Educational ethnography
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Geoffrey Walford |
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Geoffrey Walford is Professor of Education Policy and a Fellow of Green Templeton College at the University of Oxford. |
Aims of the resource.
This resource gives an account of the history and current use of ethnography in educational research and provides links to other useful resources.
What is ethnography?
Ethnography is simultaneously one of the most exciting and misunderstood research methodologies and research products within educational research. What initially appears to be a straightforward process of ‘hanging around’ and writing about what has been seen and heard, rapidly becomes a far more complex process. There are continual debates about how high quality ethnographic work should be conducted and presented, and there are some who would wish to broaden the concept way beyond traditional understandings. This resource presents a fairly traditional interpretation – that is exciting and worthwhile enough!
Historically, ethnography was mainly associated with anthropology, but it also has roots in sociology and, in particular, the Chicago School of sociology. Anthropology developed during the late nineteenth century in order to understand the cultures of particular people who were usually regarded as ‘primitive’. But the armchair theorists who first called themselves anthropologists mainly relied on information gained from missionaries and travellers to various parts of the British Empire and other African and Asian countries. Few recognised the benefits of observing these other cultures for themselves and of coming to understand the culture through fieldwork. Bronisaw Malinowski is usually given the credit for inventing fieldwork when he visited the Trobriand Islands in 1915-16 and 1917-18 from which he wrote Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922) and other books. While the much later publication of his diaries raised questions about just how close to the ‘natives’ Malinoski actually got (Stocking, 1983), it was he who at least stated that his aim was to ‘grasp the native’s point of view’ and who encouraged a generation of anthropologists to follow his lead. In the USA Franz Boas occupies a similar position to that of Malinowski, but with more emphasis on theory development. However Boas was not particularly interested in fieldwork. It was left to one of his students, Margaret Mead (1969 [1930]), to develop what she called ‘participant observation’ in her fieldwork amongst the people of Samoa.
Participant observation is also often associated with the sociology of the Chicago School – in particular during the period 1915-35 when Robert Park was in his ascendancy. Park had been a newspaper reporter and argued that first-hand observation of all walks of life was necessary to gain a full understanding of the urban environment. The second generation of Chicago School sociologists such as Howard Becker and Everett Hughes in the 1950s built upon these early studies and spread ideas about the importance of participant observation.
An interest in educational and learning issues was late in arriving in both anthropology and sociology and, even now, ethnography of education tends to be found more in department of education than in departments of sociology or anthropology. While some early anthropologists had generated data and written about such issues as child socialisation and the family, a specific educational emphasis only grew in the 1960 in both USA and UK. Anthropologists started entering the classroom in the USA somewhat earlier than in Britain. George Spindler started fieldwork in elementary schools in the early 1950s and, with his wife Louise, encouraged the development of a whole range of ethnographic studies (Spindler, 1982). In England, a series of studies were conducted by what is commonly called the Manchester School during the 1960s and 1970s. There, within a joint department of sociology and anthropology, doctoral students selected a range of sites which included schools. Three pathbreaking studies were conducted David Hargreaves (1967) who looked at a secondary modern school, Colin Lacey (1970) who did an ethnography of a boys’ grammar school, and Audrey Lambart (1976) who focused on a girls’ grammar school. The books by Hargreaves and Lacey are still models for educational ethnography and well worth reading. Stephen Ball (1981), who was a doctoral student of Lacey, extended this series with his own ethnography of a comprehensive school.
Most people expect educational ethnographies to be conducted in schools and classrooms, and the majority of studies are probably of this nature. But there are many examples that examine learning and teaching in a wide variety of diverse contexts. For example, Amar Dhand (2006 a and b) has explored peer learning amongst drug users in India, while Sara Delamont (2006, Stephens and Delamont, 2006) has looked at capoeira teaching. Further, while some ethnographic studies are conducted in the researcher’s own country and locality, others depend on extended periods away from home and may involve mastery of another language.
The essential elements of educational ethnography.
