Pub Date : 2020-07-03DOI: 10.1080/17457823.2020.1788404
Mikael R. Karlsson, Peter Erlandson
ABSTRACT This article is a part of an on going ethnography project that run over six years in an Upper Secondary School in the south of Sweden. In this particular article we shed light over the implementation, enactment and reactions from the staff of one of the latest of a series of reforms that has been launched into the Swedish educational system: The Teachers’ Salary Boost reform (TSB). The reform rewarded especially excellent teachers – with raise in their monthly wage with 200–300 €. 40–50% of the teachers at the school did not get any raise at all. We produced our data using ethnographical methods with focus on participant observation, formal and informal interviews. From our data we draw the conclusion that while the leadership at the school executed the reform as a question concerning administration, the teachers receive the reform as a question concerning existence. The embedded trivialisation of teachers’ skilfulness remodelled the teachers professional positioning and made them questioning their professional lives and professional selves.
{"title":"Administrating existence: teachers and principals coping with the Swedish ‘Teachers’ Salary Boost’ reform","authors":"Mikael R. Karlsson, Peter Erlandson","doi":"10.1080/17457823.2020.1788404","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17457823.2020.1788404","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article is a part of an on going ethnography project that run over six years in an Upper Secondary School in the south of Sweden. In this particular article we shed light over the implementation, enactment and reactions from the staff of one of the latest of a series of reforms that has been launched into the Swedish educational system: The Teachers’ Salary Boost reform (TSB). The reform rewarded especially excellent teachers – with raise in their monthly wage with 200–300 €. 40–50% of the teachers at the school did not get any raise at all. We produced our data using ethnographical methods with focus on participant observation, formal and informal interviews. From our data we draw the conclusion that while the leadership at the school executed the reform as a question concerning administration, the teachers receive the reform as a question concerning existence. The embedded trivialisation of teachers’ skilfulness remodelled the teachers professional positioning and made them questioning their professional lives and professional selves.","PeriodicalId":46203,"journal":{"name":"Ethnography and Education","volume":"16 1","pages":"129 - 144"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2020-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/17457823.2020.1788404","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45187021","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-07-03DOI: 10.1080/17457823.2020.1788405
Ruth Unsworth, Jonathan Tummons
ABSTRACT The formation of teachers’ professional practice has been discussed in relation to a wide variety of influences, with government prescription of practice often criticised as oppressing professional agency. Set within an ethnographic study within one English primary school, this paper explores the role of intertextuality in the form of intertextual hierarchies during a policy-led period of change to teachers’ professional practice: the introduction of a new way of teaching mathematics. Drawing on actor-network theory and literacy studies, we trace the stages of the translation of the new method from policy into practice, through the intertextual hierarchies which carry this knowledge across policy/practice boundaries. We highlight the crucial role of texts as actors within a remodelling of professional practice. Describing how the socio-material use and creation of texts leads to localisation of policies, we lend hope to schools in terms of their own agency within government-driven agendas.
{"title":"Reassembling teachers’ professional practice: an ethnography of intertextual hierarchies in primary mathematics","authors":"Ruth Unsworth, Jonathan Tummons","doi":"10.1080/17457823.2020.1788405","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17457823.2020.1788405","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The formation of teachers’ professional practice has been discussed in relation to a wide variety of influences, with government prescription of practice often criticised as oppressing professional agency. Set within an ethnographic study within one English primary school, this paper explores the role of intertextuality in the form of intertextual hierarchies during a policy-led period of change to teachers’ professional practice: the introduction of a new way of teaching mathematics. Drawing on actor-network theory and literacy studies, we trace the stages of the translation of the new method from policy into practice, through the intertextual hierarchies which carry this knowledge across policy/practice boundaries. We highlight the crucial role of texts as actors within a remodelling of professional practice. Describing how the socio-material use and creation of texts leads to localisation of policies, we lend hope to schools in terms of their own agency within government-driven agendas.","PeriodicalId":46203,"journal":{"name":"Ethnography and Education","volume":"16 1","pages":"109 - 126"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2020-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/17457823.2020.1788405","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41633153","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-07-02DOI: 10.1080/17457823.2019.1698309
A. Hipkiss, S. Windsor, D. Sanders
ABSTRACT This article uses vignettes and photographs taken from ethnographic research to reframe the methodological assumptions within school garden research. New theoretical perspectives are applied to previous empirical school garden research that provides deeper understandings of both the teaching and the learning of ecoliteracy in such material contexts. Actor Network Theory and Social Semiotics further highlight the affordance of school garden spaces. We make public the conversations of a small research group about a perceived ethnographic turn towards materiality, aesthetics and agency.
