Methodological Developments in Ethnography, Volume 12 (Studies in Educational Ethnography)

PREFACE

Ethnography has become one of the major methods of researching educational settings. Its key strength is its emphasis on understanding the perceptions and cultures of the people and organisations studied. Through prolonged involvement with those who are being studied, the ethnographic researcher is able gradually to enter their world and gain an understanding of their lives. Each volume of Studies in Educational Ethnography focuses on a particular theme relating to the ethnographic investigation of education. Most of the volumes have been closely linked to an annual 2-day residential conference which explores various elements of ethnography and its application to education and schooling. The series of Ethnography and Education conferences began in the late 1970s, and was originally held at St. Hilda’s College, Oxford University. The series later moved to Warwick University, back to the Department of Educational Studies, University of Oxford in 1996, and finally returning to St. Hilda’s College in 2004. Unusually, this present volume collects together papers that were specially commissioned rather than being presented at this annual conference. They are selected on the basis of their high quality, their coherence as a group and their contribution they make to debates about ethnographic methodology. They do not present one coherent view of how ethnography should be conducted but, rather, present a range of sometimes competing arguments and developments. The series recognises that the nature of ethnography is contested, and this is taken to be a sign of its strength and vitality. While the idea that the term can be taken to be almost synonymous with qualitative research is rejected, chapters are included that draw upon a broad range of methodologies that are embedded within a long and detailed engagement with those people and organisations studied. Geoffrey Walford

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INTRODUCTION What counts as ethnography and what counts as good ethnographic methodology are both highly contested. This volume brings together chapters presenting a diversity of views on some of the current debates and developments in ethnographic methodology. It does not try to present a single coherent view but, through its heterogeneity, illustrates the strength and impact of debate. In the first chapter, Amar Dhand addresses the problem of access from a learning theory perspective. It suggests that Lave and Wenger’s ‘legitimate peripheral participation’ is a suitable lens to understand the interpersonal dynamics when a researcher enters a site and attempts to gain an inside perspective. Basing his discussion on his own research of a group of heroin addicts in India, he proposes that on first arrival the ethnographer is assigned to designated roles that are salient to participants. Subsequently, through a negotiation of identity meanings, the ethnographer and participants create ‘new’ roles that are legitimatized to the group. Finally, with key informants, the ethnographer and informant engage in mutual educative processes where each can ‘read’ and teach the other. While he acknowledges the limitations of applying the concept of legitimate peripheral participation to questions of access, he argues that the theory offers a unique insight to processes that are at the core of the ethnographic experience. Harry Wolcott’s short chapter delves deeper into one of the commonly accepted attributes of ethnography – the criterion of ‘intimate, long-term acquaintance’. Basing his discussion on his well-known experience and account of ‘the sneaky kid’, he asks: ‘In ethnographic fieldwork, just how intimate is intimate?’ In the next chapter, Susan James argues that participant observation as a data collection technique provides for a rich encounter and that the potential to meet people and learn about their lives and experiences knows no bounds. This chapter focuses on the experiences of a researcher working as an apprentice in three different kitchens for a doctoral study. The decision to be a participant observer rather than a nonparticipant observer when researching learning in the workplace is discussed and the dichotomy of researcher and worker is highlighted. Anecdotes are provided to explain the experiences of participant observation in terms of identity, language, ix

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uniform, acceptance, and initiation procedures while conducting research on learning in the workplace. Nick Hopwood’s chapter explores the different roles researchers can adopt in their fieldwork, making specific reference to a school-based ethnographic study. The concept of territories is introduced, demonstrating that research sites may comprise a number spatially, temporally, and/or socially defined settings. He argues that different roles may be appropriate in these various settings; ethnographic research will be strengthened by an understanding of the complex combinations of and flux between roles that may occur within short periods of time in a single research site. Martin Forsey’s chapter explores the tendency for critical educational ethnographers to produce accounts of schooling in which teachers either disappear or are represented as mere cardboard cutout figures. There are three main aims for this chapter: (1) explaining the relative lack of attention to teachers in criticalist accounts of schooling; (2) exploring the implications of these oversights for qualitative research in schools; and (3) suggesting ways in which the researcher’s mindset might shift to address the issues arising from our currently ‘averted gaze’. Advocating a mindset attuned to the critical appreciation of social life, Forsey suggest a need to heighten the importance of clear and precise documentation of the power-filled social relations characterizing educational settings as an important element of the criticalist project. Further to this, he argues for the need to position ourselves in ways that allow us to better see, feel, and evaluate some of the multitude of interactions that take place in schools and their surrounds. The chapter by Sue Walters sets out the differences that she sees between ‘ethnography’ and ‘case study’ and the reasons for choosing to do case studies using ‘ethnographic methods’ for a recent research study. After considering the bewildering number of ways in which ‘ethnography’ and ‘case study’ have been defined and differentiated and how these differing definitions were resolved for the purposes of describing and reporting her own research, she explores what ethnographic methods can bring to a case study and why doing case studies of particular pupils rather than of particular classrooms is an important research decision. She then discuss how a single ethnographic case study (or a set of single ethnographic case studies) can be of use outside of the specific micro settings of their production, thus addressing concerns about the generalizability and usefulness of ethnographic case study research. The next chapter by Eric Tucker puts forward a new role for ethnography in social and educational research. He argues that abstract measurement is at the center of much educational research, from tests, to observational scales, to questionnaires. Contemporary psychometrics and related

Introduction

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statistical techniques are the preeminent methodological approaches with regard to the development of measurement instruments. Yet, in recent years, the variety and intensity of the demands social scientists and policy makers place on indicators have grown dramatically. Furthermore, researchers are beginning to describe instances where there seems to exist a substantial gap between established measurement instruments and the social phenomena they intend to measure. This article contends that the most prominent existing procedures to secure valid indicators tend to overemphasize verification and correspondingly de-emphasize empirical research that aims toward generation and modification. It proceeds to make the case that the features and strengths of ethnography specifically, and qualitative research more generally, make it uniquely suited to contribute to the development of new indicators and the improvement of existing indicators. To provide some warrants for these arguments, this paper first offers a brief reading of the state of the practice of social science empirical research on measurement. It then turns to a specific example of this author’s ethnographic research project that aims to improve indicators of social capital formation, in the hopes of providing an exemplary instance of how ethnographic methodologies might contribute to the generation and modification of new, quality measurement instruments. Kristen H. Perry’s chapter raises many important questions about the ways in which ethical Institutional Review Boards control what and how it is possible to research. She focuses on the particular problem of anonymity, which is seen as the default option by most Institutional Review Boards, yet is highly problematic in practice. Not only are there many difficulties in maintaining anonymity in an increasingly electronic information age, but also some participants actually want to have their names included in the research reports. She argues that the model of research enshrined within Institutional Review Boards’ beliefs and procedures is outdated and inappropriate for much qualitative research. She draws on her own research among Southern Sudanese refugees to illustrate her argument. Geoffrey Walford’s chapter returns to the old problem of generalization and ethnographic studies. He argues that the overgeneralization of ethnographic case studies has been to disadvantage of the development of ethnography as a methodology and field of study within education, and that ethnographers should avoid attempts to generalize. He describes and discusses some of his own studies and argues that their utility and merit (to the extent that they might have both) depends on their uniqueness rather than their wider applicability. He further argues that authors should name their research sites wherever possible to try to ensure that readers do not overgeneralize.

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The chapter by Dalia Aralas focuses on the need for the ethnographic eye to broaden its field of vision in grappling with particular issues in some kinds of qualitative research. Specifically, Aralas argues for the considerable value of an approach that differs from but complements conventional video ethnographic approaches. To illustrate, she discusses a study which adopted a different video ethnographic approach to pursue its objective of investigating the nature of mathematical imagination. This made possible the generation of different kinds of data that, in turn, facilitated an intensive interrogation of the initial framework of the study. It is argued that the resultant data analysis opened up opportunities for a continuous reconstruction of a more layered alternative framework that led to a reconfiguration of the phenomenon under study. She argues that while extending video approaches might be seen to partially undermine prevailing views, the consequent production of alternative accounts and frameworks make worthwhile contributions to our understanding. Gretar Marino´sson’s chapter is unusual in that it is based upon an ethnographic study of one school conducted by an educational psychologist. Marino´sson reflects on these different ways of doing educational research and describes his own procedures. He follows a grounded theory approach and argues that it is possible to unearth the ground rules of education through ethnography using methods of data generation based on a reciprocal relationship between the whole and its parts. The behavior of individuals thus bears witness to these ground rules and the institution’s structure and classification activity. In this way it might be said that the drop merges into the ocean and vice versa. Heewon Chang’s chapter focuses on how to conduct rigorous autoethnographies. Autoethnography is an ethnographic inquiry that utilizes the autobiographic materials of the researcher as the primary data. Chang is keen to emphasize that autoethnography is different from other selfnarrative writings such as autobiography and memoir, in that it is based on cultural analysis and interpretation of the researcher’s behaviors, thoughts, and experiences in relation to others in society. She argues that autoethnography should be ethnographical in its methodological orientation, cultural in its interpretive orientation, and autobiographical in its content orientation. She discusses the definition of this inquiry method, methodology, and benefits of autoethnography as well as some of the pitfalls to avoid when doing autoethnography. Geoffrey Walford Editor

USING LEARNING THEORY TO UNDERSTAND ACCESS IN ETHNOGRAPHIC RESEARCH Amar Dhand INTRODUCTION This paper addresses the problem of access in ethnographic research from a learning theory perspective. It extends a recent symbolic interactionist approach to the problem (Harrington, 2003) by conceptualizing access as a process of ‘legitimate peripheral participation’, broadly understood as the processes that enable ‘newcomers’ to become part of the sociocultural practices of a community (Lave & Wenger, 1991). I present evidence from my journey of gaining access to three social structures of a group of heroin addicts in India: a non-governmental organization (NGO), a small group of ‘brothers’, and a friendship with a key informant. Using this evidence, I argue that the ethnographer negotiates identity roles, acquires an understanding of the ‘rules’ of interaction, and engages in educative processes that make him or her a legitimate peripheral participant. Harrington (2003) defines access as ‘the process by which researchers gather data via interpersonal relationships with participants’ (p. 593). Her review of the methodology literature reveals a fragmented understanding of the processes, and she attempts to integrate the formulations with a symbolic interactionist framework. With particular emphasis on social identity Methodological Developments in Ethnography Studies in Educational Ethnography, Volume 12, 1–25 Copyright r 2007 by Elsevier Ltd. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 1529-210X/doi:10.1016/S1529-210X(06)12001-X

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and self-presentation theories, she reveals four relationship patterns in the access process: (1) Ethnographers are initially defined according to categories salient to participants; (2) Ethnographers attempt to share and enhance similarities; (3) Participants must validate the ethnographers’ identity claims; (4) The extent of difference between the identities of the ethnographers and participants determines the need for inside informants or covert strategies. Lave and Wenger’s (1991) thinking is useful because it conceives changes in Harrington’s ‘interpersonal relationships’ as a social learning process. They suggest that social relations change during direct involvement in activities (p. 94). Moreover, embedded within these activities and its constituent relationships is the ‘place of knowledge’ or the ‘learning curriculum’ that is only mastered through participation in the activities and engagement in the relationships. This leads them to the assertion that ‘learning occurs through centripetal participation in the learning curriculum of the ambient community’ (p. 100). Such a notion of knowledge acquisition through participation is helpful because it provides insight to the acquisition process (‘access’) and the knowledge acquired (‘data’) by ethnographers as they become participant observers. The ethnographer’s journey and knowledge has a relationship to the journey and knowledge of a ‘newcomer’ or ‘apprentice’ who is learning to participate: From a broadly peripheral perspective, apprentices gradually assemble a general idea of what constitutes the practice of the community. This uneven sketch of the enterprise (available if there is legitimate access) might include who is involved; what they do; what everyday life is like; how masters talk, walk, work, and generally conduct their lives; how people who are not part of the community of practice interact with it; what other learners are doing; and what learners need to learn to become full practitioners. It includes an increasing understanding of how, when, and about what old-timers collaborate, collude, and collide, and what they enjoy, dislike, respect, and admire (p. 95).

As is indicated by the qualification ‘(available if there is legitimate access)’, Lave and Wenger are also interested in access, but from a different perspective. As one of their central issues (pp. 100–105), they explore access in terms of transparency of the community’s activities and sequestration of the ‘newcomer’. In their analysis, the focus is on the community enabling or limiting access; the ‘newcomer’ negotiating or creating opportunities for access is relatively unexplored. Such inherent ‘barrier’ mechanisms are relevant to ethnographic access, but this paper focuses on the ethnographer’s negotiation of those ‘barriers’. Other methodology literature has not been unmindful of this direction of thinking. ‘Apprenticeship as a field method’ (Coy, 1989; Downey, 2005) and

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‘learning the ropes’ (Shaffir & Stebbins, 1991) have received some attention. Murray Wax (1967) is particularly articulate about such ideas: y the student begins ‘outside’ the interaction, confronting behaviors he finds bewildering and inexplicable: the actors are oriented to a world of meanings that the observer does not grasp. Thus, with a strange language, at first all is mumbo-jumbo, then patterns begin to emerge, and the student proceeds from halting discourse (stumbling over new phonemes and translating inwardly from his mother tongue) to the fluency of one increasingly at home in the language and situation y gradually he comes to be able to categorize peoples (or relationships) and events y (p. 325).

However, the apprenticeship literature tends to focus on the ethnographer taking the role of an ‘apprentice’ usually in an organized situation (weaving, shamanism, dance classes, etc.). It does not consider a more diverse set of roles in informal, non-organized contexts. Moreover, the ‘learning the ropes’ accounts, including Wax’s comments, usually do not utilize learning theories and remain more anecdotal, as Harrington has also identified. Although primarily focused on access, this paper also offers a unique commentary on ‘legitimate peripheral participation’. Ethnographers are distinctive ‘newcomers’ because they are more cognizant and reflexive of their journey. Therefore, they chronicle the experience of ‘centripetal participation’ more directly. In this way, my journey has illuminated some points for consideration in Lave and Wenger’s theory. First, the theory may be strengthened by exploring the robust reciprocal effects of the researcher or ‘newcomer’ on the current ‘old-timers’, a suggestion recently supported in the literature (Davies, 2005; Fuller, Hodkinson, Hodkinson, & Unwin, 2005). Second, the theory should be considerate of the diversity of journeys that ‘newcomers’ may experience. For instance, the journey of the researcher to become a ‘full participant’ (and not a ‘complete participant’ as understood in the methodology literature) is quite different from the journey of other ‘newcomers’ in this social context. This paper first provides some contextual details of the general field methods, setting, and participants. It then describes my journey of gaining access through exploring relationships with NGO staff members, ‘brothers’ from a small group, and a key informant. Finally, I discuss some of the insight gleaned from these data in relation to Harrington’s suggested relationship patterns, and the suitability of implicating Lave and Wenger’s learning theories to those patterns.

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GENERAL FIELD METHODS This paper derives from a seven-month ethnography involving three fieldwork periods over a span of 12 months. The ethnography explored organized (Dhand, 2006b) and naturalistic peer learning patterns (Dhand, 2006a) among a group of heroin addicts in Yamuna Bazaar, New Delhi. I choose to name the site to prevent results from being falsely generalized (Walford, 2002). The principal methods were participant observation and semi-structured interviews. All fieldwork was conducted in Hindi and English without an interpreter. A native Hindi speaker transliterated and transcribed all Hindi tape recordings into Roman Hindi. A different native Hindi speaker was consulted in translating quotations for this paper. Analysis for this paper was aided by the use of a qualitative software program called TamsAnalyzer (Weinstein, 2004). Sections from fieldnotes and transcripts were first selected and coded with the code methodology. Then, segments relating to inter-relationships important for data generation were recoded as methodology > access. These data were then organized into three groups representing relationships with different social structures in the group and recoded as methodology > access > NGO, methodology > access > brothers, and methodology > access > Baba. These categories were then analyzed manually for more detailed discrimination and finer analysis of emergent themes. Items constituting similar themes were then placed together and compared using the cut and paste function of a word processor. This led to a consolidation of the final thematic structure in each of the three major categories.

SETTING Yamuna Bazaar was a lively market area in Old Delhi, centred upon mostly Hindu religious activities. The area was home to one of India’s most sacred temples (Hanuman Mandir) and its largest crematorium (Nigam Bodh Ghat). Believed to be referenced in the 300 BC epic poem Mahabharata, both places were located on the sacred Yamuna River and had deep cultural meanings of piety, charity, and the end of life. This religious milieu defined many of the social activities including parading dead bodies down the main road for cremation, giving food and money to the poor after prayer routines in the temples, and conducting auspicious rituals on the Yamuna River. The ancient area, however, was also undergoing modern development. The construction of the Kashmiri Gate metro station and bridge intersecting

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main commuter lines had caused widespread urban advancements. The Yamuna Pusta, a large illegal colony known for its high criminal and drug activity, had recently been destroyed with all residents forcefully relocated. Roads were being remade, parks were being cleaned up, and local police were more strictly displacing homeless people from the footpaths. For heroin addicts, the clash of ancient religious elements with modern development dynamics offered both support and brutality. They were aided by free food, shelter options, and health services from a multitude of religious and non-profit organizations. Conversely, they were often the victims of high criminal activity, police abuse, and stigmatization. Survival, therefore, required learning how to take advantage of the supportive services without falling prey to constant threats and hardships.

PARTICIPANTS The participants were a group of active, rehabilitating, and rehabilitated heroin addicts associated to the SHARAN NGO in Yamuna Bazaar. Within this group, there was an internal structure of NGO staff members, small ‘brotherhoods’ of active heroin addicts, and dyad relationships between addicts. This paper describes gaining access to each of these internal structures by exploring the interpersonal relationships with approximately 50 NGO staff members, a 6-member ‘brotherhood’, and 1 key informant. The NGO staff members constituted most of the rehabilitating and rehabilitated addicts who were formerly street users in the area. The demographics of the NGO staff were, therefore, similar to the active addicts in terms of the following characteristics: mostly male, mean age of 30-years old (ranging from 15 to 60 years old), 3:1 Hindu to Muslim ratio, mostly migrated from neighbouring villages but have lived in Delhi for approximately 5 years, live temporarily in local shelters or shared quarters, and mostly unmarried and estranged from family. The active addicts were different from the staff in terms of being regular users, usually homeless, working as trash/paper collectors, rickshaw drivers, or odd job helpers, involved in both organized and random stealing, and commonly in and out of jail. Most of the participants were experienced poly-drug addicts who had a history of using substances for at least five years. The two major heroinbased drugs were (1) brown sugar/smack, an unrefined powdered form smoked on tin-foil and available from street dealers, and (2) injection, an intravenously administered cocktail of drugs labelled ‘norphine’, ‘avil’, and ‘diazepam’ (opioid alkaloid, anti-histamine, and CNS depressant), and

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available at local pharmacies. A using addict would not utilize both concurrently, but would readily switch based on cost. Most using addicts ‘chased’ or ‘fixed’ at least two times per day, usually at the expense of food, shelter, and clothing. The more ‘recreational’ substances used concurrently or during intervals in between major drugs were solotion (solvents), ganja (marijuana), charas (chewing marijuana), nitrazepam tablets (CNS depressant), and daaru (alcohol), although this was not a complete list.

PLAYING A PART IN THE NGO The process of accessing this group of heroin addicts began by establishing a role in the NGO that provided services for the participants. In this section, I describe the evolution of identities that I performed from ‘international guest’ to ‘NGO worker’ to ‘interviewer’ and ‘observer’. Each transition in this process was marked by disagreement with my performance and the role’s associated expectations. This dissonance led to a re-negotiation of my identity in which individuals legitimized my new position. Interestingly, in the course of co-constructing and legitimizing the ‘interviewer’ and ‘observer’ roles, participants began to enact their renditions of these roles and discussed their ‘findings’ with me. Although a key stage in gaining access, the NGO-associated roles also limited access to relationships that were important to my research questions. Therefore, over time, I began with transition into roles with other group structures. During my pilot study in March 2004, I navigated the network of NGOs in Delhi to learn about target populations and the offered services. I searched the Internet and directories, contacted leaders through e-mail, and visited various centres and events. At one of the events sponsored by POND (Partnership of NGOs in Delhi), I met Derek, one of the leaders of SHARAN, who invited me to observe the harm reduction services for heroin addicts in Yamuna Bazaar. When I visited the SHARAN Dropin Centre, I was an ‘international guest’, a role to which the participants were adapted. Because the organization received international funding, and conducted research in collaboration with Johns Hopkins University, the members were used to visitors inspecting the services. My host, Derek, spent half-a-day introducing me to their programs and staff members. He gave me a tour of the facility, explained the services in English, enabled me to observe an education session, and led me through the surrounding parks where I watched addicts actively injecting. He also enabled me to take pictures of the drug sets and equipment by explaining to the addicts that

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I would not photograph them, just their drugs (FN 03.29.04). At this point, my presence was not unusual for the participants. I was another Western voyeur who was being escorted by the leader, perhaps in an attempt to secure funding or programmatic assistance. There was no need to further investigate this short-term visitor. When I returned to the centre in December 2004, Derek and the staff were surprised to see me. Derek stated, ‘Although you had said you would come back, I didn’t think you actually would’. I was no longer following the expectations of a guest: I returned to the site; I was hanging around for full days without the leader, and I was speaking Hindi with the staff and clients. This discordance with role expectations led to a flurry of questions that aimed to re-position me into a meaningful role. Although my responses to these questions aimed to establish a researcher’s identity, my efforts were thwarted by more pervasive ideas about identities and motives. For example, when I attempted to explain that I was doing research on how friends learn from each other to a group of staff, one of the members announced to the group: ‘He’s thinking about setting up a new Centre in his country and came here to get ideas’. The other members nodded in agreement with the statement (FN 12.21.04). Similarly, when I attempted to explain that I was born in Canada, but my parents were from India, this was interpreted as: ‘He’s an Indian who left India and is living in Canada’ (FN 12.21.04). As this statement reveals, there were some intrinsic characteristics that also contributed to my role designations. Specifically, my Indian origin and appearance (mid-twenties age, male sex, foreign Hindi accent, single marital status) were a unique set of characteristics that needed interpretation. One such justification was that I was ‘an Indian living abroad who had returned to look for an Indian wife’. My intrinsic qualities for the most part, however, could not explain my presence in Yamuna Bazaar socializing with heroin addicts. Although one participant mentioned that he initially thought that I was an addict (FN 02.03.05), most participants explained my membership as an ‘NGO worker’, especially the non-addict, middle-class type who worked with the computers in the back room. This assignment as a ‘worker’ was initially troubling for me because it had interventionist expectations – that I would be providing services for clients on a daily basis. I believed, however, that to force a researcher’s role designation at this stage was neither tactical nor natural, although I would continually remind participants of my research even though they may re-interpret it. Therefore, I accepted the status of an ‘NGO worker’ as one of my roles, and contributed by providing feedback to the staff. As an ‘NGO worker’ without any official responsibilities, my activities included accompanying peer educators on outreach in the surrounding

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areas, sitting with staff members as they provided services at the centre, and participating in idle ‘time pass’ routines such as drinking tea, conversing about daily happenings with addicts, and simply watching and listening to participants. My only informal responsibility was to provide feedback, or commentary, on services. For instance, NGO leaders such as Derek would request my input on educational materials such as new booklets, posters, and videos. They would look for advice and insight from my experience, which I tried to emphasize was very little in the NGO arena. On one occasion, however, I intervened after observing NGO barbers not cleaning shaving equipment or changing blades during their services with the clients (FN 12.27.04). My actions included informing on-duty NGO leaders, researching, and explaining the literature on contracting blood-borne viruses to Derek, and conducting a 10-min presentation on the topic for the staff upon his request (FN 12.28.04). Following this instance, which I felt I had both a role and an ethical obligation to act upon, I did not make any more presentations. Rather, my feedback came in more discreet conversations with individual members. For example, when a worker publicly disclosed the HIV status of a client, I took him aside and explained why that may not be a good idea (FN 02.17.05). Over time, it became clear that there was discordance with my role as an ‘NGO worker’ and its associated expectations: I spent little time in the back room with the computers; I would not keep a regular schedule, and I was more interested in listening and talking to active users than most NGO workers. My anthropological tools, including my notepad and tape recorder, also became identifying symbols. Participants became interested in what I was writing down or why their recordings would be useful. With new inspiration, I began to explain that I was writing down stories so that I could understand what was happening and then describe it to people in my country. Similarly, I would explain how I would listen to the recordings, think about them, and then ‘play’ certain parts for the outside world. Some participants became excited about the possibility of being recorded for an outside audience. My topic of ‘learning’, however, remained a mystery to most participants who would again re-interpret my statements into constructs such as ‘he is watching how drug users live’. Nonetheless, my positions as ‘observer’ and ‘interviewer’ were becoming consolidated through these interactions. Some of the peer educators who were keen observers of my activities began to validate and legitimize my presence and actions. In one instance, a peer educator explained to an addict: ‘He has come from Canada to listen to us, and because he is from so far away, your stories are safe with him and will not get to the police’ (FN 01.21.05). Similarly, prior to my first

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recorded interview, two peer educators gained the participant’s permission by endorsing me as a person from ‘outside’ who has come to talk to clients and learn about SHARAN’s services (FN 12.29.04). As these examples reveal, specific supporters began to legitimize my questions as benign and confidential, and my identity as deserving openness and, perhaps, respect. Additionally, in the process of facilitating my research, some participants were beginning to play the role of ‘co-investigators’. Participants who were co-constructing the roles of ‘interviewer’ and ‘observer’ with me also began enacting these researcher roles. For example, one staff member devised strategies about how to collect data: 1) Observe before 8am to see addicts before and after their first fix; 2) Listen to conversations at the night shelter where there is a more relaxed atmosphere; 3) Follow some of the ‘smarter’ clients to see how they talk to their friends (FN 12.22.04).

