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Critical Ethnography in Educational Research
Ethnographic methods are becoming increasingly prevalent in contemporary educational research. Critical Ethnography in Educational Research provides both a technical, theoretical guide to advanced ethnography--focusing on such concepts as primary data collection and system relationships--and a very practical guide for researchers interested in conducting actual studies.
238 pages, Paperback
First published December 12, 1995
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
January 28, 2010
It's actually PHIL Carpsecken. I have taken a few classes with him, and this book is quite useful. I've read it before, but it's key to the dissertation, so there you go.
May 4, 2024
This is a really foundational book for me. The reason it's four stars is just that I'm rating the book alone. I think this is something you need to work through with other people. It needs to be something you build on and practice with, so it's a component of research experience, but you can't really understand it if you just read it from cover to cover.
The core, I think, of this book is that it's less a research method as a research philosophy. Phil does his best to open up your imagination to what is possible in social research. It's not about setting rules for "proper" inquiry; it's about redefining relations between researcher and participant.
If there are two key ideas here they are "reconstruction" and "member checking." Reconstruction indicates that the role of the researcher is not to sit at a detached remove and judge the rightness or wrongness of what they see. Instead, the goal is to inhabit the perspective of others and learn to understand their perspective. The act of reconstruction is making explicit that which was implicit to the participant. How do we take the unconscious knowledge of one person and make it accessible and intelligible to others?
The methods are not unique to this philosophy. You observe, take notes, and conduct interviews or focus groups. What's different is that you don't treat those answers as an end. Instead, once you evaluate those materials and put forward your own interpretations of them, you MUST member check them. The validity criterion for social research is that the participant recognizes themselves in how they've been described. So, if you produce an analysis or try to interpret an act from an individual and they tell you that you are wrong, you need to acknowledge that. The goal isn't to expose people or to prove them wrong. The goal is to have everyone involved feel themselves to be accurately represented. The outside observer has the special privilege of being able to take what the participant believes to be obvious, universal, and indescribable and put it into words.
This book teaches you a process for that, but it's not about following precise steps in a precise sequence to manifest valid results. It's about redefining the social relations of research to direct them toward mutual recognition of implicit beliefs. This is hard work, but it's at the core of human study.
The core, I think, of this book is that it's less a research method as a research philosophy. Phil does his best to open up your imagination to what is possible in social research. It's not about setting rules for "proper" inquiry; it's about redefining relations between researcher and participant.
If there are two key ideas here they are "reconstruction" and "member checking." Reconstruction indicates that the role of the researcher is not to sit at a detached remove and judge the rightness or wrongness of what they see. Instead, the goal is to inhabit the perspective of others and learn to understand their perspective. The act of reconstruction is making explicit that which was implicit to the participant. How do we take the unconscious knowledge of one person and make it accessible and intelligible to others?
The methods are not unique to this philosophy. You observe, take notes, and conduct interviews or focus groups. What's different is that you don't treat those answers as an end. Instead, once you evaluate those materials and put forward your own interpretations of them, you MUST member check them. The validity criterion for social research is that the participant recognizes themselves in how they've been described. So, if you produce an analysis or try to interpret an act from an individual and they tell you that you are wrong, you need to acknowledge that. The goal isn't to expose people or to prove them wrong. The goal is to have everyone involved feel themselves to be accurately represented. The outside observer has the special privilege of being able to take what the participant believes to be obvious, universal, and indescribable and put it into words.
This book teaches you a process for that, but it's not about following precise steps in a precise sequence to manifest valid results. It's about redefining the social relations of research to direct them toward mutual recognition of implicit beliefs. This is hard work, but it's at the core of human study.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews