Cross-cultural Literacy

Ethnographies of Communication in Multiethnic Classrooms

Steven F. Arvizu, Marietta Saravia-Shore

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351237086
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Originally published in 1992. This book advocates and demonstrates the benefits of an anthropological approach that recognizes the centrality of culture in the educational process. This approach encompasses knowledge and understanding of other cultures' patterns of interaction, values, institutions, metaphors and symbols as well as cross-cultural communication skills. Ethnographic studies of multi-ethnic classrooms and schools in their community context are presented in this excellent volume with a view to informing practice and policy concerning the education of language minority students and teachers, and anyone with an interest in foreign language education and bilingual education.

PART III

Constructing Classroom Contexts

On Ethnographic Studies and Multicultural Education¹

Henry T. Tmeba and
Pamela G. Wright²

Introduction

The purpose of this study is to review and assess the contributions of current ethnographic studies to a better understanding of the educational process in multicultural settings, focusing on microethnographic research. In pursuing this purpose, the chapter addresses the development of microethnographic research methods, the characteristics and findings of current microethnographic studies, and the overall state of the art of this field as it relates to education in multicultural settings.

Background

General Ethnography, New Ethnography, and Ethnography of Schools are approaches reflecting particular methodological and theoretical biases which produce different outcomes. Each of these ethnographic approaches has contributed to the development of microethnography.

Traditional Ethnographic Approaches

Ethnography has been described as the central task of fieldwork, which in turn has been considered the “hallmark” of cultural anthropology. The function of ethnography is the description of culture. At the core of this work has been a “concern with the meaning of action and events to the people” under study (Spradley 1979:3, 5).

Basic to the study of ethnography has been a distinction between an “emic” and an “etic” approach. These terms were coined by Kenneth Pike and defined by him as follows:

In contrast to the Etic approach, an Emic one is in essence valid for only one language (or culture) at a time…. It is an attempt to discover and to describe the patterns of that particular language or culture in reference to the way in which the various elements of that culture are related to each other in the functioning of the particular pattern (Pike 1954:8).

Further:

An etic analytical standpoint … might be called “external” or “alien,” since for etic purposes the analyst stands “far enough away from” or “outside” of a particular culture to see its separate events, primarily in relation to their similarities and their differences, as compared to events in other cultures (Pike 1954:10).

Prior to the mid-1960’s, ethnographers favored an etic approach whereby they assumed that all cultures had a uniform system of classification. Their method involved the observation of behavior in an effort to locate patterns of behavior that fit into the universal classification system. Strategies for analysis ranged from “pure induction” to combinations of inductive and deductive methods (Pelto and Pelto 1978:62).

During the 1960’s, a group of social anthropologists who were trained in sociolinguistics began to develop the approach alternately called ethnoscience, the New Ethnography, and an emic approach to ethnography. A definition of ethnography offered at that time was:

A discipline which seeks to account for the behavior of a people by describing the socially acquired and shared knowledge, or culture, that enables members of the society to behave in ways deemed appropriate by their fellows (Frake 1964:132).

This group of ethnoscientists often turned to linguistics in search of theoretical and methodological support in conceptualizing culturally bound behavior. This tendency has been explained as follows:

It can be argued that of all the many aspects of culture, language is the easiest to study and its description the easiest to formalize … [and] it may be strategic first to try out new viewpoints and theoretical approaches on language and then see whether these approaches might also be applied elsewhere (Burling 1969:817).

As part of their emphasis on a strict methodology, the new ethnographers were concerned with issues of descriptive validity, reliability and exhaustiveness. They saw descriptive validity as being conditioned upon an emic analysis of ethnographic data; reliability as a congruence between the ethnographer’s interpretation of observed behavior and the social meaning attached to that behavior by the actors; and exhaustiveness as an unncessary burden that ran counter to the selection of crucial ethnographic events essential to the understanding of a culture.

The new ethnographers argued that people “construe their world of experience from the way they talk about it” (Frake 1962:74) and that discourse analysis is therefore crucial to ethnographic description. They insisted that:

By developing methods for the demonstrably successful descriptions of messages as manifestations of a code, one is furthermore seeking to build a theory of codes—a theory of culture. Since the code is construed as knowledge in peoples’ heads, such a theory should say something of general relevance about cognition and behavior (Frake 1964:132).

What these ethnoscientists demanded was precision, specificity, and clear articulation between a theory of behavior and the ethnographic data from which it was drawn. Their major accomplishment was to “ground” ethnographic descriptions, with all their behavioral inferences and their implied theory of behavior, in the ethnographic evidence available through linguistic behavior in a given social context.

