Institutional Ethnography

A Theory of Practice for Writing Studies Researchers

Michelle LaFrance

• Publisher: Utah State University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781607328674
• Topic: Filología
• Subtopic: Lingüística

A form of critical ethnography introduced to the social sciences in the late 1990s, institutional ethnographyuncovers how things happen within institutional sites, providing a new and flexible tool for the study of how "work" is co-constituted within sites of writing and writing instruction. The study of work and work processes reveals how institutional discourse, social relations, and norms of professional practice coordinate what people do across time and sites of writing. Adoption of IE offers finely grained understandings of how our participation in the work of writing, writing instruction, and sites of writing gives material face to the institutions that govern the social world.In this book, Michelle LaFrance introduces the theories, rhetorical frames, and methods that ground and animate institutional ethnography. Three case studies illustrate key aspects of the methodology in action, tracing the work of writing assignment design in a linked gateway course, the ways annual reviews coordinate the work of faculty and writing center administrators and staff, and how the key term "information literacy" socially organizes teaching in a first-year English program. Through these explorations of the practice of ethnography within sites of writing and writing instruction, LaFrance shows that IE is a methodology keenly attuned to the material relations and conditions of work in twenty-first-century writing studies contexts, ideal for both practiced and novice ethnographers who seek to understand the actualities of social organization and lived experience in the sites they study. Institutional Ethnography expands the field's repertoire of research methodologies and offers the grounding necessary for work with the IE framework. It will be invaluable to writing researchers and students and scholars of writing studies across the spectrum—composition and rhetoric, literacy studies, and education—as well as those working in fields such as sociology and cultural studies.

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Institutional Ethnography

A Theory of Practice for Writing Studies Researchers

DOI: 10.7330/9781607328674.c001

Locating the actual as a distinct terrain of inquiry is one of the first challenges [of institutional ethnography]. We can hint at it by saying that underlying anyone’s everyday life experience something invisible is happening to generate a particular set of circumstances. It is that “something” that is of research interest. People’s lives happen in real time and in real locations to real people. Institutional ethnographers explore the actual world in which things happen, in which people live, work, love, laugh, and cry.

—Marie Campbell and Frances Gregor, Mapping Social Relations: A Primer in Doing Institutional Ethnography (original emphasis)

Conceptions of writing are closely imbricated with the actualities of our work as writing instructors, writing researchers, and people who work within the rich contexts of writing programs (Ohman 1976; Crowley 1998; Miller 1993; Horner 2000). Conceptions of writing constitute, organize, and shape the experiences and practices at the center of our work. Likewise, the organizational patterns of our work, the structures of our everyday lives, inevitably shape how we conceptualize writing. How, then, do we study these mutually constitutive relationships? In other words, how do we study how writing and writing instruction happen?

This chapter lays out and adapts the sociological framework of IE for the study of work in institutional sites of writing: classrooms, writing programs, writing centers, vertical writing curricula, campus cultures of writing, assessment initiatives, and other local and national sites where writing is the generative fulcrum that organizes institutional contexts. IE is “a method of inquiry designed to discover how our everyday lives and worlds are embedded in and organized by relations that transcend them, relations coordinating what we do with what others are doing elsewhere and elsewhen” (Griffith and Smith 2014, 10). The general goal of IE is to uncover how things happen—bringing to light the experiences and practices that constitute the institution, how discourse compels and shapes what people do, and how norms of practice speak to, for, or over individuals. IE focuses on the everyday work life of individuals, tracing work processes and textual mediations as these reveal the interplay among the individual, the material, and the ideological. The IE framework prompts us to ask how the experiences and practices of writing and its institutional structures (writing courses, writing instruction, and writing administration) are generated by the complex institutional contexts. How do we understand the material actualities of writing, writing instruction, and sites of writing? How does our work take shape?

