What We Don't Say Out Loud: Opportunities and Challenges of Participatory Ethnography in Urban Schools

• In Event: 69.023 - Participation in Qualitative Methods: Challenges and Possibilities

Abstract

This paper explores the complexities of participatory ethnography when that research is committed to equal power relations, co-authorship, and co-production. Data for this paper are drawn from a larger, ongoing participatory ethnography of a unique University/school partnership. Results of the analyses found that power produced generative frictions that animated changes in understanding of the research and produced resistance to the research simultaneously. This paper contributes to recent moves in educational research toward public scholarship and engaged research that works alongside participants. The paper discusses how such research might be done by describing the generative frictions that were produced in participatory ethnography in an urban high school under intense scrutiny by the state department of education and the general public.

Author

• Joanne C. Larson, University of Rochester