Key Themes in the Ethnography of Education

Sara Delamont, Author

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781412901598, 9781412901581
• eBook ISBN: 9781446297513
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Recherche dans l'éducation

"This is a beautifully written book that takes the reader to the heart of ethnography as experience. Readers can walk in the shoes of ethnographers who have travelled before them, and learn as they learned. Sara Delamont is an undisputed expert in both ethnography and education, and here illustrates she is also a tour de force in writing style. All the important ingredients for a recipe to make a good quality ethnography are here, and they are served up with relish!"
- Karen O'Reilly, Loughborough University

"This is a  powerful, richly nuanced, evocative work; a stunning and brilliantly innovative  intervention. It provides ground zero - the starting place for the next generation of social scholars of education. A major accomplishment."
- Norman K. Denzin, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign  

The ethnography of education has been conducted by sociologists and anthropologists, largely in self-contained and self-referential ways. This book celebrates the continuities and the strengths of ethnographic research on education in formal and non-formal settings, deliberately transgressing the sociology/anthropology divide. Education is broadly defined to cover many settings other than schools, in many countries, for many age-groups.

The book is structured thematically, including chapters on movement and mobilities, memorials and memories, time and timescapes, bodies, and performativities, multi-sensory research, and narratives. Strategies for designing innovative ethnographic projects, and for fighting familiarity are provided.

one

introduction: a detective of some kind

This study of Edgewood Academy extends my ongoing exploration of American high schools… I began in rural, Midwestern Mansfield and Mansfield High School (Peshkin, 1978/1994), where village life and agriculture were prominent. I continued thereafter, first in fundamentalist Christian Bethany Baptist Academy (Peshkin, 1986)… next in blue-collar Riverview and Riverview High School (Peshkin, 1991)… and finally in Indian High School (Peshkin, 1997).
(Peshkin, 2001: xi)

Before I went to St Polycarp RC School in 1996 I was told by my cousin that the older girls gave first-years wrong directions on purpose so they got lost all the time.

The subtitle of this chapter, as of all the chapters, is a quote from Zora Neale Hurston Mules and Men (1935: 60). Here she compares the ethnographer to a detective: probably the first scholar to draw what is now a common analogy, but still not a bad starting point. All the chapters are introduced by a quote from an educational ethnography (the voice of the scholar) and an urban legend or scary story about school transfer (the voice of the child). The opening of Peshkin (2001) recounts a long career doing one school ethnography after another: an unusual work trajectory. The ‘urban legend’ reminds us that for children waiting to transfer from a primary to a secondary school, the stories they hear warn them that big secondary schools can be treacherous places where they are in danger of being tricked and misled.

While writing this book I have edited two companions. Delamont (2012a) is a four volume set of 70 articles on the ethnography of education, containing papers from Mead (1943) to Petrone (2010). Delamont (2012b) is a handbook in which 56 scholars explain the research methods for doing Qualitative Research in Education, from studying documents (Prior, 2012) to dancing the results (Bagley and Castro-Salazar, 2012). This book is the condensed, individual vision that drove those compilations.

The research discussed is one of the outstanding achievements of the sociology and the anthropology of education. It is a research area that depends on a qualitative method – ethnography – which is the basis of all anthropology and has been part of sociology for over a century, but only widely used in sociology of education since the late 1960s. There are previous reviews of this research (e.g. Hammersley, 1980, 1982; Atkinson, Delamont and Hammersley, 1988; Pelissier, 1991; Foley, Levinson and Hurtig, 2001). I draw on the research to outline what sociologists and anthropologists know about the everyday lives of pupils and students inside schools, colleges, and universities and what they know about the everyday lives and interaction patterns of the adults in those educational institutions. In practice that tends to mean teachers, because there has been a scandalous neglect of research on the other adults who work in educational institutions: secretaries (except Casanova, 1991), cooks, cleaners, lab technicians, nurses and so on. In the USA where school counsellors are a separate occupation, they have been studied (Cicourel and Kitsuse, 1963), but other occupations are largely ignored.

