. 14 October. ERIC Reports: ED401128. Washington DC: U.S. Department of Education, Ofﬁce of Educational Research and Improvement. Powell, A. B., Francisco, J. M., & Maher, C. A. (2003). An analytical model for studying the development of learners mathematical ideas and reasoning using videotape data. Journal of Mathematical Behaviour, 22, 405–435. Sfard, A. (1998). On two metaphors for learning and on the dangers of choosing just one. Educational Researcher, 27(2), 4–13. Walford, G. (2001). Doing qualitative educational research: A personal guide to the research process. London: Continuum. Walford, G. (2002). Introduction: Debates and Developments. In: G. Walford (Ed.), Debates and developments in ethnographic methodology. Studies in Educational Ethnography (Vol. 6.). Oxford: Elsevier. Wertsch, J. V. (1998). Mind as action. New York: Oxford University Press. White, A. R. (1990). The language of imagination. Oxford: Blackwell. Wittgenstein, L. W. (2001). G. E. M. Anscombe (Trans.), Philosophical investigations [German text, with a revised English translation.] (3rd ed.). Oxford: Blackwell.

THE OCEAN MERGES INTO THE DROP: UNEARTHING THE GROUND RULES FOR THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF PUPIL DIVERSITY Gretar L. Marino´sson All know that the drop merges into the ocean but few know that the ocean merges into the drop. (Kabir 1450–1518 cited by (Baldock, 1995)

ETHNOGRAPHY OF ONE SCHOOL Working as a teacher and an educational psychologist in England and in Iceland for a number of years, I slowly realised that I had to abandon much of what I had learned during my training in psychology and research methodology. The social world of school children was simply far more complex and uncharted for the known theories and methods to sufﬁce. I had to function at a different level to that of a traditional scientist or a clinical psychologist if only to be accepted by the children I worked with let alone gain answers to the type of questions I had been asking for some time (Marino´sson, 1998): Why are so many children and youths disaffected by school since the purpose of education is ostensibly to serve their needs? How do children who ﬁnd their life in school difﬁcult perceive the school and Methodological Developments in Ethnography Studies in Educational Ethnography, Volume 12, 185–206 Copyright r 2007 by Elsevier Ltd. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 1529-210X/doi:10.1016/S1529-210X(06)12011-2

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other people there? How do the adults at school understand these pupils and their work? What shapes their reactions in the school context? It became gradually clear to me that through listening, and above all through caring, I obtained a totally different kind of information and attained a radically different kind of understanding of the meanings and interplay of complex factors to that obtained through experimental or other methods based on logical positivistic epistemology. Factors such as selfimage, social role, status, power, acceptance, social relationships and hierarchy emerged as crucial elements in the lives of the pupils, teachers and families that I talked to. The role of meaning and values in child development and upbringing became clearer. And oddly enough, in that confusing, context-bound social world, discernable patterns emerged, more subtle and complex than in the experimental world, but equally valid, it seemed, and even transferable to other contexts. I was looking for a method that would help me seek explanations of how these phenomena inter-linked; ethnography seemed promising. In the study on which this paper is based my purpose was to analyse the work of a mainstream compulsory school as it bore upon its response to pupil diversity (Marino´sson, 2002). I wanted to see how things were and ask why rather than look at how things could be and ask why not; I therefore intended the study to be descriptive and explanatory rather than normative. I attempted to create a comprehensive picture of a school and its relationship to its community, focusing on its handling of pupils’ diverse learning needs. This involved examining the dynamic process of deﬁnition and provision for individual needs as this was dealt with by the teachers, the school management, specialised services, pupils and their parents. Common knowledge of schools tends to be at the level of anecdotes; their organisation being complex and little understood, as are the processes that deﬁne the construction of pupil diversity. Moreover, many practices become quickly routinised. Examples are the categorisation of pupils, the use of space for teaching, the division of labour among the staff and methods of instruction and examination. I wanted, however, to go beyond description of such routines and analyse the underlying assumptions. Mercer and Edwards (1981) called these kinds of assumptions ‘‘educational ground-rules’’. I realised that as it was the pupils most difﬁcult to teach who threw into relief the structure and morality of the school some of its ground rules could be studied by looking at the way it attempted to meet the needs of its peripheral members. They test the function of individual parts, the link between them and the organisation’s relations with wider bureaucratic and social systems. Thus, a diversity of needs is the moment of truth for any

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school and its efforts to meet them an optimal way to study its structure and function. I was thus looking for evidence of the ‘taken-for-granted’ assumptions which, although rarely or never explicitly invoked or discussed by participants, nevertheless deﬁne the process of ‘doing education’ (Mercer, 1991).

I wanted to attempt to unveil the educational ground rules, formulate and present them for discussion. This meant looking for basic (often unspoken) assumptions that are the central elements of education as a social construction or inﬂuence this construction fundamentally. Examples are that children’s learning capacity is seen to be largely inherited and to that extent immutable; that parents ability in handling their children’s upbringing is at best questionable; that the school has the role of a moral agent in this upbringing and that there is a need for tight control of pupil groups particularly to prevent disturbance as learning is considered to take place in quiet surroundings. As the task of ethnography is to determine how cultural factors and human agency interact with each other to co-determine social life, it is singularly well suited to such a study. Ethnography is literally a description of a (foreign) culture; thus, this is a study of the (foreign) culture of a school. There is only one way to understand another culture: to live with it. To take up residence in it, ask to be tolerated as a guest, to learn the language. Then there is hope that understanding will come sooner or later. It will, however, always be a mute kind of understanding. For, as soon as one understands the unknown, the need for an explanation disappears. To explain a phenomenon is to distance oneself from it. (Hoeg, 1992)

This is an example of a traditional kind of ethnography where a researcher spends some considerable time in the ﬁeld gathering data about real people in order to understand and explain the social processes in the school as they relate to the phenomenon under study (Wolcott, 1999). To paraphrase Woods (1996), the research is contextualised within settings in the school and the researcher’s self is inextricably bound up with the research (p. 51). Thus the researcher is both the major research instrument and the one who monitors how this instrument is being used. He must therefore be careful to evaluate the inﬂuence of his own values and theoretical organisation on the interpretation of the data. Accounts can be read backwards to uncover and explain the consciousness, culture and theoretical organisation of the observer. (Willis, 1984, p. 90)

Thus, a classroom observation says as much about the observer as it does about the pupils and the teacher observed, and what they are doing in that

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classroom. As Delamont (1992) has pointed out, data collection is never atheoretical. The study was based on the critical realist view shared by Bashkar, Harre´ and others (Danermark, Ekstro¨m, Jakobsen, & Karlsson, 2002) that ‘‘there is a world of events out there that is observable and independent of human consciousness [and that] knowledge of that world is socially constructed’’ (Denzin & Lincoln, 2005, p. 13). Bhaskar thus holds that reality is ontologically stable but epistemologically unstable; although reality is in itself an intransitive phenomenon, our knowledge of it is subject to social and political inﬂuences and therefore transitive (Bhaskar, 1989). Critical realists believe that scientiﬁc work must go beyond statements of regularity to analysis of the mechanisms, processes and structures that account for the patterns that are observed (Denzin & Lincoln, 2005). In what follows the methods of producing data and explaining the underlying social processes through a grounded theory procedure are described and discussed. The argument is that it is possible to unearth the ground rules of education through an ethnographic lens using methods of data collection based on an assumption of a reciprocal relationship between the whole and its parts. These ground rules govern the behaviour of individuals in the same way as the institution moulds people’s thinking (Douglas, 1986). Conversely, the behaviour of individuals bears witness to these ground rules and the institution’s structure and classiﬁcation activity. Thus the interaction of the whole and its parts is a key to unearthing the basic assumptions that determine to a large extent the response of the school to the diversity of its pupil group. Accordingly one may through close scrutiny of, say, observation data related to micro-events or interviews that revolve around daily experiences in the classroom pick up evidence of fundamental social constructions that are based on value-laden assumptions that may be termed the ground rules of responding to pupil diversity.

THE CASE OF MOSSY MOUNT SCHOOL Choosing a case is critical to understanding the phenomenon under study. Hamel (1991) maintains that case studies must ‘‘locate the global in the local’’ thus making the careful selection of the research site the most critical decision in the analytic process. Stake suggests that we select a case from those instances, from which we think we can learn the most. This may or may not be a case typical of such cases in general. Attributes, such as ease of entry and likelihood of occurrence of the phenomenon, make the case the

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one most likely to be learned from (Stake, 1994, p. 243). This suggests that selecting a case is essentially a matter of sampling. Case study is not a methodological choice but a choice of object to be studied. [y] As a form of research, case study is deﬁned by interest in individual cases, not by the methods of inquiry used. [y] We could study it in many ways. [y] The name case study is emphasized by some of us because it draws attention to the question of what speciﬁcally can be learned from the single case. (Stake, 1994, p. 236)

Choosing one school for the study has a corollary in the archetypal village chosen as a unit for case studies in anthropology. It is of a convenient size, thus giving a comprehensive view, and it is assumed that it illustrates the particular traits of the culture that the research is attempting to describe or explain (cf. Clark, Dyson, & Millward, 1995). As Spindler and Spindler argue in their foreword to Wolcott’s book on the Man in the Principal’s Ofﬁce y it is only through a case study in depth of this kind that the dynamics of the system and the interactions of people within it can be seen in their functional totality. (Wolcott, 1973)

Thus, I use this single school to present important aspects of mainstream compulsory schools in Iceland, saying to my readers: Here is the underlying structure, the skeleton of the case, unencrusted by the idiosyncrasies of speciﬁc instances, and here is a model of the dynamic that sets its parts in motion. (Weiss, 1994, p. 173)

