Ethnography as a Co-Mediated Process of Cultural Translation: Toward an Equity-Based Educational Research Agenda

• In Event: The Necessity of Seeing Anew: Dreaming Up New Possibilities for Research on Nondominant Communities

Abstract

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to explore the potential of an equity-oriented humanist approach for inspiring a paradigm shift concerning the ways in which non-dominant students and their communities are framed, represented, and described in educational research. By proposing an innovative, culturally-mediated model of ethnography, this paper demonstrates how ethnographically-informed inquiries, as building blocks of the equity-oriented approach, can be formulated in a way that generates meaningful educational implications for people from non-dominant backgrounds.

Framework: To critically examine the ethnographic underpinnings of the equity-oriented humanist approach to educational research, the paper draws on Bhabha’s (1994/2004) notion of “cultural translation” that problematizes normative and essentialist understandings of cultural communities. From a cultural translation perspective, the discursive presentation and representation of cultural communities are characterized by fluidity and hybridity in the sense that they are mediated by the continual movement of community members that traverse, in both literal and figurative senses, pre-established cultural borders. By situating cultural translation in relation to ethnography, the paper is intended to investigate the affordances of ethnographic studies for developing a set of culturally-hybridized discourses that challenge dominant narratives either romanticizing or pathologizing learning experiences associated with people from non-dominant backgrounds. Also, in order to better capture the mobile and agentive role of people in the process of cultural translation, the paper perceives varied subjects involved in ethnographic inquiries, e.g., researchers and participants, as part and parcel of a network of “activity systems” (Engeström, 2001) that shapes and is shaped by the cross-border movement co-mediated within and across the systems .

Methods: The analysis reported here developed within a larger multi-sited ethnography (Marcus, 1995; Vossoughi & Author, 2015) that followed youth across everyday activities in their after-school program, homes, and community. A total of 14 families participated (12 Latino, 2 White); each self-identified as working class.

Findings: Building on a case-study based analysis, the paper illustrated the affordances of considering ethnographic research in education as a process of cultural translation that was embodied through the cross-border movement co-mediated by both the researchers and the participants. The cross-border movement, which can be further conceptualized as a shared object negotiated within and across varied activity systems involving the researchers and the participants, led to the development of an equity-oriented humanist approach to understanding learning in cultural contexts.

Significance:
The scholarly significance of this paper is two-fold. First, by arguing for a cultural translation turn in ethnography, the paper offers a critical perspective that gives due attention to cultural ways of learning associated with people from non-dominant backgrounds. This perspective sheds light on developing equity-based educational discourse and inquiry wherein learning is considered not so much a finite product but an ongoing process. Second, by analyzing the cross-border movement that characterizes cultural translation in reference to a network of activity systems involving both the researchers and the participants, the paper foregrounds the analytical potential of a culturally-mediated perspective for examining the dynamics of cultural translation in general, and for interpreting its implications concerning ethnographic research in education in particular.

Authors

• Peng Yin, Berkeley University of California

• Krista L. Cortes, University of California - Berkeley

• Patrick Johnson, University of California - Berkeley

• Kris Gutierrez, University of California - Berkeley