Various authors use describe ethnography in slightly different ways and, indeed, there is some debate about how far the boundaries should be extended.
Hammersley and Atkinson (2007: 1) discuss it in the following way:
We see the term as referring primarily to a particular method or set of methods. In its most characteristic form it involves the ethnographer participating, overtly or covertly, in people’s daily lives for an extended period of time, watching what happens, listening to what is said, asking questions—in fact, collecting whatever data are available to throw light on the issues that are the focus of the research.
Bryman (2001) suggests five key features, the last of which moves beyond the process to the product:
- Ethnographers immerse themselves in a society
- to collect descriptive data via fieldwork
- concerning the culture of its members
- from the perspective of the meanings members of that society attach to their social world
- and render the collected data intelligible and significant to fellow academics and other readers.
The editors of the academic journal Ethnography and Education similarly listed what they saw as the seven key elements of ethnography.
The key elements of ethnographic research applied to the study of education contexts are:
- the focus on the study of cultural formation and maintenance;
- the use of multiple methods and thus the generation of rich and diverse forms of data;
- the direct involvement and long-term engagement of the researcher(s);
- the recognition that the researcher is the main research instrument;
- the high status given to the accounts of participants’ perspectives and understandings;
- the engagement in a spiral of data collection, hypothesis building and theory testing—leading to further data collection; and
- the focus on a particular case in depth, but providing the basis for theoretical generalisation.
(Troman et al., 2006)
One interesting feature to note about these descriptions is that none mentions ‘qualitative’ or ‘quantitative’ data or methods. While it is now widely recognised that this crude division is largely unhelpful, ethnography is still generally thought of as being a ‘qualitative’ method or set of methods—indeed, some writers incorrectly use the term to be synonymous with qualitative methods. In fact, while ethnographers are unlikely to use sophisticated statistical analysis, they often generate quantitative data as well as qualitative notes and descriptions. Quantitative claims, which are frequently made in ethnographies, require quantitative data, so the use of structured observation, time-sampling and even surveys is required in certain circumstances in addition to more open-ended participant observation and interviewing. The methods used depend upon the research questions that the study eventually tries to answer.
Why is ethnography appropriate for educational issues?
I have argued elsewhere that ethnography is a research strategy especially well-suited to answering particular research questions about learning, teaching and educational issues (Walford, 2008, Massey and Walford, 1998). It cannot, of course, answer all research questions—there will always be a place for statistical surveys and randomised control trials—but ethnography can answer a range of questions where we are concerned to document and understanding learning and teaching processes. This discussion identifies what might be seen as the minimum requirements for a research project to be called ethnographic, as opposed to, say, just qualitative or naturalistic, and also shows how these features make ethnography particularly relevant to studying education and learning. Fundamentally, there is a correspondence between the way in which children and others learn and the way that ethnographers go about their task. The parallels between the two processes are such that ethnography is well suited to the investigation of a range of research questions about the experience of learning.
1. A study of a culture
Ethnographers stress that we move within social worlds, and that to understand the behaviour, values and meanings of any given individual (or group), we must take account of their cultural context. In this respect, ethnography balances attention on the sometimes minute everyday detail of individual lives with wider social structures.
Schools and other learning contexts have a particular micro-culture which all the learners and teachers have to understand. Of particular interest in school ethnography is the potential clash of cultures between the culture that a child inhabits outside school (in family or peer groups) and the culture within the school to which the child is expected to conform. The gradual enculturation process that ethnography entails enables elements of the school culture to be identified in a way unlikely to be evident by other research methods. By living through that process of getting to know the culture, an alert ethnographer can understand that which has become tacit knowledge to those who inhabit the culture.
2. Multiple methods, diverse forms of data
Data constructed during fieldwork may consist of written documents, the researchers’ own fieldnotes (including records of discussions, chance conversations, interviews, overheard remarks, observational notes), audio and video-recordings; and quantitative data may also be included, such as the findings from surveys or structured observation.
