READINGS
Required texts: none
Recommended texts:
Mehan, H. (1979). Learning lessons. Boston: Harvard University Press. (Ch. 1 is in the Block 4 coursepack.)
Cazden, C. (1986). Classroom discourse. In M. C. Wittrock (Ed.), Handbook of Research on Teaching, 3rd edition. New York: Macmillan. (See below for more details.)
Evertson, C. M. & Green, J. L. (1986). Observation as inquiry and method. In M. C. Wittrock (Ed.), Handbook of Research on Teaching, 3rd edition. New York: Macmillan. (See below for more details.)
Course Pack
The items in the coursepack are listed here in the order in which we shall adress them in class. They are not all required reading, and I have tried to give some sense here of what each one deals with so that you can make an informed decision about whether and when to read them. It is, however, important that you read the two chapters by Nofsinger by the second week of the block, since they provide an introduction to and overview of Conversation Analysis. Please feel free to add your comments on these readings to the course e-mail discussion.
1. The Study of Social Interaction:
Ball, S. J. (1990). Self-doubt and soft data: Social and technical trajectories in ethnographic fieldwork. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 3, 157-171.
?Ball's article addreses the topic of the relationship between researcher and researched, which we shall return to in more detail in Block 3. Ball talks of the researcher's "social trajectory through fieldwork" as a "distribution of time and energy, in different places, with different people, and at different times." And he speaks of the importance of reflexivity on the part of the researcher. "Ethnography," writes Ball, "probably is unteachable"; "the only way to learn it is to do it. The only way to get better at it is to do more of it." Certainly this is an essential part of learning this approach to research.
This article contains useful observations on entry into the field, the social relationships one forges, and sampling issues. But the article goes beyond this. Indeed, Ball's aim is set high: "[p]resumably we should attempt to relate social theory to research method, substantive theory to epistemology, and presentation and style to ontology" (p. 170). The brief section on "places" (p. 162-3) contributes to our understanding of "setting" (cf. Block 3). And Ball writes sensitively of the difficulties consequent upon the fact that "in most social settings, there is no special role set apart for researchers." He suggests that we need to consider the researcher as involved in interaction with participants on three different levels: keeping their "'good' researcher persona in place"; shifting and selecting material to analyze; and reflexively considering the relationship between these two (p. 166). Data, suggests Ball, are "soft" and so the researcher must be "skillful." We must be consistent, if we employ a social constructivist ontology, in our considerations of research method: "data are the social construct of the research process itself, not just of the 'natives' under study.... Indeed, what counts as data, what is seen and unnoticed, what is and is not recorded, will depend on the interests, questions, and relationships that are brought to bear in a particular scene. The research process will generate meaning as part of the social life it aims to describe and to analyse." I take it that what Ball means by 'generating meaning' is that research inevitably has some impact upon the social setting and the people being studied. Required.
Jacob, E. (1987). Qualitative research traditions: A review. Review of Educational Research, 57, 1-5
Evelyn Jacob compares ecological psychology, holistic ethnography, cognitive anthropology, ethnography of communication, and symbolic interactionism. In each case Jacob articulates the assumptions about human nature and society that each approach rests upon, as well as its focus, methodology, and application to the study of education. This paper predated Jacob's similar piece in AERJ. It is another useful review to dip into. (You may then want to take a look at Atkinson, P., Delamont, S., & Hammersley, M., 1988, Qualitative research traditions: A British response to Jacob, Review of Educational Research, 58, 231-250, for a criticism of Jacob's presentation of distinct "traditions" and her neglect of British work. Then examine her reply: Jacob, E., 1989, Qualitative research: A defense of traditions, RER, 59, 229-235, and a defense by Lincoln, Y. S., 1989, Qualitative research: A response to Atkinson, Delamont, and Hammersley, RER, 59, 237-239.) Recommended.
Wilson, S. (1977). The use of ethnographic techniques in educational research. Review of Educational Research, 47, 245-265.
