Ethnography in Higher Education [1st ed.] 9783658303808, 9783658303815

Citation preview

Doing Higher Education

Clemens Wieser Angela Pilch Ortega Editors

Ethnography in Higher Education

Doing Higher Education Series Editors Rudolf Egger, Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz, Graz, Austria Tobina Brinker, Arbeitsstelle für Hochschuldidaktik, Fachhochschule Bielefeld, Bielefeld, Germany Balthasar Eugster, Hochschuldidaktik, Universität Zürich, Zürich, Switzerland Jan Frederiksen, Institut for Medier, Erkendelse & Formidling, Københavns ­Universitet, Kopenhagen, Denmark

More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/16187

Clemens Wieser · Angela Pilch Ortega Editors

Ethnography in Higher Education

Editors Clemens Wieser Aarhus University Aarhus, Denmark

Angela Pilch Ortega University of Graz Graz, Austria

ISSN 2524-6380 ISSN 2524-6399  (electronic) Doing Higher Education ISBN 978-3-658-30380-8 ISBN 978-3-658-30381-5  (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-30381-5 © Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Responsible Editor: Stefanie Laux This Springer VS imprint is published by the registered company Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH part of Springer Nature. The registered company address is: Abraham-Lincoln-Str. 46, 65189 Wiesbaden, Germany

Contents

Ethnography in Higher Education: An Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Clemens Wieser and Angela Pilch Ortega Ethnographic Studies in Higher Education Questions of Imagination: On the Dearth of Ethnography in Higher Education. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 Martin Forsey Teaching Expertise in Higher Education: Constructive Alignment and How an Experienced University Teacher Maintained Constructive Alignment in Practice. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33 Clemens Wieser Post-Humanist Critical University Ethnography: The Potential of a ­Critical-Creative Reconfiguration of Critique. . . . . . . . . . . 53 Miriam Madsen “Process not Product”: Rethinking Feminist Teaching Across Disciplines with Autoethnographic Trialogues. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73 Daniela Jauk, Sabine Klinger and Nicole Pruckermayer Teaching Ethnography Ethnography for Engaging Students with Higher Education and Societal Issues. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93 Sarah Robinson

v

vi

Contents

Teaching Ethnographical Methods: Research Workshops for Students as a Space for Critical Reflection on Knowledge Production. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111 Angela Pilch Ortega We Are, I Am, You Are: “Joining in” as a Pedagogy and Research Tool. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127 Corinne McKamey, Cleti Cervoni and Rhoda Bernard Innovation in Ethnographic Methods The Problem of the Definition of the Situation in Educational Ethnography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 147 Christoph Maeder An Ethnographer Lured into Darkness. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157 Ned Barker Virtual Networks and Asynchronous Communities: Methodological Reflections on the Digital . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 177 Darlinda Moreira

Contributors

Angela Pilch Ortega, Dr. phil., is Associate Professor in Learning World Research and University Didactics at the Department of Education, University of Graz, Austria. Research focuses on biographical and learning world research, social movements and societal learning, and postcolonialism. Christoph Maeder,  Dr. oec. HSG, is Professor of Educational Sociology at the University of Teacher Education in Zürich, Switzerland. Research fields are the sociology of knowledge, organizational sociology and ethnographic research. Clemens Wieser,  Dr. phil, is Associate Professor in Educational Theory at the Danish School of Education, Aarhus University, Denmark. Research focuses on knowledge transformation, professional development, professional self-care, pedagogical practice in education, and tacit knowledge. Cleti Cervoni, Ed.D., is Professor in the School of Education at Salem State University in Salem, Massachusetts USA. She teaches courses on qualitative research and culturally responsive teaching. Her research interests are gender and science education and issues of equity in education. Corinne McKamey,  Ed.D., is Assistant Professor of Culture, Communities and Education, and Co-Director of the Youth Development B.A. program at Rhode Island College. Research interests include educational care, youth work, and identity. Daniela Jauk, Ph.D., is Assistant Professor at the Departments for ­Sociology and Criminal Justice at the University of Akron, Ohio. Research focuses on scholar activism, gender in criminal justice systems, and horticulture in incarcerated settings using feminist methodologies and didactics.

vii

viii

Contributors

Darlinda Moreira, Ph.D., is Pro-Rector for Innovation and Pedagogical ­Management at the Universidade Aberta, Portugal. Research focuses on distance education, anthropology of education, global education, adult education and ­lifelong learning, relationship between formal and informal education. Martin Forsey,  Ph.D., is Associate Professor in Anthropology & Sociology at The University of Western Australia. Research focuses on school reform, school choice, mobilities and education, qualitative research methodologies, internationalisation and active pedagogies in higher education. Miriam Madsen, Ph.D., is Assistant Professor in the Administration of Public Education at the Danish School of Education, Aarhus University. Research focuses on quality measurement, budgeting and accounting in higher education, higher education policy, the economics of education, and new materialist studies of numbers. Ned Barker,  Ph.D., is Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Education, University College London. Research interests focus on the complex relationships between the body, society, and technology and the use of sensory ethnography as a way to explore these relations. Rhoda Bernard,  Ed.D., is Managing Director of the Berklee Institute for Arts Education and Special Needs, Berklee College of Music. Research focuses on dis/ability studies and arts education, music educator professional identity, ­qualitative research methods, and researcher subjectivity. Sabine Klinger,  Dr. phil., is Assistant Professor at the Department of Education, University of Graz, Austria. Research focuses on social work, gender studies, diversity, digitalization, feminist teaching in higher education. Sarah Robinson,  Ph.D., is Associate Professor and Educational Anthropologist at the Centre for Teaching Development and Digital Media at Aarhus University, Denmark. Research focuses on entrepreneurial learning, models for the future university, curriculum reform, and teacher agency.

Ethnography in Higher Education: An Introduction Clemens Wieser and Angela Pilch Ortega

1 Our Starting Point Ethnographic research in higher education is gaining momentum. In the last 10 years, we saw a great increase in publications, and more and more researchers endorse ethnography because of its distinctive qualities and its productivity for research in higher education: Ethnography is commended for its unique approach to social practices through continuous and immediate experience in field work, and its unfragmented methodical attention to situations, interactions, and experiences. This attention is realised through an field-specific opportunism that is unique to the educational ethnography, a methodology that enables the selection of conclusive data subsequent to an initially unstructured data collection (Hammersley 2017; Walford 2018). These distinctive qualities translate into a set of principles for ethnographic research: Ethnography is a research approach that does take place over time, and engages in an exploration of different situations in the field in order to include a wide range of practices and participant perspectives. This does require time in the field, and continuous reflection on the contexts and processes to which these situations relate. Alongside this, ethnographic research also comes with an interest to illustrate the relationship between situated micro processes of practice, meso processes of a local community, and macro processes

C. Wieser (*)  Danish School of Education, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark e-mail: [email protected] A. Pilch Ortega  Department of Education, University of Graz, Graz, Austria e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2020 C. Wieser and A. Pilch Ortega (eds.), Ethnography in Higher Education, Doing Higher Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-30381-5_1

1

2

C. Wieser and A. Pilch Ortega

on socio-historical or political level, which goes beyond the insular microscopic analysis of interaction or the detached macroscopic analysis of discourses and policies. The unique qualities and principles of ethnographic research are especially fruitful for research on higher education, which can be characterized by its entangled arrangement of different spaces—spaces of learning and teaching, spaces of research, networking spaces, and spaces of higher education policy. What is characteristic for these spaces is their relation to each other, and with respect to research on higher education, their entanglement necessitates an approach that can illustrate the links between them. Educational ethnographers highlight that ethnography is particularly fit to explore and illustrate these links, because it provides a strategy to select appropriate data sets, and to assemble these data sets into compelling collages (Beach 2010). In ethnography, such collages are built on participant observation and field notes, but more often than not, ethnographic accounts include other data, such as video data of interactions, individual and collective self-representations of participants (such as blogs, video diaries, drawings, mappings), different types of interviews, artefacts, or sounds—altogether chosen because they enable “seeing voices” of participants, and because they make us aware of the noises and sounds that shape the ecology of social spaces (Forsey 2010; Maeder 2014). The development of ethnographic research in higher education is driven by different regional and international networks, which creates a heterogeneous landscape and makes it difficult to identify something like an established field that can be confidently referred to as the ethnography of higher education (see also Forsey in this volume). This may be due to the limited meeting spaces for educational ethnography that emphatically focus on higher education. However, the situation still allows to build on previous conferences, symposia, and special issues have started conversations on ethnographic research in higher education, bringing together researchers from different research environments in order to explore ethnographies in higher education in general (e.g. Pabian 2014), or in order to look at more specific topics such as university reforms between global knowledge economy and regional reforms (e.g. Wright and Rabo 2010; Wright et al. 2019). These conversations made clear that ethnographic research is built on diverse premises and traditions, and that most ethnographers rely on a specific set of such premises and traditions, which shapes their culture of doing ethnography. This culture might reflect a certain regional consensus, even though there might be even local cultural differences in the conduct of ethnographic fieldwork and analysis (Beach 2010, p. 50; Breidenstein 2017, p. 11). It might also reflect on the fact that becoming an ethnographer is embedded in local academic cultures,

Ethnography in Higher Education: An Introduction

3

which shape, enable, and disable research experiences, backgrounds, professional friendships, and contexts of research (Katz 2019). Altogether, this leads to a situation which requires a certain tolerance towards difference, a belief that each of the ethnographic cultures we meet can be seen as a reflection of a local research regime, and an openness to explore the focal qualities that these cultures may reveal when we listen to them. Furthermore, the situation illustrates that much ethnographic research comes with an implicit commitment to cultural relativism, which is also key to the empirical approach endorsed in ethnography (cf. also Hammersley 2018). After all, ethnography is empirical in the very concrete sense of the word: It is experience-based, and refrains from temptations of standardization and its promise of methodical control, in favour of methodological opportunism and cultural relativism (Knoblauch 2011; Kusch 2019). This relativist approach relates to the famous verdict “anything goes”—which according to Feyerabend (1993, p. 159) means to “make my selection in a highly individual and idiosyncratic way”. Starting with this verdict, our book can be seen as a collection of individual and idiosyncratic ways of doing ethnography in higher education. Together, this collection might not lead to a collective return to “fundamental principles” of ethnographic inquiry (Beach et al. 2018), but it might lead the observant reader to some reflections with respect to the own approach to doing ethnography in the face of the many modalities of ethnography that exist, and to some inspirations with respect to how ethnographic research can be done. This book includes a collection of chapters that present ethnographic studies on higher education, reflect on teaching ethnography, and discuss innovation in ethnographic methods. Starting point for this collection was the Rethinking Educational Ethnography Conference 2019 in Graz, which brought together a group of ethnographers that engage in higher education. The conference is part of a larger conference series that was started in 2010, grounded in a discussion of emerging concerns in ethnographic research. This discussion started at the first Rethinking Educational Ethnography Conference, dedicated to virtual ethnography. Until today, eight international conferences were organized in Borås, Helsinki, Porto, Barcelona, Napoli, Copenhagen, Klaipeda, Budapest, and Graz. Each year, we use the conference as a meeting space to discuss topics related to ethnographic epistemology, methodology, and practice—the outcome of which can be found in previous publications related to the conference series (Hernández Hernández et al. 2013; Landri et al. 2014). At the same time, the Rethinking Educational Ethnography Conference is relatively small and offers only a limited number of sessions to enable fruitful conversations and discussions amongst participants. The conference culture is to circulate papers before the conference,

4

C. Wieser and A. Pilch Ortega

and to organise sessions that provide time for a short presentation, where authors can emphasise main points and arguments, while the majority of the time in the sessions is dedicated to a conversation on the paper. Our conference series takes pride in its inclusive approach, and aims to create an atmosphere that welcomes innovation, where experienced and inexperienced researchers have the opportunity to meet, talk and socialize. The eighth conference in Graz has been built on the culture of previous Rethinking Educational Ethnography Conferences, and was organised by Clemens Wieser and Angela Pilch Ortega at University of Graz, in collaboration with the European Educational Research Association EERA Network 19, the Ethnography network. The thematic focus of the book reflects the conference theme, which highlighted three issues for discussion: Ethnography as a methodology for research on higher education, ethnography as a methodology that engages students in research, and innovation in ethnographic methods. With respect to research on higher education, we argued that ethnography provides an elaborate methodology that emphasises the significance of meanings students, researchers, and university leadership attribute to higher education. Ethnography investigates the everyday life in higher education, from classroom interactions to faculty meetings on university policy, and employs a range of data collection methods to document what is going on in universities. Ethnography thus seems particularly appropriate to address experiences and challenges of students and researchers in higher education. With respect to ethnography as a methodology that engages students in research, we illustrated the benefits of acquiring ethnographic skills: Ethnographic skills enable students to gain inside knowledge into contexts inside and outside of universities (cf. Robinson, in this volume), knowledge that is particularly relevant for professional and community development. Such inside knowledge yields the possibility to connect people, and to reveal and address difference in positions and experiences. These issues reflect in the call for papers. Our call for papers specifically invited contributions that addressed one or several of the following issues: • Ethnographic studies on higher education contexts: Teaching and learning processes in higher education, curriculum and university development, student engagement and drop-out, inequality in higher education, student cultures and diversity • Teaching ethnography in higher education: Approaches, benefits and challenges in acquiring a dynamic methodology • Innovation in ethnographic methods: Auto-ethnography, approaches to virtual ethnography, and approaches to the analysis of diverse ethnographic data

Ethnography in Higher Education: An Introduction

5

More generally, the Rethinking Educational Ethnography Conference also invited papers that reflect and build on the current discussion of ethnographic epistemology, methodology, and practice. After the conference, the authors who presented a paper had the option to be included in this book, and were invited to develop their conference paper into a book chapter, based on the feedback that they received during the conference. The vast majority of authors opted for this, and the author group that gathered in this book entered a peer review process that took place in two rounds, to make sure that the chapters that you can find in this book are coherent in argumentation, consistent in style, and rigorous in their illustration of academic considerations and empirical findings. The chapters reflect the work of this group of authors, which ranges across the three overarching issues of the conference, and which is united by the careful attention to the everyday life in higher education, the unexpected exception of the rule, and the implicit meanings of practice. In line with the issues of the conference, the book is made up of three parts: Part I focuses on Ethnographic Studies in Higher Education, part II focuses on Teaching Ethnography, and part III focuses on Innovation in ethnographic methods. Each part is led by a contribution from one of the keynote speakers of the conference: Martin Forsey, Sarah Robinson, and Christoph Maeder. The following sections give a quick overview over the chapters.

2 Part I. Ethnographic Studies in Higher Education In the first chapter Questions of Imagination: On the Dearth of Ethnography in Higher Education, Martin Forsey reflects on the absence of ethnography research in higher education. Starting with the question “What is going on here?”, the chapter brings together a range of ethnographic perspectives to argue that the way in which ethnography is imagined and practiced significantly contributes to our beliefs about the prevalence of ethnography in higher education. Through various imaginaries of ethnographic practice, the chapter explores opportunities and barriers in which ethnography can be practiced in the field of higher education. The chapter concludes with the argument that ethnographic studies in higher education need to build more legitimacy than they currently enjoy, both inside and outside of higher education. Clemens Wieser focuses on Teaching Expertise in Higher Education, and explores how an experienced university teacher maintained constructive alignment in practice. The chapter builds on the theoretical consideration that both personal and practical knowledge are essential for teaching. Taking a look at teaching expertise in higher education, the chapter presents a knowledge devel-

6

C. Wieser and A. Pilch Ortega

opment model that frames teaching as a practical set of orientations that guide awareness and enable situated appraisal, and a personal set of orientations that enables the problematisation of teaching experiences. This model provides the background for an ethnographic case study at the University of Copenhagen, which explores the professional development of an experienced teacher at the Faculty of Science. The case study illustrates that the teachers’ work particularly focuses on maintaining constructive alignment for students. Miriam Madsen illustrates a Post-Humanist Critical University Ethnography. The chapter highlights the potential of a critical-creative reconfiguration of critique, and aims to stimulate a rethinking of ethnographic research practice that challenges existing power relations and creates a space for gathering main university actors, such as students, academics and managers. The chapter provides an outline of post-humanist philosophy, and illustrates ways in which this theoretical position links to ethnographic research. In a next step, the chapter proposes an innovative arrangement of ethnographic research practice that explores ways in which philosophical ideas can be operationalised into methodological decisions. Consequently, the chapter presents parts of an empirical analysis that exemplifies how a critical-creative ethnography can avoid the reproduction of power relations. The chapter “Process not product”: Rethinking Feminist Teaching across Disciplines with Autoethnographic Trialogues by Daniela Jauk, Sabine Klinger and Nicole Pruckermayer aims to address feminist teaching through autoethnographic trialogues. In their writing, autoethnography is used as a method for ­self-interrogation in three voices. As an author team with different approaches to gender studies and feminism, they explore their feminist practice of teaching, and bring together their personal pathways and the question of how it shapes teaching practice. The reflection and re-construction of heteronormative and patriarchalbias in knowledge production processes and the implementation of intersectional strategies is part of their feminist teaching practice. Questioning the universality of feminist ideas of teaching and underlining the procedural character of their exploration, they offer critical reflections and inspire critical thinking and practice within feminist teaching spaces.

3 Part II. Teaching Ethnography Sarah Robinson’s chapter Ethnography for Engaging Students with Higher Education and Societal Issues presents ways in which we can shift away from a neoliberal focus in education. While educational institutions are under critique because they do not prepare students to respond to challenges of a future that is

Ethnography in Higher Education: An Introduction

7

changing and unpredictable, entrepreneurial mindsets and neoliberal discourses have deeply influenced university structures. The chapter emphasises that ethnography provides the means to engage students with knowledge that links to real life issues, and empowers active citizenship. More specifically, this engagement relies on the Scandinavian definition of entrepreneurship, and a change maker model that is used for teaching at Aarhus University in Denmark. Ethnography here becomes a pedagogical tool that involves students in the process of knowledge production and the exploration of societal issues. The chapter Teaching Ethnographical Methods: Research Workshops for Students as a Space for Critical Reflection on Knowledge Production by Angela Pilch Ortega also focuses on ethnography as a pedagogical tool that offers opportunities for critical reflection on knowledge production processes. She argues that knowledge production and the formation of opinions is shaped by patterns of interpretation that remain widely tacit. The author argues that research workshops provide a space for critical reflection on such tacit knowledge, and that these research workshops encourage students to question their personal assumptions. Based on the analysis of a research workshop on qualitative research methods for students, the chapter gives insights into some of the challenges that teachers may face when doing research on ethnically sensitive topics. With their chapter We Are, I Am, You Are: “Joining in” as a Pedagogy and Research Tool, Corinne McKamey, Cleti Cervoni, and Rhoda Bernard reflect on their approach of “joining in” both with respect to its pedagogical function as well as its function for research. Joining in as an educational tool has been developed as a common practice of their teaching and research activity. The authors argue that the logic of joining in is more than a tool—it is an approach to teaching and research that questions the idea of a single powerful professor in the room. In their chapter, they give three examples which illustrate how joining in can be used in a range of contexts in order to collect, analyse, and reflect on empirical data.

4 Part III. Innovation in Ethnographic Methods In the chapter The Problem of the Definition of the Situation in Educational Ethnography, Christoph Maeder takes an interactionist perspective to elaborate on the concept of situation in educational ethnography. Based on the fact that we all have a familiarity with the educational system and its routinized and embodied membership knowledge, the chapter unfolds the argument that it is necessary to look at pedagogical situations as professional strangers in order to construct how people in a classroom act as educators and students. This interest in the construc-

8

C. Wieser and A. Pilch Ortega

tion of a pedagogical situation leads towards an illustration of molecules of pedagogical situations, which starts out with Goffman’s question “What is going on here?”, and presents ethnomethodological concepts for the analysis of pedagogical interaction. Ultimately, this illustration underlines one central asset of ethnographic research on education, namely that it can provide precise descriptions and systematic analysis based on participant observation. In the chapter Going Dark, Ned Barker offers some reflections on doing ethnography in higher education. In his chapter, he problematizes the privileged use of observation in ethnographic traditions and the tendency to fade in terms of visibility and immediacy within the research process. The chapter provides an argument that permanent reflection is a core practice of ethnographic research. Without this permanent reflection, we are left in the dark and unable to find a way to respond to the nittygritty qualitative nature of ethnography. Drawing on two methodological vignettes, he gives insights into the reflection process of his PhD research, with the intention to uncover methodological tensions and to offer possibilities of being lured into darkness whilst doing participant observation. Finally, the chapter Virtual Networks and Asynchronous Communities: Methodological Reflections on the Digital by Darlinda Moreira offers a reflection on methodological aspects of ethnographic research in a digital educational field. The chapter raises methodological issues and challenges when doing research on cyberspaces, virtual networks and the asynchronous communities. Moreover, it underlines the specific modes of communication and interaction of cyberspaces that need to be considered when doing research in this area. Her reflections focus on specific challenges of doing participant observation in a cyberspace context.

5 Discussion The conversation on Ethnography in Higher Education that this book provides is situated within the broader economic, societal and regional contexts of universities, and provides an understanding of whether and how ethnography is responsive to the methodological challenges of exploring higher education, how we can teach ethnography in higher education, and how we can arrive at innovation in ethnographic methods. Each of the chapters in the book reflects on empirical data, providing critical insight into the possibilities that educational ethnography offers in higher education, as well as exploring issues and challenges surrounding the methodology. Reading the chapters in relation to each other, the individual contributions also go beyond the three main issues of the book, addressing a range of further issues: Some authors focus on the ways in which educational ethnog-

Ethnography in Higher Education: An Introduction

9

raphy draws on theory, how current theoretical developments impact the empirical enterprise of ethnography, and support venturing into unfathomed phenomena (Maeder, Wieser, Madsen, and Moreira, in this volume). Another group of authors emphasises the political role that educational ethnographers take, and address the political implications of doing ethnography, using it as an empowerment strategy to resist the neoliberal university, subvert academic power relations, and reject heteronormative and patriarchal subjection (Robinson, as well as Pilch Ortega, McKamey/Cervoni/Bernand, and Jauk/Klinger/Pruckermayer, in this volume). Yet another group of authors takes a reflective stance towards educational ethnography, exploring the reliance of ethnographic research on permanent reflection, and how the situation of educational ethnography is co-constructed by our own definition of its situation in the wider field of education (Barker and Forsey, in this volume). The ideas and considerations gathered in this book form the beginning of a conversation. Looking across the different chapters and into the topics that are jointly raised, this conversation might lead to answers to some the challenges we experience, and to the perspectives we imagine. We hope you, the readers, will join and expand this conversation with your commentary, critique, and debate. We hope you enjoy the book!

References Beach, D. (2010). Identifying and comparing Scandinavian ethnography: Comparisons and influences. Ethnography and Education, 5(1), 49–63. https://doi. org/10.1080/17457821003768455. Beach, D., Bagley, C., & Marques da Silva, S. (2018). Ethnography of education: Thinking forward, looking back. In D. Beach, C. Bagley, & S. M. da Silva (Eds.), The Wiley handbook of ethnography of education (pp. 671–690). Hoboken: Wiley. Breidenstein, G. (2017). Interdisziplinäre Tradition und disziplinäre Konvention in der erziehungswissenschaftlichen Ethnographie. Zeitschrift für Qualitative Forschung, 18(1), 9–20. https://doi.org/10.3224/zqf.v18i1.02. Feyerabend, P. (1993). Against method (3rd ed.). London: Verso. Forsey, M. (2010). Ethnography as participant listening. Ethnography, 11(4), 558–572. https://doi.org/10.1177/1466138110372587. Hammersley, M. (2017). What is ethnography? Can it survive? Should it? Ethnography and Education, 13(1), 1–17. https://doi.org/10/gdshv5. Hammersley, M. (2018). Ethnography of schooling in England: A history and assessment of its early development. In D. Beach, C. Bagley, & S. M. da Silva (Eds.), The Wiley handbook of ethnography of education (pp. 212–239). Hoboken: Wiley. Hernández Hernández, F., Fendler, R., & Sancho Gil, J. M. (Eds.). (2013). Rethinking educational ethnography: Researching on-line communities and interactions. Barcelona: Universitat de Barcelona Press.

10

C. Wieser and A. Pilch Ortega

Katz, J. (2019). On becoming an ethnographer. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 48(1), 16–50. https://doi.org/10.1177/0891241618777801. Knoblauch, H. (2011). Videoanalyse, Videointeraktionsanalyse und Videographie – Zur Klärung einiger Missverständnisse. Sozialer Sinn, 12(1). https://doi.org/10/gdshvw. Kusch, M. (2019). Simmel and Mannheim on the sociology of philosophy, historicism, and relativism. In M. Kusch, K. Kinzel, J. Steinzinger, & J. Wildschut (Eds.), The emergence of relativism: German thought from the enlightenment to national socialism (pp. 165–180). New York: Routledge. Landri, P., Maccarini, A., & De Rosa, R. (Eds.). (2014). Networked together: Designing participatory research in online ethnography. In: Proceedings of the 3rd annual conference on Rethinking educational ethnography: Researching on-line communities and interactions. Rome: Istituto di ricerche sulla popolazione e le politiche sociali. Maeder, C. (2014). Analysing sounds. In U. Flick (Ed.), The SAGE handbook of qualitative data analysis (pp. 424–434). Los Angeles: Sage. Pabian, P. (2014). Ethnographies of higher education: Introduction to the special issue. European Journal of Higher Education, 4(1), 6–17. https://doi.org/10.1080/21568235. 2013.864569. Walford, G. (2018). Recognizable continuity: A defense of multiple methods. In D. Beach, C. Bagley, & S. M. da Silva (Eds.), The Wiley handbook of ethnography of education (pp. 36–49). Hoboken: Wiley. Wright, S., Carney, S., Krejsler, J. B., Nielsen, G. B., & Williams Ørberg, J. (2019). Enacting the University: Danish University reform in an ethnographic perspective. Dortrecht: Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-024-1921-4. Wright, S., & Rabo, A. (2010). Introduction: Anthropologies of university reform. Social Anthropology, 18(1), 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1469-8676.2009.00096.x.

Ethnographic Studies in Higher Education

Questions of Imagination: On the Dearth of Ethnography in Higher Education Martin Forsey

Abstract

In the decade just passed there were some notable lamentations about the lack of attention to ethnographic research in post-secondary education, or higher education (HE) as it is better known. To call the level, or amount of concern significant, would be an exaggeration, but this does not mean claims regarding a dearth of ethnography in HE is not significant, at least for those of us with professional interest in the area. In this chapter I want to bring the concerns together into the one space, opening up an important question for any ethnographer— “what is going on here?” While it is fruitless to try and establish the veracity of claims regarding ethnographic research being particularly absent in HE studies, it is clear there is no established field that could confidently refer to itself as “the ethnography of higher education”, and it is in this lack where the real dearth lies. Interrogating how ethnography is imagined and practiced in order to address what is going on, it is clear the views and versions of ethnography practitioners carry as part of their professional habitus, how ethnography is imagined to be, contributes significantly to beliefs about the prevalence of ethnography in HE. Imagining ethnographic practice is obviously a matter of perspective and standpoint, emanating in no small part from training and experience. Through these various imaginaries I want to explore what it means to apply them to HE, speculating on whether some of the various ways in which ethnography is represented by various practitioners hinder its adaptation into HE. M. Forsey (*)  Discipline of Anthropology and Sociology, The University of Western Australia (M257), Perth, WA, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2020 C. Wieser and A. Pilch Ortega (eds.), Ethnography in Higher Education, Doing Higher Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-30381-5_2

13

14

M. Forsey

Keywords

Fieldwork · Ethnographic imaginary · Common sense · Mythology · ­Multi-sited ethnography · Anthropology · Participant observation · Collective ethnography

1 What’s Happening to Ethnography? The Heroic Vision of Fieldwork Has Long Been that of a Venture into the Unknown and an Adventure of Discovery. (Faubion and Marcus, Quoted in Jaschik 2009)

Ethnography is not what is used to be (Kenway 2015; cf. Faubion and Marcus 2009); but perhaps it never was. “The single-site, year in the field, ­one-tribe-one-scribe realist tale” ideal identified so eloquently by Van Maanen (2011, p. 164) as the once and so-called standard model of ethnography, is open to negotiation, although not in all quarters of the ethnography field. That said, the challenges to the traditional “participant observation plus” (Crang and Cook 2007) model of ethnographic practice has been challenged since the inception of the term, although perhaps more by practice than by philosophical engagement. I think immediately of no less a figure than Margaret Mead’s defence of “studying culture at a distance” (Mead 1953). Consider also the following reflection from the sociologist Herbert Gans (1999, p. 540)—he explains his research pedigree well enough below: When Everett Hughes taught me the University of Chicago in the late 1940s,1 we were trained in Participant Observation (PO), although we also called it fieldwork. We were already aware, however, that PO was an umbrella word covering several combinations of participation and observation and that different combinations were relevant for different studies and sites. Gans was writing a plea to return to use of the PO as the umbrella term of choice rather than ethnography, which he argues has grown too wide, “covering topics that are barely related to PO or in considerable conflict” (1999, p. 541).

1I

am often intrigued by the ways in which sociological contributions to what is now called ethnography, is ignored in considerations of its methodological and epistemological imperatives. The lack of attention to the pioneering role of the Chicago School is particularly baffling.

Questions of Imagination: On the Dearth of Ethnography …

15

It is difficult to imagine any such movement in the near future. In contemplating this collection as an example, a title highlighting participant observation in higher education simply will not cut it aesthetically when compared with its ethnographic counterpart. PO is not a term to capture imaginations with, and as I am about to argue, imagination is significant when it comes to mobilising engagement with ideas. Of far greater moment for this collection and its readers is the reminder Gans, among others, offers about the fluid nature of ethnographic practice, inviting reflection on what it means to be and to call oneself an ethnographer of higher education. Claims of insufficient attention being paid to doing ethnography in higher education (HE) mark the take-off point for this essay, allegations I relate in no small part to the mythic representations of the norms and forms of ethnographic practice just highlighted (Rabinow and Marcus 2008). The point being that the research conducted and reported as ethnographic, may not be considered as such by significant commentators—the “contemporary traditionalists” as Kenway (2015) calls them, who defend ethnography’s sacred norms and forms, especially in relation to space, time and mobility. There are distinct possibilities of misrecognition, or even a lack of recognition, for work claimed as ethnographic by researchers, and that various forms of mis-recognition support perceptions of a dearth of ethnography in higher education. There is another key factor to consider: the alleged lack of attention to higher education by ethnographic researchers may well reflect broader trends in educational research. There is a distinct possibility that social researchers are not as attracted to universities and other forms of tertiary education as sites worthy of consideration as they are to other sites of significance. The evidence for this hypothesis is difficult to find, which helps account for the personal reflections in this essay focused on my reluctant movement towards becoming an ethnographer of HE. The first empirical move for this paper is to consider some of the arguments posited about there being a dearth of ethnographic attention within HE, particularly in terms of their context and the evidence offered. Ultimately, I think it is fruitless to measure a distinct lack of ethnographic work in HE, especially when one considers possibilities of there being a comparative lack of research attention to HE in many areas of the social sciences, a point to be arrived at in due course. In a more speculative manner, the focus then shifts towards contemplations of the ways in which ethnography is both imagined and practiced, linking gaps and alliances to broader arguments about the desirability of conducting ethnographic studies in and around universities and other institutions of higher education. Desirability is further explored in relation to HE as a site of research activity. The

16

M. Forsey

research is certainly happening, but to what extent is it avoided by practitioners outside of education faculties and centres of learning and teaching in HE?

2 What is (Not) Going on in the Ethnography of Higher Education? The decade just passed contained a number of notable lamentations about the lack of attention to ethnographic research in post-secondary education. To call the level, or amount of concern significant, would be an exaggeration, but this does not mean claims regarding a dearth of ethnography in HE is not significant, at least for those of us with professional interest in the area. Well-known geographer and university administrator Nigel Thrift (2011) opened up discussion about a dearth of ethnographic research in HE via a blog published by The Chronicle of Higher Education, noting that “academia often seems remarkably ­under-studied in ethnographic terms”. Thrift’s observation was extended by Pabian (2014) through his introduction to a special issue focused on ethnographies of higher education (European Journal of Higher Education), asserting that ethnography is “a rarely adopted approach in the field of higher education research”. In the same year, Iloh and Tierney (2014, p. 20) pointed to the unrealised potential for ethnography to capture the dynamics of “an increasingly evolving postsecondary landscape”. While the special issue (SI) edited by Pabian helps address concerns about the lack of ethnographic research in and about HE, his argument implies that the SI is a mere drop in an indifferent, neglectful ocean. Shifting disciplinary allegiance and continents, Gusterson questions the anthropological tendency to ignore higher education. Writing in his role as President of the American Ethnological Society he argued that, “the anthropological literature on universities is… underdeveloped, scattered, and riddled with blind spots” (Gusterson 2017, p. 435). Gusterson’s insertion into debates about the presence and the role of anthropological research in higher education is significant to the deliberations of this paper because of the centrality of anthropology to the ways in which ethnographic practice is imagined, a point picked up later in the chapter. What of the evidence? Neither Thrift nor Iloh & Tierney offer any; they work off impressions only. Gusterson (2017, p. 435) presents evidence from Anthropology and Education Quarterly. Over a four-year period, he counted less than 4% of published articles focused on. It is important to remember Gusterson’s focus on anthropological studies rather than ethnography per se, and that anthropology is often portrayed as the progenitor of ethnographic practice (Kenway 2015).

Questions of Imagination: On the Dearth of Ethnography …

17

Pabian (2014, p. 6) in his introduction to the special issue he edited also offers a small research base, citing “a quick search” of Higher Education Abstracts which returned 70 hits for “ethnography”, compared with more than 2000 hits for both “interviews” and “questionnaires”. For the comparison to have useful validity we need to know if the differences of scale highlighted vary significantly from other fields of social scientific endeavour—compared with ethnography are interviews and questionnaires more popular in qualitative research domains? If so, to what extent? It is also useful to know how many of the interviews and questionnaires were part of a broader ethnographic study? For validity’s sake, it would be helpful to see if reliable figures could be gathered comparing the use of the three approaches (among others) for education studies in general. If there is less research in HE studies in general, regardless of approach, there should be no surprises in sensing a lack of attention to HE in specific areas when compared with other fields of study. Stimulated initially by the suggestions just highlighted of a dearth of ethnography, a colleague and I have looked systematically at the presence and practice of ethnographic research in the HE landscapes (see Forsey and Page, forthcoming). When we began the review, we were overwhelmed by the volume of papers and dissertations uncovered in our initial search of abstracts located through various search engines. It was difficult to see a dearth of ethnography from that particular angle. In making the project more manageable, we honed in on the titles of peer-reviewed papers and completed Doctoral theses, narrowing the field to 142 papers proclaiming through their titles to be based on ethnographic research into higher education. With a timeframe of 1985–2018 this amounts to 4 papers per year (although the average has expanded in the past decade with 9.9 per year). The numbers seem small, but the figures are meaningless without comparable data of other methodological approaches AND comparative research in education more generally. We have no way of knowing from our data if ethnographic research is under-represented when compared with the broader educational field, or other fields of social research. Not that we have any intention of finding out as the enormity of the task of proof seems disproportionate to the importance of the question. For the purposes of this paper I am prepared to accept there is not as much ethnographic research in the HE field as there could or should be, particularly given the significant social and cultural impact of tertiary institutions. That said, it is important to acknowledge there is no established field titled “the ethnography of higher education”. Perhaps this is the dearth that matters. While there are plenty of journals and conferences centred around Higher Education in general, and a number of disciplinary societies contribute to research outputs in the

18

M. Forsey

broader field of education (which in turn often codes for schooling), established disciplines tend not to have a sub-disciplinary field gathered around research into higher education. Compounding the issue for ethnographers, our research commitments tend to transcend disciplinary boundaries, making the establishment of a specific group of scholars identifying as Ethnographers of HE even more difficult to achieve. It is impossible to gauge, but I suspect there are not very many social researchers in the world who identify themselves primarily as ethnographers of HE, for many it is likely to be a secondary focus. Time then to shift attention towards the productive ethnographic question about “what is going on here?” (Geertz 1976; Walvoord and McCarthy 1990). Beyond relativist arguments, how might we explain the lack of attention to HE by social researchers in general and ethnographers in particular? In so doing, I want to signal the importance of recognising how ethnography is imagined as a research practice. Such a move helps emphasise the different ways in which people identify themselves as “Ethnographer”, or at least as ethnographic in practice. As will be discussed the contestation surrounding identification of “real” or “genuine” ethnography can help explain why two research papers reflecting quite similar approaches to the research process may have one identifying as ethnographic, while the other eschews the label.

3 Seeking Reasons for the Dearth of Ethnographic Practice in Higher Education Returning to the first of the quartet of papers cited above concerned about ethnographic diminishment in HE, Thrift (2011) offers three possible reasons: 1. It is all just too close to home and therefore uncomfortable; 2. It is indulgent: we are here to study other people, not ourselves; and 3. There is a distinct genre of campus novels which do much the same thing as an ethnography. The first two suggestions seem more plausible than the last, and more productive in their focus. Gusterson (2017, pp. 435–436) offers elaborated, psychologised versions of Thrift’s explanations, pointing initially to “avoidance relationships” causing a revulsion to being too reflexive (to the point of self-indulgence perhaps?). He moves on, raising important questions about perceptions of research into university life held by those working within it, suggesting colleagues do not value such a research focus, attributing this to structures within the academy,

Questions of Imagination: On the Dearth of Ethnography …

19

described via Wisniewski (2000, p. 8) as an ‘exclusive club’ fearing the embarrassment of public scrutiny. Pabian (2014, p. 15) identifies positionality and engagement as two main challenges arising from conducting ethnographic research in HE, issues “easily eschewed” by researchers pursuing short “dives” into the field through interviews or questionnaires (pp. 14–15). According to Pabian, in seeking to research colleagues often in their home university and/or their “home discipline”, the Ethnography of HE involves the researcher in significant role conflation, triggering more stress and discomfort than the individual can bear without some form of adaption: Adoption rather than suspicious rejection of this embeddedness gave rise to auto-ethnography where the researcher’s self becomes not an obstacle nor even an instrument but an “object” of research (while never ceasing to be the “subject” of research). What this requires is a unique level of reflexivity, awareness and conscious positionality (pp. 14–15). The unique epistemological, ethical and methodological difficulties associated with conducting a study so proximate to the university-based researcher, the accompanying risks of embarrassment and censure, and the potential ­career-jarring, income-threatening possibilities can certainly trigger the sorts of avoidance identified by Gusterson, helping explain evasion of ethnography in and of HE. These are plausible explanations, but we do not have systematic evidence supporting them. The degree to which research in HE is valued or not, or seen as desirable—as much by the researcher as her colleagues—is a key matter for any discipline or research approach. If there is less research in this arena, regardless of approach, it is not surprising those looking into the HE field notice its lack regardless of discipline or research approach. Beyond matters of desire, another key matter speaking more directly to ethnographic practice centres around the manifold ways in which ethnography is imagined. Massey (1991, p. 260) puts the case well: “the very volume of protests that ethnography is this and not that betrays its extreme malleability as a research method … [it] can be adapted … to numerous perspectives and ends”. The next section explores some of this malleability and the myths that have come to surround the governing of ethnographic practice.

3.1 Myths and Common Sense: What Do We Imagine When We Speak of Ethnography? Even today, whenever I think of ethnographers in action, I am inclined to think of someone pulling a canoe up onto a beach while curious inhabitants peek out of

20

M. Forsey

village huts. I do not think of myself driving 25 miles on the interstate, one eye on the freeway, the other on the fuel gauge, to “record what happens” two times a week when a classroom teacher turns on a 15-min television program (Wolcott 1999, p. 237). If we think of ethnographers as an informal community of practice, most are probably well aware of the importance of moving beyond what people say they do to what they actually do (Forsey 2010b, p. 71). Emphasising the obvious, what people say they do, what they like to think they do, is often built around idealised versions of social practice individuals are socialised into, albeit with varying levels of success. For this the building of a mythological base is often vital. Building on our discussion of how we imagine ethnography and ethnographic research, I want to open up some space to contemplate what informs our imagination regarding ethnography, for which I suggest focusing on the ideas of myth and common sense as helpful heuristic devices. A significant minority of reports built out of ethnographic research conducted in sites of higher education, those canvassed in the research outlined above argue a case for the centrality of anthropology in the establishment of ethnographic practice in the broader academy (Forsey et al. forthcoming). This belief helps position Malinowski, the so-called “father of fieldwork”, as a historical figure with a “quasi-mythical status [whose] disciplinary descendants … continue to measure themselves against his achievements” (Young 2014). Myths and mythic figures work this way, expressing and enshrining fundamental understandings about society and its organizations (Fry 1995); in this case with a “learned society” linked through the formal and informal practices by which one becomes a knowing and accepted member. Malinowskian edicts about ethnographic research carries the alluring promise of comprehending “the intimate touches of native life”, but only if one is prepared to be “in close contact with the natives, one way or the other, for a long period of time” (Malinowski, cited in Erickson and Murphy 2017, p. 212). Epstein, et al. (2013) point to an ethnographic tradition, created in no small part by Malinowski and arising from a mythos of “open-air anthropology” (Stocking 1983, p. 111), resulting in three “sacred imperatives” for ethnographers—“time, depth and field”. Epstein et al. (2013) capture these obligations in terms of the long-term immersion and encounter imperatives of fieldwork—often summarised as participant observation—and commitments to “thick description” in a “field”. Holism is also worth adding to the list, perhaps as an extension of depth, but certainly as part of an anthropological imaginary that takes for granted the centrality of representing “the whole” (Bubandt and Otto 2010, p. 4; Forsey 2019).

Questions of Imagination: On the Dearth of Ethnography …

21

The requirements of detailed observations and engagement with the minutiae of everyday life over an extended period of time, reaching into the native worldview in order to visualise the whole of the social world they inhabit, have become part of anthropological common sense, and, by implication, an ethnographic ideal. Following Gramsci’s (1985, p. 421) use of common sense as the ­taken-for-granted, self-evident scientific truths emerging out of a particular time and place, there is a strong sense of these “truths” becoming relatively rigid forms of popular knowledge as they enter into common circulation, which in the case of ethnography refers to movement around disciplinary corridors much more than in arenas beyond the academy—as common as it usually gets. Rendered by Gramsci as part of part of a scientific folklore, there is a mythic quality to his notion of common sense, which simultaneously reflects and produces knowledge through training and socialisation. The norms and forms of the common-sensical views of fieldwork, often used as a synonym for ethnography (Ingold 2008), have become part of a “pedagogical routine” (Marcus 2009, p. 16) helping form a researcher’s habitus. As part of routinized behaviour such customary pedagogies often translate into practices that are difficult to disrupt and dislodge for a variety of structural and personal reasons.

3.2 Ethnography and the Village To help exemplify some of the forms this common sense takes in relation to HE, I turn to one of the best-known ethnographic traversals of higher education of our time in Rebekah Nathan’s My Freshman Year (2005). Nathan chose a student dormitory as the logical place to focus her attention, assuming the identity of a l­ive-in first year student at her home university for the whole of an academic year. On the cover of the book, Lois Weis, who also wrote a notable ethnography based on the experiences of Black students in a community college in the USA (Weis 1985), describes how “Rebekah Nathan uses her well-honed anthropological skills to study the “university as a village”” (my emphasis). Nathan seemed to anticipate the dormitory as village-like, expecting students’ lives “to be more public, … for students to be involved with dorm mates in a number of joint events” (p. 32). However, she found instead a student dormitory existence mainly enacted behind closed doors and a college life “in which no one is in the same place at the same time” (p. 38). Insofar as it reflects the Malinowskian fieldwork mythos, seeking the village in ethnographic work is understandable; but, ultimately, it is a puzzling and inadequate metaphor, in many, if not most settings, including perhaps villages

22

M. Forsey

themselves (see Clifford 1997). Imagining a university as a village is a stretch. Armstrong and Massé (2014, p. 809) suggest a city as a more apt analogy, pointing out that “Universities are not internally coherent organizations with a single mission”, rather they serve “multiple ends and constituencies” as massive scientific and research organizations, housing a wide variety of occupations and professions, running large hospitals, and semi-professional sporting teams in some instances. However, municipal analogies are difficult to sustain. Universities are oft times a part of cities and towns, and sometimes quite apart from them; they have distinct structural forms, with their own forms of cultural and economic production built around unique daily life rhythms and demographic profiles. They are universities, and perhaps there is no other way to study them but as that, on their own terms. Returning to Gusterson’s lament (2017) about the lack of anthropological attention to higher education and the exclusionary practices and the avoidance relationships he posits as a significant cause of this lack; I counter-posit the Malinowskian village archetype as another contributing factor. Within the broad ambit of educational ethnography, schools fit more readily into the idea of a village than do universities—they are bounded spaces with relatively small populations (most of them). They are usually located within a broader community, and many of them are filled with local people who spend most of the working day within the village boundary. There are set routines and discrete populations of people who are relatively easy to follow through the working day. Schools seem easier to ethnograph, and to imagine ethnographing than universities in the classic sense of the term. Do we need to feel like we are conducting a study of a village for it to feel genuinely ethnographic? Reflecting on the anthropology of Britain and the role of interviews in such work, Hockey (2002) asserts that many a postgraduate student is reluctant to name their rich qualitative research as ethnographic lest their methods be judged inadequate by an external examiner when measured against the apparent power of the term. I wonder if there is a similar dynamic at play in imagining doing an ethnography of a university, or at least in claiming the work to be ethnographic, or anthropological in the case of both Gusterson and Nathan.

3.3 Ethnography as Participant Observation “Plus” As already indicated, the ethnography of higher education literature has a strong tendency to equate ethnography with participant observation, alongside concomitant implications of this process being practiced over an extended period of time.

Questions of Imagination: On the Dearth of Ethnography …

23

There is nothing surprising in this observation as the equation is commonplace beyond education (Shah 2017; O’Reilly 2009; Crang and Cook 2007; Delamont 2004). With this in mind, despite having questioned the tendency to equate ethnography with participant observation in earlier writing (Hockey and Forsey 2012; Forsey 2010a, b), I want to pause the critical voice (at least for a moment) in order to take seriously the realities created by this common sense view of ethnographic modes of practice. More especially, I want to allow the reasons for the construction of ethnography primarily as participant observation (PO) plus a variety of other methods (Crang and Cook 2007, p. 35) to surface in order to further explore their implications for ongoing ethnographic practice. The attraction of an approach allowing the voice of ordinary folk to be extraordinary, that encourages a “real” understanding of the everyday experiences of a group of people by immersing oneself into their locale and experiencing their lived experience as closely and directly as possible, seems obvious. PO promises, and often delivers, rich insight into “the hows and whys of human behaviour in a particular context” (Guest et al. 2012, p. 15); affording “a data-driven picture of an insider-informed space” (Iloh and Tierney 2014, p. 21); and challenging ‘our theoretical presupposition[s] about the world’ (Shah 2017, p. 45). Looking more carefully at the conceptual framing of approaches to qualitative research, for ethnography to be distinguished from other forms of qualitative research it needs participant observation, or something like it. How practical, permissible and desirable it is for a university academic to position herself or himself as participant observer of aspects of university life is important to explore. In his book “Ethnography: A Way of Seeing” (2014, pp. 241–242), Wolcott (well known as an educational anthropologist) describes in some detail the negotiations following a meeting with his editor’s upon completion of the first draft of the text. The editor suggested the ethnographic “purity” expressed thorough the text put the approach just out of reach of most potential readers. With rhetorical hyperbole, he estimated only about 30 ethnographers across the globe would support Wolcott’s case for ethnography as articulated in the draft. The critique caused Wolcott to redraft. In the final copy he made it clear that ethnography encompasses more than fieldwork. However, he also made it very clear that “there is no substitute for fieldwork carefully done and carefully reported”. Remembering, as noted above, Wolcott vivid imagery of an ethnographer as “someone pulling a canoe up onto a beach”, it is clear that, despite the shifts in the norms and forms associated with ethnographic practice over its relatively short history, the mythos of fieldwork has a tenacious grip on many an ethnographic imaginary (Rabinow and Marcus 2008).

