James D. Dyer

Dr. Kim DeVries

ENG 5870

Spring 2009

Midterm.

Question #1

1. Drawing on the scholars we have studied so far, develop a definition of ethnography as the field relates to the composition classroom. What are the particular challenges and benefits of such studies? What techniques do these scholars suggest for overcoming these challenges? Which ones would you employ and why?

This is a fascinating question, and a difficult one to answer honestly. My favorites among the readings are Goffman and Percy, I think that between them they tell us everything we need to know about ethnography in general. A. “all the world’s a stage,” and B. “All experience is packaged, but you need to figure out how to package it for yourself instead of just accepting the script.” In the end, ethnography is conducted by utilizing “the sociological imagination” and by being ready to accept experiences as they are, and without having any preconceived notions about what the experience is for yourself or for others. This is a problematic goal because we all have preconceived notions about what classrooms are or should be like. However, it is not entirely impossible to go into a room without such notions unduly influencing one’s observations. For a start it is important that the ethnographer is aware of their expectations and experiences, and then keeps them in mind both when observing, and when reflecting upon observations. Then when writing up their findings, they should make those assumptions and proclivities explicit before trying to analyze situations or make recommendations. In this way it is possible for the reader to take into account the authors perspective when making judgments based on the reading.

Bruggemann states that she wants to talk about:

[…]representative roles and role playing-with both researcher

and subject roles, both self-constructed and socially constructed roles,

both preestablished and constructed-in-the-process roles, and both participant

and observer roles. […] I plan to explore, both generally and specifically, what goes on in the hyphenated space of the participant-observer role. And I also plan to show how that hyphenated space has worked and continues to work me as I have tried to work it. (18)

This is both the problem of and the necessity of ethnography, the ethnographer is stuck in between things. The ethnographer is a participant in the thing that he/she is studying, so it is is impossible to be completely unbiased—how can one not get emotionally involved with people that one spends a large amount of one’s time with?

The term that anthropologists use to describe excessive identification with one’s subjects is “going native.” And there have been cases where significant damage to studies, and even entire ways of life, have occurred due to ethnologists becoming too much a part of what they are studying. Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is perhaps an extreme example of this sort of thing (though Kurtz was not an anthropologist), but there have been many such cases over the years that ethnology has been practiced, including one in Chicago where the ethnologist wound up being convicted of murder after going in to study street gangs. Ethnography in the classroom does not bear the same sort of risks for the ethnographer perhaps, but it is still a form of participant observation, so it is also unavoidably subjective.

However, I think that ethnography in the classroom is also the best way to form pedagogy, the best way to understand classroom dynamics, and the best way to learn to exert control over a bunch of youngsters without infringing on their development as people. Watching K operate in his class is interesting because he controls them with his plans and his intellect, even though he is not much older than many of the students. In contrasting with my methods, I realize that simply by being middle aged, male, and not small, I don’t get the same sort of response (not that my methods or responses are better, just that they are significantly different) , and in W’s class, he uses a somewhat different approach than either of us, and the dynamic is entirely different because it is a creative writing class instead of being a core academic writing class, and the students are a bit older, more familiar with academic culture, and enjoy poetry.

So, Ethnography is storytelling, as much as it is science, we use our theories to form our conclusions, but our experience we transcribe as best we can, not so much to tell others what to do, but to tell them where we have been and what we have seen. Then we make recommendations for the way we think that things are, and how they might be changed for the better firmly rooted in our own unique experiential and theoretical package. Ethnology is conducted from the “I,” and each eye is different. However, when you are talking about teacher research, all of the eyes have been similar places, have had congruent experiences, have read many of the same books, and have spent a lot of time in classrooms. It is likely that many such stories will have points of similarity, and the way we learn from ethnography is by reading others works, and conducting our own, and that when multiple teacher researchers have come to similar conclusions, then it is time to start thinking about the pedagogical implications of those conclusions.

Or, if you run into stories that are wildly different, then you also want to ask why is this case different? and , What can I learn from the way that is different? Sunstein talks about ethnography in a way similar to my point when she says,

Our completed draft is as much a textual performance as it is a report of

research. Anthropologist Margery Wolf explains, “The better the observer,

the more likely she is to catch her informants’ understanding of

the meaning of their experiences; the better the writer, the more likely

she is to be able to convey that meaning to an interested reader from

another culture” (5). Reading ethnography, too, requires a jump into the

writer-researcher’s tension-as she works between cultures and makes

choices which will craft her informants’ world into words for her reader.(197)

Essentially, ethnography is the translation of life into text, with a focus on the shared cultural aspects of that life, the life of a particular social group, at a particular time or times, but the story cannot be told without both skill with text, and personal details because each social unit is made up from a conglomeration of individuals and those individuals personal pathologies and proclivities effect the way that the social group interacts and constructs its individually situated subculture.

Furthermore ethnography must be both reflexive (taking notes during observations, or writing down what was observed immediately after a class—just putting the experience into words as they come naturally to you) and reflective, which consists of reading over what you wrote at a later time, and remembering, and thinking about the implications of the experience. The reflexive part of the job is pure storytelling, the reflective can be more scientific because one can look up facts and figures after doing observations, and then reflect on how those facts relate to the observed dynamics of the classroom. For instance, does observation of students behavior, and students reported grades show a congruence of traits in individuals that lead to successful academic performance? Are there ways to promote the learning of such traits? Does the instructors classroom style reflect either positive or negative learning outcomes? Are there certain types of classroom behavior by either instructors or students that are statistically showing better outcomes? Can we teach those behaviors? Or, are they a function of individual pathologies interaction occurring randomly in specific settings?

In the end, ethnology is an extremely personalized research method, and is useful specifically for that reason, but that is also its greatest weakness, so I would suggest that in addition to teachers being ethnographers in their own right, they also read many different ethnographies by others in order to get perspective on the workings of many classrooms.