This is an early review of the application of anthropological techniques in educational settings. Its interest to us now is largely, though not entirely, historical. The point worthy of note is that back in the late 1970s Wilson explained the rationale behind the use participant observation and related techniques in terms of "two sets of hypotheses about human behavior: (a) the naturalistic-ecological hypothesis, and (b) the qualitative-phenomenological hypothesis" (p. 247). The first concerns the influence of setting on human behavior; the second insists that "the social scientist cannot understand human behavior without understanding the framework within which the subjects interpret their thoughts, feelings and actions" (p. 249, original emphasis). This means, suggests Wilson, that the researcher must "develop a dynamic tension between the subjective role of participant and the role of observer so that he is neither one entirely" (p. 250). You should compare Wilson's description of the need for a researcher "to systematically empathize with the participants" with Geertz's critique of verstehen as empathy. Do you agree with Wilson that such a researcher "is able to view behavior simultaneously from all perspectives" (p. 259), "transcending his own perspective" (p. 261)? It is clear that Wilson follows the phenomenological tenet that the researcher should, and can, be objective about subjectivity, rather than the hermeneutic position that Geertz and other contemporary anthropologists now hold.
Wilson usefully describes a set of issues in the ethnographic research process: entry and establishment of role; data collection; objectivity; and analysis of data. His discussion of the latter is largely in terms of the "grounded theory" approach of Glaser and Strauss, but he discusses important questions to be asked of all interpretive research. Recommended.
2. Conversation Analysis:
Nofsinger, R. E. (1991). Ch. 3. Action sequences and Ch. 4. Turn organization. From Everyday conversation. Newbury Park: Sage.
These two chapters provide a good, straightforward overview of the terms and analytical approach of conversation analysis (CA). Please read both chapters before the second week of Block 4. Required.
Mehan, H. (1979). Ch. 1: Looking inside schools. From Learning lessons. Boston: Harvard University Press.
Hugh (Bud) Mehan conducted an analysis of the social organization of talk in a single elementary school classroom (Courtney Cazden was the teacher!). He used the techniques of Conversation Analysis to study the structure of interaction between teacher and students, in order to throw light on the "internal life of schools." In this chapter, the first in his book, Mehan explains the relevance of a case study of a single classroom, describes the research strategy he used and compares it with other efforts to look inside schools, and explains the policies guiding the research and the data collection and analysis procedures. In his discussion of the limitations of correlational studies of differences between schools on 'input' and 'output' variables Mehan argues that such studies leave schooling an unexamined black-box, and provide only probabilistic and abstract findings that are hard to derive policy from. And Mehan contrasts his "constitutive ethnography" with both simple quantification of classroom behavior and conventional field studies. He provides here a helpful summary of the analytic strategies of this approach. Recommended.
Green, J. L. (1983). Research on teaching as a linguistic process: A state of the art. In E. W. Gordon (Ed.) Review of Research in Education, American Educational research Association: Washington, D. C., pp. 151-252.
This is a somewhat clumsily written review of ten research projects in the early 1980s which were sponsored by the National Institute of Education and dealt mainly with communication in the classroom. The chapter is useful resource. Green describes constructs forming "a framework that guides observation, collection and analysis" of material in these studies (p. 171 ff): face-to-face interaction is a rule-governed phenomenon (though by 'rule' here is meant something more like the 'methods' that Garfinkel describes, or the 'techniques' that Nofsinger appeals to); social contexts are constructed; meaning is context-specific; comprehension involves inference; the classroom is a communicative environment; teachers orchestrate and manage. You may wish to compare and contrast this framework with topics we've discussed in class.
3. The Games People Play:
Hammersley, M. (1990). School learning: The cultural resources required by pupils to answer a teacher's question. From Classroom ethnography: Empirical and methodological essays. Milton Keynes: Open University Press.
Martyn Hammersley is a British ethnographer of education. As Louis Smith notes in the introduction to this collection of Hammersley's publications since the early 1970s, British and American researchers studying classroom interaction often have little awareness of each others' work. Here Hammersley aims (in a piece first published in 1977) to "investigate the nature of learning in school by focussing on a teacher's question, albeit one which took up a whole lesson. Teacher-asks-a-question-pupils-answer is a central interactional form in classrooms, in both oral and written media. My central interest in this question concerns what pupils have to do to answer it. The nature of the cultural resources required to answer teacher questions has implications both for what pupils must do in school in order to 'do well' in selection terms, and for what they might learn, for what 'world' they are being socialized into" (p. 28).
Hammersley engages here in a detailed analysis of the conversation among teacher and students without losing sight of the larger sociocultural forces that influence and organize what is done in the school classroom. Recommended.
Wittgenstein, L. (1953). § 66 - 71 from Philosophical Investigations. New York: Macmillan.
Conversation Analysis studies the organization of "turns" of talk and the conversational moves that people make when they take a turn. The root metaphor is that of a "game," and interpretive researchers will often speak of the "language-games" that different communities are involved in. But the notion of a game is a little tricky. Eccentric Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (who first suggested that there are many different language games) in this short excerpt (from the book which inspired Peter Winch's famous and controversial The idea of a social science) suggests that there is no single feature characteristic of all games. Required.