24

M. Forsey

Ethnography has been part of the education research scene for some time now; yet the body of educational research literature is remarkably untouched by the theoretical and conceptual discussions that have taken place in anthropology over the past three decades or so (Epstein et al. 2013, p. 470), an observation largely supported by my recent review of the ethnographic research literature in higher education (Forsey et al. forthcoming). Put another way, the ethnographic imaginary has shifted, and continues to shift, away from the one-tribe-one-scribe realist tradition captured so eloquently by Van Maanen (2011); yet, these changes have barely registered in educational research practices and writing (Epstein et al. 2013; Pierides, 2010; Kenway 2015).

3.4 Beyond the Village Trope Returning again to Nathan’s (2006) Freshman Year, it is important to remember she never intended to complete a holistic study of university life; her focus centred mainly on the first-year student experience, addressing questions about apparent lack of involvement in academic activity. Nathan may have wanted to study her home university as some sort of village, but her study necessarily reflected a research sensibility guided more by the “chains, paths, threads, conjunctions or juxtapositions of locations in which the ethnographer establishes some form of literal, physical presence with an explicit posited logic of association or connection” (Marcus 1995, p. 105), even if it is not recognised as such. Marcus is describing his influential idea of a “Multi-sited ethnography, developed as a means of capturing what it takes to research geographically dispersed phenomena. Following the chains, paths and threads that open up and arise within the research arena, offers an approach well suited to the inductive tendencies of ethnographic research. The approach is also applicable to contained sites of action. Indeed, this approach is arguably a tacit part of standard ethnographic practice regardless of setting(s), allowing productive means of negotiating a way through ethnographic imperatives for holistic studies of an entity titled university. Indeed, the only example of a text aimed at documenting the social life of a university I have found in my travels, dampens down expectations of coverage of the whole in describing the monograph as offering “ethnographic glimpses” and “the first of a possible set of ethnographies of York University [Canada]” (Van Esterik and Baker 2014, p. 2). Given the size and complexity of higher education settings, the “chains, paths and threads” approach to ethnographic research in universities seems inevitable, offering (among other topics) studies of learning and teaching experiences,

Questions of Imagination: On the Dearth of Ethnography …

25

university administrators, use of library spaces, student sports and other extracurricular activities, staff interactions, audit cultures and so on. Pursuing particular themes seems an inevitable reality for ethnographers of HE, which can create insecurities for some when claiming ethnographic status for the ensuing report. How practical, permissible and desirable it is for a university researcher to position herself or himself as participant observer of aspects of university life is important to explore. In order to do so, the paper now takes a personal turn.

4 Desirability, Practicality, Permissibility and Positionality in and of Ethnographic Research in Higher Education Reflecting back on close to a decade of what I can best describe as tentative research in HE, for much of the time the work has felt like a “side-line”, something to do until something better comes along. It is starting to grow on me. While I accept Gusterson’s argument (2017) that HE is central to many a contemporary struggle, it is more of an intellectual acceptance than a whole-hearted, emotional embrace of the idea. The struggles in other spheres feel somehow more urgent, more “real”, less indulgent. As a site of social research endeavour, HE strikes me as a field with a legitimacy problem. How many of us I wonder set out to be a documenter and analyser of higher education? And for those of us coming to the field out of social science disciplines, how comfortable are we in being there (or should that being “here”)? I stumbled into researching HE processes. My teaching experiences led me there, linked as they were to my interests in the anthropology/sociology of education and the broader society in which schooling is located. In offering a potted history of my relatively recent turn towards HE as a research site, I do so with an ethnographic sensibility, assuming there is some truth in the ethnographic conceit regarding the great being found in the small. (I also assume there is but a small conceit in sharing my own story in such a manner). There is a curious moment in Nathan’s lucid account of her Freshman Year (2006) when she points out how, after more than 15 years as a university teacher and following the auditing of two very different units at her home university, she started doing ethnography (my emphasis). The doing of which Nathan writes refers to her assuming the identity of a live-in first year student at her home university for the whole of an academic year. As is the case with Nathan, I also identify as anthropologist, but probably more hesitantly, or with more qualification

26

M. Forsey

than she does; nevertheless, I cannot help wondering what she was doing in the first 15 years of her teaching career. I am advocating for more precise use of language when it comes to thinking about ethnographic research processes, so perhaps there is some analytical hay to be made in the distinctions between being ethnographic and doing ethnography in our workplaces. With this in mind, I find it impossible to not be ethnographic in just about all that I do. It seems more productively accurate to suggest I find it impossible to imagine not being anthropological/sociological in my everyday practice and that it is in the writing up of my/our data, however it has been gathered, that I/we “do ethnography” and be ethnographic. In other words, it seems useful to distinguish between ethnography as a product of a research process and research processes that enable one to be ethnographic. Active learning in university classrooms has been the thread I have followed in recent times; it has become the theme of my current ethnographic work in higher education (see Forsey and Page 2018; Tonkin et al. 2019). I have been working with Sara Page since 2016 when I commissioned her to help me research the student experience of the flipped classroom. I hired her directly out of her undergraduate studies because I knew she could write and that she had thought deeply about learning processes in her own undergraduate degree. These small biographical details are important because I struggle to imagine students responding easily or authentically to a “senior scholar” such as myself, especially when he happens to be a teacher in the university of interest, seeking to engage authentically in the class activities, prompting and prodding insights from them as he does so. I was keen to have a recent graduate doing the participatory work that I wanted to open up in the classroom. Our work together has involved Page “hanging out” with students in various classrooms, in her interviewing and surveying them in the three units I have carriage of: a broad first year unit, a second-year sociology unit and a third-year study of ethnography. She has also involved herself in helping teach interviewing techniques in the upper level units, which adds another dimension to her engagement with the students. The partnership has evolved from my own “cottage industry” into broader collaborations with colleagues across the campus. Page has been involved in classes ranging from Introductory German, Engineering, History and Micro-economics, while I “directed” the project from the sidelines. In all cases Page has participated in tutorial classes, conducted interviews and focus groups and has surveyed all or part of the cohort enrolled in the units under investigation. Where feasible we are writing-up this research in collaboration with the unit coordinators (see for example Tonkin et al. 2019).

Questions of Imagination: On the Dearth of Ethnography …

27

I suspect my reticence to be participant observer in classrooms for the ethical and methodological reasons outlined, is not peculiar to me. Nathan’s touchstone text certainly demonstrates that middle-aged professors can take on participatory roles in higher education—we can join the students, even in our home universities. But I have to admit to finding it difficult to imagine doing so, and not simply as a physical act. Perhaps because I am located at a smaller university than Nathan I cannot envisage being accepted as anything other than teacher to the students or colleague to the teachers. I find it difficult to imagine performing my everyday self in any other manner than as teacher, at least in a university setting. Nathan did not initially reveal she was a professor at the university in which she was enrolled as a freshman until she had the opportunity to interview her fellow students. It was not an uncontroversial decision, and I imagine many ethnographers refusing to engage with participants in this manner—which may well mean that the work does not get done especially if ethnographic practice continues to be imagined, if not idealised, as “an act of rugged individualism, a solo activity in which the fieldworker lives for an extended period of time among ‘the natives’” (Forsey 2010a; see also Stocking 1983). As my work has developed in HE I have to also admit to it being a matter of convenience, the research pool is close at hand, access is easy to negotiate, as is ethics approval. Small pots of money help and I am fortunate in being able to access such funds. I can be quite productive without feeling a particular need to seek larger funding. And my family and I do not have to endure the disruptions associated with field-work away from home. That said, as this research space has opened up before me, it has become apparent that there is a rich field of ethnographic endeavour to be explored and developed “out there”. Currently, there are many individual studies—it is mainly a “cottage industry”—and is a long way from being a defined, systematic field of study. Returning to Nathan’s touchstone study for one final time, it is interesting to contemplate the implications of conducting a study in one’s home university, in our own workplace. It is a standard practice it seems. The lack of attention to “other places” makes it clear that the ethnography of higher education is not a developed subfield in the way that the ethnography of schooling is. Despite their centrality in “contemporary struggles over race, gender, sexuality, class, international migration, and neoliberalism” (Gusterson 2017, p. 435), universities are not spaces of general ethnographic intrigue; if they were there would be a steady stream, rather than a trickle, of studies conducted by research students and established academics across a range of institutions.

28

M. Forsey

5 Conclusion Arguing that ethnographic output from institutes of advanced learning is more trickle than stream clearly suggests a lack of ethnographic studies in HE; however, as is also argued, it is not clear if the metaphor of flow applies equally or not across a range of disciplinary and methodological approaches to HE. There is a dearth of sorts, but that may well be because, despite a university’s importance as a site of social action and re-production, social scientists in general do not take higher education as seriously as they might. The ethnography of HE is an endeavour in search of a field in which to practice. If it is to flourish it needs clusters of researchers reaching for phenomena to pursue and sites in which to investigate them. Practitioners applying for grants and getting them, would also help, as would regular conferences of national and international scale, and perhaps even a specialised journal or two. For this to happen the ethnography of higher education needs to find greater legitimacy than it currently enjoys, an argument that applies across the social sciences, and which of course is circular in its line of thought. Because the focus is ethnography, I am arguing that addressing this particular and alleged dearth requires ongoing interrogation of what it means to conduct ethnographic research in HE. A persistent commitment to a common sense view of ethnography as constituted primarily through participant observation, resulting from long term fieldwork in something akin to a village, and as an activity pursued by individuals following the sorts of robust, muscular ideals presented though the Malinowskian mythos, probably makes it difficult for many to imagine entering the higher education field as ethnographer, let alone forming it. Joining actively into the active reimagining of ethnographic practice, what it entails and produces is a necessary element of constructing an active and attractive field in which to practice the ethnography of higher education. As one whose professional identity is tied up with being an educational ethnographer and teacher, my hesitant and sometimes reluctant venture into the ethnography of learning and teaching in higher education, emphasise the importance of working collectively where possible, employing credible researchers who can work less ambiguously in classrooms and student “hang-outs” than can a university professor—perhaps regardless of age. Campus presence is decreasing, lecture attendance dwindling—the ephemeral nature of student engagement in the spaces of higher education, make deep hanging out sometimes impossible to achieve, and also methodologically undesirable. The same can be said for ethnographic

Questions of Imagination: On the Dearth of Ethnography …

29

research among academic staff, and this is before we begin to consider the deep epistemological, methodological and ethical complexities associated with being simultaneously colleague, teacher, researcher, friend, and professional competitor, a point well made by Pabian (2014), and noted earlier. Spreading our wings, flying beyond the immediate coop that so often marks the territorial boundaries of much of the ethnographic work in higher education, would help deal with many of these issues. For this to happen we have to be able to imagine the field differently, less hesitantly, as a legitimate scene to be interrogated and discovered in the manner that ethnographic research affords so well. In my case the research would have to cease being something “done on the side” of other activities and embraced as my new field of research, either that or I would need to broaden the studies of learning and teaching in my home university, involving multi-disciplinary teams, for which participatory forms of research have less emphasis than if it were my “own project”. In the latter case maintaining my commitment to being ethnographer and doing ethnographic research also requires embracing new ways of imagining the task, finding a middle ground between ethnography being just about everything in the field of qualitative research and its representation as a method for which the demands limit its practice to “about 30 ethnographers worldwide” (Wolcott 1999, p. 241; see also Forsey 2018). Decoupling ethnography from participant observation is a beginning point (Hockey and Forsey 2012), acknowledging that engagement with the lived experience of research participants in whatever form this takes lies at the heart of the production of ethnographic knowledge, following the chains, paths and threads that open up and arise within research fields (Marcus 1995) to capture the patterns and the range of experiences into a thoughtful analysis of “the people” being ethnographed (Forsey 2018). News of the dearth of ethnography in higher education may well be exaggerated, but the field could be more vibrant, more expansive and inclusive. As suggested from the outset, it is a question of imagination. Imagining ethnography as a product based on various forms of authentic engagement with people and the social scenes they inhabit and re-produce, could well open up the space for more researchers to envisage and acknowledge doing their research ethnographically in an around institutes of higher learning. It may also allow those scrutinising ethnographic work in HE, policing it in some instances, to better recognise the ethnographic work hidden in the books and journals lying beyond their normal disciplinary focus and those that are still to come.

30

M. Forsey

References Armstrong, E. A., & Massé, J. C. (2014). The sociology of higher education: Contributions and new directions. Contemporary Sociology, 43(6), 801–811. Bubandt, N., & Otto, N. (2010). Anthropology and the predicaments of Holism. In N. Otto & N. Bubandt (Eds.), Experiments in holism: Theory and practice in contemporary anthropology (pp. 1–15). Maiden Mass: Wiley. Clifford, J. (1997). Routes: Travel and translation in the late twentieth century. New York: Routledge. Crang, M., & Cook, I. (2007). Doing ethnographies. Los Angeles: Sage. Delamont, S. (2004). Ethnography and participant observation. In C. Seale, G. Gobo, & J. Gubrium (Eds.), Qualitative research practices (pp. 217–229). London: Sage. Epstein, D., Fahey, J., & Kenway, J. (2013). Multi-sited global ethnography and travel: Gendered journeys in three registers. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 26(4), 470–488. Erickson, P., & Murphy, L. (2017). Readings for a history of anthropological theory. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Faubion, J., & Marcus, G. (2009). Fieldwork is not what it used to be: Learning anthropology’s method in a time of transition. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Forsey, M. (2010a). Ethnography and the myth of participant observation. In S. Hillyard (Ed.), New frontiers in ethnography (pp. 65–79). Emerald: Bingley. Forsey, M. (2010b). Ethnography as participant listening. Ethnography, 11(4), 558–572. Forsey, M. (2018). Educational ethnography in and for a mobile modernity. In D. Beach, C. Bagley, & S. Marques-Silva (Eds.), Handbook of ethnography and education (pp. 571–603). London: Wiley. Forsey, M. (2019). Losing the students in a school ethnography: Anthropology and the puzzle of holism. The lost ethnographies: Methodological insights from projects that never were. In R. Smith & S. Delamont (Eds.), Studies in qualitative methodology (pp. 109– 121). Emerald: Bingley. Forsey, M., & Page, S. (2018). Digital backgrounds, active foregrounds: Student and teacher experiences with ‘flipping the classroom.’ In D. Lupton, I. Mewburn, & P. Thomson (Eds.), The digital academic: Critical perspectives on digital technologies in higher education (pp. 105–121). Abingdon: Routledge. Forsey, M., Page, S., & Tonkin, K. (under review). Ethnography in higher education: A scoping review of the field. Fry, P. (8 December 1995). Why Brazil is different. Times Literary Supplement, S. 6–7. Gans, H. (1999). Participant observation in the era of “Ethnography.” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 28(5), 540–548. Geertz, C. (1976). From the native’s point of view: On the nature of anthropological understanding. In K. Basso & H. Selby (Eds.), Meaning in anthropology (pp. 221–237). Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Gramsci, A. (1985). Selections from cultural writings. London: Lawrence & Wishart. Guest, G., Namey, E., & Mitchell, M. (2012). Collecting qualitative data: A field manual for applied research. Los Angeles: Sage. Gusterson, H. (2017). Homework: Toward a critical ethnography of the university. American Ethnologist, 44(3), 435–450.

Questions of Imagination: On the Dearth of Ethnography …

31

Hockey, J. (2002). Interviews as ethnography? Disembodied social interaction in Britain. In N. Rapport (Ed.), British subjects: An anthropology of Britain (pp. 209–222). Oxford: Berg. Hockey, J., & Forsey, M. (2012). Ethnography is not participant observation. In J. Skinner (Ed.), The interview: An ethnographic approach (pp. 69–88). London: Bloomsbury. Iloh, C., & Tierney, W. (2014). Using ethnography to understand twenty-first century college life. Human Affairs, 24, 20–39. Ingold, T. (2008). Anthropology is not ethnography: Radcliffe-brown lecture in social anthropology. Proceedings of the British Academy, 154, 69–92. Kenway, J. (2015). Ethnography “is not what it used to be”: Rethinking space, time, mobility, and multiplicity. In S. Bollig, M.-S. Honig, S. Neumann, & C. Seele (Eds.), MulitPluriTrans in educational ethnography: Approaching the multimodality, plurality and translocality of educational realities (pp. 37–55). Bielefeld: transcript. Marcus, G. (1995). Ethnography in/of the world system: The emergence of multi-sited ethnography. Annual Review of Anthropology, 24, 95–117. Marcus, G. (2009). Notes towards an ethnographic memoir of supervising graduate research through anthropology’s decades of transformation. In J. Faubion & G. Marcus (Eds.), Fieldwork is not what it used to be: Learning anthropology’s method in a time of transition (pp. 1–34). Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Massey, L. (1991). Just what are we talking about? Disciplinary struggle and the ethnographic imaginary. In S. Gilbert-Brown & S. Dobrin (Eds.), Ethnography unbound: From theory shock to critical praxis (pp. 259–281). New York: SUNY Press. Mead, M. (2000). The study of culture at a distance. In M. Mead, & M. Métraux (Eds.), The study of culture at a distance (pp. 3–60). New York: Berghan Books (First publication 1953). Nathan, R. (2005). My freshman year: What a professor learned by becoming a student. Ithica: Cornell University Press. O’Reilly, K. (2009). Key concepts in ethnography. Los Angeles: Sage. Pabian, P. (2014). Ethnographies of higher education: Introduction to the special issue. European Journal of Higher Education, 4(1), 6–17. Pierides, D. (2010). Multi-sited ethnography and the field of educational research. Critical Studies in Education, 51(2), 179–195. Rabinow, P., & Marcus, G. (2008). Designs for an anthropology of the contemporary. Durham: Duke University Press. Shah, A. (2017). Ethnography? Participant observation, a potentially revolutionary praxis. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 7(1), 45–59. Stocking, G. (1983). The ethnographer’s magic: Fieldwork in anthropology from Tylor to Malinowski. In G. Stocking (Ed.), Observers observed: Essays on ethnographic fieldwork (pp. 70–120). Madison: University of Wisconsin. Thrift, N. (2011). Why so few ethnographies? The chronicle of higher education. WorldWise. https://www.chronicle.com/blogs/worldwise/why-so-few-ethnographies/28314. Accessed: 1. Oct. 2019. Tonkin, K., Page, S., & Forsey, M. (2019). Managing cognitive load with a flipped language class: An ethnographic study of the student experience. Foreign Language Annals, 52(3), 551–575.

32

M. Forsey

Walvoord, B., & McCarthy, L. (1990). Thinking and writing in college: A naturalistic study of students in four disciplines. Urbana: NCTE. Weis, L. (1985). Between two worlds: Black students in an urban community college. Boston: Routledge. Wisniewski, R. (2000). The averted gaze. Anthropology and Education Quarterly, 30(1), 5–23. Wolcott, H. (1999). Ethnography: A way of seeing. Walnut Creek: AltaMira Press. Young, M. (2014). Writing his life through the other: The anthropology of Malinowski. The Public Domain Review. https://publicdomainreview.org/2014/01/22/. Accessed: 22. Jan. 2020. Van Esterik, P., & Baker, L. (2014). Trying the way: Ethnographic glimpses of York University. Toronto: Anthropology Monograph Series. Van Maanen, J. (2011). Tales of the field: On writing ethnography. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Teaching Expertise in Higher Education: Constructive Alignment and How an Experienced University Teacher Maintained Constructive Alignment in Practice Clemens Wieser

Abstract

Teaching expertise in higher education currently receives elevated attention. This attention has also sparked an interest in expertise development, which is the focus of this chapter. The chapter characterises teaching expertise in higher education from a knowledge development perspective, and presents a knowledge development model grounded in the concepts of tacit knowing and self-care. This model provides theoretical sensitivity for an ethnographic case study on knowledge development at the Faculty of Science at University of Copenhagen, where I engaged in fieldwork with an experienced university teacher, and explored the way in which she developed her expertise based on her teaching experience. Analysis of this case highlights that this teacher was involved in an expertise development process that focused on maintaining constructive alignment for students throughout her course. Keywords

Teaching expertise · Expertise development · Higher education teaching · Video ethnography · Video diary research · Constructive alignment · Knowledge transformation C. Wieser (*)  Danish School of Education, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2020 C. Wieser and A. Pilch Ortega (eds.), Ethnography in Higher Education, Doing Higher Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-30381-5_3

33

34

C. Wieser

1 Introduction In higher education, teaching and the pedagogical thinking of teachers are regarded as two domains which have the strongest positive effect on student learning (Hattie 2015). This empirical finding results in a growing research focus on teaching and teacher’s expertise development (Mann 2001; Littlejohn et al. 2019). It also reflects in initiatives of European research ministries, which focus on quality assurance procedures for teaching, university teacher-training programmes, and the recognition of good teaching through teaching prizes (Krejsler 2017). However, these initiatives are not yet accompanied by research: Higher education has a well-established research focus on student support, student wellbeing and learning intensity—while teaching does not attract the same attention. To redress this imbalance, this chapter focuses on teaching in higher education by exploring teacher knowledge, teaching practices, and teachers’ expertise development. This exploration is based on a case study at the University of Copenhagen, and on a knowledge development model that sensitises ethnography fieldwork and analysis. Empirical research in this chapter is based on the idea that teachers rely on personal and practical educational knowledge when they teach. This idea is conceptually elaborated in a knowledge development model later in this chapter, where teaching is seen as both a practical set of orientations that enables situated appraisal and guides teaching, and a personal set of orientations that enables the problematisation of teaching experiences. These orientations are interrelated and surface in different fields, which makes ethnography and its ability to follow practices throughout different fields a particularly appropriate research strategy. Personal educational knowledge enables teachers to address challenges that they encounter in their courses, such as heterogeneous student groups, various levels of experience, or gender differences. It also enables teachers to address didactic issues such as coherent course design, alignment between lectures and exercise sessions, and the negotiation of course content with co-teachers. The complementing counterpart of personal knowledge is practical knowledge. Practical knowledge provides teachers with orientations that enable involved teaching. To provide a conceptual description of practical teacher knowledge and analyse its development, the chapter is divided into three sections. The first section presents the knowledge development model that enables the analysis of teacher knowledge in higher education. The second section presents the case study and outlines the challenges experienced by an expert teacher, which address constructive alignment in different ways. The third section explores the main challenge identified

Teaching Expertise in Higher Education: Constructive Alignment …

35

by the teacher: Providing alignment between course aims, course curriculum, teaching methods, and student examination.

2 Teaching Expertise in Higher Education: A Knowledge Development Model Personal knowledge is a central concept in the work of Polanyi (1962) and focuses on tacit aspects of expertise. From a Polanyi perspective, teaching expertise consists of a teachers’ awareness in a given teaching and learning situation, and the appraisal of this situation (Wieser 2016b). Polanyi’s conception of personal knowledge illustrates what a teacher is involved in during teaching, and elaborates on its elements: subsidiary awareness, focal awareness, and situated appraisal. These elements are outlined in the following two paragraphs. Subsidiary awareness is characterised as tacit and non-propositional, which makes it difficult for teachers to deliberately explain what they were aware of in a particular situation, and how this awareness shaped what they did. It enables performance precisely because teachers do not have to consider what they are doing, and can avoid deliberating upon the premises for their action. Following this assumption, actors only have very limited access to knowledge about their actions because staying in action requires them to avoid any explicit consideration of the appropriateness of their actions. Subsidiary awareness can thus be described as an instrument of personal attention that enables teachers to effectively achieve a teaching objective (Polanyi 1962, p. 57). In aiming for this objective, teachers are aware in a subsidiary manner of events that are relevant with respect to this objective. Subsidiary awareness becomes focal awareness when an event requires attention, e.g. when students need to be supported during an exercise. When teachers notice an event that is problematic, they bring this event and its context into their focal awareness. This process enables teachers to comprehend elements of a situation and their relationship to each other. Such a comprehension takes place through situated appraisal. Situated appraisal refers to the process in which the observation of a situation by teachers leads to comprehension of its constitutive elements. This comprehension is based on an awareness of the elements that constitute the situation in question. In appraisal, teachers assess these elements and relate them to the teaching objective. In doing so, elements that are relevant in connection with achieving this teaching objective are brought into focus, while teachers remain aware in a subsidiary manner of other elements that support action leading towards a

36

C. Wieser

teaching objective. Subsidiary awareness thus supports the achievement of teaching objectives. For instance, awareness of student reactions to an illustration of climate change risks on a PowerPoint slide will help teachers to adapt their explanation of this illustration. From a functional perspective, appraisal enables a teacher to perform in class, because it provides a “from-to knowing” for action (Polanyi and Prosch 1975, p. 34). Phenomenally, appraisals are present in “practical knowledge” (p. 41), and particularly in reflecting on action: “By reflecting on the way we are performing it [the act] we may seek to establish rules for our own guidance in this act” (Polanyi 1962, p. 30). Appraisal leads teachers to experience “lines of force” with respect to which they have to act (Polanyi 1962, p. 426; Dreyfus 2007, p. 108). Lines of force are experienced with respect to the classroom situation as a whole, and not with respect to individual elements of a situation, because the latter would require an established appraisal of the whole situation. In other words, appraisal warrants a continual process of teaching without conscious interference. Again, this process does not rely on critical reasoning, which would require teachers to reflect on how to act, and to reflect on the corresponding mode of reflection. Appraisal does not involve critical reasoning because it accommodates the singularity of a situated event and integrates subsidiary awareness into a focal awareness in order to act with respect to a situation. A visual overview of practical knowledge and its elements can be found in Fig. 3.1. In this figure, elements are indicated by a black dotted outline, and practices are indicated by a blue outline. The process that links elements and constitutes expertise development is indicated by arrows. From a Polanyi perspective, expertise development takes place in involved teacher practice. In involved practice, teachers appraise elements of a situation, relate them to each other, and find ways to act with respect to a teaching objective. Expertise development takes place when teachers discover that their current practical knowledge is not sufficient to achieve a teaching goal. This experience of surprise and lack of ability to tackle a teaching situation impels teachers to experiment with the situation, and to focus on peculiarities of the surprising aspect in an attempt to handle it—a sort of minimal crisis intervention while teaching. In this process, teaching objectives and strategies are not separated, but are used reciprocally to grasp the uncomprehended aspect of a situation. From this perspective, teaching expertise develops in involved educational practice when teachers establish new elements of practical knowledge. Besides involved educational practice, it is obvious that expertise also develops in detached reflective practice. Such detached reflective practice is what Foucault describes in his concept of care of the self, a concept which illustrates reflective processes of knowledge development (Wieser 2018). Self-care enables teachers to detach from involved practice. The main difference between detached

Teaching Expertise in Higher Education: Constructive Alignment …

37

Fig. 3.1   Teaching expertise: a knowledge development model. (Source: own illustration)

and involved practice is the quality of the commitment involved: whereas involved practice is committed to situated appraisal or praxis, reflective practice is committed to inference (see Polanyi 1962, pp. 337–339). Based on this difference, the conception of self-care focuses on the detached aspect of commitment, and a process of detachment incorporates several elements: “We must apply ourselves to ourselves. We must turn away from everything that is not part of ourselves but which might grab our attention. We must turn away from everything that turns us away from our self, so as to turn ourselves around towards our self” (Foucault 2005, pp. 205–206). Care of the self is a concept that illustrates the reflective practice of recollection as a way in which “men fix rules of conduct for themselves” (Foucault 2005, p. 61). Foucault’s perspective on expertise development emphasises that teachers recollect experiences to develop a perspective for a given teaching and learning situation, and create orientations that guide their performance in class. Recollection takes place when teachers reflect on teaching after it has happened, in a detached reflective practice. Such recollection is framed as self-care, which

38

C. Wieser

from Foucault’s perspective consists of three elements: a reflective standpoint, problematisation, and the return to the ontological homeland. The left side of Fig. 3.1 gives a visual overview of recollection as reflective practice, its elements and characteristics. Based on this visual overview, the process of expertise development can be described as follows: professional values and conceptions of teaching start to take shape during teacher education and are shaped furthermore in biographical processes—they shape the reflective standpoint of a person. This standpoint is a platform for the problematisation of teaching experience. In problematisation, an experience is examined in an effort to establish a truth about what it conveys. In problematisation, teachers revise their personal teaching expertise and aim to establish a renewed ontological homeland. This revision takes place on an ongoing basis and drives the development of expertise based on the teacher’s reflective standpoint and problematisation. The reflective standpoint is shaped by an attitude towards the self. This attitude is shaped by personal conduct and personal concepts of educational practice, and helps teachers to recollect previous experience. Foucault (2005, p. 31) highlights that the attitude towards the self is moral and not intellectual, and that this moral foundation is necessary to develop a personal truth on which teachers rely in teaching. Beyond this, the development of personal truth also requires free speech to destabilise personal belief and problematise previous practice. Problematisation is defined as a practice “that makes something enter into the play of true and false” and constitutes an “object of thought” (Foucault and Rabinow 1984, p. 335). The purpose of problematisation is to enable teachers to identify the truth of what goes on in a classroom. Consequently, expertise development takes place when teachers problematise experiences. Problematisation can be characterised as turning away from situated judgement, and a teachers’ detachment from involved teaching. Expertise development through recollection also requires a turning around towards personal truth, an attempt to understand personal involvement in previous episodes of teaching. As self-care is an ongoing effort to arrive at a better personal truth, truth is only established temporarily. Nevertheless, Foucault describes this arrival as a return to an ontological homeland which has been left during recollection. The return to an ontological homeland takes place at the end of a problematisation process. The outcome of problematisation is that a teacher establishes a personal truth which forces a teacher back to the world of the classroom and teaching. Here, teaching is established by the return of teachers to a personal, revised ontology of teaching which marks the return to an ontological homeland. This ontological homeland is a “homeland of essences, truth, and being” (Foucault 2005, p. 209), and provides the knowledge which a teacher uses in teaching.

Teaching Expertise in Higher Education: Constructive Alignment …

39

To summarise: Involved educational practice relies on teachers’ practical knowledge and is based on two types of awareness: subsidiary awareness, which supports action through observations of educational activities taking place in a classroom situation; and focal awareness, which links the situated pedagogical knowledge of teachers with their teaching objective. Both types of awareness are prerequisites for situated appraisal, which provides from-to knowing to perform teaching—knowledge about how to proceed from a given situation to a set goal. In part, expertise development takes place in recollection. Overall, recollection enables teachers to problematise teaching experiences that were unfulfilling in terms of their own teaching objectives. Recollection produces a discontinuity because it includes a problematisation of knowing that guides teaching. Such problematisation relies on professional values and personal concepts of teaching, and teachers can partly explicate this knowledge during recollection. In other words, recollection changes the beliefs of teachers that provide orientations for teaching. From this perspective, the development of teaching expertise relies on reflective practices of recollection that transform the orientations that guide teaching (Wieser 2016a). Conclusively, the knowledge development model described here provides a range of perspectives for the analysis of expertise development, and forms the foundation of the case study presented in the following section. This case study takes its analytical starting point in an exploration of problematisation of teaching experiences in order to understand what expert teachers focus on with respect to their courses.

3 What Does an Expert Teacher Focus on? A Danish Case To explore the focus that expert teachers adopt with respect to their teaching, I engaged in fieldwork that took place over two months at a Danish university. More precisely, it took place during the spring semester of 2018, and followed Lykke Hansen, an Associate Professor and with 21 years of teaching experience, throughout a course she taught for first-year Master’s students. Lykke’s course is part of a Master’s programme at the Faculty of Science at the University of Copenhagen, a high-ranking faculty that offers an excellent study environment with an international focus. The study environment at the science faculty relies in part on the faculty’s department of science education, which also provides a science teaching programme for staff. This programme, called Universitetspædagogikum in Danish, is designed to make the faculty’s excellent research accessible for students. It is a

40

C. Wieser

mandatory part of tenure, and includes several modules with an individual workload of 250 h. The programme is a relevant context for this case study, as Lykke completed the Universitetspædagogikum programme prior to gaining tenure, and draws on concepts from its curriculum in her teaching. The course plan that Lykke designed for her course is based on her experience of this course from previous years. In the first interview, Lykke talked about her experiences, and how she developed her teaching approach for the course. In this interview, Lykke mentioned a range of foci in her course. The course has tight time constraints due to the semester block structure at the science faculty: each academic year is divided into four blocks of nine weeks each. Courses usually stretch over one block worth 15 ECTS credits, and this block structure provides teachers with focused time periods for teaching. Lykke’s course took place in block four, which meant that her work in the first half of the spring semester focused on research, and in the second half on teaching. The course included seven weeks of teaching and had 40 students, who met Lykke in class twice a week, once on Mondays for a four-hour lecture, and a second time for four hours of exercises on Wednesdays. The Wednesday meetings were sometimes split into two sessions in which students worked in groups. In the exercises, Lykke’s teaching focused on the application of concepts that had been introduced in the lectures. This fieldwork employed a “thin” ethnographic research strategy (Hammersley 2018, p. 7), and included participant observation and videography of the lectures and exercises with a view to understanding the knowledge development processes involved in educational practices, as well as narrative interviews and video diaries to understand reflective educational practices (Wieser 2015). My fieldwork began one week before the course started, and lasted until the course was finished. After the course, Lykke and I met twice more to follow up on her reflections on the course. In total, the fieldwork included 44 h of participant observation and videography during course sessions, six narrative interviews with a total length of 10 h and 44 min, and seven video diaries. Figure 3.2 provides a visual overview of the fieldwork and the data that was collected. I started participant observation of the course sessions by taking a predominantly observing role because Lykke, the students and I did not yet know each other well. The lecture sessions gave little opportunity to participate, because they consisted primarily of Lykke introducing her students to central concepts. The exercise sessions allowed me to play a more active role, and my observations and fieldnotes focused on shifts in focal awareness to comprehend the appraisals that Lykke performed. However, I started to participate more actively later on, and I abandoned the position of being a “marginal native” after devel-

Teaching Expertise in Higher Education: Constructive Alignment …

41

Fig. 3.2   Visual overview of fieldwork and collected data. (Source: own illustration)

oping a closer relationship with Lykke (Hammersley and Atkinson 2007, p. 89). Lykke agreed that I could shadow her interactions with students during group work, which helped me to “reveal the subtleties of perspective and purpose shaping those actions in the real-time context” (McDonald 2005, p. 455). The lectures and exercise sessions were recorded on video to document Lykke’s interactions with the students. Videography enables an analysis of shifts in focal awareness in response to classroom events, because rapid sequences of action are recorded and can be reviewed. From a methodological perspective, videography creates an additional “contact space” (Hirschauer and Breidenstein 2002, p. 126) to participant knowledge, because it enables an analysis of the “temporality of interactions” (Knoblauch et al. 2012, p. 74). Video preserves the sequential structure of shifting awareness and appraisal, two central elements of involved practice, according to Polanyi. However, videography also involved technical challenges. For instance, in order to record interactions within the space restriction of classroom environments, a video camera was needed with a short focal length, omnidirectional microphones, and long battery runtime. These requirements were met with a Canon HF G40 camcorder. Narrative interviews were based on the ­three-step structure proposed by Schütze (1983, p. 285), and included (1) a first phase in which the interviewee produced a narration based on her experiences

42

C. Wieser

Fig. 3.3   Video diary on course week 1. (Source: fieldwork)

in the course; (2) a second phase which explores the tangential potential of the narration, during which I often asked Lykke if she could talk a little more about situations that seemed to be interesting with respect to her situated awareness and appraisal; and (3) a third phase in which Lykke could produce abstract descriptions of recurring themes and systematic relationships of phenomena in teaching. The video diaries aimed to provide the participant with an environment in which she could express her personal thoughts and ideas freely without an interviewer as a communicative counterpart. These diaries also provided a resource to guide future observations and questions in conversations and interviews. Taken together, all three elements of fieldwork created spaces in which the development of expertise could be seen, talked about and explored. The identification of foci in expertise development is based on fieldwork, and its analysis is based on a review of fieldnotes. Fieldnotes enabled me to review themes in Lykke’s practices and comments across the data material, and guided my approach to understand her perspective on teaching, both in direct observation of practice and in reflection (Jeffrey and Russell 2018, p. 112). This made it possible to identify a personal focus in expertise development, and prevented the analysis from highlighting particular aspects of expertise. Such aspects can certainly be found in videography or interview data, which can be meticulously analysed. However, such a focus confines analysis on singular events, and dis-

Teaching Expertise in Higher Education: Constructive Alignment …

43

regards the perspectives of the participants because it systematically abandons the personal involvement in which expertise is established. Instead, ethnographic fieldwork makes it possible to identify foci in expertise development based on the relevance that Lykke herself gives to her practice. During the course, Lykke covered a wide range of themes, such as: choices in the course structure, the introduction of the course topic in different contexts, time management during class to cover the agenda of a session, social interactions between students attending the course, or exam parameters. All of these themes were addressed by Lykke, either in class, or in interviews and video diaries. However, Lykke only devoted her continuous attention to a few of these themes, because only a few of them constituted a challenge for her teaching. Based on a review of fieldnotes, these themes were, in her own words: “Bringing students in line” so that they can work on the course topic together, “making exercises work for students”, and “crossing over with other course teachers”—the negotiation of alignment between course teachers. These were the themes which Lykke problematised in her reflections, and which she was aware of in her teaching. Drawing on our knowledge development model, such problematisation is a vantage point for expertise development. The following section of this article provides an analysis of data material that illustrates these themes and makes it possible to present the expertise development on which Lykke focused. In this case, the themes that Lykke focused on revolved around a central topic: maintaining an aligned learning environment for students, an alignment between course aims, course curriculum, teaching methods, and types of student examination. This topic is explored below.

4 “It’s all about bringing everyone in line”: Maintaining an Aligned Learning Environment for Students as a Challenge in Expertise Development Providing an aligned learning environment for students was a major topic for Lykke, and she talked about aspects of an aligned learning environment from the very first interview. The focus on alignment is connected to the curriculum of the MSc programme and the students it attracted. The programme focuses on climate change, and includes a range of approaches from both natural science and social science which were mirrored in the student population in Lykke’s course. There were 40 students in her class, 27 of whom came from outside Denmark. It was also important to find out about the academic backgrounds of the students. To achieve this, Lykke started the first course session with a Shakespeak quiz,

44

C. Wieser

an interactive voting tool that was integrated in her PowerPoint slides. This tool served to reveal the level of student diversity on this course: 68% of the students had an international background. Only 10% had a Bachelor’s degree from the University of Copenhagen. 77% had a natural sciences background (such as geoscience, environmental science or biology); while 20% came from the social sciences (such as social geography, urban planning or landscape architecture). In other words, the students that started the course arrived with a great diversity of subject backgrounds. The diversity of subject backgrounds has a strong impact on Lykke’s course design. She pointed out that she chooses which natural and social sciences concepts to include in the course, which leads to a situation in which the students “learn what I think they should learn”. Lykke chose the set of concepts for her course based on their contribution to student participation, and regardless of their relationship to a specific subject. She has continually refined this framework over the last five years, since she became the course coordinator. After five years as course coordinator, Lykke reports that she still sees some need for further development in areas such as: developing better student support in exercise sessions, and developing the guidelines for student reports. After some weeks of observing and talking with Lykke, I reviewed my fieldnotes to identify aspects of expertise development that Lykke continually attended to. In doing this, I searched for an overarching topic that Lykke followed in her expertise development, a topic that would accommodate a range of features such as support for group work, the development of the report guidelines, the selection of concepts, and the establishment of a common framework for students with diverse backgrounds. Taken altogether, these aspects aim at one thing: providing students with an aligned learning environment. Lykke is extremely keen to provide her students with an aligned learning environment, and this reflected in my fieldnotes for the first week, during which I wrote a note on Lykkes’s ability to present the course concepts in different examples: I was impressed by the way Lykke talked about examples, the way she talks about a case study and presents it in her course as an example of something. It’s not a completely new theme of course – see Klafki – but it is very important for Lykke to craft her course. I definitely feel that I should follow up on the topic. (Reflexive fieldnote, 17 April 2018)

This fieldnote was a first hint of the aligned learning environment that Lykke intended to provide for her students, and this topic remained central in my observations and fieldnotes. To explore this topic further, I analyse and illustrate

Teaching Expertise in Higher Education: Constructive Alignment …

45

Lykke’s problematisation of this topic based on her own “indexical expressions” (Garfinkel 1967, p. 11), based on video diary data and videographic data. Both data sources make it possible to explore the ways in which Lykke talks about providing an aligned learning environment for students, and what she did during sessions to bring students “in line” with course concepts. Lykke mentions “bringing everyone in line” several times during interviews and in video diaries, where she reflected on her experiences in each course week. In the video diary for course week 1, she highlights her intentions for the course and states that “students have to get the first grip on concepts”. The “first grip” is the starting point for “bringing everybody in line”, one theme that Lykke problematises in her reflection. She elaborates on this challenge in the following video diary segment, which she recorded in her office after the first course week: “Well it's a bit a hardcore lecture the first week, because it's about ehm it's about new concepts, some of them know of them, some of them don't ehm and, and ehm so it's very much a matter of bringing everyone in line. That means, that some of the students they will be, not bored, but say: well, we know about this, or we know about most of it. And then sometimes they are not. You could see that they become less attentive and what is important is, that I kind of say… well, or give some emphasis or give some more details than what I did in, in the course, some of them already had in the autumn. So that they understand it, even though it seems, as if they know, what I am telling about, they have heard about it before. Now they are getting more details.” (Video diary on course week 1)

In this quote from the video diary, Lykke presents bringing everyone in line as a balancing act between her introduction of concepts relevant to the course and the different subject backgrounds of the students. “Bringing students in line” here means ensuring that all the students are equally familiar with the set of concepts that Lykke chose to use in her course. Lykke considers the subject background of students to bring everyone in line, as she only taught a minority of students in a previous course. Lykke describes the lecture in the first week as hardcore. The term “hardcore” refers to a previously unmatched intensity, to relate to the course topic as intense as the topic demands. Thus, the term may refer to the students’ experience of the lecture as a space of intense learning; it may also refer to Lykke’s teaching, and her experience of intense teaching. Both options can be explored further in interpretation: • The hardcore lecture for the students: In the context of her explanation that some of the students will know about the concepts, “hardcore” may relate to the situation that some students find themselves in. In this interpretation,

46

C. Wieser

Lykke talks about her awareness of student diversity. In the lecture, Lykke was aware that students whom she had taught in a previous course might react to the lecture by thinking “we know about this”. At the same time, Lykke was aware that some students were not familiar with the course concepts. The awareness of these two student groups led her to observe the student audience in her lecture: Lykke observed the degree of attention that students paid during different phases of her lecture. Based on these observations, she decided whether more details were necessary, and this also reveals one aspect of her lecturing strategy: Lykke’s strategy is to cover the basics of the concepts she introduces, and if she observes students becoming less attentive, she increases the level of detail in her explanation to make sure students are brought in line. • The hardcore lecture for Lykke: “hardcore” may also refer to the way that Lykke sees her own teacher role, because the lecture requires her to perform in an extreme manner, a manner which she would usually avoid. This interpretation makes it relevant to go beyond the video diary and look at the content of the lecture in the first week. What is striking with respect to session content is the number of PowerPoint slides that Lykke used in this session: 69 slides. This is about twice as many slides as her other lecture sessions contained (the standard number being 30–40 slides). The lecture session in the first course week also introduced a range of concepts related to climate change both from a natural science and from a social science perspective: hazards, exposure, and vulnerability as three elements of climate change risk; impacts, resilience, adaptive capacity, and adaptive strategies. These concepts were fundamental for the following weeks, when Lykke presented different cases: climate change in developed countries in course weeks two and three, climate change in less developed countries in weeks four and five, climate change in the Arctic in week six, and climate change in an urban context in week seven, which was the last course week. All these weeks drew on concepts that were introduced in week one, and Lykke intended to give the right amount of detail for the students. This interpretation shows that Lykke’s personal knowledge of the course and her practical knowledge of teaching are linked in a specific way: her personal knowledge about differences in students’ subject backgrounds and their impact on concept comprehension is linked with her situated awareness of the lecturing situation. Through situated awareness, Lykke observes the level of student attention and intends to arrive at a maximum of concept comprehension. Her intention to achieve concept comprehension is also monitored with respect to students who have not been in contact with course concepts before:

Teaching Expertise in Higher Education: Constructive Alignment …

47

“And on the other hand, the ones who not heard of these issues before, ehm I have to make sure they, they are actually on board and ehm tell them, that some of it might be difficult, we'll be working with it throughout the course, was what I was saying. One way of telling them, that it's not a big deal, if they do not understand everything just the first week. And the other thing is that I've uploaded in Absalon some background documentation or documents which I urged them to read and look into at least. And we will also be working with them in, in the exercises. That was those about, about what is climate change actually about, which exposures are in different regions and so on …” (Video diary on course week 1)

Lykke details two perspectives that are important for her teaching in a diverse student group: The first perspective focuses on students that know about course concepts. She intends to keep these students involved. The second perspective focuses on students with no comprehension of course concepts. Lykke intends to bring this group of students “on board”. In this metaphor, the course can be seen as a ship that is sailing towards a target. In the first course week, this ship is still in a harbour, and Lykke’s job is to bring the students onto the ship so the journey can begin. In this metaphor, the students are passive, and participating in the journey does not require them to actively manoeuvre the ship. Even though the degree of participation that Lykke expects from this student group will likely change, she does not expect these students to understand the concepts just yet. Lykke approaches these students by saying “it might be difficult”, a phrase that acknowledges frustration that these students might experience. In approaching these students, Lykke promises a process of familiarisation for the concepts in question. She promises this with a view to maintaining the students’ motivation to develop a better understanding of concepts, in an attempt to prevent the students from dropping their attempt to understand the concepts because they might perceive them as too difficult. In addition, Lykke offers background documents on Absalon, the virtual learning environment used at the University of Copenhagen. Lykke urges the students who are not on board yet to read these background documents, so they can look into “what is climate change actually about”. This phrasing indicates her approach with respect to teaching this student group: students unfamiliar with the course concepts may imagine that climate change cannot be truly understood; they might perceive climate change as a spectacular topic, or as diffuse and indefinite phenomena. Lykke introduced the documents in the course as a way to define phenomena of climate change, and thus make climate change comprehensible by using a range of concepts and examples from different regions. To sum up: Lykke’s intention in the lecture session was to introduce course concepts, bring students “in line” for working with these concepts, and have students “on board”.