{"title":"The girl with the garden gloves: researching the affordances of sensual materialities in the school garden","authors":"A. Hipkiss, S. Windsor, D. Sanders","doi":"10.1080/17457823.2019.1698309","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17457823.2019.1698309","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article uses vignettes and photographs taken from ethnographic research to reframe the methodological assumptions within school garden research. New theoretical perspectives are applied to previous empirical school garden research that provides deeper understandings of both the teaching and the learning of ecoliteracy in such material contexts. Actor Network Theory and Social Semiotics further highlight the affordance of school garden spaces. We make public the conversations of a small research group about a perceived ethnographic turn towards materiality, aesthetics and agency.","PeriodicalId":46203,"journal":{"name":"Ethnography and Education","volume":"15 1","pages":"350 - 362"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2020-07-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/17457823.2019.1698309","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44191999","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-07-02DOI: 10.1080/17457823.2019.1698307
Begoña Vigo-Arrazola, Belén Dieste-Gracia
ABSTRACT This article focuses on the relevance that aesthetic practices play extending parental involvement and influence in school contexts in Spain. One rural, one urban and one peri-urban school have been included in the research. Participant observation and interviews were the main means of data production. In the results all the different schools promoted parents’ participation. However, differences in aesthetic practices and experiences were found. Parental involvement was developed in schools in different ways in relation to local contextual conditions and the salient characteristics of the geographic spaces the schools belonged to. Practical aesthetic knowledge produced multiple strategies of action.
{"title":"Identifying characteristics of parental involvement: aesthetic experiences and micro-politics of resistance in different schools through ethnographic investigations","authors":"Begoña Vigo-Arrazola, Belén Dieste-Gracia","doi":"10.1080/17457823.2019.1698307","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17457823.2019.1698307","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article focuses on the relevance that aesthetic practices play extending parental involvement and influence in school contexts in Spain. One rural, one urban and one peri-urban school have been included in the research. Participant observation and interviews were the main means of data production. In the results all the different schools promoted parents’ participation. However, differences in aesthetic practices and experiences were found. Parental involvement was developed in schools in different ways in relation to local contextual conditions and the salient characteristics of the geographic spaces the schools belonged to. Practical aesthetic knowledge produced multiple strategies of action.","PeriodicalId":46203,"journal":{"name":"Ethnography and Education","volume":"15 1","pages":"300 - 315"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2020-07-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/17457823.2019.1698307","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41462366","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-06-01DOI: 10.1080/17457823.2020.1761416
J. Engel
ABSTRACT The article aims to develop a theory of biographical knowledge and practices of aesthetic articulation. Thus, it examines the aesthetic practices of young people beyond their verbal utterances. Using seven video case studies, it demonstrates the extent to which biographical knowledge is articulated in aesthetic practices – drawing, dancing, making music, etc. Aesthetic practices of articulation are theoretically defined as modes of relation between people and objects and between people and spaces. The article introduces a new ethnographic approach in biographical research that takes into account the lack of research into the significance of aesthetic practices in non-formally institutionalized areas and is thus also an epistemological guide that goes beyond highly cultural patterns and contexts. This has also proved particularly relevant for investigating subjectivation processes of vulnerable groups or, more specifically, the emergence of unequal subject positioning.
{"title":"The materiality of biographical knowledge – ethnography on aesthetic practices","authors":"J. Engel","doi":"10.1080/17457823.2020.1761416","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17457823.2020.1761416","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The article aims to develop a theory of biographical knowledge and practices of aesthetic articulation. Thus, it examines the aesthetic practices of young people beyond their verbal utterances. Using seven video case studies, it demonstrates the extent to which biographical knowledge is articulated in aesthetic practices – drawing, dancing, making music, etc. Aesthetic practices of articulation are theoretically defined as modes of relation between people and objects and between people and spaces. The article introduces a new ethnographic approach in biographical research that takes into account the lack of research into the significance of aesthetic practices in non-formally institutionalized areas and is thus also an epistemological guide that goes beyond highly cultural patterns and contexts. This has also proved particularly relevant for investigating subjectivation processes of vulnerable groups or, more specifically, the emergence of unequal subject positioning.","PeriodicalId":46203,"journal":{"name":"Ethnography and Education","volume":"15 1","pages":"377 - 393"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2020-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/17457823.2020.1761416","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"59966768","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-05-18DOI: 10.1080/17457823.2020.1764856
A. Castellsagué, Sílvia Carrasco
ABSTRACT Education and gender have become central issues within development discourses and practices in Nepal, under the powerful idea that school enables equality for women, collective wellbeing, and the nation’s development. While hegemonic approaches to development are being increasingly challenged, critical contributions focusing on the education-gender intersection are still scarce. Drawing on data from an ethnographic research in a Himalayan village and school, this paper analyses the forms of knowledge, styles and relationships within learning processes in/outside the school, and its implications for the gender regime (re)production. Findings challenge the idea of schooling as an empowering tool for women by showing not only the coexistence of contradictory or differentiated models of transmission and acquisition of culture but also of contents, meanings, and its value change, in a Nepal governed by and within the paradigm of development.