MacIntyre, A. (1984). pp. 97-99 from Ch. 8: The character of generalizations in social science and their lack of predictive power. From After virtue: A study in moral theory. 2nd ed. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press.
In another short excerpt, in which Alisdair MacIntyre discusses why the social sciences cannot discover law-like generalizations from which to predict human behavior, he points out that "the problem about real life is that moving one's knight to QB3 may always be replied to with a lob across the net." Required.
Bennis, W. (1989). When winning is losing. Ch. 14 from Why leaders can't lead. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
And in a third brief excerpt, professor of business administration Warren Bennis takes issue with the notion that business is a game. The lesson to be drawn from these three pieces? Not to take the game metaphor too seriously or too narrowly. (But take a look in Block 3 at John Caputo's talk of play.) Required.
Goetz, J. P. & LeCompte, M. D. (1984). Ethnography and qualitative design in educational research. Orlando, FL: Academic Press. Pp. 109-119, 142-153.
I have selected two sections -- on participant observation and nonparticipant observation -- from this fairly typical representative of the writing on qualitative research in education. Goetz & LeCompte's book contains useful practical suggestions but, as these passages illustrate, also shows confusion about some of the philosophical issues that interpretive research must deal with.
For instance, participant observation note-taking is described as "based upon the empathy investigators develop with participants in the process of taking a variety of roles in the course of the investigation" (p. 109). But this is the psychological account of verstehen that Giddens rightly considers outmoded (see the selection from Clifford Geertz for a debunking of the myth that the anthropologist is somehow more empathic than common folk). Its goal, we are told, is just to document participants' "definitions of reality and the organizing constructs of their world," as though these are unproblematically evident, and as though they do not on significant occasions require a critical appraisal by the researcher. If on some occasions "participants serve as arbiters" of the researcher's fieldnotes, this practice also has methodological and ethical problems.
Nonparticipant observation, on the other hand, is described as requiring "a dispassionate recorder" (p. 143) and "a detached, neutral, and unobtrusive observer" (p. 145). The authors cite none of the people who have suggested that such a stance is undesirable, even impossible. They are adopting the "orthodox" view of science that Giddens describes.
Goetz & LeCompte suggest that participant observation is directed by the choice of research topic, the study's theoretical and conceptual framework, the data that emerge, and the researcher's reactions and hunches (p. 112). This seems right to me (though it surely clashes with the notion that the ethnographic researcher "lives as much as possible with and in the same manner as the individuals being investigated," p. 109), but the example provided (pp. 114-118) shows none of these factors. The field notes don't reflect a clear social role the researcher has adopted in the classroom, nor do they seem to capture the "definitions" of either the students or the teacher. Like the accompanying classroom diagram (p. 115), they seem to be written 'from above', providing a view of the classroom that none of the participants could ever actually have.
Compare the examples of nonparticipant observation (pp. 148-151). Here the focus stays on the teacher throughout, but can you find other significant differences between this and the participant observation fieldnotes? Required.
Everhart, R. B. (1977). Between stranger and friend: Some consequences of "long term" fieldwork in schools. American Educational Research Journal, 14, 1-14.
Robert Everhart discusses the balance between the two roles of participant and observer -- "friend" and "stranger" -- in terms of role, reciprocity and receptivity. He describes his own two-year study of a junior high school in a sensitive and non-technical manner. This article forms an interesting pair with Geertz' more philosophical piece. It's interesting to find a piece like this published in AERJ back in 1977! (Wayne Urban referred to this article in his introduction to the new AERJ section, in the first coursepack.) Recommended.
4. From Description to Explanation:
Willis, P. (1977). Learning to labor: How working class kids get working class jobs. New York: Columbia University Press. pp. 11-51.
Paul Willis' analysis of the counter-school culture of a group of working class boys in an English comprehensive school in the industrial midlands remains my favorite school ethnography. Willis, working in the Birmingham Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies, described the life and time of "the lads," as they called themselves. In this excerpt Willis is articulating the oppositional culture that "the lads" develop, and its elements, and in doing so he illustrates precisely the kind of hermeneutic analysis that Geertz proposes.
The informal group is the basic unit of this culture, says Willis. Opposition -- to the teachers, to conformist boys (the "ear 'oles"), to girls, and to ethnic minorities -- is the major dimension of their culture, expressed as a general style of behaving (and misbehaving). "The lads" struggle to appropriate the organizational space and time of the school and make it their own.