There are, however, certain problems associated with the metaphor of a village, for although the villages studied may have been reasonably homogenous examples of the cultures they operated within, this is not the case with schools today (or indeed villages). Societies are complex and changing and individual schools have their own cultural attributes, which are different from other schools. I approached Mossy Mount School from a wide perspective, ﬁrst looking at the local community and the school catchment area; then at the school as a whole, and ﬁnally activities and events inside the school, only to return to the larger backdrop later. The district where the school is located is divided into six school catchment areas, some of the schools still being built. The area that Mossy Mount serves is a housing estate that has been built up in the last 25 years. The houses are mixed, terraced houses and blocks of ﬂats as well as some bungalows. Most of the houses are privately owned but there are also some ﬂats bought with social support for those on limited

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income. The district is overwhelmingly populated by people of lower income and lower social status compared to the municipality as a whole. Most of the parents work long hours outside the home, leaving the children to child minders or to fend for themselves outside school hours. The school was chosen because it was a fully comprehensive compulsory school (having 600–700 pupils of 6–16 year age groupand 70 teaching staff); had experience of working with pupils with disabilities or special needs and an organised response to these. Although most Icelandic schools are much smaller (300–400) and not situated in an urban area, a school like Mossy Mount sheds a better light on a school’s response to diversity than many others, as it is a complex organisation, containing different levels of interaction. The diversity of pupils’ needs is large and so are the pressures and attempts, from teachers, pupils, parents and specialists, to respond in some way. The main disadvantage in selecting such a large school is its complexity and the difﬁculties in description and analysis that this entails. In a case of this type the sampling is moreover bound to be nested (Miles & Huberman, 1994, p. 27), in that the individual pupils or teachers sampled are a part of the pedagogic events or activities, which again are a part of the school. This again reﬂected the assumption of a reciprocal relationship between the whole and its parts.

STUDYING THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF PUPIL DIVERSITY This intensive, qualitative case study of one school was framed within an interpretive paradigm (Bogdan & Biklen, 1992; Lincoln & Guba, 1985) informed by social constructionism (Berger & Luckmann, 1966; Burr, 1995; Gergen, 1985, 1994, 1999; Nightingale & Cromby, 1999) and symbolic interactionism (Blumer, 1969; Hargreaves, 1978; Rock, 1979; Woods, 1996). One of my assumptions was that the construction and reconstruction of pupils’ diverse learning needs and the school’s response to these occur through a process of negotiation where symbols play a central role. According to this perspective our criteria for identifying behaviour or events are highly circumscribed by culture, history or the social context, or are altogether non-existent. Thus, we are invited to consider critically the social origins of our taken for granted assumptions about the ‘real’ world and about knowledge. I assume, as mentioned above, that there may be ‘‘reality out there’’ but that my knowledge of it is partial, ﬂeeting, socially produced and temporally situated.

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I assumed that participants constructed and reconstructed meaningful concepts about children’s behaviour, abilities, culture, gender, etc. and possible responses by the school to these individual qualities. Pupils with disabilities are identiﬁed within a process of negotiation from the initial hunch or a feeling developed by a teacher in the course of her interaction with her pupils to the formal diagnosis by an outside expert. This is an emergent process, which the pupils and the parents enter into in response to expectations, which they perceive to come from the school and the education system. Symbolic interactionism deals with small-scale events and psychological processes. Fundamental to it is the view that people construct their own and others’ identities through social encounters. Social constructionists take a wider view by claiming (Berger & Luckmann, 1966) that all social phenomena, including knowledge of ‘reality’, are constructed through social interchange. This occurs, they claim, through externalisation, ‘objectivation’ and internalisation. An example of this process is provided by the way categories of disability have developed. Sleeter, in discussing the emergence of the category of ‘learning disabilities’ in the US, notes: During the late 1960s and early 1970s, minority groups pressured schools to discard the notion of cultural deprivation and stop classifying disproportionate numbers of minority children as mentally retarded. In 1973, the category of mental retardation was redeﬁned, lowering the maximum IQ score from one standard deviation below the mean to two (Grossman, 1973), which dissolved the category of slow learner. [y] Instead, many students who previously were or would have been classiﬁed as retarded, slow or culturally deprived were now classiﬁed as learning disabled (Sleeter, 1986, p. 52).

Thus, new ideas about the nature of learning difﬁculties were externalised and ‘objectiﬁed’ through changes in criteria for the categorisation of pupils. Then, the new criteria were internalised or accepted as ‘real’ by later generations of parents and teachers. A similar story can be told of the social construction of other, more recent categories, such as attention deﬁcit, hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Thus, special educational needs are not discovered but deﬁned. Diagnostic practices produce their clients rather than uncover their disorders. Once pupils belong to a client group, special educational provision can be established. There would not, for example, have been seen to be much justiﬁcation for building institutions for ‘idiots’ had they been viewed as happy individuals (Borjeson, 1997, p. 17, his emphasis). Similarly, our understanding of the nature of difﬁcult behaviour in children, which has changed in the last 100 years from ‘immoral’ to ‘disordered’, inﬂuences our reactions to individuals (Reid, Maag, & Vasa, 1993). As sufferers of a biological aberration they are now seen to be deserving of expert attention.

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Learning disabilities exist, of course, but they are speciﬁc to individuals more than to medical or psychological conditions, and they shade into the general population (Goodey, 1999). Pupils’ behaviour is inﬂuenced by such factors as the school as an organisation, the meanings individual actors read into the relevant social context as well as personal genetic makeup. Recognising that social constructionism and symbolic interactionism cannot be expected to account for all behaviour or all situations observed, they nevertheless deal with how behaviour is constructed at the level of a ‘‘theory of mind’’, taking into account what the participants know about the thinking of those in question, about the social circumstances, about biological determinants, etc.

DOING ETHNOGRAPHY Data collection and analysis started the moment I gained the ﬁrst shred of information about the school. This was a classical type of ethnography where one investigator stations himself in the middle of an action zone and, with himself as the main instrument of data collection, gathers information through interaction with the locals that may help him understand what is going on and why. After gaining access I adopted the role of a researcher with a low proﬁle. I tried to present myself openly and honestly but at the same time showing an interest in the people. I hoped that they would feel that my presence as a friendly human being had a benign effect and thus counterbalanced their natural apprehension, and that my genuine affection for children and respect for teachers and their job would be felt sufﬁciently so that my potential informants would trust me to treat their lives in conﬁdence. Naturalistic studies that rely on observation of people and personal informants must rely on trust for gaining access to the ﬁeld. Johnson found the existing theories of trust unsatisfactory: the exchange theory, which maintains that trust results from a quid pro quo relationship; the individual morality theory, which asserts that trust comes from building up a ‘good guy’ image; the adoption of a membership theory, which claims that trust is invested in persons willing to commit themselves to a group; and the psychological need theory, which asserts that trust is based on a need fulﬁlment by the respondent. Instead, Johnson sees the relationship of trust as a developmental process, to some extent biographically speciﬁc, which means that the enquirer has to build and attend to the development of trust with each respondent continuously to prevent it from being destroyed (Johnson, 1975) referred to by Lincoln and Guba (1985, p. 256). The approach I

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adopted recognises the importance of the developmental and personal nature of trust and its maintenance. It also underlines the crucial role of the personal image portrayed by the researcher both before and after personal trust is established. The study spanned over three years in the life of the school, the ﬁeldwork lasting for over two years of that time, on average 1–2 days a week. I started by making myself acquainted with the school as a whole, its collaborators and district services. This involved a great deal of observation, both general on corridors, in staff room and in classrooms as well as focused in one class. It also meant interviewing key informants and observing crucial meetings and a variety of lessons. Gradually, I focused more on contexts including pupils considered to have disabilities or special needs. Finally, I concentrated on interviewing pupils, their parents, experts and administrators outside the school as well as informants within it. I collected documentary material throughout the study. Thus data collection can be seen to have shifted several times and oscillated between concentrating on the whole to focusing on details and back again. Similarly the use of methods alternated from a mixture of methods to an emphasis on observation and then to interviews. Thus, despite the assumption of a relationship between the whole case and its individual parts it was deemed necessary to check and recheck data from both observations and interviews through triangulation. This study was characterised by a process of exploration where theory development was postponed until it could be grounded in the data.