Similarly, in a number of instances including my first recorded interview, participants would ask questions and, occasionally, conduct full ‘interviews’ for my benefit: Rohit and a self-appointed ‘translator’ began asking questions like when did you start, what did you use, and where do you inject as if these were the questions that I would be interested in. There is no doubt that I am but it’s funny that they assume that this is my project and they are asking on my behalf. It’s also interesting that these interactions automatically become interview interrogations of one or two users (FN 12.30.04).

One participant also became an ‘observer’ who reported his ‘findings’ in connection with my current research aims: After I described my current project of observing the switch [from smoking to injecting] in the park, Derek said he observed a peer interaction in which one user was really looking for an injection cocktail but couldn’t find one for the set price. Another drug user then said, ‘I’ll take you there’. The man said, ‘No, you’ll give me today and then what will happen tomorrow’. Derek thinks he said this because he and others were present and listening (FN 03.02.05).

It is important to note that none of these instances were coordinated or encouraged by me prior to the event; I did not recruit ‘interviewers’ or ‘observers’ for my research. Rather, in the process of co-constructing my roles with the participants, the members themselves began naturally to enact those roles. These instances, therefore, suggest that the legitimacy process causes shifts in not only the researcher’s role, but also the participants’ roles. Although the role of a liberal ‘NGO worker’ with a co-constructed ‘team of research partners’ was advantageous on multiple levels, there were drawbacks as well. First, as I have reported elsewhere (Dhand, 2006b), peer educators needed to sustain a professional distance from active users to

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maintain a reputation of a ‘clean’ ex-user. I found that this distance was being transferred into my relationship with active users as well. Second, because of expectations that I should only be present with my other ‘colleagues’, I found that I did not ‘fit in’ so well to the context during nonworking hours (FN 08.14.05). Most importantly, I found that my research questions, which were interested in naturalistic learning among active addicts, required a different set of roles than were available with my current identity. Therefore, I underwent a transition period that involved changes in spaces where I spent time, activities that I participated in, and relationships that I fostered. I began to spend less time at the centre, limited my involvement in services such as outreach, and became less connected with staff members. Instead, I became more of a regular in the ‘backstage’ park, played card games, and built friendships with a small group of addicts who began to legitimize my presence as a ‘brother’.

BECOMING A ‘BROTHER’ Small groups of five to seven addicts would spend idle time together, sleep in the same area, generate income, gather food, and usually, but not always, use drugs together. They would call each other ‘brothers’, occasionally with adjectives such as ‘big brother’ or ‘little brother’. Through a series of legitimizing activities, I began an enculturation process of becoming a ‘brother’ in one small group. This section describes this process highlighting my activities with the participants, knowledge acquired, boundaries of my particular role, justification and validation of those boundaries, and legitimacy that participants gained from me. To use Goffman’s (1959) term, the ‘backstage’ area was a public park adjacent to the ‘frontstage’ SHARAN Centre. In this space, addicts congregated, relaxed, socialized, gambled, and used various substances in concealed corners on the periphery. Near the beginning of my fieldwork, my access to the area was limited. The NGO staff typically stayed in the ‘frontstage’ space because it was important for maintaining professional standards including a reputation of being ‘clean’. Therefore, through association, my initial attempts to enter the ‘backstage’ was met with disapproving comments by the staff and curious stares by the addicts. Any attempt to strike up conversations with the addicts was awkward and uncomfortable. A breakthrough occurred when a key informant, with whom I built a friendship in the NGO space, was playing cards in the park one day. I got his attention from the outside railing and asked whether he could teach me

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the game. He agreed and invited me to join the group. After introducing the basic rules to the four-player game called seep, the key informant made me hold his dealt hand of cards. Initially, he would gesture towards a card and instruct me to place it on a particular pile or open space in the middle playing area. Eventually, I would begin to gesture to a card and he would nod affirmatively or negatively, with occasional explanations without tipping off the other players (FN 02.17.05). Although I did not become extremely competent at the game, the apprenticeship activity began to legitimize my presence in the park. My actions of sitting with a small group, watching the card game, and occasionally playing became accepted as part of the social life of the environment. Furthermore, as the participants’ curiosity of me lessened, the activity became an ideal vantage point to observe interactions and activities in the area. As I learned about the range of activities that occurred in the park, I began to participate in as many non-drug related ones as possible: I played cricket with the addicts and street children; I listened to disagreements and verbal fights that absorbed everyone’s attention, and I participated in ‘gossip’ about daily happenings. Of course, during the ‘gossiping’ sessions, I could not help but ask a few more questions than the others, but I attempted to refrain from disrupting the natural path of the conversation. The topics of these ‘chats’ ranged from complaints about NGO services to health problems of a particular addict to even jokes or stories for entertainment. Topics that were relatively hidden from me at this time, probably because of my lack of participation in drug-related activities, were conversations about illegal income generation and drug-procurement procedures. These topics would cause addicts to use a lower voice or to adjust their body position. Importantly, my presence was not unnoticed by the group: many conversations would be about me. Groups of addicts would ask numerous questions and engage in lengthy dialogue about my comments. In many ways, I embraced this process and answered questions enthusiastically because the sorts of queries and their responses to my answers provided me with insight into the types of issues that were important to the group. Similar to the NGO staff members, questions about my origin, family, and marital status were some of the initial questions. However, unlike the staff, these participants were also interested in street-related aspects of my country such as whether fights occur between Muslims and Hindus, the degree of cleanliness compared to India, and the variety and effects of the drugs (FN 02.09.05). For many of these questions such as the drugs in my country, I could not provide experience-based answers that satisfied the crowd. This would lead to theorizing about the life and culture on the streets of Canada. One

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member explained the use of a drug called ‘crack’ that is placed on the top of the head causing the body to freeze like a statue, which he demonstrated (FN 01.20.05). Over time, I learned about the daily routine that extended past NGO work hours. Once the sun went down, mosquitoes would make the park uninhabitable, so participants would co-ordinate to meet in other places where they would have tea or continue their game. After receiving a few invitations and making safety arrangements, such as having my rickshaw driver parked in the area, I began to join members for tea. During my first night visit, I met Imran, a 38-year-old addict who had been in Yamuna Bazaar for 20 years. Immediately, he struck me as a respected senior in the group who was insightful of events and issues. During our conversation, he described criminal activity under the bridge while addicts sleep, the methods of two men in front of us who were planning to steal supplies from the back of rickshaws, and the way that he and his friends removed a dead body from the river one hour ago at the request of the police (FN 08.31.05). My presence with him also stimulated other addicts to approach us and talk about events openly and honestly. One participant communicated that the reason he came to Delhi was to pickpocket to make money to survive (FN 08.31.05). The openness and richness in stories were unparalleled in the study thus far. Participants were discussing topics that were previously off-limits with me. Additionally, on repeated encounters with Imran at the tea stand and the park, I began to notice a consistency to the addicts that gravitated around him, and they began to welcome my company. Through the initial connection with Imran, I began to spend leisurely time with his small group of ‘brothers’ on a regular basis. I would seek out the group in both the park and the tea stand and sit with them, drink tea, watch card games, listen to the radio, and engage in daily conversations. I learned that the ‘brotherhood’ consisted of five core street addicts and one or two fluctuating ones. All the ‘brothers’ were Muslim, although two, including Imran, had spent many years as Hindu Babas, or holy men, travelling to pilgrimages across India. Although he was not much older than the rest, Imran was referred to as the ‘big brother’ in the group and usually made decisions about activities, timings, and drug use. In addition to the activities that I mentioned above, the group would sleep in the same area and smoke ganja (marijuana) together. The group, however, never used smack as a group, which a member said was because Imran advised against it, although members would do it ‘quietly’ outside of the group (FN 10.10.05). The ‘brotherhood’, therefore, served as a drug deterrent, but was probably

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tolerant of private use by individuals. Throughout my time with the ‘brotherhood’, I retained a privileged status: my tea was always paid for by Imran or other members; my arrival was acknowledged with respectful greetings; individuals became quiet when I talked and never argued with me as they did with each other, and members would admonish any addicts who would ask me for favours or money. The group’s special treatment was complemented with a legitimization of my participation boundaries and eccentric qualities. Most of the ‘brothers’ celebrated my lack of drug use including not taking cigarettes by openly announcing it to curious bystanders. One of the ‘brothers’, named Veer, was particularly vocal in my defence. He explained to another addict in my presence that I do not play cards, smoke ganja, or drink with the ‘brothers’ because I probably do that with ‘brothers’ in my country, but cannot do it here (FN 10.10.05). Similarly, in an admonishment of an addict asking me to help him with NGO services, Veer stated: He is here to meet brothers because of love. He comes here on his own accord to hang out and meet with brothers. He will then tell his brothers [in his country] about the brothers here and how there are good people in Delhi (FN 10.24.05).

These examples illustrate that key limitations of my involvement, namely my non-drug use and inability to provide services, were justified in local explanations to legitimize my unique role in the group. Similarly, my constant notetaking, which many participants outside of the group associated with police recordkeeping, was interpreted as beneficial for the ‘brothers’: ‘I think this, that our brother writes for our benefit. He does not write to harm us’ (Veer 10.10.05). Moreover, Veer appeared to even understand my research procedures: Veer: You do this: you write down all of our conversations and go home at night. When you write down from here, then at home you go at night, alone, you do it, you write. That my brother did this today. Today, he did this and this. So you write all of it when you go there. And that makes us happy. AD: How did you figure this out? Veer: You sit with us, get up with us, and you are always writing. So from this I deciphered it. Yes, that our brother writes for us (Veer 10.10.05).

The legitimization process also had reciprocal qualities: the ‘brothers’ seemed to gain legitimacy through my presence with them. Sentiments of love, happiness, and even pride were expressed when the ‘brothers’ described my involvement with them. More than one ‘brother’

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celebrated my connection with their group. During an interview, Veer described how he felt about my presence: That our brother has come close to us from a foreign land. He will do something or other for us, our brother. For this reason, we get happy, by seeing you. It feels good to us. That our brother has come to us from a foreign land. He sits here with us. Because we have seen those types of people, who don’t stand, let alone sit. But you sit and stand with us. It feels good to us. He is our brother. He is also one (Veer 10.10.05).

Acknowledgement of my participation in their lives was also accompanied by an appreciation of my studies and pride for my future potential. Veer continued: When you go home, then our big brother Imran, he remembers you. So following him, we also begin to remember you. This brother tells us that our brother is doing his studies there. He is doing great studies. One day, he will become a good man, a very big man he will become. So we also get happy, that our brother had come close to us at one time. He is doing some good work. We are addicts. But our brother, he is one good man, sure a great man. So, we remember you. So it makes us happy, when our big brother tells us (Veer 10.10.05).

Although it was important for me to gain legitimacy from the group to secure access, my scholarly accomplishments and potential for success seemed to provide legitimacy or even hope for Veer and, perhaps, other members of the group. It was probably the first time that they could associate as a ‘brother’ with a person who was not tragically fixed in a world of poverty and addiction. Perhaps through documenting and presenting their lives to ‘brothers’ in my country, I was a vehicle for a type of transcendence for them. Becoming a brother was a gradual process of gaining access to the ‘backstage’ regions, building relationships with key informants such as Imran, and spending copious amounts of leisurely time with one small group of ‘brothers’. In so doing, the ‘brothers’ became advocates of my unique qualities and actions, and, in turn, I became a legitimizing presence for their lives as well.

A FRIENDSHIP WITH BABA Baba was a 33-year-old street addict who became a key informant in the study. My relationship with him was an important means of experiencing and understanding events and issues. Our relationship, therefore, not only provided physical access, but also interpretive access to underlying meanings that were often implicit and subsumed in everyday life. This section will

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describe these aspects of access by delineating the development of our relationship and how it gained interpretive functionality. It highlights initial role-plays of a ‘guide’–‘follower’ where Baba facilitated my viewing and experiencing of events. It follows with descriptions of how we coordinated our daily lives and created new communication strategies to teach and learn from each other. Lastly, it recounts the formation of ‘big brother’–’little brother’ dynamics including protection and planning instances that both facilitated and impeded access to data. Baba was a holy man in appearance. He had a beard and wore a creamcoloured turban, saffron kurta (traditional loose fitting shirt), white dhoti (wrap-around cloth around his waist and legs), beads around his neck, and colourful rings on his deformed fingers. I was, therefore, interested in his reaction to an exorcism that was taking place on the banks of the Yumuna River during the first days of my fieldwork. However, our initial attempts at communicating were frustrating: he would speak in a rough street Hindi dialect that I could not understand, and I would reply in formal Hindi that would humour him. Therefore, I chose to stand next to NGO staff members and listen to their commentary instead. However, when the exorcism group returned from the other side of the river on a boat and banked slightly downstream from our ghat (steps leading into the water), Baba gestured to me: Baba follows, looks back at me and nods at me, motioning me to come forward. I don’t know if this is a good idea but I move behind him. We navigate some tight alleys. I catch up to him and he says, ‘look at what they did to her’. We walk up the stairs and down to the main road where we see two auto rickshaws waiting y Baba leads me to the street and tells me to write down the number of the rickshaw (FN 12.27.04).

Baba facilitated an extended observation of the event. He had navigational knowledge about the alleys and cultural understanding about how close to follow and watch the events, all of which he used for my benefit. Moreover, his facilitation of accessing these data was not through verbal explanation, but through silent direction. He became a ‘guide’ and I became a ‘follower’. In subsequent months, Baba guided me through a number of experiences that were difficult and, occasionally, dangerous without his help. In the one instance that I assumed an ambiguous identity, he led me through an observation of how drug cocktails were acquired by injecting drug users. Drug cocktails were ampoules of injection drugs sold by local pharmacies for inflated prices to street addicts. I had heard the name and location of one such pharmacy and I wanted to observe the interactions. When I asked Baba for directions, he recognized the naivety of my plans and decided to

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take me. On our way, he reprimanded me for arranging to complete the observation by myself. He explained that I could not go to the shop by myself and just watch. The addicts or the storeowners may suspect me, and then I would be in danger. Subsequently, Baba organized the operation: he recruited a middleman who was a ‘regular’ and would be trusted by the pharmacist; he instructed the middleman on the drugs to purchase and the procedures to use, and he assembled our relative positions so that the middleman would not run away and I would have a good view of the transaction. He then lectured to me about the ‘rules’ that I must follow to observe the drug procurement. His directions were specific and repeated multiple times with illustrative analogies, examples, gestures, and signals. In total, he gave me the following ‘rules’: 1. Don’t go to the shop by yourself. 2. Don’t let anyone know that we are doing this just for knowledge. 3. Keep quiet during the negotiation with the middleman. 4. Watch your pockets (Baba slapped my hand when I took something out of my pocket and a 10 rupee bill fell on the ground). 5. Follow the middleman and keep walking (to make sure he doesn’t run away). 6. Don’t show your notebook. 7. Don’t let them think you are an undercover cop. 8. Don’t show the ampoules too much. 9. (Through gestures like stepping on my foot) Walk away from the middleman and don’t talk to him too much. 10. Pretend you are a user who uses at home (FN 03.02.05).

These ‘rules’ were the implicit protocols for assuming an indigenous identity in this situation. Baba was providing me with cultural knowledge about interactions, motivations, and dangers that he probably acquired through experience (in dealing drugs as I later learned). Moreover, he had tailored his ‘rules’ to accommodate my unique qualities and motives: he would probably not tell other ‘novices’ to hide their notebooks. Through ‘insider’ knowledge and an understanding of my traits, Baba enabled me to be legitimate and peripheral in the social context, thereby securing access not only physically, but also in terms of interpretation of events and personalities. Baba used to describe our relationship as ‘two guys walking together’ (FN 03.02.05). There was coordination in our daily activities. We created our own traditions such as buying a half litre of whole milk and sharing a kettle

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of dood ka chai (tea with extra milk), exploring hidden markets of Old Delhi, and walking together to my rickshaw at the end of the day. Baba would also emphasize our shared Kshatriyas caste heritage and suggested that we follow the traditional schedule of our ancestors including waking up at 4:00 am, working from 6:00 am to 12:30 pm, napping from 1:30 to 3:00 pm, working again from 3:00 to 9:00 pm, eating dinner and sleeping at 11:30 pm (FN 02.17.05). During this and other suggestions such as playing the role of ‘street doctor’ which he did often and I was not comfortable doing, I had to set a limit to our joint participation. Such boundaries were usually accepted, although occasionally they would lead to curt disagreements. Our negotiated co-ordination led to the development of new communication mechanisms that bridged the comprehension gap that was initially present. During our conversations, he would frequently interrupt himself and ask: ‘Do you understand what I mean?’ Whenever I would say yes, occasionally he would test me by saying: ‘Okay what? Explain’ (FN 09.15.05). Additionally, he would reiterate some of my incorrectly pronounced words in better forms to both understand what I meant, and to help me learn the ‘lingo’. Interestingly, he also began to detect when I would use my language difficulty to act naive with him or other participants; he would joke that I played dumb so that others would give me more information (FN 08.20.05). Outside of language scaffolding, we also drew diagrams and used demonstrations to convey our meanings. Diagrams such as maps of places for exploration were drawn in my notebook or in the dirt with both of us contributing scribbles to make points as we talked. Demonstrations such as common pick-pocketing strategies in crowded areas (FN 08.30.05) would involve both of us using bodily movements to understand each other. The co-constructed process of designing specialized communication mechanisms produced educative interactions that were reciprocal. As we began developing these unique conveyance devices, much of our time was spent teaching and learning from each other. Perhaps, we both became excited about the ‘foreign’ information that each of us could gather from the other person. Baba taught me a great diversity of topics. Nearly every area that I was interested in received some commentary and interpretation from him. He was particularly important in understanding core religious and cultural values, health beliefs, and different relationship structures. He would illustrate his points with experiences from his roles as a ‘holy man’, ‘street doctor’, ‘drug dealer’, and ‘son’ in a ‘father’–‘son’ relationship with another street dweller. For example, he would explain the causes of ‘cancer’ in the lungs by drawing a diagram in my notebook (Fig. 1) depicting alcohol going into the lungs and damaging them (Fig. 2). On another occasion, he described the

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Fig. 1.

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Baba (Right-Hand Side) Drawing a Diagram for the Ethnographer (LeftHand Side) (FN 09.15.05).

players involved in drug dealing by adding arrows to the English labels that I wrote in my notebook (FN 09.14.05). Importantly, his comments would be couched in elements of our new ‘language’ that began to ring with clarity. Our collaborative tools were able to expose and unravel difficult concepts providing an unparalleled access to significant meanings and processes. This educative utility was also reciprocal. Baba would ask me to read English instructions on drug labels and explain them to him (FN 02.04.05). I would also conduct basic English speech and writing lessons as well as participate in mental math games that he would usually win. On occasion, he would playfully call me his ‘master’ in reference to a principal in a school. As much as we were collaborators in gaining understanding from each other, Baba and I also constructed a ‘big brother’–‘little brother’ dynamic.

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Fig. 2.

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Baba’s Illustration in the Ethnographer’s Notebook Depicting How Alcohol Goes into the Lungs and Causes ‘Cancer’ (FN 09.15.05).

On multiple occasions, Baba would nurture and protect me. For example, during my interviews with other addicts, he would occasionally leave a cup of tea on a ledge behind me. Moreover, the specificity of his ‘rules’ during our observations and explorations were largely to ensure my safety.

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Following his pick-pocketing demonstration, he emphasized that I should learn this so that I do not become a victim. During the final months of my fieldwork, he also became very interested in giving advice for my future. He recommended that I should open a hospital with a pharmacy on the side to treat patients and make money from drugs as well. He also suggested getting married quickly, having one boy and one girl, and taking care of my mother and father (FN 09.18.05). Such notions of ‘settling down’ seemed to taint his perspective of my research. As I was watching a card game in the park with Baba, Imran, and the brothers, the following dialogue occurred: Baba then says, ‘Amar Singh, settle down.’ Imran returns the comment and says, ‘Worry about yourself.’ Baba continues, ‘I look at him and I y don’t like it y sitting with drug addicts. Open a store. Sitting with these men, and you will one day y [use drugs?]’ (FN 10.08.05)

In some ways, Baba wanted to save me from becoming like him. In his ‘big brother’ role, he was not a ‘role model’ but rather a person who encouraged me to live a traditional healthy life, and perhaps even unlearn the ‘tragic knowledge’ that he had taught me. Although such tactics of nurturing, protecting, and planning were important for access, they also impeded access and data generation in significant ways. Baba would get frustrated with seeing me spend idle time with the ‘brothers’. Moreover, he would admonish me for walking alone in some areas, coming at night, or talking to particular people. Balancing these concerns with my objectives as a researcher took negotiation and, at times, distancing from my key informant. Baba provided access to core meanings and implicit knowledge of a street addict’s life. Our relationship involved guidance through everyday activities, sharing daily rituals, creating new communication tools, and using these tools to teach and learn from each other. Through our friendship, he enabled me to be a researcher that was physically present in, and cognizant of, some key moments in an addict’s everyday routine.

DISCUSSION Access in ethnographic research is the participation in negotiated interpersonal relationships or ‘role-plays’ that enables the ethnographer to become a legitimate peripheral participant in the socio-cultural context. The element of negotiated interpersonal relationships is handled by Harrington (2003), and is supported by these data. This analysis, however, reveals the importance of acknowledging the social learning processes involved in access, and

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suggests the utility of Lave and Wenger’s (1991) ‘legitimate peripheral participation’ in understanding these processes. In applying Lave and Wenger’s thinking to the situation of access, some implications for theory development are also revealed. Following a literature review and analysis of the access problem, Harrington (2003) arrives at four relationship regularities that occur during the process of access in ethnographic research: When ethnographers approach a research site, they will be defined in terms of social identity categories salient to participants (p. 607). Ethnographers gain access to information to the extent that they are categorized as sharing a valued social identity with participants or as enhancing that identity through their research (p. 609). Ethnographers’ identity claims must be validated by participants in order for researchers to gain access to information (p. 611). The more that ethnographers’ social identities differ from those of participants, the more likely that access will involve the use of insider informants or deception as self-presentation strategies (p. 612).

All four patterns have some resonance with the data presented in this paper. In support of the first point, the NGO staff initially categorized me as an ‘international guest’, ‘a person who was thinking about setting up a new centre in his country’, and an ‘NGO worker’. These identities were meaningful to the participants, and they were assigned to me to make sense of my presence. The second pattern was applicable in the processes involving co-ordination of daily activities with participants. For instance, my positions as a ‘brother’ in the ‘brotherhood’ and ‘guy who walks with me’ to Baba became viable roles when the participants and I shared time together, and we began to recognize and enhance our joint similarities. The third regularity was relevant during instances of the co-construction of roles (e.g. ‘observer’ and ‘interviewer’) and the legitimization and defence of my intrinsic characteristics (e.g. Veer’s comments). The final assertion reflects the necessity of Baba to enable experiences and unlock everyday meanings for my comprehension. Although Harrington appropriately focuses on the interpersonal relationships, she fails to illuminate the enabling mechanisms underpinning the patterns. Especially for points two, three, and four, the following questions arise: How do ethnographers become aware of which identity elements to share and enhance, and how that sharing should take place? How do researchers create opportunities in which their identity claims will be validated? How do investigators align perspectives and goals with insider

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informants so the informants become meaningful access-points and interpreters? My argument is that the answers to these questions involve learning processes that are theoretically grounded in ‘legitimate peripheral participation’ (Lave & Wenger, 1991). Through participating in daily interactions, ethnographers begin in designated roles on the periphery. From here, they examine other roles, recognize meaningful identity elements, and become reflexive about which of their qualities best ‘mesh’ with established identities. They then spend time in joint activities (e.g. card games), appreciating the ‘rules’ of conduct, and testing different ‘self-presentations’ with the participants. Slowly, they enable participants to relate to their work in ways that are understood locally, and concurrently involve them in co-creating legitimate positions that make ‘sense’, and may be articulated to others. Lastly, with those members who become particularly helpful, ethnographers co-create communication devices and teaching tools with the informants that enable both parties to ‘read’ and teach each other in meaningful ways. Through this process of participating in activities and engaging in dynamic relationships, ethnographers are penetrating the ‘learning curriculum’ of ambient community life. They become recipients and contributors to ‘knowledge’ that is constantly being created, modified, and stored in the course of socio-cultural evolution. The acquisition artifacts such as skills and information that serve as indicators of having ‘learned’ something are absorbed along the way in a ‘subsumed’ manner. In many cases, researchers may not even notice when or how they acquired the ability to participate appropriately or make the correct judgements. Unbeknown to them, their instincts become tuned to what to do in certain circumstances, who to talk to about specific topics, and how to ask the right questions. During these instinctual moments, reflexive ethnographers may inquire about why or how they ‘guessed right’ about a person or situation. Only then will they appreciate the social learning processes that have enabled them to gain access to this level of insight. There are some qualifications to the described process. First, the legitimate roles that are constructed do not need to be identities that have a history with the group (e.g. ‘addict’ or ‘apprentice’). Some of the constructed roles may be quite unique or ‘new’ to the context, and still be legitimate (e.g. ‘observer’ and ‘brother who does not smoke with us’). Second, as an elaboration of the first point, ‘full participation’, which Lave and Wenger argue is where peripheral participation leads, need not be ‘complete participation’ (Gold, 1958). An ethnographer can become a ‘full participant’ without resorting to covert research: ‘full participation’ in a diversity of roles including one akin to ‘researcher’ can be legitimized.

