(Re)Entering a Field 20 Years Later: Challenges of (Re)Learning to Research Literacy Practices

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

Abstract

In this presentation, I will examine the epistemological nature of ethnographic research through contrasting the logic of inquiry (Green, Dixon, Zaharlick, 2003) of two ethnographic studies on literacy practices in a Brazilian metropolitan neighborhood (Palmares). In one of these studies, developed in the late 80s, I examined the opportunities that preschool children had to engage with writing in their daily activities. This study involved participant observation in and out of school sites, interviews with children, their parents, teachers and school administrators. In 2009, adopting the same research perspective, I returned to this neighborhood and re-entered the Field, where it was possible to re-encounter many of the previous research participants. In this second case study, I aim to identify changes that have taken place over the years and to examine the implications of these changes for the meanings of literacy and the changing relations of local and global, for such people.

Drawing on the concept of potential expression (Strike, 1974), I examine the logic of inquiry constructed in these two case studies as a way of analyzing the implications of ways of naming, knowing and doing research in a particular time and space and within a particular program of research. This perspective has implications for what can be known and understood about a particular social group or phenomena under study. According to Strike, a program of research frames the questions that can be asked and what cannot be asked, defines the object of study; defines what constitutes a well-formed account and that some accounts will not count as well-formed; and defines the tenets of evidence and warrants possible. These aspects constitute the elements of language (discourse) that the research community uses and has a particular expressive potential: what can be known and said about particular phenomena, and in the case of this analysis, possibilities of examining the connections between local and global literacies, through contrasting data from two ethnographic studies on literacy practices in a Brazilian metropolitan neighborhood (Trombetas).

In doing a contrastive analysis of the logic of inquiry developed in these two case studies, I take a reflexive approach to the theoretical and methodological research choices made in developing these two case studies and I examine the expressive potential of the case studies developed at these two points in time (1989/2009). Through exploring the notion of expressive potential, I aim to make visible how the logic of inquiry (Green & Bloome, 1997; Green, Dixon & Zaharlick, 2000) constructed in these two case studies was grounded in ways of naming, knowing and doing research in a particular time and space and within a particular research program. In this presentation, I will examine examples related to the theoretical framework (e.g., theories available for conceptualizing literacy) and related to methodological issues, regarding the researcher’s entry to the field.

Author

• Maria L. Castanheira, Federal University of Minas Gerais