Ethnoscience based on discourse analysis was meant to discover categories, classifications, and discriminations relevant to the people under study, in an effort to arrive at an understanding of the cognitive system of the bearers of a culture (Sturtevant 1964). Studies of this type focused on religious behavior (Conklin 1964), beer making (Frake 1964), and firewood (Metzger and Williams 1966).

During the past three decades, the settings for ethnographic studies have changed from remote, non-Westem locations to urban settings in our own major cities and, in many cases, to schools. This movement has necessitated changes in the methods and ideals of ethnography. As early as 1957, when anthropologists first moved toward the study of groups and institutions in complex societies, Alfred Kroeber charged that elements of “old-fashioned ethnography” such as ethnohistorical research, were being neglected, and that researchers were often unable to elicit data beyond the “expectable obviousnesses.” Such criticisms are still made today; yet, despite them, traditional ethnographic methods have been successfully adapted to meet the needs of educational research.

Ethnography and the Schools

Those ethnographers who began to work in schools came from two distinctive backgrounds. One group consisted of traditional ethnographers who had done work in non-Western settings. The other group was made up of ethnographers who had been influenced by sociolinguists and by the methodology of ethnoscientists. The work of the second group will be considered in the next section.

Traditional ethnographers approached the study of schools in much the same way they had the study of villages. By assuming that in both instances there existed a set of rules that governed behavior and underlay the social system, they asked themselves the same questions: What is the organization of everyday life? What do the different types of people do? What are their roles and responsibilities? What are the behaviors considered appropriate in interpersonal interaction? How does the overall system operate in its “holistic” sense (Erickson 1976:15–19)? These questions were often broad, ambitious, and unspecified. Studies in this tradition are exemplified by the work of Wolcott (1967, 1973), Burnett (1969), and Spindler (1971, 1974).

As traditional ethnographers continued this line of research, however, questions began to be raised about the validity of transferring the methods of standard ethnographic field work to the study of schools. An early effort in this direction was developed by Burnett (1973) in which she began to focus on specific, educationally relevant events and settings. Another move in this direction came from Erickson (1976). In this article, he applied Malinowski’s categories for studying societies to the study of schools, concluding that “some of his [Malinowski’s] principles of fieldwork and reporting can serve as a model for school ethnographers, but not his specific methods, for his social units differ from ours in both size and kind” (Erickson 1976:2).

Microethnography

The field of microethnography has developed as a logical extension of the new ethnography; it has been influenced by sociolinguistics, sociology, cognitive psychology, and, to a lesser extent, the ethnography of the schools. In contrast to previous linguistic efforts sociolinguists focused on the social context and dynamics of language use. Thus, sociolinguists such as Fishman (1966, 1970, 1972), Lambert and Tucker (1972), Labov (1966, 1972), Hymes (1964, 1967), and others dealt with the process of acquiring a language and using it in diverse social settings. Mackey (1970), Spolsky (1974), Shuy (1979), Kjolseth (1973) and Fishman (1973) also dealt with the use of language in instructional contexts.

Sociologists and cognitive psychologists working in the late sixties and early seventies made other important contributions to the method and theory of microethnography. Ethnomethodologists such as Garfinkel (1967) and Mehan and Wood (1975) emphasized the importance of the structure of interaction in seeking to understand the regularity of behavior. Cognitive psychologists suggested that “differences in social organization and values influence the organization and manifestation of cognitive processes” (Scribner and Cole 1973), and that “cultural discontinuities introduced by formal education entail cognitive discontiuities in the organization of basic cognitive capacities” (Cole 1974:7).

In the early seventies, Cazden, John, and Hymes (1972) selected studies that applied linguistic concepts relevant to the use of language in classroom settings. Boggs (1972) and Philips (1972) addressed the issue of compatibility between the use of language in the home/community and in the classroom. Philips identified four participant structures, defined as “ways of arranging verbal interaction with students, for communicating different types of educational material, and for providing variation in the presentation of the same material to hold children’s interest” (1972:377). This concept has substantially inf...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Introduction to Cross-Cultural Literacy: An Anthropological Approach to Dealing with Diversity: Marietta Saravia-Shore, Teachers College,Columbia University Steven F. Arvizu, California State University at Bakersfield
• Cross-Culturally Compatible Schooling
• Community Contexts
• Constructing Classroom Contexts
• Biographies of Contributors
• Index