Hammersley's "Ethnography: Problems and Prospects:" Many of the large concerns and questions that have been raised in class about educational ethnography are addressed in this article. Hammersly contrasts the use of ethnography in education with its use in anthropology as a means of questioning the viability of its use in ed. His concerns are:

1) There is always a tension between relaying the first-hand experiences of participant-observation and the need to analyze those experiences.

2) Ed ethnographies are often conducted with much less face time and no long-term immersion in the community being studies. The effect can be decontextualization due to lack of contact time.

3) Less time in the field means fewer opportunities to understand the temporal conditions of an environment.

4) The context for the study is usually smaller which may lead to gaps in understanding.

5) Interviews may not be sufficiently ethnographic in nature due to their artificial construction.

6) The highly political nature of some ed ethno creates a large amount of systemic bias.

That said, there is something (what to name it?) that we get from ed ethno that mitigates these concerns.

Priti Chopra's "Betrayal and Solidarity:" Wow, the binary relationships presented in this essay were like logic-puzzles and could be a bit paralyzing in some situations. For example, to conduct an ethnography in literacy is to reconstruct the ethnographer as literate and the previously viewed as illiterate literate, therefore, reinscribing a power structure. Using the example the study I am proposing as part of this class, the back-to-farm graduates aren't seen within our community as "illiterate" because this group has power and agency in the community. But the reason to conduct this study is that others outside the community may not share my view of the American farmer and my institution, outside of the ag department, has not discussed the needs of these specific students. Yet, as Chopra cautions, I should be careful not to create a new binary of responsibility and blame. How much of the work of ethnography in literacy is about identifying the problem with an implication of blame? We have to be careful to offer the same understanding and careful attention to the institution, people, etc. that may be blamed as a result of an ethnographic study.

Invisible Cultures and Interactional Ethno

Invisible Cultures and Castanheira's Interactional Ethnography:

"It has been suggested that microethnographic work is, in its cutltural and social structuralism, overly deterministic, ignoring the locally negotiated historical situatedness of the phenomena it documents" (Invisible Cultures xv).

I thought this criticism of microethnography was interesting because in writing my literature review, I came across the same criticism of a framework that I am thinking of using for my study. This is a fair and necessary charge--a checks and balances for structuralist theoriests, perhaps--but it isn't a particularly powerful one. The structural theory gives a way of interpreting or understanding what we see. (In the assessment article I read last night, Kane refers to this as an important first step in testing theory that teachers use consistently in the classroom.) Sometimes theories of processes and patterns give us the language to discuss what we see in an equally meaningful manner, and it can by highly useful in locating parts of the data that are "different" than what has traditionally been seen before.

Castanheira, et al make this point nicely in their essay ("Interactional Ethno") on page 361: "This approach provided a theoretically driven way of allowing us to bracket our own cultural expectations." They mention later in the paragraph that using a structuralist approach held them "accountable" to their goal of focusing on the relationships important to Aaron's school success.

The Finale of WwW

Given the article we read for yesterday and the two epilogues in our edition of the book, WwW clearly has a life of its own due to such a large readership. This has probably been a blessing and a curse to Heath as a researcher. What an interesting thing to constantly be expected to publicly reflect on a work that you wrote so long ago.

On Learners as Ethnographers: "We do that everyday, and so do our students" (339).

This quote captures 0ne of the major themes of the book. That some teachers' methods of instruction are stripped of context, and therefore, don't make use of the students' already developed keen sense of their environments and the language used in them. One concern often expressed by teachers is that they can't know every student as much as they wish they could or they don't have time to use student generated research. But the methods used by some of the teachers in WwW show differently. Using ethnographic methods gives students an academic space to share their lives and what they see, and by making better use of their rhetorical skills, creates a more productive learning environment than other methods that don't respond to the school/home literacy gap. This teaches studenrs how to make use of the gap.

WwW and Chapter endings

Heath has a skill at ending chapters in a very literary manner. I like and dislike the endings--something to keep in mind when ending an ethnographic essay, article or presentation. We all want to end with a punch or strong statement, but does it distort reality a bit? Consider the endings to Chapters 5,6, and 7:

"In short, for Roadville, Trackton's stories would be lies; for Trackton, Roadville's stories would not even count as stories" (189).

"Neither community's ways with the written word prepares it for the school's ways" (235).

"For the children of Trackton and Roadville, however, an for the majority of the millworkers and students in Piedmont schools, the townspeople's ways are far from natural and they seem strange indeed" (262). ***Lends an eerie feeling to the photos that follow.

Do these statements define the entire proceeding chapter? They may cross over the line of creative license for me--not sure.

