James D. Dyer
Dr. Kim DeVries
ENG 5870
Spring 2009
The Values of an Ethnographer

It is their belief in the social construction of knowledge and their
actions based on this belief that set teacher-researchers apart from
other teachers and that distinguish their kind of research from
other kinds of inquiry. Successful teacher research is usually conducted
by an open-minded, inquiring teacher who sees the classroom
as an egalitarian community in which he or she is but one of
many learners. Peter Elbow perhaps best describes this perspective:
“Even though we are not wholly peer with our students, we can
still be peer in [the] crucial sense of also being engaged in learning,
seeking, and being incomplete. (Ray 175)

Ethnography is perhaps ideally suited to teacher research because such research is necessarily conducted from the point of a participant observer. Either in our own classrooms, or in those of our peers and colleagues, we cannot help but become engaged in the classroom dynamic, after all, one classroom or another is where we have spent a great deal of our lives. First in Elementary School, then Middle School, then High School, then college, and then at least some graduate work. For many of us, more than half of our lives have been spent in a classroom (if you don’t count time spent sleeping anyhow). So, teachers at whatever level are experienced participants in classroom cultures and understand instinctively if not consciously that each individual classroom is a micro-cosmic expression of the platonic ideal of “The Great Classroom In The Sky,” but that each classroom is also different from every other one because no one can achieve that platonic ideal in the real world of students, and posters, and teachers, and defective air-conditioning, and lack of budget and so forth.

Furthermore, while most teachers are not trained as ethnographers, they are trained (at least subconsciously) to observe the particular combination of student traits in each classroom, and to adjust their teaching, or participation to fit into that particular classroom culture. It would be virtually impossible to obtain a teaching credential, or even a bachelor’s degree without being able to do this, and one who could not comfortably adjust to various classroom cultures would never want to teach in any case. Teachers MUST be comfortable in an “educational” social matrix, so they already are ethnographers of a sort, all that is left is for them to become conscious and methodical in their observations, and to pool resources so that one teacher’s experiences can be used to expand the practical repertoires of other classrooms. Ray makes a point of this when she discusses how she reinterpreted her own observations after reading the observations of her collaborators from two other institutions in different states who were working with different ethnic populations.

Also, Ray says in her conclusion, that as more teachers begin conducting independent research in their classrooms, and return to college to learn more about research and to continue their professional development, the perspectives that they bring back to the university from the field will lead to changes and new growth in the theory and practice of educational research in general. To me, this seems to be happening already, as I have taken a number of theory and research classes wherein k-12 teachers shared their experiences, and those anecdotes have changed the way that I view research and teaching. Overall, this was a illuminating article, that I enjoyed reading because it gave me a fresh perspective on the work of research, and teaching.