Just as learning and teaching often demand multiple forms of input to be successful, so ethnography exploits a variety of research tools. In order to ‘develop the story as it is experienced by participants’ (Woods 1994: 311), and gain a multi-dimensional appreciation of the setting, the ethnographer must be prepared to consider many different types of data. These can be generated only through the use of multiple methods, which may include interviewing, observing, quantitative work, and assembling cultural artefacts.
These processes are again very similar to the way people learn both in and outside of educational institutions. They often adopt a ‘magpie’ attitude to information, picking up anything that looks interesting. They will generate enough data until they feel that they have enough to make sense of what is going on. In order to satisfy their curiosity they usually need many different forms of data and employ a variety of different methods to generate it—looking, listening, asking, watching, experimenting and so on.
3. Engagement
For learning to occur there needs to be engagement with the material to be learned. In particular, there often needs to be a relationship of trust between the learner and the teacher. Similarly, a basic tenet of ethnography is that the best way of getting to know a culture is through first-hand involvement. Ethnographers work on the premise that there is important knowledge which can be gained in no other way than just ‘hanging around’ and ‘picking things up’. The principle of engagement by the researcher contains two elements: human connection with participants, and an investment of time. There is an assumption that, as the researcher becomes a more familiar presence; participants are less likely to behave uncharacteristically. The idea is that participants ‘perform’ less, and, as trust builds, reveal more details of their lives. So the success of an ethnography depends on the researcher developing and maintaining a positive personal involvement with participants, and returning perhaps many times to the field.
Learners, too, need to spend time with others before they can begin to trust what they have to say. Learning is rarely a once-and-for-all process, but depends upon repeated engagement over time.
4. Researcher as instrument
It is inevitable that the ethnographer is his or her own primary source of data. Whether the researcher’s subjectivity is a weakness or strength is not the issue, it is simply an inevitable feature of ethnographic (and much other) research.
But recognising the presence of subjectivity is not the same as saying that anything goes. Somehow a balance must be struck between suspending preconceptions and using one’s present understandings and beliefs to enquire intelligently. Just as a learner needs continually to test what is being learnt against prior knowledge and to be aware of where there are gaps in knowledge, so the ethnographer has similarly to be aware of prior assumptions and lack of knowledge. To achieve such awareness, the ethnographer must constantly review the evolution of his or her ideas, reflecting on why particular decisions were made, why certain questions were asked or not asked, why data were generated a particular way and so on. Above all the ethnographer must try to articulate the assumptions and values implicit in the research, and what it means to acknowledge the researcher as part of, rather than outside, the research act.
5. Participant accounts have high status
Much ethnographic work gives high status to what participants say or show about themselves. Participants hold knowledge about themselves which nobody else has, and what people believe to be the reality of their world is important information in understanding their activities, values, meanings and relationships and in working out what is going on. The most direct means of getting this information is to ask those people and to observe them in their everyday activities. This has methodological implications. Rather than relying on a preconceived framework for gathering and analysing data, ethnographers use their interactions with informants to discover and create analytical frameworks for understanding and portraying that which is under study.
If we want to know more about children learning, it makes sense to investigate directly those who know best what it is like to be a child learning. In recent years there has been a considerable growth in studies that try to gain the voices of children. Many of those involved with school improvement now believe that such views are vital. Yet teachers or inspectors are hardly the most appropriate people to be able to gain this information. Quick, one-off interviews with inspectors or teachers, all of whom have considerable power over learners, may give some new insights, but the sort of data generated by ethnographers who have built relationships of trust with children is likely to be of considerably more use and validity.
But giving high status to participants’ accounts is not an end in itself. A researcher may well be able to discover and articulate things about individuals and groups which they cannot see themselves, as well as things which neither the participants nor researcher can see at the outset of the study. Multiple perspectives are often uncovered and the ethnographer should be in a good position to develop an overarching account.