THE AMBIVALENCE OF THE OBSERVER Observation involves a complex array of processes. Sanger points out, for instance, that there is a world of difference between observation and seeing. He describes the latter as creating order out of the chaos of signals reaching the brain, gleaning information from the environment by placing signiﬁcance on some things and not others, making meaning out of a situation, even noticing the absence of things, being aware of one’s in-built biases and taking steps to counteract them (Sanger, 1996, pp. 1–8). An observation, the result of looking, seeing and interpretation is in turn based on the observer’s assumptions, his cultural knowledge (Spradley, 1980). In comparison with interviews and document analysis, observations have distinct characteristics as a data collection method: they are one way, and therefore void of the negotiation with another about the choice of information recorded; they are

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ﬂeeting, the observer being unable to catch everything that is happening and thus must choose without a moment’s hesitation one aspect in place of another; and the data they produce are the observer’s own interpretations of a scene. Interpretation thus enters into the observation earlier than it does in the interview or document analysis. Some researchers equate ethnography with participant observation as this method is a necessary (although not sufﬁcient) ingredient of the ethnographic approach. Others argue that there is no such thing as a complete participation or a complete observer: in research complete participation would prevent the research act and no one can avoid taking part to some extent. Although the prospect of complete participation may be alluring to would-be researchers, considering the anonymity and protection it affords as well as minimising reactivity on behalf of the participants, the advantages are, as I have discovered, heavily outweighed by the restrictions it places on mobility, access to various parts of the settings under study and relationships with at least some of the actors. This, incidentally also applies to the role of a complete observer. It can easily work against the purposes of the research to be an obvious outsider (Hill, 1995). On the other hand, it can be a considerable advantage over being seen to be one of the staff (Hargreaves, 1967). The trick is to be seen to be part of the scene while maintaining a certain distance from it. This can, however, prove to be immensely challenging (Hammersley & Atkinson, 1983, p. 93). When observing in classrooms I usually sat at a table like the pupils’, either on my own or beside a pupil, and made notes in my little black book. I usually greeted the class upon entering, told them my name, and that I was conducting research in the school and asked whether I could stay with them for a while. Being in doubt as to whether this was at all within their authority to decide they usually said nothing, sometimes a vague yes or a single no could be heard. Often, some pupils came up to me at the end of the lesson and asked what I was doing or what I was writing. I told them honestly that I wrote down everything that I saw and heard. They asked no more but I understood that some of them thought this was yet another assessment, perhaps because they had not behaved well enough. I tried to be aware of the effect I had on my surroundings but did not make a habit of asking the teachers or pupils about the inﬂuence of my presence and participation in class. As Sanger (1996) points out the mechanics of research of this type remain ﬁrmly in the ethnographer’s possession despite his attempts at remaining detached (p. 16). I am not at all certain that open observation of this kind in classrooms is ethically acceptable. It raises, among other things, the question of whether a

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classroom is a private or a public place. In a traditional school, like Mossy Mount, with one teacher per class in one classroom where the door is usually closed, one gets the feeling that one is entering a private place of a kind, like somebody’s ofﬁce. One needs permission or a good reason to enter. In the words of Eisner (1998): Classroom is like a ladies’ boudoir. This feeling is strengthened where the classroom door is locked from the inside (to prevent disturbance by pupils from other classes), as was often the case in this school. Perhaps the classroom ﬁts the third form of territory in the public realm suggested by Loﬂand (1989), the parochial form, characterised by a sense of commonality among the participants who are involved in interpersonal networks that are located within ‘‘communities’’. This is not so in classes which take place in open-plan schools. I have frequently walked through such classes without so much as being noticed. The closed-circle feeling of the classroom is thus deﬁned by the physical structure and how it is perceived, ﬁrst and foremost by the teacher. The acceptability of the observation depends to a large extent upon how (un)obtrusive it is to the members of that community. Signs like the observer’s glance and his stance; his reactions to what is happening and his method of recording are signals to the pupils about whether there is reason to react to the observer’s presence. With my demeanour and explanation, I tried to indicate to the pupils that I was doing the most natural thing imaginable, making notes of what was happening in their classroom. As this was not at all natural to them, they probably ascribed it to the vagaries of adults.

WALKING A TIGHTROPE BY QUALITATIVE INTERVIEWING The type of interviewing employed in this study has most frequently been named in-depth interviewing. I am not content with that term as research interviews of this kind can be of any depth. For lack of a better term I prefer qualitative interviewing (Weiss, 1994, appendix). The aim of the interview is, in Sanger’s (1996) words creating the conditions in which the interviewee says what he/she means, means what he/ she says, says what he/she thinks, and thinks about what he/she says. p. 66)

The challenges presented by unstructured interviews are three, according to Sanger. First, how to achieve a penetrative conversation with a relative stranger in a short time; second, how to strike a balance between one’s desire

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to know and the respondent’s right to some measure of protection; and third, there is the problem of ‘‘what claims to truth are associated with the results’’ (Sanger, 1996, p. 65). The ﬁrst problem is the one of overcoming obstacles to being accepted in a strange culture by presenting a sympathetic mien, the second relates to conﬁdentiality and the third to validity. Qualitative interviews do raise particular issues compared to other methods of data collection. They are a testing ground for the dilemma experienced by the ethnographic investigator as s/he tries on the one hand to see a situation through the eyes of a stranger and on the other attempts to keep in abeyance ‘‘precisely those assumptions that must be taken for granted’’ in the interview (Hammersley & Atkinson, 1983, p. 93). Keeping this balance is important as the way the interviewee sees the researcher, as a stranger or a friend, determines to a large extent the quality of the material he imparts to him. I think, I managed to assure my teacher informants that I understood their professional assumptions and their daily preoccupations, but that I still wanted to know in greater detail of their reﬂections on their job, the school and the pupils. The same can be said about the people outside the school whom I interviewed, the parents, the professionals, the administrators and the politicians; this contact was generally a pleasant and meaningful experience. The pupils were a little more difﬁcult: despite my attempts at explaining my purpose (I am doing a research study on the school, trying to understand how the people here think about pupils who have disability or special needs), they did not understand my point well enough. They probably saw me as an outsider, asking odd questions, which did not concern them. This is where the greatest distance lay between my informants and myself. Nevertheless they generally did as well as could be expected and enjoyed the attention and the chance of missing a lesson. During interviews I attempted to get to the heart of my informant’s meaning, ‘‘capturing the ‘essence’ of the account’’ (Miles & Huberman, 1994, p. 8). There was a constant search going on for an understanding of why things were as they were; a quest for some meaningful relationships. I used whatever threw light on the research questions, be it something I heard, saw, read or simply perceived through insight as a result of being immersed in the school for so long, assuming that the drop would merge into the ocean. The focus was on the way my informants understood and accounted for the phenomena under study and the situation as it was how it had come to be and their attitude to it. Despite my preoccupation with using each interview to the full for data collection, I tried also to make it into a conversation where I joined the other person in her or his thoughts and stated my own position on the matter under discussion.

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I did not manage very well to conceal my own agenda when talking to my informants and in writing about my observations. This agenda consisted of urging mainstream schools to try harder in educating all pupils irrespective of learning needs, disability or other differences. I assumed a pluralistic community outside the school and that this mainstream school should host such a community. I wanted the school to take an active stand on social justice and equality among its pupil group. However, the immediate purpose of the study was to describe and understand the way the school reacted to the diversity of pupils’ learning needs at the time of the study. The crucial question was what facilitated and what restricted the school in taking up the challenges of inclusion?

USING WHATEVER TEXT HAS ALREADY BEEN CREATED I collected a number of documents on paper and websites about individual pupils, the school, the school district as well as laws, regulations and National Curriculum Guides. I used this material in three ways: to provide clues about dominant themes in the operation of the school; as starting points for discussion of issues with participants and as instruments for triangulation in analysing data from observations and interviews. Most of the documentary data was thus dealt with in interviews during ﬁeldwork.

MAKING SENSE OF THE DATA I utilised grounded theory, or the constant comparison method, as a methodical, systematic process of data analysis and viewed it as such rather than as a methodological framework. Glaser and Strauss (1967) describe this as a method for generating theory from data, and argue that a theory thus produced would be more suited to its purposes than theory generated by logical deduction from a priori assumptions. It would ‘ﬁt’ the data in the sense that the categories produced would be readily applicable to and indicated by the data and it would ‘work’ in the sense that it would explain the behaviour under study. The process of grounded theory study is well described by Bartlett and Payne (cited by Scott, 1996). It involves basically 10 steps, which may be viewed as a heuristic device rather than a cook-book prescription. The theory develops gradually, from the ﬁrst attempts at categorisation to the step of theoretical integration; where it should be complete, only to be tested as a whole against the data.

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The observation data, the documentary evidence and some of the interviews formed a base for a detailed description of the school. In addition a great deal of the interviews was used for the purpose of attempting to glean answers to some of the major research questions. This was done through interpretation of the meanings of participants in combination with interpretation of observations and analysis of documentary evidence. Transcripts of interviews were analysed in more than one way. First, all elements of each interview were coded and sections coded in a similar way were interpreted as a whole. Second, each salient part of an interview (paragraph or longer) was paraphrased in a few words in the margin and labelled with a broad category of an emergent theme. These themes were then listed on the front cover of the transcript together with the major thread running through the interview, if there was such a thread. The themes formed emerging hypotheses, which I then tested in further interviews or observations. The same applied to ﬁeld notes. Thus the process is a bottom-up procedure, where larger, more complex, categories are based on smaller and simpler ones, again reﬂecting the desert in the gain of sand. Gradually, as my overview of the school and its form of operation developed, some themes started emerging. These were at ﬁrst too numerous to keep control of but I wrote them down in sketchy format and gradually grouped them together. The themes formed emerging hypotheses, which I then tested in further interviews or observations. The same applied to ﬁeld notes. The approach can therefore be described as issue-focused analysis (Stake, 1994, p. 239). Some concepts emerged early and disappeared early, others remained longer, still others did not crystallise until later. Thus local integration gradually led to inclusive integration (Weiss, 1994, p. 160). It is the researcher who decides at every point what is meaningful in the data and how it can be used for constructing theory. He alone is responsible and cannot blame the method if the results are not as he might wish. This is indicated by Strauss and Corbin (1990) as they speak of the need for the researcher to ‘‘see with analytic depth what is there’’ as he or she performs the crucial task of coding (p. 76). Strauss and Corbin therefore seem to assume that insight and/or a priori theoretical knowledge is an advantage to the creation of a grounded theory. The theory is thus not entirely grounded in the data but at least partly based on the researcher’s preconceptions. This may mean, for instance, that the categories will not necessarily turn out to be as discrete as Glaser and Strauss prescribe, but instead be loosely overlapping themes. This is how the method is used in this study: as a guideline for the development of emergent themes.