48

C. Wieser

The exercise session two days after the lecture was designed to continue this agenda, and Lykke used the exercise session to refine her awareness of differences in concept comprehension. She used the exercise to see how students used course concepts, and to appraise their concept comprehension. Owing to the diversity of students on the course, Lykke intended to gain an overview of their background in natural science and social science, and their ability to work with the concepts introduced in the lecture. With a view to gaining this overview, Lykke designed group exercises involving three tasks. The first two tasks aimed to develop the students’ familiarity with course concepts, and the third task required students to study and present climate change risks in different regions. During group work, Lykke did not stay with each group for too long, because she wanted the groups to have time to work together. Lykke characterised her participation in the groups as “listening in” to the group discussion, and specifically listening to the ways in which students discussed course concepts (see Fig. 3.4). This enabled her to appraise whether the student groups “were on track”—and based on this appraisal, she could comment on their use of concepts. The track aims at the course report that students are expected to deliver. During this exercise session, Lykke approached this aim by making students go “all the way” that she also expects them to go for their course reports. In the context of the course topic—adaptation to climate change—this meant that students had to go all the way from an assessment of climate change risks in a specific region to options for climate change adaptation. The three tasks in the exercise were designed to give students an experience of what it means to go “all the way”. The analysis of data material and fieldwork gave insights into the range of considerations on which Lykke drew in the development of her lecture and exercise sessions. The analysis of fieldnotes, narrative interviews and video diaries showed that the didactic design of her sessions remained generally unproblematic for Lykke, and that she planned and managed situated didactic interactions fluently. In the vocabulary of the theory of didactic situations (Brousseau 2002), the phases of the didactic game were not problematic for Lykke. She was able to pass a didactic environment on to the students, and the students were able to work in this environment, express themselves, and work towards the performance of given tasks. However, Lykke problematised two didactic elements of her practice: having students on board, and bringing students in line. The following conclusion is dedicated to a discussion of these two elements, and links them has to the current discussion on teaching in higher education.

Teaching Expertise in Higher Education: Constructive Alignment …

49

Fig. 3.4   Exercise session, with Lykke listening in during group work. (Source: fieldwork)

5 Conclusion The two central elements of problematisation that Lykke addressed during fieldwork were getting students on board, and having students in line. Lykke’s problematisation of these two elements of her practice was not limited to particular didactic situations or tasks that she experienced during lectures and afterwards reflected upon. The two elements were taken up again and again over the period of fieldwork, and relate to a continuous process of maintaining an alignment between course sessions and student learning. Having students on board enables students to negotiate course concepts during sessions, and bringing students in line enables a working relationship between students and course concepts so they can use these concepts for the course report. These two didactic elements commonly focus on enabling student participation in course interaction. Based on her experience as a teacher, Lykke knows that neglecting these elements would create a barrier for student participation and student learning. Lykke’s focus on getting the students on board and getting them in line helps to achieve alignment in the course. The effect of such alignment is an adjusted course and session structure that reduces barriers for student interaction, both with respect to course concepts, and in a social perspective. This reduction took place through Lykke’s negotiation of course concepts

50

C. Wieser

with students and her appraisal of students’ concept comprehension. The problematisation of teaching by Lykke thus may be related to elements of constructive alignment, which Biggs (2012) famously introduced in higher education. Constructive alignment aims conceptually at the consistency of a learning environment, and includes three components: intended learning outcomes, teaching and learning activities, and assessment tasks. According to this concept, each component contributes to constructive alignment: “optimising the likelihood that they [students] will engage [in] the appropriate learning activities” (Biggs 2012, p. 45). Biggs’ concept of constructive alignment can support a teacher to spell out learning outcomes for students, and relate teaching activities to learning. However, the learning activities that Biggs illustrate are relationships that are “most likely” elicited by teaching activities (Biggs 2012, p. 49). Biggs thus assumes a cause-effect relationship between teaching and learning. Such an assumption is common in evidence-based approaches, while a majority of research approaches rejects such an assumption due to biographical and situated influences and contingent processes of teaching and learning practices (Wieser 2016b, pp. 590–593). This chapter put the role of teaching practices for constructive alignment into focus, and fieldwork highlights the repeated negotiation of intended learning outcomes between students and teacher, and the complex considerations of Lykke to get students in her course engaged in appropriate learning activities. Thus, Lykke presented course learning objectives in the first lecture session, and intended to enable students’ participation in the learning activities she designed. Lykke’s teaching and reflection point to an engagement with the course that extends beyond the traditional scope of constructive alignment. Her engagement is not limited to the alignment of intended learning outcomes, assessment tasks, and the choice of appropriate teaching and learning activities. Fieldwork draws attention to the teaching and learning activities that Lykke engaged in during her course, and her intention to scaffold learning processes beyond an appropriate choice of teaching and learning activities. This intention is realised through an awareness of potential barriers that different student groups might experience. This awareness is subsidiary to her focal aim in teaching, and incorporates an awareness of at least two student groups: one group of students that Lykke supported so they are on board intended activities; and another group of students Lykke support in interacting with course concepts and drawing on them for their course report. This awareness guided teaching and learning activities, and may also be also framed as an awareness with respect to didactic processes (Brousseau and Warfield 2015, p. 316). Figure 3.5 illustrates the teaching and learning activities that Lykke realised as a didactic process. The expertise development that Lykke involves herself focuses on this didactic process. Her involvement also reveals some of the challenges that she faces as an experienced teacher at a high-ranking faculty with significant emphasis on

Teaching Expertise in Higher Education: Constructive Alignment …

51

Fig. 3.5   Didactic processes in the course: getting students on board and in line. (Source: own illustration)

research-based teaching. Analysis suggests that the challenge for an experienced teacher like Lykke is not a comprehension of concepts of constructive alignment. A central challenge for teaching lies in an awareness of potential learning barriers, and the maintenance of learning that is aligned to course objectives through corresponding teaching practices. A further exploration of these teaching practices allows to illustrate challenges that teachers in higher education face. Such teaching practices are often described as tacit and situated, and existing studies that employ questionnaire or interview designs are often not able to uncover such qualities. Consequently, there is a need for research on tacit knowledge in teacher practice, and for ethnographic examinations of the kind of knowledge transformation that takes place when teachers develop their competences in the face of practical challenges. Ethnographic approaches are capable of accessing fields of involved and reflective practice, so ethnographic strategies seem to be a highly appropriate way of understanding the nature of teaching and expertise development.

References Biggs, J. (2012). What the student does: Teaching for enhanced learning. Higher Education Research & Development, 31(1), 39–55. Brousseau, G. (2002). Theory of didactical situations in mathematics. New York: Kluwer. Brousseau, G., & Warfield, V. (2015). Didactical contract and the teaching and learning of science. In R. Gunstone (Ed.), Encyclopedia of science education (pp. 316–321). New York: Springer.

52

C. Wieser

Dreyfus, H. (2007). Detachment, involvement, and rationality: Are we essentially rational animals? Human Affairs, 17(2), 101–109. Foucault, M. (2005). The hermeneutics of the subject. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Foucault, M., & Rabinow, P. (1984). The Foucault reader. New York: Pantheon. Garfinkel, H. (1967). Studies in ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall. Hammersley, M. (2018). What is ethnography? Can it survive? Should it? Ethnography and Education, 13(1), 1–17. Hammersley, M., & Atkinson, P. (2007). Ethnography: Principles in practice. London: Routledge. Hattie, J. (2015). The applicability of visible learning to higher education. Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Psychology, 1(1), 79–91. Hirschauer, S., & Breidenstein, G. (2002). Endlich fokussiert? Weder ,Ethno‘ noch ,Graphie‘. Anmerkungen zu Hubert Knoblauchs Beitrag „Fokussierte Ethnographie“. Sozialer Sinn, 2(1), 125–128. Jeffrey, B., & Russell, L. (2018). Ethnographic writing. London: Tufnell. Knoblauch, H., Soeffner, H.-G., Raab, J., & Schnettler, B. (2012). Video analysis: Methodology and methods. Qualitative audiovisual data analysis in sociology. Bern: Lang. Krejsler, J. B. (2017). Capturing the ‘Evidence’ and ‘What Works’ agenda in education: A truth regime and the art of manoeuvring floating signifiers. In M. Y. Eryaman & B. Schneider (Eds.), Evidence and public good in educational policy, research and practice (pp. 21–41). New York: Springer. Littlejohn, A., Jaldemark, J., Vrieling-Teunter, E., & Nijland, F. (2019). Networked professional learning: Emerging and equitable discourses for professional development. New York: Springer. Mann, C. (2001). After the reform: Reflecting on effective teaching in higher education. British Educational Research Journal, 27(5), 653–657. McDonald, S. (2005). Studying actions in context: A qualitative shadowing method for organizational research. Qualitative Research, 5(4), 455–473. Polanyi, M. (1962). Personal knowledge towards a post-critical philosophy. London: Routledge. Polanyi, M., & Prosch, H. (1975). Meaning. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Schütze, F. (1983). Biographieforschung und narratives Interview. Neue Praxis, 13(3), 283–293. Wieser, C. (2015). Technology and ethnography—Will it blend? Technological possibilities for fieldwork on transformations of teacher knowledge with videography and video diaries. Seminar.Net – International Journal of Media, Technology and Lifelong Learning, 11(3), 223–234. Wieser, C. (2016a). Continuing innovation and development of teacher expertise—The continual transformation of personal knowledge for teaching. Tidsskrift for Professionsstudier, 23, 54–61. Wieser, C. (2016b). Teaching and personal educational knowledge—Conceptual considerations for research on knowledge transformation. European Journal of Teacher Education, 39(5), 588–601. Wieser, C. (2018). Evidence and its integration into teacher knowledge: Foucaultian perspectives to link research knowledge and teaching. Journal of Education for Teaching, 44(5), 637–650.

Post-Humanist Critical University Ethnography: The Potential of a ­Critical-Creative Reconfiguration of Critique Miriam Madsen Abstract

Critical university ethnography often springs from the ethnographer’s own engagement in the university. Consequently, the university becomes a site for ethnography ‘at home’, often resulting in a critique that reinforces existing power relations by speaking the voice of those subject to power and criticising those in power. This chapter draws on post-humanist and socio-material perspectives in order to stimulate a rethinking of ethnographic research practices in ways that alter the existing power relations and create spaces to gather various university actors, such as managers, teachers and students. First, the chapter outlines two distinct characteristics of post-humanist and s­ocio-material philosophies: the inclusion of more-than-human entities in ethnographic research, and a mode of analysis that involves proposals of new possible realities. Second, the chapter proposes a rearrangement of ethnographic research practices which includes a suggestion of entangled practices as the object of analysis, of co-constitutive and entangled relations as the analytical focus, and of new ways of relating human and more-than-human entities as the approach to formulating critique. Third, the chapter exemplifies the suggested approaches in an empirical analysis of the quality assurance that is done at universities as part of accreditation processes. The result is a critical-creative ethnography that avoids reproducing existing power relations and instead reframes and connects various purposes within the university. M. Madsen (*)  Danish School of Education, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2020 C. Wieser and A. Pilch Ortega (eds.), Ethnography in Higher Education, Doing Higher Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-30381-5_4

53

54

M. Madsen

Keywords

Critique · Ethnography · Post-humanist   methodology · Socio-materialist methodology · Universities · Quality systems · Metrics

1 Introduction Doing critical ethnography is always a political affair. The sites we as ethnographers choose to engage with, the questions we ask, and the people we choose to follow strongly influence the knowledge we produce, and thereby the power relations we enable. These methodological choices of site, research question and collaborators, and their political connotations, become even more vital in critical university ethnography, where the field of our ethnographic engagement is close to our home as academics. Closer to home, as in universities that are part of the same policy and management systems as those of our own work places, we (as individual, critical ethnographers) may have more at stake and may already be individually entangled with the matters that we study. This chapter aims to unfold one possible approach to the political aspects of our research design in university ethnography, which draws on some of the new insights made available to us by post-humanist philosophies. These opportunities involve a shift in the object of analysis from the doings and sayings of people (Culhane and Elliott 2017, p. 10) to entanglements of more-than-human agencies. This shift enables a different political relationality, where the university ethnographer moves beyond criticising other actors within the home university (or a similar site with similar power relations as in one’s own university), and towards formulating a critique of the particular ways more-than-human entities enter into and affect human relations. Through this shift, the political affairs of doing university ethnography become open to mutual conversation and to inventions of possible future practices rather than part of the consolidation of (perhaps polarised) existing power relations. In the first part of this chapter, I offer a reading of post-humanist philosophies and their implications and openings for re-thinking ethnography. The second part of the chapter includes suggestions for how philosophical ideas can be operationalised into methodological decisions. And finally, the third part of the chapter offers an example of an analysis where I put these ideas into practice. I will sum up these moves made in my analysis in the concluding discussion. The ideas offered throughout the chapter are not meant as prescriptions to be followed to the letter, but more as thoughts that can inspire ethnographers

Post-Humanist Critical University Ethnography …

55

to work with post-humanist philosophy and come up with their own politically reflected methodologies. Thus, the contribution of the present chapter is to invoke new thinking about how to design critical-creative ethnographic studies at universities while simultaneously being positioned within the university as an academic. While the examples included are from the field of university governance and administration, I imagine that similar approaches can be developed for other branches of university ethnography, including for example university didactics and social inequality studies.

2 Post-Humanist Ethnography In the following outline of how we may begin to rethink ethnography from a post-humanist perspective, I highlight two aspects of post-humanist philosophies that in my reading have the potential to dissolve some of the usual patterns of power and critique within critical university ethnography. I use the terms ­‘post-humanist’ and sometimes ‘socio-material’ to refer to these philosophies, which include a range of specific theories by different theorists. I perhaps fall short of emphasising the distinctions between the different theoretical perspectives, but may in turn succeed in showing a general direction of how to renew critical university ethnography. I particularly draw on actor-network-theory (or after-ANT, Law and Hassard 1999) and agential realism (Barad 2007) in my framing of methodological shifts in post-humanist ethnography. These two sets of theories represent different ways of thinking post-humanist ethnography, which is why they complement each other well, as discussions from both theoretical developments can be used to develop my points here.

2.1 Expansion of Objects of Analysis One of the most significant innovations of post-humanist and socio-material philosophies is the enlargement of the crowd of actors available for ethnographic analysis. With actor-network-theory, non-human actors such as scallops that actively anchor themselves (Callon 1986, p. 205), door-closers that keep the cold out and the heat inside (Johnson 1988) and enrolment forms that hook together free lunches and “supplemental educational services” (Fenwick and Edwards 2011, p. 716) have become active entities that perform work in and on their relations to other entities.

56

M. Madsen

Also, philosophies like agential realism (Barad 2007) emphasise ­ ore-than-human entities. For example, in lightning, electrons make “their way m to the earth” and thereby address objects on the ground, which then respond by trying to connect to the electrons (Barad 2011, p. 35). In school life, the cell phone and social media like ARTO make children accessible for bullying also outside school hours (Højgaard and Søndergaard 2011, p. 351). In the Bologna Process, colour-coded scorecards motivate the participating countries to implement the agreed upon standards for higher education (Brøgger 2018, p. 361). And in the digital world, algorithms form, shape and reconfigure ‘difference’, for example racial, class or gender differences, as they learn from vast amounts of data and repeat and amplify the patterns in the data (Dixon-Román 2016, p. 487). In both these schools of philosophy, as well as other like-minded theories, the non-human or more-than-human objects importantly take on a more active role than that of an artefact. They do something. There are, however, important differences between the philosophies that are worth keeping in mind. For example, actor-network-theorists usually speak of a ‘generalized symmetry’ (Callon 1986, p. 200) between ‘human’ and ‘non-human’ actors (or between social and technical entities), while agential realism speaks of ‘post-humanism’ to include the more-than-human in the analysis, while explicitly refusing an a priori distinction between human and non-human actors. I generally speak of the more-than-human as a term that potentially includes human actors, but also acknowledges entanglements of various entities beyond and/or without human actors. Furthermore, while actor-network-theory can be seen as a theory-complex that understands the world to be made from constructions of entities or actors that connect to each other and thereby enable new ‘networks’ or more complex entities, agential realism starts from the entangled state of the world from which entities arise and gain meaning and materiality. However, human actors in both cases become decentred as the a priori actor of interest. To remedy this, the ­post-humanist philosophies propose a shift in the object of ethnographic analysis. If successful, a post-humanist analysis enables various actors within the university context (managers, heads, teachers, administrative staff and students) to connect to critical points made by the ethnographer and not merely read them as opposition (a theme that will be elaborated on in the second part of the chapter). This may become more feasible if they, as human actors, are not the sole objects of analysis but analysed as being embedded in much wider entanglements that constitute them and their actions.

Post-Humanist Critical University Ethnography …

57

2.2 Different Modes of Critique The post-humanist or socio-material perspectives also allow for different actors to connect by a shift in mode of critique. As Decuypere and Simons (2016) point out, socio-material perspectives call for an abstention from emancipatory, unveiling modes of critique that aim to reveal a reality that was hitherto hidden for various actors in the field (and usually those subject to power). Instead, these perspectives prefer a hopeful mode of critique or critical creativity (Decuypere and Simons 2016, p. 28) that seeks to intervene through ethnographic descriptions. With the performative effects of research in mind, ethnographic descriptions that gather or compose, de-familiarise, attach, and recompose may have the capacity to intervene into existing practices (Decuypere and Simons 2016, pp. 39–41). In other words, ethnographic descriptions written according to the post-humanist or sociomaterial tradition aim to be ‘empirically informed proposals at reassembling what is given today’ (Decuypere and Simons 2016, p. 41). Importantly, as Decuypere and Simons explain in the following quotation, reassembling here means a particular mode of mapping as part of the construction of an ethnography: “‘Assembling’ in this respect relates to the particular actions the researcher undertakes in scrutinizing and reporting of this setting … By and large, this could be termed as a cartographic way of researching, in which this mapping allows to see and describe the relations by means of which a setting is constituted. This mapping needs to be understood in a specific manner, however, that is, in a performative and not in a mimetic sense: in a sociomaterial vein, mapping is not conceived as an endeavour aiming to faithfully represent a setting, but rather as an activity of description that aims to produce an adequate account and that presents (rather than represents, reflects or explains) such relational compositions …. As such, maps (both written and visual) are considered as active devices themselves: mappings instead of maps.” (Decuypere and Simons 2016, pp. 35–36)

By creatively assembling or gathering actors in new ways that enable them to see themselves and their relations differently, the ethnographic descriptions allow for the actors to come together and invent new practices (Latour 2004) rather than repel them from the ethnographer and his or her critical points. The shift in mode of critique is enabled by a fundamentally different philosophy than the representational philosophy that most knowledge production is based upon. This philosophical shift involves a rejection of the separation of entities into two kinds: ‘representations and entities to be represented’ or into knowers and the known (Barad 2003, p. 804). Instead of a representational understanding of

58

M. Madsen

the world, reality is thought as process or an ongoing becoming in which things and human beings come to be in particular ways (Decuypere and Simons 2016, p. 32). The relations from which things and human beings emerge are here thought to be performative in the sense that they make the world (Barad 2003). With this in mind, ethnographic research becomes reconfigured as a practice that presents how different entities emerge through their mutual entanglements and relational engagements rather than represents the true nature or essence of people and things. Reality as process or becoming does not take place independently of research practices but is rather entangled with them. For example, the ethnographer contributes to the practice of ‘world-making’ by defining boundaries between different categories of action or entities in empirical material (Schadler 2019, p. 219). The political aspect of critical-creative university ethnography then becomes a matter of contributing to a liveable world for the various actors inhabiting the university by contributing to a ‘world-making’ in which people belong. A project of unmasking some actors at the favour of others (for example unmasking teachers in favour of students, privileging some students in favour of other students, or managers in favour of academics) would have the opposite effect. The job of the post-humanist critical-creative ethnographer is to do ethnography in a way that ‘offers the participants arenas in which to gather’ (Latour 2004, p. 246).

3 Consequences for Research Practices Together, the two shifts described in the previous section point towards ethnographic research that is interested in relationality within universities, including more-than-human entities, and aims to come up with new ways of relating human and more-than-human entities, which can also include the re-creation of more-than-human entities. As a result, critical-creative ethnographic research can detach itself from placing responsibility for what it criticises within a human actor, and instead place it in the relations between entities and in the practices of their mutual engagement. This detachment is accompanied by some rearranged research practices that I will describe in this section.

3.1 The Research Object and Selection of Sites The first research practice I suggest to rearrange is the delimitation of what to study. Drawing on the inclusion of more-than-human entities in the array of ethnographic research objects, the rearrangement is about placing the phenom-

Post-Humanist Critical University Ethnography …

59

enon that is being studied beyond a single actor. As an educational governance and administration ethnographer, I for example chose to rearrange my research interest in quality assurance at Danish universities into an interest in the metrics that are used in quality assurance. I conceptualise metrics as: entanglements of categorising and calculative practices that produce key figures (or other types of numbers); management practices of acting upon key figures that are deemed problematic; educational development practices that are put in place to improve the key figures; and further entities such as numbers, reports, data management systems, hierarchies of managers and teachers, national accreditation institutions, and performance management theories. Metrics are entanglements of a range of processes and entities that are mutually dependent and co-constitutive. Through this conceptualisation, ‘quality assurance’ or the category of ‘managers’ evades being constructed as the thing that needs to be critiqued. Instead, a range of interdependent processes and relations between entities come into focus. Methodologically, this means that post-humanist ethnographic fieldwork follows these entanglements of practices rather than for example a single actor, such as the quality workers or the managers. Spending days in the same site, as in a quality assurance office, is not sufficient to open up the practices of metrics. These practices take place in various sites—some take place in spreadsheets, some take place in meetings, some in informal discussions among colleagues, some in the quality assurance offices, and some in the correspondence between the university and the accreditation institutions via websites, manuals, emails and quality assessment reports. The fieldwork needs to engage with all these sites— not as sites of their own interest, but as sites that open up the study of metrics. The metrics of quality assurance, where some programmes are approved and others not approved or conditionally approved, become the entry points into various physical and virtual sites within and outside the university. Thus, a rearrangement of both the ethnographic site(s) and the object of analysis implies a different starting point for the study. It is a starting point that does not in advance define some university actors as either the powerful that need to be criticised or as victims or people on ‘the ground’ whose voices need to be supported by the ethnographer. In my case, I chose to start from the complex entanglements of metrics in order to focus on practices that include various relations between human and more-than-human entities. I imagine that other ethnographers will be similarly able to construct novel ways of framing their work by rearranging the sites and the research questions, even though their research interest is different.

60

M. Madsen

3.2 Analysis of Relations within the Field To pursue the consequences of this reframing of institutional relations, my next suggestion is to approach the various actors involved in the studied practices in an entangled way. Here, I draw on agential realism, which designates phenomena or particular entanglements, rather than separate individual entities, as the primary ontological units of the world. The individual entities emerge out of particular entanglements, and thus only gain boundaries and properties as a product of a particular entanglement and of particular relations to other entities within a phenomenon (Barad 2007). Other socio-material perspectives, such as actor-network theory, differ from agential realism insofar as they show a tendency to theorise ‘networks’ (their concept of relationality) as assembled from various, heterogeneous and separate objects (Latour, 2005, p. 5). But in actor-network theory, these separate entities are mutually constitutive, and therefore this theoretical difference can be glossed over here. The point of analysing the entanglements of the various actors involved in the practices studied is exactly their co-constitutive relation. When the actors are seen as mutually constitutive of each other, we move away from the idea that some actors are a priori more powerful than other actors, or that the current state of the world is a product of their will. A critical ethnography that works from entanglements of relations endeavours to show how all entities emerge as a product of their mutual entanglements. Actors, including their purposes and intentions, are seen as the product of the practices that make up the entanglements, rather than as mere sources of or reasons for relations to other entities. For example, university managers and their practices are called into being by their particular entanglements with laws, boards of directors, data, media discourse, the design and location of their offices, expectations from staff and students, dress codes, salary systems and so forth. And Ministry officials and their practices are called into being by the rule of law, ideas about responsible governance, political debates, election results, transnational comparisons and policy advice, media discourse and so forth. When an ethnographic analysis shows all these entanglements, the ones usually identified as the powerful may connect to the analysis rather than reject it or rebut its claims. An analysis such as the one indicated in these examples does not mean, however, that the ‘powerful’ appear as mere product. The practices of these actors are simultaneously constitutive of other entities and relations, and these constitutive effects (Dahler-Larsen 2007) of management practices are also important to show in the analysis. Importantly, this mutual, co-constitutive

Post-Humanist Critical University Ethnography …

61

relationality of all the involved practices and entities is not possible to establish if only some of the actors involved are observed and interviewed in the study. Thus, the point, outlined above, of entering the field by following heterogeneous practices involving a range of human and more-than-human entities as well as various physical and virtual sites is a pre-condition for producing an analysis that is sensitive towards entanglements. Theoretically, the idea of being ‘called upon’ to emerge in a particular way can be thought of as the creation of a field of possibilities. A field of possibilities enables and constrains practices (Barad 2003, p. 819) such as governing practices or study practices within education. The notion of a field of possibilities indicates that actors are not strictly determined by their environment, but that some ways of becoming (for example becoming a manager or student) are more feasible than others. For example, university managers could make decisions in the interests of academic staff that are controversial in the eyes of the Ministry governing the university, so this kind of decision comes with a certain risk that makes it less feasible (or less possible) in the eyes of the managers. Negotiating the boundaries of the field of possibilities might be an important role for critical university ethnography, which I will unfold in the final methodological consequence of ­post-humanist and socio-material ethnography before I move on to an analytical example.

3.3 Re-negotiations and Re-inhabitations of the Field of Possibilities The third rearrangement of ethnographic research practices relates to the shift from representational knowledge that reveals what is really going on behind our backs to knowledge that proposes new compositions of entanglements or networks, informed by empirical work. These re-compositions take advantage of the field of possibilities and find new ways of inhabiting it. The new compositions may also negotiate the boundaries of the field of possibilities as it is seen or experienced by various actors. Meanwhile, the craft of a feasible re-composition requires thorough insight into the becomings of these various actors, including how they operate and with what purposes, achieved through comprehensive fieldwork that follows the actions and rationalities of clusters of actors. For example, conventions of calculative practices work on data in particular ways that open up a limited space of possibilities for different possible calculations. At a different level, university management is embedded in a public administration ethos where accountability,

62

M. Madsen

and particularly accountability measures based on quantitative data, is considered necessary for responsible governance and administration. This means that while some actors within the university, for example some groups of academics, may find it unhelpful and time-consuming to go through repeated cycles of data processing, (some) managers may not see it as possible to avoid without putting their positions as managers in the public sector at stake. Some groups or individuals may even emerge in ambiguous ways, for example students who may in principle be opposed to the tight leash that data-driven accountability may put on their programmes, but at the same time call for accountability measures in times when they feel unjustly treated by teachers. The post-humanist critical-creative ethnographer who gathers and connects, rather than reveals, draws on these insights on the relations between different entities and practices, as well as the fields of possibilities, and explores new ways of composing these relations. With this aim, the ethnographer strives to produce proposals that keep all the actors connected, or in other words proposals that accommodate the hopes, purposes and requirements of different actors, yet in more liveable ways, to overcome some of the problematic practices that are observed in the present. These new proposals may take the form of new concepts or vocabularies, new configurations of the roles of particular actors, new practices, or new non-human entities (for example a new communication system or a new kind of number) and the leaving behind of previous practices or vocabularies (such as that of a ‘power structure’).

4 An Example: More-Than-Human Quality Cycles In the above sections, I have suggested a few rearranged ethnographic research practices like different ways of entering the field and selecting ethnographic sites (through practices of becoming entangled with human and more-than-human entities), a different way of analysing the relations between these entities (through entanglements and fields of possibilities) and a different way of doing critique (through proposals of new ways of inhabiting the field of possibilities). In the following and final section, I will exemplify what a critical-creative ethnographic analysis might look like, building on these rearranged practices. I draw on a piece of fieldwork from my PhD studies, where I followed the quality metric on ‘programme relevance’ at three Danish universities and their Humanities faculties or schools. I observed meetings and quality assurance systems, read reports, spreadsheets and action plans, and interviewed the involved actors (managers, teachers,

Post-Humanist Critical University Ethnography …

63

students and quality workers). I also interviewed an Executive Officer from the Danish Accreditation Institution and studied policy documents and accreditation reports. Within the research field of university governance and administration, quality assurance is an important phenomenon that engages a wide array of actors and entities in order to produce legitimate university education. It entangles university governance and administration with a wide array of practices and entities, ranging from bureaucratic processes to educational design. It is furthermore characterised by a particular political framing. In Denmark, which is the case country of my study, The Danish Accreditation Institution is responsible for quality assurance at higher education institutions as framed by the Danish accreditation law (Uddannelses- og Forskningsministeriet 2018a), an accreditation decree ­(Uddannelses- og Forskningsministeriet 2018b) and the national Guide to institutional accreditation (The Danish Accreditation Institution 2013). Since 2013, the Danish Accreditation Institution has followed the paradigm of ‘institutional accreditation’, where the responsibility for the quality assurance of individual programmes is in the hands of the institution or university. This means that each university must set up its own quality assurance remit, and that this work (both in terms of the principles and practices of quality assurance) is now the object of accreditation by the national institution. Because of this recent development, Danish universities have spent a lot of time and effort building quality assurance systems and practices that fulfil the Danish Accreditation Institution guidelines. This process has changed the practices at most universities in specific ways that affect both the actors involved and educational development. In this section, my analysis of the practices of quality assurance will illustrate the post-humanist approach to critical university ethnography described in the first sections of this chapter.

4.1 Quality Cycles of Data Processing and Action Planning One of the accreditation criteria mentioned in the Danish accreditation decree (Uddannelses- og Forskningsministeriet 2018b) and guidelines (The Danish Accreditation Institution 2013) is ‘programme relevance’. Programme relevance is measured in several ways, the most important of which is through the key figure of graduate unemployment. In consequence, the graduate unemployment key figure becomes a proxy of the quality of degree programmes. The graduate

64

M. Madsen

unemployment statistics and their entanglements with quality assurance p­ ractices make up the more-than-human entanglement that is my object of analysis in this example. I call this entanglement a ‘metric’, meaning a set of practices and entities that produce a simplified result (such as a number or an approved/not approved verdict). In the following sections, I analyse the operations of the metric (how it works) and how it affects some of the involved actors. Due to the limited space available, the analysis will not be unfolded in its totality, but presented sufficiently to serve as an example. The Danish Accreditation Institution frames the processes of quality assurance at universities in a specific, linear way. In its guide to institutional accreditation, the Accreditation Institution emphasises the requirement of a ‘connection between ends, means, knowledge and following up’ (2013). The guide describes this connection as… “whether your quality assurance is performed on an ongoing, systematic basis so that it is always possible to assess and develop the quality of the institution’s activities. An important element in this connection is whether you receive knowledge about problems on an ongoing basis, evaluate questions and attempt to solve problems in a well-founded manner.” (The Danish Accreditation Institution 2013, pp. 19–20)

As the quoted passage shows, the quality system should ensure a linear relation between ‘receiving knowledge’, ‘evaluate questions’ and ‘attempting to solve problems’. The capacity to identify and solve problems defines a good quality system, according to The Danish Accreditation Institution. It is through this capacity that degree programmes and their leaders show themselves to be responsible. A ‘knowledge flow’ ‘upward and downward’ is described in the guide as a prerequisite for discussions across various formal bodies and roles at the university, and for making the management responsible for the quality of programmes (2013, pp. 20–21). Key figures are considered a very important (if not the only) element in this ‘knowledge flow’ as they fit the linearity of the process. Like other key figures, the graduate unemployment key figure enters an annual (or at some universities biannual) formal cycle of data processing and action planning. While the graduate unemployment rates published by the Danish Ministry of Higher Education and Science are always publicly available at the ministry website, the annual operation of embedding them into data dissemination devices translates them into something more than publicly available free-floating numbers. They become formalised entities that demand certain actions, including a procedure of discus-

Post-Humanist Critical University Ethnography …

65

sions, document production and approvals. In the process, the numbers typically flow through the group of teachers of a given programme, through the Study Board where teacher and student representatives formally make decisions on the programme, and through the head of programme. These various bodies produce inputs for the comments on the key figures, status reports on previous action plans and new action plans. The inputs then flow through the head of programme into the ‘head of programme report’, which then flows on ‘upwards’ in the university hierarchy for approval and further decision making. The action plans are important elements in the entanglement of the graduate unemployment metric. The idea seems to be that the numbers presented in the key figures can be improved on through various actions. If a degree programme has a graduate unemployment problem, it can literally act its way out of this situation by producing action plans that will show their effects in future key figures. Consequently, the key figure emerges as a performance indicator, which says something about the performance or behaviour of the programme (rather than for example the behaviour of individual graduates or developments at the labour market). The idea that actions can lead to changes in future unemployment numbers constitutes a causality of actions and their measurable effects. This causality is in line with the logic of performance management, where unsatisfactory performance indicators are expected to motivate staff and guide action towards improved performance (Pollitt 2013; Redden 2019).

4.2 Colour-Coded Key Figures and Responsible Manager Behaviour With the knowledge flow of the key figures, degree programmes become visible across the organisational layers in a quantified and categorised way. Early in the process, the key figures are marked as satisfactory or unsatisfactory by a threshold (usually defined by a ‘key figure memorandum’ or similar document). The threshold determines a colouring of the key figure, indicating if there is a problem or not. For example, at one of the universities in my fieldwork, a green tick is triggered if the number is marked as satisfactory, while an unsatisfactory mark triggers a red circle, called a ‘red light’. In case of a ‘red light’, the head of programme is obliged to comment on the number and produce an action plan. At this particular university, ‘red lights’ across several key figures means that the programme will be more closely monitored by the Board of Directors and ultimately risks possible decisions on cuts in enrolment or closure of the programme.

66

M. Madsen

The red colours explicitly become a sign of tangible danger. The colours become part of how programmes are made knowable across the different organisational layers. At most universities included in my fieldwork, the threshold between red and green (and sometimes yellow) numbers is the same across all programmes. With a common threshold, programmes are made commensurable (Espeland and Stevens 1998) or numerically comparable. As commensuration processes transform qualities into quantities, some information is discarded while other information is re-organised into new forms (Espeland and Stevens 1998, p. 317). The properties that are made commensurable in the metric make other categorisations of difference irrelevant, and thus invisible. At the same time, while some programmes have a history of a much higher unemployment rate than the one marked by the threshold, it might seem quite impossible to reach the threshold in some cases. The common threshold establishes what Heimer (2006, p. 110) calls a ‘classificatory’ or relational knowledge that compares across different units of measurement, rather than a ‘biographical’ knowledge that compares data from the same programme in different years. As a result, developments over time, which may be positive, become invisible in the colour-coded knowledge on the programmes. The quantified (coloured) knowledge enables managers and other key role inhabitants (student representatives, teachers, quality staff and so on) to know degree programmes differently than they otherwise could (Winthereik and Jensen 2017, p. 258). The transparency provided by the thresholds and the colour-coded key figures invite managerial decision power as well as a power to act within teaching environments. A space for showing oneself responsible is created. The simplicity and ‘apparent straightforwardness’ (Espeland and Sauder 2016, p. 22) of the produced knowledge makes it easy for the management to ‘evaluate challenges’ or in other words identify degree programmes with continuous problems that become the object of management decisions. In the quality framework, it is important to show one’s capacity to take action and solve problems, not only for programmes, but also for senior managers. The shame and embarrassment associated with insufficient performance indicated by red numbers needs to be counterbalanced with responsibility, which is signified by action plans and managerial decisions. Meanwhile, the development of actions and decisions that will ensure ‘green’ graduate unemployment in the future is not as straightforward as it sounds. The necessary actions do not emerge from the performance data. As Guy Redden points out, it is ‘somewhat illogical to assume that the creation of data in itself creates methods, capacities or resources that actually help actors to improve their performance’ (2019, p. 30). The data give no answers, they only point towards

Post-Humanist Critical University Ethnography …

67

problems. But the operations of the quality system, with its annual (or biannual) cycles of measurement and action, combined with the properties of the graduate unemployment statistics, perhaps call for a particular kind of actions—actions with immediate effects.

4.3 The Protracted Character of Graduate Unemployment Numbers Graduate unemployment figures are characterised by particular temporal properties. The performance data presented at a given time as part of the quality cycle always represent a bygone time. The present data will most often measure graduates who did their studies as part of a previous (or pre-previous) version of the programme regulation. The mismatch between current data and current programme regulation is related to the matter which is measured in the graduate unemployment statistics. The time span between the enrolment of a student and the occurrence of a measurable employment status of the same student (now graduate) is considerable. As the graduate unemployment statistics produced by the Danish Ministry of Higher Education and Science measure graduate employability in the 4th to 7th quarter after graduation, it takes at least 2 + 2 years from the enrolment in a master’s programme to the presentation of data. In the case of bachelor programmes, it takes at least 3 + 2 + 2 years (as it is uncommon in the Danish system to finish one’s university studies without a master’s degree). As most programmes reform their regulation at least once in a five-year period, the data become obsolete and irrelevant as an indicator of current problems. In addition, the effects of the current action plans will not appear in the key figures anytime soon. While the ideal version of the performance management cycle assumes that the actions will improve subsequent key figures, this is literally never the case as the effects of action plans are encumbered with such a significant delay. If, for example, an action targets bachelor students, the number of years until this action will show its effect on the graduate unemployment rates might reach seven or eight. Even if an action targets students who graduate in that same year, the effects will not show for two or three years, because the students need to be in the labour market for two years before the measurement takes place, to which some time for data processing can be added. Thus, the ‘production time’ of a graduate, and of graduate unemployment data, is protracted. This temporal dimension of the key figure favours some actions rather than others. In order to appear responsible, managers and heads of programme need to take action in a way that will show its effect as quickly as possible. As a result,

68

M. Madsen

actions that target master’s students at the end of their studies (or unemployed graduates) become more feasible than actions that target bachelor students. The viable actions are those that help graduates find a job effectively, rather than those that develop the content of the programme to better equip the graduates for the labour market (itself a problematic notion that I will not go into here). Actions that address the content of programmes do not provide the desired immediate effects (relatively speaking), and too much is at stake in the form of management decisions at higher management levels to risk working on a slow course of action.

4.4 Proposals for Different Engagements with Graduate Unemployment Statistics The above analysis of the quality cycles at Danish universities and their entanglements with the graduate unemployment key figure has shown a range of relations and shown how these relations between various entities co-constitute the entities involved. For example, the analysis brought out the relation between colours, affect and responsibility—a relation that calls on both teachers, heads of programme and managers at all hierarchical levels within the university (levels that are co-produced by the Accreditation Institution notion of ‘upward and downward’) to take action on problematic key figures, even if they are aware that they key figures do not actually describe current problems. Simultaneously, the threshold between ‘red’ and ‘green’ numbers automates the assessment of programmes and thereby creates quantitative categories that are difficult to alter. While this analysis acknowledges the responsibilities associated with the roles of head of programme and manager, it may also point towards new ways of inhabiting these responsibilities. For example, the critical-creative post-human ethnographer could propose to grant the human actors involved in the quality cycles more power to decide when a programme appears to have a quality problem. This could either be done by allowing managers to decide on individual thresholds for individual programmes (based on actual expectations rather than on calculated arbitrary values) or by giving them the opportunity to perform individual assessments of programmes, perhaps with the help of a more rich and diverse form of knowledge that is less disruptive of human-to-human conversations and narratives than mere key figures. These actions continue the entanglements of human actors (such as managers) and the non-human key figures, but in a different relation between the two that creates more space for a third actor (the teachers) and for the constant ­re-negotiation of assessment practices.

Post-Humanist Critical University Ethnography …

69

The analysis also presented the temporal relations between past versions of programmes, present key figures and action plans, and effects far into the future as an important property of the graduate unemployment key figure. The relation between this protracted temporality and the rapid temporality of the quality work cycles calls for shallow actions with immediate effects rather than more fundamental changes in the programmes, in order to make teachers and managers appear responsible. Here, the critical ethnographer may propose different temporal relations. For example, the quality cycle could be prolonged in relation to the graduate unemployment indicator in order to allow the effects of previous actions to emerge before new action plans are made. This prolongation would make space for longer-term strategies and more thorough educational development.

5 Concluding Discussion In this chapter, I have first outlined how critical university ethnography may draw on the notion of the more-than-human and as well as post-representational forms of critique in order to engage differently with the political affairs of producing a critical ethnography. Second, I have suggested three (entangled) re-arrangements of ethnographic-methodological practices, including the rethinking of the selection of objects (and thereby also the site) of analysis, the rethinking of analysis towards a presentation of entanglements and co-constitutive relations between various entities within the field, and the rethinking of critique in the form of proposals for new ways of engaging with more-than-human entities. Third, I have shown an example of an analysis that uses these ideas and results in proposals of new relations between managers and calculative practices, and new temporal arrangements of quality cycles. Through these proposals of ways to recompose the relations between human and more-than-human entities within the entanglements of quality assurance, the critical ethnographer becomes able to offer a critique that various actors can collaborate from, rather than a critique that identifies actors as deserving criticism. In my case, I build on the acknowledgement of the requirements of managers to ensure quality according to national guidelines, of the interests of teachers in working with meaningful action plans and thereby spending their time in a valuable way, and of the student’s interest in getting a job. By acknowledging the purposes and limitations of various actors, and by performing a politically reflected ethnography sensitive to these purposes and limitations, I (as a critical ­post-human ethnographer) aim to avoid the reproduction of existing power relations and thereby move beyond the everyday conflicts ‘at home’ in the Danish university sector.

70

M. Madsen

As a final point of discussion, I will identify a potential weakness of my understanding of critique in post-human ethnography. It is clear that the types of critique that come out of analyses like those proposed in this chapter will not be radical in nature, but rather corrective. The analysis of quality work outlined above is not an analysis that provides a critical-creative alternative to quality assurance altogether, but an analysis that suggests ways of improving quality assurance as it appears in its entanglements with university education, various university actors, wider political scenes and particular key figures. In order to produce a critical-creative post-human ethnography that radically does away with existing, dominant norms and structures, the ethnographer, as I see it, needs to engage with sites where alternative practices take place. But perhaps there is also room for improvement, and thereby a space for a creative critique based on ­post-human ethnography, within our existing university models and practices.

References Barad, K. (2003). Posthumanist performativity: Toward an understanding of how matter comes to matter. Signs, 28(3). https://doi.org/10.1086/345321. Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Durham: Duke University Press. Barad, K. (2011). Nature’s queer performativity. Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences, 19(2), 121–158. https://doi.org/10.5250/quiparle.19.2.0121. Brøgger, K. (2018). The performative power of (non)human agency assemblages of soft governance. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 31(5), 353–366. https://doi.org/10.1080/09518398.2018.1449985. Callon, M. (1986). Some elements of a sociology of translation: Domestication of the scallops and the fishermen of St Brieuc Bay. In J. Law (Ed.), Power, action, and belief: A new sociology of knowledge? (pp. 280–292). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Culhane, D., & Elliott, D. (2017). A different kind of ethnography: Imaginative practices and creative methodologies. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Dahler-Larsen, P. (2007). Constitutive effects of performance indicator systems. In S. Kushner & N. Norris (Eds.), Dilemmas of engagement: Evaluation and the new public management (pp. 157–169). Amsterdam: Elsevier. Decuypere, M., & Simons, M. (2016). On the critical potential of sociomaterial approaches in education. Teoría de la Educación: Revista Interuniversitaria, 28(1), 25–44. https:// doi.org/10.14201/teoredu20162812544. Dixon-Román, E. (2016). Algo-Ritmo: More-than-human performative acts and the racializing assemblages of algorithmic architectures. Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies, 16(5), 482–490. https://doi.org/10.1177/1532708616655769. Espeland, W., & Stevens, M. (1998). Commensuration as a social process. Annual Review of Sociology, 24(1), 313–343. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.soc.24.1.313.

Post-Humanist Critical University Ethnography …

71

Espeland, W., & Sauder, M. (2016). Engines of anxiety: Academic rankings, reputation, and accountability. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Fenwick, T., & Edwards, R. (2011). Considering materiality in educational policy: Messy objects and multiple reals. Educational Theory, 61(6), 709–726. https://doi.org/10.1111/ j.1741-5446.2011.00429.x. Haraway, D. (1988). Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective. Feminist Studies, 14(3), 575–599. https://doi. org/10.2307/3178066. Heimer, C. (2006). Conceiving children: How documents support case versus biographical analyses. In A. Riles (Ed.), Documents: Artifacts of modern knowledge (pp. 95–126). Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Højgaard, L., & Søndergaard, D. (2011). Theorizing the complexities of discursive and material subjectivity; agential realism and poststructural analysis. Theory & Psychology, 21(3), 338–354. https://doi.org/10.1177/0959354309359965. Johnson, J. (1988). Mixing humans and nonhumans together: The sociology of a door-closer. Social Problems, 35(3), 298–310. https://doi.org/10.1525/ sp.1988.35.3.03a00070. Latour, B. (2004). Why Has critique run out of steam? From matters of fact to matters of concern. Critical Inquiry, 30(2), 225–248. https://doi.org/10.1086/421123. Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the social: An introduction to actor-network-theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Law, J., & Hassard, J. (1999). Actor network theory and after. Oxford: Blackwell. Pollitt, C. (2013). The logics of performance management. Evaluation, 19(4), 346–363. https://doi.org/10.1177/1356389013505040. Redden, G. (2019). Questioning performance measurement: Metrics, organizations and power. Los Angeles: Sage. Schadler, C. (2019). Enactments of a new materialist ethnography: Methodological framework and research processes. Qualitative Research, 19(2), 215–230. https://doi. org/10.1177/1468794117748877. The Danish Accreditation Institution. (2013). Guide to institutional accreditation. https:// akkr.dk/wp-content/filer/akkr/Korekturl%C3%A6st-og-godkendt_Vejledning-om-institutionsakkreditering-endelig_godkendt.pdf. Accessed: 15. Apr. 2020. Uddannelses- og Forskningsministeriet. (2018a). Bekendtgørelse af lov om akkreditering af videregående uddannelsesinstitutioner. LBK nr 173 af 02/03/2018. Retsinformation. https://www.retsinformation.dk/Forms/r0710.aspx?id=198244. Accessed: 15. Apr. 2020. Uddannelses- og Forskningsministeriet. (2018b). Bekendtgørelse om akkreditering af videregående uddannelsesinstitutioner og godkendelse af videregående uddannelser. BEK nr 205 af 13/03/2018. Retsinformation. Accessed: 15. April 2020. Winthereik, B., & Jensen, C. (2017). Learning from experiments in optimization: ­Post-critical perspectives on monitoring and evaluation. Journal of Cultural Economy, 10(3), 251–264. https://doi.org/10.1080/17530350.2017.1289414.