6. Cycle of hypothesis and theory building
Ethnographers have a constant commitment to modifying hypotheses and theories in the light of further data. In this type of enquiry, developing a theory is not so much an event as a process. As new data emerge, existing hypotheses may prove inadequate, the ethnographer’s sense of what needs to be looked at and reported on may change, and initial explanations of what is going on may be supplanted by ones which seem to fit better. Such an approach is consonant with emergent design, another distinguishing feature of ethnography.
While it may not be clearly articulated, all learning occurs in a similar way to that described above. New information is tested against old understandings and these may be modified if there seem to be contradictions. Although not usually acknowledged, learning involves a process of theory development and testing which is closely aligned to the processes made explicit in ethnography. Ethnography should thus be a good tool for understanding elements of learning.
How to do Educational Ethnography
There are many books and article that consider the various research methods that can be used in ethnographic work. Some of these are discussed below. But, perhaps the most important method of understanding the research processes adopted by ethnographers of education is to read some good examples or the genre. There is nothing better than reading some good examples of what has been done by others.
Any such list is subjective, and runs the risk of being seen to be biased, but some of my personal favourites in Appendix A.
Shorter reports of ethnographic studies can be found in the academic journal Ethnography and Education and in the series of books under the title Studies in Educational Ethnography. Anthropology and Education Quarterly also carries some ethnographic articles, but most are reports of interview-based studies only. Regular conferences on Ethnography and Education are run each September in Oxford.
There are also an ever-growing list of research methods books on various aspects of interviewing, observation, use of audio and video recording, narrative approaches, data handling, analysis of classroom dialogue and general analysis, and so on. Much of this is very useful, but often only after some preliminary fieldwork has started. As with all understanding, there has to be a real context and motivation before the more abstract material begins to make sense. A list of some of the most useful is given in Appendix B. Some of the classic texts are indicated by **.
Some of the most insightful texts on interviewing are Kvale (1996), Kvale and Brinkman (2008), Rubin and Rubin (1995) and Forsey (2008). Some have also found Walford (2001: ch 6) useful. All of these resources stress that interviewing within ethnography is not formulaic, but a delicate process of negotiation between the interviewer and the interviewed. In ethnographic work the interviews are always embedded within a long-term and developing relationship and are never simple one-off events.
All of the books on ethnographic research have sections that discuss observation methods. I have found Foster (1996), Wolcott (1990) and Delamont (2008) particularly useful. But observation is only the first step to writing an ethnography and the key link is the writing and use of fieldnotes to record what has been seen and experienced. There is less published material on this aspect than one would expect, but some important contributions are those of Emerson, et al. (1995), Sanjek (1990), Woods (1996), Coffey (1999) and Walford (2007)
Finally, a book that gathers together accounts of the experience of doctoral students doing educational ethnography is Walford (2002).
References
Ball, S. J. (1981) Beachside Comprehensive, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bryman, A. (2001) Introduction, in A. Bryman (ed.) Ethnography: London: Sage.
Coffey, A. (1999) The Ethnographic Self, London: Sage.
Delamont, S. (2006) The smell of sweat and rum: teacher authority in capoeira classes, Ethnography and Education, 1(2): 161-175.
Delamont, S. (2008) ‘For lust of knowing—observation in educational ethnography’ in G. Walford (ed.) How to do Educational Ethnography, London: Tufnell Press.
Dhand, A. (2006a) The practice of poetry among a group of heroin addicts in India:
naturalistic peer learning, Ethnography and Education, 1(1): 125-141.
Dhand, A. (2006b) The roles performed by peer educators during outreach among heroin addicts in India: Ethnographic insights, Social Science and Medicine, 63: 2674-2685.
Emerson, R.M., Fretz, R.I. and Shaw, L.L. (1995) Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes, Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Forsey, M. (2008) ‘Ethnographic interviewing: from conversation to published text’, in G. Walford (ed.) How to do Educational Ethnography, London: Tufnell Press.
Peter Foster (1996) Observing Schools. A methodological guide, London: Paul
Chapman.
