I like this passage from our chapter (just out!): An ethnographic perspective pushes us to contend with the nature of how knowledge is constructed in our classrooms, what counts as literacy and disciplinary knowledge and, ultimately, whose knowledge counts. Anthropologist, Dell Hymes, reminds us that: [O]f all forms of scientific knowledge, ethnography is the most open, the most compatible with a democratic way of life, the least likely to produce a world in which experts control knowledge at the expense of the studied. The skills of ethnography are enhancements of the skills all normal persons employ in everyday life. ... [I]t provide[s] for making explicit relationships and patterns that members leave implicit. ... Ethnography in short is a disciplined way of looking, asking, recording, reflecting, comparing and reporting. (Hymes, 1981, p. 57) From this point of view, therefore, teachers who draw on ethnographic traditions to systematically examine their teaching practices can be seen as engaged in the intentional documenting and describing; noticing and naming of the work they do, with the intention of analyzing and announcing what they learn. This DNA embodies habits of action that nurture habits of mind that are deeply rooted in the interactional ethnographic tradition out of which the CoLab emerged.
Posted on: Mon, 12 May 2014 17:15:45 +0000