First Reaction to Ways with Words

I started reading Ways with Words last night. It is fascinating both in content and on the meta-reading level of understanding how the text may be a model to draw on in my own ethnographic studies. So, while Heath is describing Dee and the other residents of Roadville, I am trying to absorb who Dee and the other residents are while also thinking about the thoroughness of her descriptions, the types of scenes and objects she describes as well as Heath invisibility in the introductory chapters. I hope we can take some time in class to talk about why this work is so important and the impact it has had on literacy scholarship.

(Short post--just wanted to jot down my initial thoughts before they escaped me.)

On Writing Field Notes

Does anyone else have the very romantic image from movies of researchers sitting in their tents (or huts) late at night and typing up field notes? The light is dim; there is mosquito netting around the bed; and the ethnographer is wearing all khaki.

Wolfinger's article on fieldnotes was very helpful, though I don't think it said anything really surprising. It was helpful because it provided practical advise about how to "see" the event in writing. The salient and comprehensive approaches would both be useful depending on the context. I am wondering if you'd want to begin with a more comprehensive approach, assuming you're new to the environment, and then use the salient approach more later. I am uncertain which approach, probably salient, would correlate best with the Heath/Street suggestion to keep a dialogic notebook in the field. Salient would offer the most opportunity for reflection in the notebook.

Here are a few phrases and ideas from the text that I want to remember:

'many levels of textualization set off by experience' (Van Maanen on 86)

'A single minute would be more than enough time to produce material to fill pages if I simply gave that minute the opportunity to impress itself upon me' (a student ethnographer on 86)

'Concentrate on the first and last remarks in each conversation' (Bogdan and Taylor on 91)

New Directions (Connor)

As someone who teaches technical writing (workplace writing), I found this article very interesting and useful. And I am wondering whether or not I can use excerpts in my fall tech writing class. Many of the most popular textbooks for entry level tech writing classes devote some space to intercultural writing issues, but the exercises and information always feels a bit inadequate. It just isn't something easily captured in a textbook--thank goodness. There are parts of this article that would be accessible to my students. I realize as well that the intercultural nature of workplace communication should be a integral part of the course, not just a unit. But I am not sure I know enough to really teach the class as such.

Thoughts from Reconstructing Culture (McDermott and Varenne)

This article was the most the most useful and interesting of anything we have read thus far. I was constantly starring passages that stood out ideas that I wanted to remember. Here are some of the quotes that I found most compelling and why:

"Culture is not a past cause to a current self. Culture is the current challenge to possible future selves" (8). Culture is so often named as the cause for action, identity, thoughts, etc, and this statement seems to both support and deny that. How can culture not be a past cause and also be a challenge to future selves? Wouldn't that then make it a past cause at some point? Perhaps the authors are trying to say that the variant nature of culture keeps makes this true. I am still thinking about this one.

(There is also a great Dewey quote about social institutions on this page.)

"Educational reseachers rarely consider how unlikely it is tha a culture formulating a problem of type X could also produce a solution that would not recreate the circumstances that originally brought the problem to attention" (12). AAaaaaa--frustration. This makes efforts to inact change seem doomed.

"Individuals are not special. They are general" (17). Beautifully stated, but is this really true? Don't the authors want to empower individuals with their "cutlure is not fate" talk, implying there must be something individuals have to offer beyond the general. Obviously, I don't quite get this one yet.


"We have no choice but to study that which we also make" (23). This is why we immerse ourselves in another cutlure. Is that right? Of course, by being there, we also participating in making that group's history or culture.

**I have about 20 more passages and quotes I could record, but I am out of time.

class project ideas

For this class, I have two different ideas that I think would work as an ethnographic research project. I am unsure which is the better choice, but my group mates seemed most interested in the second idea.

1) While teaching at the U of Central Arkansas I lived in a residential college (a dorm where students live and take classes together) as a faculty-in-residence. The student behaviors that I saw really intrigued me. I saw students who were working harder on their papers than most of their teachers would have imagined; students who worked leaned on each other in impromtu peer review sessions; and students who were really eager to get on-the-spot assistance during the writing process. Most interesting of everything I saw was the students' using writing to communicate within the dorm. Students in the dorm used writing within their community in sophisticated ways. Again, something their teachers never would have expected. I wasn't surprised to learn that the students were rhetorically saavy in their home communities, but I was surprised by how often their turned to writing as a mean of community action. For my project my research question would be: how do students in residential colleges use writing in their daily lives? Because I did a conference presentation on this, it seems like a good idea to continue the work. It is a project I have always wanted to do more with.

2) My second project idea stems from my current teaching context: a regional university in Northwest Missouri with many students who are from farming families and who intend to return to farming after receiving a college education. Unlike many college students who see college as a way of moving into a new lives or new career paths, these students are returning to family businesses and their original rural communities. My research question would be: how do students' academic writing experiences transfer (or not) when the students transition back to the farm and how does this impact the large farming community? This topic is most directly relevant to my everyday life as a teacher in Northwest Missouri and would help me better understand the students who make my life so interesting.