As a “deep theory” (Lillis 2008), IE offers a process of inquiry for exploring how institutions take shape. IE as methodology poses the ongoing critical work of ethnography as a simultaneous process of theorizing our work within institutional contexts and as a means to understand the actualities of that work that live below the layers of our materialist discourse. In order to study writers, our work with writing instructors, our own work (as faculty and administrators), and sites of writing as a series of institutional relations—so that we surface the ways local institutional forces shape writing practices, writing instruction, and writing itself—ethnographers must be prepared with a flexible and adaptable set of heuristics, a critical working vocabulary, and a complex understanding of the ways these sites are co-constituted by knowing individuals who carry out their work in different settings. With its comprehensive framework for understanding how our work is institutionally generated and coordinated with the work of others, IE supports new and practiced writing studies researchers who would seek to understand the particularities of our everyday lives. The actualities we uncover deepen our ongoing efforts to understand the impact of the labor conditions of the field and the relationships between pedagogy and material conditions. The IE process of inquiry can help writing researchers study the complexities of institutional locations and the experiences and practices associated with writing, shifting the focus of study from what writers do “naturally” to account more fully for how writers, writing instructors, and writing administration negotiate their institutional contexts and material actualities.

Sections of this chapter define the key terms for work with IE in sites of writing: ruling relations, standpoint, social coordination, problematic, work and work processes, institutional discourse, and institutional circuits. Chapter 2 demonstrates how a project with IE is carried out, offering the case study of two linked gateway courses as the background.

How Do We Understand Institutions?

Institutions are hierarchically ordered, rule-governed, and textually mediated workplaces, “organized around a distinctive function, such as education, health care, and so on” (Smith 2005, 225). Institutions are also complex rhetorical, social, and material entities, as scholars in writing studies have argued (see, for instance, Porter et al. 2000; Horner 2016; Schell 2003; the introduction to this volume). As ethnographers who study writing and the conditions that surround, shape, and produce writing, we want to enter sites with our eyes open to often hidden, erased, or elided experiences and practices that live below our preconceived notions of institutionally organized work.

Most of us tend to have a “generalized macro-level ideal” in mind when thinking about or discussing institutions and large formalized organizations (LaFrance and Nicolas 2013). That is, we share a collective understanding of these sites based on common preconceptions and experiences in and around them (Smith 2005, 160). The challenge for the institutional ethnographer is to recognize the dynamic and generative nature of the institution as a social entity. IE supports this move by conceptualizing individuals as unique and knowing while emphasizing how institutions function as “shape-shifters,” social constellations that adapt to the distinctive needs and roles of the individuals who engage them. The “university,” for example, looks quite different from individual to individual. As Melissa Nicolas and I explain, “A professor experiences ‘university’ very differently from the student who experiences ‘university’ very differently from her parents who, again, experience ‘university’ very differently from the trustees. And even an individual’s micro-level account of ‘university’ changes over time: a first-year student has a different relationship with ‘university’ than a senior whose definition will change as she becomes an alumnae” (LaFrance and Nicolas 2012, 131).

Institutions of higher education, campus communities, writing programs, professional positions, and classrooms come into being in the moments in which people negotiate the everyday toward some highly individualized end. In noting the mutable nature of the institution, we are able to refocus our ethnographic eye on people as they negotiate their environments. We are able to challenge our own presumed or static understandings imposed by institutional or professional discourses. We are able to trace patterns of behavior that emerge over time and space as we compare, contrast, and make associations within and across sites, observing how people in similar situations do what they do.

To trace these mutually constitutive relationships, IE focuses the researcher on what people do in the everyday—the practices they engage in, the decisions they make about those practices, and how their negotiations of policy, procedure, hierarchies, and systems of value take on a particular shape. On the one hand, these everyday experiences and practices are a matter of choice, preference, and personal forms of identification; on the other hand, because institutions are material locations and social relations have material implications, these everyday doings are influenced by the common ways of doing, knowing, and being that are active social and professional norms in local settings. It is the “doing” of people who are situated in time and space that brings these tensions into visibility, making the institution itself legible for study (Smith 2001, 163). A focus on the doing of people and attention to how they do what they do within institutional contexts allows the institutional ethnographer to bring new insights to the study of writing as a material face of the institution.

