Becoming an Educational Ethnographer

The Challenges and Opportunities of Undertaking Research

Juana M. Sancho-Gil, Fernando Hernández-Hernández

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000295566
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This book provides practical advice on the learning and teaching perspectives of ethnography, including what undertaking research looks like and the experiences it will bring. It considers what it means to be and become an educational ethnographer and builds on an inextricable entanglement between the researchers' field of study and their research trajectories.

With a range of carefully chosen international contributions, this book uses a variety of practical case studies to provide further information about the pros and cons of this research perspective. Chapter authors share the knowledge and experience gained from the research and how it has affected their approach to social phenomena.

This book is an ideal introduction for anyone considering research approach or becoming an educational ethnographer and will be of interest to researchers already working in this field.

1

RESEARCHING – AND BEING AN ETHNOGRAPHIC RESEARCHER – AS A PROCESS OF BECOMING

Juana M. Sancho-Gil and Fernando Hernández-Hernández

Introduction

This chapter introduces the purpose of this book with a tentative approach to the concept of becoming, its relationship with the praxis of ethnographic research, the movements of researchers and the very notion of what research could be. By following these guidelines, we explore the following questions: How can we face investigation that does not follow a pre-defined path or apply pre-set methods, but opens up to dialogues emerging in the encounter with the experiences of the collaborators and the researcher? What is the effect of research processes when disrupted by the unexpected, and the researcher places themselves in a position of not-knowing? Which is the relevance of researcher’s movements through an ethnographic study and how this journey affects inquiry, configuring itself as a relational experience where one is attentive not to the expected, but to what is happening in a non-linear and full of bifurcations process, doubts and places of not-knowing? How do these movements allow exploring other senses of ethnographic research that revise and question some foundations and practices on the supposedly standardized way of doing research and being an ethnographic researcher in education?

The purpose of this book

This book wants to be part of the conversation that began in the 1990s about the onto-epistemological, methodological, and ethical foundations of social and educational research, under the umbrella of the post-qualitative turns. According to St. Pierre (2011, p. 615), these turns ‘announce a radical break with the humanist, modernist, imperialist, representationalist, objectivist, rationalist, epistemological, ontological, and methodological assumptions of Western Enlightenment thought and practice’. This movement celebrates the methodological differences and complexity of qualitative research and advocates for greater openness, imagination and risk-taking, especially to carry out research based on ‘post-theories’ (new materialism, new empiricism, posthumanism). These new ontologies demand methodological displacements, incidents, conceptual leaps, and landslides, as well as theoretical links. In conventional qualitative humanistic research (St. Pierre, 2011) the methodological references and methods that connect them to reality are often considered relatively simple and concrete, compared to more complex or abstract entities that help to generate knowledge, concepts and arguments differently. This framework allows us to think about the meaning of research from another perspective, with other foundations and purposes. But above all, it enables us to argue that research is not just about following a pre-fixed path, in which methods are applied, to give an account of results foreseen in the initial questions (Hernández-Hernández & Revelles Benavente, 2019, p. 27).

As Lather (2007), Koro-Ljungberg et al., (2009), Jackson & Mazzei (2012) and Koro-Ljungberg (2015) have argued, theories (what guides and supports research) and methodologies are interconnected to enable functional relationships. Moreover, we can consider them as political movements against normative science, especially among those academics interested in emerging ontologies and surprising methodologies. When methodologies are considered immanent, changing, and transforming (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/1987) – and bearers of unknown and unforeseen elements – research practices seem to bring academics closer to openness and imagination. Publications linked to this line of thought try to review, expand, and critically examine the state of normative qualitative research insofar as it has been configured as a space of thought that tends to evade all doubt.

In 2018 we discussed some of these insights in a paper (Sancho-Gil & Hernández-Hernández, 2018) presented in the European Conference of Educational Research at the network of Educational Ethnography, which led to this publication. In this presentation we considered four themes crossed and affected by the notion of becoming, which emerge from the ESBRINA research group¹ ethnographic studies (Domingo et al., 2014; Hernández-Hernández, 2017; Hernández et al., 2012; Hernández-Hernández & Sancho-Gil, 2017; Hernández-Hernández & Sancho-Gil, 2015). These issues are particularly challenging and promising for unveiling the complexities of the multiple layers of institutional cultures. And to question our ontological, epistemological, methodological, and ethical frames in ethnographic research.