Hammersley, M. and Atkinson, P. (2007) Ethnography: Principles in practice, third
edition, London: Routledge.
Hargreaves, D. H. (1967) Social Relations in the Secondary School, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Kvale, S. (1996) InterViews. An introduction to qualitative research interviewing, London: Sage.
Kvale, S. and Brinkman, S. (2008) InterViews: Learning the Craft of Qualitative Research Interviewing, London: Sage.
Lacey, C. (1970) Hightown Grammar, Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Lambart, A. (1976) The sisterhood, in Hammersley, M. and Woods P. (eds.) The Process of Schooling, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Malinowski, B. C. (1922) Argonauts of the Western Pacific, London: Routledge.
Massey, A. and Walford, G. (1998) Children earning: ethnographers learning, in Walford, G. and Massey, A. (eds.) Children Learning in Context. Stamford CT: JAI Press.
Mead, M. (1969) The Social Organisation of Manu’a, [original 1930], Honolulu: Bishop Museum Press.
Platt, J. (1983) The development of the .participant observation’ method in sociology: origin myth and history’ Journal of History of the Behavioral Sciences, 10(19): 379-393.
Herbert J Rubin and Irene S Rubin (1995) Qualitative Interviewing. The art of hearing data, London: Sage.
Rudduck, J., Chaplain, R. and Wallace, G. (1996) School Improvement: What can pupils tell us? London: David Fulton.
Spindler, G. (1982) Doing the Ethnography of Education: Educational Anthropology in Action, New York: Holt Rinehart and Winston.
Sanjek, R. (1990) (ed.) Fieldnotes: the making of anthropology. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Stephens, N. and Delamont, S. (2006) Balancing the Berimbau: Embodied ethnographic understanding, Qualitative Enquiry, 12(2): 316-339.
Troman, G. with Gordon, T., Jeffrey, B. and Walford, G. (2006) Editorial. Ethnography and Education 1, no. 1: 1-2.
Walford, G. (2001) Doing Qualitative Educational Research, London: Continuum.
Walford, G. (2002) (ed.) Doing a Doctorate in Educational Ethnography, Amsterdam and Oxford: JAI/Elsevier.
Walford, G. (2007) ‘Classification and framing of interviews in ethnographic interviewing.’ Ethnography and Education, 2(2): 145-157.
Walford, G. (2008) (ed.) How to do Educational Ethnography, London: Tufnell Press.
Wolcott, H. (1990) Writing Up Qualitative Research, London: Sage.
Woods, P. (1994) Collaborating in historical ethnography: researching critical events in education, International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 7(4): 309-321
Woods, P. (1996) Researching the Art of Teaching: Ethnography for Educational Use, London: Routledge.
Wood, P. and Jeffrey, B. (1996) Teachable Moments: The art of teaching in primary schools, Buckingham: Open University Press.
Woods, P. and Jeffrey, B. (2003) The Creative School: A framework for creativity, quality and effectiveness, London: RoutledgeFalmer.
Appendix A. Some examples of good and readable ethnographic studies of education.
Patricia A. Adler and Peter Adler (1998) Peer Power. Preadolescent culture and identity (New Brunswick, New Jersey, Rutgers University Press) Parents as researchers.
Lawrence B Angus (1988) Continuity and Change in Catholic Schooling (Lewes, Falmer). An Australian Catholic school ethnography.
Stephen J Ball (1981) Beachside Comprehensive (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press) A classic study following on from David Hargreaves and Colin Lacey.
Dennis Beach and Marianne Dovemark (2007) Education and the Commodity Problem: Ethnographic investigations of creativity and performativity in Swedish schools (London, Tufnell Press)
Shereen Benjamin (2002) The Micropolitics of Inclusive Education: an ethnography (Buckingham, Open University Press)
Ghazala Bhatti (1999) Asian Children at Home and School (London, Routledge)
Jo Boaler (1997) Experiencing School Mathematics: Teaching styles, sex and setting (Buckingham, Open University Press)
Phillip Brown (1987) Schooling Ordinary Kids (London, Tavistock)
Robert G. Burgess (1983) Experiencing Comprehensive Education (London, Tavistock). See also Robert G Burgess (1987) ‘Studying and restudying Bishop McGregor School.’ In Geoffrey Walford (ed.) Doing Sociology of Education (Lewes, Falmer)
Phil Carspecken (1991) Community Schooling and the Nature of Power (London, Routledge). About a parent take-over of a school in Croxteth, Liverpool.