“Process not Product”: Rethinking Feminist Teaching Across Disciplines with Autoethnographic Trialogues Daniela Jauk, Sabine Klinger and Nicole Pruckermayer

Abstract

In this paper, an interdisciplinary team of authors analyzes a series of autoethnographic trialogues addressing their approaches to teaching within and beyond gender studies environments. Sabine Klinger (education studies, social work; Austria), Nicole Pruckermayr (architecture, art, community education; Austria) and Daniela Jauk (sociology, criminal justice; Austria and US) are ethnographers, educators, and identify as feminists. They explore their sometimes similar and sometimes very different approaches of applying these intersections strategically in their feminist teaching praxes. The authors use autoethnography as method and as vehicle for analytic writing and ­self-interrogation in three voices. They referred to taped and transcribed trialogues and engaged ethnographic memoing for their analysis. They contextualize their experiences within the framework of “rhetorical modernization” (Wetterer, Achsen der Differenz. Gesellschaftstheorie und feministische Kritik II, Westfälisches Dampfboot, Münster, 286–319, 2003) and the “new gender contract” (McRobbie, Top Girls. Feminismus und der Aufstieg des D. Jauk (*)  Department of Sociology & Department of Criminal Justice, University of Akron, Acron, USA e-mail: [email protected] S. Klinger  Department of Education, University of Graz, Graz, Austria e-mail: [email protected] N. Pruckermayer  Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Technology, Graz, Austria e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2020 C. Wieser and A. Pilch Ortega (eds.), Ethnography in Higher Education, Doing Higher Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-30381-5_5

73

74

D. Jauk et al.

n­eoliberalen Geschlechterregimes, Springer, Wiesbaden, 2010) which both denote a r­ e-traditionalization of gender discourses. Keeping in mind these contemporary developments, we explore the question of whether and how it can make sense to use feminisms in teaching and scholarly work to offensively and subversively shape and inspire critical thinking and practice. It is not our goal in this paper to present feminist teaching as a canon or part of a canon. Instead, we have developed an awareness in our trialogues that science is historically constructed along axes of inequality. Keywords

Feminist pedagogy · Feminist teaching · Autoethnography · Higher education ·  Feminism

1 Preamble This paper is the product of bringing to the table our differently “disciplined” approaches to gender studies and to feminisms. Academic knowledge production is a deeply gendered process we re-construct in our teaching. Reflection and exposure of a heteronormative and patriarchal bias in knowledge production processes are essential strategies of feminist critiques of science and feminist teaching. We conceptualize feminisms as plural in our theory-building and practice in order to avoid the misconception of feminism as a monolithic block. Using plural feminisms also embraces the diversity in feminist thought brought to the table by queer, Black, transnational, disability studies, intersectional and many other researchers from around the world. We cannot and will not offer an exhaustive literature review on feminisms or on feminist teaching, feminist teachers or ­gender-sensitive didactics (a term that has been introduced and marketed more recently in European higher education institutions) in this paper. What we offer is an exploration of feminist teaching in and beyond gender studies programs in interdisciplinary perspective against the backdrop of repressive gender discourses and backlash. How do we do feminist teaching? How can we integrate feminisms in structure and content of learning environments? What is the interplay between feminist didactics and feminist content? These are some of the questions we asked ourselves in hopes to open up the box of “feminist teaching” and share what we found in it. In this sense the paper is not a finished analysis but a start of a conversation that hopefully continues across disciplines, countries, and feminisms.

“Process not Product”: Rethinking Feminist Teaching …

75

2 Methods/Process We, the authors, have taught in various constellations, at various Austrian and US universities, in various disciplines in gender studies programs and other disciplinary programs (sociology, education studies, art/architecture), as well as in public, community, and adult education settings. We gathered in preparation for the Fourth Austrian Gender Studies Association Conference (Jauk et al. 2016) and started to ask ourselves questions about our teaching practice. We began conversations around the questions: What are the characteristics of a feminist learning environment? Can there be a “feminist teaching” at all? Is teaching necessarily feminist solely by discussing gender issues? How can we transport feminisms and feminist ideas in classrooms beyond gender studies programs? Are we comfortable using the “F-word” (feminisms) in every teaching context? As s­ cholar-activists we continued the conversation in a local radio show (Pruckermayer et al. 2017) and presented a first analysis of the material in writing (Klinger et al. 2019). We crafted a performative ethnographic piece for the Eighth Rethinking Educational Ethnography (REE) Conference in June 2019 in Graz/ Austria and are indebted to all participants and reviewers from the REE network who helped us sharpen our lens for this chapter that is a snapshot in time of our current process. Over the course of two years, we met in workshop-like gatherings, and we taped and partially transcribed these conversations that were structured around the questions above. Our “trialogues” became data and offered new themes for further conversations. These autoethnographic explorations are based in feminist theories and praxes of “situated knowledges” (Haraway 1988). We strive to acknowledge the relevance and situatedness of each specific and subjective perspective on feminist teaching. In our trialogues, we compare and sometimes melt our perspectives into a more intersubjective framework that works for us, but we remain aware that “objectivity” is a chimera that has been utilized as instrument of power in the sciences. Aligning with Haraway (1988), we strive to disintegrate this power, as “feminists don't need a doctrine of objectivity that promises transcendence” (p. 579). We choose to be responsible for our words and actions and make visible their contexts and potential flaws. Along these lines, we do not wish to distill “a” theory of feminist pedagogy or stage a “feminists’ competition.” We embrace autoethnography as a methodological framework because it allows us to discuss our feminist disciplinary praxes critically. We can also be vulnerable in these explorations and sometimes uncover unconscious bias and privilege and also celebrate the awareness that we

76

D. Jauk et al.

have local and limited knowledges. There is no need to be generalizable, because “feminist objectivity means quite simply situated knowledges” (Haraway 1988, p. 581). In our conversations, we have realized that our different disciplines do not necessarily require fundamentally different approaches to feminist teaching. Here we find spaces of solidarity and commonality across the boundaries of disciplines and geographic academic cultures. In particular, we are interested in how we can be aware about mechanisms of in/equality, domination, and in/ex/ clusion that are engrained in academic work praxes and structures. The reflection of academic work praxes seems particularly relevant as we are confronted with rhetorical modernization (Wetterer 2003, 2013) and “politics of disarticulation” (Mc Robbie 2010) not only among the students in our classrooms, but also among co-workers, in media, and the social environment. The question is how can we address the backlash without provoking rejections that cloud or completely eliminate a learning experience? According to Angela Mc Robbie, young women today are offered a new gender contract that includes the disarticulation of feminist claims and contents in a new gender discourse. For the price of silencing feminist voices, white, middle class women are offered the social perk of becoming more visible in public spheres of labor market, education system, as well as consumerist and civil culture (McRobbie 2010). We wonder, might it make sense to not use the F-Word obtrusively in feminist teaching and art, and to work in feminist manner more subversively? Along the lines of the proverb “actions speak louder than words,” we wonder if it is sometimes smarter to work with this disarticulation and have a “feminist attitude” in a given learning environment and to consistently use participatory feminist didactics instead of the “F-word.”

3 Biographical Pathways Even if this text is a theoretically traversed autoethnography, in describing our own experiences and subjective experience, we transgress the boundaries between the therapeutic, the political, and the scientific (Ellis and Bochner 2000). It is about taking our own embodied experiences as a source of knowledge and change for feminist teaching. bell hooks illustrates this knowledge-making when she says that classrooms can be a space “where teachers were willing to acknowledge a connection between ideas learned in university settings and those learned in life practices” (hooks 1994, p. 15). This confrontation with (our own and foreign) feelings and experiences is an inevitable and indispensable part of the autoethnographic research and writing process (Ploder and Stadlbauer 2013, p. 375).

“Process not Product”: Rethinking Feminist Teaching …

77

Autoethnography is particularly suitable for the interdisciplinary discussion and (self-)reflection with feminist conceptions of teaching and artistic interventions in the practice of scientific work. It operates at the boundaries between science and art and thus also at the borders of the respective discipline (Ploder and Stadlbauer 2013, p. 401). Grappling with these boundaries can inspire new insights as well as sharpen and accentuate the (self-) understanding as teachers, researchers and artists. Limits, whether of disciplines or of one's own s­ elf-image, can be questioned and altered. Also, in our choice of autoethnography as a method of research and as a form of scientific writing, we already see a significant (subversive) feminist impetus, since this creates and links the reflection of power and hierarchy with an emancipatory claim (Ploder and Stadlbauer 2013, p. 395). Our trialogues are simultaneously the process and product of research (Ellis et al. 2011). We teach in various constellations at various German and English-speaking universities that often have what we called “normative classrooms” in our trialogues. In these normative teaching and learning contexts, retrievable knowledge is prioritized over the reflection of social norms, orders and hierarchies. By neglecting implications of gender, sexuality or (in the worst case) normative action towards the students (e.g. by insisting on gender dichotomy), oppressive norms are reinforced. Normative teaching is also expressed in the dichotomy between teachers conceptualized in a hierarchical relationship with the students. Reflecting upon the setting of the classroom has a clarifying effect. In the ­non-normative classroom, we recognize the importance of (self-) reflexivity as an essential feature of feminist research (Hesse-Bibber and Piatelli 2012) and teaching (Schlüter and Justen 2009). We realized that our individual pathways to (feminist) teaching need to be a unit of analysis, and we start out here by introducing the authors-team and their respective individual backgrounds in our own voices: S.K.: I am a partnered, childless cis-woman who grew up in rural area. I am the youngest of four daughters. From my early childhood I remember a story about my birth that my parents told me: I apparently cried a lot in the first minutes of my life and because my father wished he had a boy the midwife interpreted my crying as sadness over not being a boy. I always found this story strange and it made/makes me feel uncomfortable and insufficient. I guess that is way I have always been very sensible about gender issues and inequality. In my family I am a first-generation college student with a PhD in education and training. Currently I am teaching and researching at the university of Graz (Austria). My main topics are feminist, gender, and migration research and processes of digitization in social work. I have studied education and gender studies and was interested in gender issues since the beginning of my university education. I deepened my knowledge by attending numerous seminars, discussions with fellow students, family and friends, as well as my choice to

78

D. Jauk et al. be pedagogically active in gender-related fields of work. Furthermore, it was and is natural for me that I am to be interested in gender issues and critically question normative, hierarchical, polar notions of gender roles, relationships and orders. However, in exchange with others, I have noticed that this consideration of gender as a (pedagogical) relevant category is far from being shared by everyone, and that my position often requires seeking? legitimacy and is seen as an individualized interest or individual orientation. For me, I wonder why the feminist thematization of gender in educational thinking and pedagogical action is often considered obsolete, when (in my view) a reflective treatment of the sexes is not (yet) part of (social) pedagogical practice. D.J.: I was about 13 years old when I painted a Venus symbol ♀ on my green 70s wallpaper in my nursery with red car paint, to the horror of my parents. The room was in a house in a remote Styrian village. The village was so remote it lacked a grocery store. In the midst of wealthy farmers, my household was blue collar working class. Patriarchy and domestic violence fuelled by alcoholism were dominant norms across all classes and backgrounds. I have dedicated my life and work to this feminist symbol of women that I marked upon my mural. In my work as a social worker and in my political work as a women’s representative of the city of Graz, I have collected many individual life stories of women, girls, and transgender people, which I later tried to understand in a sociological framework. I completed my PhD in sociology in the USA where I am now married with a child – a heteronormative exterior for a (still) queer identification and intention. In recent years I have taught at various universities in Austria and the USA, but I come from the field of feminist group work with girls, and I have experience in adult education and facilitating workshops. Currently, I am helping to build and evaluate organic gardens in women’s prisons in a feminist participatory action research framework. As of the fall of 2019, I embarked on a tenure track journey as an assistant professor for Sociology and Criminal Justice. I move within this field of tension that on the one hand, I am part of a normative and disciplining ‘prison industrial complex,’ and on the other hand, I strive to work against this system, at least to slightly undermine or erode it. N.P.: I am currently working as a freelancer, an artist, a cultural worker and a forester. I have studied biology and architecture, and hold a PhD in visual culture and cultural anthropology. I am married and have a child, and I have taught at various Austrian universities, mostly in the field of contemporary art, but often in connection with gender-sensitive topics. In retrospect, I would say that I grew up as a tomboy, at that time I did not know the term yet. I was proud when strangers identified me as a boy. My parents did not try to bend me. My father wished he had a boy, and so he supported my then classic male education as a structural engineer and later as an architect. He absolutely wanted me to get a truck driver's license, and later on I pleased him with my extended training in forestry. And yet there were limits. People often told me subtly or less subtly that I was invading a foreign domain and did not belong have lost nothing here. At the age of fifteen, I could not grasp these structurally limits structurally. But through continuous search, countless discussions, books, and the many courses in gender studies that have emerged since the 1990′s, I developed a clearer picture of what constitutes the impact of expected

“Process not Product”: Rethinking Feminist Teaching …

79

gender dichotomies. I have also encountered possibilities of emancipatory and feminist concepts of life, which, irrespective of whether they are now in the field of content, have shifted my focus of interests from initially strong technical orientations, to including media art into areas of humanities, art and cultural subjects of the natural sciences which are highly similar, sometimes completely interchangeable.

What we all have in common is that we teach in feminist ways and we often experience resistance or negative reactions when we introduce feminist content in classrooms and art projects. Contemporary feminist teaching takes place in a context in which misogyny and anti-feminism are (again) socially acceptable (Scambor and Jauk 2018). We encounter audiences claiming that feminism is an outdated topic and that they have no interest in engaging with it. Schlüter and Justen (2009) also address the fact that many students have a defensive attitude towards gender issues. Social transformation processes obscure gender inequities. For instance, the decreased publicity of gender-hierarchical contradictions can mask gender hierarchies and differential advantages, and the individualization of social conflicts frames gender work as a private task (Bitzan 2002, p. 30). All three of us have seen those student-faces disinterested, sometimes reddish-excited when the F-word (feminism) often consciously, sometimes unconsciously, is put into the academic learning and research space. Gender relations have started to evolve in contradictory ways in recent years. On the one hand, there seems to be a gradual weakening of gender-specific dividing lines in the world of work and employment (Kutzner 1999). On the other hand, an astonishingly stable persistence of gender hierarchies, differential power structures and even solidification can be observed more generally (Wetterer 2002).

4 Analytic Framing of Our Subjective Experiences The assertion of “no-longer-necessary-behavior” and the assumption of the existence of feminist politics are not particular and individual phenomena, but part of current social developments to which we now turn. As a theoretical reference frame, we use the concept of rhetorical modernization processes (Wetterer 2003) and a new neoliberal gender contract (McRobbie 2010). Wetterer (2003) describes a coexistence of equality and inequality and the discrepancy between the beliefs and actions of individuals. She uses the term “rhetorical modernization” to describe an innovation “that shows itself in discourse and language, but rarely in practice” (p. 12). She observed a gap between how people act in regard to gender roles and equality and how people think and talk about it. People think

80

D. Jauk et al.

that gender equality and equal partnerships are already a social norm, yet they do not live accordingly. This contradiction is resolved through de-thematization of inequality, which—while not eradicated—is protected from criticism. The hierarchical structure of gender distinction is excluded from individual experience and language repertoire and thus made invisible. Inequality is understood as the “consequence of a free and conscious choice” (Wetterer 2003, p. 298) for which the actors themselves are responsible; structurally created problems are thus personalized and individualized. With this development, young and well-educated women from Western countries are pop-culturally exposed to “a new gender contract” (McRobbie 2010, p. 57) and “a kind of rhetorical equality” (p. 18). Women can now, for instance, participate in the public sphere and the labor market, have education and have some say about their reproductive desires and be consumers. The images of women produced in media performatively show the achieved successes and suggest that feminist interventions and criticism of patriarchal power relations are no longer necessary (Klinger 2015). However, in return for public visibility, women are implicitly expected to forego feminist policies and positions (McRobbie 2010). While this practice acknowledges the achievements of feminism, feminist social criticism is dismissed as outdated. Angela McRobbie calls this renunciation of feminist content and demands “politics of disarticulation” (p. 47). This process unfolds within the context of neoliberalism, in which the co-optation of emancipatory, feminist concerns is reduced to questions of gainful employment and competitiveness in a neoliberal market (Maurer 2006). While high education attainment level of women has become the gold standard of equality (McRobbie 2010, p. 113), women are not hired at the same rates as men, especially in positions of power. They are also still underpaid everywhere.

5 Of Searching and Finding Feminist Teachings and Practices In the following section, we explore the question of what constitutes teaching for us in a trialogic—autoethnographic process, which is located between scientific work and socio-critical impetus. We also explore the question of whether and how it can make sense to in teaching and scholarly work to use the F-word (feminism) explicitly and also subversively to shape and inspire critical thinking and practice. Our autoethnographic narration is not to be understood as a finished analysis and does not end with the production or submission of this text. It “becomes” only with the sensual, emotional experience of respective readers (Ellis and Bochner

“Process not Product”: Rethinking Feminist Teaching …

81

2000). The text is thus to be provided as a process of understanding on the part of the writers. As writers/authors of this article we want to encourage the reader to co-produce meaning as we offer an examination of our subjectivity (Ploder and Stadlbauer 2013). This process is also connected to the tenet of feminist pedagogy to provide spaces and opportunities to reflect and break through hierarchies (hooks 2000), while not covering up the structural hierarchy between teachers and students (at least if unilateral grading systems are applied). There are no simple if-then causalities for the implementation of feminist teaching and practices. In the following sections, we provide three applications of our process of searching and finding feminist teaching practices. We deliberately chose to present our edited autoethnographic excerpts here, insinuating a feminist methodology that makes space for participants’ voices (Sprague 2005) and also to represent the multivocality of an open, reflective, and vulnerable pedagogical practice. Despite the our differences, we converge in our attempts to 1) allow students to study the unusual and also the very usual invisible norms in order to better understand the social world; 2) shift focus away from the individual and towards social, historical and cultural contexts; and 3) trying to open multidimensional discursive spaces that including the non-academic community. D.J.: I'm inspired by Halberstam's gagafeminism (Jauk et al. 2017). The “Art of Gaga” is “a policy of free fall, wild thought, and imaginative reinvention best represented by children under eight, women over 45, and the armies of marginalized, abandoned, and unproductive people” (Halberstam 2012, p. xv). For me this means to enable learning in non-normative places, and to allow students to study voices that are not usually amplified. What does this look like? It looks like an empty classroom at times, because we are out there in the community participating in a social protest or volunteering for a community organization. It looks like a full classroom at times because we bring in activists, artists, collaborators across campus and into our classrooms. In other words, we make room for people we typically do not see at the university and also making our classrooms accessible to them. My students enjoyed a drag queen in full gear talking about her performance art and drag kin networks for a lunch class. A student had urged me to invite her, and it was hard to say no, since I had promoted my feminist want for student led activities. Yet I was so scared of other students being disrespectful, asking “wrong questions,” or “presenting her” like bearded lady in a circus tent. What if I cannot “control” the conversation and smooth over the discomfort that might arise among all of us? I supplemented with materials on queer kinship and we could contextualize with data on staggering homelessness of queer folk in the US due to discrimination and family strive. The end of the story is that it led to a really great encounter in the classroom. I felt the student who had made this connection was very proud that two seemingly different spheres are connecting in this conversation that evolved and in the fact that. Drag Queen was walking the college hallway in broad daylight. Femi-

82

D. Jauk et al. nist teaching is taking risk. Getting out of that comfort zone. Making myself vulnerable. I try to supplement normative discourse and stray from textbooks. This also makes sense because textbooks cost an average of $100.00 in the US and present exclusionary practice. I include other learning materials such as art, artifacts, and multimedia and have students suggest texts. I try to bring technology-positive and ­community-positive feminisms to the classroom. For instance, we can skype in a guest speaker from Guatemala (and at the same time reflect on access to technology, resources and activist discourses in less privileged regions), or we could invite cyberfeminists to teach us online feminist hacking. We can connect with local activists who fight food insecurity and plant community gardens. As a feminist teacher, I also want to bring students to communities in a resource-sensitive way, so that they contribute, and not burden. I want to co-create learning spaces and meet students as learners who are aware that they are responsible for equitable information input into our learning space. Sharing the construction of the learning space helps me convey to students that I am not a mechanical and consumer-oriented ‘lesson automaton’. I want to evoke and endorse questions that feminisms do not exist in either/or spaces but in in both/and. S.K.: For me, the question of the formation of subjects through social discourses arises again and again. This opens up perspectives on the interaction of different social discourses, by means of which central social norms are conveyed and in which individuals must orient themselves in their ways of life and existence. For this reason, it is important for me, in addition to conveying theoretical and technical content, to take greater account of the analysis of social discourses and their influence on processes of perception, action and evaluation together with the students. This means that the current social discourses and processes of social transformation are taken up in the theoretical conception and within empirical research. Considering this, together with my students, we re-negotiate the question of the socializing horizon of (de-)addressing gender and the meaning of feminism and feminisms before the background of neoliberal appropriation. Here, the imparting of theoretical knowledge is just as central as the consideration of critical social diagnoses and gender-reflective and diversity-aware content. The theoretical references vary depending on the main focus of the course. An interactive instead of an instructive or unidirectional editing of the content is of great importance. I try to implement this renegotiation on different levels, including using interactive teaching methods, making connections with community members, and utilizing case studies and self-reflections. In order to communicate feminist content, a practice-oriented approach is very important to me. Students are particularly enriched by the guest lecturers from various feminist contexts and artists who are regularly invited to my courses. In addition to guest lectures, we use case-related collegial consultation (Schlee 2012), sociometric surveys (Ameln and Kramer 2014), observation assignments, analysis of newspaper articles and Youtube videos as didactical methods. In addition, I have had particularly good experiences integrating a biography-oriented approach to teaching. Especially when it comes to dealing with resistance, this self-reflexive level and the value-free survey of the respective realities of life is an important tool. The awareness of patterns of thinking and action as well as the lifting and harnessing of life-historical resources are important, since

“Process not Product”: Rethinking Feminist Teaching … social issues as well as aspects of education are subject to biographical influences. which often remain unconscious. Biography-oriented approaches offer important starting points and points of reflection. This involves raising awareness of patterns of thought and action as well as raising and utilizing life-historical resources, including gender-sensitive language. The focus of biographical work is not only on the individual, but also on the social, historical and cultural context. In addition, I recommend an interactive rather than instructive approach to gender and gender issues in order to identify individual references to the topic and make them useful for personal learning processes. An important part of biographical work is also to develop a common orientation of (self-)reflection and a feedback culture among students. One example of how I implement a biographical approach is via creative and self-reflective work. Therefore, I like to work with ‘poetry slam’ instead of an academic presentation or a seminar paper. The task of the students is to write and present a text or poetry which refers to their theoretical knowledge, practice-oriented experiences and self-reflexive biographical work. Let me give you one example: In a course with the focus on gender, diversity & intersectionality, students spent a semester learning about social categories of difference and belonging (race, class, gender etc.) while reading and discussing related literature. In addition, I encouraged the students to reflect on their own socio-pedagogical professional attitudes and on their biographical experiences in free writing sessions. The students presented their analyses in a poetry slam session at the end of term in the classroom. While rhyming, rapping, choral speaking and whispering students share their biographical work enriched with theoretical knowledge (see Klinger 2019 for details on this assignment). N.P.: My actions and my thinking are profoundly shaped by the biologist Anne Fausto-Sterling. She has significantly shaped my view of gender identity. Her conception of a multidimensional sex space, in the early 1990s, knows no pole formation, such as male or female, sex and gender, but has a multi-dimensional axis system (e.g., genetic, cellular, hormonal, anatomical, environmental influences, experiences, age, etc.; see 1993, 2000). The dissolution of gender categories, together with the queering of our identities, offer enormously important processes that ensure humanity to all different genders. I am currently working on a larger interdisciplinary art, research, and peace project exploring es issues of democracy in public urban space. My starting point was to promote a more realistic view of different genders in public spaces. This project focuses attention on dignity, a life without degradation and, above all, safe border crossings. The project is about framing a process of seeing and hearing people as fully-fledged individuals, while also reflecting upon our respective gender identities and challenges. With who we are and what we can do, we can work together to develop a positive vision of the future, but all genders must be brought in dialogically. In my work with students and others, I try to open discursive spaces that do not end in rigid counter-positions, but in the best cases, evoke a constructive response (Rosa 2016). Project-oriented and research-led work offers good opportunities here. In the context of teaching, it is important for me to open a safe space and then keep it consistently protected and reflective. Injuries and violent experiences (which include linguistic oppression processes) that occur within protected spaces are even more degrading than elsewhere,

83

84

D. Jauk et al. as they strike within apparent security. I am convinced that with constructive criticism and “staying in the conversation,” we can negotiate (social) conflict situations, including those based on a lack of gender equality or the fact different needs of different genders are not addressed.

In our shared conversations we addressed the implementation of our feminist teaching. In doing so, we shared the experiences of repeatedly being confronted with resistance, defensiveness, and negative reactions. At the same time, our individual and context-driven handling of the F-word was different, which resulted in a lively and interested exchange. The essence of this discourse is presented along the following question: What can a feminist teaching attitude and practice look like that works with and/or without the term feminism or feminisms? What does our concrete handling of the F-word look like? N.P.: From my experience, it's important to stay true to feminist teaching content. That is, the constant demand of feminist themes is necessary, otherwise they are easily disappearing, not out of intention but also out of habit, since otherwise they are often absent. For example, for many years I worked with definitely n­ on-feminist activists, even in classrooms. It was more important to me not to allow a gender preference in my interactions with students or in the selection of illustrative examples – than to actively show a feminist attitude. Proclaiming a feminist conviction would have brought more problems than benefits. Which does not mean that I always choose a more subversive gait. Context matters. It has been my experience that in some contexts, I simply cannot listen when I say something offensively. And it is important for me to have a dialogue in order to have an exchange with someone else, not a confrontation. For me it makes sense to work subversively, because sometimes it is simply impossible not to do it! Gayatri Spivak's “Strategic Essentialism” (Spivak 1996) seems to have a possible answer here in order to remain able to have agency. Spivak is concerned that it may be politically necessary to think of identities, from a strategic perspective, to expose these identities as false and to point out the constructive character. The reflected action is the highest premise here. D.J.: I'm very clear in most of the classrooms I've taught in and put the F-word on my hat. I carry it in front of me, I pronounce it, I put it in the middle of the room on the first day. I treat it like a diamond. I am proud of feminisms and all the thinking practitioners who have prepared paths for us. I think it's important to be transparent and authentic, and ‘feminist’ is what I AM, what I've always been, even though meanings of the word have changed for me and are always multiple. I make myself vulnerable and I advertise the F-word. When students get the ­ ‘reddish-excited face,’ as they hear me out myself as feminist, sometimes I get scared, but I've never been ashamed. Then it is so wonderful and helpful to remind everyone that we are anchored in science and our work is evidence-based. Here I want to see data! Here I want to debate based on systematic research. My dear colleague and team-teacher Dr. Solveig Haring has taught me to make clear in the first class session that ‘private statistics’ are not welcome in this classroom. These are the individual examples and

“Process not Product”: Rethinking Feminist Teaching … exceptions that we all know. For example, the neighbour who earns more than her husband, who in turn cleans the house every week. Or the grandfather who was a chain smoker for 50 years and never got lung cancer. As a scientist, I want to see data. I want to help identify patterns. And I want to make one thing clear — wage differences, violence, gender stereotypes, the binary gender system as a forced corset for all people — it's not just about women. Feminism is for everybody (hooks 2000). Yet I admit, I also had the privilege of teaching in sociology and gender studies, which is a safe environment. I am sure that in architecture and technology classes I would encounter many reddish-excited faces and perhaps undermine my authority with this offensive F-word strategy. When I aggressively perform my feminism in the classroom, then maybe I take away the ‘aha experience’ and the surprise. I mean the surprise that comes when people learn to understand data and own it and see themselves that ‘gender’ ‘sometimes literally destroys lives and opportunities and prevents life (keyword: selective abortions, femicide), without me telling them. S.K.: In my teaching I deal with my own feminist attitude rather defensively. Also, I rarely use the F-word, especially at the beginning of a class. From my experience, feminisms are hardly known by students, or it annoys and only occasionally meets with approval from them. In order not to dazzle the students, as it were, with the gleaming and bright light of the feminist diamond (see above) in the middle of the room, I prefer to embody feminist principles and concerns (eg solidarity, questioning of normativities, pointing out structural inequality, taking the lives of the students seriously, to convey intersubjectivity, emancipation) and to act according to them. Different categories of social inequality (class, race, gender, age, etc.) are at the center. Here I also like to use didactic strategies of gender-reflected pedagogy. These are the dramatization, the de-dramatization and the non-dramatization of gender (Debus 2012, p. 150). Dramatizing approaches are useful, among other things, if the pedagogical work should encourage the participants to think about gender relations. I highlight gender differences in class to encourage students to reflect gender hierarchies and discrimination, and to make gender visible as a relevant structure of social inequality. This approach is necessary when students dramatize gender and bring gender stereotypes into discussion, especially if this happens regularly. For example, they may claim that women/girls or boys/men do not possess certain abilities, are particularly suitable for specific activities, are not allowed to wear these clothes or those colours, etc. One option is to first carry out one's own pedagogical dramatization, for example by talking about gender images and differences, in order to de-dramatize them afterwards. Through a de-dramatizing approach, it can be made visible that gender is not the only difference category and to show individual differences within the gender groups. The strategy of non-dramatization is characterized by the fact that it keeps gender in mind, among other things as an analytical approach, but does not place it at the center of educational activities. Non-dramatizing offers a start in a room where gender is not set as central. The goals of this strategy are: promotion of individual diversity and individual competencies, addressing issues other than gender, Non-dramatization differs from de-dramatizing because they do not seek to relativize an initial dramatization but begin in a space in which gender is not (yet or

85

86

D. Jauk et al. currently) defined as central (Debus 2012, p. 155). But it is important to stress that de- or non-dramatizing gender differences does not mean to ignore gender inequality or to become gender-blind. By focusing with the students on these strategies, they also start to learn more about an intersectional approach. While talking about and introducing other strategies and approaches it brings the students to a place where they are using the F word without rushing and reflect on a rhetorical modernization. This can also mean constantly questioning whether existing categories correspond to the complexity of human realities and asking the question of “other” categories and thus to include various systems of relevance. It is important to me to establish a fundamental social connection that is intertwined with the students’ entire life experience. For that it is important to me to make enthusiastic and not (always) to convince ‘combative and serious'. My goal is not to continue to transport the normativity of social expectations of competence and action in an unchecked manner. In my classes, it is important to critically scrutinize these norms themselves and, if necessary, to change them in relation to an alternative lifestyle and a more humane world. At the latest, if this ‘subversive’ strategy comes to fruition and the students want to be able to question their own ideas and prejudices at least once because of the content-related discussions, then it is time for me to say the F-Word proudly, offensively and enthusiastically. In this context, I require students to take distance from the surrounding world and to engage with a reflective and possibly new and unknown knowledge.

6 Final Thoughts and More Open Questions You may be disappointed now if you expected a classical academic paper, as our piece is characterized by multivocality, discrepancies and in-between spaces. It should instigate (self-)criticism and along the lines of situated knowledge (Haraway 1988) and it should be an invitation to connect and further explore together. From hooks (1994), we learn that teaching and learning means to give space to different forms of knowledges by creating connections between academic knowledge and lived realities. Autoethnography as a method is appropriate to navigate this endeavour as we understand it as an invitation to recipients, listeners, and readers to enter a dialogue with us. We do not attempt to present a perfect and streamlined taxonomy of what feminist teaching might be, but much rather we question the universality of such an idea and make transparent how our unique feminist stance in a classroom is shaped by our social locations and individual pathways and how we might further develop it together. Our goal is a pedagogical attitude that is characterized by empowerment which makes it possible to critically reflect and shape the world. It is possible to be ambivalent and at the same time very clear about one’s own identities and values. In this sense, we also want to continue to reflect on our

“Process not Product”: Rethinking Feminist Teaching …

87

own ambivalence towards the F-word and problems that come with our analysis. For example, the legitimate question arises as to whether it is paternalistic to deny learners the F-word and what image of teaching as a strategic interaction might underlie a subversive strategy. In addition to the already mentioned “strategic essentialism” (Spivak 1996) as a subversive and strategic perspective, an evolved form of gaga-feminism could point the way, making room for a creative combination of methods and didactics. For gaga-feminism is “a scavenger feminism that borrows promiscuously, steals from everywhere, and occupies the ground of stereotypes and clichés all at the same time.” (Halberstam 2012, p. 5). In a ­gaga-feminist framework, we can “play,” try, make mistakes, and experiment (as in this article), because “gaga feminism is a form of political expression that masquerades as naive nonsense but actually participates in big and meaningful forms of critique” (Halberstam 2012, p. xxv). Also, the question ambivalence arises for us as teachers who work in a system that we want to criticize and change at the same time. Meyerson and Scully (1995) call such individuals “tempered radicals.” It is radical to want to change the system, but human beings have to act “tempered,” often strategically and with moderation. In English, “tempered” means hardened, improve the consistency of something. A second interpretation of “temper” is “anger.” So as feminist teachers we for sure are angry about power differentials, but we also live in and through them. We improve over time how we navigate systems of privilege and oppression. We may not act our anger outwardly at times, seemingly complying—having improved in our consistency and elasticity to grapple with them. Meyerson and Scully (1995) do not see ambivalence as a problem that needs to be “solved”, but as a resource that allows nuanced action. We are also ambivalent about the label “feminist” because it can become something static and loaded. We would thus like to conclude by reaffirming that we must repeatedly question ourselves in how we legitimize and normalize feminist discourses and thus make them instruments of power and empowerment by canonizing radical strands of knowledge. Instead, we should strive to denaturalize feminisms in self-reflexive practice and deliberately leave questions open, as Luke and Gore (2014) also show. If there is a preliminary conclusion of our trialogues, then it is not the one answer to the question of what exactly feminist doctrine is or the demand for it to be an exclusively pro-feminist doctrine. It seems more important to us that there should be no anti-feminist or misogynistic or xenophobic attitude and positions in teaching and science that ignores or distorts empirical results and science (sic!) stemming from inequality research. If we look to gaga-feminism in this piece we do this fully aware that gaga-feminism does not include a sufficient criticism of capitalist, neoliberal, and colonial structures, we

88

D. Jauk et al.

so desperately need. This is a topic for one of our next trialogues. However, there is agreement that we need feminist teaching as we move into a political climate characterized by radicalization, legitimized anti-feminism and social inequality. This paper is not a finished analysis, but rather a start of a conversation that hopefully continues across disciplines, countries, and feminisms. In conclusion, we deliberately do not offer a product here, we offer a process – and we hope you feel inspired to engage.

References Ameln, F., & Kramer, J. (2014). Psychodrama: Grundlagen. Berlin: Springer. Bitzan, M. (2002). Sozialpolitische Ver- und Entdeckungen. Geschlechterkonflikte und Soziale Arbeit. Widersprüche. Zeitschrift für Sozialistische Politik im Bildungs-, Gesundheits- und Sozialbereich, 84, 27–42. Debus, K. (2012). Dramatisierung, Entdramatisierung und Nicht-Dramatisierung in der Geschlechterreflektierten Bildung. Oder (Wie) Kann ich geschlechterreflektiert arbeiten, ohne geschlechtsbezogene Stereotype zu verstärken? In Dissens e. V., K. Debus, K. Schwerma, & B. Könnecke (Eds.), Geschlechterreflektierte Arbeit mit Jungen an der Schule (pp. 150–158). https://www.dissens.de/de/publikationen/jus.php. Accessed: 13. Sep. 2018. Ellis, C., & Bochner, A. (2000). Autoethnography, personal narrative, reflexivity. Researcher as subject. In N. Denzin & Y. Lincoln (Eds), Handbook of qualitative research (pp. 733–768). London: Sage. Ellis, C., Adams, T., & Bochner, A. (2011). Autoethnography: An overview. Historical Social Research, 36(4), 273–290. Fausto-Sterling, A. (1993). The five sexes. The Sciences, March/April, 20–25. Fausto-Sterling, A. (2000). The five sexes. The Sciences, July/August, 18–23. Halberstam, J. (2012). Gaga feminism: Sex, gender, and the end of normal. Boston: Beacon Press. Haraway, D. (1988). Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective. Feminist Studies, 14(3), 575–599. Hesse-Bibber, S., & Piatelli, D. (2012). The feminist practice of holistic reflexivity. In S. N. Hesse-Biber (Ed.), Handbook of feminist research: Theory and praxis (pp. 557–582). Thousand Oaks: Sage. hooks, b. (1994). Teaching to transgress: Education as the practice of freedom. New York: Routledge. hooks, b. (2000). Feminism is for everybody: Passionate politics. London: Pluto. Jauk, D., Klinger, S., & Pruckermayr, N. (2016). Working with/out the F-Word: Interdisziplinäre Konzeptionen und Interventionen in der feministischen Lehre. Paper presented at the ÖGGF-Österreichische Gesellschaft für Geschlechterforschung. Austrian Society for Gender Research.

“Process not Product”: Rethinking Feminist Teaching …

89

Jauk, D., Haring, S., & Mörth, A. (2017). „bloody mary hairy!“ a DIY (gaga-)feminist didactics cock*tail tale. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ThWI01zO-Fcandt=353s. Accessed: 9. Sep. 2019. Klinger, S. (2014). (De-)Thematisierung von Geschlecht. Rekonstruktionen bei Studierenden der Erziehungs- und Bildungswissenschaften. Opladen: Budrich. Klinger, S. (2015). Die (De-)Thematisierung von Geschlechterhierarchien im Verhältnis akademischer Sozialisationsprozesse und gesellschaftlicher Diskurse. In B. Dausien, C. Thon, & K. Walgenbach (Eds.), Geschlecht – Sozialisation – Transformationen. Jahrbuch der Frauen- und Geschlechterforschung in der Erziehungswissenschaft (pp. 111– 128). Opladen: Budrich. Klinger, S. (2019). Poetry Slam – Studierende der Sozialpädagogik reflektieren Geschlecht, Diversität & Intersektionalität. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/331579782_ Poetry_Slam_--_Studierende_der_Sozialpadagogik_reflektieren_Geschlecht_Diversitat_Intersektionalitat. Accessed: 8. Mar. 2020. Klinger, S., Jauk, D., & Pruckermayr, N. (2019). Teaching with/out the F-Word. Journal für Psychologie, 27, 30–50. https://doi.org/10.30820/0942-2285-2019-1-30. Kutzner, E. (1999). Die Un-Ordnung der Geschlechter. Industrielle Produktion, Gruppenarbeit und Geschlechterpolitik in partizipativen Arbeitsformen. München: Hampp. Luke, C., & Gore, J. (2014). Feminisms and critical pedagogy. London: Routledge. Meyerson, D., & Scully, M. (1995). Tempered radicalism and the politics of ambivalence and change. Organization Science, 6(5), 585–600. McRobbie, A. (2010). Top Girls. Feminismus und der Aufstieg des neoliberalen Geschlechterregimes. Wiesbaden: Springer. Maurer, S. (2006). Gouvernementalität ‚von unten her‘ denken. Soziale Arbeit und soziale Bewegungen als (kollektive) Akteure ,beweglicher Ordnungen‘. In S. Maurer, & S. Weber (Eds.), Gouvernementalität und Erziehungswissenschaft: Wissen – Macht – Transformation (pp. 233–252). Wiesbaden: Springer. Ploder, A., & Stadlbauer, J. (2013). Autoethnographie und Volkskunde? Zur Relevanz wissenschaftlicher Selbsterzählungen für die volkskundlich − Kulturanthropologische Forschungspraxis. Österreichische Zeitschrift für Volkskunde, 116(3/4), 373–404. Pruckermayer, N., Jauk, D., & Klinger, S. (2017). Working with/out the F-Word: Interdisziplinäre Konzeptionen und Interventionen in der Lehre. [Radio Interview]. In Reni Hofmüller, Hotel Passage Radio Helsinki, 24 January, 2017. https://cba.fro.at/334546. Accessed: 17. Oct. 2019. Rosa, H. (2016). Resonanz: Eine Soziologie der Weltbeziehung. Berlin: Suhrkamp. Scambor, E., & Jauk, D. (2018). Mander es isch Zeit - Akteur_innen, Denkformen, Diskurse und Argumente antifeministischer Männerarbeit in Österreich. In U. Peters, J. Lang & R. Claus (Eds.), Antifeminismus in Bewegung. Aktuelle Debatten um Geschlecht und sexuelle Vielfalt. Hamburg: Marta. Schlee, Jörg. (2012). Kollegiale Beratung und Supervision für pädagogische Berufe. Hilfe zur Selbsthilfe. Ein Arbeitsbuch. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer. Schlüter, A., & Justen, N. (2009). Pädagogische Biographiearbeit mit Studierenden zur Förderung der Genderkompetenz. In N. Auferkorte-Michälis, I. Stahr, A. Schönborn, & I. Fitzek (Eds.), Gender als Indikator für gute Lehre. Erkenntnisse, Konzepte und Ideen für die Hochschule (pp. 169–179). Opladen: Budrich.

90

D. Jauk et al.

Spivak, G. (1996). The Spivak reader: Selected works of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. London: Routledge. Sprague, J. (2005). Feminist methodologies for critical researchers. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield. Wetterer, A. (2002). Arbeitsteilung und Geschlechterkonstruktion. “Gender at Work” in theoretischer und historischer Perspektive. Konstanz: UVK. Wetterer, A. (2003). Rhetorische Modernisierung: Das Verschwinden der Ungleichheit aus dem zeitgenössischen Differenzwissen. In G. Knapp, & A. Wetterer (Eds.), Achsen der Differenz. Gesellschaftstheorie und feministische Kritik II (pp. 286–319). Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot. Wetterer, A. (2013). Das erfolgreiche Scheitern feministischer Kritik. Rhetorische Modernisierung, symbolische Gewalt und die Reproduktion männlicher Herrschaft. In E. Appelt, B. Aulenbacher, & A. Wetterer (Eds.), Gesellschaft. Feministische Krisendiagnosen (pp. 246–266). Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot.

Teaching Ethnography

Ethnography for Engaging Students with Higher Education and Societal Issues Sarah Robinson

Abstract

As higher education institutions have increasingly come under criticism for failing to equip students for a fast changing and unpredictable future, the role and purpose of the future university has come under debate (Barnett and Bengtsen, Knowledge and the university; Re-claiming life, Routledge, London, 2020). In response, discourses about entrepreneurial mindsets, attitudes and competences have flourished. These discourses have further anchored the structures and management of the institutions in line with neoliberal ideology. This chapter suggests that teaching students an ethnographic approach to how their disciplinary knowledge is produced and formed in practice could be an important way to begin exploration of societal issues. In Scandinavia, entrepreneurship researchers and educators have been working with a broader definition of entrepreneurship that is about creating different kinds of value. In Denmark, this broader perspective on entrepreneurship and value has led to the development of a change-maker model that has been the basis for some teaching in the Humanities at Aarhus University. In this model, ethnography is used to explore how social practices are formed and shaped. Using ethnography in teaching helps students engage with their disciplinary knowledge.

S. Robinson (*)  Centre for Teaching Development and Digital Media, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2020 C. Wieser and A. Pilch Ortega (eds.), Ethnography in Higher Education, Doing Higher Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-30381-5_6

93

94

S. Robinson

Keywords

Ethnography · Pedagogy · Sociological imagination · Social change · Entrepreneurship

1 Introduction I cannot know what I know until I have expressed that in my own words and furthermore, I cannot understand the power of that knowledge until I have investigated its truth in real life practices. (quote from a personal conversation with an Educational Philosopher)

For many reasons, the future that students are being educated for has never before been so uncertain. The labor market of the last century was marked by stability, certainty and security in the way that work and employment were shaped and evolved through industrialization. But, as digital technology is integrated into work and life practices and the traditional forms of industrialization become outdated, it would seem that patterns of work life are rapidly becoming less foreseeable and more unpredictable. Moreover, not only are the patterns of past work life rapidly changing, but the content and structure of work itself has been changed and challenged by digital technologies that surround and connect us. Currently, we are bombarded with statistics that show that over half the jobs we have today were not in existence just a decade ago. Therefore, this era of uncertainty and risk require higher education institutions to do some serious re-thinking if they are going to be able to prepare the young for a different kind of future (Barnett 2004). And as higher education institutions have increasingly come under criticism for failing to equip students for a fast changing and unpredictable future, the role and purpose of the future university has also come under debate (Barnett and Bengtsen 2020). Discourses about entrepreneurial mindsets, attitudes and competences have flourished as they are linked to neoliberalism and have been used as concepts to further entrench neoliberal strategies, changing the structure and management of the institutions. The neoliberal is one agenda that has had an enormous influence on what we value in education. A focus on the (competitive) individual, on competition between institutions and nations, and on accountability have all resulted in re-shaping much of what we teach and how we teach, in higher education. For example, the entrepreneurial university has become equated with the corporatization of the university (Shore and Wright 2017). And teaching entrepreneurship tends to be about encouraging students to create business

Ethnography for Engaging Students with Higher Education …

95

ventures and are evident many programs across the university. While this chapter acknowledges the challenges and threats that result from an increasing focus on neoliberal agendas, and on economy as the only value, it will suggest that perhaps there is an opportunity here to take a different turn. What is interesting is that alongside the massive critique of the university discussions about new visions, purpose, and role of the university are appearing (Barnett 2018; Wright and Greenwood 2017). There may now be an opportunity to shift away from a neoliberal focus on education as being about credentialing, qualifications, and from knowledge as being about economic growth, to ideas about the university that are much broader and, some might argue, more progressive (Shumar and Robinson 2018a). In university teaching theory is often separated from practice. Therefore, it can sometimes be difficult for students to understand how theory informs practice and how practice informs theory. Both are important to university teaching but are often hard to achieve. This chapter suggests that teaching students an ethnographic approach could be important to exploring how societal issues could be understood through their disciplinary knowledge and link theory with practice. Referring back to the citation at the beginning of this chapter, I will argue that it is through actively engaging with knowledge, not just ‘having knowledge’, that students become empowered to be active agentic citizens. Therefore, this chapter suggests that different forms of teaching, new pedagogies, are needed, not only to engage students with their disciplines, but also to link academic knowledge with real life issues. It is suggested, that ethnography could become integrated as a pedagogical tool in supporting such processes. This chapter begins with some background that is based in a teaching and research experience that changed the way the author understood entrepreneurship as an everyday practice and as a method to create different kinds of value. The Scandinavian approach to entrepreneurship as a method and everyday practice is briefly explained. I will then argue that an ethnographic approach could be an important pedagogical tool for exploring how societal issues can be investigated through the lens of disciplinary knowledge. The change-maker model, a new pedagogy used in the Arts at Aarhus University, provides the contextual framework for using ethnography. The chapter concludes by discussing the potential of an ethnographic stance for linking academic knowledge to real life practices and engaging students through inquiry and collaborative reflection.

96

S. Robinson

2 Background In my work as a teacher, and later as an educational anthropologist, I have been passionate about the potential of education to transform individuals to become active agentic citizens. By chance, I took a postdoc in a business school as the ethnographic researcher in an inter-disciplinary research project that focused on Entrepreneurship Education. My training in ethnography has helped me to observe, reflect on and reach an understanding of teaching practices. Ethnographers learn to take the other’s social world very seriously. That means empathetic engagement with others in their life practices and contexts, whether they are familiar or not to the ethnographer. I expected that the course would teach students to take an idea and develop it into a business. However, the teachers were interested in entrepreneurship, not as a goal but as a method. They understood entrepreneurship to be about everyday practice (Blenker et al. 2012) and about creating value (in a broad sense) for others. Through innovative pedagogies that engaged the students with their disciplinary knowledge the students were encouraged to identify arenas where they could create value for others. These values could be cultural, social, environmental etc. with the emphasis being on a broad set of values. The course was designed to link disciplinary knowledge and real-world practices together through the experience of the student. It challenged the student to understand their own competences and then to reflect on the values they held dear to them. The goal of the teachers was to develop the student’s awareness of their academic knowledge, be able to articulate their competences and networks, to engage students through their own passions (internal values) with potential stakeholders in organizations and communities and identify a problem to create value together. I was excited by the broad understanding of entrepreneurship and could see how this linked to notions of education as emancipation and enlightenment (Biesta 2010). Furthermore, these students from different disciplines, all came to the course without preconceived ‘ideas’ about what they would develop. What seemed to happen on the course was not that they produced great prototypes or services but that through identification of problems they began to understand how their knowledge could link to and inform real life practices. In this process, students were required to go into the field to identify actual problems. For this part, ethnography seemed to provide some important insights and tools. Entrepreneurship as a method, with an ethnographic stance incorporated, seemed to enhance learning towards those transformative qualities that I had so long believed in.

