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.