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Lastly, because of its negotiated nature, the learning process has reciprocal elements. Access is successful only when the participants engage in learning about the researcher as well. Only then will research goals be understood and incorporated into legitimate roles and activities. This final point reveals the unique commentary that the journey of the ethnographer may offer to theoretical development of ‘legitimate peripheral participation’. Although Wenger (1998) acknowledges the concept of ‘brokering’ or the ‘use of membership to transfer some element of one practice into another’ (p. 109), there is limited consideration for the extent and complexity of reciprocal effects (Davies, 2005). These data reveal that as participants (‘old-timers’) learn about researchers (‘newcomers’) and coconstruct meanings with them, they may participate differently and shift the types of roles that they perform in the community (e.g. ‘observer’ and ‘interviewer’). Fuller et al. (2005) have also reported that novices may play educational roles in relation to experienced workers in contemporary workplace settings: For example, our research has demonstrated that experienced workers are also learning through their engagement with novices, and that part of the process of legitimate peripheral participation for many novices is to help other workers to learn. This insight is of significance as it helps undermine the view of communities of practice as unchanging (p. 64).

These findings, therefore, suggest that understanding how ‘old-timers’ learn in relation to ‘newcomers’, and how that learning affects the legitimization process may be valuable avenues for inquiry. A second point for consideration is the diversity of journeys that different ‘newcomers’ may experience. The original theory recognizes that there is a ‘diversity of relations involved in varying forms of community membership’ (Lave & Wenger, 1991, p. 37). However, it may be useful to consider the extent of difference between my journey and the journey of an experienced addict who has just moved into the area. To account for the variety of experiences of such dissimilar ‘newcomers’ may be beyond the applicable boundaries of the theory. However, exploration of the potential range of differences in journeys, and how that range relates to the initial characteristics of ‘newcomer’ or other variables such as time or significant events, seems to be an intriguing line of research.

CONCLUSION This paper has attempted to provide a theoretical addition to conceptualizations of access in ethnographic research. It argues that access is not only

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the researcher’s interpersonal relationships with the participants, but also the process of becoming a legitimate peripheral participant in the sociocultural context. The analysis has revealed that the process of engaging with the ambient community’s ‘learning curriculum’ may be strategic and negotiated, but also quite subtle and implicit in nature. Therefore, careful and reflexive accounts of access journeys with consideration of social learning processes are needed to provide further insight into the phenomenon. Because of the unique position of the ethnographer as a cognizant ‘newcomer’, such an approach may also be of value to the theoretical development of Lave and Wenger’s prominent ideas.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Mr. Francis Joseph transcribed and transliterated the tape recordings. I am grateful to my advisor Professor Geoffrey Walford for his probing questions, and the staff of SHARAN and SAHARA for their co-operation and friendship. This research was supported by the Rhodes Trust.

REFERENCES Coy, M. W. (Ed.) (1989). Apprenticeship: From theory to method and back again. Albany: State University of New York Press. Davies, B. (2005). Communities of practice: Legitimacy not choice. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 9(4), 557–581. 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(10), 2674–2685. Downey, G. (2005). Learning Capoeira: Lessons in cunning from an Afro-Brazilian art. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fuller, A., Hodkinson, H., Hodkinson, P., & Unwin, L. (2005). Learning as peripheral participation in communities of practice: A reassessment of key concepts in workplace learning. British Educational Research Journal, 31(1), 49–68. Goffman, E. (1959). The presentation of self in everyday life. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Gold, R. L. (1958). Roles in sociological field observations. Social Forces, 36(3), 217–223. Harrington, B. (2003). The social psychology of access in ethnographic research. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 32(5), 592–625. Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shaffir, W. B., & Stebbins, R. A. (Eds) (1991). Experiencing fieldwork: An inside view of qualitative research. Newbury Park, CA: Sage.

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Walford, G. (2002). Why don’t researchers name their research sites? In: G. Walford (Ed.), Debates and developments in ethnographic methodology (pp. 95–107). Amsterdam, London: JAI. Wax, M. L. (1967). On misunderstanding Verstehen: A reply to Abel. Sociology and Social Research, 51(3), 323–333. Weinstein, M. (2004). TamsAnalyzer: A qualitative research tool (Version 2.49b7). Boston, MA: Free Foundation. Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of practice: Learning, meaning, and identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

THE QUESTION OF INTIMACY IN ETHNOGRAPHY$ Harry F. Wolcott I have many friends who are ethnographers, but most of my friends and colleagues are not ethnographers. So I look for ways to explain ethnography to them without inadvertently giving a lecture or seeming too pedantic. Yet I do not want to shortchange my response or forego an opportunity to inform someone of what ethnography means to me and the kind of person-centered approach that I take. So throughout my career I have watched for definitions or descriptions or even catch-all phrases that one can use to convey the essence of ethnography. ‘Participant observation’ is of some help, but it hardly explains why someone might spend a year or two among a group of total strangers, another year writing about them, and then expecting to find an audience eager to read the report. Nor could I find a way to explain why no two ethnographies ever seemed to look exactly the same. Most recently, I have turned my search to see if I can identify for myself a set of conditions that all ethnographies seem to fulfill. It is easy to construct such a list, but I always find that as soon as I begin to elaborate, I run into exceptions, conditions that are NOT met by each and every ethnography.

$

An abridged version of this paper was presented at the meetings of the eleventh annual Interamerican Symposium on Ethnographic Educational Research held in Buenos Aires, Argentina, on 22 March 2006.

Methodological Developments in Ethnography Studies in Educational Ethnography, Volume 12, 27–33 Copyright r 2007 by Elsevier Ltd. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 1529-210X/doi:10.1016/S1529-210X(06)12002-1

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Most of the conditions that I found are met in most ethnographies most of the time, but no one set of conditions seems to hold in every case. Here was my beginning list. I concluded that ethnography is: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

holistic cross-cultural comparative based on first-hand experience conducted in natural settings the result of intimate, long-term acquaintance non-evaluative basically descriptive specific flexible and adaptive corroborative idiosyncratic and individualistic

Developing this list was fun and a challenge. Of course there could be any number of items on it – 12 just seemed about right for my purposes. But I wondered if every facet that I identified really had to be present every time. Can the mix vary from one ethnographer, or one ethnography, to another? I came up with the idea that writing an ethnography is somewhat like baking a loaf of bread. No two recipes or loaves need ever be quite the same, and there is no absolute set of ingredients that goes into the mix. Yeast, sugar, salt, and fat are usually added to flours ground from wheat and other starchy seeds, but buckwheat and quinoa, for example – both of which can be used in bread making – are not members of the grass family. Nor does what passes for a loaf of bread necessarily look the same the world over. I note only that loaves of bread usually bear strong resemblance to the variety of breads made by others in the same region. If you are baking a loaf, or writing an ethnography, you want yours to look like the ones made by those around you who claim to be doing something similar. It is not only the ingredients but what is done with them – how they are selected, and how they are combined – that makes the differences we observe. The basic materials are essentially the same. Like the world’s breadmakers, qualitative researchers everywhere draw from the same source – in this case, human social behavior – to obtain their raw material. It is their choice of ingredients and how they choose to combine and work them that make the difference, I cannot help wondering if distinctions that we pride ourselves on do not seem nearly as important to those

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outside our own circles. For example, North American ethnographers usually combine their materials with a healthy dose of culture. ‘Culture’ is not something one sees on the ground as an observer; it is something the ethnographer puts there to make data workable from an ethnographic point of view. But if it is not culture, some other organizer – for instance, community, institution, social structure – helps render the analysis, giving some characteristic way of ‘marking’ one’s work, so it looks like what it is supposed to look like.

A TEST OF THE ATTRIBUTES LIST I cannot subject listeners to such a long list. At my age I cannot always remember all 12 items myself. But I keep them in mind as a guide for discussions about ethnography, especially for assessing works that seem to be questionably ethnographic, that is, works that claim to be ethnographic but are suspect in that regard. I do not think that whether one meets these conditions is necessarily that important, except that recognizing what ought to be included to warrant the label ‘ethnography’ serves as a convenient shorthand for describing a study and judging its contribution. My last field-based study presents a case in point. It was based on original fieldwork. It started out as what anthropologist Stanley Brandes has described as an ‘ethnographic autobiography’ (see a discussion in Wolcott, 2004). It is a life story of a young man whom I called ‘Sneaky Kid,’ an unfortunate choice of names since it made him seem far younger than he was. I ‘found’ Sneaky Kid living on my place – I live in the country on the side of a hill with some steep forested terrain. He had constructed a cabin out of sapling trees when I discovered him. He was a 19-year-old youth at the time, had spent some part of his life in the local community, had long been out of school, had never been regularly employed, and admitted to having recently spent time in ‘reform school.’ Since he was on private property, he asked if he could stay. As long as he did not burn down the forest, he was not going to hurt anything, so I let him stay. He stayed far longer than I ever imagined – two years! When I needed to do a major construction project, digging a new water line to my house from a spring on the hill, he asked if he could do the work rather than my hiring it out. We began working together. I found myself growing increasingly attracted to him, at first psychologically, then physically. I was fascinated with his ability to eke out a living for himself and survive the winter months in cold, damp weather. Given what seemed to be our mutual inclination, we eventually became physically involved as well.

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Then the thought occurred that here was the very kind of person I had hoped to find for studying cultural acquisition. With our newfound intimacy, I assumed that he could and would talk about any aspect of his life. He agreed to some interviewing, and I began to tape sessions with him to recreate his life story. Eventually, I prepared a draft that he read and approved while still living on my property. Toward the end of his second year, however, things started to go awry. He began acting strangely, and one day he suddenly announced his decision to leave. We both knew he had no particular place to go, but he had become dissatisfied that his life was not leading anywhere. We parted as friends. Frankly, I thought he might be back in a matter of weeks, if not days. I knew I would miss him. I tried contacting him. He had promised to keep in touch, but I heard from him only once after he left. His travels of several months terminated at the home of his mother in Southern California, a thousand miles away. On the telephone he seemed quite animated. He told me that his mother had committed him briefly to a mental health facility. Then I totally lost track of him y until he returned two and a half years later to burn my house to the ground and seriously attempt to harm me. There followed a trial, after which he spent some time in prison. I have never seen him since. It is a tragic story, but that is not my point. My publisher encouraged me to write more, beginning with the original life story but extending it now to describe his surprising return and all that had transpired, both before and after the fire. I accepted the publisher’s challenge. That is the account that I have provided in Sneaky Kid and Its Aftermath: Ethics and Intimacy in Fieldwork (Wolcott, 2002). But there were two of us in the story now, and the new part read more like a memoir. So the question for me became: Where does ethnography stop and the account become something else? And does it matter? I assume there are certain cautions concerning any group of people with whom we intend to conduct ethnography. I am not sure what particular precautions apply to dealing with a 20-year-old streetwise youth who had undergone police interrogation but was not used to ethnographic interviewing. We began with questions about where he had lived and how he had gone about selecting a site and constructing both his cabin and his life. He never did talk as freely as I assumed he would, in spite of our perceived intimacy. I was never sure if some of the stories he told about others were really about himself – there were parts that I simply could not corroborate. Nor did I have to. My account starts with his story, in his words – until it

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became our story, mostly in my words. The account has coherence, and his part had his approval. But, is the account ethnography? Let me evaluate it against my list of criteria. The account is holistic, based on the experience of the full two years he spent in my place. I am sure I was the only person with whom he regularly conversed. Our formal interviews could not have been conducted in more natural settings – I took the tape recorder up to his cabin and we talked in the sunshine of Oregon mornings. But we also talked all the time outside the formal interviews – at least as much as a reticent youth will talk. Our conversations were always specific: about him and his life, both as he had experienced it and as he sometimes liked to imagine it. Of necessity, my stance was non-evaluative – I had to turn a blind eye to some of the experiences he recounted (such as his attempt to rob a convenience store) as well as to how he had procured some of the things that now graced his cabin and his life – stolen bicycles topping the list. Oddly enough, he was not into drugs except for his sporadic use of marijuana. His plan to grow a few plants of his own suffered from his failure to water them consistently. This absence of heavy drugs is the most dramatic contrast with anthropologist Juan Gamella’s strikingly parallel account of a similar-aged youth in Madrid conducted during the same years and published there, La Historia de Julia´n, memorias de heroina y delincuencia, currently in its fourth edition (See Gamella, 1990). My study is as flexible and as adaptive as I could allow myself to be in doing it, for I had literally stumbled upon my subject in my own backyard. I was slow to see the possibilities for preparing an account contrasting schooling and education, but here was a golden opportunity. What may seem missing are qualities of being cross-cultural and comparative, but in this case – learning about a person from the same community – I brought those qualities to the study myself from previous fieldwork as an anthropologist. I have long insisted that we need to make better use of anthropology in everything we do under the banner ‘anthropology and education.’ In this case, I introduced a cross-cultural perspective by contrasting what I called Sneaky Kid’s cultural alternatives with my own patently middle-class career alternatives. When he decided to leave, we talked about the possibilities he was considering as an emerging adult. They were remarkably different from the ones I would have considered under similar circumstances. He tried enlisting in the armed services, just as Julia´n in Gamella’s account had done – until he discovered that he had not completed enough years of schooling to qualify for enlistment. The other alternatives he mentioned included the unlikely possibility of committing suicide, going permanently on welfare

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(off and on he had been the recipient of food stamps), getting locked up in jail or prison, being institutionalized as a crazy person – an attractive alternative to him – or going ‘home.’ Home, his least favorite possibility, was the option he finally had to settle for, although he had not been a welcome guest in either of his divorced parents’ homes for years. To return to the ‘tricky part,’ let me say more about ethnography as the result of intimate, long-term acquaintance. What is ‘intimate enough?’ And how intimate is too intimate? I remind you that Sneaky Kid and I were into a sexual relationship before he became my informant. It was the very nature of our relationship that prompted my asking if he would share his life story. (It might be more accurate to say that he agreed to let me draw his life story out of him. He originally estimated that his story would take a total of about 12 h to tell. In fact, when we started the interviews, he spoke non-stop for about 12 min, concluding with ‘and so I decided to come up here and give it a try.’ After that, it was entirely up to me.) Not much has ever been said about being involved with an informant, particularly a younger one of the same gender. Although I have tried to open things up a bit by addressing this issue in the book, my experience is that not much is ever going to be said. Nor do I recommend that anyone attempt to advance the frontiers of ‘anthropology and education’ by working on this angle. But we are human beings, and these things happen. When they do, I think we are better off to be forthright about them than to pretend they never occur. Your readers expect to learn about the people you have been learning about, but they also want to know something about YOU, their storyteller. Working with what we recognize as vulnerable age groups – children and youth – our personal feelings about them can inspire or impede us. I am always interested in learning all I can about those who want to inform me about children and youth. To this point, I have presented the problem of intimacy in fieldwork as being mine. Now I would like to make it yours, as well. Of all the terms on my list of conditions for ethnography, when I say that ethnography is ‘the result of intimate, long-term acquaintance,’ I think I have pointed to ethnography’s single-most telling aspect, the one that sets it apart from all other qualitative approaches. And so I ask again, ‘How intimate is intimate?’ And, when you work with children and young people, where do you draw the line? Years ago, an American anthropologist posed a rhetorical question: What kind of Hopi or Kwakiutl Indian will tell his story to a White man? I now pose a parallel question: What kind of adolescent will tell his story to an ethnographer? Or we might turn the question around to ask, ‘What kind of story is an adolescent willing to tell a researcher?’

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I am all for using ethnographic techniques in learning about young people. I know I learned a lot from and about Sneaky Kid, and I doubt if I will ever understand all that I did NOT learn about him. But, as Clifford Geertz reminded us years ago, ‘it is not necessary to know everything in order to understand something’ (Geertz, 1973, p. 20). So, what exactly is it that we as ethnographers wish to know? And how likely are we to find out?

REFERENCES Gamella, J. (1990). La Historia de Julia´n: memorias de heriona y delincuencia. (4th ed. 2003). Madrid: Espan˜a. Geertz, C. (1973). Thick description: Toward an interpretive theory of culture. In: C. Geertz (Ed.), The interpretation of cultures. New York: Basic Books. Wolcott, H. F. (2002). Sneaky kid and its aftermath: Ethics and intimacy in fieldwork. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press. Wolcott, H. F. (2004). The ethnographic autobiography. Auto/Biography, 12(2), 93–106.

TO COOK OR NOT TO COOK: PARTICIPANT OBSERVATION AS A DATA COLLECTION TECHNIQUE Susan James INTRODUCTION As I sit here typing, I take a long, hard, registering look at my hands. I see them as someone else would: dirt embedded in cracked, dry, stained skin, with small cuts, some covered in bright blue waterproof plasters, others healing nicely. Hands that, as a child, I imagined belonged to the wicked witch of the west or hands a gardener or other craftsperson may be proud of y (Diary notes, 20 May 2002)

The reasons my hands looked this way were the 50 kg of potatoes I had peeled in the 2 weeks prior to the diary entry, the 40 kg of onions I removed the paper shells from and the 10 kg of Jerusalem artichokes I separated their skins in the kitchen of a local restaurant. These tasks were undertaken in the endeavour to understand how an apprentice constructs knowledge and skill in the workplace. In recent years there has been a renewed focus on learning in the workplace (Billett, 2001; Hawke, 1998) and the literature is extensive and rapidly increasing (for example, Billett, 1995, 1996, 2001, 2002; Boud & Garrick, 1999; Eraut, 2000a, 2000b, 2001; Eraut, Alderton, Cole, & Senker, 1998; Fuller & Unwin, 2003a, 2003b; Fuller, Hodkinson, Hodkinson, & Unwin., Methodological Developments in Ethnography Studies in Educational Ethnography, Volume 12, 35–50 Copyright r 2007 by Elsevier Ltd. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 1529-210X/doi:10.1016/S1529-210X(06)12003-3

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2005; Hodkinson, 2004 among others), but regardless of your epistemological belief, ‘one broadly established truth y is that learning at work cannot be separated out from the everyday working practices of the workplace’ (Hodkinson, 2004, p. 12): Learning is no longer a separate activity that occurs either before one enters the workplace or in remote classroom settings. y The behaviours that define learning and behaviours that define being productive are one and the same. Learning is not something that requires time out from being engaged in productive activity; learning is the heart of productive activity. (Zuboff, 1988, p. 395)

Consequently, to understand how elements of the workplace provide affordances (Billett, 2001) for the construction of knowledge and skill it was necessary to understand the activity of the workplace. The diary entry at the beginning of this chapter indicates I took a very hands-on approach: participant observation. The list of tools and methods available to a researcher is extensive, so why did I consciously choose a method, which, considering my field research sites, was bound to end up with some form of physical punishment? It could be said that participant observation chose me. The purpose of this chapter attempts to explain the experiences of a researcher beginning her field research and putting into action the results of the decision-making processes from the first 18 months of a doctoral study, paying particular attention to the use of participant observation techniques – a method that has shaped the project and the researcher irrevocably – as a data collection tool rather than non-participant observation, which seems to be the norm in researching and learning in the workplace.

THE CONTEXT The aim of the research was to understand how elements of the workplace provided affordances (Billett, 2001) for the processes of knowledge and skill construction. To do this, young people training to be chefs were the focus to illustrate how knowledge and skill is constructed during apprenticeship on the trajectory towards becoming a chef. Apprentice chefs were chosen for five reasons: 1. Labour is a key type of goal-directed activity, and it is through labour that a kitchen functions to produce objects (meals), on time and within budget, achieving the desired outcomes of satisfied customers and profit. Observing apprentice chefs while they completed various tasks in the production environment of a kitchen provided the potential to

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3.

4.

5.

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understand how learning is experienced and to identify the processes involved in constructing knowledge and skill in the workplace; Apprenticeship provided the opportunity to study an apprentice’s on-thejob learning within an activity system (Engestrom, 1987) through direct and indirect guidance (Billett, 2001); The apprentice chefs in this study were all completing a Foundation Modern Apprenticeship, which requires the completion of a National Vocational Qualification (NVQ) at Level 2. NVQs can be completed through a Private Training Provider (PTP) or through a day release programme at a College of Further Education (F.E. College) consequently the opportunity existed to examine off-the-job learning in another activity system: a F.E. College. Traditional apprenticeship was the only route to becoming a chef until the Modern Apprenticeship programme was introduced in 1994. In researching how apprentice chefs learn, the history of apprenticeship is of significance with regard to the opportunities afforded the apprentice in constructing his or her knowledge and skill; and My background provided phenomenological validity to the study. I have worked in the hospitality industry for a number of years and have taught this subject in secondary schools in Australia; therefore this background knowledge provided me with invaluable insight. My experience also provided me with a significant resource in negotiating access to sites: in times of economic hardship, what chef is willing to turn down the prospect of a month of free labour, while I work alongside the apprentice?

THE DECISION-MAKING PROCESS Some of the most well-known research into learning in the workplace is Lave and Wenger’s (1991) study of West African tailors whereby they argue the tailors learn their trade by gradually becoming participants able to engage fully as members of an existing community of practise. Similar work on learning to move from a novice to an expert has been conducted by Billett (1995a, 2001) focusing on hairdressers knowledge and skill construction, Scribner’s (1999) work on dairy worker’s social construction of knowledge, and Hutchin’s (1993) research into navigator’s learning their profession. All these studies were conducted using non-participant observation techniques combined with interviews or, in the case of Felstead et al. (2005) augmenting case study work with a survey which highlights smaller, perhaps less

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significant but no less important, changes in capability or understanding in learning at work. Consequently, to understand how learning is experienced in the workplace, an initial methodology was constructed that was influenced by, aligned with, and built upon previous research conducted by Billett (1995) and Moore (1981). Billett’s research on how hairdressers structure their knowledge through authentic activities in hairdressing salons using ethnographic techniques in four case study sites greatly influenced my initial thinking and planning. He used non-participant observation, semistructured interviews, a client survey and an activity-sheet to collect data to investigate the social and situational effects of knowledge construction in the workplace. Moore and his team worked in The School for Experiential Learning (SEL) to ‘develop a systematic approach to locating the pedagogy and curriculum of experiential education’ (Moore, 1981, p. ii). The purpose of the study was ‘to examine these various experiences and try to figure out a way to analyse them in terms of education’ (Moore, 1981, p. 13) and involved 3 years of participant observation in over 35 sites where the students of the SEL were placed as ‘apprentices’ and ‘interns’ over a set period of time, while also spending a small portion of time attending ‘seminars’ and ‘inhouse’ courses at the school. From reading Moore’s report, I decided that in order to understand the knowledge and skills an apprentice chef constructs, I would need to analyse the specific tasks assigned and completed by him/her. For ultimately, the apprentice constructs his/her knowledge and skills by performing and experiencing the various duties given by the other chefs in the kitchen, and the conversations he/she is involved in. Furthermore, to understand the processes involved in an apprentice’s construction of knowledge and skill, it is necessary to understand the workplace as a whole, and the apprentice’s place within this establishment. Therefore, in order to see the apprentice fulfilling his/her responsibilities, I would need to spend a lot of time with the apprentice in the workplace.