In 1971, Murray and Rosalie Wax bemoaned the lack of ‘a solid body of data on the ethnography of schools’ (p. 3) but at the very same time they published their lament the first steps towards creating the solid body of data they wanted to see had already been taken. In the late 1960s there were eight pioneering researchers who published ethnographies of everyday life in schools and classrooms:

1. L. M. Smith and W. Geoffrey (1968) The Complexities of an Urban Classroom.

2. P. Jackson (1968) Life in Classrooms.

3. D. Hargreaves (1967) Social Relations in a Secondary School.

4. H. F. Wolcott (1967) A Kwakiutl Village and School.

5. A.R. King (1967) The School at Mopass.

6. E. Leacock (1969) Teaching and Learning in City Schools.

7. J. Singleton (1967) Nichu: A Japanese School.

They were not exactly the first school ethnographies because there were earlier scattered examples or studies with some ethnographic data in them, such as Hollingshead (1947) and Stinchcombe (1964). However, those did not start a torrent of other studies: the seven monographs listed above were the beginning of a 40 year tradition.

All but one (Hargreaves) of the seven is American, although if one extended the deadline to 1970 a second UK book – Lacey (1970) – parallel to Hargreaves (1967) could be added. Focusing on the seven books highlighted here, two are about the everyday lives of exemplary elementary school teachers in the US (1 and 2), two are about the ineffectiveness and culture clash in the schooling, or miseducation, of First Americans and First Canadians (4 and 5). Singleton (1967) is the first book to detail how very differently the Japanese school system works, and Leacock (1969) exposed the mechanisms inside urban schools that were producing African-American failure in the American ghetto. Hargreaves’s (1967) book explored what happened to boys in a city in the north of England who had failed the 11+ exam and were then placed in a streamed secondary modern school where most learnt nothing except to be disaffected. Lacey (1970) is an ethnography of an elite state school for boys he called Hightown Grammar. Despite these pioneering books, Palonsky (1975) still felt able to state in print that: ‘there have been very few studies in education which have used the participant observation format’. He cited only Gordon (1957), McPherson (1972) and Cusick (1973). In his inaccurate generalisation he followed a pattern for qualitative researchers in education that persists to this day. One purpose of this book is to display the many studies that have been done.

Beyond the school but still in formal education there were parallel ethnographies of higher education by Becker, Geer, Hughes and Strauss (1961) and Becker, Geer and Hughes (1968) which formed the basis for understanding how students make sense of their experiences, paralleling the work on school pupils and foreshadowing all the subsequent ethnographies of higher education such as Moffat (1989), Sinclair (1996) and Adler and Adler (1991). Of course many people are educated or trained or socialised or enculturated in settings that are not called schools or colleges, and in ways that are not formal, and as this book progresses we shall explore the ethnographies of such enculturation too.

None of the pioneering studies treated the sex, gender, sex roles, sexuality or sexual orientation of the teacher or the pupils as problematic: those topics came later. Foley, Levinson and Hurtig (2001) is a thoughtful mapping of how the American anthropology of education developed in the 1990s to pay more attention to gender, and to be written by scholars from many more perspectives, especially ‘ethnographers of color’ (p. 41). Class, race, and ethnic or linguistic diversity were already apparent in the tradition.

However, if we start by focusing on the studies of formal schooling in the UK and the USA it is clear that my list mixes sociological and anthropological ethnographies, and is therefore unusual. There are two traditions in school and classroom ethnography (Atkinson and Delamont, 1980; Delamont and Atkinson, 1995; Delamont, 2012c), and the scholars in each simply ignore each other’s work. The sociologies and anthropologies of education in the USA and Canada are still ignoring each others’ publications as resolutely in 2012 as they have for 45 years. Because there is also a resolute ethnocentricism among school ethnographers, so that Americans read nothing written outside the USA, and most non-Americans ignore much of the best American output, the big picture about schooling that could be discerned is not. It is very noticeable that, for example, Weis (2004), a sociologist, does not cite Ortner (2002, 2003), an anthropologist, or vice versa, and that the British Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute reviewed Ortner (2003) but has never reviewed Weis’s work.

