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Session 8: Thursday 29th October 09:30-12:00    

Ethnography

Session Content

• Group discussion of Kalthoff’s’s article.
• Discussion of Geertz Chapters and general issues relating to ethnography.
• How might you use an ethnographic approach in your own study?

 Preliminary Reading

KALTHOFF, H. (2013). Practices of Grading: an ethnographic study of educational assessment. Ethnography and Education. 8(1): 89-104. [Review Article]

CRESWELL, J. (2012). Qualitative Inquiry and Research Design: choosing among five approaches. Third Edition. Thousand Oaks. Sage. Sections on ethnography and also Appendix E.

GEERTZ, C. (1977). The Interpretation of Cultures. New York. Basic Books. Especially cc. 1 and 6.

Further Reading

BENEDICT, R. (2006 [1946]). The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: patterns of Japanese culture. New York. Mariner Books.

BOCHNER, A., P. & Ellis, C. (Eds.) (2002). Ethnographically Speaking: Autoethnography, literature and aesthetics. Walnut Creek. Altamira Press.
           
DOUGLAS, M. (2002 [1966]). Purity and Danger: an analysis of concepts of pollution and taboo. London. Routledge.

DOUGLAS, M. (2003 [1970]). Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology. Oxon. Routledge.

ELLIS, C. (2004). The Autoethnographic I: A methodological novel about autoethnography. Walnut Creek. Altamira Press.

GEERTZ, C. (1988). Works and Lives: The anthropologist as author. Cambridge. Polity.

MALINOWSKI, B. (1922). Argonauts of the Western Pacific: An account of native enterprise and adventure in the archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea. Prospect Heights. Waveland Press.

PARK, Julie, J. (2011). ‘“I needed to get out of my Korean bubble”: An ethnographic account of Korean American collegians juggling diversity in a religious context’. Anthropology and Education Quarterly. 42(3). 193-212.

PLAYER-KORO, C. (2011). Marginalising students' understanding of mathematics through performative priorities: a Bernsteinian perspective. Ethnography and Education. 6:3. 325-340. DOI: 10.1080/17457823.2011.610583
           
RAHEJA, G.G. (1988). The Poison in the Gift: Ritual, prestation, and the dominant caste in a North Indian village. Chicago. University of Chicago Press.

RYLE, G. (1968). The thinking of thoughts: what is Le Penseur doing? Retrieved from http://lucy.ukc.ac.uk/CSACSIA/Vol14/Papers/ryle_1.html

SIMMONS, C.A. (2014). Playing with popular culture—an ethnography of children's sociodramatic play in the classroom. Ethnography and Education. 9(3). 270-283, DOI: 10.1080/17457823.2014.904753

WHYTE, W.F. (1993 [1969]). Street Corner Society: social structure of an Italian slum. Third Edition. Chicago. University of Chicago Press.
 
Ethnography entails the attempt to access the meanings constituted in particular cultures that may comprise whole societies or, more commonly, smaller cultural groups. The approach derives from anthropology and is now widely used (and misused) in social and in educational research. There are many different takes on ethnography, Clifford Geertz (1977), for example, describes the ethnographic interpretation as in many respects similar to literary studies; the practitioners of both seek to produce interpretations of meaning without insisting that they have the final word on it. There are no set data collection strategies associated with ethnography, but Geertz, again, advocates the collection of very rich data, covering situations from all sides, as it were to produce what he calls ‘thick description’, an expression that he borrows from Gilbert Ryle (1968), a layered description that generates meaning upon meaning upon meaning. A reading of Ryle’s original lecture gives a good sense of the problem.

Two boys fairly swiftly contract the eyelids of their right eyes. In the first boy this is only an involuntary twitch; but the other is winking conspiratorially to an accomplice. At the lowest or the thinnest level of description the two contractions of the eyelids may be exactly alike. From a cinematograph-film of the two faces there might be no telling which contraction, if either, was a wink, or which, if either, were a mere twitch. Yet there remains the immense but unphotographable difference between a twitch and a wink. For to wink is to try to signal to someone in particular, without the cognisance of others, a definite message according to an already understood code. It has very complex success-versus-failure conditions. The wink is a failure if its intended recipient does not see it; or sees it but does not know or forgets the code; or misconstrues it; or disobeys or disbelieves it; or if any one else spots it. A mere twitch, on the other hand, is neither a failure nor a success; it has no intended recipient; it is not meant to be unwitnessed by anybody; it carries no message. It may be a symptom but it is not a signal. The winker could not not know that he was winking; but the victim of the twitch might be quite unaware of his twitch. The winker can tell what he was trying to do; the twitcher will deny that he was trying to do anything. (Ryle, 1968; no page numbers)

… and so on.

Because of this requirement for ‘thick description’, researchers adopting an ethnographic approach will often use both formal and informal interviews, participant and non-participant observation and documentary evidence, but they may also use other data collection strategies as well, even employing quantitative methods where this is deemed to be appropriate; the aim is to generate sufficient and sufficiently rich data to enable what can be defended as a valid and reliable interpretation—but not the only possible interpretation—of the meanings that are produced within the culture.

Kalthoff’s article presents an interesting way to study teachers’ assessment practices and is concerned with the ways in which assessment outcomes are actually achieved. The study represents a departure from the technical study of assessment that may be concerned with issues of the validity and reliability of assessment procedures—Kalthoff is explicitly NOT concerned with this‑—and also from sociological studies that consider assessment outcomes in terms of the reproduction of social inequalities—again, this is explicitly NOT Kalthoff’s interest. The work was carried out in the early 1990s in German high schools, but has only just been published in this English language journal. Kalthoff spent nine months in the schools getting right up close to the teachers’ assessment practices, both in private marking mode and in the negotiation of grades in oral examinations. Only part of the whole study is presented in this article. In reading the paper you should concentrate on the following issues—especially the ones in green—for discussion in the seminar:

• How does this study differ from other approaches to the study of assessment that are mentioned in the paper?
• The author gives little information on his sampling strategies, but does outline the various data collection strategies that he used; what were they?
• What can you say about the data analysis techniques? In what ways does the researcher engage in interpretation?
• In what ways does this research match up or fail to match up with Creswell’s description of ethnography? How does it compare with Geertz’s ethnography of the Javanese funeral?
• What meaning does the expression ‘thick description’ have in the context of this study?
• Could an interview study or another approach have achieved the same kinds of findings?
• Can you identify the main line of argument in the paper; how are validity and reliability in respect of the claims made affirmed in this (kind of) study?
• How is Kalthoff using the terms ‘self-observation’ and ‘third-party observation’?

Prezi

KeyMethodological Terms from the Review Article