Ethnography for Engaging Students with Higher Education …

97

3 There is More to Entrepreneurship than the Economic World organisations, such as OECD and the World Economic Forum, suggest that students and faculty need to develop a set of competences and mindset that allows them to meet the challenges of the twenty-first Century. These competences and skills are often linked to being entrepreneurial. This rhetoric, captured by neoliberal strategies, has a tendency to depict the entrepreneurial as being about creating economic value (Shumar and Robinson 2018a, b). Much critique of neoliberalism and entrepreneurship points to the sole focus on the economic as the value (Shumar and Robinson 2018a). If understanding entrepreneurship is only about starting a business venture, then this is one way of narrowing the potential goals of entrepreneurship and being entrepreneurial. Alternative views of entrepreneurship are already visible throughout the world for example, in the craft industries, in social entrepreneurial projects and in democratic community and social movements (Shumar and Robinson 2018b). These examples demonstrate that there are other kinds of value connected with being enterprising that may be about human rights, welfare, equity, well-being etc. This author and others have previously critiqued the narrow (neoliberal) understanding of entrepreneurship that ignores the potential of harnessing the production of other kinds of value (Lackéus 2016; Shumar and Robinson 2018b; Steyaert and Katz 2004). Blenker et al. (2012) claim that enterprising behavior is in fact something that we practice in everyday situations to solve problems as they arise. In Sweden, Lackéus (2016), an entrepreneurship education researcher, has pioneered the notion that entrepreneurship education is about creating value for others. Thinking about how to design entrepreneurship education programs that go beyond the focus on creating business ventures and link not only to a range of values, but also link to academic knowledge in the social sciences and humanities, has enormous potential for engaging students (Robinson and Blenker 2014). This thinking might encourage the re-design of programs from entrepreneurship as a goal to designing programs where entrepreneurship is a method and where disciplinary knowledge is the central. In this way, we might think about entrepreneurial learning (Cope 2005; Cope and Watts 2000) as about learning to see opportunities and to link academic knowledge to real life issues to create value such as the social, cultural or environmental. Potentially both creating a range of values for others and learning to think and act in enterprising ways could be beneficial to learning how to link academic knowledge with societal issues and engaging students early on in meaning-making processes.

98

S. Robinson

However, when analyzing the elements of entrepreneurship programs, the process is often centered on starting with (good) ideas, brainstorming, going through creative processes and coming up with solutions to solve problems. Here design thinking, innovation and creativity become significant tools. But being enterprising is not just about these tools. While these elements are important, what is often ignored, is how individuals come up with an idea. An idea often comes out of a focus on a particular problem or issue, something that does not sit well (Spinosa et al. 1997). In their book ‘Disclosing New Worlds’ Spinosa et al. (1997) describe the entrepreneur as having a particular sensitivity, or awareness to situations where there is something that is out of sync and does not function optimally which they call a ‘disharmony’. It is this sensitivity to situations where something is not optimal that the entrepreneur becomes aware of and is driven to investigate. And understanding a disharmony, identifying where and how it comes into being, is crucial preparation to coming up with the right idea. Not doing the investigative work might mean not solving the disharmony or finding a solution to a different problem. This is perhaps why there is a tendency to reproduce the society (problems) that we have rather than to make it better. Therefore, being able to critically reflect on and investigate how a disharmony occurs is a crucial part of entrepreneurial learning. And this is where a university education, defined by critical thinking, investigation, analysis, and all the other elements that make up ‘good research work’ come to bear. It is also here that an ethnographic stance, and ethnographic methods are useful. Understanding a problem, identifying a problem and qualifying a problem is about being able to reflect on how knowledge is practiced, where and what forms it takes. It may also be about who has the power in a given situation to exert or ignore particular kinds of ‘knowing’. Therefore, ethnography, as an approach could provide ways to understand a problem within its context. It provides an opportunity to ask questions about how that problem has arisen, for whom, in what context and how it is played out. Developing an ethnographic stance as an approach to view, observe and listen to actors in their world and using ethnographic methods to interrogate and reflect on that context could be central to engage students with societal issues through the lens of their academic k­ nowledge.

4 Ethnography for Developing the Social Imaginary C. Wright Mills (2000, p. 195) writing The Sociological Imagination, suggests that the academic project is a craft, that cannot be divided into strategies and routine practices, but comes out of a necessary reflection and critical dialogue with

Ethnography for Engaging Students with Higher Education …

99

others and that this must include ‘life experience’. Therefore, both one’s past and present experiences affect what one does in the future and the academic intellectual therefore should link these experiences to thinking about how one wants a future to look and to what one is able to do in the future. The empowerment that comes through this combination of thinking and experience is what higher education can offer both faculty and the student and thereby rise above the mundane and routine to reach the potential that the social imagination can offer. In ‘Learning for an unknown future’, Barnett (2004) suggests that we should consider what kinds of pedagogy are appropriate for teaching and learning in the twenty-first century. He states that ‘A pedagogy for uncertainty gains its ultimate achievement when the self is engaged’ (Barnett 2004, p. 257). He describes a pedagogy that is needed for an uncertain future that requires engagement with preconceived knowledge to explore unknown life challenges, what he calls ‘disciplinary wonder’ and ‘educational development.’ These forms of pedagogy are reproductive and may in fact strangle creativity and innovative solutions to problems. Barnett (2004) further argues that in order to achieve ‘educational transformation’ we also need to move away from the discourses of skills and competences that have become popular in the past decade. A curriculum that is ‘aimed at nothing less than the transformation of the human being’ will move away from the instrumental and technical approaches to learning (Barnett 2004, p. 257). Mills and Morton (2013, p. 161) write about the ethnographic imagination and the work and sensitivity this requires and comment ‘We see ethnography as both a scholarly habit and a moral disposition: quietly attentive, modest, critical and above all empathetic.’ A number of ethnographers write about the power of an ethnographic approach as a way of being, seeing, thinking and writing about life practices. Gaggiotti et al. (2017, p. 326) suggest that ‘socio-cultural anthropologists typically do not view ethnography as merely a method’. Further, it is an ‘interpretive craft’ and requires immersion in the social practices and lives of people in the contexts in which they find themselves (Van Maanen 2011). Van Maanen (2011, p. 220) goes on to say that ‘learning in (and out) of the field is uneven, usually unforeseen, and rests more on a logic of discovery and happenstance than a logic of verification and plan. It is anything but predictable or linear’. The power of ethnography is that it allows us to take a step back from our own understanding of the world and move towards understanding the ‘other’. Watson (2012, p. 16) suggests that rather than viewing ethnography as a method we should see it as a ‘culturally holistic social science genre.’ There is an imaginative aspect about ethnography that allows the development of a sociological imagination—seeing and understanding the world through the experience of the other. Gaggiotti et al. (2017, p. 328) in the following comment suggest that ‘ethnography is, thanks to

100

S. Robinson

this imaginative aspect, an art, not a technique and is a dynamic dialectic relationship between practice and theorising’. How can the university be an institution that is based on human values and an institution that, in addition, supports the nurturing of a range of values that bring meaning to the individuals who populate its buildings? Questioning what values are promoted in higher education and thinking about student learning experiences, may explain what some students may feel when they face an education that is without meaning or meaningless, and why students will then drop-out. It may be important then to consider how the ‘imaginative’ university (Barnett 2013) could gain traction in the current climate. This requires not only imagining different kinds of futures but it also requires questioning how best to equip students for this future and what this might require of our teaching.

5 New Pedagogies for University Teaching? The last century saw the expansion of the notion of the knowledge economy and the positioning of higher education institutions as the holders of the knowledge as a commodity to be packaged and sold to students and society. Acceptance of knowledge as a commodity has been contested and debated. Saying that the university is only about knowledge is like saying that society is only about growing the economy and ignores the many facets of value to human kind and to the well-being of our environment. Knowledge about and knowledge for have become synonymous with what knowledge is, as a commodified unit (Shumar and Robinson 2018b). In fact, Barnett and Bengtsen (2020, p. 11) claim that ‘the university has accepted an impoverished sense of knowledge and its relation to the world’ diminishing its responsibilities and possibilities in the world. Demanding that the university is not only about knowledge in these terms but is about wisdom and being socially and ethically sensitive and open to all of society (Barnett and Bengtsen 2020). Teaching at the university is, in many institutions, being ­re-shaped to answer the needs of global and societal challenges. For some teaching might only be about transfer of knowledge (acquisitional learning), for others it is about actively engaging students (participatory learning) in new practices and ways of thinking. If knowledge is conceived only as a commodity, danger lies in the power of having ownership of knowledge. On the other hand, participatory learning can ‘lead to a new and more democratic practice of learning and teaching’ (Sfard 1998, p. 9). However, when action builds on experience, knowledge is what is at the heart of experience, which is why Sfard (1998) warns of the dangers of favoring one over the other.

Ethnography for Engaging Students with Higher Education …

101

In response to the climate of uncertainty, and in order to engage with a wider understanding of knowledge, being knowledgeable, knowledge creation, and understanding ourselves as individuals in a globalized and digital world, some institutions are attempting to encourage faculty and students to engage with institutional curriculum design. For example, at the University College London, a ‘connected curriculum’ has been designed. In that publication, Fung (2017) emphasizes the need to make a clear connection between what students learn and how this relates to practice with regard to what they can do (with the knowledge) afterwards. This is how at least one institution is supporting the development of active democratic citizens. Fung (2017) advocates ‘active enquiry’ that engages the student in developing their knowledge and creating new knowledge by embedding this into program design. They claim that teaching should be research-based and inter-disciplinary, to encourage students to look outwards to the world and become aware of the complexity of global challenges. So perhaps we should question when is teaching about transfer of knowledge and when does teaching elicit new knowledge and for what purpose? At the heart of this discussion are the importance of values, and what it is that (we) the university values. This discussion means that it is important to think about what is valued and how these values are reflected in practice. So, the first question to explore could be; how can the university (academics and students) reach an understanding about which and what values are important? In Towards an anthropological theory of value, Graeber (2001) argues that there are three essential ways to define value; the sociological—what is good proper and desirable (sociological), the economic—defined by relationships between a potential producer and potential consumer and the linguistic—defined by how we allot meaning through language. These three definitions of value are important for the university as it is founded on a community of reflective practitioners whose knowledge base is extensive and who are geared to enter into mutual dialogue. Perhaps we should consider, as Graeber suggests (2001, p. 230), looking at ‘social systems as structures of creative action and value as how people measure the importance of their own actions within such structures’. Society is a collective project and is being made and reshaped continually, although it has a tendency to act as ‘the regulative p­ rinciple for people’s actions’. Thinking about how the university connects to society and how the society is connected to the university, I turn now to the pedagogical model developed for Humanities students at Aarhus University.

102

S. Robinson

6 The Change-Maker Model This pedagogical model was developed over a number of years and came at a time when attention was being given to the increasing lack of engagement by Humanities students, an increase in dropout rates, coupled with a focus on the relevance of a Humanities degree and how employable graduates might be afterwards. It was suggested that producing more ‘entrepreneurial students’ would solve these issues. However, talking about entrepreneurship, enterprising students or an entrepreneurial mindset has negative (neoliberal) connotations in the Humanities. Therefore, the focus in this model is about learning a process that links academic knowledge to real life practices, linking theory to practice, and making learning meaningful by getting the students to think about how they might create value for others. Figure 6.1, the change-maker model, has been developed, adapted and tested on over 200 students in a range of degree programs, from linguistics and intercultural studies to IT based educational design. Through the development of the model, we have seen how students actively engage with their academic knowledge and find ways to enter into dialogues with practitioners and stakeholders where common values overlap. The model consists of five phases. In brief, the students will address each of the phases starting with Me and moving out. This is not a direct outward progression but an iterative one. The model puts the student at the centre of their learning, focusing first on what the student knows and is interested in learning. In the context of collaboration, students then work together to focus on issues that they are curious about and identify a particular arena that links to their academic knowledge (We). In the next phase, the students will move into field work and research the practices that they see through an ethnographic stance and with the use of ethnographic methods (Discovery). Here they will engage with practitioners and stakeholders. Drawing on their understanding of the issues that they meet they will identify an issue that they feel able to solve. After brainstorming and coming up with potential ways of solving the problem, and collaboration with the stakeholders the students will present their suggestions to the stakeholder (Experimentation). Finally, the student will be asked to consider what knowledge they have gained (individually) from the process, what this has meant for their ­learning and what they would do differently if they did the process again (­Consolidation). There is not space in this chapter to go into more detail about the ­change-maker model. But it might be important to mention that, even though students in Denmark are generally around the age of 18 or 19 years when they begin their Bachelor programs, it seems that no one has ever asked them what they bring to the classroom. The first phase which focuses on the individual s­tudent

Ethnography for Engaging Students with Higher Education …

103

Fig. 6.1   Change maker model. (Source: own illustration)

requires that they articulate their competences, skills, experiences and interests with others. All this is anchored in the context of the academic program and the disciplinary knowledge to make it relevant to the disciplinary concepts and relevant practices. Even at Masters level, students still struggle to articulate what it is they can do and where their competences lie. Many students are surprised by the focus on what they can do, who they know, their experiences and their motivations. Reflection is an important part of the process. At each classroom meeting, the students meet with their feedback team who listen to ‘where they are at’ and then question them about their understanding of the related issues. As they practice this technique, the students become more adept at asking open questions, observing body language, listening for ‘buzz’ words etc. This reflection technique is practiced throughout the process and is important in supporting students to ask questions that are open and sensitive to the other. Table 6.1 below illustrates some of the activities that are typically found in each of the phases.

104

S. Robinson

Table 6.1   Activities in the change-maker model 1

Classroom work

Activity

Reflection

Me

Who am I? What can I do? Who do I know? What do I care about?

Mapping of competences, Skills, academic knowledge, critical learning experiences, Networks Passions, interests, identification of community/organisations = values

Individually In pairs Collectively

We

Formation of teams

Mapping of joint competences, Skills, academic knowledge, critical learning experiences, Mapping of networks pertaining to interest = values Initial contact to community or organization of interest

Team peer feedback—asking open questions, stimulating reflection and deep understanding

Discovery

Field research

Research design Observations and conversations Identification of disharmony

Team peer feedback on research design, initial observations, identification of area of interest (disharmony) Interaction with stakeholders

Experimentation

Work in the class/field Experimenting in the classroom to build prototype Experimenting in the field

Team peer feedback on experiments (creativity)

Consolidation

Work in the field/class Presentation of prototype

Stakeholder feedback and team peer feedback on prototype

Ethnography for Engaging Students with Higher Education …

105

The model presents an iterative pedagogical process where feedback from peers and faculty are recurrent aspects. In the following section, there is a detailed explanation of how an ethnographic approach is used to identify and qualify a problem and to work towards a sociological imagination that links to the practices of the stakeholder.

7 Ethnographic Methods for Understanding Life Practices When the students have formed teams, they make decisions about their ‘common field of interest’. This is stimulated by a discussion about what they are passionate about, what they value, what makes them angry, what they feel is unjust and how their academic knowledge links to these. After mapping their individual networks, they identify an organization or community (stakeholder) they may have access to. While some teams have an idea early on about the kind of problem that the stakeholders have, others do not. The goal of the fieldwork is to gain a deeper understanding of the stakeholder’s practices through observations, conversations and interviews. It is at this stage that we begin to talk about doing fieldwork, about ethnographic methods and about gathering data. Many students will have experience of carrying out interviews but few understand what ethnography means. We discuss gate-keepers, access, potential ethical issues, how to observe, what to record and so on. On entering the field, they have a research question and a research design. They will carry out observations, have ad hoc conversations, semi-structured interviews and make notes and recordings throughout the period of data gathering. The students are asked to make an individual critical reflection on their learning as they progress through the process. When they come back from the field, the data are summarized and reported back to the feedback team. The data are also summarized in a written report for the teacher. During the time the students are in the field, they will encourage the stakeholders to become involved in qualifying the disharmony, where it occurs, how it occurs and when. All the work done in the field is related to looking through the ethnographic lens, to being curious, asking questions and being open. While research time is limited, the fact that the students work in teams and divide the research between them, each taking responsibility for different aspects, means that the work is intensified and rich data is gathered. The teams are required to meet regularly to discuss and critically reflect on their observations and decide what the next steps of the research process should be. Some teams find that they may need to shift their focus away from their original ideas. This pivoting is important and is

106

S. Robinson

u­ sually discussed at length in the classroom. Often students regard this as ‘failing’ as they are not sticking to the original plan, and for others it is risk-taking to change focus. What they do when they enter the field is to take an ethnographic stance to (i) gain insider knowledge of the problem from their own perspective and (ii) deepen their understanding through the encounter with the stakeholders in the field. It is here that the ethnographic stance helps the student in achieving an understanding of where the problem lies, who has the problem and how the problem can be articulated that the stakeholder recognizes and finds relevant. Only after agreement about the articulation of the problem do the students begin to move towards solutions through idea generation.

8 Discussion The use of ethnography in the change-maker pedagogy seems to be a powerful way to engage students with their academic knowledge in value creation with people outside of the university (Thestrup and Robinson 2016). Ethnography is methodologically important in this process—it is a way to understand, critique, and reflect on relationships that deal with power, elites, ethics, culture, and societal issues. Therefore, allowing the question to emerge from the data, letting curiosity lead enquiry and investigation means being able to observe and to listen and to make meaning in practice. Providing students with the opportunity to engage in societal issues through ethnographic methods could be important to the future of (teaching at) the university and society. The challenge presented here is how to engage actively with society in all its different organizational forms through university structures, research, courses and programs and question what it is we value. This could be made possible by combining ethnography in new pedagogical approaches. But learning to take an ethnographic stance is not something that happens easily or over a short period of time. Traditionally ethnographic work is done over long periods of time through immersion in the field. However, time is not a commodity that is abundant in teaching and learning and doing ethnography well takes time. It is however worthwhile considering how students might interact with their academic knowledge and how they make meaning out of theory and practice together and whether the change-maker model, with its reliance on ethnography, presents an opportunity to engage students in authentic ways with their academic knowledge. How the teacher sets this up must be done in ways that are appropriate and sensitive to the disciplinary setting. In order to create the space where the university positions itself as the ‘home’ of reasoning, for inquiry and

Ethnography for Engaging Students with Higher Education …

107

with the purpose to reshape and better society, faculty must be able to provide space for mutual dialogue and challenge what values the institution promotes. In the words of Barnett and Bengtsen (2020, p. 135) ‘It would be a space that encourages students to engage in pedagogical debate about difficult issues. And it would be a space in which the public can happily enter, so form part of the public sphere.’ In their book on creating a new public university, Levin and Greenwood (2016, p. 80) argue that ‘integrating teaching and learning, becoming more skillful in diverse fields, knowing the basic elements of research, effectively communicating research results, and coming to value and being able to practice ethical participation in social change’ are core to the business of being a university. This focus on social change is interesting. It provides a challenge for us as faculty. Faculty are the university, the university is not the collection of buildings with offices, classrooms and lecture theatres and some spaces for socializing (Barrow 2018) but the people who populate it. And what is created by faculty is ‘what is valued’—teaching, knowledge, expertise, research, critical thinking etc.—and this is why students come to the university, why a university education is important (valued by society), and it is why society stays the same or changes (Shumar and Robinson 2018b).

9 Conclusion This chapter acknowledges that the university is under pressure and that this pressure is evident at different levels. Neoliberalism has narrowed down what it means to become educated and what an education is. This has affected the way in which degree programs are presented, what the content is and how this is measured. In the new century, with the promises and threats of a digital age, there is has been an increasing drive towards an agenda of competences and skills. Alongside this are discourses about entrepreneurship and being entrepreneurial, captured by the neoliberal discourses, to mean being about creating economic value. The university has become a place where knowledge is a commodity and the value which is valued is the economic. But, in the words of Barnett and Bengtsen (2020, p. 139), ‘the university has the potential to become much more than society’s key supplier of cognitive capital’. These philosophers of higher education state that the university is currently positioned to inspire and to empower and could take a leading role in growing public debate and knowledge (Barnett and Bengtsen 2020). They further suggest that ‘Universities, if societally and culturally active and engaging, may help societies to put the familiar under ­question,

108

S. Robinson

and thereby open up towards what is unfamiliar and even strange’ (Barnett and Bengtsen 2020, p. 143). These aspirations could be formulated through the way we approach teaching and the kind of pedagogies we chose when we meet ­students. Barnett (2004) suggests that meeting and coping with uncertainty requires the framing of a pedagogy that is fluid, flexible and takes account of human relationships. These relationships are open to vulnerability and go beyond just knowledge and just skills, to encompass an acknowledgement of the fragility of ‘being human’ in the world. The uncertainty that arises from the ‘super-complexity’ of the fragility of our existence, means that as academics, we must question how we meet and engage with students and how our teaching supports them to become citizens who can go beyond reproducing the world as it is today to citizens who are actively engaged with reshaping society for a better future (Barnett 2004). If the university is to play an active role in the shaping of the next generations of students, and as a place for critical interaction between faculty, students and society, then higher education teaching practices must be challenged. Research and teaching are core elements in the higher education project. How these are combined in university settings may empower students to become active democratic citizens able to cope with the uncertainty of the twenty-first century. The practice of teaching and learning at the university has to move out of ‘knowledge as a package’ thinking to engage with ‘knowing and thinking’. There must be room to think about how the learning process can nurture and support students to be able to make society a better place and to deal with some of the global challenges faced by all humans. Learning is, and always will be, about ­meaning-making. Making meaning from experiences leads to new practices and new ways of being with each other. As a society, we give credence to a ‘good education’ but the content and form of that education is heavily influenced by agendas of power. This chapter has argued that one possible way to engage students with/in their academic knowledge might be to think about the learning process as a method for linking academic knowledge to real life issues, not by presenting cases (the students will still be dis-engaged), but by requiring students to actively engage with stakeholders outside of the university. The ‘imaginative ethnographic project can thus be seen holistically as an emancipatory endeavour that simultaneously involves seeing and understanding, problematising, practising and learning’ (­Gaggiotti et  al. 2017, p. 328). By integrating an ethnographic stance and ethnographic methods into a higher education pedagogy, we might be able to challenge the relationship between having knowledge, knowing and pedagogy through teaching and learning. We might begin by questioning why we teach in particular

Ethnography for Engaging Students with Higher Education …

109

ways and how we might expect students to engage with knowledge to become knowledgeable human activists. This pedagogical model, with ethnography as a key element in the learning process, may help us work towards answering these questions and support students to move from being (passive) academic citizens to becoming active democratic citizens. This chapter suggests that for university teaching to be worthwhile students must actively engage with knowledge, not just ‘have knowledge’ as a commodity. Therefore, different forms of teaching and new pedagogies, are needed, not only to engage students with their disciplinary knowledge, but also to link theory with real life issues. It suggests that ethnography could be integrated into pedagogy to support such processes.

References Barnett, R. (2004). Learning for an unknown future. Higher Education Research and Development, 23(3), 247–260. Barnett, R. (2013). Imagining the university. Abingdon: Routledge. Barnett, R. (2018). The ecological university: A feasible utopia. Abingdon: Routledge. Barnett, R., & Bengtsen, S. (2020). Knowledge and the university; Re-claiming life. London: Routledge. Barrow, C. (2018). The entrepreneurial intellectual in the corporate university. London: Palgrave. Biesta, G. J. (2010). A new logic of emancipation: The methodology of Jacques Rancière. Educational Theory, 60(1), 39–59. Blenker, P., Frederiksen, S., Korsgaard, S., Müller, S., Neergaard, H., & Thrane, C. (2012). Entrepreneurship as everyday practice; towards a personalized pedagogy of enterprise education. Journal of Industry and Higher Education, 26(6), 417–430. Cope, J. (2005). Toward a dynamic learning perspective of entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, 29(4), 373–397. Cope, J., & Watts, G. (2000). Learning by doing: An exploration of experience, critical incidents and reflection in entrepreneurial learning. International Journal of Entrepreneurial Behaviour and Research, 6(3), 104–124. Fung, D. (2017). A connected curriculum for higher education. London: UCL Press. Gaggiotti, H., Kostera, M., & Krzyworzeka, P. (2017). More than a method? Organisational ethnography as a way of imagining the social. Culture and Organization, 23(5), 325– 340. Graeber, D. (2001). Toward an anthropological theory of value. The false coin of our own dreams. London: Palgrave. Levin, M., & Greenwood, D. (2016). Creating a new public university and reviving democracy. Action research in Higher Education. Berlin: Berghahn. Mills, C. W. (2000). The sociological imagination. London: Oxford University Press. Mills, D., & Morton, M. (2013). Ethnography in education. London: Sage.

110

S. Robinson

Robinson, S., & Blenker, P. (2014). Tensions between rhetoric and practice in entrepreneurship education: An ethnography from Danish higher education. European Journal of Higher Education, 4(1), 80–93. Sfard, A. (1998). On two metaphors for learning and the dangers of choosing just one. Educational Researcher, 27(2), 4–13. Shore, C., & Wright, S. (2017). Privatising the public university: Key trends, counter trends and alternatives. In S. Wright & C. Shore (Eds.), Death of the public university: Uncertain futures for higher education in the knowledge economy (pp. 1–30). Berlin: Berghahn. Shumar, W., & Robinson, S. (2018a). Rethinking the entrepreneurial university for the 21st century. In M. Peters & R. Barnett (Eds.), The idea of the university – Contemporary perspectives (Vol. 2, pp. 78–94). Bern: Lang. Shumar, W., & Robinson, S. (2018b). Universities as societal drivers: Entrepreneurial interventions for a better future. In S. Bengtsen & R. Barnett (Eds.), The thinking university a philosophical examination of thought and higher education (pp. 31–46). London: Springer. Spinosa, C., Flores, F., & Dreyfus, H. (1997). Disclosing new worlds: Entrepreneurship, democratic action and the cultivation of solidarity. Boston: MIT Press. Steyaert, C., & Katz, J. (2004). Reclaiming the space of entrepreneurship in society: Geographical, discursive and social dimensions. Entrepreneurship and Regional Development, 16, 179–196. Thestrup, K., & Robinson, S. (2016). Towards an entrepreneurial mindset; Empowering learner in an open laboratory. In P. Papadopolous, R. Burger, & A. Faria (Eds.), Innovation and entrepreneurship in education (pp. 147–168). New York: Emerald. Van Maanen, J. (2011). Ethnography as work: Some rules of engagement. Journal of Management Studies, 48(1), 218–234. Watson, T. (2012). Making organizational ethnography. Journal of Organizational Ethnography, 1(1), 15–22. Wright, S., & Greenwood, D. (2017). Universities run for, by and with the faculty, students and staff. Learning and Teaching — The International Journal of Higher Education in the Social Sciences, 10(1), 42–65.

Teaching Ethnographical Methods: Research Workshops for Students as a Space for Critical Reflection on Knowledge Production Angela Pilch Ortega

Abstract

Processes of knowledge production and the powerful role of the formation of opinions and patterns of interpretation are to a great extent implicit or linked with tacit knowledge. Critical reflection on knowledge production is one of the key issues in doing qualitative research. Research workshops involving students offer the opportunity to critically reflect on research practice, in particular on the analysis of empirical data. The communicative activity of analysing empirical data supports questioning tacit knowledge and implicit assumptions, encouraging critical reflection on the knowledge production processes. Drawing on a research workshop on qualitative research methods for students whose focus was on issues of the social response to migrants and refugees the paper highlights some of the challenges that appear when doing research on ethnically sensitive topics. Keywords

Research workshops · Qualitative methods · Critical reflection on knowledge production · Migrants and refugees

A. Pilch Ortega (*)  Department of Education, University of Graz, Graz, Austria e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2020 C. Wieser and A. Pilch Ortega (eds.), Ethnography in Higher Education, Doing Higher Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-30381-5_7

111

112

A. Pilch Ortega

1 Introduction As researchers we occupy a privileged social position of speaking within the society and we produce knowledge which gains importance for guiding actions in different action fields of society (see Pilch Ortega 2018, p. 96 ff.). In general terms, the formation of opinions and patterns of interpretation is deeply influenced by knowledge generated within society and implicit assumptions which the members of a society more or less share as a common ground for social life and relationships. Having this in mind, knowledge production should be done carefully and in a reflexive way, paying specific attention to involvement in power relations and hegemonic forces. Research which focuses on ethnically sensitive topics such as migration and refugee movements carries the risk of reproducing problematic discourses in this field and participating in the production of racist regimes and practises. Against this backdrop, the paper aims to address knowledge production processes within a reflexive learning space of a research workshop for students. The critical reflection on knowledge production is one of the key issues in doing qualitative research. The mode of knowledge production is closely connected with the “interpretative paradigm” (Wilson 1973) as the epistemological basis of qualitative research. In general terms, research workshops are characterised by a collaborative and communicative means of doing research and seek to open up a learning space that enables participants to explore qualitative research in a step-by-step way through practising it. This calls for a social architecture which tries to create egalitarian, solidly united and reliable relationships among all participants in order to avoid hierarchies and dominant positions, in particular of experienced researchers, within the research process. The communicative activity of analysing empirical data furthermore supports questioning tacit knowledge and implicit assumptions, encouraging critical reflection on the knowledge production processes. According to grounded theory, the analysis of the data and the theorising process of social phenomena involve the development of a theoretical sensitivity and a detailed reflection on the generation of theoretical assumptions. Especially the line-by-line analysis of the data allows for the examination of empirical data on a microscopic level and to form analytic questions. With the collaborative and communicative structure of research workshops, the analysing process is accompanied by critical reflections and discussions that allow questioning implicit assumptions and tacit knowledge. Drawing on research workshops for students focusing on qualitative methods, the paper gives insights into the knowledge production process as a collaborative work. The students carried out different research projects focusing on issues of social response to migrants and refugees. Over a period of one year, they worked together

Teaching Ethnographical Methods: Research Workshops for Students…

113

in small groups investigating different fields of action, such as social engagement with refugees or involvement in social movements, in this case right-wing initiatives. Another topic of the research projects of the students focused on patterns of interaction in different professional settings, and finally the social response of print and online media to migrant and refugee movement was investigated. Against this backdrop, the paper gives insights into some of the challenges which appear when doing research on migration and refugees movements. The examples described give insights into the social structure and dynamic of the research process and provide some of the research findings of the students’ research projects. In particular, the production of otherness as a problematic framing encourages students to question their perspectives and assumptions related to a research topic.

2 Research Workshops on Qualitative Methods: Essential Features and Surrounding Conditions Research workshops on qualitative methods have a longer tradition (see Reim and Riemann 1997, p. 225; Pilch Ortega 2015, p. 203). Initial steps for establishing research workshops within the German-speaking part of Europe can be already found in the 1970s. The organisation of these first research workshops has been influenced by experiences that German researchers made with research groups and seminars in the associated with Anselm L. Strauss (see Riemann and Schütze 1987, p. 55). Currently research workshops are applied in many different areas and could be institutionally established at many universities. They play an important role concerning the socialisation process for young academics. In addition, they are presumed to be a good example for research-oriented learning (see Müller 2017; Pilch Ortega 2015, p. 202). However, even if applied in different areas (e.g. as courses for students, within the scope of action research and ­practice-oriented training) they share some main characteristics that seem to be important for the practice of research workshops (see Heimgartner and Pilch Ortega 2012, p. 207 ff.). One of these characteristics can be seen in the interactive and collaborative structure of such learning settings. Referring to research workshops for students focusing on biographical research, Riemann and Schütze (1987) mention for instance: “The basic idea of the student research workshop is that the central procedures (not only of data collection but also of data analysis) are communicative ones. Biography analysis like other types of qualitative research depends on various communicative activities” (Riemann and Schütze 1987, p. 56).

114

A. Pilch Ortega

Riemann and Schütze (1987) underline the powerful potential that lies in the communicative practise of qualitative research. The communicative and collaborative structure also plays a central role for the production of knowledge, i.e. the theorization process of social phenomena based on empirical data. According to grounded theory, the analysis of empirical data and the generation of theoretical assumptions are considered to be a dialogue between the researcher and the data that has to be systematically reflected upon, and within which the development of a “theoretical sensitivity” is central (see Strauss 2004, p. 169). Strauss states in this context: “In this interplay between data and researcher, the latter brings to bear not some mythological neutral objectivity, but quite self consciously allows and encourages personal, disciplinary, and research experiences to enter into the analysis. (…) these experiences are part of ‘theoretical sensitivity’, are not used in an undisciplined way but with considerable self awareness” (Strauss 2004, p. 169).

The interactive interpretation process of a research group functions as a sort of ‘reflexive corrective’—the participants are somehow each other’s sounding boards. Hence, the communicative activity is a central part of the qualitative research process (see Reim and Riemann 1997, p. 225; Pilch Ortega 2015, p. 204). The analysis of empirical data unfolds through negotiating interpretation and meanings. The complexity of meanings and perspectives is seen as a constitutive part of developing scientific knowledge. Within these processes, issues of knowledge production and the powerful role of the interpretation of meanings have to be addressed. Through the communicative interpretation process theoretical and personal assumptions, meanings and perspectives can be highlighted in a critical-reflexive manner. It allows the reflective development of a theoretical sensitivity for examining the social phenomena or problem raised. Additionally, it requires self-consciousness and self-awareness in order to critically reflect upon the knowledge production process (see Pilch Ortega 2015, p. 205). Dausien (2007) states in this regard that it is important to become aware of one’s own position in society as a researcher and the corresponding perspective which needs to be reflected as well (see ibid., [9]). Research workshops also ask for specific (social) conditions under which the research process takes place. The collaborative practice of the research process raises issues concerning the ‘social architecture’ of such learning settings, the question of how and in which way participants are getting involved in the research process. In this regard, the ‘culture’ of research workshops shows an attempt to establish egalitarian, solidly united and reliable working rela-

Teaching Ethnographical Methods: Research Workshops for Students…

115

tionships for all participants as far as possible (see Pilch Ortega 2015, p. 205). Against this backdrop, power relations and hegemonic forces have to be focused and critically reflected, in particular concerning the powerful position of experienced researches in their interactions with young academics. In addition, students should experience research workshops as a space where they can participate with confidence and interject their knowledge, perspectives and assumptions without being initially assessed or criticised. However, academic hierarchies, in particular at universities, carry the risk of hiding the relationships of dependence. Students are assessed by their teachers, thus the understanding of the necessity of egalitarian and solidly united working relationships becomes challenged by the university structures and dynamics. Nevertheless, research workshops should function as a sort of exercise room wherein students are able to collect research experiences, while supporting each other and being guided by experienced researchers. Usually students work together in small groups “in which everybody is encouraged and supported to start interaction” (Riemann and Schütze 1987, p. 58). In particular for the data analysis, it is important to facilitate the communicative activity, and there “should be the permanent opportunity to get involved within the dynamics of research interaction” (ibid.). The interplay between exemplary illustrations by experienced researchers and a self-reliant and autonomous exploration of research practice seems to be a learning arrangement that is useful for learning how to do qualitative research. Research moreover is understood as a scientific practice, as a sort of ‘scientific handcraft’ that cannot be taught solely by theoretical instructions, but has to be practiced through active participation within a research process. By incrementally exploring, trying out and practicing research, students acquire basic research knowledge in a long-term learning process (see Knoblauch 2007). Students gain self-awareness and self-confidence with their own practice of interpreting and coding empirical data and developing their research projects. Furthermore, they learn to position themselves and find their own voices as members of the scientific community.

3 A Research Workshop for Students Exploring Issues of the Social Response to Migrants and Refugees: An Example The central goal of research workshops for students is to learn about qualitative methods and how to apply them. Apart from developing the research design and collecting empirical data, the development of the theoretical framework according to the thematic issues raised and the analyses of the data are important. This

116

A. Pilch Ortega

opens up a space for critical reflection on theoretical as well as personal assumptions and the question of how social phenomena are framed and interpreted. As a teacher, one challenge is to give students the opportunity—in terms of learning by doing—to create their research project in relation to a central issue. This calls for an open space where they have the possibility to work independently and have their own research experiences, thus giving them the opportunity to make mistakes and to learn from them. Another challenge is that, as the senior academic, you have to oversee the whole research process, give theoretical and practical input according to the qualitative research method and supervise the reflection process, which is central to the whole endeavour. Having this in mind, the intention of the following example from a research workshop for students was to create a learning space for students wherein they are able to explore qualitative research practice, to share their experiences with the other participants and to learn how to successfully carry out a research project. The critical reflection on problematic discourses in the field of migration and refugee movements has been at the centre of this course. In the current political response of societies to migrants and refugees, the formation of opinion and, in general terms, the production of knowledge plays an important role in producing racist regimes and practises. How we frame and respond to current challenges and problems as societies involves powerful patterns of interpretation, which are to a great extent implicit and hence not primarily reflexively available. As researchers, we take part in such knowledge production processes, and even if unintended possibly contribute the (re)production of problematic discourses in this field. The research workshop on qualitative methods for students is tied to the curriculum of the Master’s Programme in Adult Education at the University of Graz and encompassed two semesters. The central goal is the “development of an empirical research project focusing on current and socially relevant issues in the area of lifeworld learning and adult education” (University of Graz 2019). As a focal issue, the topic ‘the current political response of societies to migrants and refugees’ had been raised for the course, which took place during the 2017 academic year. “After successfully completing the course students will be able to do empirical research on complex questions of educational science” (ibid.). Over one year, 24 students worked together in research projects focusing on different topics surrounding issues of the social response to migrants and refugees. The research workshop involved 16 meetings, each session with the duration of three hours. The student projects investigated, for instance, the motivation for social and voluntary engagement with refugees as well as the involvement of right-wing initiatives (such as the ‘identitarian movement’). Other projects highlighted responses from print and online media relating to refugee movements, and finally research projects inves-

Teaching Ethnographical Methods: Research Workshops for Students…

117

tigated patterns of interaction in dealing with migrants and refugees within the medical sector as well as educational settings. Methods used were, for instance, field investigation, narrative interviews, discourse analyses and videography. Ethnographic field investigation was part of all research projects of the students.

3.1 Framework and Main Stages of the Research Workshop Thematic Introduction The research workshop started with a thematic introduction through the presentation of video clips of a protest of refugees in the Votive Church in Vienna, Austria in 2012. The thematic introduction gains importance for opening up a social issue or problem for the students. The chosen topic ‘social response to migrant and refugee movements’ refers to a current and socially relevant issue that also involves problematic discourses that need to be critically reflected upon. The trailer of the film “Last Shelter” enabled such a critical reflection and initiated a deeper discussion about the social response to migrant and refugee movements. The film draws on the situation of 63 refugees who occupied a church during Christmastime due to their imminent deportation. Most of the refugees had fled war experiences. Protesting over months and also going on hunger strike, some of them were deported even if their protest had been supported by a broader public. Over three years, the filmmaker accompanied the refugees in their “struggle for asylum and human dignity” (Last Shelter Film 2019). He wanted to create a “timeless film” and “an explosive documentary” about a central social issue in Europe. In reference to his production, the director of the film states the following: “In ‘Last Shelter’, visualizing discourses, processes and mechanisms r­elating to refugees and protest was important for me. How does a society react when refugees initiate a self-organized protest, occupy a church and progress from being petitioners to active participants in the political process? How do we react when refugees who have become confident activists occupy a church, during the Christmas holidays no less, thus taking a place in our consciences and social thinking? A documentary that takes a look at social topics must get involved in contradictory discourses rather than serving up exclusionary or ideological world views. It should initiate comprehensive examination and discussion of a topic that lasts several years and goes beyond clichés and superficial aspects” (ibid. 2019).

The film provoked ambivalent feelings as well, and it was important to discuss and reflect on those emerging emotions. The use of emotions for learning and the

118

A. Pilch Ortega

stimulation of a critical dialogue was a didactic part of the thematic introduction. The trailer of the film Last Shelter was accompanied by other video clips showing the social protest of the public which supported the protest of the refugees in front of the Votiv Church in Vienna. Another video clip showed, for instance, the violent eviction of the refugee protest camp by the police. The short video clips were followed by a more general discussion about the current situation in Austria, in particular about the social response of society to refugee movements. The students shared their emotions and perspectives, also discussing their own opinion about the topic. Afterwards the students were asked to identify interesting topics for them surrounding these issues. One important point was that they should not research refugees or migrants; consequently, the focus should be on society and different action fields. Finally, they formed themselves into small research groups of 2–6 participants, each having a central research interest. Research Design, Ethnographic Field Investigation and Theoretical Sensitivity The first challenge for the student groups was to develop the research design, and relatedly to make their research objective and the initial research interest more concrete. In the early stages, different concepts of investigation were discussed with a focus on the epistemological background of different research approaches. What is of importance, according to grounded theory, is the reflection on the research topic and research interest continually during the whole research process. Identifying the research object and the related research interest is already based on assumptions that have to be critically highlighted and reflected. The research findings may challenge the initial ideas and assumptions and, in some cases, require a revision of the research design. At the beginning of the research process it is also important “to find out if the student is specifically interested in social phenomena which can be dealt with in process analysis” (Riemann and Schütze 1987, p. 60). In order to get a broader and at the same time a more specific view of their initial research ideas, the students groups made a preliminary ethnographic field investigation. The main goal of the field investigation is to identify, for instance, basic “logics of the field” (Bourdieu 1977; Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992) and representative dynamics that are relevant for understanding the issues raised. One essential part of the field investigation is to document the whole process within a research diary, to help students to critically reflect on their implicit assumptions and perspectives as well as tacit knowledge. They are also asked to pay particular attention to their emotions by noting, recording and linking them to the highlighted issues. On the basis of these first research findings of the field investigation, the students discuss the research perspectives within their research groups and revise their research design and research interest. At the

Teaching Ethnographical Methods: Research Workshops for Students…

119

same time, students start to explore theoretical approaches that could be useful concerning their research interest. Part of developing their theoretical sensitivity is the collection of knowledge about the social phenomena they are investigating. Moreover, the students are asked to study basic literature of the respective field and to discuss it in small groups. Methodological Issues, Data Collection and Analysis Prior to the data collection and data analysis, the research workshop offers the possibility to discuss methodological issues and questions concerning the application of the different methods used. One of the goals is the development of basic knowledge about dealing with empirical methods of qualitative research. In addition, the social role as researcher as well as ethical implications of research practice and the maintaining of data privacy are highlighted. This first stage of data collection is accompanied by a detailed reflection on the experiences the students had within the research field and the discussion of challenges that arose. One of the more challenging stages of a qualitative research process is the analysis of the empirical data. The student groups were asked to do a structural analysis of the data. Referring to the communicative character of structural analysis, Riemann and Schütze (1987) argue: “Now, our central basic experience with our workshop is that the central communicative activities of qualitative analysis, namely structural description, analytic abstraction, contrastive comparison and following up the implications of systematic relationships, can be intensified by really enacting them via communicative interaction within a social group of fellow researchers” (ibid., p. 57).

Riemann and Schütze (1987) underline the communicative power of the structural analysis that forces a categorical understanding of the data. Through the ­formation of initial properties, the other participants feel encouraged to “question them or even to formulate counterpropositions” (ibid., p. 57). Another advantage of a qualitative analysis lies in a careful ‘handling’ of the data, which can be done with a line-by-line analysis according to grounded theory. The line-by-line analysis consists of a careful discussion about “how the person quoted has used single words, phrases, and sentences” (Strauss 2004, p. 170). Strauss mentions that it forces students and researchers “to examine the data microscopically” and “to listen closely to what the interviewees are saying and how they are saying it” (ibid., p. 173). Even though the line-by-line analysis entails a lot of time and effort, it helps to initially discover first categories and to formulate properties and dimensions on an abstract level. Moreover, it helps to reflect on problematic discourse,

120

A. Pilch Ortega

implicit assumptions and tacit knowledge. Finally, this sort of analysis makes students “aware that it is up to them to mine that data” (ibid.) and that they have to reflect upon their personal assumptions as well. The following section focuses on the critical reflection on the production of knowledge and seeks to illustrate some of the challenges that appeared when critically and collaboratively reflecting on issues surrounding refugees and migrants.

3.2 Challenges within the Knowledge Production Process The analysis of data is one of a number of issues in qualitative research. The coding of empirical data leads to the production of a scientifically framed knowledge, which is on the one hand linked with a privileged position of representation, and on the other hand is interwoven with power relations. In particular, knowledge production related to migration and asylum is entangled with hegemonic discourses, Eurocentric perspectives and power regimes. Thus, the reflection of implicit assumptions and tacit knowledge surrounding these topics gains significant importance. In this regard, the suggestion is that the line-by-line analysis of data offers the opportunity to question seemingly ‘approved’ assumptions and opens up a space for critical discussion and reflection on the knowledge production process. The analysis is understood to be an interactive and communicative activity, wherein the participants share their perspectives and ideas. Moreover, the detailed discussion of what, for instance, an interviewee says and how he or she is saying it, forces researchers to ask analytic questions and to mine the data on a more abstract level. Drawing on the research workshop for students and the corresponding analysis of the empirical data, I will use examples to highlight different aspects that presented a challenge within the knowledge production process. The first example focuses on problematic ‘othering’ constructions within the research design. The creation of otherness refers to a “process in which, through discursive practices, different subjects are formed, hegemonic subjects – that is, subjects in powerful social positions as well as those subjugated to these powerful conditions” (Thomas-Olalde and Velho 2011, p. 27). Othering refers to asymmetric power relationships wherein a dominant group or community creates ‘the other’ in an essentialist way by negating heterogeneity and individuality. The creation of difference is produced through the homogenisation and stigmatisation of the ‘others’. In this context, Thomas-Olalde and Velho (2011) mention that the concept of othering also offers an

Teaching Ethnographical Methods: Research Workshops for Students…

121

“analytic perspective which takes into account the ambivalences of actions (also of actions intended to be counter-hegemonic) within dominant discourses. We deal with practices of subject formation in the context of Othering to extend our abilities, to reflect, and to act in order to multiply practices of resistance” (ibid., p. 47).