Seven major themes are vividly present in those landmark volumes which have proved to be enduring: that is they have re-emerged in the classroom and school ethnographies ever since.

1. How schools can create scholastic and disciplinary difficulties and accentuate the problems they face (difficulties and problems they cannot subsequently solve) by their organisation and procedures without realising what they are doing.

2. How there can be irreconcilable culture clashes between ethnic or cultural or linguistic minorities and the mainstream government (or missionary) school system, and how such culture clashes can also arise across social classes.

3. How hard the everyday life of the classroom teacher is.

4. How classrooms are places where ‘busyness’ is valued.

5. How teachers make 1000 decisions every day.

6. How precarious the teacher’s control regime is, even in the best run classrooms in the most elite schools.

7. How resistant to change the dominant systems of talk, of teaching, and of control over knowledge are.

The research that has confirmed, (re)discovered, and (re)examined these seven themes forms the empirical heart of the book. The methodological discussions draw on that research, and are intended to provide a guide for future scholars wishing to use ethnography in educational settings. The book aims to provide help and advice for educational researchers about how to frame research questions; think about what is important about teaching and learning and what is not; and, for those researchers who adopt qualitative methods, practical help with data gathering, reading, and writing, around the key themes. In each chapter there is an account of what is known about the topic, and what is not known (often more important and interesting) and there is a focus on the implication of that account for future research(ers).

The studies of formal and informal schooling that are recommended and praised in the book are predominantly examples of what Fine (2003) called ‘peopled ethnography’. He set out principles for ‘peopled ethnography’ articulating, even codifing, the methodological strategy that had guided his studies of fantasy gaming (1983), Little League baseball (1987), restaurant kitchens (1996), mushroom hunters (1998), American high school debating teams (2001), and meteorologists (2007) among many other small groups. He emphasises that he values ‘interacting small groups as the primary focus of ethnographic investigation’ (Brown-Saracino et al., 2008: 547). Fine was careful to state that ethnographic work at the micro-level is fundamental even when the theoretical issues to be illuminated are macro-level. In their 2008 paper, Brown-Saracino, Thurk and Fine develop the ideas to move beyond small groups, via seven pillars of ‘peopled ethnography’ (PE):

1. PE is theoretical: it is not just a description of a setting or culture, but can answer ‘why?’ and ‘how?’ questions and allow the identification of other settings where the theory might apply.

2. PE builds on other ethnographic studies to prevent ‘blind’ entry to the new fieldwork.

3. PE studies the interaction of small groups in settings where there is meaningful, ongoing, social life.

4. PE meets calls for generalisations by working on multiple research sites.

5. PE relies on extensive, in-depth fieldwork, only concluded when theoretical saturation is reached.

6. PE reports on interaction through thick description.

7. PE relies on ‘analytic objectivity’ (Brown-Saracino et al., 2008: 549): a distance sustained between the scholar and the members of the group under investigation.

Although Fine and his colleagues do not mention explicitly that these principles rule out autoethnography, and other more ‘engaged’ forms of qualitative research, they do so implicitly. My position on that is set out in Chapters 2 and 12. These principles do not address how the writing and representation of ethnography are to be done, although Fine’s own work has used a ‘conventional’ ethnographic format. A similar manifesto for ‘traditional’ ethnography to that espoused by Fine and his colleagues, but one in which the issues of writing and representation are addressed is Katz (2001, 2002). He starts by pointing out that:

Literary devices traditionally used for representing social life have been rendered deeply suspect by analyses that reveal how they implicitly construct social realities and subtly claim rhetorical authority. (Katz, 2001: 443)

Katz argues that the standpoints used to evaluate ethnographic data ‘cut across writing styles and bridge the anthropology/sociology divide’ (2001: 444). In other words, Katz believes ethnographers share a common culture. His own construction of that common culture was, however, both ethnocentric and sexist, which undermined his belief in one ethnography. Katz only cites American authors to make his point, ignoring European writers (Atkinson, 1983, 1990, 1992, 1996; Edmondson, 1984; James et al., 1997; Spencer, 1989, 2001). Katz also omits all the contributions to the debate by women scholars (e.g. Behar and Gordon, 1995; Coffey, 1999; Richardson, 1990, 1994).