Sarah A. Chase (2008) Perfectly Prep. Gender extremes at a New England Prep school. (Oxford, Oxford University Press)
Heewon Chang (1992) Adolescent Life and Ethos. An ethnography of a US high school (London, Falmer)
Angeles Clemente and Michael J. Higgins (2008) Performing English with a Postcolonial Accent: Ethnographic narratives from Mexico. (London, Tufnell Press)
Paul Connolly (1998) Racism, Gender Identities and Young Children (London, Routledge)
Robert B. Everhart (1983) Reading, Writing and Resistance (New York, Routledge and Kegan Paul)
Martin Forsey (2007) Challenging the System? A dramatic tale of neoliberal reform in an Australian High School (Charlotte, NC, Information Age Publishing)
Gary Alan Fine (1987) With the Boys. Little League baseball and preadolescent culture (Chicago, University of Chicago Press).
David Gillborn and Deborah Youdell (2000) Rationing Education. Policy, practice, reform and equity (Buckingham, Open University Press)
Andy Hargreaves (1986) The Two Cultures of Schooling (Lewes, Falmer). See also Andy Hargreaves (1987) ‘Past, imperfect, tense: Reflections on an ethnographic and historical study of middle schools.’ In Geoffrey Walford (ed.) Doing Sociology of Education (Lewes, Falmer)
Bob Jeffrey and Peter Woods (1998) Testing Teachers (London, Falmer)
Guofang Li (2002) East is East: West is West (London. Peter Lang) About home literacy, based on four Chinese families in Canada.
Ronald A King (1978) All Things Bright and Beautiful? A sociological study of infants’ classrooms (Chichester, Wiley). See also Ronald A King (1984) ‘The man in the Wendy house: Studying infants’ schools.’ In Robert G Burgess (ed.) The Research Process in Educational Settings: Ten case studies (Lewes, Falmer)
Stacey J. Lee (2005) Up Against Whiteness: Race, school, and immigrant youth (New York, Teachers College Press)
Paul McLaren (1986) Schooling as Ritual Performance (London, Routledge and Kegan Paul)
Máirtín Mac an Ghaill (1988) Young, Gifted and Black (Buckingham, Open University Press). See also Máirtín Mac an Ghaill (1991) ‘Young, gifted and black: Methodological reflections of a teacher/researcher.’ In Geoffrey Walford (ed.) Doing Educational Research (London, Routledge)
Máirtín Mac an Ghaill (1994) The Making of Men. Masculinities, sexualities and schooling (Buckingham, Open University Press) See also chapter 9 of Geoffrey Walford (ed.) Doing Research about Education.
Patrick James McQuillan (1998) Educational Oportunity in an Urban American High School (Albany NY, State University of New York Press)
Lynda Measor and Peter Woods (1984) Changing Schools (Milton Keynes, Open University Press). See also Lynda Measor and Peter Woods (1991) ‘Breakthroughs and blockages in ethnographic research.’ In Geoffrey Walford (ed.) Doing Educational Research (London, Routledge)
Susan Laird Mody (2005) Cultural Identity in Kindergarten: a study of Asian-American children in New Jersey. (New York, Routledge)
Michael Moffatt (1989) Coming of Age in New Jersey (New Brunswick, Rutgers University Press) A fascinating ethnography of College students! Tells more than most want to know.
Alan Peshkin (1986) God’s Choice. The total world of the fundamentalist Christian school (Chicago, University of Chicago Press). An excellent study.