Thomas-Olalde and Velho argue that othering as an analytic perspective helps to identify the involvement in power relationships, which in particular gains relevance for research processes. The following example from the research workshop is related to a student research project that investigated patterns of interaction in dealing with migrants and refugees within the medical sector. The intention of the students was to investigate how workers in a medical setting deal with ‘the other’, in particular how the professionals deal with migrants and asylum seekers. Hence, the othering construction was part of their initial research design. In general terms, research on migration carries the risk of focusing exclusively on migrants as the others. Within a research project, migrants are possibly asked to tell their life history as migrants, without being aware of reproducing the problematic discourses as a researcher in this field. Having this in mind, the task was to reflect on and discuss personal assumptions surrounding this topic, and to facilitate the comprehension that the framing of social phenomena is not an innocent activity, rather it is something which has to be done carefully and in a reflexive way. A further challenging aspect that appears during the analysis is the fact that the construction of otherness possibly emerges as a phenomenon within the empirical data. People may refer to ‘others’ by framing them as ‘the others’ while talking about their experiences in daily life or at work. A structural analysis intends to reconstruct the perspective of the interviewee and creates interpretations about the meaning of such narrations. The analysis further seeks to identify such othering constructions and to interpret such constructions as a part of the broader biographical sense horizon. Drawing on these examples, a broader discussion was initiated about ‘othering’ constructions as a problematic part of the research design and how to find an adequate framing of social phenomena. Additionally, the concept of othering was used as an analytic perspective in order to highlight power relations and hegemonic structures. Finally, othering was identified as a strategy of interviewees to deal with the diversity of social interactions in their working area. After this discussion, the students taking part in the project about the medical sector redesigned their research perspective and focused, in the end, on patterns of social interaction as a relevant phenomenon in this field. The research findings show that the question of how patients are framed depends on various patterns of interpretation. These patterns of interpretation are influenced by the field logics of the

122

A. Pilch Ortega

medical sector, but also by dynamics of social interaction and by habitual social roles, personal as well as professional. For instance, dealing with refugees in a medical setting emerges as a technical challenge rather than an ethnic or social problem due to the lack of language skills. In contrast, for another professional in the medical sector, dealing with refugees appears to be a relational challenge: in this context the interviewee differentiated between ‘familiar strangers’ and ‘strange strangers’, underlining the importance of ‘the right behaviour’. Within this perspective, patterns of classification according to typical stereotypes play an important role. The second example of the critical reflection on knowledge production processes that I would like to present is related to the research project of students that dealt with the motivation for social engagement with refugees. At first glance, motivation as a research objective appears to be something that could be identified easily and explicitly. Nonetheless, within our discussions we highlighted motivation as a process that is subconscious, transitive and continuously reviewed. The broader discussion about framing motivation as a research objective opened up analytic awareness concerning issues of social engagement in general terms. Based on the empirical data, we identified three different types of “sense figures” related to social engagement. The term “sense figure” was used as a heuristic concept for identifying specific characteristics of habitual orientations and dispositions in this field. Social engagement emerged for instance as a practice of following others. The interviewee of this case study lives in a small village near the border, and with others of the community she worked as a volunteer, giving water and food to refugees. She commented on her experiences and provided various examples of the ‘thankless receivers’ accompanied by othering constructions and stereotypes. The question of how to receive help functioned as a dominant normative concept for guiding action. Retrospectively, she drew the conclusion that her social engagement was a sort of ‘wrong-welcome culture’. In the light of the increasing number of refugee movements in 2015 the “right way” to welcome refugees and migrants had been a huge discussion within the public sphere of Austria. The social engagement of the interviewee does not appear as a personal decision, but has been strongly influenced by the voluntary engagement of others of the community. Another sense figure we could categorise on the basis of the structural analysis focuses on the development of solidarity based on processes of identification. Various interviewees underlined, for example, their social engagement with the comment that this situation of vulnerability is something that could also happen to them. The social engagement with refugees and their situation provoked processes of identification, which influenced the mode of social interaction. What was of special interest to the student groups is

Teaching Ethnographical Methods: Research Workshops for Students…

123

that this solidarity-based engagement was intertwined with the tendency to build up a personal connection to refugees. Although, due to the limited time for developing and maintaining personal relationships and because of the precarious conditions of refugees, the interviewees commented that this aspect was one of the more challenging in terms of their social engagement. In some cases, the social relation between volunteers and refugees broke off suddenly due to the deportation and denial of a residence permit status. Social engagement also emerged as a sort of political statement. As the research findings reveal, solidarity and human rights function as a basic principal of the worldview of some interviewees. In contrast to the previous sense figure, personal relation gains less relevance. Instead, on the basis of the empirical data we could identify different abstract modes of social involvement. Comparing them with the other categories, social engagement as a political statement is characterised by greater persistence. The final example comes from the project that investigated the engagement for right-wing initiatives: in this regard the identitarian movement. The identitarians are classified as right-wing extremists even though they describe themselves as a patriotic youth-led movement that seeks to call public attention through political activism in order to spread their ideology. At the very beginning, we discussed whether a group like the identitarians could be framed as a social movement: this question was quite challenging for us. In general terms, we can say that social movements are active and open-ended interventions that seek to influence social conditions (see Fuchs 1999). With social mobilisation processes, the power of agency becomes strengthened; if waves of social protest appear to a greater extent, then public discourses and power regimes can be partially challenged. Hence, social movements have to be focused as phenomena that are linked with societal dynamics as well as the complexity of social transformation. Movements and contra movements interact and influence each other; their activities gain relevance as a specific mode of social response to current challenges and social problems (see Pilch Ortega 2018). To the surprise of the students, we found various characteristics of the motivation of people for getting involved in social engagement, which might be typical for left-wing social movements as well. ­Self-efficacy, for example, plays an important role for the interviewed members of the identitarian group accompanied by the wish to be politically active. The implementation of alternative courses of action for dealing with refugees was one of the main goals. Additionally, the engagement was framed as an adventure, which opens up possibilities for activism and pushing social and ethical boundaries. Finally, exchange with like-minded individuals appears to be an important reason for the engagement as well. At this point, we could ask us where the difference to involvement in other social movements lies, and if there should be any

124

A. Pilch Ortega

difference? In this context we identified different modes of stereotypes, enemy images and other scenario of threats, which gain relevance for guiding actions. Against this backdrop, the reflection on emerging emotions as well as the discussion about ethical issues related to doing research was an important part of the knowledge production process. Moreover, it was important to highlight the different dynamics as a relational rather than individual phenomenon.

4 Concluding Remarks The aim of the paper was to focus on issues of knowledge production and the powerful role of the formation of opinions and patterns of interpretation. Such processes are to a great extent implicit or linked with tacit knowledge. Hence, making such framing processes reflexively available gains importance. In this context, the chapter highlights a research workshop as a space for critical reflection on knowledge production processes in order to prevent the reproduction of problematic discourses. Research workshops on qualitative methods already have a longer tradition. Currently they are applied in many different areas and at many universities as a vital tool for higher education. They play an important role for the socialisation of young academics and are presumed to be a good practice example of research-oriented learning. Research workshops involving students offer the opportunity to critically reflect on research practice, in particular on the analysis of empirical data. The described research workshop for students focused on the social response to migrant and refugee movements. Students were asked to investigate how society responds to migrants and refugees in different action fields. The aim of the research workshop was, on the one hand, to open up a space where the students could realise their research experiences autonomously while supporting and helping each other. On the other hand, the research practice was accompanied by supervision and theoretical as well as practical inputs, which helped them to reflect on their research process and the analysis of the empirical data. The paper highlights some of the challenges that arise when doing research on issues surrounding refugees and migrants. Against this backdrop, one important issue was to avoid the reproduction of problematic discourses such as othering constructions within the research design. Another aspect was to view social phenomena in a relational, processual and contextualised perspective. In general terms, we can say that framing ‘others’ functions as a relevant dimension for guiding actions as well as the different field logics in which agents act. The social interactions are characterised by inequality and power relations within the different fields (e.g. the right way to receive and to be thankful). Highlighting the

Teaching Ethnographical Methods: Research Workshops for Students…

125

relational dimension opened the students’ minds to the complexity of social interactions. In summary, it can be stated that the collaborative analysis of the empirical data within a research workshop for students opens up a communication space where issues of knowledge production and related challenges can be focused upon. The line-by-line technique as well as the comparison of properties and dimensions of categories helps “to break through even an unrecognized assumption and certainly through a recognized one” (Strauss 2004, p. 176). Moreover, students learn to do the coding process of the empirical data in a careful and reflexive way, which encourages them to trust in their own abilities as well.

References Bourdieu, P. (1977). Outline of a theory of practice. Cambridge: University Press. Bourdieu, P., & Wacquant, L. (1992). Invitation to reflexive sociology. London: Polity. Dausien, B. (2007). Reflexivität, Vertrauen, Professionalität. Was Studierende in einer gemeinsamen Praxis qualitativer Forschung lernen können. Diskussionsbeitrag zur FQS-Debatte „Lehren und Lernen der Methoden qualitativer Sozialforschung“. Forum Qualitativer Sozialforschung/Forum: Qualitative Social Research, 8(1). https://www. qualitative-research.net/index.php/fqs/article/viewArticle/220/485. Accessed: 30 June 2019. Fuchs, M. (1999). Kampf um Differenz. Repräsentation, Subjektivität und soziale Bewegungen. Das Beispiel Indien. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp. Heimgartner, A., & Pilch Ortega, A. (2012). Die partizipative Methode der Forschungswerkstätte am Beispiel eines interkulturellen Handlungssettings. In H. Stigler & H. Reicher (Eds.), Praxisbuch Empirische Sozialforschung in den Erziehungs- und Bildungswissenschaften (2., erweiterte Edn., pp. 205–216). Innsbruck: Studienverlag. Knoblauch, H. (2007). Thesen zur Lehr- und Lernbarkeit qualitativer Methoden. Diskussionsbeitrag zur FQS-Debatte „Lehren und Lernen der Methoden qualitativer Sozialforschung“. Forum Qualitativer Sozialforschung/Forum: Qualitative Social Research, 8(1). https://www.qualitative-research.net/index.php/fqs/rt/printerFriendly/217/479.    Accessed: 30 June 2019. Last Shelter Film. (2019). A film by Gerald Igor Hauzenberger. https://last-shelter.com/ about-last-shelter/. Accessed: 30 June 2019. Müller, W. (2017). Forschendes Lernen: Ein Beitrag zur Überwindung der Trennung von Forschung und Lehre? In W.-D. Webler & H. Jung-Paarmann (Eds.), Zwischen Wissenschaftsforschung, Wissenschaftspropädeutik und Hochschulpolitik. Hochschuldidaktik als lebendige Werkstatt (pp. 245–255). Bielefeld: Universitätsverlag Weber. Pilch Ortega, A. (2015). Forschungswerkstätten als Beispiel forschungsgeleiteter Lehre. Ansprüche, Möglichkeiten und Grenzen eines qualitativ angelegten Forschungssettings. In R. Egger, C. Wustmann, & A. Karber (Eds.), Forschungsgeleitete Lehre in einem Massenstudium (pp. 201–216). Wiesbaden: Springer VS.

126

A. Pilch Ortega

Pilch Ortega, A. (2018). Lernprozesse sozialer Bewegung(en). Biographische Lerndispositionen in Auseinandersetzung mit Erfahrungen sozialer Ungleichheit. Wiesbaden: Springer VS. Reim, T., & Riemann, G. (1997). Die Forschungswerkstatt. Erfahrungen aus der Arbeit mit Studentinnen und Studenten der Sozialarbeit/Sozialpädagogik und der Supervision. In G. Jakob & H.-J. von Wensierski (Eds.), Rekonstruktive Sozialpädagogik. Konzepte und Methoden sozialpädagogischen Verstehens in Forschung und Praxis (pp. 223–238). Weinheim: Juventa. Riemann, G., & Schütze, F. (1987). Some notes on a student research workshop on „Biography Analysis, Interaction Analysis, and Analysis of Social Worlds“. Biography and Society, 8, 54–70. Strauss, A. L. (2004). Analysis through microscopic examination. Sozialer Sinn, 2, 160– 176. Thomas-Olalde, O., & Velho, A. (2011). Othering and its effects − Exploring the concept. In H. Niedrig & C. Ydesen (Eds.), Writing postcolonial history of intercultural education (pp. 27–51). Frankfurt a. M.: Lang. University of Graz. (2019). UNIGRAZOnline. https://online.uni-graz.at/kfu_online/ wbLv.wbShowLVDetail?pStpSpNr=582052&pSpracheNr=2&pMUISuche=FALSE. Accessed: 30 June 2019. Wilson, T. P. (1973). Theorien der Interaktion und Modelle soziologischer Erklärung. In Arbeitsgruppe Bielefelder Soziologen (Ed.), Alltagswissen, Interaktion und gesellschaftliche Wirklichkeit. Vol. 1: Symbolischer Interaktionismus und Ethnomethodologie (pp. 54–79). Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt.

We Are, I Am, You Are: “Joining in” as a Pedagogy and Research Tool Corinne McKamey, Cleti Cervoni and Rhoda Bernard

Abstract

We define and show one way we teach the process of “joining in,” where ­students learn to make non-judgmental associations and connections around a common text or piece of data. We then provide three storied examples of how we apply and teach this process of “joining in” in data collection, analysis, and reflection. For us, “joining in” is not only a tool, but is also a foundational approach to our teaching and research. Keywords

Joining in · Teaching · Ethnography · Higher education · Data collection · Data analysis · Collaborative data analysis

C. McKamey (*)  Educational Studies Department, Rhode Island College, Providence, USA e-mail: [email protected] C. Cervoni  Secondary and Higher Education, Salem State University, Beverly, USA e-mail: [email protected] R. Bernard  Institute for Art Education and Special Needs, Berklee College of Music, Brighton, USA e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2020 C. Wieser and A. Pilch Ortega (eds.), Ethnography in Higher Education, Doing Higher Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-30381-5_8

127

128

C. McKamey et al.

1 Introduction We are three members of a writing and study group who have been together for eighteen years, meeting every six weeks to read and talk about each other’s work. We are qualitative researchers, ethnographers, and higher education instructors. We sometimes write together and often present together. In this chapter, we explain a shared research process and teaching tool that has been foundational to our development as researchers and instructors. We call this process “joining in” (Bernard et al. 2010). In the first section, we define and show one way we teach the process of “joining in.” We then provide three storied examples of how we apply this process of “joining in” to data collection, analysis, and reflection. For us, “joining in” is not only a tool, but also a foundational approach to our teaching and research. Through “joining in,” we look at and make associations about pieces of writing or data together. We do not try to solve problems or come to a resolution. We sit with uncertainty and seek cognitive empathy with the other members of the group. We have found this collective “joining in” process essential to our individual and collective work, and it has allowed us to understand texts, data, and situations from multiple perspectives and points of view. We have also found that teaching undergraduate and graduate students the process of “joining in” has helped us to construct communities of practice within our classes where we importantly learn alongside our students. The call for this edited volume affirms the importance of students learning ethnographic skills which enable them “to gain inside knowledge into educational contexts [that] yields the possibility to connect people and make positions and experiences visible.” Although there are many debates about what constitutes ethnography (Hammersley and Atkinson 2007, pp. 1–19), we align with Geertz (2008) who argues that ethnography is a process of understanding culture, and that culture is a context that is made through people’s “everyday lives” (Wolcott 1999, p. 8) that can be “thickly described.” We also view ethnography through a postmodern lens, where we assume that knowledge and analysis is always partial, and informed by the researcher’s subjective identities (Behar 1996; Rosaldo 1989). As educators writing and researching in the ethnographic/qualitative tradition, we find ourselves drawing from the disciplines of sociology, anthropology and psychology. Some may call us “bricoleurs” (Denzin 2003) piecing together different ideas, images, and discourses to expand a theory or to shed light on a social justice issue. Corte and Irwin (2017) argue that in the academy, in addition to methods, data collection and analysis, we must address competing epistemologies

We Are, I Am, You Are: “Joining in” as a Pedagogy …

129

in ethnography. Their belief is that students ought to be aware of the different stances ethnographers may take in their research before they choose a path that will influence their future career decisions. Corte and Irwin (2017) describe these two ways of knowing in ethnography as form and flow. On the one hand, form is what one would call the traditional, Western way of knowing. Knowledge is thought to be generalizable, and there is a theoretical framework that holds the research project together. Data is triangulated, and theory is built upon present theories. By contrast, flow as a concept of ethnography incorporates arts-based methods and presentation genres. Flow encourages voices that haven’t been heard—or have been silenced—and solicits stories from the community. In this chapter, we show how we teach and use one form of flow—“joining in.” Whether teaching form, flow, or some combination of both, teaching ethnographic methods in higher education contexts presents a number of challenges. One challenge, as noted by Corte and Irwin (2017), is that ethnography requires extensive fieldwork over a long period of time, and yet classroom contexts in higher education are punctuated by four or five month semesters. In most cases, qualitative research courses are taught in just one semester. The time constraints in the academy barely permit enough time for our students to learn what we want them to understand deeply, never mind the epistemological debates in the field. Another challenge in higher education is the predominant lecture format that positions the lecturer as the-one-with-knowledge and students as the ­ones-without-knowledge. The positioning of the faculty instructor as the one-inpower would seem to be in conflict with flow-related techniques, which highlight those who are not in power. Our approach to teaching ethnographic methods in higher education addresses both of these challenges. With respect to the time constraints of the academic semester, we opt for depth over breadth by delving deeply into the close examination of smaller pieces of data, rather than attempting to complete a full-fledged ethnographic study in just a few months. In terms of the educational format and the positioning of teacher and student, we support and create a safe space for dialogue of collaborative meaning-making with our students. Our pedagogy is based on the work of feminist qualitative researcher Kathleen Weiler (1991), which critically reflects and builds upon the work of Paulo Freire and liberatory pedagogy. We support questioning the role and authority of the teacher; recognizing the importance of personal experience as a source of knowledge; and exploring the perspectives of people of different races, classes, and cultures. In our teaching we engage each other and our students in an “interpretive community” (Fish 1980, p. 357) whereby we read and share associations and cultural assumptions we each bring to a text, and we reflect upon the collective and shifting

130

C. McKamey et al.

meanings we make together. This process aligns with Michelle Fine’s “work groups” where participants understand material through discussion towards understanding a text through many different vantage points and keeps open the possibility of emergent meanings (Kamberelis and Dimitriadis 2011). Like Catherine Kohler Riessman (2007), we define “text” broadly, and include traditional written textual forms (transcribed interviews, poems, novels), media (videos, movies, YouTube snippets), and collective experiences (classroom discussions, collective observations, experiences). To collectively read a text means understanding its larger context and meaning and recognizing the multiple interpretations and meanings that we each bring. This orientation draws from educational theories about critical literacy (Freire 2018; Luke 2014; McKinney 2016) and ethnography (Eisenhart 2018; Geertz 2008; Rosaldo 1989). We learned this process of collective reading and interpreting when we were doctoral students. Our advisor, Wendy Luttrell, invited us to share and think with each other about our snippets of transcripts, thinking memos, or observational notes. In this interpretive space, we learned to avoid judging each other or our work, and to be open to new insights, ways of thinking, and interpretations of our data. We learned to “join in” thinking with each other, making personal associations, asking questions, and following threads of understanding (Bernard et al. 2010). We have continued meeting and learning together for twenty years, and we have each applied the orientation and tools of “joining in” in our own teaching and research practices as educational scholars and practitioners. This process of “joining in” has helped us to develop our understandings about our research methods, our research contexts, and ourselves. This method of collective reading and “joining in” is a pedagogical approach to texts that we use in our teaching in higher education. It is also an approach to research. The intent of “joining in” is to engage in a process of being in relation—with texts, with others, and with self. The approach consists of a protocol of asking open ended, non-judgemental questions (e.g., What do you notice? Can you tell or show me an example? Where do you see that?). Through developing the skills of careful questioning and listening (without judging or trying to come to a “solution”) and keeping students “in” the material, students learn how to observe and listen to the speaker, and to “join in” with the speaker’s thinking. This process of “joining in” positions participants to be in non-judgemental relation with each other as researchers, with participants in the field, with data and concepts. At the same time, it teaches participants to be self-reflective and aware of their own positions, ideas, and perspectives in relation to others. Being part of an interpretive community, and practicing thinking with others about texts and works of art has provided us with opportunities to reflect upon and de-center

We Are, I Am, You Are: “Joining in” as a Pedagogy …

131

our own understanding and interpretations, and to learn to listen carefully for different interpretations, stances and perspectives. This process has many different applications, including data collection, data analysis, and subjective knowing. Because the process of “joining in” is a tool that can be used in multiple settings, we have included four distinct illustrations of how we use “joining in” in our pedagogy and research practice. In “Joining In” as a pedagogical tool, we show how we invite students or workshop participants to “join in” thinking with each other about a poem. We begin with this arts-based method to provide a framework for understanding the generative space that this work can facilitate (Greene 1994), and to highlight the mechanics of this tool. We follow with three different applications of this tool in research settings. In “Joining in” as a data collection tool, Cleti provides a case study of using the tool to interview and understand second grader’s doing and thinking about science. In “Joining in” as analysis, Corinne shows how she engaged our writing group in the process to better understand and raise questions about visual data. Finally, in “Joining in” as subjective exploration, Rhoda writes about how talking through and reflecting upon her own subjectivity and position as an able-bodied researcher of musicians with disabilities helped her to think deeply about her relationships with her informants and with the topics of her research.

2 “Joining in” as a Pedagogical Tool Using a poem as text, we invite classrooms students or workshop participants to think with and join in understanding a poem (Schneier 2001). We look at and interpret the text, and think with each other about how our sharing our individual interpretations—based on our social locations, geographic origins, linguistic and research traditions—help us collectively understand the layers of meaning within the text. We purposefully chose a poem because of it accessibility. We could have chosen a piece of data or text, but a poem allows each of us to find our way into the text without it belonging to any one person or research project, and without there being a single known way of interpreting the text. In the tradition of Maxine Greene, we believe that the “wide awakeness” (1994) of engaging with a piece of art provides a rich model for the multi-layered, non-judgmental, and open ended search for possibilities and interpretations engagement of “joining in.” Rules of Engagement We begin with establishing the rules of engagement. As educational researchers and as educators we are often in charge of creating collaborative classroom

132

C. McKamey et al.

c­ ultures. We invite participants to name their expectations of what a collaborative group that “thinks with” each other does. In doing so, we make explicit taken for granted assumptions, and together we establish culture for this space. One example might be “do not talk over anyone,” or maybe reframed more positively as “let each speaker finish their thought.” The Process To become familiar with the poem, we read through it three times. We first read the poem silently, and invite them to jot notes as they read. We then we hear the poem read aloud two times—once from a volunteer and again from a second volunteer who is from a different social location from the first. In these readings, we ask what words or phrases do participants notice? At a workshop at an ethnography conference, for instance,1 we read Audre Lorde’s poem Progress Report (1997). A stanza of the poem is included below. We invited the participants then, and we invite you, the reader of this chapter now, to read the following stanza to themselves/yourself, taking notes on what they/you notice. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

You are the child of wind and ravens I created always my daughter I cannot recognize the currents where you swim and dart through my loving upstream to your final place of birth but you never tire of hearing how I crept out of my mother’s house at dawn, with an olive suitcase crammed with books and fraudulent letters and an unplayed guitar.

In our debrief of the silent reading, we asked people to stay close to the text, noting exact words or phrases rather than interpretations. One theme a reader noticed was the familial words in the poem: Child (1), daughter (2), birth (5), mother (7). Another noticing was words connected with movement: wind (1), swim (3), dart (3), upstream (5) crept (7).We then invited a participant, a white woman,2 to read

1We

have presented a version of this workshop at several conferences. This case study is a compilation of several discussions. 2This gendered assumption was based upon the speaker’s dress and appearance. We talk about problematizing this assumption within the group later in this section.

We Are, I Am, You Are: “Joining in” as a Pedagogy …

133

the poem aloud to the group. We again asked the group to talk about what they noticed after hearing the poem read aloud. We talked about if anything changed. In the debrief, the group spent some time debriefing maternal words related to the speaker in the poem: child (1), daughter (2), birth (5), loving (4), created (1). The group further looked at the word “upstream,” and considered the multiple possible meanings of this word: an actual stream or river, a geographical return to a place, or the image of an egg floating downstream/upstream within a uterus. And finally, we invited a participant from a different social location than the first, a white man, to read the poem aloud. We again as a group talked about what we noticed and if anything changed. The group noticed many changes in the ways they heard the poem. In this reading, one image that a participant noted was an association of the olive suitcase (8) with the speaker, a man, who had been in the military. The group reflected upon their own assumptions about gender and cultural and experiential associations with being a loving parent, or in the military. As we unpacked these associations, we also talked about the ways gender stereotypes reinforce binary categories that do not capture the complexity and possible fluidity within and across gender identities. The group talked through the entire poem in this manner. At the end of the session, we provided information about Audre Lorde, the author of the poem who described herself as black, lesbian, mother, and warrior. This new information about the author prompted the group to discuss the additional layers of meaning in our understanding of the poem, ourselves, and our differing cultural and racial contexts. In the debrief of our collective poem reading, the group discussed the research applications of “joining in,” including data collection, analysis and personal reflection. Participants asked us how we used “joining in” in our own work. In the following sections, we provide three applications of “joining in” in our research and teaching.

3 Joining in as Data Collection (Cleti) As a researcher of young children (seven and eight year olds) I am interested in how their social worlds are constructed and specifically how their gender identification works within those social worlds. I apply the concept of “joining in” as a participant observation/ethnographic technique in collecting data. When I engage with the children around materials, I will often ask: What do you notice? What would happen if we did this? Tell me more? These questions allow the children to say something because they are engaging questions and have no right answer except for what the child notices and thinks about. I encourage the children to express their associations with the science materials and draw from their own experiences and orientations to the material.

134

C. McKamey et al.

Since I am particularly interested in how children “do science” and “do gender” in primary classrooms, I will use the following excerpt to illustrate how this works in data collection. But first let me give you the context. In many primary schools, teachers and students study animals in their natural setting rather than use pictures from books and videos. Teachers ask students to raise tadpoles and butterflies to understand the process of metamorphosis, and to observe and describe the behavior of birds at the classroom feeder—all in an effort to learn how to “think like a scientist.” These authentic experiences with animals address the call for more hands-on experiences with the natural world: to learn “from nature” and not just “about nature” (Louv 2008, 2012; Pyle 2011; Sobel 2008). My research examines the subjective relationships that boys and girls develop with animals and how these relationships allow us valuable insight into children’s social lives (Cervoni 2014; Cervoni and Ivinson 2011). In this example from a primary grade classroom, Jessica and Howard3 have been asked by the classroom teacher to observe two tadpoles in an aquarium and to determine if they are the same or different. We (the two children, the tadpole, and I) are an interpretive community. We will “think with” and “join in” with each other about what we notice. The teacher has left us alone and will return later to check on our work. But first the task seems to be to get the tadpoles to stay still. Jessica: Oh this is so cool. To the tadpole: Can’t you stay for a minute? Jessica to Howard: Don’t touch it. Howard: I’m not. I’m just going to watch. Howard uses his spoon to try and get the tadpole to be in one corner of the dish. Howard: You can see his tail wiggling around. Howard: I need to see him sideways. Howard wants to draw the tadpole and he tries using a number of tools, spoons and the hand lens to get the tadpole positioned sideways. Howard: I don’t want to squish it. Howard: I’m going to try and use this spoon. The tadpole moved away from Howard’s spoon. Howard: He’s smart.

3Pseudonyms

are used for the names of participants in this an all case studies in this paper.

We Are, I Am, You Are: “Joining in” as a Pedagogy …

135

I notice that Jessica and Howard have different ways of approaching the tadpole’s movement. Howard wants to capture it, and Jessica asks the tadpole to stay still. Jessica admonishes Howard not to hurt the tadpole. When the tadpole escapes capture, Howard says he is smart. To keep the children observing, I enter into the conversation with questions that continue the conversation (Duckworth 2005) and learn that the children draw from what they know in their social worlds to interpret tadpole behavior. Howard says that the lighter tadpole is a girl. Cleti: So you think it’s a girl because it has a different color? Howard: Yes, that one is really black. Jessica: Howard, they’re hugging. Howard: I think one’s a female and one’s a male. This line of questioning, which Eleanor Duckworth (2005) calls critical exploration, helped me understand the ways that these boys and girls were negotiating cultural expectations of and meanings about being male and female, human and other-than human, through their social interactions with the animals they were studying (Thorne 1993). By analyzing discourse in context, I argue that we are better able to see children not as unitary beings performing roles in submissive ways, but as the complex, changing and contradictory people they really are (Davies 2003). I also apply “joining in” in my teaching of a University research course. In this higher education setting, I ask each student to write a “passion paper,” a story about a topic in education for which they have a passion. Some students write about trying a new instructional technique in the classroom such as mindfulness, others write about their passion for physical fitness and wonder how for others this became a life-long habit. Others write about how to involve parents in their students’ education. Their essays are personal and passionate and full of energy and wonderings. Concurrent with this writing assignment, I ask my students to join with two or three other students to form a group. I tell them that this will become their writing/reading group that will read and comment on all of their writing besides me. Together we read Elbow and Belanoff’s (2010) work on how to give feedback to peers noting the different kinds of feedback available. With this in place, we read together about their passion for teaching and learning. At this point they have not chosen their topic for research; they are just exploring ideas based on their own personal interest. In the beginning their writing may be raw and fragmented but as we continue to work together, sharing what we see and feel in each other’s writing the students become clearer and clearer about the

136

C. McKamey et al.

topic and some of the questions they want to explore. I remind them how research is an iterative process and how they have to tack back and forth from their initial passion for the topic to their research questions and back again. It is an ongoing process. By the time my students begin to organize their research design, they have become adept at “joining in” with a small group of people who understand their work as much as they do. I observe how clear they become about their own research study and how excited they get as they develop insights into their own and other students’ work by working closely with a one essay at a time, reading it aloud to each other and seeing what they notice and asking questions of each other. My work is to join in with them and ask questions as needed but really to keep them in their writing, questioning and refining as they move through the process of defining a research project.

4 Joining in as Data Analysis (Corinne) The process of “joining in” has been useful for us as an interpretive community of researchers in checking out our codes and interpretations. As a group, we meet once a month and often one of us brings a small piece of data—a transcript selection, story, or other artifact—for us to analyze together. Aligned with critical exploration interviewing techniques (Duckworth 2005), we ask each other questions of the piece of data like: “What do you notice?”, “What do you want to know more about?” and “What is missing?”. For example, I am working on a research project about the ways students in a higher education youth development program think about themselves as youth workers (McKamey 2020). To better understand students’ meanings, I asked them to develop a “Who am I collage” using found objects, craft materials, and magazine images. The process of collage making, the conversations participants have while making the collages, and the final collage images and participants’ explanations about their art provide multiple ways into understanding participant’s identity formation and meaning making (Garoian and Gaudelius 2008; Luttrell 2003). I brought a sample collage to a meeting with Rhoda and Cleti so that we could talk about ways I was analyzing the images themselves. I brought in Mark’s collage. Mark was a student who had been working in a sports-focused after school program. He had affixed several images on his artwork. In the top center of the collage, peaking off the top was a figure standing on an iceberg. On the bottom right, a man held a plant with the word, “thrive” pasted diagonally over and across the right hand side, and on the bottom left was a photo of a long cluster of bikers, many in brightly colored jackets. The words “no days off,” “service,”

We Are, I Am, You Are: “Joining in” as a Pedagogy …

137

and “global” ringed the bikers. In the bottom center was an image of a small goalie. In the direct center, connecting the iceberg with the bikers and gardener was a green felt heart. In my analysis of Mark’s and other students’ collages, it seemed like they interpreted themselves not as people with individual characteristics, but in relation to young people and the contexts in which they worked. For instance, in talking about the gardener on his collage, Mark said, “I chose this man gardening because working with kids is a lot like gardening. Gardeners need to make sure plants have water, and sunlight, and the right containers. In youth work it’s the same, making sure that kids have a good environment and resources so that they can thrive.” Mark’s metaphor of a gardener was interdependent and relational (Gilligan 2016), and positioned him in connection with young people through creating an environment, and providing resources to young people. When I shared Mark’s collage with Rhoda and Cleti, they asked questions that helped me make additional connections to the relational identity theme. They asked about the green felt heart in the middle of the page. I went back to my notes and we talked about Mark’s explanation of the heart. He had told me its meaning: “working with kids is a lot about relationships and caring.” “But why a green heart?” the group asked. “Where did he get it, or did he make it?” Their questions prompted me to think back to the day where students made collages. Everyone at Mark’s table had included a similar, but differently colored felt heart in their collage. We talked about the importance of this collective representation— Mark was not only representing himself in relation to young people with whom he worked, he was also choosing to use a heart to represent caring—a construct he shared with other students with whom he sat during the activity. Sitting and thinking with Cleti and Rhoda about a piece of visual data provided me with an important analytical space. The discussion provided me new insights and ways to think about the data, and helped me bridge my observations and notes with the two dimensional collage we were considering. I teach this practice of collective “joining in” analysis to a doctoral course on organizations and leadership. Students each write up a case study from their own leadership experiences, and then each week, individually and in groups, they consider their case from a different lens or perspective. Over the course of the semester, students develop and practice reading and responding protocols around their cases and interpretive writing about their cases. These protocols often mirror the structure of the collective textual reading we described in this chapter and that I often do with students as a model. Students also reference protocols described in Elbow and Belanoff (2010) and McDonald and Allen (2017). In their analytical work over time, students learn to pose questions, to think with each other, and “join in” each other’s thinking. As the instructor, I read and respond to

138

C. McKamey et al.

s­ tudent’s work prior to their engaging with each other in small groups. My feedback is sometimes individual, but it is also sometimes collective. Sometimes I ask students to respond within groups that have common themes in their memos to investigate like: “Zoom in” on a particular example or moment in your case, providing more detail that links to the theoretical concept that you are developing, or “Focus on positive space”—instead of focusing on what someone did not do or failed to do, what did the person do? Can you describe this person’s logic? Students’ interpretive groups provide a space for their collective learning about their own data and the process of analysis. These interpretive groups decenter me as a teacher professing knowledge to students, and positions students as collectively constructing and considering different interpretations of their data.

5 Joining in as Subjective Exploration (Rhoda) The process of “joining in” recognizes and celebrates the central role of the individual researcher as the instrument of ethnographic research (Denzin 2004; Geertz 2008; Rosaldo 1989). We align ourselves with Ruth Behar (1996) in approaching our research as “vulnerable observers” and use the process of “joining in” as a portal to express, perform, create, and explore our identities as researchers. As ethnographic researchers and professors who teach ethnographic research methods in higher education settings, we consider the self to be the instrument of our work. As we conduct our research, we do so through our lenses as individuals. Our experiences, perspectives, positions, and assumptions are with us throughout the process. Teaching ethnographic research methods in higher education involves the self in multiple layers: first, and similar to conducting ethnographic research, we are the instrument of our teaching; second, we help our students to understand themselves as the instruments of their research, and the importance of understanding, articulating, interrogating, and challenging their experiences, perspectives, positions, and assumptions. We have found the process of “joining in” to be a very effective way to gain perspectives on the self and the relationship between the self and research, as well as between the self and teaching. For example, in my recent interview study of the meanings that musicians with disabilities make of themselves and their music (Bernard 2020), I found myself confronting some of the ways that being a non-disabled ­musician-researcher gets in the way of my ability to understand deeply my participants’ meaning making. While I could connect with my respondents around music and music making

We Are, I Am, You Are: “Joining in” as a Pedagogy …

139

because I am a musician, and while I have a great deal of professional experience working with individuals with disabilities, I immediately became aware of severe limitations to my ability to gain a nuanced understanding of the experiences of musicians with disabilities. More than the mere fact that I do not identify as a person with a disability, there are numerous aspects to the disconnect between what I may be able to understand and what I can never understand about the experiences and perspectives of the participants in my research. For example, I will never understand many of the ways that the power differential between the disabled and the non-disabled plays out in our society, such as the deeply held misconceptions about disability and ability, the fixation on disability as an object of inspiration, and the fascination with—and, sometimes, the patronization of—the talent of musicians with disabilities (Bernard 2020). Because research interviews are sites of self-portrayal and identity construction on the part of the interviewee (Linde 1993), I came to think about the ways that the participants in my study portrayed themselves in their interviews with me, based on the fact that I am not disabled, and I am therefore an “outsider” in respect to this very significant aspect of their identities. I found myself listening for words that I did not hear. I specifically listened for ways that the musicians with disabilities whom I interviewed might have expressed themselves differently had I been a researcher with a disability. Reflecting on myself and the role that my being the interviewer played in this research project, I posed questions, such as: How would the participants have expressed themselves differently if I had been a researcher with a disability? What would they have felt comfortable saying to me if I had a disability, that they are not able to say to me because I do not have a disability? What shared assumptions and experiences would I have with them if I had a disability, that I can never have or understand because I do not have a disability? In what ways might they feel the need to explain—or choose to avoid explaining—themselves, their experiences, or their perspectives to a person without a disability? These questions rose to the front of my mind as I thought about the interviews I conducted with Michael, one of the participants in my recent study exploring what music means to musicians who identify as having a disability. A jazz pianist and composer with many recordings and concert tours to his credit, Michael spoke about his identity as a musician in several ways. He talked about preparing for live performances. He detailed his compositional process. He described his musical aesthetic, and the ways that it has evolved over his career. Never once in the conversation did Michael, a person who identifies as being on the autism

140

C. McKamey et al.

spectrum and having cognitive challenges, speak about his disability. It was completely absent from the discussion. Michael knew that the fact that he was participating in the study because he was a musician with a disability. When I initially recruited him for the project, I informed Michael (as I did all of the participants) that I was interested in learning from musicians with disabilities. At the outset of our interview, I read a prepared statement about my research interest. However, those were the only mentions of disability in my time with Michael. After the interview, I began to wonder about the ways that my identity as a musician who does not identify as a person with a disability influenced Michael’s responses in the interview. Would he have presented himself differently if I had a disability, too? How was my being the instrument of my work as a researcher affecting the research? What does this mean for my scholarship in this field? How can I research more effectively across this difference between my identity and that of my participants? Through the “joining in” process with Corinne and Cleti, my interpretive research community, about these issues, I developed a series of questions and prompts to help better understand my participants’ experiences. With their encouragement, I raised the issue of the differences between myself as a non-disabled person and my interviewees as individuals with disabilities and provided space for discussion before and during each interview. I also shared text about myself and the limitations that I confronted with my participants, as well as in writings and presentations about the study. In the graduate courses that I teach, as well as when I supervise Master’s theses and Doctoral dissertations, I engage my students in activities where they reflect on their subjectivity as it relates to their research topic and/or participants. My students keep regular journals, and I provide prompts, such as “how do my participants see me?”, “what do my participants and I have in common, and how are we different?”, “how might my identity, experiences, and perspectives limit the ways that I can truly understand what my participants have to say?” Together, as a class, we share our journals and “join in” with each other. By thinking about their own struggles and “thinking with” their classmates, my students begin to gain experience in examining and interrogating the instrument of their research: themselves.

6 Joining in as Flow For us, the process of “joining in,” a form of flow in research, is both pedagogy and research practice. In addition to showing how we teach “joining in” through examining a collective text, we have provided three small case studies of using

We Are, I Am, You Are: “Joining in” as a Pedagogy …

141

this process to collect data in the field, to deepen analysis through dialogue with others, and to develop reflective and subjective self understandings. The logic of “joining in” is more than a tool—it is an approach to teaching and research. This process destabilizes the idea of a single powerful professor in the room, and the single all-knowing researcher. The process of “joining in” can serve as a frame for a semester-long class. As we have shown in our case studies above, “joining in” can be used in multiple contexts and settings, including collecting data through engaging in and listening to dialogue, with analyzing data with an interpretive community, and in reflecting upon self and subjectivity. This process also provides relational opportunities for participants to make multiple perspectives, positions, and experiences visible.

References Behar, R. (1996). The vulnerable observer: Anthropology that breaks your heart. Boston: Beacon. Bernard, R. (2020). Shattering barriers: Exposing and understanding the narratives and rhetorics about musicians with disabilities. In A. DeQuadros & K. Vu (Eds.), My body was left on the street: Music education and displacement. London: Royal Holloway (in press). Bernard, R., Cervoni, C., Desir, C., & McKamey, C. (2010). “Joining in” and “knowing the I”: On becoming reflexive scholars. In W. Luttrell (Ed.), Qualitative educational research: Readings in reflexive methodology and transformative practice (pp. 485– 490). New York: Routledge. Cervoni, C., & Ivinson, G. (2011). Girls in primary school science classrooms: Theorizing beyond dominant discourses of gender. Gender and Education, 23(4), 461–475. Cervoni, C. (2014). Identity, materials and pedagogy: Girls in primary science classrooms in wales. In L. Swiniarski (Ed.), Moving forward in a global age: World class initiatives and practices in early education (pp. 67–80). New York: Springer. Corte, U., & Irwin, K. (2017). The form and flow of teaching ethnographic knowledge: Hands-on approaches for learning epistemology. Teaching Sociology, 43(3), 209–219. Davies, B. (2003). Shards of glass: Children reading and writing beyond gendered identities (pp. 9–10). Cresskill: Hampton. Denzin, N. K. (2003). Performing [auto] ethnography politically. The Review of Education, Pedagogy and Cultural Studies, 25(3), 257–278. Denzin, N. K. (2004). The art and politics of interpretation. In S. N. Hesse-Biber & P. Leavy (Eds.), Approaches to qualitative research: A reader on theory and practice (pp. 447–472). New York: Oxford University Press. Duckworth, E. (2005). Critical exploration in the classroom. The New Educator, 1(4), 257– 272.

142

C. McKamey et al.

Eisenhart, M. (2018). Changing conceptions of culture and ethnography in anthropology of education in the United States. In D. Beach, C. Bagley, & S. Da Silva (Eds.), The Wiley handbook of ethnography of education (pp. 153–172). Hoboken: Wiley. Elbow, P., & Belanoff, P. (2010). Summary of kinds of responses. In W. Luttrell (Ed.), Qualitative educational research: Readings in reflexive methodology and transformative practice (pp. 481–484). New York: Taylor & Francis. Fish, S. E. (1980). Is there a text in this class?: The authority of interpretive communities. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Freire, P. (2018). Pedagogy of the oppressed (4th ed.). New York: Bloomsbury. Garoian, C. R., & Gaudelius, Y. M. (2008). Spectacle pedagogy: Art, politics, and visual culture. New York: Suny. Geertz, C. (2008). Thick description: Toward an interpretive theory of culture. In T. Oakes & P. Price (Eds.), The cultural geography reader (pp. 41–51). New York: Routledge. Gilligan, C. (2016). In a different voice: Psychological theory and women’s development. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Greene, M. (1994). Carpe diem: The arts and school restructuring. Teachers College Record, 95, 494–507. Hammersley, M., & Atkinson, P. (2007). Ethnography: Principles in practice (pp. 1–19). New York: Routledge. Kamberelis, G., & Dimitriadis, G. (2011). Focus groups: Contingent articulations of pedagogy, politics and inquiry. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), The SAGE handbook of qualitative research (Vol. 4, pp. 545–561). Los Angeles: Sage. Linde, C. (1993). Life stories: The creation of coherence. New York: Oxford University Press. Luke, A. (2014). Defining critical literacy. In J. Zacher Pandya, & J. Avila (Eds.), Moving critical literacies forward: A new look at praxis across contexts (pp. 19–31). New York: Routledge & Taylor & Francis Group. Luttrell, W. (2003). Pregnant bodies, fertile minds. New York: Routledge. Lorde, A. (1997). Progress report. The collected poems of Audre Lorde. New York: W.W. Norton Company. Louv, R. (2008). Last child in the woods. Chapel Hill: Algonquin. Louv, R. (2012). The nature principle: Reconnecting with life in a virtual age. Chapel Hill: Algonquin. McDonald, J., & Allen, D. (2017). Tuning protocol. https://www.schoolreforminitiative. org/download/tuning-protocol/. Accesed: 26 Feb. 2020. McKamey, C. (2020). Assembling caring identities: Collage making in an undergraduate youth work course (Manuscript in preparation). McKinney, C. (2016). Language and power in post-colonial schooling: Ideologies in practice. New York: Routledge. Pyle, R. M. (2011). Thunder tree: Lessons from an urban wildland. Corvaliss: Oregon State University Press. Riessman, C. K. (2007). Narrative methods for the human sciences. Los Angeles: Sage. Rosaldo, R. (1989). Culture and truth: Renewing the anthropologist’s search for meaning. Boston: Beacon.

We Are, I Am, You Are: “Joining in” as a Pedagogy …

143

Schneier, L. (2001). Apprehending poetry. In E. Duckworth (Ed.), Tell me more: Listening to learners explain (pp. 42–78). New York: Teachers’ College Press. Sobel, D. (2008). Childhood and nature: Design principles for educators. Portland: Stenhouse. Thorne, B. (1993). Gender play: Girls and boys in school. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Weiler, K. (1991). Freire and a feminist pedagogy of difference. Harvard Educational Review, 61(4), 449–475. Wolcott, H. F. (1999). Ethnography: A way of seeing. New York: Rowman Altamira.

Innovation in Ethnographic Methods

The Problem of the Definition of the Situation in Educational Ethnography Christoph Maeder

Abstract

This paper questions the particular contribution that can be made by educational ethnography in terms of research on education in general. The definition of the situation as a concept from symbolic interactionism is proposed as a powerful framing device to understand how educational realities are constructed by actors. Understood in this way, educational settings become places where sequences of action follow a recognizable pattern of meaning. These patterns of practice are metaphorically regarded here as ‘molecules of education’. By providing such foundational tokens, it is argued that educational ethnography can contribute to educational research in an essential way because it deciphers what education does. Keywords

Interaction · Education · Social situation · Ethnomethodology · Ethnography

1 Introduction What—if anything—can educational ethnography contribute to our understanding of learning and teaching that other approaches cannot? What can be our contribution to science when, through the practice of participant observation in our C. Maeder (*)  Fachgruppe Erziehungs- Und Sozialwissenschaften, Pädagogische Hochschule Zürich, Zürich, Switzerland e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2020 C. Wieser and A. Pilch Ortega (eds.), Ethnography in Higher Education, Doing Higher Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-30381-5_9

147

148

C. Maeder

research, we always become limited to the observation of small groups of people within their local contexts? This question enters my mind whenever I start thinking about the role, the function and the possible contributions of educational ethnography.1 If we want to untangle such questions, I believe that we need to accept Sarah Delamont’s (2012) advice and first fight our own familiarity with the field of educational institutions. A familiarity with education is not only imposed on us by growing up in families in which we become educated and socialized; we also constantly acquire it through numerous years of socialization in all kinds of schools, from first grade up to university or higher vocational training. Furthermore, as researchers who usually also teach, we even belong to educational organizations as active and central participants. This creates a comprehensive, routinized, embodied and special membership knowledge of what educational institutions are and how they function. Such processes render educational institutions as taken for granted and blind us to many of their properties. Therefore, familiarity is dangerous for the educational ethnographer and can blur her or his vision substantially, as she or he might then regard the participants’ views as social scientific explanations and become the victim of a presumably hasty understanding of the field. In order to fight familiarity, we can gain a social scientific perspective through the use of social theory. Moreover, with its help we must try to achieve the status of the “professional stranger” (Agar 1996) who is capable of looking at things differently. As we all know, this is a major challenge, as falling back into our daily routines is easy. The given self-evidence of everyday life lurks everywhere and endangers our ethnographic intentions. Nevertheless, only by becoming “marginal natives” (Freilich 1977) in the field of educational institutions can we achieve a theoretically informed and empirically fruitful perspective on the creation and functioning of educational realities. The benefit of such an artificial estrangement towards education lies in the capacity to address the ‘core’ questions of education in a social-constructivist framework. Such a perspective does have an irritating power for all those who take education and its organization as a given and are perhaps only interested in its forms and/or performances, or what is loosely called ‘outcomes’. However—

1I

use the term ‘educational ethnography’ here, referring to the application of the research methods of participant observation and interviewing in the settings where education takes place. This simple categorization will suffice here, but it does not take into account differences between pedagogy and education, or specifications such as ethnography ‘in’, ‘on’ or ‘off’ educational institutions. For an elaboration on such issues, see Maeder (2018).

The Problem of the Definition of the Situation in Educational …

149

as I try to argue here—exactly such an artificially alienated and distant approach can prove productive in order to understand learning and teaching. To unfold my argument, I will ask at the start what may constitute a useful definition of an educational situation. Alternatively, one might state this the other way around: how can we distinguish an educational situation from other forms of interactional occurrences, like an interrogation or a medical interview? The question will bring me to the works of the ethnomethodologists (EM) who developed what they called the Initiation-Response-Evaluation (IRE) sequence as the constituent pattern in and for educational situations. I then add further dimensions that should also play a role in defining an educational situation. Finally, I draw my conclusions on what educational ethnography can contribute to our understanding of institutionalized educational social orders that other approaches cannot.

