Though I have a better understanding of what ethnography is, I still feel that I'm not 100% clear on its most concise definition. Apparently, however, I am not alone. According to Hammersley, the word is often used in different ways for different occassions. Often ethnography is defined by the methods employed (which is how I best identify what it is). However, ethnography can refer to an anthropological study or a linguistic exploration of langauge; it can be both poetic and rhetorical (p. 10). If ethnography is anything, it isn't simple.

As I've stated before, I can now best identify an ethnography through its methods. However, as I was reading through Eisenhart's article, I was struck by the passage "my worry is that the way we teach and write about ethnographic methods may encourage the use of methods that are no longer adequate for addressing aspects of cultue that are important to contemporary life" (p. 18). This passage caused me to pause and ask, well what are the ethnographic methods with which I am the most familiar? Observations, Interviews, possibly surveys? Eisenhart's article seems to imply that the ethnographic methods that long have been in existence are no longer sufficient. That we need to develop or appropriate methods of inquiry that were not observed as ethnographic, which led me to the following questions:

• What are some examples of new ethnographic methods and how have they "filled in the gaps" in the other ethnographic methodologies? (for instance are virtual observations [observations in online contexts] the same as observations that might take place in the real world?)
• Have some of the ethnographic methods of research become obsolete? If so how?
• Where are the gaps in ethnographic studies that must be filled in?
• How can we as ethnographers maintain the balance between individual privacy and still communicate the information that is important to the inquiry?

Mills Response

This posting is in response to Mill's article, "Access to Multiliteracies: a Critical Ethnography." Given my own interest in new literacies, I found this article to be quite interesting. This article caused me to consider something that I wrote once, regarding the integration of multimodal themesets into a creole speaking classroom to bridge the primary and secondary literacies of the students. I would like to someday, when the funds are available, to conduct critical ethnography to see precisely how theme-sets might be integrated into the classroom. Mill's does a fantastic job of depicting her research procedures and stresses the importance of a drawing from a strong theoretical base.

Questions that I may need to ask myself, moving forward with my own research, include the following:

• How does my sample population fit into the larger social order (see chart on p. 310).
• Are there any participants that I am unaware of? Perhaps school administrators, or other authority figures who are not directly interacting with students in the class...what role might they play in a given study?

This article serves as a nice example of how to articulate the events of a study.

Invisible Cultures

The book The Invisible Cultures calls attention to one of the very difficult issues that we observe as ethnographers, the ability to separate yourself from the focus topic enough to objectively report what you see. In this book, particularly in chapter 7, we become increasingly aware of the divide that exists between minority students and Anglo students in the classroom.


However the following questions arose while reading the book:

As an ethnographer, is it ever acceptable to make critiques of the culutral practices you observe? Often throughout the text, it appears that the author demonstrates her dissatisfaction with the teachers methods, implying that there are "problems." She seems to clearly be taking sides, suggesting that the instructor is largely at fault for the disconnect between them and the non-anglo students in the classroom.

Second, in the conclusions, the ethnographer who conducted the study offers suggestions for improvements, one of which being replacing the Anglo instructor with one who understands the cultural differences between the anglo and non-anglo students. This also appears to be a "judgement call". Does this suggestion violate the researchers objectivity?

If we were to replace the instructor, might this issue of non-comprehension shift then to the anglo students? If so, does this action resolve the issue?

If this study were conducted again today, would it still hold true? Are minority children still, for a lack of better terminology, "left behind" in the classroom? The author writes "Teachers are usually expected to expiriment with changes in their teaching" (p. 134). Is this true if we were to consider the prime directive of "No Child Left Behind?

Reflections on Ways with Words--overall

Many of the issues that we encounter in Ways with Words parallel what we, as instructors, often observe in our own classroom. Heath writes, "For the children of Roadville and Trackton, school is the first place in which they meet on an extended basis the townspeople's ways of using oral and written language" (p. 265). I observe that this is the case here at IUP as students from various socioeconomic backgrounds interact with one another in various classes. For example, many students from the inner city schools of Philadelphia have different experiences with oral and written language than students from more rural communities, like Indiana, Erie, or Warren. As a result a gap in literacy can clearly be observed, even in classes at IUP. If we were to use Heath's book as a model for an ethnographic inquiry into IUP, I wonder what it would look like.

Ways with words ch. 4

What assumptions can we make when interpreting an ethnographic study? This is the question that I found myself asking as I read Chapter 4 in Ways with Words. Consider for a moment "Rattles, in blue or pink, stuffed animals, 'busy boxes' . . . mobiles, and wall plaques on a religious theme or illustrating nursery rhymes are favorite items" (p. 114). In this passage, Heath is describing the items that people bring, most often, to baby showers. But what assumptions can we make? Are the items centered around "religious themes" predominantly Christian? Can we, as the reader, assume that these "religious themes" are of a particular religion?

