Cross-Case Analysis of Academic Literacies Across Disciplines in High School and University Settings

• In Event: Ethnography as Epistemology: An International Dialogue on Challenges Facing Ethnographers Studying Knowledge Construction Across Disciplines, Time Scales, Actors, Institutions, and Countries

Abstract

Ethnographic perspectives, in the sense indicated by Green and Bloome, have been adopted in a number of applied projects in the field of literacy and numeracy. A recent example is the Letter Project (Learning Empowerment through Training in Ethnographic Research) which attempts to help adult literacy facilitators to build local curriculum and pedagogy on the basis of ethnographic explorations of local literacy and numeracy practices. The aim is not to train such people to be anthropologists but rather to build on their own often implicit knowledge and their ethnographic sensibility to help them to ‘start where learners are’ by finding out what the people in their classes actually do in their everyday lives with literacy and numeracy. Participants then exchange findings as a basis for elaborating on their ethnographic skills and for building curriculum that will be appropriate to adult learners. The model is being extended from India and Ethiopia, where it began, to new projects in Uganda, S. Africa and possibly Nigeria, Mexico etc. It offers a case study for how ethnographic perspectives might be deployed in educational contexts, suggesting a working model that might be adapted in other circumstances eg nursing, religious sites, schools etc and at the same time can help feedback from the field of practice into the theoretical debates about what counts as ‘ethnography’.

This project, then, raises questions of both methodology and of applications in practice. The key themes that have emerged from the perspective of methodology include: The relationship between proximity and distance; ethnography as epistemological not simply technique; findings as ‘telling cases’ rather than ‘representative cases’; recognition of reflexivity; distinguishing Description, Analysis and Interpretation. I will explain each of these perspectives and call upon them in comparative discussion with the other projects being presented in this session.

The application of ethnographic perspectives involves recognition of the relationship between proximity and distance as practitioners and researchers enter new and unfamiliar sites then return to their educational setting to report on findings and gather responses that they can take back into practice; the recognition that engaging in ethnographic perspectives is not simply a matter of adding some techniques and methods to the pedagogic context but rather recognizing the epistemological issues involved in suspending known categories, acknowledging difference, constructing new ways of knowing and representing what is known; that such ‘case studies’ are not statistical samples to be extended to a wider population but rather ‘telling cases’ of proposed conceptual and theoretical issues to which the data may contribute; recognition of reflexivity as a key component of the process, as the researcher and practitioner takes account of their own social situation and how it is perceived by learners/ subjects in an interactive ethnographic process; and the procedural strategy of distinguishing Description, Analysis and Interpretation in developing representations for others, in written or verbal form, of the experience and the findings.

Author

• Brian V. Street, King's College London