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UNEARTHING THE GROUND RULES: AN EMERGENT THEORY My emergent theory concerned itself with explaining why the school responded to its pupils as it did. This involved uncovering assumptions, the ground rules, about the functioning of the school but it also sought an understanding of their provenance. However, in trying to trace the origin of perspectives or policies, attitudes or actions, it is important to recognise the inherent obstacles. For one thing proving causation in the social realm is complicated and often tenuous. For another, participants who act on their ideas or express particular viewpoints may not be aware of the link between their action and an existing theory; all those who accept a particular theory are, for example, not necessarily in agreement about its content, purpose or application. A theory explaining how a composite of social constructions, such as a school’s response to pupil diversity, has developed must therefore at best be tentative.

HOW DID THE SCHOOL RESPOND TO DIVERSITY? The ﬁrst crucial ﬁnding to emerge was a conﬁrmation of the ‘foreshadowed problem’ that pupils were categorised into two groups, the majority, and a minority who were considered in need of additional resources for a variety of reasons. Diversity was treated as a nuisance rather than strength in management as well as in the composition of classes. The second ﬁnding was something that I was not looking for and therefore came at ﬁrst as a surprise: the school laid particular emphasis on the control of behaviour. Thus the school instituted mechanisms for the prevention and containment of disruption at all levels from classrooms to management. Thus, although the general ethos was one of the incorporation and inclusion (Reynolds & Sullivan, 1979, p. 50), there were some situations where coercive exclusions were considered necessary, at times for the common good. The third important ﬁnding was that the school operated an efﬁcient system of management that offered those pupils, who were not able to adjust to the mainstream curriculum a continuum of special needs provision within the school although some pupils were not catered for, particularly those whose behaviour caused concern. The fourth important ﬁnding was the prominence the head teacher gave to raising standards in all aspects of schoolwork. The ﬁnal major ﬁnding was the surprising isolation of the school from its local community, particularly the parents, despite its considerable

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activity that aimed to establish and maintain links with local social agencies and expert services. While the school maintained a collaborative network with these outside agencies for the ostensible purpose of preventing substance abuse among its youth, it neglected its relationship with their parents, who took a passive consumer role towards the school, treating it as a service institution for their children. This appeared to be the result of a longstanding unspoken policy that parents keep a certain distance from schoolwork. Their primary role was to make sure that their children were properly prepared for school and keep well informed about the schools’ decisions. They should certainly not meddle too much in school business.

WHY DID THE SCHOOL RESPOND TO DIVERSITY AS IT DID? During the study the educational ground rules governing the function of Mossy Mount School as an institution gradually emerged. With the help of the literature I then attempted to explain the socio-historical context in which these ground rules were formulated. These I considered the major factors in the social process of constructing pupil diversity: 1. The school is a moral institution based on Christian values. The dominant value system of the community is thus the guiding light for the aim of the school to improve its pupils, morally, mentally and physically. The school’s primary role of upholding these values in society explains its preoccupation with behaviour over and above learning. This means that pupils are assessed on their behaviour as much as on their school attainments. 2. The school is a bureaucratic institution structured around principles of efﬁcacy and run according to set rules and routines. This explains the school’s preoccupation with teaching hours and pupil/teacher ratio in place of curricular matters particularly as regards special needs. Here economic means take precedence over educational ends. The bureaucratic structure of the school is strengthened by the adoption of the positivist paradigm in its conception and dissemination of knowledge. 3. The school is a pedagogic institution, caring for and disciplining its pupils. This is closely associated with the child-centred and tolerant attitude of teachers on the one hand and the emphasis on the act of learning on the other. The caring attitude is more prominent, reﬂecting the importance placed on well-being. It also means that teachers operate both as proxy parents and as professionals.

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4. The school is a professional institution run on principles of professional knowledge. The role of the school as a socialising agent has in recent years been played down. Instead, teaching the subjects, as deﬁned by the National Curriculum Guide, has been seen as the school’s major task, based upon positivistic conceptions of truth, objectivity, reason, knowledge and learning (Ajalna´mskra´ grunnsko´la, 1999). Traditional methods of grouping pupils, whole class teaching to the mean and the emphasis on school subjects are indications of this perspective. This explains the technical approach adopted, the psycho-medical model governing the school’s management of special educational needs. It explains why teachers call in experts when pupils do not ﬁt a pre-determined mould. 5. The school is under the strong inﬂuence of professional interests of the teachers and the experts, who challenge the management’s endeavour to maintain control of pupils. The teachers’ claim for control over pedagogic activity in the classroom is founded on their autonomous professional role and the power vested in their Trade Union as reﬂected in their collective agreements on work conditions. The claim by outside services for control over decisions about difﬁcult pupils is defended on the basis of their expert knowledge and their gatekeeper function in assessing individual pupils for special provisions. The difﬁculties inherent in changing schools in the direction of inclusion while continuing to premise their work on the psycho-medical paradigm (Dyson & Millward, 1997, p. 55) may be seen as an example of a clash of values and power placing the school in a set of dilemmatic situations. If one makes someone too special he may lose general rights and if one tries to play down his or her disability, (s)he may lose the beneﬁts of being recognised as being disabled (the individuality–commonality dilemma). Similarly, placing a pupil in a special unit may beneﬁt him/her educationally but scar him/her socially by stigmatisation (the placement dilemma). These dilemmas, which are temporarily resolved but not necessarily solved, arise from trying to match the full range of individual needs into a common system. They concern conﬂicting perspectives and basic values underpinning the diverse purposes of the school, which people are uncertain about how to reconcile or choose between. In response to these dilemmas, if and when some limit of attainment or behaviour is reached, individuals are excluded through the means of referral to support services. This is usually done, in line with the dominant notions of scientiﬁc knowledge, under the guise of acquiring or acting according to expert advice, although in most cases separation and demarcation have already taken place. Thus medical–psychological diagnosis and placement,

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supported by bureaucratic arrangements, habitually become the ﬁnal stages of labelling and aggregation in a process of resolution of dilemmas that are fundamentally of an ethical nature.

DOES THE OCEAN MERGE INTO THE DROP? The basic assumption of the ethnographic approach to the study of a single school used in this research is concisely stated in the epitaph from the Little Book of Suﬁ Wisdom. The drop of rain becomes part of the ocean but similarly the ocean becomes part of the drop. Thus the interplay between the smaller elements of the social world of the school and the school as an institution together with its related agencies is reciprocal. The concept of the hermeneutic circle (Gadamer, 1979) is useful in this context. It involves the continuous process of alternating between interpreting the meaning of each part of the text (anything containing a message that can be read) and the text as a whole. The assumption is that interpretation of the text as a whole helps interpretation of the parts and vice versa. Shifting from foreground to background and back again in this way certainly applies both to data collection and analysis. The minutiae of social interaction observed, the ﬁner details of personal constructions heard, the particulars of discourse read in written documents dealing with the identities of individuals and the school’s response to these are all clues to the prevailing social constructions of pupil diversity. In this sense keys to the understanding of the universe may often be found in its microcosms (Hamel, 1991) the global in the particular, the world in the grain of sand, provided that the case is carefully selected. Institutions, conversely, guide perception and legitimate knowledge through the use of symbols for classiﬁcation (Douglas, 1986). The categories produced involve power relations and social consensus within the institution. Mary Douglas’ work is particularly relevant to the study of a school as an institution and its production of special needs through its classiﬁcation systems. A classiﬁcation system is made for use. How classes are made depends entirely on the classiﬁers’ interests. Straight away this approach links knowledge to action. (Douglas, 1999)

For Douglas, categorisation is closely related to reasoning. The ﬁrst step towards opening common reasoning up for analysis is to identify the method of categorisation, language. Language, or the symbolic universe, is therefore treated as data in the search for understanding of how reality is constructed and reconstructed. Although the institution is originally

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fashioned by agreement on labile loosely organised activities (Selznick, 1996), its patterns of action soon become stable and inert, in turn affecting the future behaviour of all its members who perceive it as an objective reality (Berger & Luckmann, 1966, p. 71). Thus, the power of the school as an institution and its related agencies impregnates, and in that sense merges into, the school’s daily activities and constitutes the observed incidences, the statements heard and discourses read in a study such as this. The argument proposed here is the general one of the reciprocal relationship between the whole and its parts, which makes it possible to infer something about the backdrop, the ground rules of education, from data gleaned in speciﬁc events studied and vice versa. This relates to the discussion about the value of case studies (Ragin & Becker, 1992). While I claim that there is an internal reciprocity in the case studied (the theoretical concept of school response to pupil diversity), I do not maintain that it is representative of other similar cases elsewhere. Nevertheless, I believe that there is much to learn here about other similar cases particularly at an analytic level. One of my basic conclusions is that Mossy Mount School’s response to pupil diversity is a reﬂection of basic values and assumptions, which have their origin in the complex development of Western societies in the past several hundred years. These include governmental approbation of school systems for the purposes of maintaining moral order in the community. One can therefore appreciate that it may take considerable time and effort to fundamentally alter the school’s response to the problem of pupil diversity. Ultimately, of course, this is a matter of the kind of knowledge produced, of truth and the validity of the study. If a strategy such as was employed in the case of Mossy Mount School produces a trustworthy holistic picture of a well-selected case and manages to unearth some of the ground rules of education through careful data collection and interpretation one may conclude that the whole and its parts are linked reciprocally and that the drop merges into the ocean and vice versa. If not, a more laborious approach must be adopted to make an authentic case. It is left to the reader to judge whether the above argument is borne out by the methods and processes described and by the conclusions and inferences produced.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I am indebted to Anne Nevøy for her valuable suggestions regarding an institutional approach to analysing the data. I also wish to recognise a considerable debt to my supervisors, Ingrid Lunt and David Scott.