THE PILOT STUDY Access was negotiated with Rob, the head chef at The Hutch. The research was explained to Rob and later to Nat, the apprentice, after which it was agreed that I could spend a week observing the action in the kitchen. The other chefs were informed of my presence in the kitchen, why I was

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observing their work, and gave informed consent to be involved in the research. The first few days of the week were spent honing my observation skills, making decisions on what should be observed and trying to gain a feel for the kitchen. I was able to make copious notes of the activity in front of me as I stood in my corner of the kitchen. However, as the week wore on I began to seriously question the authenticity of the working day I observed. It is very unusual to have someone standing or sitting around in a kitchen (Ruhlman, 1997, 2001). From having worked in kitchens before – my phenomenological validity – I was aware that kitchens are hectic, hot places fraught with tension that was more often than not relieved through swearing, practical jokes and a lot of yelling (see also Bourdain, 2000). In the first 3 days at The Hutch, I had not once seen any of this tension relief. I needed to test my hypothesis as it was becoming increasingly evident how painfully aware everybody in the kitchen was of my presence, particularly my note-taking. Generally, the only people who enter a kitchen to take notes are health and hygiene inspectors or assessors of some kind. I needed the chefs to see me as part of the kitchen as opposed to an outsider. Jeffrey and Troman (2004) believe ethnographic research depends entirely on the focus and site of the research and adhere to three ethnographic principles: 1. research taking place over time to allow a fuller range of empirical situations to be observed and analysed and to allow for the emergence of contradictory behaviours and perspectives. Time in the field, alongside time for analysis and interpretation, allows continuous reflections concerning the complexity of human contexts; 2. considering relations between the appropriate cultural, political and social levels of the research site and the individual’s and group’s/community’s agency at the research site; and 3. including theoretical perspectives in order to: ‘sensitise’ field research and analysis: provide an opportunity to use empirical ethnographic research for the interrogation of macro and middle range theories; and to develop new theory. Using non-participant observation techniques at The Hutch was not allowing me to adhere to any of the three principles. Consequently, I made the decision to spend the second week of the pilot study as a participant observer. Of course, I could have stayed for longer than a month. Feasibly, how long could they have kept up this facade? Jeffrey and Troman (2004) call this ‘compressed time mode’ and believe that, while this type of shorter

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time-span ethnography provides a snapshot of what is happening, it does not uncover much of what is really occurring. I do not agree and this will be discussed further below but for now, more pertinently, my research timetable did not allow more time to be spent in the field research sites to find out whether it was a facade. In the second week there was a noticeable difference in the atmosphere of the kitchen such as yelling, swearing and practical jokes, which had not occurred the week before. Although the data was not as detailed as in the previous week (because I was unable to record exact conversations), it was a more accurate reflection of the daily experiences of the people working in the kitchen. What is lost in detail is gained in validity because the data collected using participant observation techniques provides a more accurate account of the kitchens and the workers in it. Furthermore, working collaboratively on tasks proved more conducive to conversations with the apprentice and was a way of gleaning data that might otherwise have stayed under the surface if using non-participant techniques. As Robson (1993, p. 197, emphasis in original) states, The fact that an observer is an observer is made clear from the start. The observer then tries to establish close relationships with members of the group. This stance means that as well as observing through participating in activities, the observer can ask members to explain various aspects of what is going on. It is important to get the trust of key members of the group (key either because of their position or because of personal qualities such as openness or interest in the ways of the group).

During the time spent working as a participant observer with the apprentices, I asked questions regarding the tasks rather than ‘just getting on with it’. The questions asked were used to ascertain how the tasks influenced and promoted learning on the progression towards becoming a chef. These questions helped to make the process of knowledge and skill acquisition more explicit (Eraut, 2001). Having the apprentices primarily as key informants rather than subjects to be observed – although on occasions the apprentices were this also – is an important aspect to the validity of this research (Hammersley & Atkinson, 1995, pp. 140–141) as the data is enriched by the apprentices’ input as key informants (Robson, 1993, p. 197; Taylor, 1998, pp. 53–66) and not just subjects to be interviewed. The key informants in each of the kitchens are presented in Table 1. Moreover, not only did participant observation allow me to collect data on the tasks the apprentice completed and his/her wider role and experiences in the activity of the kitchen, it also allowed my own experiences in the kitchen to enhance the data collected because, for all intents and purposes, I was treated as an apprentice. For example, I had to peel 50 kg of potatoes

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Table 1.

Key Informants.

Kitchen

Key Informants

The Hutch Chives

Nat – 1st year apprentice Jack – 2nd year apprentice Daniel – 1st year apprentice Lawrence – 1st year apprentice Clint – 1st year apprentice

Gastronomique Sebs

during my first week at Gastronomique. The other chefs laughed at the brown colour of my hands from all the dirt. Barry, the head chef, walked past and mumbled, ‘‘The same task I did in my first week as an apprentice and the same task Lawrence did when he first started here.’’ My acceptance into the kitchens was also exemplified by the hat I wore while working at Chives, which was required by all the chefs for health and hygiene purposes. The hats were used as a semiotic tool; the colour of the cap signifies one’s status in the kitchen: the head chef had a black cap, sous chefs wore blue caps, a chef de partie would wear a purple hat, and second year apprentices wore red and white checked caps. To me, the fact I was given a yellow cap – the same colour a first year apprentice wore – signified authenticity, especially as work experience students were given paper hats! The decision to continue as a participant observer was an easy one; as I said earlier, it chose me. The kitchen came alive in the second week of the pilot study and as I was going to be in my next three sites for a month each, working 6 days a week on the same shifts as the apprentice, I needed the kitchens and the workers in them to be as natural as possible. Jeffrey and Troman (2004) may think a month is not long enough, but 4 weeks in a stilted environment, with people not being as they normally would be, would feel like an eternity. I also felt that one month would be enough time to begin to understand the routines and patterns of the workplace, to feel the tempo and workflow of a shift while also preventing me from becoming too familiar and just another worker. As a participant observer, the dichotomy between my dual roles of worker and researcher (Spadley, 1980, pp. 54–58) became apparent during the time I spent in the field research sites. On a number of occasions the role I played was decided for me, but there were many times when I was making the choice to be one or the other: a researcher or a worker. Often this was a difficult choice: do I let the conversation continue as merely a co-worker and see what is unearthed; or do I intervene as a researcher with a question to elicit a response? There were times when both situations occurred – when I intervened and when I did not

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– but I can never be sure as to whether the most appropriate choice was made, as the data I collected is only going to reflect the decision made in that instance. As Hammersley and Atkinson (1995, p. 227) argue, One must be aware of the possible effects of social location on all kinds of data, including ethnographers’ own observational reports: we too occupy particular locations and what we observe, what we record, and how we interpret it will be influenced by these.

Being aware of the distinct yet problematic line between worker and researcher made prioritising my roles easier in the second and third field research sites: as much as I was a worker in the kitchens, I was first and foremost a researcher who frequently had to interrupt conversations and ask questions. However, while the decision to be a participant observer had been an easy one the actual experience was not.

PARTICIPANT OBSERVATION: THE EXPERIENCE Although I had worked in kitchens before, it had been several years, and certainly not with research motives and goals in mind. No amount of reading of the participant observation literature could have prepared me fully for what I was about to experience. Participant observation means so many different things in ‘real life’. There is much literature on being a participant observer (e.g., Bogdewic, 1999; Burgess, 1984; Delamont, 2005; Friedrichs & Ludtke, 1975; Hodkinson, 2004; May, 1993; Parker, 2002; Taylor & Bogdan, 1998), particularly in relation to schools and educational institutions (e.g., Delamont, 1992; Eisner & Peshkin, 1990; Holmes, 1998; Massey & Walford, 1998, 1999; Woods, 1986), and while this literature provided some valuable information, often the practicalities and logistics of being a participant observer are not discussed. And, as mentioned, participant observation does not seem to be a method favoured by researchers of workplace learning. Identity I spent 1 month in each site. By my calculations, this amount of time would allow the routines and rhythm of the workplace to surface. After the first few days, a feeling of ‘never having been anywhere else’ began to settle: routines and layout were learned, and I did settle into the rhythm of the workplace. This is deceptive. It allows one a familiarity that it should not as it allows one to forget the purpose of being in the field and to think of oneself as a chef, and nothing could be further from the truth. For example,

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having been at Chives for a week, I was asked to do a job with one of the apprentices. Neither of us fully understood what was required but rather than ask for clarification, something I would do as a researcher, the apprentice and I went ahead and completed what we assumed was required because we did not want to be yelled at. Although the food produced was fine, it was a variation on what we had been told to do, and consequently a tirade of abuse followed. The majority of this diatribe was aimed at the apprentice but the full force of what was being said was felt by both of us! My identity as an apprentice had overtaken my identity as a researcher and manifested itself by not having the gumption to ask for clarification. Although it was generally forgotten by those in the kitchen that I was first and foremost a researcher (or perhaps, more accurately, it was kept in the backs of their minds), my role as a researcher did come to the fore on various occasions. During the course of the shift, I would ask the apprentice a number of questions regarding the tasks. Sometimes an immediate answer, with what seemed to be very little thought, was given. Other times, the apprentice stopped and looked, pondering the question, making him/her step away from the task at hand and aware of the situation from my perspective. The act of the apprentice thinking of an answer, rather than giving an automatic reaction, brought my role to the fore. Occasionally comments would be made such as ‘will you write that in your book?’ and ‘no one else asks questions like that’ or the question would need to be re-worded for comprehension, immediately re-establishing my role as a researcher. For example, the head chef had spent quite some time with Lawrence, the apprentice at Gastronomique, and me showing us how to make a risotto. It was a particularly interesting example of instruction for my research. Afterwards I asked Lawrence about the ‘fusion’ of two particular ingredients in a risotto he was shown to make. I then needed to explain the word fusion. On many of these occasions, the incident brought back to my mind the role I was there to play, as I forgot also. When I was immersed in the middle of a busy service in a hot environment churning out meals it was easy to forget the main purpose of my presence. During such times there is no room for error and even less for reflection (Delamont, 2005), a disadvantage of participant observation. Reflection needs to take place after the shift. As desirable as a notebook would be, and I did carry a small one in my pocket, the risk of burnt food compared to time out for note-taking was too high. The feeling of involvement that familiarity breeds resulted in another mistake. It is one thing for a chef to criticise an apprentice, but an entirely different story for a pseudo-chef to ‘go native’. After a week of working with

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Daniel at Chives (there are seven apprentices at this site) I was becoming more and more frustrated with his lax attitude and frequent wandering, leaving me to complete the task at hand. Service was complete, the cleaning had been done and a few of us were standing around joking and laughing, analysing the day, waiting for that big hand to hit 12. The apprentice, Daniel, was trying to defend his actions from an incident earlier in the day and comments were flying from every which way. This apparently was de rigueur until I made a comment about the apprentices finely honed ability to walk off at crucial times leaving me to complete his tasks. A few laughs went around but also some raised eyebrows and looks. In those 10 seconds, I was reminded that I was not fully an apprentice and quickly learned a very important lesson if I was going to be able to continue to listen to conversations such as these: in certain instances keep my mouth shut! Language This topic has two aspects. I will refer to the first as ‘professional language’ and the second as ‘colourful language’.1 Professional language is two-fold: the professional language of a chef, and my professional language as a researcher. The language of a chef is riddled with French words and also industry specific words, which contain absolutely no meaning outside of a kitchen. For example, ‘the Hobart’ is the mixer – Hobart is the actual brand of manufacturer. Lucky for me, I was au fait with the majority of the words from my previous experience in the industry. I say lucky because I do believe that this could have been a point of continuous ridicule throughout my stay in these kitchens had I not been up-to-date. Of course, as an ‘apprentice’ the odd (very few and far between!) query is allowed and I do have to admit to listening carefully to the apprentices when they asked for clarification. The second aspect of professional language is my own professional language: the language of a researcher. As technical as the language of a chef may be, chefs do not tend to use words that are considered essential to an academic (or an apprentice academic as the case may be). The work in the kitchen may be going along fine until I asked a question and the person I asked would look at me blankly and say ‘‘What does that mean? Speak English woman’’ or ‘‘You can tell who has been to university’’. Naturally this would be said loudly so all others around could hear and I was immediately differentiated. Time would need to be taken before I was ‘one of the workers’ again. I soon learned to curb my professional language and it was amazing how much more credible I became when I also sprinkled my conversation with a few choice ‘colourful’ words.

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In a kitchen, swear words seem to be used as nouns, verbs, adjectives and even prepositions on occasion. It was expected to pepper one’s vocabulary with as much colourful language as possible. By eventually joining in, the doorway into the kitchen and its activity seemed to open just that little bit wider. In fact, at Chives, I was informed that a bet had been taking place as to when I would crack and swear for the first time. This was very reminiscent of school playground games, but nonetheless important to my being a participant observer and accepted in the workplace. Uniform In the pilot site I was lent a pair of chef’s trousers to wear during my time in the kitchen. Apart from being very comfortable, the trousers had a big, black check pattern on them. The trousers were the same as the ones worn by everyone else in the kitchen. Due to this similarity I did not think anything of it. At Chives (the first field research site after the pilot study) I was informed by the administrator (not the head chef) when negotiating access that I would be required to provide my own uniform. Not a problem I thought. I looked in the yellow pages for a supplier, made a phone call and ordered a chef’s jacket and trousers, feeling very excited at having my own uniform. The lady on the other end of the telephone inquired as to what type of trousers I would like. I asked her to explain and she rattled off a number of different styles. I vaguely remembered seeing the head chef wearing blue and white but could not be sure. I decided on blue and white large check trousers. Turning up on my first day I was shown the female change room. As I emerged all the other chefs stared. I froze: what was wrong, why were they looking at me like that? One of the chefs said ‘‘Look, it’s Jamie Oliver!’’ I then realized they were all wearing SMALL blue and white checked trousers. For the next 2 days I fielded questions on my choice of apparel. Thankfully, after a couple of days the jokes died down BUT it was still one thing that I did not need to deal with and could have potentially averted if I had been more aware. I have since read Linda Measor’s (1985) article, ‘Interviewing: a strategy in Qualitative Research’ whereby she does discuss the different clothes she wore when interviewing teachers and students. Why, oh why, had I not read it earlier? Acceptance As a participant observer one wants, as much as possible, to be a part of what is happening, to try to understand all that is occurring and the only

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way to be a part of all that is happening is to be accepted. If I was to try to gain a true understanding of what an apprentice learns, how he/she becomes a chef through constructing knowledge and skill and what it means to be a chef, I needed to be accepted to the fullest extent possible. Jack, one of the apprentices at Chives, accepted me immediately. He explained the goings on and seemed to revel in his teacher role. This allowed me to be accepted by the other chefs much more readily as they could see how well we were working together. However, there was one chef at Chives who did not begin to speak to me until the fifth day. This was difficult considering on three of these days I was working with Daniel, another apprentice in this kitchen, and we were under that particular chef’s direction. He communicated to me via Daniel. Eventually this changed and by the end of the second week full communication was occurring. I did ask him why he had taken so long to speak to me and his gruff reply was ‘I needed to be sure of what you are about’. Indeed, he went on to become one of the most helpful chefs in that kitchen. Generally though, within the first few days of being in the kitchens, once the other chefs were sure of why I was there and were comfortable with the fact that I was not judging them or their work in any way, tension dissolved. I believe this was aided by the fact that I was clear from the start that the chefs were able to ask me questions. Also, on the second day in each kitchen, I took my field notes in from the first day to show the apprentice, to gauge his impression of the day and whether our conclusions of the day were the same. This was a particularly interesting form of collaboration with my key informants and, I believe, helped to aid the reliability and validity of my study as I was trying to ensure the data was as accurate as possible. A few of the other chefs had a look and asked questions. I had my notes on subsequent days but no one except the apprentice was interested after the first day. Participant observation allows the researcher an authenticity to the phenomena that is incalculable. As previously mentioned, I felt the quality of the data I collected was greatly improved in the pilot site once my position moved from non-participant observer to participant observer. Evidence for this is the fact that in Chives and Gastronomique I was yelled at, joked about, ridiculed, given and shown tasks, just as the apprentice was. One example illustrates this point perfectly. My knife skills were rather rusty. Consequently, by the end of the first week at Chives I had blue water proof plasters on three of my fingers. For the next 2 days I had the ‘blue plaster song’, a song made up by the chefs in that kitchen, sung (taunted) to me when I entered the kitchen. I was, for all intents and purposes, treated as an apprentice.

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Initiation procedures Undoubtedly, part of being accepted was the initiation procedures I had to pass. One of these, I believe, was the colourful language aspect already mentioned. Another was being the butt of many jokes in the first few days and not rising to take the bait. Although more females are appearing in kitchens, these workplaces are still very male dominated areas. Testosterone was abundant, as one would expect with the chefs all vying for a place on the pecking order and letting their place be known. Tolerating sexist jokes was an aspect that had to be endured for ultimately my dual role of researcher/ chef was tenuous. One false move and I could very easily have been asked to leave. Unfortunately, this meant smiling at tasteless comments and putting my usually forthright demeanour on the backburner. A far more physically painful test was the slicing of lemons, limes and oranges into garnishes when it was common knowledge that I had a lot of nicks and cuts on my hands. The chefs in these kitchens needed to test me. I was encroaching on their territory and although they knew to a certain extent what I was about, I was learning, or was about to learn, a lot more regarding them and their work lives than these chefs were going to learn about me. I needed to earn their trust and the most suitable way for the chefs was through these tests. The 50 kg of potatoes mentioned earlier was a test: did she have enough stamina and patience to peel her way through them all? Could she be trusted to perform other tasks in the kitchen and ultimately enter our/their domain?

TO COOK OR NOT TO COOK? These areas I have highlighted are those that I was least prepared for in fulfilling my role as a participant observer: knowing where boundaries for my participation in conversations were, the way my identity as a chef and researcher would develop, being accepted and belonging (or not), language, initiation tests, and my trousers. It could be argued that these issues are situation specific: a researcher conducting field research in a school would not have to face these matters. Yes, to a certain extent the researcher in an educational institution may not be faced with these specific challenges but there would be issues of language, working out in one’s own mind their position as participant observer, issues of acceptance, and uniform among others. The words of Sarah Delamont (2005, p. 310) ring in my mind:

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Delamont (2005), along with Becker (1971) and Wolcott (1981), have long argued that educational research needs challenges to its familiarity and I agree with them. Being a participant observer provided many challenges, as outlined above, and participant observation, by its very nature of course, will not be suitable in all research situations as Jeffrey and Troman (2004) suggest but it should not be readily dismissed as time-consuming, being possibly most suitable for doctoral research (Walford, 2002). So much of the learning that occurs in workplaces, and the knowledge and skill that is constructed through the everyday practices of work, becomes implicit and tacit (Eraut, 2000a, 2000b, 2001). Using participant observation techniques can help to make our understanding more explicit and need not take more time than non-participant observation but can provide much more rewarding results for the research and the researcher.

NOTE 1. Colourful language is the term I use to describe the ubiquitous swearing.

REFERENCES Becker, H. (1971). Sociological work: method and substance. London: Allen Lane. Billett, S. (1995). Structuring knowledge through authentic activities. Brisbane: Griffith University. Billett, S. (1996). Constructing vocational knowledge: History, communities and ontogeny. Journal of Vocational Education and Training, 48(2), 141–154. Billett, S. (2001). Learning in the workplace: Strategies for effective practice. Crows Nest, NSW: Allen & Unwin. Billett, S. (2002). Workplace pedagogic practices: Co-participation and learning. British Journal of Educational Studies, 50(4), 457–481. Bogdewic, S. (1999). Participant observation. In: B. Crabtree & W. Miller (Eds), Doing qualitative research. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Boud, D., & Garrick, J. (Eds). (1999). Understanding learning at work. London: Routledge. Bourdain, A. (2000). Kitchen confidential. London: Bloomsbury Publishing. Burgess, R. (1984). Methods of field Research 1: Participant observation. In: R. Burgess (Ed.), In the field. London: Allen & Unwin.

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Delamont, S. (1992). Fieldwork in educational settings: Methods, pitfalls and perspectives. Lewes: Falmer Press. Delamont, S. (2005). No place for women among them? Reflections on the axe´ of fieldwork. Sport, Education and Society, 10(3), 305–320. Eisner, E., & Peshkin, I. (Eds). (1990). Qualitative enquiry in education. The continuing debate. New York: Teachers College Press. Engestro¨m, Y. (1987). Learning by expanding. An activity-theoretical approach to developmental research. Helsinki: Orienta-Konsultit. Eraut, M. (2000a). Non-formal learning and tacit knowledge in professional work. British Journal of Educational Psychology, 70, 113–136. Eraut, M. (2000b). The dangers of managing with an inadequate view of knowledge. turning knowledge management downside up. Sao Paulo: 3rd International Conference for Sociocultural Research. Eraut, M. (2001). Transfer of learning between education and workplace settings. Northampton: TLRP International Workshop, University College. Eraut, M., Alderton, J., Cole, G., & Senker, P. (1998). Development of knowledge and skills in employment. Brighton: Institute of Education, University of Sussex. Felstead, A., Fuller, A., Unwin, L., Aston, D., Butler, P., & Lee, T. (2005). Survey the scene: Learning metaphors, survey design and the workplace context. Journal of Education and Work, 18(4), 359–383. Friedrichs, J., & Ludtke, H. (1975). Participant observation. Farnborough: Saxon House. Fuller, A., & Unwin, L. (2003a). Learning as apprentices in the contemporary UK workplace: Creating and managing expansive and restrictive participation. Journal of Education and Work, 16(4), 407–426. Fuller, A., & Unwin, L. (2003b). Creating a ‘Modern Apprenticeship’: A critique of the UK’s multi-sector, social inclusion approach. Journal of Education and Work, 16(1), 5–25. Fuller, A., Hodkinson, H., Hodkinson, P., & Unwin., L. (2005). Learning as peripheral participation in communities of practice: A reassessment of key concepts in workplace learning. British Educational Research Journal, 31(1), 49–68. Hammersley, M., & Atkinson, P. (1995). Ethnography: Principles in practice. London: Routledge. Hawke, G. (1998). Learning, workplaces and public policy. Sydney: 1st Annual Conference of AVETRA. Hodkinson, P. (2004). Research as a form of work: Expertise, community and methodological objectivity. British Educational Research Journal, 30(1), 9–26. Holmes, R. (1998). Fieldwork with children. London: Sage. Hutchins, L. (1993). Learning to navigate. In: S. Chaiklin & J. Lave (Eds), Understanding practice: Perspectives on activity and context (pp. 35–63). Toronto: Cambridge University Press. Jeffrey, B., & Troman, V. (2004). Time for ethnography. British Educational Research Journal, 30(4), 535–548. Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Massey, A., & Walford, G., (Eds). (1998). Children learning in context, studies in educational ethnography vol. 1. Stamford, CT: JAI Press. Massey, A., Walford, G. (Eds). (1999). Explorations in methodology, Studies in educational ethnography vol. 2. Stamford, CT: JAI Press.

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May, T. (1993). Social research. Issues, methods and process. Buckingham: Open University Press. Measor, L. (1985). Interviewing: A strategy in qualitative research. In: R. Burgess (Ed.), Strategies of educational research. London: Falmer Press. Moore, D. (1981). The social organisation of educational encounters in nonschool settings. Chicago: Centre for New Schools. Parker, A. (2002). Pressures, problems and the PhD process. In: G. Walford (Ed.), Doing a doctorate in educational ethnography. London: JAI. Robson, C. (1993). Real world research. Oxford: Blackwell. Ruhlman, M. (1997). The making of a chef: Mastering heat at the Culinary Institute of America. New York: Henry Holt and Company. Ruhlman, M. (2001). The soul of a chef. New York: Penguin. Scribner, S. (1999). Knowledge at work. In: R. McCormick & C. Paechter (Eds), Learning and knowledge. London: Paul Chapman Publishing. Spadley, J. (1980). Participant observation. London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Taylor, S. (1998). Introduction to qualitative research methods. A guidebook and resource. New York: Wiley. Walford, G. (Ed.) (2002), Doing a doctorate in educational ethnography, Studies in Educational Ethnography (Vol. 7). Oxford: JAI Press. Woods, P. (1986). Inside schools. Ethnography in educational research. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Zuboff, S. (1988). In the age of the smart machine: the future of work and power. Oxford: Heinemann Professional.

RESEARCHER ROLES IN A SCHOOL-BASED ETHNOGRAPHY Nick Hopwood INTRODUCTION The roles that ethnographers adopt in their fieldwork are ‘‘perhaps the single most important determinant of what he [or she] will be able to learn’’ (McCall & Simmons, 1969, p. 29). My purpose in this paper is to demonstrate that these roles can be in a state of rapid flux, depending not only on who the researcher is interacting with, but also on a complex system of constantly changing settings for those interactions. To this end I explore different ‘territories’ associated with my own schoolbased ethnographic research, each constituting a particular setting in which I adopted specific roles. Territories are not simply spatial areas, although location is often an important factor in determining which roles are appropriate. Particular places are often used in different ways by different people at different times in schools, and this has implications for the sorts of roles researchers can or should adopt. The concept of territories as temporally, socially and spatially defined settings can be used as a lens to explore detailed aspects of the nature of research sites, providing a fresh understanding of the roles ethnographers adopt in their fieldwork. I provide contextual information about my research before considering existing frameworks for understanding roles in ethnographic research. The main body of this paper is then devoted to exploring in detail the roles I Methodological Developments in Ethnography Studies in Educational Ethnography, Volume 12, 51–68 Copyright r 2007 by Elsevier Ltd. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 1529-210X/doi:10.1016/S1529-210X(06)12004-5

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adopted in each of five different territories in school. Finally, I suggest that the process of examining the territories of research sites has considerable potential for enabling ethnographers to explore and exploit researcher roles as means to access information.