2 The Problem of the Definition of the Educational Situation: A Challenge for Educational Ethnography 2.1 Educational Interaction in an Interactional Perspective The idea of the definition of the social situation is classical symbolic interactionist thinking and represents a foundational concept for interpretive theories and qualitative research in general (see Blumer 1986). It originated in a study on the child in America by William and Dorothy Thomas, who argued, “[i]f men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences” (Thomas and Thomas 1928, p. 571). This sentence became a small but influential theorem that spread through the social sciences into different disciplines and schools of thought. Here I will follow the interactional track that has influenced ethnomethodology and the sociology of the interaction order (Goffman 1983). However, the definition of the situation has also influenced socio-linguistic research on speech and speech act theory (Hymes 1972), culminating in studies on classroom discourse (Cazden 2001). The last turn in the form of what is called ‘situational analysis’ (Clarke 2005) later overcame ideas concerning the definition of the situation as being strictly tied to interactions. By placing grounded theory after a postmodern turn, Clarke expanded the concept of the definition of the situation, rendering it available for meso- and macro-analyses, too. Interestingly, with the exception of

150

C. Maeder

Cazden’s work, the definition of the situation has never played a major role in educational ethnography. Nevertheless, as I will argue here, it can make a fundamental contribution to our understanding of educational practice(s) and the construction of corresponding realities. In most educational ethnographies, the definition of the educational situation is derived from a taken-for-granted perspective or a context, which is of course built into the power of the definition itself. Seen this way, if something happens in a school, university or another educational establishment, it becomes pedagogical or educational by place and institution, not by its inherent structure of action, practical logic or the aspirations attributed to it by some actors. Such an approach can yield attractive cultural descriptions and sociological analyses. However, it cannot touch upon the very basics that lie in the educational situation itself. If we want to do this, we have to use a different approach and ask for the actual and formal properties of interactional systems of education. If we look at the familiar (the classroom, the family, the bookshop, the cafeteria, etc.) in a real ethnographic way as professional strangers, then we can start asking what a pedagogical situation consists of and how this can be recognized by those who perform it. Maybe then we can find a way of tentatively generalizing our findings. The argument is that the classroom or the family as a context for such situations does not make any situation within it an educational one just because it is happening there. It is exactly the other way around in this perspective: because the people in the classroom act as educators and/or students, they are involved in the definition of a situation in the classroom as a pedagogical site. This definition of the situation can also occur in order to define a family situation or a leisure arrangement elsewhere as an educational one. Thus, the pedagogical definition of the situation that leads us to education must become discernible and observable as a form of a recurrent practice that seems natural to the participants. It is this practice that contributes to the construction of the ‘classroom’ or the family setting as educational and refers generally to instruction, learning and education. I believe that the definition of an educational social situation is important for all educational researchers, particularly those in ethnography. It can be metaphorically regarded as a kind of ‘molecule’ or basic cultural pattern for research into education and learning in general. Put the other way around: if we do not accept the common-sense notion ‘because it is happening inside a classroom it has to be pedagogical’, then we need another, more ethnographic framework to describe and analyze our fields.

The Problem of the Definition of the Situation in Educational …

151

2.2 Molecules of Educational Situations: Interaction as Instruction If we are interested in what a pedagogical situation is by action and practice, then ethnomethodology (EM) provides us with valuable terms and concepts to do so. Our observational endeavour usually starts with the famous Goffmanian question as formulated in the ‘frame analysis’, where he explains how not only ethnographers but in principle everyone must first find an answer in every social situation in which they become involved to the question “What is going on here?” (Goffman 1974, p. 16).2 When it comes to such research on educational settings, the work of Hugh Mehan (1974) in “Accomplishing classroom lessons” introduced exactly this kind of research to educational ethnography.3 We can also say that Cicourel and his coeditors long ago delivered the first template for this type of ethnographic research with their book Language Use and School Performance (1974). These authors criticized the quantitative approaches of producing only thin descriptions of the vital and complex forms of practices of education that are unfolding in everyday school life. As Cicourel et al. wrote: This means that the teacher, for example, must understand the children’s learning problems in a context that includes classroom dynamics of noise, interruptions, absences, special dialects, bilingualism and the like. Correlational measures based on traditional ‘objective tests are not adequate to handle these problems; most of these conditions are contextually based and seldom enter into the analysis of questionnaires or psychological tests…. In this study we provide a beginning in that direction. (Cicourel et al. 1974, p. 6).

Such an ethnographic attentiveness returns to the issue of how learning and schooling is lived out as a complex system of ‘doings’ within networks of interaction that are embedded in a structural context. Close observation of previous (or usually discarded as unimportant) features of everyday life provides a resource

2The main argument of Chap. 2 is taken from a text where I put the definition of the situation into the context of the sociology of knowledge (see Maeder 2018). As regards questions around teaching and learning, I see a treasure of possibilities still to be harvested for educational sciences in the sociology of knowledge (see Berger and Luckmann 1966). 3For critical acclaim and an appraisal of the classroom research of Mehan Hugh in this tradition, see Macbeth (2003). For an assessment of the importance and the contributions of this research in general, see Mehan (2012).

152

C. Maeder

for developing an understanding of the reality of education in schools. This requires, I argue, an ethnographic sensibility and an ongoing fascination with lives that are unfolding in real time and in real places. In his classic classroom study, Mehan (1974) focused on how a teacher instructed pupils to obtain factually correct and grammatically complete answers. He showed in minute detail how the instruction was given and how the outcomes of the pupils’ efforts were assessed. This simple triad of instruction, response and evaluation forms the core of the IRE abbreviation. What Mehan demonstrated was the ongoing and infinite character of negotiation regarding what was considered as complete, correct, right or wrong as well as the astonishing complexity of classroom environments and lives as illustrated in Cicourel et al.’s quotation above. This approach of having a very focused perspective in combination with an open ethnographic curiosity was at the time a very innovative way of looking at classrooms. And it paved the way for additional studies, e.g. see: Mehan and Griffin (1980); Danby and Baker (1998); Breidenstein (2007); Danby (2009). I will not discuss classroom research in depth here and I omit (for example) classics like Jackson’s (1968) Life in Classrooms, Cazden’s (2001) Classroom Discourse and debates around classroom research such as Hammersley’s (1986) Controversies in Classroom Research.4 What is crucial to note here is the scheme that Mehan introduced and used in his research through the components of initiation/instruction, reaction/response and expectation/evaluation. This later became the IRE sequence in his ethnomethodology. This sequence is regarded as a constituent element of looking at and defining a pedagogical practice when combined with observation of the ways in which the people involved negotiate meanings. Whenever we see arrangements that follow this IRE logic, in addition to negotiations of meanings, we can expect to see and analyze a kind of education in action. In order to avoid misunderstandings, it must be recognized here that IRE plus the negotiation of meaning is more than just a one-way instruction; it is the scheme of pedagogy embedded in practice. I have indicated this by using the double terms of initiation/instruction, reaction/response and expectation/evaluation. In a nutshell, the ethnomethodologists supplied educational ethnography with a handy model of the formal properties of practical social actions that we can observe as scientists interested in instruction in education. Instruction is surely

4For

an overview, see Delamont’s book (2012) All Too Familiar: A Decade of Classroom Research.

The Problem of the Definition of the Situation in Educational …

153

not all there is in education, but I reckon that it is a big part of it and that it has the definitional power to define situations through interactions. Such a concept is a solid step towards a needed basic methodological foundation for educational ethnography. It helps to recognize “understanding understanding as an instructional matter” (Macbeth 2008), which has been put on the agenda: Classroom instruction is an interactional organization, and thus a sequential one. Sequential organization is itself the on-going achievement of common understandings, and we find those achievements amply displayed in the canonical three-turn sequence of direct instruction, wherein the teacher poses a question, a student replies, and in third turn the teacher produces an assessment of the aptness or correctness of the reply (…) The very progression of instructional sequences – their interactional production and possibility – thus turns on those understandings whereby questions find answers. This question – how do classroom questions find answers – is especially compelling in the instruction of novices of whatever age (Macbeth 2008, p. 441).

3 Conclusion: The Simplicities and the Complexities of Educational Institutions I have focused on the ideas of the sequential properties of the educational interactional order (as expressed by the IRE sequence) as well as the importance of interaction as negotiation as a constituent practical foundation or scheme in order to define situations of learning and teaching. Such a basic scheme—which holds true not only in the classroom but also in general—is something that can only stem from the observation of small groups in their practical everyday life. Alternatively, stated the other way around, the IRE sequence allows us to make an essential distinction between what is considered an educational situation or practice and what is not. It yields a difference that makes a difference, as Bateson (1972) has claimed.5 Furthermore, it provides us with an observational tool for participant observation that can be applied in both formal and informal settings. Understood in this way, education and learning as phenomena transcend their contexts and become accessible for observation nearly everywhere humans interact. Such a perspective is surely an antidote against overly simplistic correlational models of educational realities that assume that education and learning happen

5Such a claim is of course not without controversy. Additionally, there is critique on different sides regarding the notion of the IRE sequence (see Macbeth 2003).

154

C. Maeder

in a very trivial way. As Cicourel et al. (1974) have claimed, learning and education is always embedded in complex local environments with material, social and even sensory aspects that themselves constitute an entity that, according to Bittner (1974), we now call a “social organization”. The social organization of education and learning in situ therefore provides a powerful starting point if we want to find about them. However, even if the IRE sequence is a constituent scheme for the production of educational situations and realities, it is surely not enough for a sound ethnographic description. Such a description must, in my opinion, be complemented by other dimensions of meaning such as asymmetries in social relations and the resulting differentials in power (e.g. Beach 2018), different degrees of capacity and competence to act (roles), the meanings of the places for the actors (e.g. Forsey 2018), the materialities of the environments (e.g. Fenwick et al. 2015), the sensory properties of the spaces (e.g. Pink 2009), the intentions and the experiences of the actors (Honer and Hitzler 2015) and more. This kind of ethnographic research then reveals the high degree of complexity that governs everyday educational interactions in classrooms and elsewhere. Moreover, it provides a formal and functional model for finding, analyzing and understanding such complex encounters in their contexts. I began my text with the question what—if anything—can educational ethnography as research on small groups through means of participant observation contribute to our understanding of learning and teaching that other approaches cannot. My answer may be condensed into the following: precise ethnographic description and analysis, even of a single classroom or informal group, can yield general and definitional observational schemes (D’Andrade 1993, p. 48 f.) that allow us to make important and relevant distinctions or differences when we are looking for or trying to track the phenomenon of education. Furthermore, just as Bateson long ago remarked when he was dealing with questions of differences as a form of knowledge, “[i]n fact, what we mean by information – the elementary unit of information – is a difference which makes a difference” (1972, p. 460). I believe that the IRE sequence as a concept manufactured by ethnographers and used as a tool to discover and examine educational realities is a ­difference-making token that can help to define the situation for education in different contexts. Moreover, I see its major contribution as being as elementary as when molecules become substances. This is an analogy with chemistry and of course it does not carry us too far. However, the analogy hints quite well at what I regard as one of the main assets of ethnographic research on education: being precise in description and systematic in analysis when doing participant observation.

The Problem of the Definition of the Situation in Educational …

155

References Agar, M. H. (1996). The professional stranger. An informal introduction to ethnography. New York: Academic. Bateson, G. (1972). Steps to an ecology of mind. Collected essays in anthropology, psychiatry, evolution, and epistemology. Northvale: Jason Aronson Inc. Beach, D. (2018). Structural injustices in Swedish education. Academic selection and educational inequalities. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Berger, P. L., & Luckmann, T. (1966). The social construction of reality. A treatise in the sociology of knowledge. London: Penguin. Bittner, E. (1974). The concept of organization. In R. Turner (Ed.), Ethnomethodology. Selected readings (pp. 69–81). Harmondsworth: Penguin. Blumer, H. (1986). Symbolic interactionism. Perspective and method. Berkeley: University of California Press. Breidenstein, G. (2007). The meaning of boredom in school lessons. Participant observation in the seventh and eighth form. Ethnography and Education, 2(1), 93–108. Cazden, C. B. (2001). Classroom discourse. The language of teaching and learning. Portsmouth: Heinemann. Cicourel, A. V., Jennings, K. H., Jennings, S. H. M., Leiter, K. C. W., MacKay, R., Mehan, H., & Roth, D. R. (Eds.). (1974). Language use and school performance. New York: Academic. Clarke, A. E. (2005). Situational analysis. Grounded theory after the postmodern turn. Thousand Oaks: SAGE. D’Andrade, R. (1993). Cognitive anthropology. In T. Schwartz, D. G. M. White, & C. A. Lutz (Eds.), New directions in psychological anthropology (pp. 47–58). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Danby, S. (2009). Childhood and social interaction in everyday life: An epilogue. Journal of Pragmatics, 41, 1596–1599. Danby, S., & Baker, C. (1998). What’s the problem? Restoring social order in the preschool classroom. In I. Hutchby & J. Moran-Ellis (Eds.), Children and social competence: Arenas of action (pp. 157–186). Oxon: Routledge. Delamont, S. (2012). All too familiar? A decade of classroom research. In S. Delamont (Ed.), Ethnographic methods in education (pp. 279–294). Los Angeles: Sage. Fenwick, T., Doyle, S., Michael, M., & Scoles, J. (2015). Matters of learning and education: Sociomaterial approaches in ethnographic research. In S. Bollig, M.-S. Honig, S. Neumann, & C. Seele (Eds.), MultiPluriTrans. Emerging fields in educational ethnography (pp. 141–162). Bielefeld & New York: transcript & Columbia University Press. Forsey, M. (2018). Educational ethnography in and for a mobile modernity. In D. Beach, C. Bagley, & S. Marques da Silva (Eds.), The Wiley handbook of ethnography of education (pp. 443–454). New York: Wiley. Freilich, M. (1977). Marginal natives at work: Anthropologists in the field. Cambridge: Schenkmann. Goffman, E. (1974). Frame analysis: An essay on the organizaiton of experience. New York: Harper Row. Goffman, E. (1983). The interaction order. American Sociological Review, 48, 1–17.

156

C. Maeder

Hammersley, M. (1986). Controversies in classroom research. London: Open University Press. Honer, A., & Hitzler, R. (2015). Life-world-analytical ethnography: A ­phenomenology-based research approach. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, Special Issue Article, 1–19. Hymes, D. (1972). Introduction. In C. B. Cazden, V. P. John, & D. Hymes (Eds.), Functions of language in the classroom (pp. xi–lvii). New York: Teachers College Press. Jackson, P. W. (1968). Life in classrooms. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston. Macbeth, D. (2003). Hugh Mehan’s learning lessons reconsidered: On the differences between naturalistic and critical analysis of classroom discourse. American Educational Research Journal, 40(1), 239–280. Macbeth, D. (2008). Understanding understanding as an instructional matter. Journal of Pragmatics, 43, 438–451. Maeder, C. (2018). What can be learnt?: Educational ethnography, the sociology of knowledge, and ethnomethodology. In D. Beach, C. Bagley, & S. Marques da Silva (Eds.), The Wiley handbook of ethnography of education (pp. 135–151). Hoboken: Wiley. Mehan, H. (1974). Accomplishing classroom lessons. In A. V. Cicourel, K. H. Jennings, S. H. M. Jennings, K. C. W. Leiter, R. MacKay, H. Mehan, & D. R. Roth (Eds.), Language use and school performance (pp. 76–142). New York: Academic. Mehan, H. (2012). Understanding inequality in schools: The contribution of interpretive studies. In S. Delamont (Ed.), Ethnographic methods in education (pp. 87–113). Los Angeles: Sage. Mehan, H., & Griffin, P. (1980). Socialization: The view from classroom interactions. Sociological Inquiry: Special Edition on Language and Social Interaction, 50(3–4), 357– 392. Pink, S. (2009). Doing sensory ethnography. London: SAGE . Thomas, W. I., & Thomas, D. S. (1928). The child in America. Behavior, problems and programs. New York: Knopf.

An Ethnographer Lured into Darkness Ned Barker

Abstract

No matter the combination of methods ethnographers bring to their research design and to participant observation, our pursuit to log, interpret, analyse and present the lives of those we meet is never an entirely intellectual or objective one. Ethnographic fieldwork is intimately sensory (Pink, Doing sensory ethnography, Sage, London, 2015), invokes our imagination (Sparkes, Qualitative research in sport and exercise, 1:21–35, 2009) and requires us to actively navigate social landscapes (Hammersley and Atkinson, Field relations. Ethnography: Principles in practice, Routledge, Stoodleigh, 2007). There is a tendency for these elements to fade in terms of visibility and immediacy within the research process. For those in accord with (Davies, Reflexive ethnography: A guide to researching selves and others, Routledge, New York, 2008), continuous reflexive labour becomes a core praxis to monitor the ways we observe and participate in this textured environment. Without this, we are left in the dark and are less able to see how we can (or should) respond to the nitty–gritty qualitative nature of ethnography. In this Chapter, two of methodological vignettes will act as entry points to unpack a set of tensions that commanded my attention during an eighteen months ethnography in Higher Education. ‘You Look Like an Ivory Tower Student’, for example, begins to troubleshoot ethnographic participation within educational environments. ‘Going Dark’, on the other hand, problematises the prioritisation of visual observations that are implicit in

N. Barker (*)  School of Education, University of Lincoln, Lincoln, UK e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2020 C. Wieser and A. Pilch Ortega (eds.), Ethnography in Higher Education, Doing Higher Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-30381-5_10

157

158

N. Barker

ethnographic tradition. Throughout these discussions a metaphor of being lured into darkness is offered as a productive orientation for ethnography. Keywords

Sensory ethnography · Darkness · Examples of reflexivity · Performing arts

1 Setting the Scene “Taste, sight, sound, touch, smell, heat, body awareness, pain, anger, frustration, balance, weight, scope, acceleration, logic, instinct, hunger, belief. The senses we engage with when we conduct fieldwork are nodal points between our ethnographic environments and us. Through them, we become ethnographers. Through them, our bodies become our research instrument” (Choy et al. 2009, p. 201).

How much of the environment and our senses do ethnographers habitually engage with when their bodies are engaged in participant observation? An ethnographer lured into darkness is a somewhat accurate way to represent my experiences of doing doctoral research whilst at the same time offering a metaphor for productively navigating the challenges implied by this question. This Chapter is therefore tasked with mapping out, and reflecting upon, some of the key elements of this process with a complimentary view to shine a light on methodological tensions that arose when doing educational ethnography. In this introductory section the scene is set in terms of contextualising the origins of the research because this history cannot be detached from how the ethnography was conducted, and the contributions drawn from it. This leads into the a priori methodological refinements that aimed to account for the range of senses that I would attend to during the research. To do this guidance is drawn from sensory ethnography (Pink 2015), the Performing Arts (PAs), and embodiment scholarship more generally. Two selected excerpts from my reflexive diary entries will then be retold with a view to unpack broader methodological considerations pertinent to educational ethnography. The intention is that these methodological vignettes may act as provocations, bringing to the fore tensions and possibilities of being lured into darkness whilst doing participant observation. Before writing the proposal for my PhD research (Barker 2018) I had never been particularly interested in the PAs. I knew very little about what it consisted of or what performing artists did, felt, or desired and so on. This does not mean, however, as an embodied being who is situated within wider cultures, I had no

An Ethnographer Lured into Darkness

159

presumptions or insights that would unavoidably penetrate the ethnographic process. For example, applying a Bourdieusian lens (1993), I had a sense of my tastes as a consumer of admittedly bland/mainstream film and television et cetera. In most measurable ways I was (and remain) an outsider, far removed from inner circles and avant-garde practices. Despite this position I vividly remember a strong sense that these educational fields would occupy my attention for the foreseeable. The proposal was to set in motion an 18-month multi-sited ethnography (see Marcus 1999; Pierides 2010) where I followed PA students during their transitions into, and through, Higher Education (HE). The confines of the (neoliberal) academy necessitated that, in part, my decision to focus on the above was also built upon rationales that stood a chance of attracting funding. Building a case within the competitive climate, where ethnographers must sell their value, I became strategically aware that proposing to study the transitional experiences of PA students would have the potential to produce timely contributions to educational issues that have high import for social justice. Previous research has identified that: progression rates for PA students through education and into employment are worrying low (Basis 2011); the sector is unequally stratified along lines of class, gender, age, location and race (Creative SkillSet 2012); and the PAs comprised a significant section of a fast-growing form of vocational education in the UK (BTEC qualifications). This oversupply of graduates will inevitably continue to congest an already crowded pipeline into the intended labour markets. Many converging factors such as these, and others, accumulate to a degree where according to Oakley (2009) the industry has been characterised by an almost unparalleled level of precarity. Admittedly however, there were less strategic but far more powerful influences that underpinned the genesis of this research. The underlying contributory factors were entangled with my imagination of doing, and producing, ethnography. This included a range of senses that are difficult to articulate. Approximately, the lure of the PAs originated from its novelty to me where the immaterial, aesthetic, and performative nature of artistic labour represented some sort of mystical land to explore.1 No doubt this fed into a vague anticipation that to study this terrain

1Indeed,

the earliest anthropological/colonial missions, through which the practice of ethnography was formed, was predicated on a desire of the researcher to step beyond their native customs and better understand new exotic pastures (Davies 2008). This might be less common or even possible within educational ethnography nowadays for a number of reasons (Hammersley 2017). Whilst I guard against nostalgic visions of these early anthropological expeditions and repel the way in which they ingrained a damaging ‘ethics of the other’, I retain that there was, for me, a deeply embodied attractiveness to step into an unknown.

160

N. Barker

might nourish my forming theoretical and ethnographic appetites. These appetites were developing through my interest with ‘embodied sociology’ as Shilling (2008) coined it, a personal/political concern for social justice in education and society and being drawn to narrative forms of representation in ethnography (see Maanen 2011). Reflecting back on this time, I feel that my expanding commitments and curiosities, in conversation with memorable references to the PAs in the theoretical literature that I was engaged (e.g. Bourdieu 1993; Williams and Bendelow 1998), guided me to this topic more so than the rationales cited in my funding application. More importantly, these senses and feelings informed the type of ethnography I aspired to do. It was the complex fusion of these embodied instincts that led me to actively pre-formulate a particular set of methodological orientations: 1. Working from the recognition that the ethnographers’ body is the research instrument (Hammersley and Atkinson 2007) it was “especially important [for me] to incorporate into ethnographic works the sensuous body – it smells, tastes, textures, and sensations” (Stoller 1997, p. xv). This lead me design and conduct a research project that was at its core a sensory ethnography (Pink 2015). 2. Whilst I was attracted to narrative forms of representation, keeping in line with the realist traditions of ethnography (Hammersley 1992). I wanted to place value on sustained attempts to depict phenomena as accurately as possible. Furthermore, on a theoretical level my framework was influenced by Shilling’s (2005, 2008, 2012) corporeal realism that takes the body as the main unit of sociological analysis. Therefore, the narratives of transition I produced, that foregrounded the embodied student, were to be ‘based on a true story’. 3. In order to capture rich data pertaining to the embodiment of the students it was vital that a range of methods complemented participant observation such as: interviews, videographic recordings, audio recordings and artefact collection. Visual methods (e.g. Degerbøl and Nielsen 2015; Phoenix 2010) became a productive and disruptive resource when documenting movement, aesthetics, and audiovisual landscapes. In relation to this, and adhering to Pink’s (2015) advice on being flexible when doing sensory ethnography, the cluster of techniques that I would employ emerged in response to the field. 4. Student ‘transitions’, by definition, cannot be confined to neat spatiotemporal boundaries (Colley 2007) and as such I needed to be mobile enough to follow the object of study, students-in-transition, across multiple sites. This required a multi-sited ethnography that is necessary to “follow the people; follow the thing; follow the metaphor; follow the plot, story or analogy; follow the life

An Ethnographer Lured into Darkness

161

or biography” (Pierides 2010, p. 186). And whilst this might reconfigure the traditional boundaries of ethnographic sites it was an obvious requirement to understanding transition because it “makes it possible to take into account the world that is on the move” (ibib, p. 187). Reflecting upon the genesis of this project, in some detail, frames this Chapter because educational ethnographers seldom acknowledge, with real-life examples, the role of these senses in the research process, from its inception to dissemination. Against this backdrop, the primary purpose of this Chapter was to set the scene by stimulating reflections on how senses, like these (that are inclusive of ‘feelings’, ‘opinions’, ‘presumptions’, ‘expectations’, ‘prejudices’ and so on), penetrate every part of the ethnographic process—in preparing to enter the field, arriving and responding to the environment. Indeed, it is not new to acknowledge that ethnographers, equipped with their living bodies as instruments of data collection and analysis, cannot ‘turn off’ certain senses or feelings, nor can they turn on others (see for example Pink 2015; Choy et al. 2016). Instead of remaking this obvious case, this Chapter seeks to explicate the role of the senses in this research, mostly in relation to a sense of darkness, while retelling a reflexive journey through which I sought to ‘productively harness’ the murky dynamics of doing fieldwork and being an ethnographer in the pursuit of novel/needed insights. To refine and illustrate this central aim, communicating further some of the methodological paths trodden in this study, the next section begins to map out the wide net that was cast around the senses within this ethnography. Following this, two selected excerpts from my reflexive diary entries will be retold with a view to unpack broader methodological considerations, and orientations, that are pertinent to ethnography in HE and beyond. Finally, the discussion is concluded through an invitation to productively harness a full spectrum of senses and become an ethnographer lured into darkness.

2 Sensing the Scene, Feeling our Way Traditionally much of ethnography has been based upon the ethnographers’ vision and hearing (Hockey and Forsey 2012). The hegemony of focusing on audiovisual landscapes when ‘in the field’ has pushed other senses to the margins. Under the auspices of sensory ethnography (Pink 2015), and sensory scholarship and more broadly (Stoller 1997), much progress has already been made to rebalance the privileges of sight and sound. Effort to redress sensory imbalances in research has

162

N. Barker

resulted in innovative cross fertilisations of methodological approaches, for example, bringing multimodality into fruitful dialogue with sensory ethnography (e.g. Jewitt and Leder Mackley 2019). New approaches geared towards sensing social scenes calls for ways of doing ethnography that do not limit our awareness to the five sense model (sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch) that dominates western thought (Pink 2015; Sparkes 2009). The selected vignettes unpacked in this Chapter seek to illustrate that for ethnographers this quest is as much about developing sensitising orientations, through reflexivity and praxis, as it is about innovating methods. Drawing heavily Pink’s (2015) seminal accounts on Doing Sensory Ethnography it is clear that researchers must seek to expand what senses they open themselves up to, and sit with, during their reflexive practice. In this expansion we must not stop after accommodating proprioception, balance, pain, temperature, hunger and other biophysical sensations. We must also increase our awareness of other senses, because as Morris (2017) eloquently stated sensation is more than biology interacting with environment, it is a social process. There are many scholarly traditions from which to capture, examine, and represent these senses from psychoanalytical thought to affect theory. For me, Bourdieu’s (1977) notion of the social body contained a useful starting point from which to elaborate upon dominant categories of the senses, where all embodied actors, including educational ethnographers, have, “tastes and distastes, […] compulsions and repulsions, with, in a word, all its senses, that is to say not only the traditional five senses… but also the sense of necessity and the sense of duty, the sense of direction and the sense of reality, the sense of balance and the sense of beauty … and so on.” (original emphasis, p. 124)

For the purpose of the reflections foregrounded in this Chapter I would add that it is ethnographic duty to consider and calibrate our sense of darkness—a sense that will be show to take both metaphorical and actual forms. In probing and articulating rich ethnographic encounters a phenomenological approach provided an anchor for exploring the multifaceted ways in which a sense of darkness appeared during the research. Phenomenology is an approach that is central to sensory ethnography (Pink 2015), can be found at the core of Bourdieu’s formation of the body (Bourdieu 1977), and is compatible with Shilling’s CR in so far as it allows for sociological descriptions of the experiential dimensions of the body. Whist this view of the body leaves potential sites of reflection intentionally open, there are some defined edges to the net I cast over the senses. With the sole task of collecting and processing the empirical world ethnographers would be

An Ethnographer Lured into Darkness

163

advised to stop short of attuning oneself to extrasensory perceptions in the way that has been popularised in the 1999 film, The Sixth Sense. The mystic/magical/spiritual ‘sixth sense’ is of little relevance to realist commitments on which ethnography has been built (Hammersley 1992). What is relevant, however, are the internal (embodied) and external (environmental) landscapes that engulf every aspect of the research process. In precise terms then, ethnographers sense the scene(s) through interplay between their embodiment, the material surroundings and other bodies.2 Making sense of these senses is no easy task. Recasting the role of the senses, to encompass what is ‘other’ to categorisable sensation, during the life of ethnography is an attempt to distance oneself from the sensory bias entrenched in the western model. It is a recognition that even before entering the site we have senses of ‘what it is like’, and these are important to reflect upon. Indeed, these senses are likely to be informed by patchwork of anecdotal and unreliable sources. These senses, left unchecked, will tacitly shape the research design even before framing our participation in, and observations of, that community. The danger is that ‘realist accounts’ of the field will become distorted in ways that damage the contribution of the ethnography. Reflexivity is held up as the tool to account for and mediate these biases (Hammersley and Atkinson 2007; Davies 2008; Pink 2015). It would however be naïve to ever assume that these senses can be rendered irrelevant to data collection, analysis and indeed research design (Hammersley 1992). The argument here is not that ethnographers are neglectful of their reflexive duties, rather, an ethnographer’s craft can better make visible very intimate/complex/nuanced expressions of the ways in which a myriad of senses shaped their research. After establishing some abstract conceptual and methodological anchors, such as those outlined thus far, the next significant step in the research process is when the researcher strides into the field and meets their participants. New senses are added in during this empirical encounter yet it would be incorrect to perceive this as a completely separate and distinct phase of the research because as Geurts (2004) understood, “we do not enter the field, after all, having left our bodies at home” (ibid., p. 368); it is through our lived bodies where the past, the unfolding present and anticipations of the future are connected (1962). In following my

2This

recognition has additional millage beyond typical theoretical grounds for sensory and embodied scholarship that is usually heavily influenced by phenomenology. For example, Latour (2005) suggested that ‘the social’ only becomes visible when associations are being made (by humans). The full repertoire of these connections pass through the sensory domain outlined here, inclusive of the other senses.

164

N. Barker

body into the field the forthcoming vignette is taken from diary entries during one of my first days visiting the HE site for the study. The remainder of this Chapter is dedicated to very early moments in my fieldwork where, through the act of reflexivity, the methodological orientations already outlined moved from the abstract to the real. Abundant methodological and ethical tensions arose from this process against which productive pathways forward were discovered.

3 Entering the Scene: Plotting Movements towards Participation A researcher must physically enter a site (except perhaps in digital ethnography) in order to become an active participant and surely first impressions count in ethnography as they do in other socially situated endeavours. It is conceivable that the legacy of the encounter will go toward setting the limits and possibilities for participation within that context. This is not to say that by getting this meeting ‘wrong’ brings about irreversible damage to future participation, impression management as Goffman (1968) showed us is a continuous activity that infuses any social scene. Likewise getting it ‘right’ will not necessarily result in conducive field relations because maintaining these is a continual and complex task (Hammersley and Atkinson 2007). Instead the contention is that through first contact with the participants impressions are made, barriers can be established, and the positionality of the researcher becomes more than just an abstract concept. As soon as a fieldworker enters the site the concept of positionality becomes something that needs to be navigated in situ. But how do ethnographers do this? An answer is by ‘feel’ and (hopefully) through reflexivity. The methodological vignette that follows is taken from my forth visit to City University to introduce myself, and my research, to a new group of first year BA (Hons) PA students. From contentious beginnings over time I was able to establish enough of a rapport with this group that made more ethnographically productive forms of participation possible. “You look like an Ivory Tower Student”. 2nd of October 2014: Having mulled over the previous day’s fieldwork I awoke this morning with a subtly revised approach. Dark colours and chequered shirts seemed to be a very common clothing choice for the students I met yesterday. So, opening up my wardrobe I gravitated towards a black/white checkered shirt—one that I seldom wear. Today I will make strides towards becoming an insider I thought as I buttoned up my shirt.

An Ethnographer Lured into Darkness

165

I feel comfortable yet different as I jump onto the early morning train, coffee in hand. On one level I think that my appearance is authentic; these are my clothes, they fit my body, they have my smell. The shirt even has a signature coffee stain, as so many of my possessions do. Equally, however, I notice a sense of anxiety that this choice of clothing may be nothing more than an attempt to camouflage my researcher identity. I record these ethical tensions in my diary: ‘is presenting myself in this way merely a fabrication to exploit rich data? is this a soft method of misleading participants moving towards a covert and unethical operation? The sense of unease had not evaporated as I stepped off the train to make my way to ‘the hut’ where I am to meet a new group of PA students. I arrive early and wait outside. I strike up casual conversation with a student (who coincidently also came on the same train) and ‘the technician’ George (who is having a quick smoke before the students arrive). After a while, around six animated young adults turn into the street—they are laughing, nudging each other, and talking loudly. So buoyant are the bunch that George commented jokingly “they look like some young eager PA students!” The moment the group get into range the girl in the centre of the group, Gabby, asks if they are allowed in yet —“not yet there is a class going on at the moment” replies George. Acknowledging this, the group stop in the road and continue their animated conversations. We go back to ours. Unexpectedly, a large male student calls out to me directly “what course are you doing?” A sense of unease sharply returned as I explain clearly “I am actually a researcher …” providing the crowd with an exhaustive explanation of my presence here and other important information. Instantly I became the centre of everyone’s attention. I am aware however that, for now at least, there is little interest in the nature of the research and their possible roles within it. Instead students are looking at me analysing what they see. Responding to me introducing myself as ‘a researcher’ the large male student said, “Ahh, I thought as much when I saw you. You look too posh to be a student here”. In agreement another girl added “Yeah I was thinking that you look like an Ivory Tower Student3”. I notice a few nods of agreement. Despite conscious efforts to work towards becoming and ‘insider’, I was clearly ill-prepared, there were aspects of my identity and appearance that stood out from the crowd. There were bodily signs that could not cover up my difference, or the

3Ivory

Tower was a highly prestigious Russell Group University within miles of this site, City University.

166

N. Barker

attempts to do so were amateurish. There is little new about students questioning the researcher’s presence in educational ethnography, yet what this encounter demonstrates is that entering a site can be an intense social moment with heightened scrutiny. Reflecting upon this event I realised that I had been forewarned of this likelihood by Jachyra et al. (2015) when the lead author entered the field to a student abruptly questioning, “who are you, and what are you doing here?” (ibid., p. 242). I over confidently had a sense that this would not happen to me within this HE environment however, because of my comparable age and calculated efforts to blend in. This moment, along with others, ruptured what I thought I knew about the PAs world and my presence within it as an ethnographer. Moreover, the suspicion of my presence speaks to a broader notion of positioning oneself within the field and navigating the insider–outsider dynamics of our methodology. These have long been reflected in educational ethnography. Nevertheless, this reflection highlights one way in which I was feeling around in the dark in my attempts to actively navigate the social environment. In this encounter there are also indications that the participants were momentarily in the dark and perhaps left in the shadows in relation to my presence and motivations, and while this might not necessarily be unethical or problematic in this case, it highlights an important area to become sensitive to when managing productive and ethical field relations. Reflecting on moments like this is vital in casting new light over the field and for feeing how to participate moving forward. As made apparent in this section, during the nitty–gritty unfolding of ethnographic encounters the researcher can never be in full control of the nature and effects of their participation. This first encounter makes explicit some of these tensions while bringing into focus my limited agency that continued to varying degrees throughout the research. These intricacies provided a constant thread to reflect upon. It was, however, rare to receive direct and explicit feedback from the participants on my participatory status. Therefore, for the most part, these reflections frequently slipped into the domain of the senses. Although my ability to subtly alter my personal appearance (amongst other aspects of impression management) was inadequate at the beginning and beyond my control, over time my dexterity in sensing my way through these moments improved. My reflexive quest allowed me to respond, in action, and position myself within the physical and social milieu to better effect. To get ‘closer to the action’, or in other words to leave less of the field in darkness. The ethical, practical and social terrain exposed within this short narrative only begin to map out the complexities of ethnographic participation—in this case specifically within HE. There is little room here to elaborate further (for a richer account see Barker 2018). And whilst all ethnography, particularly in HE

An Ethnographer Lured into Darkness

167

is bounded by limits to participation,4 the argument made here is that it becomes increasingly difficult to actively navigate social landscapes without attending to this sense of participation. Because participation and observation are coupled together in the activity of ‘being there’ (Pink 2015) any sense of participation is conjoined with what one can see; in doing so framing how the ethnographers’ body observes, regardless of whether their surroundings are cast in ocular light or dark.

4 Being Lured: A Rejection of Night Vision Ethnography ‘Going Dark’. 22nd October 2014: The educational environments that I have become used to tend to be flooded with artificial lighting. When in the field (across the multiple sites) where these PA students were being educated, I frequently found myself plunged into darkness, or into an estrange assortment of colours. Architecturally speaking, the main rooms had no natural lighting. Other rooms that were used had thick blackout material that could be drawn to stop light from entering through the windows. Someone would always shout “going dark”, as is the custom, before the house lights were switched off. It would become so black that even faint silhouettes would disappear—our eyes would be rendered useless.5 While this is normal and expected practice for the students, it was strange and unfamiliar ethnographic territory to me. How do I collect data? More fundamentally what does data consist of? I can’t see what is going on. I cannot be sure who is talking, and who they are talking to; my senses are impaired; my window into the field diminished; my fieldnotes unconfident. But just because I can’t see what is going on doesn’t mean that nothing noteworthy is happening.

4Clear

examples of this include: a researcher will never have the same stakes invested in the activities; and ethically it is problematic to participate in group work that funnels towards formal assessments. 5Typically our eyes have approximately 126 million light sensitive cells but this means little during a blackout. Given the correct architecture and elimination of background artificial lighting (e.g. fire escape routes, mobile screen phones and so on) it seems impossible to see others, even as silhouettes. It is also true that when a room is full of bodies there can never no light at all because human bodies emit light. Bodies however shine at a level far below visual perception—yet a portion developed through this Chapter is that if one observes closely (with all their senses) they will not be blind.

168

N. Barker

Darkness certainly raises difficulties for traditional emphasises implicit within “classic participant observation” (Pink 2015, p. 95). In these scenarios the visual environment was manipulated to literally show the social scene in a different light. There would often be dark spaces for students to retreat to, outside of my visual awareness. But also lighting could act as a frame, providing a centre for my attention to naturally fall. More than this, ‘moods’ or ‘atmospheres’ (as the students in City University described it) were created. These were central to the learning experiences and social dynamics that unfolded in that space. My sense is that these should be taken seriously in my methodological reflections, the holistic landscapes that are created/manipulated/distorted surely mean something to the participants artistic imaginary. As a response to lighting conditions my awareness to ‘soundscapes’ and other senses were enhanced. Just for a moment, the movement of a curtain, the tone of a voice, the positioning of an object, and the feeling of the cold all became meaningful sensory dimensions that added to the landscape of experience. Whilst these awarenesses slipped away like any thought or imagination, remnants will remain in these ethnographic reflections. What remains, documented here in my growing fieldnotes, is an awareness that the learning environment is a rich and layered landscape despite often appearing empty and dark. Recently I have begun to take these awarenesses that do not rely exclusively on sight, into other settings where the artificial lights shone bright. In fact on occasions, I have found myself closing my eyes to help me see. Continuing to reflect on the ethnography long after it was ‘completed’ I shared this vignette at a research seminar. As we discussed this reflection, a colleague from Science Education offered a simple and eloquent solution, “why didn’t you use night vision goggles so that at least you can see what was going on?”. Notwithstanding, clear ethical obstacles to watching students in moments when they might be less aware of being visible there is an obvious appeal to this. On a visual plane this neatly overcomes the problem of darkness and increases potentials for accurate observations within this environment. Whilst there might be benefits in exploring the dark with technological aid there are drawbacks. At least two problems with this approach devalue the proposed methodology of ‘night vision ethnography’. In elaborating upon these rejections my orientations and senses towards fieldwork are refined. The first problem is epistemological in nature and is based on the risk of deforming sensory realism. Therefore, in doing so moving enterprises away from reasonable aspirations that ethnographers (Pink 2015) and PAs alike (Garner 2007) might hold dear. This criticism reduces down to the artificial way in which

An Ethnographer Lured into Darkness

169

night vision goggles propose to explore darkness. It is incontestable that the ethnographers’ eye, that is incorporated into their living bodies, is in many ways a limited instrument. For example, the human eye can only perceive a small range of wave lengths (400–700 nm) and this data is ‘stored’ unreliably in memory and not in incorruptible digital repositories. Considering this, it is easy to contrast the ethnographer’s body in inferior terms to the accuracy and functionality of technologies at their disposal. But it would be a mistake to place too much value in technological solutions, especially in night vision goggles as a portal into darkness. A nuanced critique of videographic methods in sensory ethnography can be applied to flesh out the basis for skepticism and ultimately rejection. Degerbøl et al. (2015) understood that whist there are obvious benefits in taking visual recordings during fieldwork, watching the film back always ‘felt different’ not least because “some impressions simply cannot be captured with the camera, such as temperature, odours and atmosphere” (ibid., p. 65). Following this logic, in the case of the proposed night vision ethnography the technological intervention would not actually increase what is observable unproblematically, without sensory bias or distortion. Not only would tensions arise due to the restrictive capacities of the device, more so, it would afford the ethnographer experiences that distance them from those of participants. The argument here is not that capturing visual landscapes through various technological methods cannot be useful in sensory ethnography only that we must recognise that they are prone to distort sensory realities. Further to this point, there are advantages of human sensory capacities to access these otherwise dark spaces. Living bodies unlike robots, and other technologies, have advanced active sensing capabilities. Lepora (2018) recognised that this is a major challenge for even the most advanced automata stating that the difference is “we do more than touch, we feel. We do not just see, we look … we do more than hear, we listen” (ibid., p. 154). The activeness of the ethnographers’ senses are a source of potential and production rather than a feature that sabotages efforts to gain ‘realist’ accounts. These active qualities connect biophysical inputs with the other senses (as previously outlined) in the operationalisation of the ethnographic gaze (Kakavoulia 2008). This highly active, if not always consciously focused, gaze involves looking through useful lenses and exercising academic freedom to explore our surrounding with intent, scrutiny, creativity and integrity. Practically speaking however when confronted with a very visual type of darkness, like discussed in the above vignette, there are two options: (1) pause to write up fieldnotes, listen to what you hear, and record what you feel; or (2) step into the darkness.

170

N. Barker

Both actions have merit. The second, however, is not just a matter of being there,6 a notion that overlays ‘classic’ participant observation within sensory ethnography (Pink 2015). It reflects an orientation of not being satisfied of being where you are, but of being lured into the unknown—a metaphor that is stretchable beyond this visualist analysis. Similarly, it represents a mobile dynamic to Sparkes’ (2009) advocation of ‘deep listening’ to soundscapes in symphony with other sensorium rather than just jotting down audible exchanges. A luring of the ethnographers’ body into darkness is predicated on a liminal active–passive embodied orientation towards exploring the field. It involves a dualist interplay of seeking lures (searching out something to ‘observe’ and ‘analyse’) and being lured (being drawn to something through embodied senses). In the endeavour the researchers’ activeness is not disembodied, controlled by a rational and separate mind, nor is it dismissive of the limited agencies afforded to the emplaced ethnographer (as previously illustrated). It therefore requires attentiveness to all of the senses, not just those dominant in Western enlightenment, in all phases of the ethnographic process whether in-situ or in-reflection. For me its value was claimed as a productive avenue to navigate the times where I, too often, had a sense of tension at being a moth to the flame or becoming a shadow in the dark during participant observation. Committed as I was to sensory ethnography, the reflexive journeys shared in this Chapter, begin to demonstrate the ease in which ethnographic accounts inevitably centre on a very small cross-section of the audiovisual possibilities. It is too natural to be drawn to what is loudest, most visible, closest or speaks with clarity to our sensibilities and gaze. A marked orientation to explore unseen/unseeable worlds began when confronted by visual darkness but spread out in other aspects of my practice. In the context of this ethnography, at least, I argue that being lured into darkness was far more aligned to (sensory) realist commitments than what night vision goggles could ever afford. The productive potentials of being lured into darkness start to appear against these criteria. The second objection does not derive from these epistemological and methodological concerns but it is not unrelated. Opposition can be mounted from a

6Being

there resonates with the concept of presence that has become a focus for many contemporary artists and ethnographers alike. In discussing “the presence not the absence of the ethnographer” Stoller (1997) argued that “ethnographers open themselves up to others and absorb their worlds.” (p. 23). Also, presence was a powerful guiding concept for at least one student, Gabby, who in interviews was keen to teach me about Rodenburg’s ‘three circles of presence’ and how this is key to unlocking her potential as a PA.

An Ethnographer Lured into Darkness

171

sense of malnutrition with the current diet of educational ethnography that we prepare and digest. Sight is the sense of science (Welton 2007); indeed, it is often through measurable visual observations that our empirical knowledge of the world is constructed (1962). Not surprisingly then the visual dominates what is published/publishable in educational research. Ethnography is not exempt from a skewing of the senses, as noted by Hockey and Forsey’s (2012) statement that “observation is usually meant as a cover-all term for much of what is sensed in the field … but the visual so dominates Western thought that it neglects the other senses to a lower value, filtering their representations through a visualise framework” (pp. 71–72).7 Sensory ethnographic approaches enlarge this critique. For example, Morris’s (2017) study of visual impairment in education illustrated the primacy of sight in modern culture and normative educational environments. This critique is extended still further through autoethnographic accounts of dark spaces where Edensor (2013) understood that in research darkness has “been sidelined in the quest for bright space” (p. 443). In contrast to much of educational and ethnographic research, the PAs has been shaped through a long and rich history of working in, with, and through darkness, in both physical and dramaturgical spaces (see Palmer 2017). It is not surprising then that I had the sense that to neglect unlit spaces would have been a detriment to this ethnography. I found that darkness was often, in reality, bursting with activity and meaning. Further to this, the metaphor being lured into darkness became more productive when extended beyond the exploration of audial and visual blindspots—encapsulated in this vignette through the question ‘what does data consist of?’. Returning to this question throughout the ethnography I became evermore sensitive to the tangibility of both loud and quiet data. The former were things and conditions that grabbed my attention whereas the later consisted of easily observable encounters that failed to grip me in an immediate way. Furthermore, there were abundant data to organise within a five-sense model, but there were also equally plentiful sources of data that could not be accounted for with reference to these categories. I found whist these experiences or phenomena did not appear in categorisable forms, they could be logged under, and accessed through, the other senses.

7Howes

and Classen (2013) attribute this to scholastic traditions that build upon the enlight-enment of Western rationality. This, they argue, has seen researchers taking artefacts and placing them in museums of ethnography, suspending them for visual gaze in the light of the gallery.

172

N. Barker

To bring this Chapter to a conclusion I continue to draw inspiration directly from the field to lay down some guiding lights into darkness. To do this, three concepts derived from the PAs are offered: dark matter (Sofer 2013); blank spaces (Zarrilli 2007); and seeing nothing (Welton 2007). Two of these continue to flesh out what darkness might consist of in both metaphorical and actual manifestations. The third starts to bridge these ideas with ethnographic orientations. Afterall, Jewitt et al. (2017) documented a range of productive outcomes when arts-based methods and sensibilities are appropriated into the social sciences.

5 Going Dark: Some Guidance for Ethnographers “Dark matter is, quite literally, the secret ingredient whose mass holds our visible world together, although scientists do not yet know what it is” (Sofer 2013, p. 3).