1. The first concerned the ever-expanding nature of the ethnographic sites. In the 21st century, the challenge of going beyond the tangible aspects of culture, considering values and what Clifford Geertz (1973) termed as the ‘ethos’ of the culture, is now greater than ever. It is necessary to overcome the narrow focus on ethnography in one place.
2. The second, to the intra-action between virtual and ‘analogical’ sites. Something that has given way to notions such as ‘digital ethnography’ (Murthy, 2008), ‘virtual ethnography’ (Hine, 2000), ‘cyberethnography’ (Robinson & Schulz, 2009, 2011), ‘internet ethnography’ (boyd, 2010; Sade-Beck, 2004), ‘ethnography on the internet’ (Beaulieu, 2004), ‘ethnography of virtual spaces’ (Blomberg & Burrel, 2009), ‘ethnographic research on the internet’ (Garcia et al., 2009), ‘internet-related ethnography’ (Postill & Pink, 2012) and ‘netnography’ (Kozinets, 2010).
3. The third one related to the on-growing multimodal nature of information and research evidences. So, the traditional vision of fieldnotes as written (alphabetic) notes (Walford, 2009) is being challenged by the multimodal turn (Dicks et al., 2006; Hernández-Hernández & Sancho-Gil, 2018). A trend strongly driven by the proliferation of digital media that is generating new problems to manage and interpret information. Since, according to boyd (2010, np), ‘we’ve entered an era where data is cheap, but making sense of it is not.’
4. Finally, we referred to the post-qualitative, the new empiricism and the new materialism turns (Lather & St. Pierre, 2013; Barad, 2003), which sustain that theories which guide and support research and methodologies are interconnected to enable conceptual and practical relationships. When methodologies are considered as immanent, changing and transforming (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/1987) – and carrying unknown and unexpected elements, as we saw in a recent research project on how teachers learn (Hernández et al., 2020) – we are able to review, expand and examine research perspectives.

This framework allows us to think about the meaning of research, and particularly of Ethnography in Education, from other perspectives, with other foundations and purposes. But, above all, it allows us to open our imagination by thinking of research as something other than a pre-determined path, in which methods are applied to account for the results already foreseen in the initial questions. That is why we invite possible readers to be open to things that question and expand our positionalities (Hernández-Hernández & Sancho-Gil, 2015), which are always strategically provisional, and which open up ways for us to continue learning together.

By trying to be part of this conversation, this book examines ethnography in education to disrupt/de-territorialize it. It proposes to experiment with research differently through the concept and experience of ‘becoming’. This perspective on ethnography could constitute an expansion of the concept/territory of ethnography.

A ‘becoming’ approach to ethnography in education could affect observations and interviews that, while guided by the research questions, are not-pre-given from protocols. For instance, in addition to what is documented and what happens in the conversation is the sensation of connecting relations and affect/becoming that come together in the assemblage (e.g. research questions, multimodal fieldnotes, interviews, researcher positionality) (Masny, 2014).

The post-qualitative movement entails the invitation to carry out ethnography in education that does not separate ontology, epistemology, methodology and ethics. This pays attention to the entanglement between the human, the non-human and the matter. This proposal suggests one assumes ethnography not to be a pre-defined journey, but rather one that opens itself to the possibility of surprise at what happens as the research flow unfolds, concerning the studied phenomenon.

This post-qualitative perspective becomes articulated and agitated around the concept of ‘becoming’, based on the meaning that Deleuze & Guattari (1980/1987) give it and that Barad (2014, pp. 181–182) develops when she refers to what happens in a research process.

In an important sense, this story in its ongoing (re)patterning is (re)(con)figuring me. ‘I’ am neither outside nor inside; ‘I’ am of the diffraction pattern. Or rather, this ‘I’ that is not ‘me’ alone and never was, that is always already multiply dispersed and diffracted throughout spacetime(mattering), including in this paper, in its ongoing being-becoming is of the diffraction pattern.

This orientation towards of ‘becoming’ generates when, as Lather (2013) points out, researchers, following qualitative research, re-imagine and carry out studies that could produce different knowledge. This research cannot be described in an orderly manner in textbooks or manuals. There are no methodological approaches or instruments that can be learned without a problem. From this movement, one begins to approach research differently, because one adopts an onto-episte-methodology and an ethic that assumes that ‘[i]ndividuals do not exist as fixed or permanent entities separate from their surroundings but as ongoing relations of becoming in a world that is also always becoming’ (Atkinson, 2015, p. 44).

A tentative approach of ‘becoming’

The title of this book brings us to the need to discuss the notion of becoming. According to Faber (2011), despite the large differences between Whitehead’s ‘philosophy of organism’ (process thought), Deleuze’s ‘philosophy of difference’ (nomadic thought), and Judith Butler’s ‘philosophy of gender’ (part of feminist philosophy), this notion can be understood

as being part of—or better, as being at the forefront of—a philosophy for which Becoming is eminent. Indeed, in the concept of ‘Becoming,’ they turn our understanding of the world upside down—with all the philosophical, scientific, aes...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• 1 Researching – and being an ethnographic researcher – as a process of becoming
• PART I. Becoming as moving researcher positionality
• 2 Roots and routes to reading the world as an ethnographer
• 3 Becoming an educational ethnographer by organized representations of educational realities and ‘researching through’
• 4 Becoming educational ethnographer through time and ontological displacements
• 5 Becoming an ethnographer: Living, teaching and learning ethnographically
• 6 The challenges and opportunities of becoming an ethnographer
• PART II. Becoming as an onto-epistemological framework
• 7 What comes after becoming: Virtualities at the end of a doctoral research
• 8 An ethnographic research based on an ontology of becoming
• 9 Openness to the unforeseen in a nomadic research process on teachers’ learning experiences
• PART III. Becoming as a concept that allows to re-signify the subjectivity
• 10 An accidental institutional ethnographer: Reflections on paradoxes and positionality
• 11 Researchers and risk: Exploring vulnerability, subjectivity, and identity in ethnographic research through collage making
• 12 Ethnographic educational research as assemblages of teachers’ and researchers’ movements and their learning environments
• Index