Critical Ethnography in Educational Research

A Theoretical and Practical Guide

Francis Phil Carspecken

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136641565
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Ethnographic methods are becoming increasingly prevalent in contemporary educational research. CriticalEthnography in Educational Research provides both a technical, theoretical guide to advanced ethnography--focusing on such concepts as primary data collection and system relationships--and a very practical guide for researchers interested in conducting actual studies.

1

What is Critical Qualitative Research

Items covered in Chapter 1:

• Universal applications of critical methodological theory

• Distinguishing between critical value orientation and critical epistemology

• The value orientation of criticalists

• Intuiting critical epistemology: core imagery

These days, trying to learn about social research is rather like walking into a room of noisy people. The room is full of cliques, each displaying a distinctive jargon and cultural style. There is, of course, a large group talking quantitative research much as it has been talked for decades. But there are new, flashy groups heatedly discussing “constructivist,” “postmodern,” “post-positivist,” and “critical” research. Most of these people are talking about qualitative social research, but they disagree with each other on such basic issues as the nature of reality, the nature of knowledge, and the concept of truth. You cannot get more basic than that!

At the center of the qualitative groups are a number of people who have attracted the most attention. They not only advocate one type of research practice, they also claim to have categorized and explained all the rest of us. In their hands are typological charts listing the principal schools of contemporary research methodology along with some definitive statements for each. Some have us sorted out according to the purposes for which we conduct research (Lather 1991). Some compare us according to our ontological and epistemological assumptions (Guba 1990a; Guba and Lincoln 1994).

The noise in the room is intimidating enough for anyone wishing to become a new voice on research methodology. But it is the typological schemes that give me the most angst. The problem they present for a new book on qualitative social research is that a new voice will tend to get placed before it is understood.

I have set myself up for this sort of trouble with the title of my book, Critical Ethnography in Educational Research, Many of you will have preconceptions of what critical social research is because many of you will have read some of the popular methodological typologies. “Critical” always gets a place within them, but rarely is it well described.

So, I must begin this book with a request to my readers: put away, as best you can, all your preconceptions of what “critical” means. Wait to see what sense I give this term before trying to position me in relation to other methodological theories. Forget about the methodological charts and schemes you have seen in other research books: their descriptions of critical research are usually far removed from my own practice and conception of it. Wait until the book’s end before trying to compare me with other methodological theories. For my part, I will pretty much ignore the noise surrounding us as I present my critical methodological theory. I will not construct typologies of my own, will not diverge into discussions of other methodologies or even other works on critical methodology. I will aim for a fresh start; taking basic issues in all forms of inquiry and showing how they may be treated from a critical perspective.

UNIVERSAL APPLICATIONS OF CRITICAL SOCIAL RESEARCH

This book is intended to be useful for all people wishing to either conduct their own qualitative projects or to simply learn more about qualitative research. The fact that the methodology is critical does not rule out the book for people who wish to study features of human life and human experience that are not overtly political. Sociologists, anthropologists, educational researchers, and psychologists could all use this methodological framework.

Doctoral students at the University of Houston have used the methodology presented here to study a wide variety of phenomena. Houston dissertations using this framework include the following:

• “The Hidden Curriculum of a Bilingual Education Classroom”

• “Case Studies in Religious Experience”

• “Perceptions of Afro-Centric Pedagogy by African-Americans”

• “Therapist Reactions to Client Suicides”

• “Site-Based Management: The Creation of a New Bureaucratic Tier”

• “The Culture of Resisting High-School Males”

• “Male Perceptions of Intimacy”

• “Male Perceptions of Masculinity”

• “Case Studies of High-Achieving Hispanic Female Migrants”

• “Fathers of Terminally 111 Children”

• “World System Theory, World Student Culture, and Asian Indian Graduate Students in the United States”

The list could go on, as I have supervised many dissertations on a wide range of topics, most of which employed this particular critical research methodology, learned by students in the courses I teach. The point I wish to make is that critical qualitative research methodology is meant to be quite universal in the topics it can investigate. This is because all acts of inquiry beg the same set of core questions, and critical theory has addressed these questions in the most promising ways. The rest of this chapter will give a basic overview of the critical perspective.

