a. Coming to Ethnography from a Background in Teaching

Ben Rampton, King's College London (ben.rampton@kcl.ac.uk)

What difference does it make to an educational ethnography if the researcher has been a teacher?  And what if s/he hasn't?   Compared with, say, an anthropologist who's studying education, is an ex-school teacher more likely to

* associate 'macro-processes' more with policy than history, and to limit their generalisations to particular institutions?

* be driven by frustration and impatience rather than just a 'contrastive insight', and to worry more about irrelevance to real-world practice than disciplinary validity/recognition?

* over-privilege agency (drawing on a deeply ingrained optimism about the potential productivity of (pedagogic) interaction)?

* mix up 'ought' and 'is' (prescription & description), and take notions like 'the negotiation of meaning' and 'dialogicality' as phenomena to be measured/assessed empirically rather than as philosophical assumptions?

How far are tendencies like these endemic to a linguistic ethnography (LE) based in applied linguistics (AL) rather than sociology or anthropology?  Or do they instead tune to the post-structuralist/post-modern moment, where old boundaries between paradigms and between theory-and-practice are falling away?    AL-based LE might look might look hybrid compared with (certain kinds of) anthropology, but what if it's set next to cultural studies?

b. The potential contribution of Linguistic Ethnography to Vygotskian studies of talk and learning in school. 

Janet Maybin, Open University (j.maybin@open.ac.uk)

In this paper I shall revisit a number of Vygotskian and neo-Vygotskian concepts which have been influential in the study of language and learning in classrooms, and argue that Linguistic Ethnography can be used together with these concepts to extend, augment and deepen understanding of the role of talk in the development of students' knowledge and understanding. Vygotsky's placing of 'the word' at the centre of the dialectical process between inner consciousness and the outer social world suggests that processes of mental learning mediated through language are also processes of enculturation into, and action upon, a particular socio-cultural context.  Thus the 'zone of proximal development' has been described as the place where culture and cognition create each other (Cole 1985). However, while the close connection between culture and language has been examined in studies of language acquisition in young children, the application of neo-Vygotskian concepts such as appropriation and scaffolding in studies of talk in the classroom has tended to be tightly framed by specific pedagogic criteria and educationally institutionalised notions of competence. I shall argue that approaches from linguistic ethnography can be used within a broad Vygotskian framework to develop a more complex and comprehensive understanding of the role of context and the influence of wider social struggles on local activities within the classroom. Linguistic ethnography can also be used to develop a deeper understanding of the meaning of classroom interactions for the different participants and a clearer sense of the emic perspectives of students and their motivations and understandings in relation to educational and other activities in school.

Cole, M. (1985) 'The zone of proximal development: where culture and cognition create each other' in Wertsch, J. (ed) Culture, Communication and Cognition: Vygotskian perspectives. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

c. Interface? What interface? Reflexivity in linguistics research in multicultural classrooms 

Richard Barwell, University of Bristol (richard.barwell@bristol.ac.uk)

My research concerns the participation of bilingual, bicultural students in mainstream classrooms in the UK. This work involves students from South Asian, East Asian and East African backgrounds. I have focused on the discursive practices available to such students in taking part in mathematics classroom interaction. Through the course of my research, I have become interested in the interface between me-as-researcher and the students-as-researched. This interface includes the meeting of diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds within the research setting.  Johnson (1977, p. 172) defines reflexivity as "the mutual interdependence of observer or knower to what is seen or known". Such interdependence leads to methodological questions. If my observations of students and their interaction are interdependent with me and my prior experience of the world, what is the status of the claims I then make? How can I investigate the discursive practices of students, when any such investigation and any report of such an investigation are themselves constituted by discursive practices of their own? My experience of discursive practices associated with Asian identity, for example, is likely to be very different from that of the students involved in my research. Furthermore, in producing any account of an investigation of Asian identity, readers of that account will bring their own histories to their interpretation. Reflexivity, therefore, also concerns an interface between the researcher and the readers of their research.

In this paper, I draw on an extract from a transcript in which two students work on a mathematics classroom task. During the extract, issues of identity become salient, for me and for the participants. Through a discussion of the role of identity in the interaction in and around the transcript extract, I explore how the reflexive inter-relationship between the various participants (including conference delegates) blurs the interface between researcher and researched.

Johnson, J. M. (1977) Ethnomethodology and existential sociology. In Douglas, J. D. and Johnson, J. M. (Eds.) Existential Sociology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

d. Challenging family literacy pedagogy through linguistic ethnography

Kate Pahl, University of Sheffield (k.pahl@sheffield.ac.uk)

Family literacy in the UK is connected to a particular pedagogical model of literacy which has sometimes been critiqued (Pitt 2000). In England, it has not been strongly linked to ethnographies of literacy practices, unlike in Scotland where there is a stronger connection between research on literacy practices and educational practice (Heywood 2000). This presentation explores the interface between family literacy programmes, which in England are funded through the Basic Skills Agency, often set in schools and developed with parents and young children, and linguistic ethnography with families, often conducted in out of school, home and community settings. The presentation asked whether it is useful to work at that interface, and who benefits from the experience. Drawing on a two-year study of communicative practices in families, and on the researcher's experience as a family literacy tutor, the presentation argues that the ethnographic imagination can offer a challenge to the pedagogy of family literacy as taught in English school settings. Data from both family literacy and out of school settings will be explored using contextual frameworks from both family literacy pedagogy and ethnographic work in homes. By situating the focus of the presentation on the interface between pedagogy and ethnography, the relationship between the two can be explored. The presentation will ask how useful the 'lens' of the practitioner is to the 'lens' of the researcher, (and vice versa) and how this benefits research informants and family literacy students. It will argue that it is possible to look both ways - to have a simultaneous vision which both accounts for the ethnographic lens and develops pedagogy and practice.

Pitt, K. (2000) 'Family Literacy: a Pedagogy for the Future?' in Barton, D., Hamilton M., and Ivanic, R. Situated Literacies: Reading and Writing in Context London: Routledge.

Heywood, J. (2000) Involving Parents in Early Literacy. Edinburgh: City of Edinburgh Council

Part 2: 50 minute workshop led by 20 minute paper (abstract below)

Issues in research training for linguistic ethnography:  Training for practitioner researchers in an ethnographic research project

Rachel Hodge and Karin Tusting, Lancaster University

Over the past year, we have been working with the "Adult Learner's Lives" (ALL) project, one of the research projects funded by the National Research and Development Centre for Adult Literacy, Numeracy and ESOL.  The ALL Project is an ethnographic study which brings together detailed work with adult learners about the meanings of learning adult literacy, numeracy and ESOL in their lives, with analysis of audio- and video-recorded data on teaching and learning events.  

A key part of the process has been working with six teacher-researcher fellows, who were appointed to work with the project for one day a week over
a period of a year.  They have each engaged in research projects related to their own interests and professional concerns, under the broad umbrella of the ALL project. 

The fellowship has involved research training of two kinds: participation in a distance learning diploma in research and evaluation in adult basic education, coupled with a partnership and apprenticeship model where teacher-researchers met regularly with one of the three full-time ethnographers on the project, to discuss the progress of their own work and to contribute to the development of the Adult Learners' Lives project more generally. 

In this session we will talk about our experiences with working in this way and the issues that have been raised through engaging in this process.  We feel this will stimulate discussion about what is necessary and what is useful for research training in linguistic ethnography, particularly by bringing to light similarities and differences with research training in more conventional academic settings, such as postgraduate courses.