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Wolcott, H. (1973). The man in the principal’s office: An ethnography. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Wolcott, H. F. (1999). Ethnography a way of seeing. Walnut Creek, CA: Alta Mira Press. Woods, P. (1996). Researching the art of teaching. Ethnography for educational use. London: Routledge.

AUTOETHNOGRAPHY: RAISING CULTURAL CONSCIOUSNESS OF SELF AND OTHERS Heewon Chang WHAT IS AUTOETHNOGRAPHY? Autoethnography is ethnographical and autobiographical at the same time. Here I intentionally place ‘ethnographical’ before ‘autobiographical’ to highlight the ethnographical character of this inquiry method. This character connotes that autoethnography utilizes the ethnographic research methods and is concerned about the cultural connection between self and others representing the society. This ethnographic aspect distinguishes autoethnography from other narrative-oriented writings such as autobiography, memoir, or journal. Ellis and Bochner (2000) deﬁne autoethnography as ‘autobiographies that self-consciously explore the interplay of the introspective, personally engaged self with cultural descriptions mediated through language, history, and ethnographic explanation’ (p. 742). Although their deﬁnition leans too far toward the autobiographical than the ethnographic end, their observation of ‘connecting the personal to the cultural’ accurately points to the important mission of autoethnography (p. 739). This important linkage between ‘the self and the social’ is also emphasized in Reed-Danahay’s (1997) oft-quoted book, Auto/Ethngoraphy: Rewriting the Self and the Methodological Developments in Ethnography Studies in Educational Ethnography, Volume 12, 207–221 Copyright r 2007 by Elsevier Ltd. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 1529-210X/doi:10.1016/S1529-210X(06)12012-4

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Social. In these works of Ellis, Bochner, and Reed-Danahay, the ‘self ’ refers to an ethnographer self. However, when the term ‘auto-ethnography’ was ﬁrst introduced by anthropologist Heider (1975), ‘self’ did not mean the ethnographer self, but rather the informant self. In his study of Dani people, he called their cultural accounts of themselves, the Dani’s autoethnography. The term was used in a similar way when Butz and Besio (2004) discussed the colonized people’s self-understanding. Hayano (1979) employed the term ‘autoethnography’ differently when he studied his ‘own people.’ Wolcott (2004) informs us that his ‘own people’ were card players who spent ‘leisure hours playing cards in Southern California’s legitimate card rooms’ (p. 98). Since then, an extensive list of labels has been used to refer to autobiographical applications in social science research according to Ellis and Bochner (2000, pp. 739–740). For Reed-Danahay (1997), the label of autoethnography includes at least three varieties: (1) ‘native anthropology’ produced by native anthropologists from the people group who were formerly studied by outsiders; (2) ‘ethnic autobiography’ written by members of ethnic minority groups; and (3) ‘autobiographical ethnography’ in which anthropologists interject personal experience into ethnographic writing (p. 2). These varied autoethnographic studies do not place an equal emphasis on autobiography (content) and ethnography (inquiry process). Ellis and Bochner offer an insightful triadic model to illustrate the complexity of the autoethnography nomenclature. They state that ‘[a]utoethnoraphers vary in their emphasis on the research process (graphy), on culture (ethno), and on self (auto)’ and that ‘[d]ifferent exemplars of autoethnography fall at different places along the continuum of each of these three axes’ (p. 740). Some of them place more value on the ethnographic process; others on cultural interpretation and analysis; and yet a third kind on self-narratives. Keeping in mind the triadic balance, I argue that autoethnography should be ethnographical in its methodological orientation, cultural in its interpretive orientation, and autobiographical in its content orientation. This implies that self-reﬂective writings deﬁcient in any one of these ingredients would fall short of ‘auto-ethno-graphy.’

METHODOLOGY OF AUTOETHNOGRAPHY Various methodological strategies of autoethnography have been developed in a variety of qualitative research traditions and listed under different names (Ellis & Bochner, 2000, p. 740). The list of the names is also extensive

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according to these authors. Regardless of different origins and representations, all the methodological strategies share the commonality of being the qualitative, ‘narrative inquiry’ (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000). Some are more ethnographic than others in terms of its ethnographic intent and research process. The autobiographic inquires with the ethnographic orientation are the ones I focus on in this chapter. Like ethnography, autoethnography pursues the ultimate goal of cultural understanding underlying autobiographical experiences. To achieve this ethnographic intent, autoethnographers undergo the usual ethnographic research process of data collection, data analysis/interpretation, and report writing. They collect ﬁeld data by means of participation, self-observation, interview, and document review; verify data by triangulating sources and contents; analyze and interpret data to decipher the cultural meanings of events, behaviors, and thoughts; and write autoethnography. Like ethnographers, autoethnographers are expected to treat their autobiographical data with critical, analytical, and interpretive eyes to detect cultural undertones of what is recalled, observed, and told of them. At the end of a thorough self-examination within its cultural context, autoethnographers hope to gain a cultural understanding of self and others. Autobiographical narratives will add live details to this principled understanding, but narration should not dominate autoethnography. In the following subsections, I will break down the research process into two interconnected, not always sequential, steps: (1) composing autobiographical ﬁeld texts and (2) turning autobiographical ﬁeld texts into autoethnography.

Composing Autobiographical Field Texts The initial step of research involves collecting data, which continues throughout the research process with different intensity at different points. Here, I cautiously introduce a new term ‘ﬁeld texts’ by Clandinin and Connelly (2000) to refer to ‘data.’ I will sometimes use ‘ﬁeld texts’ in lieu of ‘data’ when ‘composing ﬁeld texts’ describes more accurately what autoethnographers do. Since the term ‘data’ has been traditionally associated with quantitative research inquiries and autoethnographers accumulate voluminous texts as multiple data-collection activities progress, the term ‘ﬁeld texts’ is justiﬁably adopted as an alternative to ‘data.’ At the same time, I am cautious of replacing ‘data’ with ‘ﬁeld texts’ completely because autoethnographical ‘ﬁeldwork’ is different from other qualitative inquiries. Whereas qualitative/ethnographic ﬁeldwork is likely to take place in an environment

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where the researcher comes in direct contact with others, autoethnographic ﬁeldwork often involves others in the researchers’ recollection and reﬂection. Memory is both a friend and foe of autoethnographers. Whereas it allows researchers to tap into the wealth of data to which no one else has access, memory selects, shapes, limits, and distorts. Memory fades as time goes, blurring the vitality of details. Dillard (1987) (cited Clandinin & Connelly, 2000) recognizes ‘blurring’ as ‘smooth[ing] out details, leaving a kind of schematic landscape outline’ (p. 83). Memory also triggers aversion when it attempts to dig deeper into unpleasant past experiences. Foster testiﬁes to the excruciating pain she experienced in recalling her childhood tainted with her mother’s schizophrenia and the obliterating effect of the pain on her memory until her autoethnographic study helped her heal (Foster, McAllister, & O’Brien, 2005). Memory can also select and embellish pleasant moments. Omission and addition are natural occurrences in our recalling. In the same way as subjectivity, they are detrimental to our autobiographic research endeavor unless they are properly recognized and disciplined. Composing ﬁeld texts helps researchers become aware of the limiting nature of memory and bring details to the ‘schematic landscape outline.’ Clandinin and Connelly (2000) concur that ﬁeld texts ‘help ﬁll in the richness, nuance, and complexity of the landscape, returning the reﬂecting researcher to a richer, more complex, and puzzling landscape than memory alone is likely to construct’ (p. 83). Autoethnographers can use various techniques to facilitate their recalling, organize memories, and compose ﬁeld texts as data. The techniques of data collection include, but are not limited to, (1) using visual tools such as free drawings of signiﬁcant places, ‘kinsgrams,’1 and ‘culturegrams’2; (2) inventorying people, artifacts, familial and societal values and proverbs, mentors, cross-cultural experiences, and favorite/disliked activities; (3) chronicling the autoethnographer’s educational history, typical day and week, and annual life cycle; (4) reading and responding to other autoethnographies and self-narratives; and (5) collecting other ﬁeld texts such as stories of others, ‘storied poems,’ personal journals, ﬁeld notes, letters, conversation, interviews with signiﬁcant others, family stories, documents, photographs, memory boxes, personal–family–social artifacts, and life experiences (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000, p. 101). These techniques are elaborated in my book, Autoethnography, to be published by Left Coast Press in 2007. Autoethnographers are commended to develop their own techniques of data collection to meet their research goals. One of the commonly used data-collection techniques for ethnography is participant observation, in which researchers participate in the lives of their

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informants while observing the latter’s behaviors. In a similar fashion to this, autoethnographers can observe their own behaviors and document their thoughts while living them. Rodriguez and Ryave (2002) argue that self-observation as a data-collection technique is useful because it gives access to ‘covert, elusive, and/or personal experiences like cognitive processes, emotions, motives, concealed actions, omitted actions, and socially restricted activities’ (p. 3) and brings to the surface what is ‘taken-for-granted, habituated, and/or unconscious manner that [they] y are unavailable for recall’ (p. 4). Self-observation may be used in the form of self-introspection when autoethnographers are alone or in the form of ‘interactive introspection’ while the researchers interact with others. In the interactive introspection, the researchers and the others can interview each other ‘as equals who try to help one another relive and describe their recollection of emotional experiences’ (Ellis, 1991 cited Rodriguez & Ryave, 2002, p. 7). Although Rodriguez and Ryave’s technique of ‘systematic self-observation’ is originally suggested for studies that utilize multiple informants who are instructed to conduct their own self-observation, this technique can be applied to autoethnography that focuses on one informant, none other than self. Field journals or a self-developed recording form may be used to document unstructured or structured self-observation. Interviewing is another vital data-collection technique employed in ethnographic ﬁeldwork (Ellis, 2004; Fontana & Frey, 2000; Schensul, Schensul, & LeCompte, 1999). Through interviewing with myriad informants, ethnographers gather information unavailable from participant observation. When applied to autoethnography, interviews with others fulﬁll a different goal. The interviews provide not only outsider perspectives, but also external data to conﬁrm, complement, or dispute internal data generated from recollection and reﬂection. One caveat, however, is that face-to-face interview can hamper honest exchanges between interviewers – autoethnographers themselves – and interviewees. To obtain more candid perspectives on autoethnographers from interviewees, external interviewers or other creative alternatives such as e-mail survey or questionnaire compiled by a third party may be adopted.