CONTEXT This paper draws on a study of how English year nine pupils (aged 13–14) experience and conceive school geography. Fieldwork began with three months of piloting, during which I visited the same school two or three days per week, observing geography lessons, spending time in the playground, staffroom and geography office, and talking to pupils about geography. I observed over 70 lessons, taught by several different teachers, and spent over 240 hours in school just in this period of piloting. Formal fieldwork was conducted (between April 2004 and June 2005) in three different secondary (11–18) co-educational comprehensive schools within a 25-mile radius of Oxford. Each consecutive period of fieldwork lasted over three months, with two or three visits per week, most of which took a full day. My activities were more structured than during piloting, and in each school over 30 lessons attended by the same class and taught by the same teacher were formally observed. Selected pupils were interviewed about these lessons, and participated in four additional techniques: two photo-elicitation interviews (for one of which pupils took photographs themselves), a concept mapping exercise, and a structured interaction in which pupils talked about a series of questions and how they relate to school geography. Surrounding these targeted methods of data generation were a series of less tightly focused activities, including varying degrees of participation in and observation of geography offices (departmental staff rooms) and areas open to pupils during recreation (including classrooms). These wider ethnographic features offered opportunities for both data generation and for developing rapport with participants, which then supported my more focused activities. On each school visit I would normally participate in at least two lessons in addition to the one that was the focus of my research for the day, adopting a role that can be generally described as a classroom assistant (as was appropriate given that I am not a qualified teacher). In between lessons I would generally sit in the geography office, but also spent some time in classrooms, dining halls and playgrounds.

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During this formal fieldwork I spent a further 700 hours in school. Interactions with people from the schools extended beyond school hours either through my getting a lift to and from school with a teacher, or through walking to the bus stop and taking a bus with pupils. The boundaries of my research were further blurred because I have lived with one or more teachers throughout the three years of this study and learned a lot about schools, teachers, pupils, teaching and learning by listening to (or sometimes trying to ignore) my housemates’ frequent complaints, moans and general verbal purging of aspects of their working lives.

RESEARCHER ROLES IN ETHNOGRAPHY Gold (1958) describes the roles adopted in the field as, simultaneously, devices for securing information and sets of behaviours in which the researcher him- or herself is involved. Such an understanding of research roles as both crucial to data generation and highly personal forms of engagement in research sites underpins the argument of this paper. While roles are undoubtedly significant in many forms of social research, they are particularly important in ethnography, wherein the researcher is typically involved in fieldwork settings for a greater period of time, and often more deeply than in other methodologies. The endurance of ethnography offers opportunities for ethnographers to adopt a broad range of roles, many of which may be dependent on levels of trust and familiarity, which often require and result from sustained presence in the field. Notions of endurance are also relevant to the ethnographer’s experience: ethnography is highly intensive and demanding because roles are often hard to understand, difficult to enact, and at the same time crucial to the research endeavour. For several decades ethnographer’s roles have been considered and theorised in the context of perceived shortcomings in our understanding of different roles. The aim of this paper is to offer a new way of thinking about field roles in ethnographic research that avoids some of the limitations associated with existing frameworks. Gold (1958) and Junker (1960) discuss the different sorts of roles that ethnographers might adopt in the field in terms of a fourfold typology: complete observer, participant as observer, observer as participant, and complete participant. Although these ideas are useful in the way they signpost a range of roles and encourage researchers to think carefully about

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which roles are most appropriate given different settings and purposes, they have been subject to criticism. Janes (1961) suggests that ethnographers’ roles are not static but can change over time, and within the general descriptor of ‘participant observer’, he charted a sequence with increasing degrees of acceptance from newcomer to imminent immigrant. Notions of gradual shifts in researcher roles over time proved popular, and Oleson and Whittaker (1967; cited in Walford, 1987) use this principle to describe evolving forms of exchange between researchers and participants. While introducing ideas that roles can change over time, these frameworks focus on long-term linear changes, and imply that at any one time the ethnographer’s role can be characterised by one particular form of interaction in a field site. Despite these limitations, Walford (1987) notes that such simplistic understandings of roles have had a strong legacy. Gold’s (1958) typology has been used by Punch (1998) and Robson (1993) to describe the range of indepth qualitative field roles, while Burgess (1984) describes his roles in school-based research in terms of Janes’ (1961) framework. Snow, Benford, and Anderson (1986) offer a different typology of field roles (controlled skeptic, ardent activist, buddy-researcher, credential expert), each of which they associate with particular strengths and weaknesses with respect to data acquisition or ‘informational yield’. They, like Gold and Junker, suggest that researchers adopt one role in a particular project (their typology is derived from their own experiences of doing ethnographic research), and do not accommodate either the possibility that researchers’ roles can change (develop) over time, or that researchers can adopt a variety of roles and switch between them rapidly. Goffman (1959) provides one of the earliest examples of a more subtle analysis of researcher roles. Rather than suggesting that researchers adopt monolithic roles depending on the research site, or that roles follow a linear evolution over time, he examines the nature of fieldwork sites. From this he suggests that researchers might have to adopt different roles in order to access the different social activities and settings that co-exist within the field site. Of particular note is the distinction he makes between ‘frontstage’ and ‘backstage’ settings. This paper builds on Goffman’s (1959) ideas that social activities are often separated temporally or spatially, and I will show that research sites may incorporate multiple frontstage and backstage arenas within a complex collection of territories. Walford (1986, 1987) describes a range of roles that he adopted within his school-based ethnographic research. He notes for example how the role of

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‘observer’ functioned well in lessons, but was ‘‘only acceptable within tightly defined circumstances’’ (p. 60), notably not around the playground or quadrangle. He also discusses different roles he negotiated with pupils, and a further set of roles with teachers, and it is clear that his roles changed depending on location, time and social setting. The Junior Common Room presented challenges by virtue of its pupil-dominated quality, while informal activities with teachers such as dinner parties or pub visits offered opportunities for different forms of interaction. Different roles permitted occasional forays into more subversive aspects of school life, for example joining pupils in using a stolen key to ‘break in’ to out-of-bounds areas in the middle of the night (Walford, 1986). However, the thrust of Walford’s (1987) argument was to demonstrate the weakness of existing thinking about field roles in terms of their tendency to portray them as something that researchers are the sole determinants of. He concludes: The roles open to me were severely restricted by the expectations of those being researched. Moreover throughout the time at the schools I felt obliged to present an ‘overarching role’ which was somewhat in conflict with my own feelings. (p. 62)

Unlike Walford I did not find that my role-taking was severely restricted, and I felt no obligation to present an overarching role, indeed both teachers and pupils treated me in different ways at different times, offering me ways to diversify the roles I undertook. This paper considers the association between roles and territories in my own experience of doing ethnographic research in schools. The aim is to describe the concept of research territories and to illustrate its utility as a framework for understanding fieldwork roles such that other ethnographers might be encouraged to think through the nature of their research sites and the implications this might have for the roles they adopt, and ultimately, the information they acquire.

THE TERRITORIES OF RESEARCH IN SCHOOLS In the following sections I discuss five different territories I have identified with respect to my research, each of which can be defined in terms of spatial, temporal and/or social characteristics. I consider my interactions with teachers first, pupils second, although my interactions with these two groups were complicated because: (i) Teachers and pupils were not always separated, and I was often in situations where I was interacting simultaneously with both.

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(ii) The ways one group perceived my interactions with the other group may have influenced the way they engaged with me as a participant in different aspects of their school lives. The five territories considered below are as follows: (1) interactions with teachers in the geography office; (2) interactions with teachers in the classroom during formal lesson time; (3) interactions with pupils in the classroom during formal lesson time; (4) interactions with pupils in the classroom during fringe time; and (5) formal researcher-initiated structured interactions with pupils. This is not an exhaustive account of all the territories I encountered (I might add playgrounds, buses, car journeys), but it is sufficient to illustrate both the limitations of existing writing about ethnographic roles and the utility of territories as a conceptual lens through which to explore these issues.

Territory 1 – Interactions with Teachers in the Geography Office In each school the geography teachers shared an office in which they spent considerable amounts of time. These teacher-only spaces were characterised by rapidly changing activities and forms social interaction, switching almost instantly from a backstage feel (informal, private chatter) to behaviours more suggestive of a formal frontstage setting. During break times, pupils would often knock on the door with problems (lost detention slips, books, coursework, shoes), requests (rescheduling of detentions, extensions to deadlines) or documents (parental reply slips, report cards). The opening of the door to a pupil would often trigger a noticeable change in the atmosphere of the office and the behaviour of teachers. They would refer to each other as Mr or Miss X, and would curtail any conversations or activities that might undermine a formal (frontstage) appearance to pupils. Once the door was closed and pupils shut out, activities quickly regained their backstage character, signified by the continuation of gossip or moaning about pupils from the point at which they had been interrupted. Even this small, physically bounded space, with its clear social boundaries (the exclusion of pupils) was thus host to a variety of social practices which required me to adopt a range of roles as and when appropriate. Experience of piloting taught me that doing nothing in these contexts was out of character and while not the cause of friction, served to distance me

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from teachers. Walford (1987) notes: I realised that it was important to ensure that staff and pupils knew that I was actually keeping myself busy. Most ethnographic fieldwork techniques which involve simply talking, observing and listening to people y were simply not seen as work by others. (p. 56)

While doing nothing, or appearing to do nothing was not an option, sitting notebook in hand, avidly scribbling notes, seemed to make teachers uncomfortable and create a stilted atmosphere. I learned that the most appropriate and effective form of engagement in these contexts involved my doing some activity (perhaps reading and making notes from a journal paper and occasionally scribbling short field notes) that kept up norms of busy-ness but which also maintained my position as available to join in conversations and/or ready to help a teacher out. In this way my roles fitted ongoing practices – I was busy working or busy gossiping, whichever matched the general activity of the office at a particular moment. Shifting from one role to another involved partial detachment from those roles and being aware of changes in interactions between teachers that warranted a change in my behaviour. These were sometimes obvious switches between formal and informal (front/backstage) behaviours, but were also more subtle, involving an unannounced consensus that, for example, gossip had come to an end and it was time to get some serious marking done. Gossiping with teachers had both benefits and drawbacks. It was a key facilitator of interactions which led to the development of rapport between me and staff, and particularly between me and the teacher whose classes formed the focus of my research. Informal chatter had a positive feedback mechanism in that the more I came to know about the schools (the difference between a blue and green slip) and members of staff (their good days, bad days, good sets, bad sets, general gripes and so on), the more easily I could engage in office discourse. In these moments my role was close to that described by Gold (1958) as ‘participant as observer’, in that I sought to gain the trust of teachers, and although never actually adopting the role of teacher, my role increasingly appeared in many respects to be more that of colleague rather than outsider. I reminded teachers of my status as researcher, by taking out my notebook from time to time, or by explicitly raising issues relating to my research (such as negotiating a space for me to conduct interviews at lunchtime). In order to become more colleague and less outsider I seized opportunities to ‘side’ with teachers. I might agree with a teacher that pupils had been very

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well behaved in one lesson, or that a particular pupil had demonstrated impressive thinking skills. I might also share his or her frustrations with the prospect of a year 7 class on a windy Friday afternoon. This enabled me to develop a shared and valued social identity within the geography office context. It was here that I drew strongly on what I had learned from living with teachers for several years, and made up the deficit in my understanding of schools that results from my status as a non-teacher. Having long endured the blow-by-blow accounts of particular lessons freely offered on a daily basis by my housemates, I was armed with some knowledge of the issues teachers think are important, an understanding of the pressures and frustrations of school life, and a sense of how to say the right things. Everyone (i.e. all teachers) knows that year 7s can’t be expected to concentrate for more than a couple of minutes in the afternoons, everyone knows that Fridays are the worst in this respect, and everyone understands the hyperactivity-inducing effect of windy weather on younger pupils. The longer I remained in each school, the more involved I became in various different activities and practices. This evolution of practice was documented in my field notes: as I became a familiar face and teachers got to know me I’d be asked to run off some photocopies before a lesson, carry exercise books from room to room, find a particular video, make the tea, or go to the shop to buy biscuits. In some cases I added up pupils’ coursework marks, entered data, and even helped develop resources for teaching and learning. Thus, I do not wish to challenge the arguments (discussed above) that researcher roles can evolve over time. What I hope to demonstrate is that a picture of a single role following a linear trajectory may be an oversimplification. While changes in roles are typically considered as attrition-like shifts that reflect the gradual building up of trust and rapport, I experienced particular moments after which my roles dramatically changed. This may be illustrated by considering a day when the geography staff in one school learned that their office was to become a classroom and they had to move everything that afternoon to what had previously been the storeroom. Not only did I spend several hours carting boxes, but as the only person who wasn’t teaching, I became the only person who knew exactly where everything was. From then on when things couldn’t be found the default option was ‘‘ask Nick’’, a repeated practice that solidified my rapport with teachers and significantly altered the roles I adopted thereafter (essentially even more free-flowing gossip). I was constantly conscious of the ethical implications of my role in geography office life, and of the boundaries that this imposed on forms of

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practice I could adopt. Office gossip had a tricky characteristic of changing rapidly from relatively benign subjects to others, which were more personal, confidential and even insulting. While I jumped at some chances to side with teachers, at other times this was less appropriate: I could not agree that Ben was ‘‘the thickest person I’ve ever met’’ that Dom’s parents ‘‘should never have been allowed to have children’’, or that the head is a ‘‘pathetic’’ man, and the safest practice was to avoid entry into such discussions, either by changing the subject of conversation, or by remaining busy-in-work rather than becoming busy-in-gossip. My actions and comments in the geography offices were carefully bounded in other ways. As well as setting myself rules as to what I would and wouldn’t discuss, I was clear with teachers and myself about what I would or wouldn’t do. I explained that I did not want to become involved in formal administration (dealing with detention slips, for example), or to be set up as a user on the computer system (computers were rare enough in these rooms and I felt they should be left for teachers). I did, however, agree to answer the phone, and on occasion, meet teachers’ requests to say they weren’t present so that they wouldn’t be disturbed. The geography office constituted a challenging territory because interactions with teachers within this small space were complicated by the constantly changing nature of the forms of behaviour and social interaction the teachers themselves were engaging in. My associated adoption of different roles, and my rapid shifting between them strike at the heart of my argument that ethnographic field roles should be considered with greater sensitivity than is typical in the literature. The next section shows how I adopted other roles in interacting with the same group of people in a formal classroom setting.

Territory 2 – Interactions with Teachers in the Classroom During Formal Lesson Time While the geography office was a space in which teachers could (sometimes) let their guard down, in the classroom teachers were always ‘in role’, and formal lesson time was always a frontstage setting. It was also frontstage for me, as I was a visible ‘other’ in the classroom, subject to the gaze and expectations (whether I met them or not) of teachers and pupils. Maintaining existing codes of practice, I referred to teachers as Mr or Miss X, rather than on first name terms as I would in the geography office. There were obvious limitations to both the extent and format of interactions

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between myself and teachers during formal lesson time, as the teachers’ priority was, of course, to structure and guide pupils’ learning and behaviour rather than to talk to me. Interactions between us were almost always short and of a formal nature. For example, I might ask quick points of clarification about a task, or a teacher might ask me to close a blind. Teachers also held quiet conversations with me about particular pupils or their work, but very few of these interactions could be deemed closed in the sense that there were always pupils nearby, and I remembered from my own experiences as a teenager that pupils can choose to acquire acute hearing skills when they judge that teachers are trying to be discrete. This illustrates points (i) and (ii) made above about the complexity attendant with the simultaneous presence of two social groups and the perceptions that one has of the other. Many aspects of my roles in formal lesson time involved interaction with pupils (discussed below), but my participation in classroom life was often initiated by teachers and conducted in a way that, within the existing social hierarchy of the school, distinguished me from pupils, and rendered the roles I adopted closer in feel to those of a classroom assistant. I explained to teachers that my aim was to be as helpful as possible in lessons. One took this on board immediately and on my first day in school asked me to act as ‘dragon’ in a lesson based on the TV programme Dragon’s Den. This was an ideal opportunity to show shared values with the teacher and demonstrate the sort of practices I might undertake as a researcher in their school. This illustrates the way teachers frequently engineered my role in lessons in ways that suited them. I often undertook menial tasks that enabled the teacher to concentrate on teaching and pupils on learning. I distributed and collected worksheets and atlases, helped pupils fold and unfold OS maps, and gave out the glue. More infrequently I became involved in the substantive activities of the lesson; for example, being ‘banker’ in a trading game or ‘Chris Tarrant’ in a Who Wants to be a Millionaire? plenary task. These instances of my involvement in formal classroom activities involve elements of what Snow et al. (1986) call an ‘ardent activist’ role. While neither my research sites nor questions were highly politicised, this idea is relevant insofar as I embraced the ideology, goals and rhetoric of existing classroom practice (it seemed reasonable to share the teachers’ concerns for pupils’ learning). The voluntary assumption of responsibilities (although minor in my case) and intensive participation are also among the activities listed by Snow et al. in describing this role. As in the geography office, my roles in formal lesson time were carefully bounded. I never led lessons or aspects of them, and I firmly requested with

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each teacher that I not be directly involved in behaviour management or maintenance of discipline in lessons. I did not report off-task behaviour to teachers and did not overtly engage in corrective or positive behaviour management. On occasions when teachers addressed the whole class or particular pupils with regards to discipline I avoided eye contact with pupils and stood at the back of the classroom. This non-disciplinarian boundary was less about my relationship with the teacher (although I believe it was important to set out clear areas of territory in which the teacher’s authority and roles were maintained), and more about my relationship with pupils. Other researchers have reported feeling restricted in the roles they can adopt, particularly in formal settings, and I did expect some resistance from teachers with respect to my non-disciplinary role, especially as it evolved into active participation in subversive classroom life (see below). Fortunately my experience was less problematic, and I was able to adopt the roles I felt were most appropriate and likely to help generate useful data. In negotiations with teachers I emphasised my lack of teaching qualifications, and in practice I exercised caution by avoiding certain forms of interaction with pupils that teachers might embrace less readily until I had been around for some time and was better able to judge where the boundaries around my roles with pupils should lie.

Territory 3 – Interactions with Pupils in the Classroom During Formal Lesson Time My roles in formal lesson time were not confined to interactions with teachers, indeed a significant aspect of being in geography lessons related to adopting appropriate roles in interaction with pupils. When teachers were addressing the whole class I typically sat at the back of the room (usually on a window ledge or table) making field notes in a school exercise book. This role of detached observer (Anderson & Burns, 1989) was appropriate at these times as it allowed the teachers to maintain primary authority in the classroom, and gave clear signals to pupils that I was not a teacher. When pupils were on task I engaged in numerous spontaneous interactions with pupils. These could involve approaching a pupil who had their hand up, clarifying instructions or giving them resources they needed to complete a task (such as paper if they had forgotten or lost their books). Some pupils made it clear that they didn’t want assistance from me (either by telling me, or by turning away when I approached them and calling for

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the teacher), but most actively sought my attention, some seeming simply to enjoy showing me what they’d done. I initiated some interactions by asking pupils to tell me what they were doing, or explain something about their work to me. In addition to these ‘on-task’ interactions, I also adopted more subversive roles, although these were subject to carefully constructed boundaries. Often rapport could be developed with pupils simply by making it obvious that I’d seen them misbehaving but making it equally obvious that I wasn’t going to do anything about it. This seemed to render me complicit in pupils’ subversive actions in their perceptions, and was often returned with a subtle gesture that signalled their appreciation. Misdemeanours could involve anything from chewing gum, flicking rubbers, passing messages on bits of paper, trading football cards, leaning back on a chair, or temporarily ‘stealing’ other pupils’ equipment. Although on initial visits some students would report other pupils’ misbehaviour to me, expecting some sort of reprimand or sanction, they soon stopped doing this, realising that I wasn’t going to do anything about it, and even started actively trying to involve me in off-task or disruptive behaviours. This I did (within limits) judging that it would not have unwarranted detrimental affects, but might help solidify my relationships with pupils, and thus lead to enhanced data acquisition later on. I passed notes from one pupil to another, and engaged in off-task conversations, answering pupils’ questions relating to my marital status, preferred football teams and television viewing habits. I often found that brief off-task interactions with pupils tended to be followed by a period of more focused activity on their part. It was sometimes quicker and less disruptive for me to pass a love note than for other pupils to throw it or leave their seats. Similarly, I found that pupils could be quite persistent in asking me personal questions, and my failure to respond to them seemed to make the prospect of discovery more alluring and occupy pupils’ attention even further. By reacting in a friendly and brief manner I satisfied pupils’ curiosity, and often reduced rather than augmented off-task behaviour. However, this maintained the appearance of a subversive role, and it was this appearance that was so important in developing rapport with some pupils. On some occasions teachers commented that by engaging in short informal conversations with pupils I helped reduce the likelihood of off-task behaviour escalating into something more serious or disruptive to other pupils. These roles were subject to clearly defined, self-imposed boundaries, but I was fortunate that no serious incidents arose whereby my non-disciplinarian form of practice had to be abandoned.

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This engagement in more subversive elements of formal lesson time fed directly into the roles I adopted with pupils in classroom ‘fringe’ time.

Territory 4 – Interactions with Pupils in the Classroom Curing Fringe Time I refer to break and lunch times, and the beginning and end of lessons when no formal teaching is taking place as ‘fringe’ time. Fringe time also incorporated interactions with pupils on playgrounds and out of school (on buses etc.) – my focus on classrooms here illustrates how the same space can be intersected with temporal distinctions and associated shifts in the forms of social interaction which occur. As pupils were entering and leaving a class for a lesson I chatted informally with pupils about school and home life. At break and lunch times I sometimes hung around in classrooms that were open to pupils although I limited this because I felt it was important to maintain some spaces as adultfree. I would describe this setting as both frontstage and backstage. It is frontstage in that pupils remained very much on show to their peers and it seemed, actively aware of their peer-group hierarchies and behaviour norms; it is backstage in that it was characterised by informal interactions that were not supervised or structured by teachers, and not typically accessed by adults. Pupils often used these opportunities to ask me personal questions (Do I fancy Miss X? Am I a virgin?) and other more general questions (Did I watch Little Britain?), but were also keen to tell me about themselves. Pupils seemed to learn quite quickly that I wouldn’t comment about teachers or other pupils, but that I wouldn’t reprimand them for expressing their views. Their narratives about themselves or their peers were colourful, sometimes implausible, occasionally inappropriate, and I had to make on-the-spot judgements about appropriate boundaries to my roles in this setting, sometimes pretending not to hear or simply by finding an excuse to leave the room. I was sometimes called upon to be an arbitrator in disputes between pupils, and often treated as a venting post for pupils to moan about teachers, homework, detentions and the like. I heard juicy details about a fight between pupils, although I had to be careful not to reciprocate when pupils pried about a stabbing event – I knew more than they did (i.e. who had stabbed who) but wasn’t in a position to reveal this information.

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Many of my lunch times, however, were spent preparing for and carrying out structured data generation activities with particular pupils.

Territory 5 – Formal researcher-initiated structured interactions with pupils This territory was less spatially specific than the others, incorporating a variety of classroom, corridor, staff-room and storeroom locations. I am referring here to contexts in which I invited particular pupils to meet me at lunch times and participate in audio-recorded, structured activities (either interviews about lessons, or the four techniques mentioned in the context section above). While all my interactions with pupils were part of my broad research agenda and atypical in the sense that pupils would not normally interact with a doctoral student, these formal interactions were different, and involved different fieldwork roles. The quality of data generated through these interactions depended largely on the rapport developed with pupils through my roles in formal lesson time and fringe time. I asked a lot of questions to some pupils (up to 15 separate recorded interviews with an individual), and their willingness to give up their time may reflect to an extent the shared values that I had displayed through talking to them about things they were interested in and/or my non-disciplinarian (partially subversive) classroom roles. An important feature of all recorded interviews was that they began and ended with an unfocused question about how pupils were feeling or how their day was going. I participated not just as researcher needing data, but as adult interested in children (Mayall, 2000). Cooper and McIntyre (1996) argue that young people are unqualified experts in their own fields (i.e. in matters relating to their ideas, opinions and experiences), and in these instances I called participating pupils ‘experts’ and gave them a sheet explaining why I considered them so. Many aspects of my roles in these interactions were aimed at enabling pupils to participate actively in the study rather than as passive objects of research. Such practices included asking pupils to choose names to be used in writing about them (one pair chose the names Bart and Lisa which inevitably meant I used the pseudonym ‘Springfield school’). I also asked pupils to switch the mini-disc recorder and microphone off and on and do things like check the write protect button wasn’t pressed. One technique in particular involved me ‘letting go’ of some control in my research and passing responsibility for creating stimulus materials to pupils. I gave pupils disposable cameras and asked them to take pictures showing

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what they thought geography was about.1 I asked them to take between six and ten for me, and to use the rest of the film as they wished. The cameras came with free processing coupons, and so pupils got the pictures developed themselves and brought in copies of those that were relevant to my study. Pupils seemed to enjoy this task – photographs were taken from aeroplanes, ferries, and cars (signalling the fact that pupils carried the cameras away with them on holidays). They also seemed to enjoy talking about their pictures and seemed quite proud of them, if perhaps surprised that someone like me was so interested in them. During these formal recorded interactions with pupils, I also adopted roles that were more rehearsed and more specifically attuned to my own research agenda than the other roles I have described above. All interviews were semi-structured in nature, and I had remits to follow my interview guide, steer pupils’ comments so they remained relevant, and actively listen to their responses in order to pose follow-up questions or probe for further clarification. The conduct of interviews in social research is well documented, and my purpose here is not to suggest that my roles in these contexts were unique. Rather the discussion of this fifth territory serves to demonstrate more fully the range of roles that researchers can adopt in interaction with particular groups of participants, and to illustrate that the different territories in which research takes place are not purely properties of field sites, but can be actively constructed by researchers themselves.