On Ethnography -- Reading Response for June 8

Heath and Street write that ethnographic research is all about "making the familiar strange" (p. 32). If we all assume that every individual is multicultural, we must view each individual's cultural identity as a complex network of interconnecting circles, each representing a single component of that person's identity. For example, my cultural identity is a blend of Polish, German, and American cultures. On the other hand, I am also a poet, compositionist, educator, and literary theorist. In an ethnographic study, it may be benificial to explore the borderlands between each of these cultural rings, and look at yourself from an outsider's perspective.

Recursive theory allows us to acknowledge the myth of the "innocent ethnographer" (p. 34). This is because each of us have a unique cultural identity that informs how we observe others, both inside and outside our native cultures. For example, if I were to conduct an ethnographic study focused on first-year writing classrooms, my own knowledge of composition pedagogies and theories will impact what questions are asked in surveys. In the case of classroom observations, I would most likely more keenly observe the patterns of interaction with which I am familiar and may ignore the more subtle patterns (or vice versa). Currently I am composing surveys and other research tools to explore the culture of first-year writing. As I do so I am reminded by Street and Heath to "describe only what does happen, not what doesn't happen" (p. 36). As I thought of this topic, I am reminded that I cannot think of a classroom as including or not including technology (after all, pencils are technology too). What I should observe make note of are the types of technologies that I observe in each setting.

In any study, Street and Heath argue that a Literature review is particularly important, because this is responsible for orienting the findings within the scholarly discussion that is currently taking place (or has taken place before). For instance, I were to define "visual rhetoric," it would be necessary to discuss Berlin's rhetorics and tie visual rhetoric into this discussion.

Brainstorming research topic

Understanding that an education system is cultural, each educational institution is composed of many subcultures indepedent of one another. Furthermore, each subculture consists of even more subcultures. Consider the English department here at IUP, we have a TESOL culture, a Composition culture, and a culture of literature; we have gender theorists, post-structuralists, linguists, and rhetoricians (among many others). For this project I would like to take a closer look into the culture of IUP composition - more specifically in the context of first-year writing instruction.

First-year writing classes are often composed of students from various ethnic, socio-economic, and educational backgrounds. In the end, these experiences lead each student to develop different levels of proficency in his or her various literacies. However, in today's visually based, new media revolution, visual literacy has exhibited the ability to transcend other more traditional forms of communication (i.e. written language). I feel that it would be an interesting inquiry to explore how visual rhetoric/visual literacy has been integrated into the IUP culture of first-year composition.

Potential research questions include:

• In what ways has the visual been integrated into College Writing and Basic Writing courses at IUP to bridge the literacy gaps between students of diverse cultural backgrounds?
• Has the visual caused the first-year writing culture at IUP to evolve in some way? If so, how is it different?
• What is the current consensus among compositonists at IUP regarding the role of visual literacy? Does this mark a shift in pedagogical ideology and methodology, or are the instructors largely able to use the visual in the context of their existing pedagogies?
• Does a recognition of visual rhetoric / visual literacy mark another subculture in the larger culture of first-year writing?

I am open to any suggestions on other potential research questions and on any insight that you might offer in regards to this topic.

Culture as a Verb

I think it is very beneficial to take a page from Brian Street and Shirley Brice Heath, as scholars, and approach socio-cultural issues as dynamic processes of evolution. Cultural concepts vary from one social group to the next and from one subgroup to the next. Of particular interest were their view of meta-narratives:

". . . groups that see themselves as vastly different from their neighboring groups actually share many habits and patterns of behavior. Yet the meta-narratives or stories they tell in order to give reasons for their particular history or cultural patterns may differ greatly. Meta-narratives answer questions that ask 'why do we do this and not that?' " (Street and Heath, 2008, p. 8)

Stories shape culture. But traveling back in human history, we see oral cultures that told stories of their "history." The epic poem Beowulf, for example, was told orally for generations. The poem, as we understand it today, is simply a snapshot of what the poem was at a specific junction of time, the time that it was recorded into a written form. Prior to this, however, there is no way of truly knowing how that story had been changed in the oral culture and, in many ways, the poem was altered a great deal by committing it to a written form.

While some would consider culture to be specific characteristics (dance, language, etc.), Street's position is that we must begin to view culture not as those nouns, but understanding the function of those things. For instance, the performative function of a specific dance might tell a story (be it historical or mythical). As ethnographers we must begin to understand not what we observe, but the function of what we observe, why are these significant to the particular focus group.

In many ways, Erikson observes many of these things that Street and Heath do. However, he seems to imply that culture can be both static and dynamic at the same time. That is, while some aspects of culture surely evolve, some of the traditions or motives for certain behaviors remain consistent. How then is this possible? If one aspect of culture changes, doesn't it, to some extent, impact other cultural components (indirectly in the very least)?

Back for another class of fun and adventure

I was introduced to the topic of ethnography, but still find the term elusive.