Turning Autobiographical Field Texts into Autoethnography In qualitative research, the step of data collection is not always sequential to or separate from that of data analysis/interpretation. Rather, the datacollection process is often intertwined and interactive with data analysis and

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interpretation. In other words, these activities often take place concurrently or inform each other in a web-like fashion. For example, when autoethnographers recall past experiences, they do not randomly harvest bits of fragmented memories. Rather, they select some according to their research focus and data-collection criteria. Evaluating certain experiences against the criteria is an analytical and interpretive activity that is already at work during data collection. During this data-collection process, the researchers are also able to reﬁne their criteria, which will in turn shape the analysis and interpretation process. When analyzing and interpreting autoethnographic ﬁeld texts, autoethnographers need to keep in mind that what makes autoethnography ethnographical is its ethnographic intent of gaining a cultural understanding of self that is intimately connected to others in the society. The cultural meanings of self’s thoughts and behaviors – verbal and non-verbal – need to be interpreted in their cultural context. Interpretation begs a question of ‘why’ to be answered: ‘Why does a self perceive, think, behave, and evaluate the way it does and how does the self relate to others in thoughts and actions?’ Autoethnographic data analysis and interpretation involves moving back and forth between self and others, zooming in and out of the personal and social realm, and submerging in and emerging out of data. Like other ethnographic inquiries, this step of research process is methodologically nebulous to describe and instruct because analysis and interpretation require ethnographers’ holistic insight, creative mixing of multiple approaches, and patience with uncertainty. Yet some simple strategies – searching for recurring patterns, applying existing theoretical frameworks, and compare–contrasting with other autoethnographies – can be adopted as a starter in the process of analysis and interpretation. The interweaving of data collection, analysis, and interpretation ultimately leads to the production of autoethnography. This means that autobiographical writing cannot come without a methodical process of ethnography and its focus on cultural understanding. However, it does not mean that writing can begin only when analysis/interpretation is completed. Wolcott (2001) suggests that ethnographers begin writing earlier in the ethnographic process, even during the early stage of ﬁeldwork, because writing stimulates, helps organize, and facilitates the subsequent data-collection/analysis/interpretation process. This suggestion is useful for autoethnographers. The writing style of autoethnography can vary, falling somewhere in the continuums between ‘realist’ description and ‘impressionist’ caricature and analytical description and ‘confessional’ self-exposure. Van Maanen’s (1988)

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classiﬁcation of ethnographic writings may help autoethnographers experiment with different styles such as ‘realistic tales,’ ‘confessional tales,’ and ‘impressionist tales.’ Realistic tales refer to matter-of-fact accounts and representations that ethnographers give about people whom they have studied ﬁrst hand. Realist tales are characterized by ‘minute, sometimes precious, but thoroughly mundane details of everyday life among the people studied’ (p. 48) and include ‘accounts and explanations by members of the culture of the events in their lives’ (p. 49). Ethnographers who employ realist tales tend to speak of the people they have studied with the authority of an expert. In reaction to realist ethnographers’ unabashed claim of authority over other people’s culture, those who practice confessional ethnography expose ‘how particular works [really] came into being’ (p. 74) in confessional tales. ‘Personal biases, character ﬂaws, or bad habits,’ which Van Maanen dubs as ‘embarrassing,’ are candidly displayed to demystify the ethnographic process and to augment a ‘reasonably uncontaminated and pure [ethnography] despite all the bothersome problems exposed in the confession’ (p. 78). Impressionist tales highlight ‘rare’ and ‘memorable’ ﬁeldwork experiences (p. 102). If realist tales focus on ‘the done’ and confessional tales on ‘the doer,’ ‘impressionist tales present the doing of ﬁeldwork’ (p. 102). If autoethnographers keep in mind that these tales are originally identiﬁed with ethnography and thus need to be modiﬁed when applied to autoethnography, the different tales may provide alternatives in autoethnographic writing. Whichever style autoethnographers decide to employ, autoethnographers are advised not to lose the sight of the quintessential identity of autoethnography as a cultural study of self and others.

BENEFITS OF AUTOETHNOGRAPHY Autoethnography is becoming a useful and powerful tool for researchers and practitioners who deal with human relations in multicultural settings: e.g., educators, social workers, medical professionals, clergies, and counselors. Beneﬁts of autoethnography lie in three areas: (1) it offers a research method friendly to researchers and readers; (2) it enhances cultural understanding of self and others; and (3) it has a potential to transform self and others toward the cross-cultural coalition building. Methodologically speaking, autoethnography is researcher-friendly. This inquiry method allows researchers to access easily the primary data source from the beginning because the source is the researchers themselves. In addition, autoethnographers are privileged with a holistic and intimate

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perspective on their ‘familiar data.’ This initial familiarity gives researchers an advantageous edge in data collection and in-depth data analysis/interpretation. Autoethnography is also reader-friendly in that the personally engaging writing style tends to appeal to readers more than the conventional scholarly writing. According to Nash (2004), ‘scholarly personal narratives’ liberate researchers from abstract, impersonal writings and ‘touch readers’ lives by informing their experiences’ (p. 28). Gergen and Gergen (2002) also eloquently state, ‘In using oneself as an ethnographic exemplar, the researcher is freed from the traditional conventions of writing. One’s unique voicing – complete with colloquialisms, reverberations from multiple relationships, and emotional expressiveness – is honored’ (p. 14). This unique voice of the autoethnographer is what readers respond to. Secondly, autoethnography is an excellent vehicle through which researchers come to understand themselves and others. I found this beneﬁt particularly applicable to my teaching of multicultural education. As a teacher educator, I feel compelled to prepare my students to become crossculturally sensitive and effective teachers for students of diverse cultural backgrounds. Self-reﬂection and self-examination are the keys to selfunderstanding (Florio-Ruane, 2001; Nieto, 2003). Kennet (1999) concurs with other advocates of self-reﬂection, saying that ‘[writing cultural] autobiography allows students to reﬂect on the forces that have shaped their character and informed their sense of self’ (p. 231). The ‘forces’ that shape people’s sense of self include nationality, religion, gender, education, ethnicity, socio-economic class, and geography. Understanding ‘the forces’ also helps them examine their preconceptions and feelings about others, whether they are ‘others of similarity,’ ‘others of difference,’ or even ‘others of opposition’ (Chang, 2005). Others of similarity refer to members of cultural groups that one belongs to, feels comfortable with, and share common values with. Others of difference are those who belong to groups that have different cultural standards than the self. Others of opposition are those who are considered as ‘enemies’ to the self due to seemingly irreconcilable differences. Not only writing one’s own autoethnography but also reading others’ autoethnography can evoke self-reﬂection and self-examination (Florio-Ruane 2001; Nash, 2002). Connelly shares a poignant story of how reading the selfnarrative of his doctoral student of Chinese heritage stirred up his childhood memory of a Chinese store owner from his rural hometown in Canada (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000). Through self-reﬂection, he discovered shared humanity between this stranger of his childhood and himself. This discovery of self and others is a deﬁnite beneﬁt of doing and sharing autoethnographies.

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Thirdly, doing, sharing, and reading autoethnography also help transform researchers and readers (listeners) in the process. The transformation of self and others is not necessarily a primary goal of autoethnography but a frequently occurring, powerful by-product of this research inquiry. Coia and Taylor’s (2006) experimentation with ‘co/autoethnography’ illustrates this beneﬁt. In this participatory process, the researchers involved their education students in writing their personal narratives, meeting in small groups weekly to share the narratives aloud and conduct a cultural analysis collaboratively, exchanging newly acquired self-awareness on ‘their past, present, and future selves,’ and ultimately ‘strengthen[ing] perspective on teaching’ (p. 21). In the end, the authors witnessed that students’ selfawareness and cultural understanding were broadened and their teaching philosophies and practices became more inclusive and sensitive to others’ needs. Self-transformation may be manifested in different ways in the education ﬁeld. Some may become more self-reﬂective in their daily praxis (Florio-Ruane, 2001; Nieto, 2004; Obidah & Teel, 2001). Others may adopt ‘culturally relevant pedagogy’ when selecting curriculum content and pedagogical strategies, and interacting students, peer teachers, and the community (Ladson-Billings, 1994). Self-transformation may also take place as they seek to reach out to unfamiliar others and pursue a new learning of unfamiliar cultures. As their understanding of others increases, unfamiliarity diminishes and perspectives on others change. As a result, others of difference and of opposition may be reframed to be included in their notion of community, ‘extended community’ in Greene’s (2000) term. Another type of self-transformation may accompany healings from the emotional scars of the past, which Foster illuminated in her writing (Foster et al., 2005). By sharing with others her painful experience of growing up with a mother with schizophrenia and understanding the cultural root of her ‘wounds,’ Foster experienced liberation and relief from the burden of isolation, loneliness, and shame. The liberating force of autoethnography was the foundation of self-empowerment for Foster. When manifested in increased self-reﬂection, adoption of the culturally relevant pedagogy, desire to learn about ‘others of difference,’ development of an inclusive community, or self-healing, the self-transformative potential of autoethnography is universally beneﬁcial to those who work with people from diverse cultural backgrounds. Through the increased awareness of self and others, they will be able to help themselves and each other correct cultural misunderstandings, develop cross-cultural sensitivity, and respond to the needs of cultural others effectively.