CONCLUSIONS Walford (1987) notes that it is inappropriate to consider ethnographic research in terms of single roles because ‘‘a variety of roles must be adopted which will vary with the different individuals with whom the researcher interacts’’ (p. 45). In this paper, I have explored the range of roles I adopted in a school-based ethnographic study, and have shown that different roles cannot be straightforwardly associated with particular people, times, or places, or people. I have introduced the concept of territories as settings for interaction between researchers and participants which are defined in terms of spatial, temporal and social dimensions. This concept is helpful in understanding the complex nature of research sites, and the resulting insight can help researchers consider the roles they adopt in the field.

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To consider a research site territorially is to think through the different contexts in which researchers find themselves, the forms of activity and social interaction which characterise those contexts, and the ways in which these settings can be demarcated. Rather than simply distinguishing between the frontstage and backstage, or different groups of people, researchers can begin to explore ways in which the same place is host to a range of social practices, and how these practices can change in predictable, structured ways (as with a classroom and a school timetable) or as part of a less predictable, dynamic setting (as with the geography offices). As well as elucidating the way the social nature of particular places can change over time, the process of considering the different territories within a research site can also highlight the variety of roles that researchers adopt in interaction with particular participants or groups of participants. I have illustrated this by describing my participation in the gossip of the geography office, my role as classroom assistant in formal lesson times, my informal chats with pupils in fringe time, and my role as instigator and manager of formal interviews with pupils. Such a description of research roles is strikingly different from the typologies offered by Gold (1958) and Junker (1960). It seems that the very nature of ethnography (extended periods of fieldwork involving a range of techniques and interaction with a variety of participants) lends itself to the adoption of multiple different roles. Furthermore Snow et al. (1986) suggest that as different fieldwork roles yield different types and degrees of information, a variety of roles should be utilised in any one project. However, they conclude that with few exceptions this means that research should be conducted by teams, with each individual adopting a role best fitting his or her strengths, rather than by a ‘lone ranger’. In this paper I have shown, as did Walford (1987), that researchers need not be confined to one role. However, I hope to have additionally provided researchers with a framework for making sense of the extremely complex contexts in which ethnographers conduct fieldwork and of the variety of roles that they adopt. The process of considering different territories offers a conceptual tool, which may be applied to a variety of settings, and may prove useful in providing more nuanced understandings of the nature of research sites and hence field roles. I have not described the roles I adopted in terms of a linear evolution over time, although I have indicated both instances where ideas of gradual shifts in relationships and roles are appropriate, and moments of more abrupt change. My purpose is not to refute the utility of a longitudinal trajectory in

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thinking about ethnographic field roles, but rather to situate it within a different, more multi-faceted, form of understanding that accommodates notions of longer term progression and rapid flux. Similarly, I hope to show that while the concept of frontstage and backstage settings can be helpful, it may be more useful to incorporate this distinction into a more subtle analysis of field sites, such that more than one frontstage and backstage may be identified. The examples I have provided all relate to three English secondary schools, and it seems reasonable to suggest that similar territories might be encountered in other English secondary school sites, although of course researchers may adopt quite different roles within them depending on their purposes and personality. What I hope to offer readers more generally is not an understanding of researcher roles or field sites that can be simply lifted or transplanted from one context to another, but rather the idea of thinking in terms of territories and being open to the multiple roles that researchers may adopt in particular spatially, temporally and socially defined territories within a research site.

NOTE 1. The practice of giving participants cameras in research is now referred to as ‘self-directed photography’, and the earliest use of this technique was by Collier (1957, 1967). The use of photographs and discussions about them in ethnographic and social research has been explored by Prosser (1992) and Prosser and Schwartz (1998).

REFERENCES Anderson, L. W., & Burn, R. B. (1989). Research in Classrooms. Oxford: Pergamon. Burgess, R. (1984). In the field: An introduction to field research. London: Allen & Unwin. Collier, J. (1957). Photography in anthropology: A report on two experiments. American Anthropologist, 59, 843–859. Collier, J. (1967). Visual anthropology: Photography as a research method. London: Holt, Rinehart & Winston. Cooper, P., & McIntyre, D. (1996). Effective teaching and learning: Teachers’ and students’ perspectives. Buckingham: Open University Press. Goffman, E. (1959). The presentation of self in everyday life. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Gold, R. L. (1958). Roles in sociological field observations. Social Forces, 36, 217–223. (Reprinted) In: A. Bryman (Ed.) (2001) Ethnography: Volume II (pp. 141–149). London: Sage.

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Janes, R. W. (1961). A note on the phases of the community role of the participant observer. American Sociological Review, 26(3), 446–450. Junker, B. H. (1960). Field research: An introduction to the social sciences. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Mayall, B. (2000). Conversations with children: Working with generational issues. In: P. Christensen & A. James (Eds), Research with children. London: Falmer. McCall, G. J., & Simmons, J. L. (1969). Issues in participant observation: A text and reader. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. Oleson, V., & Whittaker, E. (1967). Role-making in participant observation: Processes in the researcher-actor relationship. Human Organisations, 26(4), 273–281. Prosser, J. (1992). Personal reflections on the use of photography in an ethnographic case study. British Educational Research Journal, 18(4), 397–411. Prosser, J., & Schwartz, D. (1998). Photographs within the sociological research process. In: J. Prosser & D. Schwartz (Eds), Image-based research: A sourcebook for qualitative researchers. London: Falmer. Punch, K. (1998). Introduction to social research: Quantitative and qualitative approaches. London: Sage. Robson, C. (1993). Real world research. Oxford: Blackwell. Snow, D., Benford, R., & Anderson, L. (1986). Fieldwork roles and informational yield: A comparison of alternative settings and roles. Urban life 14(4), 377–408. (Reprinted) In: A. Bryman (Ed.) (2001). Ethnography: Volume II. London: Sage, pp. 150–169. Walford, G. (1986). Life in public schools. London: Methuen. Walford, G. (1987). Research role conflicts and compromises in public schools. In: G. Walford (Ed.), Doing sociology of education. London: Falmer.

THE STRANGE CASE OF THE DISAPPEARING TEACHERS: CRITICAL ETHNOGRAPHY AND THE IMPORTANCE OF STUDYING IN-BETWEEN Martin Forsey In this all too unequal world the orientation of many social scientists towards redressing the imbalances is not at all surprising. Indeed, I began my study of schooling in Western Australia in 1997 very deliberately orientating myself in this direction by reading Carspecken’s (1996) guide to critical ethnography in educational research. Carspecken refers to what he calls the ‘criticalist’ approach as one that is underpinned by a shared concern about social inequalities, and a desire to ‘work toward positive social change’ (p. 3). The emphasis on social justice, and the desire to not only ameliorate but also fight the sometimes brutal conditions imposed on particular groups of people by the capitalist system, articulates a research stance congruent with my preferred standpoint. But as I will show in this paper, the criticalist project is not without its problems. For a stance that is overtly committed to addressing unequal distributions of power it seems remarkably unprepared for dealing with this issue as a research objective. As Ortner (1995, p. 176) suggests of criticalist researchers, especially those focused on resistance, they

Methodological Developments in Ethnography Studies in Educational Ethnography, Volume 12, 69–88 Copyright r 2007 by Elsevier Ltd. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 1529-210X/doi:10.1016/S1529-210X(06)12005-7

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tend to glide over the complex and contradictory political realities of the social groups they portray. The major problem explored in this paper arises out of the tendency for critical educational ethnographers to produce accounts of schooling in which teachers either disappear or are represented as mere cardboard cutout figures (Forsey, 2000). This particular form of ethnographic ‘thinness’ (Ortner, 1995) is attributable to the simplistic positioning of teachers as members of the dominant group in the resistance scripts critical ethnographers appear to carry with them upon entering schools. When ethnographers of schooling disassociate themselves from a notable group in their field as a means of gaining the trust of their preferred subjects, which for critical researchers are almost inevitably marginalized students (Anderson, 1989; Reed-Danahay, 1996), all too often the result is a simplistic portrayal of teachers ‘acting on behalf of a class power not their own’ (Connell, 1995, p. 91). Such portraits undermine the broader research enterprise in which those of us who identify as critical educational anthropologists/ethnographers are engaged. There are three main aims for this chapter: (1) explaining the relative lack of attention to teachers in criticalist accounts of schooling; (2) exploring the implications of these oversights for qualitative research in schools; and (3) suggesting ways in which the researcher’s mindset might shift to address the issues arising from our currently ‘averted gaze’ (Wisniewski, 2000). Advocating a mindset attuned to the critical appreciation of social life, I suggest a need to heighten the importance of clear and precise documentation of the power-filled social relations characterizing educational settings as an important element of the criticalist project. Further to this, I argue for the need to position ourselves in ways that allow us to better see, feel and evaluate some of the multitude of interactions that take place in schools and their surroundings. This differs somewhat with recent pronouncements that have appeared in Anthropology and Education Quarterly (AEQ), the flagship journal of the American Anthropological Association’s Council of Anthropology and Education, declaring the need to heed Nader’s (1974) relatively ancient call to ‘study up’ (Priyadharshini, 2003; Hamann, 2003). While I think it is important that educational ethnographers shift what sometimes seems like an exclusive focus on subaltern groups, it is not enough to simply change the direction of our gaze. We need to pay attention to standing and moving in the ‘in-between’ spaces occupied by social groups. Such positioning can allow us to reflect upon the complex of horizontal, vertical, and perhaps even diagonal, relationships that constitute the social formations we call schools. Such positioning offers far more

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productive angles from which to explore the ways in which power is configured and impacts on people. Like Ortner (1995, p. 173), I view ethnographic positioning as not just a corporal act; it is also intellectual and moral in its intent and practice. Ortner’s thoughts on the ‘ethnographic refusals’ she associates with critical ethnography are of great importance to the arguments I am pursuing here. She describes such refusals as an avoidance of the anthropological commitment to ‘thickness’, by which she is referring to the ways in which Geertz has stressed the need for ‘richness, texture and detail’ in ethnographic portrayal (Ortner, 1995, p. 174). These ideas are pursued later in the paper; I first want to provide a brief overview of some of the developments of a critical ethnography as applied to education and to uncover some of the major strands of thought and practice in the social sciences contributing to the development of this particular research approach.

CRITICAL ETHNOGRAPHY AND EDUCATIONAL ANTHROPOLOGY Critical ethnography first emerged as a distinctive research approach in education studies in the late 1960s (Anderson, 1989, p. 250). It has now achieved a degree of respectability and has taken its place as part of the qualitative tradition in universities (Jordan & Yeomans, 1995, p. 399). Critical ethnography reflects what Geertz (1983) identified as a ‘blurring of genres’. As the name suggests, it is marked by a confluence of interpretivist field studies and critical streams of thought (Goodman, 1998, p. 51). These converging streams, arising from a variety of sources and pushed along by the currents of Marxist, neo-Marxist and feminist social theory, swirl together into a dynamically enriched mixture of the methods and theories of anthropology, sociology and education. Not surprisingly the streams formed in different parts of the globe, while composed of all of the elements just named, are configured slightly differently. As Priyadharshini (2003, p. 421) recently noted in comparing British and American strands of educational ethnography, the Western side of the Atlantic is marked by a much stronger tradition of educational anthropology than in the UK. And these differences make a difference. I write from Australia where educational anthropology barely forms a trickle. Nevertheless, I write as one who was trained primarily as an anthropologist and has applied this training to the study of schools and

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schooling. True to the swirling realities just described, I readily acknowledge the influences of sociologists and educationalists, among others, on my research and writing. I am certainly not arguing that there is a pure, or entirely distinctive, anthropology. However, when addressing educational ethnographers, which I imagine I am mainly doing here, I think it is useful to call attention to the centrality for anthropologists of ethnographic studies based on participant observation. Priyadharshini (2003, p. 426) in the same paper in which she alerts us to the differences between North American and British educational ethnography, also makes this point, or at least she does for an earlier era. Drawing on the writing of Nader (1974) and Marcus and Fischer (1986), she asserts that the self-image of anthropologists was severely disturbed if they could not ‘participant-observe’. According to Priyadharshini, things have moved on from what was apparently the case in the 1970s. In the current era, she argues, ethnographers draw upon a wide variety of techniques; thus, their research identity is no longer defined by a specific method. I beg to differ; at least as far as anthropology is concerned. Ethnography remains the signature method of anthropology, and the self-image of the majority of anthropologists remains firmly tied to participant observation in ways that I am sure is not the case for my colleagues in sociology and education departments. One can easily imagine being a sociologist or educationalist without being an ethnographer. This is simply not possible for most social and cultural anthropologists. Having indicated the impossibility of conceptualizing an educational anthropology that is distinct from other disciplinary traditions, I take it as given that anthropology has had an impact on the broader field. Therefore while this chapter focuses on critical educational ethnography in general, I pay particular attention to the ways in which anthropological ideals and ideas have influenced contemporary formations of critical thought and ethnographic practice; they help explain why teachers tend to disappear in critical ethnographic accounts of schools and schooling.

THE SUBALTERN GAZE AND DISAPPEARING TEACHERS Predictably enough, Willis’s (1977) enormously influential report of the ways in which ‘the lads’ he followed at ‘Hammertown Boys’ learned how to get working-class jobs was one of the first criticalist ethnographies I read. While I was intrigued by his account of the ways in which the rebellious

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‘lads’ of ‘Hammertown Boys’ penetrated the meritocratic veneer of schooling and ‘the role of labour in the modern structure of capitalist production’ (p. 133), I was disappointed by Willis’s treatment of the teachers in the school. This feeling was to accompany me in my reading of other critical ethnographies of schooling (Forsey, 2000). Willis reports conducting interviews with many of Hammertown Boys’ teachers, readily acknowledging them as ‘dedicated, honest and forthright y doing an exacting job with patience and humanity’ (p. 67); yet their presence in the text is slight. Anticipating this sort of criticism, Willis wisely asserts that he could not concern himself with every variety of student culture and teaching relationship. Rather, he suggests it is the role of other practitioners ‘to test reality with the concepts outlined; to contextualize; to see what role different fundamental processes play at different strengths in different situations at different times’ (p. 85). Having one of the most influential educational ethnographers suggest that the responsibility for holism lies not with the individual researcher but rather with all who are involved in the research enterprise is a productive and potentially liberating idea. Yet, the implied widening of the agenda, aimed at filling in the gaps apparent in Learning to Labour, has happened only to a limited extent. Attention was eventually given to young women and girls in the ethnographic corpus. This helped shift attention away from what one of the pioneers of this movement calls ‘boys’ own ethnography’ (Griffin, 1987, p. 87; see also Quantz, 1992, p. 456; Griffin, 1985). Ethnic minorities also became a key locus of study, a fact reflected in my, somewhat cursory, survey of recent editions of AEQ where 71% of the published articles over the 6-year period survey (2000–2006) focused primarily on ethnic minority groups.1 While some of the articles included in the count of ‘minority studies’ were written about students from White working-class backgrounds, most converged on students of similar socio-economic status from Latino, Black, Asian and Hispanic origins. Such data help support recent assertions regarding the pervasive nature of the downward focus of educational anthropology (Emihovich, 1999; Wisniewski, 2000; Priyadharshini, 2003; Hamann, 2003). This ‘subaltern gaze’ (Marcus, 1998) has a double movement associated with it, as not only do researchers give most of their attention to marginalized groups in schools (and the vast majority of the articles surveyed reported on research conducted in and around schools), they also tend to concentrate mainly on students. Just over half of the articles were written about students or youth. When those featuring relationships between students and/or teachers and parents are considered, this figure rises to 76%. Only 20% of the research featured teachers as the

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major interlocutors. Some of the reasons for these patterns are located in the various theoretical, methodological and epistemological developments in the anthropological field that are discussed below.

ETHNOGRAPHIC REFUSALS IN SCHOOLS Ortner’s notion of ‘ethnographic refusal’ offers some important insights on problems associated with subaltern studies. She brings together the anthropological ideals of thickness and holism under the rubric of contextualization, all of which she suggests lie at the heart of the ‘ethnographic stance’ (p. 174). The refusal of which she writes is marked by an unwillingness to explore a field site in all of its richness. There is a baulking at thickness and holism, resulting in the sanitizing of politics, a thinning of culture and the dissolving of actors (p. 176). At risk of oversimplifying the argument, ethnographic refusal can be summarized as a failure to take seriously the complex realities that shape, and are in turn shaped by, the collective actuality of individual lives. Ortner correlates ethnographic refusal to the study of resistance among subaltern groups, and as she describes the situation (p. 190) such studies are often unnecessarily ‘thin’. They skate over the politics of dominated groups as well as the cultural richness of those groups and the intentions, desires, fears and projects that comprise the subjectivity of social actors. Ortner’s critique can certainly be used very productively in refining criticalist studies of schooling, and help show the ambivalent, ambiguous nature of resistance in educational settings (p. 190). However, I want to call into question the standard anthropological line that Ortner appears to follow in acknowledging the downward gaze to be the most appropriate intention of ethnographic study (see p. 188). While I have no argument with her proposition that we should be moving beyond the politics of representation and the associated fears that arise about questioning and discussing the internal politics of dominated groups (p. 190), I also think that we have to widen our perspectives. Unless we pay attention to documenting and analysing other parts of the whole social field, we are doomed to another level of ethnographic refusal, one that prevents us from understanding the complexities of power as well as the ambivalences and contradictions of subordinate positions identified so cogently by Ortner (1995, p. 175). I argue that ethnographic refusal is evident in many school ethnographies and is most readily visible in the failure of critical ethnographers to pay close attention to the worldview of the teachers in the school. Thickness and

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holism are not taken seriously enough by many, probably because of particular biases against the so-called middle class, bourgeois lifestyles. Part of the refusal possibly lies in not wanting to be seen to legitimize such a way of life, or perhaps because the impetus for change for a more just, socialist society are not thought to lie with that particular group (Davies, 1995). Two relatively recent and influential examples of ethnographic accounts of schooling help illustrate the points I am making here: Fordham’s (1996) account of ‘‘Dilemmas of race, identity, and success at Capital High’’ in Washington, DC; and Reed-Danahay’s (1996) portrayal of assertions of local identity and resistance of state power by parents and students involved with an elementary school in rural France (see Forsey, 2000). Both offer powerful examples of how to do critical ethnography in schools and are exemplary in many ways. However, insofar as they fail to take seriously the worldview of teachers, they also offer examples of some of the problems currently evident in the practice of critical ethnography in schools. Reed-Danahay describes various arenas of struggle between the villagers and Henri and Lilianne Juillard, the teachers who ran the two-room primary school in her research site of Lavialle. She succeeds in portraying the teachers ‘as young suburbanites’, who drew varying levels of disquiet and resistance from the parents associated with the school. One of the arenas of ‘dispute between parents and teachers’ to which she pays particular attention is the school lunchroom (p. 175). Reed-Danahay describes how the teachers organize the eating of lunch according to the protocols of an idealized uppermiddle class ‘bourgeois’ household. Exemplifying the tendency for criticalist accounts of schooling to present teachers as ‘disvoiced bodies’ (Forsey, 2000), Henri Juillard is portrayed as a stern and distant patriarch and Liliane as the household manager who upholds patriarchal authority (Reed-Danahay, 1996, pp. 199–200). While this is probably a valid and useful interpretation of ‘what the ethnographer saw’, there is no evidence in Reed-Danahay’s ethnography of her ever asking the teachers why they acted in this way. At no point do we ‘hear’ from them. Any one who has conducted research in schools knows the importance of maintaining relationships with teachers and administrators. Reed-Danahay is no exception and she informs her readers that she had established cordial relations with the Juillards. Why then do we not read of an interview, or informal questions probing the worldview of the teachers and their reasons for behaving as they did in the lunchroom? Not only would it be more ethically satisfying to read about these viewpoints, exploring the motivations of the teachers would greatly enhance our understanding of how the school works and deepen our appreciation of the ways in which power is actually exercised in social settings.

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Fordham’s ethnography is set in a high school where the vast majority of students are Black. The author aims at ‘a culturally sensitive representation of the factors y implicated in the success of Black adolescents’ (1996, p. 23). Opening with a passionately eloquent discussion of the importance of reflexive engagements by ethnographers on the power-filled representations they make, Fordham alerts her reader to the dependence of the consumers of anthropological knowledge upon the ethnographer’s interpretations and subsequent representations. Unlike the Juillards in Lavialle, the Washington teachers are given a voice, but, in an act of ethnographic ventriloquy, they emphasize the points that Fordham wishes to make. There is no evidence I can see of the teachers being invited into dialogue with Fordham about the representations she makes of them, representations that are consistent with the criticalist tradition of painting teachers and officials as agents of the dominant, usually ruling class, bourgeois ‘other’, who are removed from the students and lack understanding of their struggle (Connell, 1995). Despite most of the teachers at Capital High being Black women, they also said to represent an assimilating ‘whiteness’ (p. 191). The teachers are portrayed as resisting the dehumanizing effects of White culture by conforming to the rules and norms of this dominant culture. Their apparent aim is to become ‘acceptable professionals’ (p. 202), or ‘foreign sages’, as Fordham insists on calling the teachers. While Fordham reports that the principal went out of her way to make her feel welcome at the school, and a number of the teachers did the same, at no point does Fordham report inviting teachers into discussion with her about the classificatory tools she uses to describe them. Instead, she seems content to follow a trend evident in many critical accounts of schooling in maintaining throughout her text a certain ironic and critical distance from these key social actors.

ETHNOGRAPHIC DISTANCING In their important introductory review of critical approaches to the ethnographic study of schooling, Levinson and Holland (1996, p. 19) offer some explanations for this ethnographic distancing. They point to the significant ethical and methodological difficulties presented by school-based research and proffer three main problems for those conducting research in schools. Firstly, ‘schools have gatekeepers from whom permission must be obtained and of course maintained’. Secondly, the research requires sustained observations and interviewing. Thirdly, ‘the finished product of the research may

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very likely involve a critique of the very people who made the research possible’. While claiming such difficulties to be unique to school-based research is debatable, they do alert educational researchers to some important, and oft ignored, issues. Yet, they immediately smooth down the important threads they unpicked by asserting that, ‘a critical school ethnography cannot help but scrutinize the actions of school officials, even if they are not our primary research subjects’. This is true, and as I hope is abundantly clear, not for one moment am I suggesting that the actions of teachers and administrators should not be subject to critical scrutiny. What I am suggesting is that critique is simply not enough and that if the critical stance does create the sorts of ethical, methodological and epistemological dilemmas Levinson and Holland allude to, then we need to think about the implications of this far more than we currently appear to be doing. In a later essay, exploring the reasons why schooling is ignored so consistently by ‘mainstream’ anthropology, Levinson (1999, p. 599) expands on the point he made in tandem with Holland by suggesting that the problems associated with studying schools lie in the often ‘difficult negotiation of structurally opposed interests and alliances’ encountered by the researcher. While he does not inform the reader about who exactly comprises the oppositional alliances and what the various parties are fighting over, it is reasonable to surmise that the conflict centres on defence and critique of a hierarchical status quo. I am arguing that teachers are rarely the main subjects of critical accounts of schooling, because they tend to be viewed as protectors of the status quo. They are simplistically portrayed as perpetrators of a system that oppresses and undermines students, particularly those from working class and minority backgrounds. While this is the case in many instances, and critical ethnography has done a great service in showing this, it is time to expand our understandings of how this happens. Very few teachers that I know deliberately set out to become oppressors of minority groups; indeed as Connell (1995) suggests, teachers as a group have an enormous commitment to an ethic of care and concern for injustice. In order to understand how educational practices are produced and reproduced real engagement with teachers and administrators should be a vital part of the critical ethnographic project over the coming years. I hasten to add that this should not be done as a means of ‘getting the goods’ on teachers (Marcus, 1998), but rather as a genuine attempt to understand the practice of power from the purview of key players in the social dramas with which we engage as participant observers. This theme is explored further in the next section.

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THE SUBALTERN GAZE IN CRITICAL ETHNOGRAPHY In their seminal account of the ways in which social and cultural anthropology has developed into a form of ‘cultural critique’ Marcus and Fischer (1986, p. 1) argue that anthropologists promised their largely Western readership enlightenment on two fronts: 1. The salvaging of distinct cultural forms of life from a process of rampant Westernisation; and 2. A form of cultural critique of and for this Western readership. Later, they turn their attention to the ways in which anthropologists shifted their attention away from small-scale societies in former European colonies, towards studies ‘at home’ in the so-called Western societies. Referring to this process as ‘repatriation’, Marcus and Fischer make a telling observation: y as they have written detailed descriptions and analyses of other cultures, ethnographers have simultaneously had a marginal or hidden agenda of critique of their own culture, namely the bourgeois, middle-class life of mass liberal societies, which industrial capitalism has produced (p. 111).

