Issues in research training for linguistic ethnography:  Training for practitioner researchers in an ethnographic research project (Rachel Hodge and Karin Tusting)
Notes from a workshop at the UK Linguistic Ethnography Forum colloquium, BAAL Annual Meeting, Leeds, 6th September 2004.
Rachel Hodge and Karin Tusting led a workshop discussion about Linguistic Ethnography research training, drawing on their experiences of working with practitioners in an ethnographic research project.  They first spoke briefly about their experiences of working with teacher-researchers in the Adult Learners’ Lives project at the Lancaster Literacy Research Centre.  Workshop participants were then asked to break into small groups and discuss the following scenario:
Imagine you are going to carry out a 2 day training for practitioner researchers to prepare them for working as part of a linguistic ethnographic research project.  Produce a skeleton programme for the two days.  Consider what topics should be covered, who should give inputs and what formats would be most appropriate.
After working on this task, we discussed the different activities people had suggested, considering the different priorities the activity revealed, looking at whether there appeared to be ‘core elements’ of Linguistic Ethnographic research training emerging, and sharing the different issues that discussions had raised.
We would like to use these discussions as a starting point for developing a web-based resource relating to research training in Linguistic Ethnography more generally.  To this end, we collected the different training programmes that people had designed, and have reproduced them below.
GROUP 1
Day 1:  Who are practitioner researchers?
1.  What is the ‘product’ – data to be collected – a concrete view of research task.
2.  A discussion of the issues with this for the participants.
[Overnight processing of this and issues addressed on Day 2, eg:
operating video camera;
writing fieldnotes;
negotiating access;
interviewing;
coding texts / artefacts.]
3.  Project and stakeholders – who they are and what they want.
Day 2:
1.  Discussion of issues, as described above.  [ie specifics of training to emerge from overnight processing.]
2.  What is ethnography – Things to think about during the project.
GROUP 2
Day 1:
1.  Icebreaker – meeting each other – hopes, anxieties, and expectations for training days.  Followed by plenary.
2.  Semi-structured interviews in pairs, tape-recorded.  Task: to find out something about who the person is, which will be shared with the whole group.  Each person interviews the other for 5-10 minutes.  Presentation of the person interviewed to plenary also taped.
Report back on how it feels to be taped and interviewed.
Each pair transcribes one minute of tape – most significant bit.
Day 2:
Bring out issues this has raised – eg ethics, doing transcription, selecting from data, representation.
GROUP 3
Day 1
Definition and purpose of ethnography as opposed to other approaches to research.
Discussions about: why are they involved?  what for?
Day 2
Techniques:
Giving them some data
Life histories
Participant observation
GROUP 4
Day 1
Begin with “where we’ve come from” – activity for all participants to articulate personal experiences of self as learners.
Introductory input about ethnographic principles, processes (very general), with specific examples of different studies (possibly described by the people who have done them)
‘Show and tell’ with participants describing their own contexts, issues, problems etc.  (They would need to be forewarned about this.)
Task for the next day: reading? photography? some data? – need a clear rationale for this.
GROUP 5
Day 1: 
What is linguistic ethnography?
Report / presentation / discussion of each practitioners’ autobiography of their knowledge / experience about language and researching language.
Then conduct a series of activities designed to introduce the participants to qualitative observing / taking fieldnotes and analysing data.  Eg, viewing a videotape of a classroom and their commentary on what they observe.  Eg, looking at already written transcripts and then practising interpreting / analysing.
GROUP 6.
Day 1.
To see what they know about the ethnographic.
Know about the objectives of the research.
Advantages / disadvantages of the ethnographic.
Principles / issues.  (give example: privacy / confidentiality.)
Day 2.
Look at an ethnographic example.  How to collect data / analyse data.
Let the researcher give feedback on how they feel
GROUP 7.
Day 1.
What is ethnography?
What is a cultural context?
How does this relate to education?
Day 2.
How to do fieldwork
How to do an interview
What is participant-observation
Do life histories
It is interesting that common elements have emerged from many of the groups.  The core elements in most of them seem to be:
Some sort of activity relating to who the researchers are, what their backgrounds are, what their interest is in doing this kind of research.
Some sort of practical activity, working with data and / or generating data.
Some sort of theoretical input about the nature of ethnography.
Several of the suggestions combine these in creative ways, for instance by asking people to produce life histories through interviewing and then using these life histories themselves as data, thereby raising methodological and theoretical questions.