Because IE sees institutions as hierarchically ordered, rule-governed, and textually mediated workplaces and as complex rhetorical, social, and material entities that shape what we do and how we do it, ethnographers who adapt the IE framework can systematically account for individual practices within the interconnected sites of programs, units, and institutions. IE is concerned with the specifics of difference, divergence, and disjunction within sites of writing; it brings to visibility what happens in local sites below the level of professional, managerial, pedagogical, and other free-floating discourses. The methodology offers us the opportunity to uncover and explore stories that are often otherwise erased by the field’s preoccupation with generalized disciplinary and pedagogical ideals.

Consider the following three vignettes:

A TA who has agreed to be a participant in my study of a linked gateway course for English majors is telling me about an assignment she is teaching in her section of the writing link. The professor who wrote the assignment prompt (a “commentary”) is a senior scholar in the field she hopes to enter and is in charge of the lecture her writing course is linked to. But the TA tells me she has never heard of or written a “commentary” and so isn’t sure how to answer the questions her students are asking about the assignment. “It’s sort of like a summary, only there’s more to it than that,” she tells me as she recounts the prompt. “[The professor] says it isn’t structured like an argument. It’s more focused on plot and character—I think. My students keep asking me what I want them to do. I keep asking him what he wants me to do.” [Laughter.]

* * *

I am meeting with a representative of the HR office because there has been some confusion over the title of a position in the writing center I supervise. Is the employee’s title “Assistant Director of the Writing Center” or “Writing Center Assistant”? Because the position is currently classified as “staff” and has been assigned to a particular “pay band,” the representative tells me that the person in the position must adhere to a regular eight-hour workday and work full-time during the breaks between semesters (when the center is closed and there is little daily “work”). The position must be focused on “front desk” duties—answering the phone and email, keeping the schedule of appointments, submitting tutor time cards, and doing other paperwork. The person in the position cannot be asked to tutor more than eight hours weekly, which includes covering shifts when tutors miss them. The individual in the position can volunteer to run workshops or work on resources for tutor training if they choose but cannot be tasked with this regularly.

As I listen to the representative, I am thinking about how I’d like to see the “Assistant Director” provide a professional model to our tutors—tutoring, leading tutor trainings, and also teaching first-year writing classes. I believe an “Assistant Director” should be working with me to develop and support a culture of writing that sustains the tutor development work beyond initial training and workshops. I want us to move away from thinking that the work of the center is about “correctness” or is “secretarial” in nature. The HR representative tells me that this move would entail a reclassification of the position, from staff to faculty, require the prior approval of the dean’s office, and require that the position be held in an academic department, such as English. I begin to realize, then, that the structure of this position will largely be determined by a number of factors that may well be beyond my control.

* * *

In a “think-aloud protocol” recorded for me, an instructor verbalizes her thoughts as she composes a writing assignment involving library research for first-year writing students. About seven minutes into her recording, her voice takes on a slight note of frustration. She describes going to the library website to find resources for her students but feeling like what she wants her students to be doing doesn’t match what the library seems to think they should be doing. Three times, she repeats the circular process of going to the campus library’s website to look for resources or links that will be helpful to her students, not finding what she is looking for, then returning to her handout.

After typing and deleting a sentence that asks her students to go to the library website to look at resources themselves, she confides to the digital recorder:

What I’m realizing about situated research practices is that . . . [five-second pause . . . and heavy sigh] . . . that if I’m researching a community there may be some things that are valuable on the library website. But a lot of what will be happening in this research process is that my students will be gathering general information about their communities and specific information about one community . . . and that will lead me outside of the typical realm of academic research.