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PITFALLS TO AVOID IN DOING AUTOETHNOGRAPHY In the shadow of the growing interest and support of autoethnographic research methods, critiques are lurking. The criticism of autoethnography does not necessarily imply that this inquiry is inherently faulty. Rather, it reminds researchers to look out vigilantly for appropriate application of this research inquiry and to avoid potential pitfalls. Here are ﬁve pitfalls that autoethnographers need to watch out: (1) excessive focus on self in isolation of others; (2) overemphasis on narration rather than analysis and cultural interpretation; (3) exclusive reliance on personal memory and recalling as a data source; (4) negligence of ethical standards regarding others in selfnarratives; and (5) inappropriate application of the label ‘autoethnography.’ The ﬁrst pitfall relates to the very notion of culture. In the minds of anthropologists, culture is inherently a group-oriented concept. Culture and people have a symbiotic relationship according to de Munck (2000) who says: ‘Culture would cease to exist without the individuals who make it up y. Culture requires our presence as individuals. With this symbiosis, self and culture together make each other up and, in that process, make meaning’ (pp. 1–2). Therefore, the notion of culture predisposes the co-presence of others even in a discussion of ‘individual culture’–‘propriospect’ in Goodenough’s (1981) and Wolcott’s (1991) term and ‘idioverse’ in Schwartz’ term (1978) (cited de Munck, 2000). By these authors, an individual culture is an individual version of their group cultures, which they construct in relationship with others. Autoethnography, therefore, should reﬂect the interconnectivity of self and others. Unfortunately, the methodological focus on self is sometimes misconstrued as a license to dig deeper in personal experiences without digging wider into the cultural context of the individual stories commingled with others. Autoethnographers should be warned that self-indulgent introspection is likely to produce a self-exposing story but not autoethnography. Second, autoethnographers swept by the power of story telling can easily neglect the very important mission of autoethnography – cultural interpretation and analysis of autobiographic texts. Self-narration is very engaging to writers as well as readers and listeners (Foster et al., 2005; Nash, 2004; Tompkins, 1996). Yet, as Coia and Taylor (2006) say, ‘It is not enough simply to tell the story or write a journal entry’ (p. 19) for the cultural understanding of self to take place. Unless autoethnographers stay focused on their research purpose, they can be tempted to settle for elaborate narratives with underdeveloped cultural analysis and interpretation.

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Third, autoethnographers can fall into the pitfall of over-relying on their personal memory as the source of data. Personal memory is a marvelous and unique source of information for autoethnographers. It taps into the reservoir of data to which other ethnographers have no access. Yet, Muncey (2005) reminds us, ‘Memory is selective and shaped, and is retold in the continuum of one’s experience, [although] this does not necessarily constitute lying’ (p. 2). Memory can censor past experiences. When data is collected from a single tool without other measures for checks and balances, the validity of data can be questioned. When the single tool is the researcher self, the unbridled subjectivity of autoethnographers can be more severely challenged. Although the obsession with objectivity is not necessary for qualitative research, autoethnographers need to support their arguments with broad-based data like in any good research practice. For this reason, they can easily complement ‘internal’ data generated from researchers’ memory with ‘external’ data from outside sources, such as interviews, documents, and artifacts. Multiple sources of data can provide bases for triangulation that will help enhance content accuracy and validity of the autoethnographic writing. The fourth pitfall stems from a false notion that conﬁdentiality does not apply to self-narrative studies because researchers use their autobiographical stories. Playing the multi-faceted role of a researcher, informant, and author, autoethnographers may be tempted to claim full authorship and responsibility for their stories without hesitation. Clandinin and Connelly’s (2000) poignant question to narrative inquirers, ‘Do they own a story because they tell it?’ should equally challenge autoethnographers. Since autoethnographers’ personal stories are often linked to stories of others, however explicit the linkage is, the principle of protecting conﬁdentiality of people in the story is just as relevant to autoethnography. Since main characters reveal their identities in autoethnography, it is extremely difﬁcult to protect fully others intimately connected to these known characters. Yet, autoethnographers, like other researchers of human subjects, are charged to adhere to the ethical principle of conﬁdentiality. This inquiry method demands more creativity in practicing it. The last pitfall concerns the confusion in using the term ‘autoethnography.’ As I discussed earlier in this chapter, the term has been used to refer to a variety of narrative inquiries sprung up in different academic disciplines. The mixed bag labeled with ‘autoethnography’ has confused researchers as well as readers. Since no one can claim an exclusive license to use this label, it is the researcher’s responsibility to become informed of the multiple usage of the term and to deﬁne its use clearly to avoid confusion. That is precisely what

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Wolcott (2004) does in his article, ‘Ethnographic Autobiography.’ Although my use of autoethnography differs from what he proposes – leaving the term to the original meaning by Hayano who refers to autoethnography as a study of the researcher’s own people – his conscious clariﬁcation of the term clearly orients readers. With the rigorous effort to distinguish autoethnography from other self-narrative inquiries, readers will be able to understand this research method for what it stands for, distinguishing it from highly descriptive selfnarratives such as autobiography and memoir.

CONCLUSION As the outgoing president of the Council on Anthropology and Education (a subdivision of American Anthropological Association), LeCompte (1987) once asserted in her speech, later published as article, that all research endeavors are autobiographic. I understood her remark to imply that research topics, methods, and processes that we select reﬂect our personal interest, biases, and circumstances. When I reﬂect on my ethnographic and qualitative works, I ﬁnd her comment insightful and accurate. My preference of case-speciﬁc narratives, ﬁeld-based research methods, and adolescents has led me through a series of ethnographic/qualitative studies. Beginning with American high school students on the West Coast of the U.S.A. (Chang, 1992a), I moved on to a study of Korean female students in a vocational high school (Cho & Chang, 1989; Chang, 2000), to Korean–American high school students (Chang, 1992b), and to Christian high school students in Pennsylvania (Chang, 1998). Venues have changed, but my dogged commitment to ethnography and adolescents has persisted. What is the cultural root of my persistence? Searching for answers to questions such as this is what autoethnographers do and what I have done in my autoethnography. Although I reserve an elaborate cultural analysis of myself for another place, here I can safely note that the research process has been empowering and transformative. My teaching and doing autoethnography has helped my students and me (1) connect our individual past with our individual and collective present, (2) understand culturally rooted reasons for our comfort with others of similarity, discomfort with others of difference, and aversion with others of opposition, and (3) expand this understanding into culturally unfamiliar territories. Opening-up to the new understanding and new possibility is the deﬁnite beneﬁt of autoethnography, which gives a foundation to cross-cultural coalition building to embrace others, even others of opposition, in the multicultural society.

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NOTES 1. The ‘kinsgram’ refers to a kinship diagram that visually shows one’s relation to other members in his/her kinship structure, created or dissolved by birth/death, marriage/divorce, and other forms of attachment/separation. Kinship diagram is often adopted in anthropological ﬁeldwork (see Bates & Fratkin, 2003, p. 282; and Puples & Bailey, 2003, p. 190). 2. The ‘culturegram,’ a self-coined term, refers to a web-like chart on which autoethnographers display their multi-faceted self-identity in terms of multicultural categories such as nationality, ethnicity, race, language, gender, religion, socio-economic class, and other interests (Chang, 2002).

REFERENCES Bates, D. G., & Fratkin, E. M. (2003). Cultural anthropology (3rd ed.). Boston, MA: Pearson. Butz, D., & Besio, K. (2004). The value of autoethnography for ﬁeld research in transcultural settings. Professional Geographer, 56(3), 350–360. Chang, H. (1992a). Adolescent life and ethos: An ethnography of a US high school. London: Falmer Press. Chang, H. (1992b). Persist or perish in the qualitative studies of adolescents: Strategies to win a silent negotiation. 1992 QUIG conference proceedings. Athens, GA: University of Georgia. Chang, H. (1998). Is cultural diversity a friend or a foe? An ethnography of Christian schools. Paper presented at the 1998 academic festival, Eastern College, St. Davids, PA. Chang, H. (2000). Triple jeopardy in identity formation: Korean urban girls in an evening commercial high school. Paper presented at the urban girls conference, SUNY, Buffalo, NY. Chang, H. (2002). Cultural autobiography: Self-reﬂective practices for multicultural educators. Paper presented at the CCTE Education 2002 Conference, Calvin College, Grand Rapids, MI. Chang, H. (2005). Self-narratives for Christian multicultural educators: A pathway to understanding self and others. A Journal of the international community of Christians in teacher education [online], 1 (1). Available at http://www.icctejournal.org/ICCTEJournal/past_issues/vol1issue1/v1i1chang [Accessed 26 February 2006]. Cho, E., & Chang, H. (1989). Life and value system of evening girls’ commercial high school students in Korea (written in Korean). Annual Journal of Soong Sil Arts and Sciences Research Institute, 19, 11–38. Clandinin, D. J., & Connelly, F. M. (2000). Narrative inquiry: Experience and story in qualitative research. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Coia, L., & Taylor, M. (2006). From the inside out and the outside in: Co/autoethnography as a means of professional renewal. In: C. Kosnik, C. Beck, A. R. Rease & A. P. Samaras (Eds), Making a difference in teacher education through self-study (pp. 19–33). Amsterdam, Netherlands: Springer. de Munck, V. (2000). Culture, self, and meaning. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland. Dillard, A. (1987). An American childhood. Boston, MA: G.K. Hall. Ellis, C. (1991). Sociological introspection and emotional experience. Symbolic Interaction, 14, 23–50.