Unfortunately such a short excerpt cannot do justice to the way Willis gives us the minutia of these boys' lives while at the same team weaving an account of social class and social institution, of schooling and laboring, of individual and social system. A must-read! Required.
Geertz, C. (1979). From the native's point of view: the nature of anthropological understanding. Reprinted in P. Rabinow & W. M. Sullivan (Eds). Interpretive social science: A reader. Berkeley: University of California Press.
In this typically gracefully written essay, anthropologist Clifford Geertz debunks the notion that Verstehen -- understanding another person's point of view -- requires empathy (Einfülen). The publication of the diary of anthropological founding-father Malinowski provides the context for Geertz' discussion: Malinowksi turns out to have "had rude things to say about the natives he was living with and rude words to say it in" (p. 226). But if a special sensitivity and attunement is not what is used, how does a researcher come to understand another person's take on the world? "The trick" says Geertz "is to figure out what the devil they think they are up to." This involves the use of both emic and etic analyses; both experience-near and experience-distant concepts (he explains these terms on p. 226-227). The problem with any notion that one simply hangs out with the "natives" is that they use emic terms spontaneously and unself-consciously, and as a result cannot readily articulate them and explain them to the researcher. Rather, the researcher must search out and analyze the symbolic forms -- words, images, institutions, behaviors -- in terms of which people represent to themselves their world and one another.
Geertz illustrates this point with examples from his own work in Java, Bali and Morocco. Then he describes what he and Malinowski have both done as "a continuous dialectical tacking between the most local of local detail and the most global of global structure in such a way as to bring both into view simultaneously" (p. 239). This movement between the parts and the whole "is, of course, but the now familiar trajectory of what Dilthey called the hermeneutic circle" (p. 239-240). This can be illustrated in familiar terms: following a baseball game requires an understanding of a bat, a hit, etc., but understanding each of these requires a sense of what the game is all about.
The last two paragraphs provide a terse summary of Geertz' main point. Required.
Farrell, E., Peguero, G., Lindsey, R. & White, R. (1988). Giving voice to high school students: pressure and boredom, ya know what I'm sayin'? American Educational Research Journal, 25, 489-502.
An example from AERJ of an ethnographic study of an urban school where students worked on the project "as collaborators rather than informants" and contributed both to data-analysis and to writing the report. The last three authors of the paper are high school students! Recommended.
5. Hermeneutic Ontology:
Giddens, A. (1983). Hermeneutics and social theory. In Profiles and critiques in social theory. Berkeley: University of California Press.
In this chapter Giddens never quite gets around to saying what hermeneutics is, beyond describing it as "the theory of interpretation." But he does a good job of locating the current interest in hermeneutics in the larger context of debates over the character of science, both natural and social science.
The first attempts to define a science of society in the 19th century took for granted that it would be just like the natural sciences, but applied to people. This meant it would be the objective study of causal laws. Early proponents of an interpretive social science disagreed, saying that they should be seeking understanding of meaning (verstehen) and not explanation in terms of causes (erklären). However, they accepted that the social scientist should aim to be neutral. Giddens shows how this is true of both Alfred Schutz, applying phenomenological philosophy to social science, and Peter Winch, applying the linguistic philosophy of Wittgenstein to the same aim. In both cases the researcher was described as employing "empathic understanding" to grasp the meaning of participants' behavior.
One mistake here was accepting the "orthodox" view of natural science. The post-positivist philosophy of science of Thomas Kuhn and others has shown that even natural scientists interpret the world. Natural science is a hermeneutic enterprise too. The difference between natural and social science is that the latter involves a "double hermeneutic": researchers deal with an object world that talks back to them, and which constructs and interprets the meanings of their activities. "Human beings... are agents able to -- and prone to -- incorporate social theory and research within their own action."
So Giddens argues that social theory is inevitably critical theory. It involves the search for causal laws in society as well as the understanding of meaning, but once these laws are identified they may well be altered by researchers' analysis of them, as people take action on the basis of the knowledge research provides them.
(Don't concern yourself at this point with Giddens' account of his "theory of structuration." This goes beyond what we will be discussing in this course.) Required.
Recommended additional reading:
At some point during this Block it would be useful for you to take a quick look at the following two review chapters in the Handbook of Research on Teaching. The Handbook can be found in IRIS, and the two chapters are on reserve. They both discuss educational research that has employed techniques similar to those we are discussing.
