Mid-Term

Maria J. Garcia

Dr. K. DeVries

4/7/09

Question #5

“The readings in this class have focused the ways that ethnography is particularly suited to those researchers who are truly wondering, seeking, curious.  Share your experiences in your classroom observations, and connect these observations to the texts we have studied.”

 I began my classroom observation as someone might approach “The Most Photographed Barn in America,” enthralled with anticipation of what was waiting to be observed. 

I cheered Purcell-Gates because I have always felt like a revolutionary, daring to challenge the status-quo, the assumptions underlying the traditional (positivist) paradigm in education: that research should be “objective, controlled, and decontextualized; that the researcher should be distanced and uninvolved; that research is always theory-driven and must be generalizable in order to perpetuate theory building; and that knowledge and truth exist in the world and are found through research” (175).   At this point in my own research, I was not feeling much “uninvolved.”  On the contrary, I had observed a particular classroom more than once and was beginning to really like the kids.  In retrospect, I ask, can this be research?  Should I be enjoying this so much? Am I keeping an uninvolved distance from my subjects?

 Brenda Jo Brueggemann’s article touched a nerve for me when she writes about the “guilt” problem of ethnographic researchers.  I really felt a sense of her struggle as she candidly wrote up her experience as a participant-observer of deaf (Deaf) writing students at Gallaudet University for her dissertation.  I could feel her frustration at the faculty, and her empathy with her subjects.  However, I believe that she got too close, “she went native,” as she admits.  She lost her sense of objectivity when she became emotionally attached to her subjects.  She writes: “When the researcher becomes friends with the participants then there can be a lapse in what the author calls the “honesty of observing” (26).  I made a conscious effort not to follow in her footsteps…so I thought.  

As time went by, in subsequent classroom observations, as I became more comfortable in my role as ethnographer, began to feel that I was loosing my objectivity, like I was loosing my purpose. I became aware of my own biases and how they might affect my research. 

At that point, reading Bonnie Sunstein’s article “Culture on the Page: Experience, Rhetoric, and Aesthetics in Ethnographic Writing” put me back on track.  I focused on what Sunstein said about research not being necessarily dull and complex; I focused on what she called the false “assumption that if an ethnographic account is engaging, it cannot be scientific” (192).  Her article helped me weave my story together; my observation with my write-up.  I became more comfortable with my style of writing, still keeping in mind that “anytime ethnographers try to write an account of their research for an intended audience, they are treading a fine line between fiction and non-fiction”.

My synthesis of the texts we have explored so far comes with Walker Percy’s article “Loss of the Creature.” Percy asks “how can man truly enrich his life?  How can he truly, honestly enjoy and understand the surrounding world and all it has to offer?  I would suggest that is how his article ties in to ethnography and teacher research; by the power of “the gaze” do we appreciate, absorb, and blend in. Percy uses the experience of observing the Grand Canyon for the first time to convey the feeling of the sightseer as a human being controlled by strong psychological tendencies.  “The sightseer measures his degree of satisfaction by the degree to which the canyon conforms to the preformed complex” (47).   According to Percy, the “packaging of experience” that occurs in an academic setting, and on “packaged vacations” like bus trips to the Grand Canyon hinder our purpose as teacher researchers and as teachers. This brings me back to day one of my classroom observation.  Why did I pick the classes I did? What led me to my decision? Did I know students in those classes? Did I know the teachers? Was I being truly objective, and if not, did I feel a sense of guilt therefore?