CRITICAL QUALITATIVE RESEARCH¹

Qualitative social research investigates human phenomena that do not lend themselves, by their very nature, to quantitative methods. There are many diverse research traditions that fall under the qualitative label (Silverman 1985, 1993; Eisner and Peshkin 1990; LeCompte 1990; LeCompte, Millroy, and Preissle 1992; LeCompte and Preissle 1993, Denzin and Lincoln 1994; Miles and Huberman 1994; Vidich and Stanford 1994). “Critical” qualitative research is one of several genres of inquiry into nonquantifiable features of social life. Small numbers of social researchers have been calling themselves “critical” for about twenty years. When asked, I place my own ethnographic work within this category (Carspecken 1987, 1991, 1992).

Those of us who openly call ourselves “criticalists” definitely share a value orientation. We are all concerned about social Inequalities, and we direct our work toward positive social change. We also share a concern with social theory and some of the basic issues it has struggled with since the nineteenth century. These include the nature of social structure, power, culture, and human agency. We use our research, in fact, to refine social theory rather than merely to describe social life. Together, we have begun to develop critical social research.

Up to the present, however, criticalists have not really shared a methodological theory. Methodological theories provide the principles by which to design a research project, develop field techniques, and Interpret data. Only quite recently have efforts been made to describe critical methodology, and the authors of these efforts do not completely agree with each other (Anderson 1989; Lather 1991; Carspecken and Apple 1992; Quantz 1992; Kinchloe and McLaren 1994).

Thus, critical social research (which is usually also qualitative) has up to this time been an orientation rather than a tight methodological school. This book differs from other articles and texts on critical research because it attempts to construct a tight methodological theory by making use of various insights from critical social theory. The methodology presented here, moreover, is intended to apply to all forms of social research, not just to social research motivated by the typical concerns of criticalists. Critical theory has enormous implications for all the basic concepts employed in social research: concepts like “validity,” “reliability,” and “objectivity,” among others.

You will find a number of articles and some books on the market today that attempt to review the field of critical social research (Anderson 1989; Lather 1991; Carspecken and Apple 1992; Quantz 1992; Kinchloe and McLaren 1994). Each such publication provides one or more statements attempting to characterize the critical orientation. They are not identical characterizations, but they are all within the same ball park. Here is one I pretty much agree with; it can be found in a recent publication by Joe Kinchloe and Peter McLaren (1994). Be warned; it is dense and will not be fully intelligible to all readers. I will clarify its main points in a discussion following:

We are defining a criticalist as a researcher or theorist who attempts to use her or his work as a form of social or cultural criticism and who accepts certain basic assumptions: that all thought is fundamentally mediated by power relations which are socially and historically constituted; that facts can never be isolated from the domain of values or removed from some form of ideological inscription; that the relationship between concept and object and signifier and signified is never stable or fixed and is often mediated by the social relations of capitalist production and consumption; that language is central to the formation of subjectivity (conscious and unconscious awareness); that certain groups in any society are privileged over others and, although the reasons for this privileging may vary widely, the oppression which characterizes contemporary societies is most forcefully reproduced when subordinates accept their social status as natural, necessary or inevitable; that oppression has many faces and that focusing on only one at the expense of others (e.g. class oppression versus racism) often elides the interconnections among them; and finally that mainstream research practices are generally, although most often unwittingly, implicated in the reproduction of systems of class, race and gender oppression. (139-140)

That, readers, was a single sentence! It is, probably unfortunately, very typical in style to what you will find in the critical and postmodern research literature. I say “probably unfortunately” because Kinchloe and McLaren’s article is actually an important contribution to the field. The dense writing style they use works well with readers like myself, who have already read many works in the critical and postmodern traditions. Some things are best said through a style like theirs. What is unfortunate is not that some writings on critical methodology are densely composed, but rather that virtually all writings in the field are composed in this way. This has made work in the critical tradition basically inaccessible to a large number of people. Hence, I will make every effort in this book to write clearly and accessibly, inviting a wide range of students and practitioners to my ideas.

Let us now concentrate on the content of Kinchloe and McLaren’s dense passage, rather than the style in which it is written. I can clarify the gist of this quotation by grouping the points it makes into two distinctive categories: (1) the value orientation of critical researchers and (2) the principles of critical epistemology. By elaborating on Kinchloe and McLaren’s list of points within these two categories, I should be able to give a clear, introductory understanding of what the critical orientation is all about.

Facts and Values

But wait a minute, does not the distinction I make here between value orientation and epistemology contradict one of the points in the quoted passage: that “facts can never be isolated from the domain of values or removed from some form of ideological inscription”? The value orientation of critical social researchers obviously has to do with values, and epistemology of all brands, critical or otherwise, is fundamental to any concept of “facts.” It would seem that I have introduced a distinction that runs against one of the very tenets of critical social research.