{"title":"Development, education and gender: challenging the empowerment rhetoric from an ethnographic study in rural Nepal","authors":"A. Castellsagué, Sílvia Carrasco","doi":"10.1080/17457823.2020.1764856","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17457823.2020.1764856","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Education and gender have become central issues within development discourses and practices in Nepal, under the powerful idea that school enables equality for women, collective wellbeing, and the nation’s development. While hegemonic approaches to development are being increasingly challenged, critical contributions focusing on the education-gender intersection are still scarce. Drawing on data from an ethnographic research in a Himalayan village and school, this paper analyses the forms of knowledge, styles and relationships within learning processes in/outside the school, and its implications for the gender regime (re)production. Findings challenge the idea of schooling as an empowering tool for women by showing not only the coexistence of contradictory or differentiated models of transmission and acquisition of culture but also of contents, meanings, and its value change, in a Nepal governed by and within the paradigm of development.","PeriodicalId":46203,"journal":{"name":"Ethnography and Education","volume":"16 1","pages":"92 - 108"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2020-05-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/17457823.2020.1764856","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44201119","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-05-12DOI: 10.1080/17457823.2020.1760910
Henriette Duch, Annette Rasmussen
ABSTRACT Familiarity and distance is an issue that is much discussed in ethnographic fieldwork. This paper focuses on the topic of balancing familiarity and distance when the researcher is directly or indirectly part of the field, which in the study consists of an adult education context of two different teacher-training courses for upper secondary teachers. The fieldworker is also a teacher at one of the courses in the study, which is thus in a double sense framed by the challenge of an adult education study. The analysis is based on Bourdieu’s concept of participant objectification and Gold’s categorising of roles in ethnographic fieldwork. It illustrates how different contexts depending on the prior familiarity of the fieldworker provide access to different degrees of participation. The particular adult education context and fieldworker relations complicate the fieldwork relations and the act of balancing familiarity and distance.
{"title":"Familiarity and distance in ethnographic fieldwork: field positions and relations in adult education","authors":"Henriette Duch, Annette Rasmussen","doi":"10.1080/17457823.2020.1760910","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17457823.2020.1760910","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Familiarity and distance is an issue that is much discussed in ethnographic fieldwork. This paper focuses on the topic of balancing familiarity and distance when the researcher is directly or indirectly part of the field, which in the study consists of an adult education context of two different teacher-training courses for upper secondary teachers. The fieldworker is also a teacher at one of the courses in the study, which is thus in a double sense framed by the challenge of an adult education study. The analysis is based on Bourdieu’s concept of participant objectification and Gold’s categorising of roles in ethnographic fieldwork. It illustrates how different contexts depending on the prior familiarity of the fieldworker provide access to different degrees of participation. The particular adult education context and fieldworker relations complicate the fieldwork relations and the act of balancing familiarity and distance.","PeriodicalId":46203,"journal":{"name":"Ethnography and Education","volume":"16 1","pages":"77 - 91"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2020-05-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/17457823.2020.1760910","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49240361","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-04-03DOI: 10.1080/17457823.2020.1738255
J. Engel, D. Beach, Benjamin Jörissen
The importance of materiality in learning and education processes has been emphasised in numerous empirical studies (e.g. Tervooren and Kreitz 2018) and theoretical argumentation (Thompson, Casale,...
