Apprenticing Ethnographers: Examining How Critical Are Textual Practices

• In Event: Teaching Ethnography Remotely: Centering the Social

Abstract

Significance

When designing courses to prepare future ethnographic researchers, how do literacy practices such as text selection, dialogic engagement, and textual production influence their development as ethnographers? How do these seemingly everyday practices have unseen consequences? Engaging in a critical self-study of a collaborative effort to apprentice novices, I share insights from an on-going project to mentor doctoral students.

Conceptual & Epistemological Orientation

I locate this research within the practice of self-study (LaBoskey,2004). As an ethnographer steeped in critical interactional sociolinguistic research for over 25 years, I am responsible for preparing researchers in bilingual/second language teacher education. While engaged in ethnographic research, critical multimodal literacies have emerged as an important area for my work. Thus, I have drawn on ethnography of communication to examine these literacy practices.

No text is politically neutral and, by extension, learning to interpret and produce new texts have consequences that are not neutral or predictable. The texts introduced by me and co-instructors allowed for rich discussions. However, from our dialogs in our position as instructors, we witnessed how our apprentices’ interpretations varied as they made these evident in their subsequent textual productions. One practice to share certain apprentices’ texts became resources for other apprentices. I have selected those texts where such moves caused ruptures within course participants' sense making. My self-study offers a window onto the textual decisions that shape becoming ethnographers as an activity of textual production.

Methodology, Description and Data Analysis

First, I present the types of textual resources that we, as instructors, co-produced with apprentices. In critically reflecting on this process, as a participant, I draw on email messages, Zoom meeting transcripts, and artifacts produced. After mapping each apprentice’s textual productions, I select telling cases by identifying and highlighting several texts that were generative of not only their engagement but also for evoking important points for unanticipated discussions. These texts produced tensions and affordances that had catalytic effects in our ethnographic class. Then I describe several consequences.

The resulting analysis evidenced apprentices developing insights from their jottings and memos, searching for further studies to support this new learning and develop additional questions. Simultaneously, in producing these texts apprentices precipitated shifts in their research agenda. Examples include removing transparency even when transparency is valued, and reducing a sense of accomplishment rather than building trust in the process.


Textual Take Aways

This study of textual resources, in both apprentice’s interpretation and production, offer insights into how texts shape social life within the boundaries of learning to become ethnographers. Hopefully, it will stimulate discussions about attending to the effects of these processes of collaboration and textual choices. For pedagogical significance, a study of these texts serves as a resource to potentially further develop framing of text types and feedback in order to improve how the teaching and learning of ethnography is theorized.

Author

• Theresa Y. Austin, University of Massachusetts - Amherst