Readers steeped in the critical tradition, the constructivist tradition, or the postmodern movement may have already concluded that I am unforgivably in error. Are not values and “facts” inextricably connected? Patti Lather (1986), for example, almost defines my chosen genre of work as “overtly ideological.” The ideology of the researcher, including her values, is supposed to enter intrinsically and inseparably into the methods, interpretations, and epistemology of critical research.

Egon Guba, himself a social constructivist rather than a criticalist, is one of those attempting to locate all social research within a methodological typology. He also believes in the tight connection between facts and values, and he describes the “critical paradigm” with reference to this connection:

If values do enter into every inquiry, then the question immediately arises as to what values and whose values shall govern. If the findings of studies can vary depending on the values chosen, then the choice of a particular value system tends to empower and enfranchise certain persons while disempowering and disenfranchising others. Inquiry thereby becomes a political act. (Guba 1990a:24)

So it would seem that my decision to separate the value orientation of criticalists from the principles of critical epistemology runs against the principles of critical research itself.

Well, I do not agree with those who make such sweeping claims about the fusion of facts and values. Earlier I have even stated that one does not need to share the value orientation of criticalists in order to employ critical epistemology. Frankly, I find many of the claims made for fact and value fusion to be sloppy! The relationship between research findings and values is a complex and many-layered affair. Yes, there is a connection between findings and values. No, we cannot simply claim their fusion into being without giving contexts and clarifications.

Guba’s remarks, typical of many, are very much off the mark. He emphasizes value choice, and he believes that, once chosen, the values of the researcher will strongly determine the facts discovered. I totally disagree. Values are not exactly “chosen,” for one thing (not usually anyway). Highly value-driven researchers like we criticalists most often feel compelled to conduct research as a way of bettering the oppressed and downtrodden. It is a personal need to do so, not exactly a choice. But that pertains to our value orientation, to the reasons why we conduct research and to our choice of subjects and sites to investigate. This orientation does not determine the “facts” we find in the field. Here, in the realm of “fact,” the realm of validity claims made at the end of a study, values and facts are interlinked but not fused. And the sorts of values involved in research findings need not be the same as the values defining our orientation.

This distinction is an important one because good critical research should not be biased. Critical epistemology does not guarantee the finding of “facts” that match absolutely what one may want to find.

So research value orientations should not determine research findings. Orientations provide the reasons why people conduct their studies. They therefore have a lot to do with the choices one must make when beginning a research project: what to study and to what end. They also determine how findings will be used—what to publish and what to leave out, who to share the knowledge with and in what way. The value orientation of the researcher does not “construct” the object of study: the same “object” can be examined for a large variety of reasons, under a large variety of motivations, and yield the same findings.

Now, the term “criticalist” applies to people like me who share a distinctive, critical, value orientation. The phrase “critical methodology” however, refers to the epistemological principles we criticalists advocate: not just for people motivated in the same ways that we are, but for all researchers. This is because critical theory has provided the most convincing answers to knotty epistemological questions begged in every act of inquiry

The essential features of critical research methodology, then, are epistemological and do not depend on the value orientation of criticalists. The value orientation of criticalists, however, is important. People operating from this value orientation have rethought traditional ideas about knowledge and reality, finding them wanting. It is therefore highly important to become familiar with the value orientation of criticalists before learning about critical epistemology.

The Value Orientation of Critical Researchers

Let us examine the value orientation shared by those of us who call ourselves “critical” Kinchloe and McLaren (1994) list a number of “assumptions” in the passage quoted above pertaining more to our shared value orientation than anything else. These are (and I will partially quote, partially paraphrase):

• that research be employed in cultural and socia...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Series Editor’s Introduction
• Acknowledgments
• 1. What is Critical Qualitative Research?
• 2. Ontological Models and Research Design
• 3. Stage One: Building a Primary Record
• 4. Validity Claims and Three Ontological Realms
• 5. Validity Requirements for Constructing the Primary Record
• 6. Stage Two: Preliminary Reconstructive Analysis
• 7. More on Reconstructive Analysis: Embodied Meaning, Power, and Secondary Concepts of Interaction
• 8. Validity Requirements for Stage Two
• 9. Coding Procedures Congruent with Reconstructive Analysis
• 10. Stage Three: Dialogical Data Generation through Interviews, Group Discussions, and IPR
• 11. Validity Requirements for Stage Three
• 12. Conceptualizing the Social System
• 13. Stages Four and Five: Conducting Systems Analysis
• Bibliography
• Index