Alan Peshkin (1991) The Color of Strangers. The Color of Friends (Chicago, Chicago University Press)
Alan Peshkin (2001) Permissible Advantage? The moral consequences of elite schooling (London, Lawrence Erlbaum)
Andrew Pollard (1985) The Social World of the Primary School (London, Holt, Rinehart and Winston). See also Andrew Pollard (1987) ‘Studying children’s perspectives – a collaborative approach.’ In Geoffrey Walford (ed.) Doing Sociology of Education (Lewes, Falmer)
Andrew Pollard with Ann Filer (1996) The Social World of Children=s Learning (London, Cassell) See also chapter 5 of Geoffrey Walford (ed.) Doing Research about Education.
Sally Power (1996) The Pastoral and the Academic: Conflict and contradiction in the curriculum (London, Cassell) See also chapter 2 of Geoffrey Walford (ed.) Doing Research about Education.
Padma M. Sarangapani (2003) Constructing School Knowledge (New Delhi, Sage) An ethnography of learning in an Indian village.
Annegret Daniele Staiger (2006) Learning Difference (Stanford, Stanford University Press)
Geoffrey Walford (1986) Life in Public Schools (London, Methuen). A study of two major boarding schools.
Geoffrey Walford and Henry Miller (1991) City Technology College (Milton Keynes, Open University Press) Chapters 3‑6. About the CTC in Solihull. See also Geoffrey Walford (1991) ‘Researching the City Technology College, Kingshurst.’ In Geoffrey Walford (ed.) Doing Educational Research (London, Routledge)
Lois Weis (1985) Between Two Worlds (New York, Routledge and Kegan Paul)
Lois Weis (1990) Working Class Without Work (New York, Routledge)
Paul Willis (1977) Learning to Labour (Farnborough, Saxon House). A classic and controversial account of a small group of working-class boys.
Peter Woods (1979) The Divided School (London, Routledge and Kegan Paul)
Peter Woods (Ed.) (1980) Pupil Strategies (Beckenham, Croom Helm) Chapters 1, 2, 3, 4 and 6
Peter Woods (1990) The Happiest Days? How pupils cope with school (London, Falmer)
Peter Woods (1993) Critical Events in Teaching and Learning (London, Falmer) See also chapter 4 of Geoffrey Walford (ed.) Doing Research about Education.
Appendix B. Some useful books on research methods used in ethnography
Hilary Arksey and Peter Knight (1999) Interviewing for Social Scientists (London, Sage)
Michael H. Agar (1980) The Professional Stranger: An informal ethnography (New York, Academic Press) Old but good
Michael H. Agar (1986) Speaking of Ethnography (London, Sage)
Paul Atkinson (1990) The Ethnographic Imagination (London, Routledge)
Diane Bell, Pat Caplan and Wazir Jahan Karim (1993) Gendered Fields. Women, men and ethnography (London, Routledge). Pays particular attention to effects of gender.
**Robert G. Burgess (1982)(ed.) Field Research: A Sourcebook and Field Manual (London, Allen and Unwin)
**Robert G. Burgess (1984) In the Field: An introduction to field research (London, Allen and Unwin)
Amanda Coffey and Paul Atkinson (1996) Making Sense of Qualitative Data (London, Sage). Especially chapter 6.
Charlotte Aull Davies (1999) Reflexive Ethnography. A guide to researching self and others (London, Routledge) A good general introduction to ethnography by an anthropologist.
Sara Delamont (2002) Fieldwork in Educational Settings: Methods, pitfalls and perspectives 2nd edition (Lewes, RoutledgeFalmer)
Ian Dey (1993) Qualitative Data Analysis (London, Routledge). Look seriously at analysis.
Jack D. Douglas (1976) Investigative Social Research (Beverley Hills, Sage)
Jack D. Douglas (1985) Creative Interviewing (London, Sage)
**Elliot W. Eisner and Ian Peshkin (1990) (eds.) Qualitative Enquiry in Education. The continuing debate (New York, Teachers College Press). Some very good chapters.