Cazden, C. (1986). Classroom discourse. In M. C. Wittrock (Ed.), Handbook of Research on Teaching, 3rd edition. New York: Macmillan.
Courtney Cazden begins this review with reference to the statement by Panel 5 of the National Institute of Education's 1974 conference on studies in teaching. Cazden calls "sociolinguistic" (Sc) the descriptive studies of classroom discourse processes which around that time started to replace "process-product" studies. Process-product studies (operating within the empirical-analytic paradigm) sought associations between coded teacher-student behavior and student achievement. Cazden notes that the separation between "positivistic" and "interpretive" perspectives in these research approaches has been paralleled by use of different journals and "a larger controversy in educational and social science research" (p. 433). However, although Cazden sets out to document Sc work, she includes even empirical-analytic studies if they include "qualitative analyses of actual classroom talk" (p. 433).
The result is a mixed bag, but nonetheless this is a useful overview. Cazden's chapter considers: classroom events and their participation structures; features of the teacher-talk register; cultural differences and differential treatment; interactions among peers; and classroom discourse and student learning. She also discusses a mixed set of methodological issues: selection of classrooms; how to record and transcribe; whether to interview as well as observe; the role of formal models in analysis; a paragraph on combining qualitative and quantitative analyses; and the question of what to report back to participants. You'll want to dip into this bag to get a sense of what researchers before you have been doing.
Evertson, C. M. & Green, J. L. (1986). Observation as inquiry and method. In M. C. Wittrock (Ed.), Handbook of Research on Teaching, 3rd edition. New York: Macmillan.
This is another mammoth-sized review chapter from the Handbook of Research on Teaching. It deals with the topic of systematic observation of "educational processes." The chapter starts out strongly but falters at the end as the authors seem to run out of things to say.
The chapter opens with an interesting outline of four phases of observational research in education. Phase One (ca. 1939-1963) was an exploratory one; Phase Two (ca. 1958-1973) was a period of development of instruments using coding categories; Phase Three (ca. 1973-present) was one of the exploration of teacher behaviors relating to student outcome performance -- process-product research, in large part; Phase Four (also ca. 1973-present) is a period of expansion, alternative approaches, and theoretical and methodological advances. The authors identify the start of this phase with the publication in 1972 by Cazden, John & Hymes of "Functions of Language in the Classroom."
Evertson and Green emphasize that any approach to the observation of classroom processes necessarily provides only one representation or view of the phenomenon under study, but that this can become a strength if it leads researchers to undertake the integration of multiple perspectives.
The chapter continues with a review of four major research programs, all multiple-site, large-team, federally funded projects, and ends by addressing rather cursorily the question: How to begin an observational study?
Week 1: The Study of Social Interaction
| Readings | Ball, in coursepack
(Jacob, in coursepack) (Wilson, in coursepack) |
| Lecture/ Discussion | Introduction to Block 4
View video-taped Touchstones discussion |
| Homework | Plan the materials you will collect and analyze for the Block 4 Project |
| Lab | Observation note-taking with video |
Week 2: Conversation Analysis
| Readings | Nofsinger Ch. 3 & Ch. 4, in coursepack |
| Lecture/ Discussion | Introduction to conversation analysis |
| Homework | Analyze a short episode from the video-taped discussion |
| Lab | Techniques for video- and audio-taping social interaction in a field setting |
Week 3: The Games People Play
| Readings | (Mehan, in coursepack)
(Hammersley, in coursepack) Wittgenstein, MacIntyre & Bennis, in coursepack Goetz & LeCompte, in coursepack (Everhart, in coursepack) |
| Lecture/ Discussion | Ethnography; Fieldwork |
| Homework | Collect material for your Block Project |
| Lab | Video of 1993 AERA mini-workshop on publishing qualitative research |
Week 4 : From Description to Explanation
| Reading | Willis, in coursepack
Geertz, in coursepack (Farrell et al., in coursepack) |
| Lecture/ Discussion | Writing an ethnography
Interpretive explanation |
| Homework | Conduct an analysis of your material |
| Lab | Review of Conversation Analysis |
Week 5 : Hermeneutic Ontology
| Reading | Giddens, in coursepack |
| Lecture/ Discussion | What is a hermeneutic ontology?
Transition to Block 3 |
| Homework | Complete your Block 4 Project Report |
| Lab | Clinic on analysis and writing |
Block 4 Project Report due
| Report for
Block Project 2 |
(a) description of your fieldwork (b) conversation transcript (c) conversation analyses (d) a short group report comparing your analyses |