Focused on what he terms ‘luminous’ description, Katz (2001: 462) understands the ethnographic consensus about how data are to be written up to be like the shared ideas of any group of craftspeople. By contrasting the shared understandings about what ‘well presented’ data of the authors from the First Chicago School of Sociology (1890–1942) look like – or rather how they read – with that of the Second Chicago School (1942–1962) (see Fine, 1995), Katz is clear that subcultures within sociology and anthropology have collectively developed ‘craft concerns for qualities of description’. Katz contrasts styles of data presentation across several well known groups or traditions of ethnography. What they have in common is that they contain ‘rich and varied’, ‘contextualised’ or ‘context-sensitive’, and ‘densely textured data’ (2001: 464). He is clear, though, that a data set can only be called rich when it contains the resources to develop causal explanation.

Research aimed at producing luminous descriptions, causal explanation, and peopled ethnography is central to this book. Despite some wild claims to the contrary, such ethnography is still being done in sociology and anthropology, and good scholars are still reflecting on how and why they do it. So, for example, Papageorgiou (2007: 223) writes engagingly that ‘Field research resembles bungee-jumping’, meaning that once you have started there is no going back. His research field is Greek folk music and he plays the Ud, a traditional instrument. Of one fieldwork event he writes:

I learned that night (and later confirmed) that appreciation of folk traditions among urban intellectuals and local villagers connected to the tradition differ radically. The former experience the performances as a pleasure. For villagers, the music recalls painful memories of loved ones who have departed… and a nostalgic melancholic recognition of a rapidly fading world.

His experience – a concert for villagers –

enlightened me far more than had hundreds of interviews I had conducted with musicians and revelers until then.

That conclusion is the central message of this book: observational data are to be preferred to interview data wherever possible.

SCOPE AND PURPOSE OF THE BOOK

The aim of most of the research discussed in this book is to see how the teachers on one hand, and the pupils and students on the other, experience and understand their educational lives: that is to see their work through their eyes. The work on pupils and students can lead readers to criticise it for being anti-teacher (e.g. McNamara, 1980; Foster et al., 1996) but, of course, many pupils are anti-teacher, and even those who are happy and conformist do not necessarily share any of the perceptions of their teachers about education.

At the same time that the sociological and anthropological ethnographers were beginning to study interaction in schools and classrooms, there were also sociolinguists (Coulthard, 1974; Cazden, 1986) focusing on classroom talk, and psychologists and educational researchers who had begun to use coding schedules to measure classroom behaviour systematically (Flanders, 1970). These approaches focused on the classroom, and overwhelmingly on the teaching of academic subjects indoors in self-contained spaces. The ethnographic work was wider in its focus, covering corridors and playgrounds, sports fields and dining halls as well as the self-contained classrooms, and, following pupils off site into their homes or into the neighbourhood during their leisure activities too. For example, Spindler (2000) remembers beginning a piece of educational research in 1950, after doing research with his wife Louise on the Menominee, a native American group. He was assigned to observe the young male teacher of a class of ten year olds ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• About the Author
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: A Detective of Some Kind
• 2 One Page of Notes and No Hypotheses: The Spyglass of Anthropology
• 3 Places and Spaces: A Group on the Store Porch
• 4 Time and Timescapes: ‘We were to dance three hours’
• 5 Memories and Memorials: A Diploma and a Chevrolet
• 6 Movement and Mobilities: Heading My Toenails
• 7 Bodies and Performativity: Not Pleasure Dancing but Ceremonial
• 8 Groups and Identities: The Profound Silence of the Initiated
• 9 Narratives and Other Tales: ‘Ah come to collect some old stories’
• 10 Senses and Multi-Sensory Matters: Indescribable Noises, Sights, Feelings
• 11 Knowledge and its Transmission: ‘Taught me all that he could’
• 12 Conclusions: Through the Roiling Smoke
• References
• Index