So I guess the question that comes up for me is, what is academic research? What is it not? I don’t want my students to have to be doing the kind of work a graduate student or a person with a doctorate is doing. I don’t think they have the resources to, and it will just make them hate life. So I keep coming around back to—how do I make this process manageable for them? And how do I make it accessible for them?

In the first vignette, a TA struggles to understand how to teach a writing assignment designed by someone else. The “commentary,” a genre that is popular in some schools of literary analysis, is a form unfamiliar to this TA, who must coach her students through the form and grade their written responses to the prompt. The TA reveals her struggle with the guidance she is getting from the professor who designed the assignment. As she recounts her attempts to make sense of the assignment, she compares it to other genre forms she is familiar and comfortable with—but seems to suggest that these comparisons are not helping her understand the assignment as she would like. This vignette reveals the ways writing is negotiated into being between those employed as TAs in the linked courses and the ways the linked-course structure influences particular understandings of writing. Writing, as it is conceived of within the social networks of the linked gateway courses, takes shape in the interplay among the professor, the professor’s writing prompt for undergraduates, and the conversations TAs carry forward to student writers who complete the assignment.

The second vignette reveals different visions of writing center work through conversations about the shape and focus of an employee’s workday. The HR office has put forward a standardized set of expectations for the work of staff members within a particular “pay band” and seeks to shape the position’s daily tasks to reflect those expectations. The investment of the HR office is in creating consistently fair expectations for all employment situations at the university and keeping the university in compliance with county, state, and federal employment regulations. These standardized ideals of work do not match my vision for the work of an “Assistant Director,” as these ideals have been inspired by professional conversations within the writing center community. The ideals of writing center work that I espouse are closely imbricated with theories of writing that (1) are active in writing studies; (2) recognize the situated, flexible, and rhetorical nature of writing; and (3) conceive of work with student writers as a form of professional expertise. The divergent visions we have for the employee’s title and daily duties demonstrate the difficulties inherent in situating the work of writing studies professionals within preexisting institutional structures. Across campus, elements of that work, such as a title and the scope of daily work practice, will look dramatically different to those involved in this discussion because of our distinctive professional investments in and institutionally situated perspectives on the nature of that work. We often think of titles and our work in generalized ways, without much attention to how these sites of our work actually take shape in the local contexts that inform and shape them.

In the third vignette, we see an instructor of a first-year writing course thinking through a question to which the field of writing studies has no fewer than dozens of different responses. From Ambrose N. Manning’s query in 1961 about whether the “research paper” was “here to stay,” to Ken Macrorie’s 1988 proposal for I-Search that pitched “research” as a form of inquiry, to Joseph Bizup’s (2008) call to teach research as a “rhetorical practice,” to Elizabeth Wardle’s (2009) critique of composition’s reliance on “mutt genres” including the “research paper,” to efforts by the Citation Project team to understand how students approach sources in their reading and writing (Howard, Serviss, and Rodrigue 2010; Jamieson and Howard 2011), there is little agreement in the field of writing studies about what constitutes “research” or how students best learn the basic conventions of “research.” Even so, this instructor seems to be bumping up against her university library’s established set of expectations for student writers. There is an interesting moment in the participant’s response, which is the sort of significant “tell” an ethnographic researcher is always looking for: the participant pauses and sighs deeply, demonstrating an emotional pause. (She tells me later in an interview that she felt what she was doing didn’t match what she thought she was expected to do.) What we see in this instructor’s narrative is an example of an individual negotiating a variety of different expectations placed on her work teaching a writing class.

The foundational tenet of IE becomes clear in these three vignettes—in the doings represented here, we can begin to see how notions of writing and its institutional contexts are co-created in the “inter-individual” interplay among discursive structures, material actualities, and the work individuals carry out (Smith 2005). The conceptions of writing in each vignette are constructed through these “discursive pivot points” (DeVault 2008, 5) that take shape in the moments when knowing and active individuals engage in their work. These vignettes then reveal how institutional contexts contour the conceptions of writing they generate. As the individuals in each vignette i...