Nader (1974) asserts that anthropologists tend to favour the underdog, a positioning she describes using the ocular metaphor of ‘studying down’, and which Marcus (1998) names as ‘the subaltern gaze’. Such preoccupations are certainly not exclusive to anthropology, as Bell (1978) noted nearly 30 years ago, sociology is also replete with top-down perspectives. However, it is quite probably the case that anthropologists by personal inclination and training are more likely to be dismissive of Western cultural formations than are sociologists and educationalists. Helping to support this assertion, Priyadharshini (2003, p. 420) notes that while social scientists in general have increasingly shifted their attention upwards, the subaltern gaze is still very evident among educational anthropologists (see also Hamann, 2003). The cultural imperatives that push and prod anthropologists towards critique of bourgeois lifestyles help explain the lack of attention to teachers in anthropological accounts of schooling. But, as Priyadharshini (2003, pp. 423–425) also shows, a lack of sympathy with middle-class existence is not the exclusive domain of anthropologists. Her PhD research, which involved a critical ethnographic study of MBA programs at Indian universities, caused a degree of consternation among her research colleagues. Priyadharshini reports that fellow social scientists often interrogate her

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about her values and theoretical stance. Linking this curiosity to her interests in a pedagogical practice (the MBA) that in the view of many ‘supplied managers for exploitative, undemocratic and corrupt multinational corporations’ (p. 424), she argues that her colleagues puzzlement arises from assumptions about qualitative researchers needing to develop a close rapport with those they study. Priyadharshini’s experiences echo concerns Marcus has been raising for more than two decades. In conjunction with Fischer (1986), he suggests that commitments to the cultural critique of bourgeois existence push social researchers towards finding and emphasizing the negative or the absurd when investigating the worldviews of middle-class people. In an earlier work, drawing our attention to the problems raised by ethnographic studies among elites, Marcus (1983) points to the methodological difficulties posed by ‘ideological distancing from one’s subjects to the point of disapproval’ (p. 23). Importantly, he links the failure to engage with elite subjects to a fear on the part of the researcher to charges of elitism, a situation which he persuasively argues arises from confusion between working empathy and ideological empathy with one’s research subjects. More recently, Marcus (1998, p. 27) has issued a timely warning against research approaches committed to ‘getting the goods’ about elite groups, and ‘probing the interior dynamics of how power shapes [the subjects] lives and is produced by them so that they can be opposed’. Social researchers are obliged to interrogate as thoroughly as possible their motivations for carrying out their research. This is not only an ethical issue; it is methodological and epistemological as well. Understanding and comprehending how people come to grips with their particular social location and realities, no matter where they are positioned in social hierarchies, is surely a key component of our jobs as social researchers. It is helpful to recognize that criticism is usually the easy part of our project, one that is often taken up all too quickly by criticalist researchers (Goodman, 1998). This ‘race to theory’ (Christian, 1987) tends to undermine what should be the primary challenge of social research – understanding social formations in all of their imperfect glory. While many of the teachers I know would find laughable any suggestions that they are part of society’s elite, especially when they compare their salaries with those of other university graduates, obviously one’s social standing is always a relative concept. This relativism helps explain why a number of critical ethnographic accounts of schooling treat teachers as part of a local elite, with all of the ideological distancing of which Marcus writes so cogently. At a time when the calls for deeper, richer, ‘thicker’, more

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nuanced understandings of power and its social effects are being issued (Abu-Lughod, 1990; Ortner, 1995), those drawn to a critique of the power relations produced by industrial capitalism often miss important opportunities to deepen their understanding of the complexities of power. Indeed, in so far as those of us committed to a politically engaged and critical anthropology of schooling ignore teachers and their formative relationships with students’ parents and administrators, we condemn ourselves to ‘ethnographic thinness’ (Ortner, 1995), and a concomitant theoretical and epistemological impoverishment.

THE PROBLEMS WITH REPRODUCTION AND RESISTANCE Critiques of the status quo mark some of the most important contributions of critical research. This is not the place to replay the development of critical thought as applied to the evaluation of schooling, but the key trope of reproduction is worth exploring because of the way in which it directs social researchers towards investigations of the beliefs and values of all social actors and their interactions with the social systems they are subject to. Initial uncovering of the ways in which schooling induces worker powerlessness that emerged in reproductionist arguments in the 1970s, and the idea that schools reproduced rather than ameliorated iniquitous social structures, offered an important corrective to liberal fantasies of education as an unproblematic ‘springboard for upward mobility’ (Levinson & Holland, 1996, p. 5; see also Althusser, 1971; Bowles & Gintis, 1976; Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977). It helps shift blame away from the victims of such structures to the system that produced them (Connell, Ashenden, Kessler, & Dowsett, 1982, p. 28). However, the trap of overdeterminism that plagues reproductionist accounts of schooling is now well recognized by most social researchers (Anderson, 1989; Davies, 1995; Levinson & Holland, 1996). Willis (1977) is often acclaimed as the one who shattered ‘the image of the passive, malleable student implicit in reproduction theory’ (Levinson & Holland, 1996, p. 9). It was the rebellious ‘lads’ of ‘Hammertown Boys’, and their penetration of the meritocratic veneer of schooling and ‘the role of labour in the modern structure of capitalist production’ (Willis, 1977, p. 133) that helped critical analysts to escape their own deterministic trap (Anderson, 1989, p. 251). Resistance emerged as the key theoretical trope of such approaches, with Willis’s ‘grounded version of resistance theory’

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becoming the touchstone work for critical ethnographers seeking to marry phenomenological concerns about human agency to Marxist preoccupations with social structure (Anderson, 1989, pp. 255–256). Resistance became synonymous with agency in many ethnographic accounts of schooling written in the criticalist paradigm, apparently providing the ethnographer with the means to move beyond static, deterministic explanations of human behaviour insinuated in cultural reproduction theories (Hoffman, 1999, p. 675). While Willis’s Learning to Labour was, and remains, an important text, especially for the way in which it allowed subsequent researchers to think beyond the traps set by an overly neat and impenetrable set of structures (p. 175), its privileging of resistance helped create a new set of conceptual problems. Resistance approaches have become hegemonic in many parts of the educational research corpus, partly because of their promise of locating agency among the subjects of the ethnographer’s downward gaze. Willis is clearly not to ‘blame’ for this, but his influence is profound and undoubtedly helped set the agenda for many a critical researcher. The problem I have with Learning to Labour lies not only in Willis’ representation of the teachers at Hammertown Boys, but also with those dismissed by the resistant ‘lads’ as the ‘ear’oles’, the complicit ‘prats’ with ‘five As and one B’ on their report (Willis, 1977, p. 14). These ‘conformists’, who display a relatively high acceptance of the authority of the school (pp. 98–99), receive scant, almost dismissive, treatment from Willis. His ethnography is thin in various directions. Responding to later criticisms about this, Willis (1981) implores his readers to recognize that his inattention to the ‘ear’oles’ does not mean that he denies their involvement in cultural production: ‘it seems hard to assume that I would forget in one instance what I’d been at pains to emphasize in another’ (p. 61). That said he then goes on to admit that the ‘ear’oles’ were presented as a foil for ‘the lads’, as a stylistic device rather than a theoretical necessity (p. 62). As such, the conformity of the ‘ear’oles’ has a pejorative ring to it, probably because their lack of resistance qua agency means that they have no role to play in the critique of capitalism (Shweder, 2001). There is apparently no potential for ‘a working-class movement with leftist undertones’ in this group (Davies, 1995). If it is true that for many critical researchers agency is usually, to be found in resistant behaviours, then, intentional or not, this equation is problematic. Such readings of the world render conformity as a form of submission to dominant structures. The agency of the conformist is denied; they become cogs in the wheel, mere ghosts in the machine. Yet, as Walford (1986, p. 23) astutely observes of the ‘ear ‘oles’, by virtue of their being able to transcend

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their own working class backgrounds, they may well have been more active and creative producers of original cultural forms than ‘the lads’ were. This dichotomous typology of ‘resistant’ and ‘conformist’ individuals, no matter how ideal these types might be, is too simplistic. It misses all of the subtle nuances in the ‘tender interval’ between structure and agency (Deeds-Ermath, 2001, p. 44). For it is a delicate space, difficult, if not impossible, to discern. As Deeds-Ermath (2001, p. 44) argues, we need to move away from dualistic representations as ‘such either/or formulae hamper language’s capacity for both/and’. As I discuss in the next section, this movement away from simple binaries into more complex dimensions that pay attention to what exists on the continuum between domination and cooperation, allows social researchers to position themselves not only in more interesting places, they are probably more productive as well.

STUDYING UP, STUDYING THROUGH In the vibrant American anthropology of education scene over recent years there have been a number of contributors to the Anthropology and Education Quarterly advocating the need to heed more closely Nader’s (1972) exhortation for anthropologists to ‘study up’. Emihovich (1999, p. 483) argued the need to ‘confront issues of power and hierarchy in all forms of educational setting’. Wisniewski (2000, p. 8) identified the need to conduct thick ethnographic research of university academics, while Priyadharshini (2003) and Hamann (2003) explore Nader’s ideas in some depth. Hamann asserts that Nader’s research agenda offers an opportunity to ‘revitalise and guide the anthropology of education’ (p. 438) and Priyadharshini uses Nader’s ideas more critically as a means of illuminating some of the obstacles faced by those choosing to study those ensconced in powerfully lofty positions. ‘Studying through’ is how Shore and Wright (1997, pp. 14–15) in their overview of anthropological research of policy name what they see as being the most useful way of approaching the study of organisations. They emphasize the importance of recognizing ‘policy communities’ as ‘contested political spaces’, of producing multisited ethnographies that ‘trace policy connections between different organizational and everyday worlds’, and of addressing questions about how particular discourses become prominent and whose voices prevail in the policy setting. Taking a lead from Shore and Wright, as well as Deeds-Ermath (2001, p. 44), I argue here the need to move away from the either/or formulae of dualistic representations of social life implied in Nader’s up and down dichotomy towards a ‘both/and’

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commitment to research conducted in the in-between spaces that help structure our social world. Priyadharshini (2003) reaches some similar conclusions, and in so doing advocates a move away from adversarial research. However, her final comment, that an inquisitorial approach to power offers ‘an opportunity for critique from within that may not be available otherwise’ (p. 434), helps illustrate how difficult it can be for social researchers to escape the oppositional imperatives that seem to guide so much of the anthropological project in educational settings. Critique is important, but, as Goodman (1998, p. 55) argues, emancipatory ideology regularly replaces portrayal as the central purpose of ethnographic research: All of us are simply trying as best we can to make sense of the experience of living y [so] clear, authentic ethnographic portrayal will likely be more educative than the ideological insights of the researcher who made the observations in the first place (pp. 56–57).

CULTURAL RELATIVISM, CRITICAL APPRECIATION AND THE IMPORTANCE OF STUDYING ‘IN BETWEEN’ British sociologist of education, Maı´ rtı´ n Mac an Ghaill (1996) is one criticalist researcher who has engaged in extensive ethnographic research project among teachers. The teachers in his research site were experiencing tumultuous change in their working lives and conditions and, based on their responses to the neo-liberalist organisational changes taking place, Mac an Ghaill identified three broad groups of teachers: Professionals; Old Collectivists; and New Entrepreneurs. His sympathies clearly lay with the two former groups in their struggle against the ascendant New Entrepreneurs. Expressing his awareness that educational researchers tend to ‘caricature social actors in terms of goodies and baddies’ (p. 184), he attributes his apparent favouring of two groups over the other to the unintended effects of using ideal types. Interestingly, he does not entertain the possibility that his dualistic portrayal is reflected in, rather than explained by, the conceptualisation of ideal types. However, it is in the next sentence, in which Mac an Ghaill distances his thinking from ‘the adoption of a relativist position’ (p. 184, my emphasis), where the tendency to caricature social actors in terms of ‘goodies’ and ‘baddies’ really lies. Mac an Ghaill’s rejection of relativism was very evident in a lecture he delivered to the Western Australian Institute for Educational Research in August 1998. Responding to a question about power and the researcher, he

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made the disarmingly candid observation that: ‘When I am with students, I hate teachers. When I am with teachers, I hate administrators. When I’m with principals y well who can you hate?’ Along with most of my fellow audience members, I laughed at this comment. It resonated strongly with me. But the laughter in part reflects a failure on the part of many critical ethnographers to take seriously the views of those we oppose. Mac an Ghaill’s comment reflects a privileging of the subaltern that characterizes much of the educational research enterprise. Coupled with rejection of relativism, the almost permanently downward focus of the ethnographic gaze has the unfortunate epistemological consequence of limiting the researcher’s abilities to comprehend what many criticalist researchers are surely all too aware of, that power is marked by complex relationships between similar and different groups located in various sections of the social hierarchy. As Ortner (1995, p. 175) argues, subaltern groups are never singular or unitary and their relationships with dominant groups are always characterized by some degree of ambivalence. After all, ‘in a relationship of power, the dominant often has something to offer, and sometimes a great deal’. Unless we find ways of positioning ourselves, physically, emotionally and theoretically, in the spaces between these sometime oppositional groups, we may never come to recognize these sorts of realities. We condemn ourselves to the sorts of ethnographic thinness and the concomitant failure to really grapple with, and reach, deeper understandings of the practice of power. Social researchers, especially those studying so-called Western societies, often conflate cultural relativism with moral relativism (Fernandez, 1990). For anthropologists at least, cultural relativism in the main seems reserved for study of ‘the other’; yet it is arguably more important in so-called home settings. I argue that ethnographers researching middle-class people need to suspend their political critique for at least a little while, learning instead to understand the people they work with and their particular life path. In other words, in the search for a rigorous cultural relativism, researchers of social spheres that incorporate people from elite and middle class walks of life need to develop a mindset attuned to critical appreciation of their research sites and the people in them. While criticism is vastly more fashionable than appreciation in analyses of industrial capitalist societies, with the former term carrying an air of gritty realism in opposition to appreciation’s wide-eyed, functionalist innocence, they have the potential to interlock. Considering the words side by side, they interweave as different threads of the same tapestry. Committing myself to appreciating peoples lived experience, no matter what their social situation, is not to naively accept all that they believe and do. Rather, it helps create

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a mindset attuned to giving social settings and the people living in them their due value. Critique clearly has the potential to perform this analytical role, but not in the way it currently shapes social thought. Social researchers entering so-called middle class settings are encouraged to find and emphasize the negative or the absurd (Marcus & Fischer, 1986; Goodman, 1998), paying little heed to the fact that, as with villagers on remote islands, we are observing ways in which people come to grips with their lives in the particular historical and social moments in which they find themselves. For those researchers committed to social justice and evoking subaltern voices, such a stance can feel very awkward, perhaps even unnatural and unethical. However, if we are to heed the earlier mentioned calls for deeper, richer, ‘thicker’, more nuanced understandings of power and its social effects, a commitment to critical appreciation of all aspects of social life is vital. Sympathetic downward gazes, punctuated by highly critical upward glances, may be emotionally and ideologically satisfying, but this does not necessarily make for a satisfactory research process. Haraway’s (1991) influential ideas on ‘situated knowledges’ alert us to the need for social researchers to position themselves in methodologically and epistemologically useful spaces. Problematizing the premium so often placed on ‘establishing the capacity to see from the peripheries and the depths’ (p. 191), she argues for ‘passionate detachment’ and ‘mobile positioning’ as the most useful response to ‘the impossibility of innocent identity politics and epistemologies as strategies for seeing from the standpoints of the subjugated in order to see well’ (p. 192). Drawing on scientific metaphors to make her case, Haraway argues that, ‘One cannot ‘‘be’’ either a cell or molecule – or a woman, colonized person, labourer, and so on – if one intends to see and see from these positions critically. ‘‘Being’’ is much more problematic and contingent’ (p. 192). Studying ‘in-between’, in the interstices of social life is what I am advocating (see Mulcock, 2001; Forsey, 2004). It is easy to say or write of course, but not so easy to operationalize. What I am calling for in the shift in mindset from critique to critical appreciation is a commitment to rich, thick portrayal of the complexities of the social sites we find ourselves in and a preparedness to report the views of a variety of social actors with tough minded fairness (see Herskovits, 1977). In other words, we need to try to see the social world from a variety of perspectives. More especially we need to be prepared to stand in spaces that allow us to view our research sites from directions towards which we are perhaps not naturally inclined. There is nothing radical in these proposals of course; most would recognize what I am suggesting as solid methodological practice for any

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ethnographer. For a variety of reasons, however, many criticalists seem to have forgotten this when it comes to portraying schools. One obvious consequence of this is that the teachers tend to disappear from critical ethnographies of schooling, and our collective understanding of these important sites of social action is the poorer for it. As Nader argued all those years ago, it is time to shift our points of focus.

NOTE 1. Included in the count is issue 1 of the 2006 volume. Number 3 of the 2002 volume was excluded because it was a special issue focused on an exceptional topic – the aftermath of the September 11 attack on the World Trade Centre.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS My thanks to Bradley Levinson, Jane Mulcock and Geoffrey Walford for their perceptive comments on earlier versions of this paper.

REFERENCES Abu-Lughod, L. (1990). The romance of resistance: Tracing transformations of power through Bedouin women. American Ethnologist, 17(1), 41–55. Althusser, L. (1971). In: B. Brewster (Trans.), Lenin and philosophy, and other essays. New York: Monthly Review Press. Anderson, G. L. (1989). Critical ethnography in education: Origins, current status, and new directions. Review of Educational Research, 59(3), 249–270. Bell, C. (1978). Studying the locally powerful. In: C. Bell & S. Encel (Eds), Inside the whale. Sydney: Pergamon. Bourdieu, P., & Passeron, J.-C. (1977). Reproduction: In education, society, and culture. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. Bowles, S., & Gintis, H. (1976). Schooling in capitalist America: Educational reform and the contradictions of economic life. New York: Basic Books. Carspecken, P. F. (1996). Critical ethnography in educational research: A theoretical and practical guide. New York: Routledge. Christian, B. (1987). The race for theory. Cultural Critique, 6(1), 51–63. Connell, R. W. (1995). Transformative labour: Theorizing the politics of teachers work. In: M. Ginsberg (Ed.), The politics of educators’ work and lives. New York: Garland Publishing. Connell, R. W., Ashenden, D. J., Kessler, S., & Dowsett, G. W. (1982). Making the difference: Schools, families and social division. Sydney: George Allan & Unwin.

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Davies, S. (1995). Leaps of faith: Shifting currents in critical sociology of education. American Journal of Sociology, 100(6), 1448–1478. Deeds-Ermath, E. (2001). Agency in the discursive condition. History and Theory Theme Issue, 40(December), 34–58. Emihovich, C. (1999). Studying schools, studying ourselves: Ethnographic perspectives on educational reform. Anthropology and Education Quarterly, 30(4), 477–483. Fernandez, J. W. (1990). Tolerance in a repugnant world and other dilemmas in the cultural relativism of Melville J Herskovits. Ethos, 18, 140–164. Fischer, A. (1969). The personality and subculture of anthropologists and their study of U.S. Negroes. In: S. Tyler (Ed.), Concepts and assumptions in contemporary anthropology. Proceedings of the Southern Anthropological Society (3), 12–17. Fordham, S. (1996). Blacked out: Dilemmas of race, identity, and success at capital high. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Forsey, M. (2004). ‘‘He’s not a spy, He’s one of us’’: Ethnographic positioning in a middle-class setting. In: L. Hulme, & J. Mulcock (Eds), Ethics, engagement and ethnography: Anthropologists confront the field, New York: Columbia University Press. Forsey, M. (2000). The anthropology of education: Cultural critique or ethnographic refusal? Anthropological Forum, 10(2), 201–221. Geertz, C. (1983). Local knowledge. New York: Basic Books. Goodman, J. (1998). Ideology and critical research. In: J. Smyth, & G. Shacklock (Eds), Being reflexive in critical educational and social research (pp. 50–66). London: Falmer. Griffin, C. (1987). Review symposium – ‘schooling as a ritual performance’. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 8(1), 87–90. Griffin, C. (1985). Typical girls: Young women from school to the job market. London: Routledge. Hamann, E. T. (2003). Imagining the future of anthropology of education if we take Laura Nader seriously. Anthropology and Education Quarterly, 34(4), 438–449. Haraway, D. J. (1991). Simians, Cyborgs and women: The reinvention of nature. New York: Routledge. Herskovits, M. J. (1977). Cultural relativism: Perspectives in cultural pluralism. New York: Random House. Hoffman, D. (1999). Turning power inside out: Reflections on resistance from the (anthropological) field. Qualitative Studies in Education, 12(6), 671–687. Jordan, S., & Yeomans, D. (1995). Critical ethnography: Problems in contemporary theory and practice. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 16(3), 389–408. Levinson, B. A. (1999). Resituating the place of educational discourse in anthropology. American Anthropologist, 101(3), 594–604. Levinson, B., Holland, D. (1996). The cultural production of the educated person: An introduction. In: B. Levinson, D. Foley, & D. Holland, (Eds), The cultural production of the educated person: Critical ethnographies of schooling. New York: State University of New York Press. Mac an Ghaill, M. (1996). Sociology of education, state schooling and social class: Beyond critiques of the new right hegemony. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 17(2), 163–176. Marcus, G. (1998). Ethnography through thick and thin. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Marcus, G. E. (1983). Elite as a concept, theory and research tradition. In: G. Marcus (Ed.), Elites: Ethnographic issues. University of New Mexico Press: Alberquerque.

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Marcus, G. E., & Fischer, M. M. (1986). Anthropology as cultural critique: An experimental moment in the human sciences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mulcock, J. (2001). Ethnography in awkward spaces: An anthropology of cultural borrowing. Practicing Anthropology, 23(1), 38–42. Nader, L. (1974). Up the anthropologist – perspectives from studying up. In: D. Hymes (Ed.), Reinventing anthropology. New York: Vintage Books. Ortner, S. B. (1995). Resistance and the problem of ethnographic refusal. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 37, 173–193. Priyadharshini, E. (2003). Coming unstuck: Thinking otherwise about ‘‘studying up’’. Anthropology and Education Quarterly, 34(4), 420–437. Quantz, R.A., (1992). On critical ethnography (with some postmodern considerations). In: M. LeCompte, W. Millroy, & J. Preissle, (Eds), The handbook of qualitative research in education (pp. 447–505). San Diego: Academic Press. Reed-Danahay, D. (1996). Education and identity in rural France: The politics of schooling. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shore, C., Wright, S. (1997). Policy: A new field of anthropology. In: C. Shore, & S. Wright (Eds), Anthropology of policy: Critical perspectives on governance and power (pp. 3–39). London: Routledge. Shweder, R. A. (2001). Rethinking the object of anthropology and ending up where Kroeber and Kluckhohn began. American Anthropologist, 103(2), 437–440. Walford, G. (1986). Life in public schools. London: Methuen. Willis, P. (1981). Cultural production is different from cultural reproduction is different from social reproduction is different from reproduction. Interchange, 12(2–3), 48–67. Willis, P. E. (1977). Learning to labour: How working class kids get working class jobs. Aldershot, Hampshire: Gower. Wisniewski, R. (2000). The averted gaze. Anthropology and Education Quarterly, 31(1), 253–274.

‘CASE STUDY’ OR ‘ETHNOGRAPHY’? DEFINING TERMS, MAKING CHOICES AND DEFENDING THE WORTH OF A CASE Sue Walters There is often a lack of clarity about the terms ‘ethnography’ and ‘case study’ and what differentiates them as research terms. This is acknowledged by many (e.g., Burns, 2000, p. 459; Hammersley, 1992, p. 183; 1998, p. 1; Punch, 1998, pp. 152, 162; Yin, 2003, pp. 12–13; Platt, 1992, p. 46 cited in Yin, 2003). The lack of clarity arises partly because the terms ‘ethnography’ and ‘case study’ can be used to describe a research strategy, a research focus (the choice of phenomena to be studied), the research methods (or procedures) used and/or the results of a research study. For a new researcher, particularly those preparing, conducting and writing up their first qualitative study, the research literature available, and I am thinking here of those books that introduce or discuss research methodology (and are aimed at research methods course reading lists), can be bewildering. In my own research into the educational experiences of a small group of early years Bangladeshi pupils at school in the east of England, searching for the correct way to describe my study, I found that different authors defined

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he terms I was encouraged to use, ‘ethnography’ and ‘case study’, in profoundly different ways. There was a lack of clarity across and within texts about what differentiated these terms and even whether the terms referred to methods of data collection, research strategies, objects of study or the final product of research. While the different uses of the terms may reflect a healthy dynamic engagement with the emerging and fluid forms of qualitative research work, or point to the contested nature of research terms, they can also create great confusion to new researchers starting to work in the qualitative field. Mindful of Daniels and Akehurst’s comment that ‘learning to be a researcher is like learning to speak a language’ (in Birbili, 2001) I start by detailing the thinking that went into sorting out the way to describe and document my research study. I briefly consider how the terms ‘ethnography’ and ‘case study’ were used in the available literature and how I went on to develop clear and workable definitions in order to present my work. I am not here describing the process of creating an appropriate research design; I knew what I wanted to do, how to do it and why. I am discussing the process I went through to find a way of talking about and representing my research, in order to decide which words to use when the words on offer could potentially mean many different things. What is outlined here is my process of working out how to name and describe what I was doing. I then turn to a consideration of, first, the importance in my research of conducting ethnographic case studies of individual children and not of classrooms and second, of how, what I came to term, ‘ethnographic case study’ can be of use outside of the specific micro setting of its production, thus addressing concerns about the generalizability and usefulness of this kind of research.