{"title":"Introduction: cultural sedimentations – ethnography on the materiality and historicity of aesthetic practices","authors":"J. Engel, D. Beach, Benjamin Jörissen","doi":"10.1080/17457823.2020.1738255","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17457823.2020.1738255","url":null,"abstract":"The importance of materiality in learning and education processes has been emphasised in numerous empirical studies (e.g. Tervooren and Kreitz 2018) and theoretical argumentation (Thompson, Casale,...","PeriodicalId":46203,"journal":{"name":"Ethnography and Education","volume":"15 1","pages":"267 - 269"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2020-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/17457823.2020.1738255","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45747909","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-04-02DOI: 10.1080/17457823.2019.1631867
Montserrat Rifà-Valls, Joanna Empain
ABSTRACT After exploring the interactions between moving image-based art practices and anthropology in recent decades, and the permeable membranes in ethnographic research, we will describe six tactics of video-ethnography used to create experimental narratives with a group of South Asian immigrant girls. Positioned in feminist critical poststructuralism, postcolonial theory and film theory, the research gives visibility to how the participants construct their identities when attending secondary school in Catalonia. Learning from artists like Ursula Biemann and Trinh T. Minh-ha, we have experimented with visual modes of producing cultural knowledge, with the aim of narrating migrant subjectivities and difference through moving images. Specifically, we focus on the production of stories through video-ethnographic research, based on the contributions of Michel de Certeau, who describes tactics as mobile, situated and fluid. In the end, this video-ethnographic research has experimented with reflexivity, ‘facing’, re-framing, in-betweenness, the interval, and spectatorship as tactics of narrating ‘otherness’
{"title":"In-betweenness in moving images: six experimental tactics of video-ethnography to narrate South Asian immigrant girls’ subjectivities","authors":"Montserrat Rifà-Valls, Joanna Empain","doi":"10.1080/17457823.2019.1631867","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17457823.2019.1631867","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT After exploring the interactions between moving image-based art practices and anthropology in recent decades, and the permeable membranes in ethnographic research, we will describe six tactics of video-ethnography used to create experimental narratives with a group of South Asian immigrant girls. Positioned in feminist critical poststructuralism, postcolonial theory and film theory, the research gives visibility to how the participants construct their identities when attending secondary school in Catalonia. Learning from artists like Ursula Biemann and Trinh T. Minh-ha, we have experimented with visual modes of producing cultural knowledge, with the aim of narrating migrant subjectivities and difference through moving images. Specifically, we focus on the production of stories through video-ethnographic research, based on the contributions of Michel de Certeau, who describes tactics as mobile, situated and fluid. In the end, this video-ethnographic research has experimented with reflexivity, ‘facing’, re-framing, in-betweenness, the interval, and spectatorship as tactics of narrating ‘otherness’","PeriodicalId":46203,"journal":{"name":"Ethnography and Education","volume":"15 1","pages":"171 - 189"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2020-04-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/17457823.2019.1631867","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49553281","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-04-02DOI: 10.1080/17457823.2019.1568273
Beth Douthirt-Cohen, Tomoko Tokunaga
ABSTRACT Scholars have called for ethnographers to reveal the emotional and controversial aspects of fieldwork. Through analysis of our fieldwork with teens in the United States and Japan, this article documents how we, two adult researchers, attempted to address adultism—a pervasive system of oppression that deems young people inferior. We discuss three types of encounters which we believe reflect how adultism operated in our fieldwork and the challenges related to de-stabilising it. The encounters revealed specific patterns and manifestations of adultism including 1) how adults regulated young people’s identities, 2) our assumptions about what rapport and reciprocity with youth meant, and 3) the dilemmas of whether or not to deploy adult power to intervene in youth dynamics we found to be troublesome. This article suggests that adult researchers reflexively examine and document challenging and unsettling moments with youth in fieldwork in order to interrupt and unlearn adultist behaviours and beliefs.
{"title":"‘Is he allowed to have a crush on you?’ interrupting adultism in fieldwork with youth*","authors":"Beth Douthirt-Cohen, Tomoko Tokunaga","doi":"10.1080/17457823.2019.1568273","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17457823.2019.1568273","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Scholars have called for ethnographers to reveal the emotional and controversial aspects of fieldwork. Through analysis of our fieldwork with teens in the United States and Japan, this article documents how we, two adult researchers, attempted to address adultism—a pervasive system of oppression that deems young people inferior. We discuss three types of encounters which we believe reflect how adultism operated in our fieldwork and the challenges related to de-stabilising it. The encounters revealed specific patterns and manifestations of adultism including 1) how adults regulated young people’s identities, 2) our assumptions about what rapport and reciprocity with youth meant, and 3) the dilemmas of whether or not to deploy adult power to intervene in youth dynamics we found to be troublesome. This article suggests that adult researchers reflexively examine and document challenging and unsettling moments with youth in fieldwork in order to interrupt and unlearn adultist behaviours and beliefs.","PeriodicalId":46203,"journal":{"name":"Ethnography and Education","volume":"15 1","pages":"207 - 221"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2020-04-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/17457823.2019.1568273","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43065038","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}