The scientific concept of dark matter, a non-luminous and unobservable substance that might constitute somewhere between 80 and 95% of the universe, inspired Sofer (2013) to investigate the ‘invisible presence’ of things that are ‘not there’ but ‘not not there’ in theatre. Attempting to trace or plot the dark matter of ethnographic spaces might act as a productive probe in accounting for those important forces that are hard to see/grasp/make sense of. An interest in dark matter involves imaginative sensory commitments to shine light on invisible matters framing them as potential resources in (social) performances. There is, however, more to going dark than being lured by this concept of darkness. Blank spaces are those that sensory voids often characterised by a perceived nothingness (e.g. silence, white noise, black/white space) but actually constitute theatrical form, “thereby creating the possibility of experience and meaning for the audience” (Zarrilli 2007, p. 47). Being inquisitive of blank spaces therefore rests on an understanding that, for example, stories are told as much as they are by silence as they are by speech. There are methodological potentials on every sensory plane here, because, where there is an absence a presence (of meaning and experience) can emerge. When gazing at blank spaces the ethnographer is straining to become familiar with textures of absence that are relational to the substances of observable ‘data’. To engage with both forms of darkness requires new ways of doing and seeing.

An Ethnographer Lured into Darkness

173

Welton’s (2007) experiences of seeing nothing took form through his autoethnographic reflections of spectating a ‘theatre in the dark’ performance.8 Theatre in the dark represents just one avant-guard experimental movement in the PAs that has been offered as an antithesis to modernist conventions of casting stories in light (Palmer 2017). As a member of the audience, Welton (2007) felt that this experiment was powerfully disruptive on a number of levels. On one level, the removal of sight had the effect of manipulating distance and intimacy, bringing objects, stories, and people close or further away. On another, it heightened his sensory experiences redressing the dominance of sight whilst also invoking a sense of fear, imagination and strangeness. There are clear productive ethnographic opportunities for stepping into the blackness that “is so strange, so unpredictable” (p. 148) because strangeness, especially in familiarity, is often cited as a critical resource to our methodology; actively seeing nothing is one way to arrive in unfamiliar and baffling territories. In my ethnography one way I experimented to this end was ‘to close my eyes to help me see’. For these reasons, when plunged into darkness Welton maintained that “seeing nothing is still to some extent seeing” (2018, p. 150), it is not a lack of, but a different type of, vision. Insights such as these from the PAs add to the reflexive vignettes shared in this Chapter to illustrate the productive value of being lured into darkness for ethnographers in HE and beyond.

References Barker, E. (2018). Bodies-in-transition: An ethnography of the opportunities and constraints of BTEC performing arts students (University of East Anglia). https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/67800/1/PhD_Thesis_Edmund_Barker_-_100033037.pdf. Accessed: 23. Apr. 2020. Basis. (2011). BTEC progression stage II survey. Final Research Report. Bourdieu, P. (1977). Outline of a theory of practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bourdieu, P. (1993). The field of cultural production. Oxford: Polity. Choy, T., Lieba, F., Hathaway, M., Satsuka, S., & Tsing, A. (2009). Strong collaboration as a method for multi-dited ethnography: On mycorrhizal relations. In M. Fanzon (Ed.),

8An

excerpt of Welton’s experiences: “The actors move us. At some point I feel someone brush my shoulder, and the effect is chilling. Far from feeling safe, cocooned in the darkness, I suddenly feel afraid. I am now conscious not just of the soundscapes, or the unfolding story, but also the extent to which we are surrounded by action” (2007, p. 148).

174

N. Barker

Mulit-sited ethnography: Theory, praxis and locality in contemporary research (pp. 197–214). Bodmin: Mixed Sources. Colley, H. (2007). Understanding time in learning transitions through the lifecourse. International Studies in Sociology of Education, 17(4), 37–41. https://doi. org/10.1080/09620210701667103. Creative SkillSet. (2012). Employment census of the creative media industries. https://doi. org/10.1002/ejoc.201200111. Davies, C. (2008). Reflexive ethnography: A guide to researching selves and others. New York: Routledge. Degerbøl, S., & Nielsen, C. S. (2015). Researching embodied learning by using videographic participation for data collection and audiovisual narratives for dissemination – Illustrated by the encounter between two acrobats. Ethnography and Education, 10(1), 60–75. https://doi.org/10.1080/17457823.2014.929018. Edensor, T. (2013). Reconnecting with darkness: Gloomy landscapes, lightless places. Social and Cultural Geography, 14(4), 446–465. https://doi.org/10.1080/14649365.20 13.790992. Garner, S. (2007). Sensing realism: Illusionism, actuality, and the theatrical sensorium. In S. Banes & A. Lepecki (Eds.), The senses in performance (pp. 115–122). New York: Routledge. Geurts, K. L. (2004). On embodied consciousness in Anlo-Ewe worlds. Ethnography, 4(3), 363–395. https://doi.org/10.1177/146613810343004. Goffman, E. (1968). Stigma: Notes on the management of spoiled idenity. London: Penguin. Hammersley, M. (1992). What’s wrong with ethnography? Methodological explorations. London: Routledge. Hammersley, M. (2017). What is ethnography? Can it survive? Should it? Ethnography and Education, 7823(March), 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1080/17457823.2017.1298458. Hammersley, M., & Atkinson, P. (2007). Field relations. Ethnography: Principles in practice (pp. 63–96). Stoodleigh: Routledge. Hockey, J., & Forsey, M. (2012). Ethnography is not participant observation: Reflections on the interview as participatory. Qualitative Research, 69–88. Howes, D., & Classen, C. (2013). Ways of sensing: Understanding the senses in society. Ways of sensing. London: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.1001/ jama.1967.03130030064016. Jachyra, P., Atkinson, M., & Washiya, Y. (2015). ‘Who are you, and what are you doing here’: Methodological considerations in ethnographic health and physical education research. Ethnography and Education, 10(2), 242–261. https://doi.org/10.1080/174578 23.2015.1018290. Jewitt, C., & Leder Mackley, K. (2019). Methodological dialogues across multimodality and sensory ethnography: Digital touch communication. Qualitative Research, 19(1), 90–110. https://doi.org/10.1177/1468794118796992. Jewitt, C., Xambo, A., & Price, S. (2017). Exploring methodological innovation in the social sciences: The body in digital environments and the arts. International Journal of Social Research Methodology, 20(1), 105–120. https://doi.org/10.1080/13645579.2015. 1129143.

An Ethnographer Lured into Darkness

175

Kakavoulia, M. (2008). The ethnographer’s “Gaze”: Some notes on visuality and its relation to the reflexive metalanguage of anthropology. In G. E. Marcus & N. Panourgiá (Eds.), Ethnographica moralia: Experiments in interpretive anthropology (pp. 213– 216). New York: Fordham University Press. Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the social: An introduction to actor-network-theory. Oxford: Open University Press. Lepora, N. (2018). Touch. In T. Prescott, N. Lepora, & P. Verschure (Eds.), Living machines: A handbook of reseach in biomimetics snf biohybrid systems (pp. 154–159). https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199674923.001.0001. Maanen, J. (2011). Tales of the field: On writing ethnography (2nd ed.). London: The University of Chicago Press. Marcus, G. E. (1999). What is at stake-and is not – In the idea and practice of multi-sited ethnography. Canberra Anthropology, 22(2), 6–14. https://doi. org/10.1080/03149099909508344. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962). Phenomenology of perception (A. J. Ayer, Ed.). London: Routledge. Morris, C. (2017). Making sense of education: Sensory ethnography and visual impairment. Ethnography and Education, 12(1), 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1080/17457823.201 5.1130639. Oakley, K. (2009). ‘Art Works’ – Cultural labour markets: A literature review. Creativity, Culture and Education Literature Reviews. https://www.creativitycultureeducation.org/ research-impact/literature-reviews/. Accessed: 8 May 2020. Palmer, S. (2017). Harnessing shadows: A historical perspective on the role of darkness in the theatre. In A. Alston & M. Welton (Eds.), Theatre in the dark: Shadow, gloom and blackout in contemporary theatre (pp. 37–63). London: Bloomsbury. Phoenix, C. (2010). Seeing the world of physical culture: The potential of visual methods for qualitative research in sport and exercise. Qualitative Research in Sport and Exercise, 2(2), 93–108. https://doi.org/10.1080/19398441.2010.488017. Pierides, D. (2010). Multi-sited ethnography and the field of educational research. Critical Studies in Education, 52(2), 179–195. https://doi.org/10.1080/17508481003731059. Pink, S. (2015). Doing sensory ethnography. London: Sage. Shilling, C. (2005). The body in culture, technology & society. London: Sage. Shilling, C. (2008). Changing bodies: Habit, crisis and creativity. London: Sage. Shilling, C. (2012). The body and social theory (3rd ed.). London: Sage. Sofer, A. (2013). Dark matter. In Dark matter: Invisibility in drama, theater, and performance (pp. 1–15). Michigan: University of Michigan Press. Sparkes, A. C. (2009). Ethnography and the senses: Challenges and possibilities. Qualitative Research in Sport and Exercise, 1(1), 21–35. Stoller, P. (1997). Sensuos scholarship. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Welton, M. (2007). Seeing nothing: Now heat this…. In S. Banes & A. Lepecki (Eds.), The senses in performance (pp. 146–155). New York: Routledge. Williams, S. J., & Bendelow, G. (1998). The lived body: Sociological themes, embodied issues. London: Routledge. Zarrilli, P. B. (2007). Senses and silence in actor training and performance. In S. Banes & A. Lepecki (Eds.), The senses in performance (pp. 47–70). New York: Routledge.

Virtual Networks and Asynchronous Communities: Methodological Reflections on the Digital Darlinda Moreira

Abstract

This chapter aims to reflect upon methodological aspects that emerged from research carried out in HE institutions and focused in digital education and its specific sociocultural and pedagogical characteristics. It presents and reflects on cyberspace as a recent educational terrain highlighting its cultural traces. Then, it discusses and analyses ethnographic practices, taking into consideration mainly the characteristics of digital educational settings in regard to the modes of communication and interaction in virtual groups, the structure of virtual networks and its asynchronous communities. Important issues that are reflected upon are i) the participant observation in itself, which takes on different characteristics in digital contexts, namely in regard to what should constitute contextual elements in transnational asynchronous communities that exist online, and ii) the virtual network, its nature, structure and time of existence and the challenges it poses to the researcher, in regard to both the mobility that he/she experiences while doing research and the changes of perspectives that differs from one to another node of the network. Keywords

Digital education · Asynchronous communities · Ethnography · Virtual ethnography · Multi-sited ethnography · Higher education · Network · Cyberspace

D. Moreira (*)  Departamento de Educação e Ensino a Distância, Universidade Aberta, Lisboa, Portugal e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2020 C. Wieser and A. Pilch Ortega (eds.), Ethnography in Higher Education, Doing Higher Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-30381-5_11

177

178

D. Moreira

1 Introduction Acting as a multiplier of social contexts that are present in various dimensions of both our online and offline lives, cyberspace, daily, originates new groups and virtual social networks. This is particularly evident, in a proliferation of digital, multicultural and global educational settings, especially in HE, and adds greater density to the already multifold dimensions of educational phenomena, in the sense that there is a complicated intersection between economic, social, political, cultural, epistemological and pedagogical dimensions. This intricacy of the educational terrain makes both the production of knowledge and the research a task of enormous complexity. This paper aims to address methodological issues that arose when developing research on digital educational contexts. In order to do that, cyberspace is highlighted as an educational terrain that poses new challenges and problems and requires new research methodologies or the adaptation of existing ones. Then, ethnographic practices are discussed and analysed taking into consideration mainly the characteristics of digital educational settings in regard to asynchronous communities and their particular modes of communication and interaction, as well as the structure of the virtual network that underlies the community. Based on my own recent experiences of fieldwork (Moreira and Fantinato 2014; Moreira 2016), I reflect upon multi-sited and virtual ethnography (or netnography) methodological approaches mainly on issues related to: i) participant observation in itself, which takes on different characteristics in cyberspace’s digital contexts, namely both in regard to what should constitute contextual elements in transnational asynchronous communities and in regard to the processes of ‘entering the Field’, and ii) on the virtual networks and the challenges they pose to the researcher, which deserves attention given both the mobility that he/she experiences, while doing fieldwork and the correspondent changes of perspectives that differ from one node to another within the network.

2 The New Educational Terrain of Cyberspace There are several views on the culture of cyberspace or digital culture. Without pretending to be exhaustive, I present some of them that have emerged in the last decades and that together show both different and complementary aspects, of what are considered fundamental characteristics of cyberculture lived online and the relationship between this and the offline. In 1995, Turkle pointed out

Virtual Networks and Asynchronous Communities …

179

how cyberculture encourages and allows for the existence of new and multiple identities, moving between reality and fiction, that facilitates ubiquitous lives, cross-linking and being in multiple scenarios at the same time, performing ­ diverse tasks simultaneously—for example, crossing work contexts with leisure, chatting, writing emails, talking on the phone, and playing or shopping. Another interesting perspective is presented by Levy (1997) for whom cyberspace, at its beginning, was a totally new space, without history or limitations, which was appropriated by humans through a “set of techniques, practices, attitudes, modes of thought and values that develop along with the growth of cyberspace” (p. 17). The idea that “intelligence and human knowledge have always played a central role in social life” (Levy 2001, p. 257) begins to emerge as one of the pillars of the cultural conception of cyberspace as a space of knowledge, which is assumed by the author as a new anthropological space, that he calls the Third Space, dependent on “mankind’s capacity for rapid acquisition of knowledge and the development of a collective imagination” (p. 257). Its new features include: “the rate of evolution of knowledge [and] the number of people who will be asked to learn and produce new forms of knowledge and finally, the appearance of new tools” (p. 257). Moreover, considering that globalization fosters places of “intensification of global interconnectivity, (…) a world full of persistent movement, mixing, contact, links, interaction and cultural exchange” (India and Rosaldo 2002, p. 2) it becomes clear that, on one hand, virtual environments are among the factors that contribute to increase and generate new diversities and new social groups, and on the other, that cyberspace is a space in consonance with the characteristics of globalization (Kerckove 1995). Boellstorff et al. (2012, p. 6) use the term virtual world, which characterizes cyberspace as being localized, cosmopolitan and global, providing auspicious environments with which one can interact and which easily extend to and persist in the offline world. Especially with the developments of the Web.4, and the possibilities of mobility and ubiquity that it provides and allows, permits to participate and explore, either incarnating avatars or interacting with bots or just surfing in an easier way, the multiple environments of the virtual world. Finally, the vision of cyberculture as a culture of flows conveys a perspective of proximity, which all netizens have already experienced. As Breslow and Mousoutzanis, (2012, p. xii) highlight: Cybercultures know neither boundaries, nor limitations, nor inhibitions. They are the ne plus ultra expression of flow spreading as, when, and how they can. Cybercultures do not follow predetermined paths, nor do they exist in predetermined states

180

D. Moreira

… Cybercultures do not articulate themselves according to a specific logic, fixed identity, or set of rules determined by one space or another. They flow from place to place, from node to node, from site to site. In so doing, they rewrite the logics, relationships, meanings, behaviours and subjectivities …

In short, cyberspace is characterized by its immensity and uncountable possibilities of access and camouflage. It is a place full of challenges, dangers and exclusions, where countless opportunities for learning and participation are open. It is contemporary mainstream culture, foremost and oppressive, embedded and imbued at the various levels of social life, and with which education systems and research must cooperate. Acting as a multiplier of online social contexts, the cyberspace not only allows for more contacts between people of different cultures, but also builds new territories and virtual communities, that create more opportunities for meetings, encounters, learning and actions. As Wheeler and Keegan (2009, p. 286) observed. there are emerging cultures in the social networking communities, and we should expect them to emerge. Wherever people gather, whether physically or virtually, shared social meanings are evolved that serve to identify that group as distinct, and perhaps even define them as unique.

This complexity of the digital space triggers, in an accelerated way, a profound change in the educational and learning acts. For example, at the level of communication and interaction which is mediated by technology and at the level of student identity formation and physical presence. Although access is fairly easy almost everywhere, the permanence in this space requires specific and elaborate skills to dominate its organization and intelligibility. The “… windows without doors, or spaces or intermediate instances, communicate with other windows” (Han 2016, p. 28) lead to either several learning alternative paths, erratic or programmed, where content, images, objectives and messages can change at every instant or to strange landscapes where one gets lost easily. In these educational scenarios, transformations are underway in the conception of learning, as well as in the role of educational agents and, above all, in the way in which they equate, consider and organize pedagogically the “permanent learning” from outside and inside the educational institutions. Educational contexts become more elastic, malleable and commutable, and the innovation challenges are more demanding and urgent. Various pedagogical approaches coexist in the digital educational contexts which can almost be placed in a continuum from on a tailor-made teaching process (tailoring education), to mass education (MOOCs). If on the one hand these pedagogical approaches mimic part of the old

Virtual Networks and Asynchronous Communities …

181

social order, on the other hand they introduce and generalize innovation, practicing and foreseeing new roles and new functions and relationships for teachers, students and other participants in educational acts. That is, we are at a time of testing, designing and sketching educational roles and functions, trying to gauge how to proceed, and with what. In short, nowadays digital educational contexts problematize: i. The need for a physical learning space, such as schools and classrooms, with the presence of equal school materials and resources for all students in the class; ii. The teacher’s role, that emerges more as a supervisor and evaluator to guide relationships with learning resources; iii. The sources’ authorities and legitimacy; iv. The selection of the learning contents, in the sense that the knowledge learned throughout life tends to be a concept increasingly dated and the promotion for life-long learning is urgent and inevitable; v. The relationship between formal and informal contexts of education and learning. Finally, given the very nature of cyberspace in relation to digital educational contexts, we can speak of the increasing number of encounters between people from different cultures, but which are combined both by virtue of common interests and by the potential of digital technology to effect human mixing, thus enabling alternative futures of smart communities, and making these places real “contact zones” term that Marie Loiuse Pratts (1991) defined as follows: I use this term to refer to social spaces where cultures meet, cloth, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out in many parts of the world today. Eventually I will use the term to reconsider the models of community that many of us rely on in teaching and theorizing and that are under challenge today (p. 34).

Although Maria Louise Pratts defined this concept, in 1991, studying situations that had nothing to do with cyberspace, this American anthropologist warned right away of its possible application to educational environments. In the case of the digital, global and multicultural educational contexts that are frequent in cyberspace, we consider it important to combine this concept with that of the learning community, presenting for this purpose, the concept of innovation communities as envisioned by Dias (2013) to online educational context, as follows:

182

D. Moreira

Online communities are the place for social integration, learning, sharing and elaboration of individual and collective knowledge, expression of knowledge and group identity. In this sense, the challenge of education for the Digital Society is to transform emerging communities into spaces for creation and innovation. (…) And already as structures oriented towards the radical change in the ways of learning and in the development of pedagogical approaches. (p. 6)

That is, a vision where the learning community is really a network, whose nodes are the contact zones with all the movement and inherent relationships.

3 Communication and Interaction in Digital Educational Settings Currently, both distance and face-to-face higher education institutions have a significant online pedagogical offering and the ongoing process of expanding the digital component produces educational contexts on a transnational scale, in the sense that, students can attend courses from any planetary location. Indeed, in 2013, Europe was offering online learning courses in approximately 82% of institutions (Gaebel et al. 2014), and taking in consideration that in online education borders to enrollments are more linguistic than national individuals are freer and have more options to choose a specific educational trajectory to pursue their objectives. In other words, there is a “globalized access” to higher education (Romiszowski 2005). In these digital educational settings, educational activities and communication, both among students and between teachers and students, are mediated by media technologies, interfaces and digital platforms. Due to the globalized access these developing educational environments involve collaboration and interaction between individuals who are in distant or near places. Thus, educational scenarios that were experienced or created for teaching purposes in familiar places and common time, through cyberspace amplification, become global and exposed simultaneously to the entire planet. In addition, to be an online student brings some inflections in the identity path, as the identity as a student requests to be reconstructed, in order to accommodate the changes experienced with the shift from face-to-digital, in basic and quotidian circumstances, as for example: the elasticity of time, non-physicality, communication, and asynchrony, which usually are alive in the processes underlying digital educational contexts. In Develotte’s (2009, p. 92) words “The asynchronous online student is forging a complete identity; and it is up to the educational researchers to explore it, in order to better respond to its specificities.”

Virtual Networks and Asynchronous Communities …

183

Indeed, we know that online student identity formation is related both to the development of trust in the system and the group interaction, as well as to the development of their own online interactions and modes of communication (Gunawardena 2014; Sousa and Dias 2017). Studies also show that the accuracy of personal information provided online is influenced by traits and characteristics relating to age, nationality, gender, ethnicity and others (Hargittai 2012). There are also results showing that the relationship of communication with context, i.e. high or low context dependence, sometimes favors some groups of cultures and sometimes others (Westbrook 2014). Finally, the area related to the study of barriers and conflicts arising from communication failures between individuals or groups from different cultural backgrounds (Latchen 2015; Rye and Støkken 2012) as well as the localist perspectives from studies on the digital educational environments situated in different continents, or in specific communities (e.g. blind and deaf), also needs to be highlighted since they show how diverse cultures and local education systems appropriate differently the educational possibilities of the digital and therefore influence different path identities. Mobility across diverse virtual settings is another specificity of educational digital contexts that are materialized in the exponential growth of places such: blogs, forums, social networks, chat rooms, where students can be more or less active or more or less free to enter, stay, leave and participate. These environments may be formal or informal, but the learning can be transferred to formal virtual educational environments, which is often the case, as higher education students’ cross-border online (as well as offline) settings. The change in types of communication, interaction, resources, images, relationships between online and offline experiences, notions of space/time, presence, are some of the impact felt on online education (Gunawardena 2014; Jayatilleke and Gunawardena 2016; Jenkins et al. 2016). A weak, porous, or even absent physicality is another characteristic of digital learning environments that has impact on communication. This trait, coupled with written language, may result in advantages for some students, who “may be marginalized in other contexts” (Stirling 2008, p. 170), however, in spite of emojis and other symbols that can help to interpret and assert meanings, the lack of n­ on-verbal communication attributes such as: gestures, pitch, intonation and laughter, difficult communication requires time and suitable learning experiences to became familiar. Indeed, the digital mode of communication is a common feature of this media, but to use it as a mode of educational communication still demands learning.

184

D. Moreira

Moreover, technical advances have been establishing a communicative space that allows the simultaneously existence of different types of communication that, in turn, are associated with different types of interaction, as well as the possibility to communicate at a global level. In particular, the “many-to-many” communication mode is used and exploited in digital educational environments (Jensen and Helles 2017; Rheingold 1993) and asynchrony triggers substantial differences at the level of interaction. The asynchronous communication mode permits additional reflection and recycling of ideas, since the extension over time of a discussion or a conversation admits editing, control of emotional or cognitive reactions, and collect rational arguments. That is, asynchronous communication accepts that individuals respond at the most convenient time for them, and for as long as they want, that eventually gives more time to reflect on the quality of the dialogues and answers. The resources that can be immediately incorporated in learning that is the documents or other elements that can be brought in-time, in a rapidly and very simple way, to the learning conversation are another substantial change of the digital in relationship to face-to-face educational settings. Another change is what participation brings to the transnational group’s diverse experiences that are brought for educational digital contexts, and become available as resources to be used in others times and places, since they are instanteously acquired online by everyone, and used by students anywhere in the world. In short, virtuality, multiculturalism, mobility, change in identity features, relationships between online and offline experiences, different work notions of time and space, simultaneous different types of communication and interactions, and in-time resources such as texts, images, podcasts, and videos are some of the features in digital educational settings that, as ethnographers of education, we need to address, because these are the kind of transformations that students and teachers undergo and/artefacts that they produced when attending online educational environments (Gunawardena 2014; Jayatilleke and Gunawardena 2016; Jenkins et al. 2016).

4 Research in Educational Digital Environments 4.1 Ethnographic Approach The importance of the interpretative paradigm and the role of context that began to be noticed in the 1970’s among educational researchers enhance the interest on ethnographic methods. Since then, there has been a stronger awareness of

Virtual Networks and Asynchronous Communities …

185

what the educational ethnographer would have to broaden in his/her’s education regarding ethnographic methods, since the theories, the objects of study and the knowledge generated by the area of Education is necessarily different from that of Anthropology, which conceived the practice of ethnography (Wilson 1977). Placing itself within the interpretative paradigm, which considers “reality” as a construction resulting from interactions between people, Ethnography aims to understand reality from the perspective of the native participant, as well as to get a deep and systematic understanding of the nature of cultural influences in that processes. In particular, ethnographic research, with both the inherent theoretical processes and critical reflection, have been uncovering individuals, collectives and institutions’ facets that otherwise would be hardly noticeable. For example, indigenous’ people as well as minority groups’ learning processes and conceptions of knowledge (Powell and Frankenstein 1997; Stathopoulou and Moreira 2013; Roman 1980; Walton and Webster 2019). It is within this framework that the most identarian and emblematic features of the ethnographic method, namely: “extended staying” and “deep plunging” into the culture of the Other, have been appropriated and adapted by educational researchers for their own contexts and purposes. Thus, according to Heath and Street (2008) is preferable to speak of “an ethnographic perspective” or “an ethnographic approach” to refer to ethnographic methods and tools used in educational situations. Indeed, sometimes these tools and methodological approaches are purposely created to investigate and interact with individuals or groups in specific educational situations and settings (Heath and Street 2008; Sousa 2013; Wolcott 1985). The reflexivity and adaptability of the ethnographic approach enables a holistic perspective and understanding of the educational processes of each stakeholder (whether students, teachers, or other agents of the educational community). In fact, for example, studying the issue of cultural diversity, and what it entails and calls, for a more equitable education to be achieved in such different educational contexts such as: foreign pupils newly arrived at a primary school, around Lisbon (Botas 2016); Portuguese students at a vocational higher education institution in Germany (Moreira and Antão 2017); teaching experience of interculturality in a trilingual school in Macao (Dias 2017); meeting the expectations of student diversity in a digital vocational retraining program (Moreira and Fantinato 2014); or how to teach mathematics in a Brazilian or New Zealand indigenous community (Domite 2013; Walton and Webster 2019), requires theoretical frameworks, methodological approaches and data collection tools particularly suited to different contexts of study. However, if an in-depth understanding of the

186

D. Moreira

realities and experiences that are specific to each of these contexts is desired, an ethnographic approach yields highly contextual and rich returns. Moreover, if we think about the emerging environments made possible by Web.4 technology, namely in the educational networks that connect learners around the world, we easily recognised the interest of the multi-sited ethnographic approach.

4.2 Multi-Sited Ethnography Multi-sited ethnography arises as an attempt to keep up with contemporaneous phenomena that are associated with the process of globalization, as well as anthropological, epistemological and sociological transformations of structural social concepts, such as space, time and place (Falzon 2016; Marcus 1995). The observation of such phenomena is at the origin of the multi-sited ethnographic approach, from the perspective that certain objects of study, are only possible to understand “following the connections” and “following people” (Marcus 1995, p. 96). In multi-sited ethnography the researcher is “encouraged to follow the connections that have become significant from a given configuration” (Hine 2000, p. 60), as the diversity of people, along with their trajectories, actions and links between them, provide a myriad perspective on the development and construction of phenomena. Thus, it clearly invokes the idea of a social network (Hine 2000; Marcus 1995) since “mobile ethnography” navigates “unexpected trajectories in tracing a cultural formation through and within the places of activity” (Marcus 1995, p. 96). Moreover, during fieldwork, different groups or individuals have mobility and a relational dimension that is important to study. Together they play an important role in the network’s frame, in the sense that they create and implement a reality, or solve a particular problem, or contribute to the design of strategies and conclusions that are going to redefine the shape of the network itself. Thus, a network is constructed, with configurations that have different characteristics from traditional research fields. It is important for the researcher to have some “intellectual and cultural affinity, in fact,” useful “knowledge with the network” (Marcus 1995, p. 15), to feel comfortable and to know how to proceed, from one place to another, to one person to another, and from one subject to another, to understand not only the perspectives of the various groups, but also how they relate and connect, and how to face all the unexpected questions that come up that impact how the research questions are deepened and redefined in this “snowball” process (Moreira 2016).

Virtual Networks and Asynchronous Communities …

187

In short, a network is a socially built structure that, while connecting people, things or ideas, rapidly changes its configuration over a short period of time, and therefore presents different characteristics from the traditional fields of ethnographic research. In regard to digital education, one has to have in mind that it links people, knowledge, places, times, objects and artefacts, making them interdependent and without meaning outside the network that they constitute. In this frame, it is easy to understand the potentiality of this methodological approach, since it is by nature an investigation that follows an approach where, more than location, connectivity and interaction are the organizing elements of fieldwork.

4.3 Virtual Ethnography, Nethnography, Ciberethnography Another methodological approach aligned with contemporaneous phenomena is virtual ethnography, or cyberethnography, or nethnography. Although further development and improvement is awaited from the work of the new generation of virtual ethnographers, some differences are already possible to highlight in relation to ethnography. These specific features are mostly related to the characteristics of the digital contexts themselves and the proper way that people interact and participate in them. Firstly, in a digital educational context the research is developed in a virtual field, in a network, and not in the customary real space. Thus, an important difference concerns the passage from space to cyberspace (Wittel 2000). Considering the different cultural features between space and cyberspace and that space is where the physical human body is located, and the cyberspace where the second self is (Turkle 2005), the mobile-cross between the virtual and the real world can be a strong stimulator of the network and, as such, this is a focal newly facet of a virtual ethnography. Another important difference, in a virtual ethnography fieldwork is developed in a virtual field, in a network, and not in the traditional terrain in real space. That is, there is a movement “from the field to the network” (Wittel 2000) and, given that a network is an open, dynamic, flexible and fluid structure, consisting of the vertices or nodes, (we consider that locations/people/phenomena/represent the “nodes” of particular interaction and expression) and the movements and connections between them (Fig. 11.1), the virtual ethnographic approach has to contemplate the unpredictable and unknown nature of the network where empty and high density locals of connectivity and interactions co-exist. Hence, the virtual ethnographic approach must address not only one location but several as well as the

Fig. 11.1   Virtual networks

188 D. Moreira

Virtual Networks and Asynchronous Communities …

189

links between them, it is an investigation more suited by a multi-sited approach. Finally, the automatic recording archives, together with those collected by the researcher constitute a vast amount of data, which may be problematic (Boellstorff 2008). Moreover, in a virtual ethnography, the textual and hypertextual nature coupled with non-physicality reduces the identification of contextual elements such as clothing, nonverbal language, gender, race and age (Conrad 2014; Gunawardena 2014; Luyt 2014). The expansion of the possibilities of interactions between individuals who, in traditional situations, would never or only sporadically communicate, is another aspect that requires innovative attention since, in virtual environments, the recording of these situations must be based on details that are not observable, that is, it is necessary to find other modes of “observation”. The possibility of archiving and recording automatically, facilitates the researcher’s analysis and reading, who can “return to the data” whenever she or he wishes and, finally, as a consequence of the previous points, given the thin border, or the possible hybrid nature, between the public and the private of some of the digital environments, together with the vast number of possibilities of choice, ethnographic procedures end up being quite demanding for the researcher, who must therefore carefully choose the virtual community he/she wants to investigate and become familiar with in advance (Falzon 2016). There are numerous places where we can develop educationally focused virtual ethnography, for example: Web pages; description/reports/programs about building web pages; Event development (webinars, colloquia, workshops); workplaces on the net; training and development of courses and training programs; genesis and development of social networks and chats for educational purposes; participation learning in virtual games such as Witchcraft, not to mention digital educational environments with their various components and the educational implications of using immersive environments, games and virtual simulations.

5 Discussion 5.1 Participant Observation through/in the Screen During one semester, I conducted a virtual ethnography in a digital educational setting. I was mostly focused on the observation of asynchronous forums, as they are important places of communication and social interaction. Indeed, I observed students’ discussions, posing and asking questions, sharing and exchanging expertise, ideas and feelings with colleagues and teachers. The main goal of

190

D. Moreira

my observations was to understand the reasons that led students to seek lifelong learning in a context of online distance education for requalification and how they intended to fit the experience in their professional situation. All the twelve graduate students that sought this online course participated in the study, although five were key informants, as they were the locus of more connectivity among students. Or, thinking about network configuration they were the most intense nodes of the network. Altogether students and teacher constitute an asynchronous and transnational digital network, since they lived in different parts of the world (Moreira and Fantinato 2014). The asynchronous environment should remember the that not only the time of the day differ but also while some may live in a snowy day, others may be in a tropical sunny day, and if some students are living in a very urban developed area, others are living in a much more remote rural location. Also, while some students have a military background others are teachers, or lawyers and consequently not only their education were different from one to another but also that their working hours are different. This was particular interesting to observe because students were taking learning advantages of being in different time schedules and localities. One of the remarks about participant observation in online contexts, as for example in educational digital settings, is that the researcher should analyse the kind of contact that exists among the individuals in the group (Jones 1999; Hine 2000). This means that not only the kind of contact and relationships that individuals may have offline are important but also the possible effects of offline contexts in online behaviour and the understandings of how individuals’ online experiences are important features to consider. As Jones (1999) observes: On-line interaction cannot be divorced from the off-line social and political contexts within which participants live their daily lives. (…). Once online, participants draw on their off-line resources, as well as understandings gained in off-line experiences, to negotiate and interpret their on-line interaction (p. 58).

The expansion of the possibilities of interactions among individuals that in traditional situations, would never or only sporadically communicate, was another aspect that required innovative attention. In fact, the network may stretch following individuals who will never meet except in the virtual network. Differences within the group as well as its social dynamics and online elements are another facet to consider in online participant observation. As Jones (1999) notes:

Virtual Networks and Asynchronous Communities …

191

Most researchers recognize differences between types of online forums, understanding that factors such as synchronicity versus asynchronicity (muds vs. newsgroups, for instance) and public availability versus various forms of controlled access (registration on muds or newsgroup moderation) affect the interactions that occur in particular groups. Even among forums of the same type, there are significant variations in purpose, level of participation, acceptable behaviours, and so on (p. 67).

The researcher must be aware that digital educational locations are not only both multi-sited and multicultural places but also induce intercultural research, according to the scale of the network, and its vast ramifications. In addition, given the tenuous border, or the hybrid nature of digital environments, combined with the intermediation of the screen that reduces context-based elements such as, locality, clothing, language, gender, race, and age, the direct meaning and the interpretation of interactions in virtual environments, as well as experiences and practices that occur in the virtual network, are based on details that are not observable, at least in the traditional sense. Thus, it is necessary to be more active and to find other modes to substitute “observation” and get contextual elements like for example ask for photographs, videos and other materials that required individual dialogues and relationships whose ethnographic procedures were quite demanding for the researcher. Moreover, research about the relationship between online and offline contexts were, very often, completely impossible due to physical distance and the financial cost associated with displacement. We tried to get some insights to surmount this displacement, for example, posing work activities that asked for application in students’ workplace and asking for episodes from students’ real environments to illustrate some theoretical concepts. The result were then presented virtually to all class and discussed.

5.2 Shaping the Network Using a multi-sited approach, a study was conducted, whose main goal was to understand the creation, launch and development of a university’s strong online pedagogical offering (Moreira 2016). That the fieldsite was non-traditional was evident since, even after the consulting of websites and hyperlinks, the delineation of the field path was not evident because its contours changed each time a new link was added and articulated with the previous one. Several protagonists were involved which were located in different departments and services of the university and it was necessary to understand how they were related and had related among themselves to construct the online pedagogical

192

D. Moreira

offering. As the fieldwork went on, the different groups which played an important role in the university’s online component, demonstrated that their different perspectives were local, in the sense that they were part of the interactions between the different groups that, together, created and implemented the online teaching component at the university. As such, an important characteristic of the study objectives became the way these groups were socially networked. Thus, the “mobile ethnography” took “unexpected trajectories in tracing a cultural formation across and within sites of activity” (Moreira 2016, p. 96). It started to become clear how each discourse related to that of other groups at the university. What they did to teach online courses was connected to university policies, to the administrators, to their personal life, to the university dynamics for training, learning and embedding technology in teaching, and to informal relations with previous groups, people, and to university life, in general. As such, the network was taking shape as the social network that was the object of study emerged and the configuration changed. The itinerary in the field was complex, multidirectional with intense movement between real places and virtual sites. Besides, not only did each network have a different nature but also to follow its development from the beginning or to enter the network after some time of existence, or even when it has several decades of existence, posed quite different challenges to the researcher and drew different possible trajectories in the process of going along with it.

6 Final Considerations Educational institutions have been undergoing the pressure of change and, in particular, digital education has made a rapid transformation into educational contexts which must be investigated. Transnational and global communities emerge as a new distinctive field, making both the multiculturality and the exposure of the educational scenarios to the world perennial characteristics. In order to understand the educational contexts that derive from the previous conjuncture, we highlight the methodological approaches that contribute decisively to the understanding of the mosaic of expressions that coexist in education. Considering the online contexts of virtual ethnography, researchers, in addition to taking the usual precautions, still have to be prepared for additional challenges such as excessive information availability, non-physicality, digital identity and how they will participate in the action and define their modes and places of “observation”, which takes on different characteristics in cyberspace’s digital contexts. Namely in regard to what should constitute contextual elements in

Virtual Networks and Asynchronous Communities …

193

transnational asynchronous online communities, and that, as we know, how they are at the heart of the understanding of ethnographic research. Also, the shaping of networks poses several challenges to the researcher, given both the mobility that he/she experiences while doing the research and the subsequent changes of perspective that differs from one to another node of the network. Therefore, in cyberspace’s digital contexts, transnational asynchronous communities in educational settings lead us to reflect upon the participant contextual elements of the virtual networks and the challenges of the researcher. The research methodologies presented above share a network whose genesis is different. At the beginning there were no awareness of the network development, which rapidly expanded around a common goal, or a person, or from a thing or an idea, and whose configuration changed according to its own dynamism, stretching and densifying, or, on the contrary, shrinking in more or less dense forms, depending on the interaction and participation that its vertices or nodes, in this case people, were able to establish as well as on what they incorporated, knowledge, artefacts, arguments, to increase the network. Looking to the asynchronous communities harboured in the network, individuals leave messages, artefacts, maps, drawings, and other digital artefacts that others will pick up and develop in different times and spaces. These asynchronous communities are locations that will eventually be transformed in “contact zones” (Pratts 1991) that densify and strengthen the whole network. These moments of intense movement are particularly important and problematic for the practice of observation mostly because they are almost impossible to be observed unless by reading the trail on the screen. Further, it depends on the initial moment that the researcher starts the investigation in relationship to the development of the network. Finally, ethical questions constitute another area where there are important differences between traditional and virtual ethnography. The researcher must clearly introduce him/herself and explained what the research’s intentions, ensuring the confidentiality and anonymity of the informants. However, the debate over what constitutes informed consent in cyberspace raises some questions regarding identity confirmation, privacy, confidentiality and anonymity, which should be safeguarded, although researchers may contact specific members of the virtual community to permission to cite, for example, direct interventions.

References Boellstorff, T. (2008). Coming of age in second life: An anthropologist explores the virtually human. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

194

D. Moreira

Boellstorff, T., Nardi, B., Pearce, C., & Taylor, T. L. (2012). Ethnography and virtual worlds. A handbook of method. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Botas, D. (2016). Histórias que a escola conta: Integração de crianças imigrantes no 1º ciclo de escolaridade. PhD Dissertation, Universidade Aberta, Lisboa. Breslow, H., & Mousoutzanis, A. (2012). Introduction. In H. Breslow & A. Mousoutzanis (Eds.), Cybercultures: Mediations of community, culture, politics (pp. vii–xx). Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi B. V. Conrad, D. (2014). Interaction and communication in online learning communities: Toward an engaged and flexible future. In O. Zawaki-Richter & T. Anderson (Eds.), Online distance education. Towards a research agenda (pp. 381–402). Edmont: Athabasca University Press. Develotte, C. (2009). From face-to-face to distance learning: The online learner’s emerging identity. In R. Goosfeloow & M. N. Lamy (Eds.), Learning cultures in online education (pp. 71–92). New York: Continuum International. Dias, A. P. (2013). Inovação pedagógica na educação aberta e em rede. Revista Educação, Formação e Tecnologias, 6(2), 4–14. Dias, A. P. (2017). Policies and realities about language in Macao. In L. A. Beckett & T. du Plessis (Eds.), Pursuit of societal harmony. Reviewing the experiences and approaches in officially monolingual and officially multilingual countries (pp. 49–85). Sun Media: Bloemfontein. Domite, M. C. (2013). Ethnomathematics and teacher education: Reasoning over the meaning of the students’ prerequisite and the teacher’s listening. In Proceedings of CERME 8 (pp. 1705–1715). Ankara: Middle East Technical University. Falzon, M.-A. (Ed.). (2016). Multi-sited ethnography. Theory, praxis and locality in contemporary research. New York: Routledge. Gunawardena, C. N. (2014). Globalization, culture, and online distance learning. In O. Zawaki-Richter & T. Anderson (Eds.), Online distance education. Towards a research agenda (pp. 75–107). Edmont: Athabasca University Press. Han, B.-C. (2016). No Enxame. Reflexões sobre o digital. Lisboa: Relógio D’Água. Hargittai, E. (2012). Open doors, closed spaces? Differentiated adoption of social networks sites by user background. In L. Nakamura & P. Chow-White (Eds.), Race after the internet (pp. 223–245). New York: Routledge. Heath, S. B., & Street, B. V. (2008). Ethnography: Approaches to language and literacy research. New York: Teachers College Press. Hine, C. (2000). Virtual ethnography. London: Sage. India, J. X., & Rosaldo, R. (2002). A world in motion. In J. X. India & R. Rosaldo (Eds.), The anthropology of globalization. A reader (pp. 1–34). Oxford: Blackwell. Jayatilleke, B. G., & Gunawardena, C. (2016). Cultural perceptions of online learning: Transnational faculty perspectives. Asian Association of Open Universities Journal, 11(1), 50–63. https://doi.org/10.1108/AAOUJ-07-2016-0019. Jenkins, H., Ito, M., & Boyd, D. (2016). Participatory culture in a networked era. A conversation on youth, learning, commerce and politics. Cambridge: Polity. Jensen, K. B., & Helles, R. (2017). Speaking into the system: Social media and ­many-to-one communication. European Journal of Communication, 32(1), 16–25. Jones, A. (1999). Doing internet research. Critical issues and methods for examining the net. London: Sage.

Virtual Networks and Asynchronous Communities …

195

Kerckove, D. (1995). A pele da cultura. Lisboa: Relógio D’Agua. Latchen, C. (2015). Gender issues in online learning. In I. Jung & C. N. Gunawardena (Eds.), Culture and online learning. Global perspectives and research (pp. 126–136). Virginia: Stylus Publishing, LLC. Lévy, P. (1997). Cibercultura. Lisboa: Instituto Piaget. Lévy, P. (2001). Collective intelligence. In D. Trend (Ed.), Reading digital cultures (pp. 253–258). Malden: Blackwell Publishers Ltd. Luyt, I. (2014). Bridging spaces: Cross-cultural perspectives on promoting positive online learning experiences. Journal of Educational Technology Systems, 42(1), 3–20. https:// doi.org/10.2190/ET.42.1.b. Marcus, J. (1995). The emergence of multi-sited ethnography. Annual Review of Anthropology, 24, 95–117. Moreira, D. (2016). From on-campus to online: A trajectory of innovation, internationalization and inclusion. International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 17(5), 186–199. https://doi.org/10.19173/irrodl.v17i5.2384. Moreira, D., & Antão, G. (2017). “Nobody is strange”: Mobility and interculturality in higher education from de viewpoint of a group of Portuguese international music students. Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Higher Education Advances, HEAd’17 (pp 633–640). Universitat Politecnica de Valencia. https://dx.doi.org/10.4995/ HEAd17.2017.5329. Moreira, D., & Fantinato, M.C. (2014). Adults’ meanings for a professional requalification in a post graduate eLearning context. In P. Guimarães, C. Cavaco, L. Marrocos, C. Paulos, A. Bruno, S. Rodrigues, & M. Marques (Eds.), Conference local change, social actions and adult learning: Challenges and responses – Proceedings of the ESREA, 26–28 of June (pp. 393–400). Lisbon: Instituto de Educação. Powell, A. B., & Frankenstein, M. (Eds.). (1997). Ethnomathematics. Challenging eurocentrism in mathematics education. Albany: State University of New York Press. Pratts, M.L (1991). Arts of the ContactZone. Modern Language Association, pp. 33–40. https://serendip.brynmawr.edu/oneworld/system/files/PrattContactZone.pdf. Accessed: 4. Jan. 2018. Rheingold, H. (1993). The virtual community: Homesteading on the electronic frontier. Reading: Addison-Wesley. Roman, T. (1980). La Celsa e la escuela bel barrio. In E. Knipmeyer (Ed.) Escuelas, pueblos y barrios: Tres ensayos de antropologia educativa. Madrid: Akal Editor. Romiszowski, A. J. (2005). Online learning: Are we on the right track(s)? In G. Kearsley (Ed.), Online learning: Personal reflections on the transformation of education (pp. 321–349). New Jersey: Educational Technology Publications. Rye, S. A., & Støkken, A. M. (2012). The implications of the local context in global online education. International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, 13(1), 191. Sousa, J. (2013). The ethnography of education as a new path for curriculum studies. Proceedings of the European Conference on Curriculum Studies–Future Directions: Uncertainty and Possibility (pp. 823–828). Braga: Universidade do Minho. Sousa, S., & Dias, P. (2017). Como cultivar interações confiáveis. Um esforço para a sustentabilidade da educação aberta e em rede. In P. Dias, D. Moreira, & A. Mendes (Eds.),

196

D. Moreira

Novos olhares para os cenários e práticas da educação digital (pp. 10–43). Lisboa: Universidade Aberta. Stathopoulou, C., & Moreira, D. (2013). Diversity in European school populations: A study in Portugal and Greece with particular attention to Romany cultures. MENON: Journal of Educational Research, 2, 20–31. Stirling, D. (2008). Online learning in context. In J. Visser & M. Visser-Valfrey (Eds.), Learners in a changing landscape. Reflections from a dialogue on new roles and expectations (pp. 165–186). Florida: Springer. Turkle, S. (1995). Life on the screen. Identity in the age of the internet. New York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks. Turkle, S. (2005). The second Self. Cambridge: The MIT Press. Walton, J., & Webster, J. P. (2019). Ethnography and multicultural/intercultural education: Uncovering the unforeseen complexities, practices and unintended outcomes. Ethnography and Education, 14(3), 259–263. https://doi.org/10.1080/17457823.2019.1584861. Westbrook, T. P. (2014). Global contexts for learning: Exploring the relationship between low-context online learning and high-context learners. Christian Higher Education, 13(4), 281–294. https://doi.org/10.1080/15363759.2014.924888. Wheeler, S., & Keegan, H. (2009). Imagined worlds, emerging cultures. In S. Wheeler (Ed.), Perspectives in instructional technology and distance education: Connected minds, emerging cultures: Cybercultures in online learning (pp. 261–277). Charlotte: IAP-Information Age Publishing Inc. Wilson, S. (1977). The use of ethnographic techniques in educational research. Review of Educational Research, 47(1), 245–265. Wittel, A. (2000). Ethnograhy on the move. From field to net to internet. https://www.qualitative-research.net/index.php/fqs/article/view/1131/2517%26amp%3Bsa%3DU%26am p%3Bei%3D6ox. Accessed: 20. Apr. 2020. Wolcott, H. (1985). On ethnographic intent. Educational Administration Quarterly, 21(3), 187–203.