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Puples, J., & Bailey, G. (2003). Humanity: Introduction to cultural anthropology. Baltimore, MD: Wadsworth. Reed-Danahay, D. E. (Ed.) (1997). Auto/ethnography: Rewriting the self and the social. New York: Oxford. Rodriguez, N., & Ryave, A. (2002). Systematic self-observation. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Schensul, S. L., Schensul, J. J., & Lecompte, M. D. (1999). Essential ethnographic methods: Observations, interviews, and questionnaires. Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira. Schwartz, T. (1978). Where is the culture? Personality as the locus of culture. In: G. De Vos (Ed.), Making of psychological anthropology. Berkeley, CA: University of California. Tompkins, J. P. (1996). A life in school: What the teacher learned. Reading, MA: Perseus Books. Van Maanen, J. (1988). Tales of the field: On writing ethnography. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Wolcott, H. F. (1991). Propriospect and the acquisition of culture. Anthropology and Education Quarterly, 22(3), 251–273. Wolcott, H. F. (2001). Writing up qualitative research (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Wolcott, H. F. (2004). The ethnographic autobiography. Auto/Biography, 12, 93–106.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS Dalia Aralas is a doctoral research student at the University of Oxford Department of Educational Studies. Her doctoral research study, ‘Investigating Mathematical Imagination’, is supported by a four-year JPA Malaysia scholarship. She is a pure mathematician by training. She is a lecturer of Universiti Malaysia Sabah (UMS) where she was the Coordinator of mathematics and science education before she left on study leave. She had academic and administrative responsibilities for coordinating academic programmes run jointly by the two Schools (faculties) of Education and Science. She has taught many undergraduate and postgraduate courses at UMS, including mathematics education, educational foundations and issues (philosophical perspectives). She was the head of the teacher training programme in mathematics and science. She directed the ﬁrst of statewide UMS mathematics camps which have been held annually. She has also tutored and examined an undergraduate class in a course in mathematics education at the University of Oxford. Besides additional training in teaching mathematics, she also has a teaching certiﬁcate in dance. Her research interests include mathematics education, particularly the philosophical strand; imagination and agency; and research methodology. Heewon Chang (PhD, University of Oregon) is associate professor of Education and chair of Graduate Education Programs at Eastern University, Pennsylvania, USA, where she teaches courses on multicultural education, research design, gender equity education, and global education. She founded an open-access e-journal, Electronic Magazine of Multicultural Education (http://www.eastern.edu/publications/emme), in 1999 and has served as Editor-in-Chief. Her book, Adolescent Life and Ethos: An Ethnography of a US High School (1999, Falmer Press), and subsequent research projects reﬂect her interest in adolescent culture. Trained as an educational anthropologist, she keeps her research focus on multicultural education, anthropology and education, and ethnographic and autoethnographic methodology. Her lived experience with the Korean, US, and German cultures inform her teaching and research agenda. 223

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Amar Dhand holds a doctorate from the Department of Educational Studies at Oxford University where he was a Rhodes Scholar from Canada, and on leave from medical studies at Harvard Medical School. His current research focuses on naturalistic peer learning processes among heroin addicts in India. He has written and continues to write about a diversity of practices among a particular group of addicts including poetry performances, street medicine, and brotherhood structures. More generally, he is interested in the interface between education and medicine in theoretical, empirical, and pragmatic dimensions. Following his medical training, he hopes to indulge his curiosity for everyday life with sociological and educational research projects that intersect with his medical life. Martin Forsey lectures in Anthropology at the University of Western Australia. He teaches introductory anthropology as well as Australian culture and society and the anthropology of organisational enterprises. Martin’s research interests include the organisational culture of schools, school choice and educational reform and he has written about ethnographic method, neo-liberal reform of schooling and organisational change. A monograph titled Challenging the System? A Dramatic Tale of Neo-liberal Reform in an Australian Government High School will be published in 2006 by Information Age Publishing. Nick Hopwood’s research interests include geography education, environmental education, and professional development in academia. As well as studying pupils’ experiences of school geography (the focus of his current work), he has been involved in projects investigating geography teachers’ conceptions and practice, and student teachers’ ideas about teaching controversial issues in geography and science. Nick’s developing interests in research methodology focus on the implications of conducting research with children, on issues of researcher roles and processes of data generation, and on the analysis of qualitative data. He is now working on a project aimed at understanding and enhancing processes of professional development for post graduate research students aiming for academic careers (part of Oxford University’s Centre for Excellence in Preparing for Academic Practice). Susan James is a postdoctoral researcher at the ESRC funded SKOPE (Skills, Knowledge and Organizational Performance) Research Centre, based jointly at Oxford and Warwick Universities. Her research interests include vocational education and training, VET systems, work-based learning, on-the-job and off-the-job training, school-to-work transitions, and

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theories of learning. She is currently working on a European-wide project researching opportunities for progression in low wage, low-skill work. Gretar L. Marino´sson is a professor of Education at the Iceland University of Education in Reykjavı´ k. He is also dean of research and director of IUE Research Centre. He was educated as an educational psychologist (in the UK) and a teacher (in Iceland) and worked as a teacher and school psychologist in England and in Iceland for 15 years before becoming a university lecturer in 1987. He obtained his masters and doctoral degrees in Manchester and London, respectively. Major research interests are special needs and inclusive education, pupils’ social interaction and behaviour, and parent–school collaboration. At present he leads a research team studying the education of pupils with learning disability in Iceland. Recent works include Pathways to Inclusion, a Guide to Staff Development (edited with Ro´sa Eggertsdo´ttir). Kristen H. Perry is a doctoral candidate at Michigan State University. Her work focuses primarily on literacy development and culture, particularly in African communities both in the US and abroad. Her speciﬁc areas of interest include the ways in which culture and literacy development transact in diverse communities. Her research also investigates the various ways in which home and community practices of literacy align with school practices of literacy, particularly for immigrant and refugee children. She is the recipient of Michigan State’s University Distinguished Fellowship and a Spencer Research Training Grant Fellowship. She also has taught in multigrade classrooms in the US state of Colorado; worked as a resource teacher and HIV/AIDS educator in Lesotho, Africa through the US Peace Corps; and tutored African refugees in the US. Eric Tucker completed his doctorate in Educational Studies at the University of Oxford with the support of a Marshall Scholarship. He graduated with distinction from Oxford with a Masters of Science in Education Research Methodology, writing a dissertation entitled Towards Grounded Indicators of Social Capital Formation. He holds honours degrees in Public Policy and Africana Studies from Brown University where he received the Truman Scholarship, Royce Fellowship, Noah Krieger Prize for the best Public Policy thesis, and graduated Magna Cum Laude and Phi Beta Kappa. As a director of publications for the National Association for Urban Debate Leagues he served as editor for the Urban Debate Chronicle, co-authored Teaching Argumentation and Debate: An Educator’s Activities Manual (2004) and authored Building an Urban Debate League: A Practitioner’s Handbook

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(2006). He also wrote How to Build a Debate Program: An Organizer’s Manual. Geoffrey Walford is professor of Education Policy and a Fellow of Green College at the University of Oxford. His research foci are the relationships between central government policy and local processes of implementation, private schools, choice of schools, religiously based schools, and qualitative research methodology. His books include Life in Public Schools (Methuen, 1986), Restructuring Universities: Politics and Power in the Management of Change (Croom Helm, 1987), City Technology College (Open University Press, 1991, with Henry Miller), Doing Educational Research (Routledge, ed., 1991), Choice and Equity in Education (Cassell, 1994), Educational Politics: Pressure Groups and Faith-Based Schools (Avebury, 1995), Policy, Politics and Education-Sponsored Grant-Maintained Schools and Religious Diversity (Ashgate, 2000), Doing Qualitative Educational Research (Continuum, 2001), Private Schooling: Tradition and Diversity (Continuum, 2005) and Markets and Equity in Education (Continuum, 2006). He was joint editor of the British Journal of Educational Studies from 1999 to 2002, editor of this annual volume, Studies in Educational Ethnography, and has been editor of the Oxford Review of Education since January 2004. He is also one of the deputy editors of the new journal Ethnography and Education. Sue Walters is lecturer in Educational Studies at Edinburgh University. She was previously employed as a Research Associate at Lancaster University Literacy Research Centre working with Dr. Uta Papen on a study of literacy, learning, and health. Prior to that, and following her completion of a doctorate on the educational experiences of Bangladeshi pupils, she worked at the Open University with Dr. Sarah Neal looking at issues of ethnicity and rural identity. Harry F. Wolcott is professor emeritus of Anthropology and Education at the University of Oregon in Eugene, Oregon, where he has spent his entire career. He had the good fortune to meet George Spindler when he went to Stanford to study for his doctorate. He realized that ‘anthropology and education’ was the right ﬁeld for him, although there really was no ‘ﬁeld’ as such at the time. Under Spindler’s direction he did his dissertation study among the Kwakiutl Indians of British Columbia and he has been doing ethnography ever since, ranging from a study of urban African beer drinking in Bulawayo, Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) to a study of a school principal across town. He is a past president of the Council on Anthropology and Education and was the fourth editor of its journal, the Anthropology and Education Quarterly.