Robert M Emerson, Rachel I Fretz and Linda L Shaw (1995) Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes (Chicago, University of Chicago Press)
David M Fetterman (1998) Ethnography. Step by step (Second edition) (London Sage)
Uwe Flick (1998) An Introduction to Qualitative Research (London, Sage) The German origin of this book sometimes offers interestingly different insights.
Jurgen Friedrichs and Harmut Ludtke (1975) Participant Observation (Farnborough, Saxon House)
Scott Grills (ed.) (1998) Doing Ethnographic Research: Fieldwork settings (London, Sage)
Martyn Hammersley (1990) Classroom Ethnography (Buckingham, Open University Press). Chapters 5-8 are methodological.
**Martyn Hammersley (1990) Reading Ethnographic Research. A critical guide (London, Longman)
Martyn Hammersley (1992) What’s Wrong with Ethnography (London, Routledge)
**Martyn Hammersley and Paul Atkinson (2007) Ethnography: Principles in Practice. 3rd edition (London, Routledge) Highly recommended.
Adrian Holliday (2002) Doing and Writing Qualitative Research (London, Sage)
Wendy Hollway and Tony Jefferson (2000) Doing Qualitative Research Differently (London, Sage) Odd, but quite good critique of more structured interviewing.
Robyn M Holmes (1998) Fieldwork with Children (London, Sage)
John M. Johnson (1975) Doing Field Research (London, Collier‑Macmillan)
Steinar Kvale (1996) InterViews. An introduction to qualitative research interviewing (London, Sage)
Steiner Kvale and Svend Brinkman (2008) InterViews: Learning the Craft of Qualitative Research Interviewing (London, Sage)
Raymond M Lee (1993) Doing Research on Sensitive Topics (London, Sage)
Yvonna S. Lincoln and Egon G. Guba (1985) Naturalistic Inquiry (London, Sage)
John Lofland (1971) Analysing Social Settings (London, Wadsworth)
John Lofland (1977) Doing Social Life (New York, Wiley)
Alexander Massey and Geoffrey Walford (eds.) Explorations in Methodology, Studies in Educational Ethnography Volume 2 (Samford CT, JAI Press)
Jennifer Mason (1996) Qualitative Researching (London, Sage) A good critical introduction to strategic issues.
George J. McCall and J.L. Simmons (1969)(eds.) Issues in Participant Observation (New York, Addison Wesley) Old, but still has some important chapters
Gretchen B Rossman and Sharon F Rallis (1998) Learning in the Field. An introduction to qualitative research (London, Sage)
Herbert J Rubin and Irene S Rubin (1995) Qualitative Interviewing. The art of hearing data (London, Sage)
David Silverman (2000) Doing Qualitative Research. A Practical Handbook (London, Sage)
David Silverman (2001) Interpreting Qualitative Data, 2nd edition (London, Sage)
Robert E Stake (1995) The Art of Case Study Research (London, Sage)
Anselm L Strauss (1987) Qualitative Analysis for Social Scientists (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press)
**Anselm Strauss and Juliet Corbin (1990) Basics of Qualitative Research (Beverley Hills, Sage) Builds on Glaser and Strauss
Geoffrey Walford (2001) Doing Qualitative Educational Research (London, Continuum)
Geoffrey Walford (2008) (ed.) How to do Educational Ethnography (London, Tufnell Press)
Harry Wolcott (1990) Writing Up Qualitative Research (London: Sage)
William Foote Whyte (1985) Learning from the Field (Beverley Hills, Sage)
Harry F Wolcott (1994) Transforming Qualitative Data: Description, analysis and interpretation (London, Sage) The first main chapter is an interesting introduction to the three overlapping activities.
Peter Woods (1986) Inside Schools. Ethnography in Educational Research (London, Routledge and Kegan Paul)
| How to reference this page: | Walford, G. (2007) Educational ethnography. London: TLRP. Online at http://www.bera.ac.uk/educational-ethnography/ |
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