RESEARCH LITERATURE: DEFINITIONS AND DISCUSSIONS1 Writers present very different descriptions of what constitutes ‘ethnography’ and ‘case study’. While not attempting to review the literature, nor to comment on or endorse the overall quality of argument and presentation of research methodology made by each of the authors considered here, the following demonstrates how different the explanations and definitions offered can be. Cresswell defines ethnography as ‘a description and interpretation of a cultural or social group or system’ in which the researcher studies the

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Ethnography A social group or entire cultural or social system

Case Study A bounded system (a programme, an event an activity, or individuals but not a system of people)

A Method of Research Study (Approach/Process)

Prolonged observation of the group, typically through participant observation and one-to-one interviews (using anthropological concepts) – always qualitative.

Can use different methods that focus on the collection of in-depth data from multiple sources rich in context documents, archieval records, interviews, direct and/or participant observation, physical artefacts - can include quantitative methods and analysis (may or may not use anthropological concepts)

A Product of Research Study (Outcome)

A holistic portrait of a group or system

Can result in very different products - an in-depth analysis of a programme, an event, an activity or individuals

With the Aim Of

Understanding the way a group or social system works, the meanings it gives to actions, artefacts and so on. Ethnography investigates people in interaction in ordinary settings, it looks for patterns of daily living (culture), what people do, say and use to find out what a stranger would have to know in order to be able to take part in the group or society in a meaningful way.

Understanding the uniqueness of a case or to providing an illustration of an issue.

An Object of Research Study

Fig. 1.

A Summary of Cresswell’s Delineation of ‘Ethnography’ and ‘Case Study’.

meanings of behaviour, language and interactions of the culture sharing group (Cresswell, 1998, p. 58) case study as an ‘exploration of a bounded system y over time’ (Cresswell, 1998, p. 61) and understands them as trying to accomplish different things: see Fig. 1. While Cresswell’s notion of the five traditions, within which ‘ethnography’ and ‘case study’ are placed, seems flawed, his discussion of the two terms helpfully highlights the fact that, in his view, while ethnography is both an object of study (that object being a cultural or social group or a system); a method (a research approach or process) and a product of research (a holistic portrait) and cannot be quantitative, case study can utilize ‘multiple sources of information’, it can result in very different products (outcomes) but it has a specific object of study (a bounded system). Such a differentiation between the two terms seemed a good working definition (and Cresswell himself notes the potential overlap between ‘ethnography’ and ‘case study’ when researchers study a system). He further differentiates the terms by stating that in an ‘ethnography’ the entire

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cultural or social system is the focus of attention, whereas in ‘case study’ a system of people ‘is typically not the case’ (Cresswell, 1998, p. 66). However, Hammersley (1992, p. 183; 1998, p. 1), while acknowledging the overlap and fluidity in the meanings of the two terms uses ‘ethnography’ to mean the much broader ‘qualitative method’ and ‘case study’ becomes ‘a selection strategy’ alongside ‘experiment’ and ‘survey’. A case being ‘the phenomenon (located in space/time) about which data are collected and/or analysed and that corresponds to the type of phenomena to which the main claims of a study relate’ (Hammersley, 1992, p. 184). Similarly, for Silverman (2005, p. 126), the term ‘case study’ refers simply to the particular topic or phenomena the research sets out to study. In this respect every research study is a study of a case. Along similar lines, Brewer, like both Hammersley and Silverman in writing about qualitative research, states that ‘While not all case studies are qualitative, all ethnographic research involves case study’ (Brewer, 2000, p. 77). Stake (1995, p. 86) prefers to take the line that case study is a choice of what is to be studied rather than being a methodological choice and, like Cresswell, that what distinguishes case study is its focus on a bounded system. Merriam follows this by defining ‘case study’ as ‘an examination of a specific phenomenon, such as a programme, an event, a person, a process, an institution or a social group using both qualitative and quantitative methods’ (Merriam, 1988, p. 9). She defines ‘ethnography’ as a set of methods used to collect data, and as a written record, but not as an object of study (Merriam, 1988, p. 23). This makes her definition different to Cresswell’s. Travers entitles his book Qualitative Research Through Case Studies but ‘case study’ does not appear in the index nor in the contents page and is used in the Preface to refer to research studies that are used as an ‘example’ to illuminate a particular research approach (Travers, 2001, p. viii). Yin, while also acknowledging that ‘case study’ is often confused with ‘ethnography’ (Yin, 2003, p. 12), defines ‘case study’ as ‘an empirical inquiry that investigates a contemporary phenomenon within its real life context, especially when the boundaries between phenomenon and context are not clearly evident’ (Yin, 2003, p. 13 my emphasis). Presented with so many differing or overlapping definitions and descriptions I was unable to simply utilize the terms to describe my research design and methodology without thinking deeply about the delineations I was offered and how I intended to use the terms in my work. What follows is an outline of my thinking and how I developed workable definitions as I ‘learnt to speak the language’ of contemporary research methods.

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DEFINING TERMS For the sake of clarity I chose to follow Stake who, as we have noted, presents ‘case study’ as not a methodological choice but a choice of object to be studied (Stake, 1995, p. 86). I took as the choice of object to be studied in an ‘ethnography’ a social or cultural group or system and the aims of ‘ethnography’ as understanding the way a group or social system works, the meanings it gives to actions, artefacts and so on. ‘Ethnography’, thus, investigates people in interaction in ordinary settings, it looks for patterns of daily living (culture), what people do, say and use in order to find out what a stranger would have to know in order to be able to take part in the group or society in a meaningful way. This results in a holistic cultural portrait of the social group (taken from Cresswell, 1998, pp. 58–60). ‘Case study’ on the other hand, following Stake, takes as the focus of its study a bounded system of some kind. This can be an individual, an event, an organization or a cultural group (or a number of these). Thus I began to conceive of the difference between the terms as this: ‘case study’ does not ignore context but it focuses on the case situated within a context. The emphasis of the investigation is on the case. Thus, in this view, ‘ethnography’ provides a holistic view of a social group or culture, ‘case study’ an in-depth study of a bounded system or case or set of cases. ‘Case study’ is able to explore a range of topics, while (traditionally) ‘ethnography’ focuses on cultural behaviour, practices and artefacts. In this way ‘case study’ differs from ‘ethnography’ in that it is not seeking to understand a social group or system (unless a group is taken as a case) it is seeking to understand a case within an acknowledged social system. This can be represented in the following manner. social group or culture or social system

social group or culture or social system (context)

Ethnography

the case

Case Study

MAKING A CHOICE Either choice of study would have been appropriate for my study of the experiences of Bangladeshi pupils in school in the context of their perceived

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underachievement. I was interested in exploring the experiences of a small group of Bangladeshi pupils in school in order to understand what was helping and hindering them in their learning. Previous statistical research had highlighted the fact that Bangladeshi pupils as a group were underachieving in the school system (e.g., Kysel, 1988; Nuttall & Varlaam, 1990; MacIntyre, Bhatti, & Fuller, 1993; Demack, Drew, & Grimsley, 2000; Pathak, 2000) but was unable to properly account for why this might be so. Various qualitative studies in the 1980s and 1990s had considered the learning experiences of minority ethnic pupils and concluded that such pupil’s poor achievement could be accounted for in terms of the different amounts or kinds of attention that different (ethnically defined) groups of pupils received from their teachers or that setting and banding arrangements in schools were key in creating disadvantage for certain minority ethnic groups (e.g., Wright, 1992; Gillborn, 1990; Troyna, 1991; Connolly, 1998a, 1998b). However, none of these studies had focused on Bangladeshi pupils and their findings did little to illuminate what might be happening for Bangladeshi pupils in terms of their learning and achievement. I could therefore have chosen to conduct what I have defined above as an ‘ethnography’ of a school or classroom, looking, like previous qualitative researchers, at the complex interactions, behaviours and meaning making of teachers, pupils and so on but focusing on Bangladeshi pupils in order to understand something of the ways in which pupils were supported or hindered in their learning and achievement. Or I could have chosen to conduct a number of what I have defined above as ‘case studies’ of individual Bangladeshi pupils with the same ends in sight. A choice of study that focused specifically on a child, or a number of children, rather than on the social group or the social system of a classroom seemed a more appropriate focus for understanding what the experiences of being a pupil in a classroom and of learning and taking part in the classroom were like. I was not intending to get a holistic view of a classroom, or a number of classrooms or school cultures but I did want to get at the experiences of specific children in the context of the classroom. The previous qualitative research noted above, which had considered minority ethnic children in the classroom, had started with the social system, the culture of the classroom and through that had shown how identities were produced and resources subsequently allocated to pupils. I wanted to look ‘right up close’ at specific children’s experiences of being in the classroom by starting with a specific child or number of identified children and seeing what was happening to them in specific groups and locations rather than exploring the dynamics of particular classrooms. The starting point for the study would be a specific child or a group of children

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not classrooms. In this respect I decided that my research would be called ‘case study’. Case study as a research strategy allows the researcher to undertake a single case study or a number of case studies. I decided to undertake a number of case studies rather than a single case study so that I would have a range of ‘portraits’ to illustrate the experiences of Bangladeshi pupils.2 An important aspect of the research was to consider the differing experiences Bangladeshi pupils might have in relation to each other and to get away from the notion that children, once ascribed to an ethnic group, must have much the same experience and needs in the classroom. In this respect, choosing to use ‘case study’ rather than ‘ethnography’ as my research strategy was an important research decision. In addition to this, a number of case studies of individual children would allow me to carry out ‘within-case analysis’ (a detailed description of each case and themes within the case) followed by a cross-case analysis (a thematic analysis across the cases) (Cresswell, 1998, p. 63) and a discussion of ‘lessons learnt’ (Lincoln & Guba, 1985). By being able to do ‘within-case analysis’ I would be able to avoid the danger of only considering Bangladeshi pupils in relation to each other and be able to consider them as individual pupils in a classroom. Combining ‘within case analysis’ with ‘cross-case analysis’ would allow for a level of depth as there would be the opportunity, later in the research, to explore any emerging themes or patterns or dissimilarities. In this respect, conducting the research as a number of case studies rather than as an ethnography was an important research decision. However, before turning to the issue of the use of a small number of portraits of individual pupils as a means of contributing to knowledge about Bangladeshi pupils’ schooling experience and the issue of underachievement it is necessary to say why I chose to describe my research strategy as ethnographic case study rather than simply as ‘case study’ or ‘qualitative case study’.

ETHNOGRAPHIC CASE STUDY AND MOVING BEYOND NOTIONS OF ‘BOUNDEDNESS’ At the heart of the definition of case study I chose to adopt (Stake, 1998, p. 86) there is an emphasis on the notion of ‘boundedness’ with which I was uncomfortable (Stake, 1995, p. 9; Cresswell, 1998, p. 61). Stake speaks of the aim of case study being ‘to thoroughly understand the bounded case’ (Stake, 1995, p. 9) and goes on to say that a child can constitute a case because s/he is ‘a working combination of physiological, psychological,

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cultural, aesthetic and other forces’ (Stake, 1995, p. 436). Although indeed a child could be considered to be a bounded unit, I am in favour of seeing children in context and in interaction, as created in and by the social processes in which they take part and not as separated, bounded identities (Yon, 2000). Case study, as defined by Stake, would seem to have an unspoken affinity with modernist conceptions of subjectivity which do not sit easily with my approach to understanding identity and subjectivity as multiple and fluid. In the light of this I chose to think of my research strategy as case study because the phenomena that the research was investigating was the child or the children rather than the classroom or the school and as ethnographic because I did not consider the child or children to be bracketed off from the culture, the interactions and the context around them. Case study, as presented by Stake, does recognize the importance of context, but for my study I wanted to be clear that context was not some kind of background scenery or ‘noise’ but was an integral part in constituting who and what the child, or children, were. In this respect using the term ‘ethnographic’ with ‘case study’ signals that the social system or cultural group that the child studied was part of was an important part of constituting who and what that child was and could be. This understanding of ethnographic case study could therefore be represented in the following way (where I have taken the previous elements of ethnography and case study and combined them). social group or culture or social system

the case

Ethnographic Case Study

I also chose to term my research strategy ‘ethnographic case study’ because my research focus required me to use many of the same research methods as an ethnographer, these being:  the need to enter into a close and relatively prolonged interaction with people in their everyday lives (Tedlock, 2000) and actively participating as a member of the social group (Emerson, Fretz, & Shaw, 1995);  suspending premature judgements about what should be selected as data, creating analytical frameworks from interactions with informants and allowing for new questions and avenues to be explored to emerge from the

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fieldwork (Walford & Massey, 1998, pp. 5–9; Stake, 1995, pp. 3, 9, 22, 33; Spradley, 1980, p. 29);  looking at the research situation from many perspectives by gathering data from many sources and in a variety of forms (Walford & Massey, 1998, pp. 5–9; Merriam, 1988, p. 69) thus capturing multiple realities (Stake, 1995; Adelman, Kemmis, & Jenkins, 1980); and  paying attention to subtlety, complexity and embeddedness (Adelman et al., 1980). and because the final outcome of the study would share a lot with the outcomes of an ethnographic study, namely, an account of processes, practices and experiences and what happens over a period of time through which phenomena and processes can be understood within their particular social, historical and spatial contexts. Such an outcome would include a richness of detail rather than the ‘forgetting’ of statistical research (Keith, 1993) and provide an account of ‘the values, practices, relationships and identifications of people’ and explain ‘What is going on here? How does this work? How do people do this? (Walford & Massey, 1998, p. 5) although presented as a series of case studies.

A SINGLE CASE, MULTIPLE CASES AND THEIR WORTH A criticism of ‘case study’, one that has an important bearing on my own study, is that findings cannot be generalized or applied to other settings and because of this they are of little use to policy and practice and to wider understandings of social phenomenon (e.g., educational achievement). Case study and qualitative research in general, including ‘ethnography’, have been defended from this criticism in a number of ways. These can be grouped as follows, running from defences which claim that such research need not be generalizable in and of itself, through those that say it can be generalizable in ways that are different to survey and quantitative work to those that claim that ‘case study’ research is generalizable in the same way as these forms of research.

1. Exploratory This defence of the importance of ‘case study’ and other forms of qualitative research sees the findings of such work important in providing insights,

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language and categories that can be utilized in the design of other, usually, quantitative studies. For example, such a study can reveal important aspects of a person or group of people’s experiences and the language that they use in order to talk about these experiences. These experiences and the language used can then be incorporated into the design of a survey, which is then administered to a large, statistically sampled group. In this respect, such a case has an important exploratory role to play in advance of another study.

2. Particularity Some researchers have defended ethnography and qualitative case study by speaking of the importance and necessity of having things depicted in their particularity (Stake, 1995; Keith, 1993). Connolly (1998a, 1998b) claims that it is a mistake to expect to be able to generalize from ethnographic research and, like Stake and Keith, he defends the remit of such work as being concerned with identifying and understanding particular social processes and practices. Sharrock and Anderson (1982, pp. 172–173) defend their research on these grounds too.

3. ‘Naturalistic Generalization’ Related to this focus on particularity, Stake and Donmoyer have both defended ‘case study’ by claiming that such work can have a ‘general relevance’ (Stake, 1995) through the manner in which it is consumed by its readers and how such a study becomes part of a reader’s knowledge of the world. Stake refers to this as a process of ‘naturalistic generalization’. According to Stake, such studies provide ‘vicarious experience’ in the form of a ‘full and thorough knowledge of the particular’ and in this way facilitate ‘naturalistic generalization’ (Gomm, Hammersley, & Foster, 2000, p. 7). Through reading a case study, people are able to build up a body of tacit knowledge on the basis of which they can act. This depends on the case study being described properly ‘in a way that captures its unique features’ (Gomm et al., 2000, p. 7). Donmoyer bases his approach to generalization, like Stake, on ‘experiential knowledge’ (Donmoyer, 2000, p. 55). He sees case study as able to facilitate learning in the reader by substituting for first hand experience (Gomm et al., 2000, p. 9). The reader consumes a case study through assimilating and accommodating what is read and integrating and/or differentiating this with what is already known (Donmoyer, 2000, pp. 59–61).

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4. Transferability Lincoln and Guba (2000) claim that there are ways of stating conclusions arising from the study of one case or context that might hold in another case or context. For them, case study research produces ‘working hypotheses’ a term they take from Cronbach (Lincoln & Guba, 2000, p. 39). The transferability of conclusions from one case to another is a function of the ‘fit’ between the two contexts. Therefore, case study researchers have to provide ‘thick descriptions’ of their research case, particularly of the context of the case, for this to be possible (Gomm et al., 2000, p. 8). This differs from Donmoyer and Stake in that ‘transferability’ as defined here can only be made if the settings and contexts of the studies are similar. Punch also chooses to talk of ‘transferability’ rather than ‘generalization’, researchers needing to be mindful of sampling, the concepts used in data analysis and of describing the context in enough detail for the reader to be able to judge whether the findings are transferable to other settings (Punch, 1995, pp. 255–256).

5. Fuzzy Generalization Bassey defends qualitative case study against the criticism that one cannot generalize from it by claiming that case study can make ‘fuzzy generalizations’, by this he means ‘the kind of statement which makes no claim to knowledge, but which hedges its claim with uncertainties y in some cases it may be found that y .’ (Bassey, 1999, p. 12).

6. Analytical Generalization This defence argues that while a case study cannot be used to generalize to a wider populations (through statistical generalization) it can be used to generalize to theoretical propositions i.e., case studies can be used to contribute to or expand on current explanations in relation to social issues (Yin, 2003, p. 10). ‘Whilst survey research relies on statistical generalization, case study research and experiments rely on analytical generalization where the researcher is striving to generalize a particular set of results to some broader theory’ (Yin, 2003, p. 37). However, a case study, just like an experiment, has to be replicated in order for generalizations to be made.

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7. Empirical Generalization Some defend case study by claiming that it is possible to make generalizations from case study in the same way that it is possible to make generalizations from survey research (Gomm et al., 2000, pp. 5, 9). Starting with an acceptance that a great deal of everyday knowledge building consists of ‘naturalistic generalization’, Gomm, Hammersley, and Foster note that such generalization is subject to a great deal of error when considered alongside ‘statistical generalization’ (Gomm et al., 2000, p. 104). They suggest that case study researchers can improve on ‘naturalistic generalization’, and therefore on the accuracy of their informal empirical generalizations, by taking account of the relevant heterogeneity within the population with which they are concerned (Gomm et al., 2000, p. 105) and consider the typicality or non-typicality of the case that is to be studied in relation to the relevant population. ‘In short, it is necessary to compare the characteristics of the case(s) being studied with available information about the population to which generalization is intended’ (Gomm et al., 2000, p. 105). They also suggest that case study researchers, instead of focusing on a case, or cases, that are typical, can choose to study a small number of cases that are atypical and at the extreme ends of the range of heterogeneity identified in the relevant population (Gomm et al., 2000, p. 107). They argue that there are two strategies, used by experimental and survey researchers, for drawing conclusions from the case, or cases, to the larger population these being ‘theoretical inference’ and ‘empirical generalization’ (Gomm et al., 2000, p. 102). Key to this form of ‘empirical generalization’ is the need to know as much as possible about the relevant wider population that the case or cases represent and to select and present the case or cases carefully in the light of this knowledge.

8. ‘Holographic Generalization’ Using the metaphor of holographic film, Lincoln and Guba suggest that, as with the film, which if cut into pieces each piece will contain within itself all of the information and image stored on the whole film, ‘the full information about a whole is stored in its parts’ (Lincoln & Guba, 2000, p. 43). Thus, in case study research ‘samples need not be representative in the usual statistical sense to render generalizations warrantable; any part or component is a ‘perfect’ sample in the sense that it contains all of the information about the whole that one might ever hope to obtain’ (Lincoln & Guba, 2000, p. 43). It is worth noting that some of the defences above refer to the importance of the writing up of the case so that the reader can gain ‘vicarious

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experience’ (Stake) or ‘transfer’ knowledge (Lincoln and Guba; Punch) or ‘learn’ (Donmoyer) yet these comments tend not to develop issues concerning the writing and reading of research. First, there is an assumption that research writing acts as a straightforward conduit carrying what happened and what was said ‘in the field’ directly (and untainted) into the reader’s mind. Yet writing, by its very nature, is restricted by its generic forms and styles; what one writes on the page is an act of framing, editing and presentation just as the way a photograph brings its own styling, framing, editing, focusing and ‘leaving out’ to the image that is consumed. Neither a written case study, nor a photograph, is neutral; both have contributed to and construct the vision ‘seen’ by the consumer, the reader. In a similar manner, while Stake and Donmoyer have considered how a reader ‘deals’ with reading a piece of case study research (through integrating what they read with what they already know or have experienced), other writers do not address how case study research is read and consumed, i.e., what readers do with case study research descriptions. The defences of case study as outlined above also need to be considered in relation to understandings of the social world. The writers who argue that one can generalize from case study research as from survey research or by using the strategy of ‘theoretical inference’ (Gomm et al., 2000, p. 102) are working within a view of the social world that can confidently expect case study researchers to be able to work with notions of universality, known and fixed populations and so on, while many writers, including this one, do not share this epistemological stance. For post-positivist researchers (those that reject universality and the notion of a reality beyond a socially produced one) these defences are less acceptable ones. Rather they will defend case study and its usefulness on other grounds (including some of those noted above) as I do here.

DEFENDING THE WORTH OF CASE STUDY: AN EXAMPLE In order to consider how a case study can be of use outside of its setting, I present a brief overview here of one of the case studies from my research study. There were six case studies in total all conducted at the same time during the course of one academic year. The six pupils were the total population of Bangladeshi pupils in Year 3 in the county, attending three different schools in the city. The children lived in various parts of the city

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with their immediate families. Fathers were the main breadwinners and were all working in the restaurant trade. The children’s mothers were all housewives. Rahul3 the subject of this case study, was one of the two boys in the study. Rahul’s case study was structured to present Rahul in relation to the following headings: as a learner, as a reader, as a pupil taking part in classroom interactions, as a multi-lingual language user, as a social member of his class, at home and at school and teachers’ response to Rahul as a pupil. The headings reflected the manner in which the data was analysed and arose out of the initial readings of the data. (The same headings were used for all of the case studies.) Through these headings Rahul’s case study depicted the spaces and the opportunities provided by the curriculum and by the teacher for pupils to ‘take part’ in classroom interactions, how Rahul ‘took part’, his needs as a learner and as a bilingual pupil, the manner in which his teachers’ assessed his needs and the support that he was subsequently provided with and how Rahul subsequently became positioned as a particular kind of pupil, one unlikely to be a successful achieving pupil. A brief summary of what is described in Rahul’s case study is provided below. Rahul was a seven-year-old Bangladeshi boy who, because of a number of long absences from school in the first two years of his schooling was beginning Year 3 of primary school with a little knowledge of spoken English and a very limited experience of the curriculum and of the English that he encountered in his classroom. The three Year 3 classrooms I conducted my research in all followed a very similar use of space in the classroom and in Rahul’s classroom, like the others, introductions to the different subjects such as Literacy, Numeracy, History and so on were conducted by the teacher with the children sitting before her on a carpet in a corner of the classroom. Rahul’s teacher would introduce a topic and build into her talk questions to the children that the children had to raise their hands to answer. After this ‘introduction’, which in Rahul’s classroom usually lasted between twenty minutes and half an hour, the children would be sent to work in their groups at desks in order to undertake a piece of work set by the teacher and explained during the introductory talk. Rahul’s teacher used a lot of talk and very little visual demonstration or example of what she was talking about at these times and the amount and level of English language in use in the classroom was well beyond Rahul’s experience and understanding. Rahul presented himself during these times as a very disengaged pupil. After about five minutes of teacher talk he would ‘switch off’ and slide to the back of the group of children. He did not raise his hand to answer questions and he ceased to look at the teacher. Whilst aware of Rahul’s beginner bilingual status, Rahul’s teacher came to understand and assess Rahul as a lazy pupil who couldn’t be bothered to make an effort to follow what was happening in class. Her early efforts to support him by holding spaces for him in class discussions and encouraging him to answer in any way he could, changed to simply supporting him by asking him at the end of every introductory session if he knew what he had to do when he left the carpet and went to his desk. The teacher usually found that Rahul did not know

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what he was expected to do and so she went through the instructions for the task with him before sending him off to his seat. Rahul’s teacher also attempted to support him as a learner by placing him in the lower ‘ability’ Literacy and Numeracy groups in the classroom as she worked with these groups more often than with others and she felt that she could offer Rahul more support in this way. However, the teacher was frequently distracted and ‘taken away’ from her work with these groups by the demands of other children or the demands of particular children in these groups and Rahul did not gain much personalised support at these times. Later in the school year when Rahul’s reading had improved and he would, by the teacher’s own admission, have been better served by moving up into a higher Literacy group, he was forced to stay in the low level group he had been placed in because of a school policy – the next group up was funded for a particular category of pupil to which Rahul did not belong. Thus Rahul became stuck in a low group for Literacy to which he no longer really belonged and which was not able to stretch him sufficiently. Rahul’s teacher and other school adults lacked specific training in working with