Ethnography in Higher Education
Abstract
Ethnographic research in higher education is gaining momentum. In the last 10 years, we saw a great increase in publications, and more and more researchers endorse ethnography because of its distinctive qualities and its productivity for research in higher education: Ethnography is commended for its unique approach to social practices through continuous and immediate experience in field work, and its unfragmented methodical attention to situations, interactions, and experiences. This unique approach is explored in the present book, which brings together researchers from Europe, America, and Australia, and includes current ethnographic studies on higher education, reflections on teaching ethnography, and innovative approaches in ethnographic methods.
The editors
Dr. Clemens Wieser is Associate Professor at the Danish School of Education, Aarhus University, Denmark.
Dr. Angela Pilch Ortega is Associate Professor at the Department of Education, University of Graz, Austria.
... In relation to higher education, ethnography has been used to examine cultural aspects of teaching and learning (Wieser & Ortega, 2020). As such, an ethnographic approach to exploring phenomena in context allows the researcher to examine both factual data and information about teaching and learning as well as reflect and interpret various artefacts (Hammersley, 2018). ...
Doctoral studies can be daunting unless candidates are able to implement effective self-directed strategies and motivational tools to ensure success, which is reflected in the high attrition rates of doctoral candidates globally. This paper explores the use of a learning management system (LMS) to support the completion of a PhD for a doctoral candidate in a regional university enrolled in the online offering. The LMS was used throughout the PhD journey by the candidate to manage and organise documents related to the PhD study and reflect on progress. Using a digital ethnographic methodology, we analyse artefacts from the LMS through the lens of self-directed learning including cognitive, metacognitive, affective and social strategies. Findings showed that the LMS proved to be a useful way to organise, access and store information and had tools to enable motivation, both by the doctoral candidate and the supervisor. They also showed that the relationship between the candidate and supervisor was critical in this success. Implications from this digital ethnography highlight important self-directed strategies enabled through the use of the LMS. In addition, the LMS allowed deep reflection on PhD progress and provided the necessary motivation to complete the study. Therefore, LMS use could potentially increase doctoral candidate retention. Implications for practice or policy Supervisors within universities could consider facilitating an LMS as an effective learning environment to organise, access and store information for a doctoral student’s studies. Doctoral students may benefit from the pedagogical tools in an LMS to enhance self-directed study and facilitate communication with supervisors during their doctoral studies.
... As a rigorous approach, digital ethnography can generate a special kind of knowledge, rich in context and reality, which is not available to other approaches commonly used in digital and Internet research. Outside of the digital space, ethnographies have contributed to our knowledge of social, cultural, and motivational aspects of teaching and learning (Iloh & Tierney, 2014), and helped us understand how universities and students experience socio-political issues such as inclusion, inequality, or gender, as well as the effects of political reforms and societal transitions (Pabian, 2014;Wieser & Ortega, 2020). However, traditional ethnography explores experiences that take place on campuses and in classrooms. ...
To understand how the digitalization of higher education influences the inter-relationship between students, teachers, and their broader contexts, research must account for the social, cultural, political, and embodied aspects of teaching and learning in digital environments. Digital ethnography is a research method that can generate rich contextual knowledge of online experiences. However, how this methodology translates to higher education is less clear. In order to explore the opportunities that digital ethnography can provide in higher education research, this paper presents a methodological review of previous research, and discusses the implications for future practice. Through a systematic search of five research databases, we found 20 papers that report using digital ethnographies to explore teaching and learning in higher education. The review synthesizes and discusses how data collection, rigour, and ethics are handled in this body of research, with a focus on the specific methodological challenges that emerge when doing digital ethnographic research in a higher education setting. The review also identifies opportunities for improvement—especially related to participant observation from the student perspective, researcher reflexivity in relation to the dual teacher-researcher role, and increased diversity of data types. This leads us to conclude that higher education research, tasked with understanding an explosion of new digital practices, could benefit from a more rigorous and expanded use of digital ethnography.
Knowledge transformation drives changes in teaching practice. It takes place when a teacher mobilises personal knowledge for teaching. Technology can inform research on how knowledge transforms in practices of distancing from classroom teaching, and how a teacher draws on them to engage with a class. The paper introduces three fieldwork approaches that blend ethnographic fieldwork with technological possibilities: (1) Videographies of classroom interaction document practical educational knowledge of teachers and the orientations they use in classroom interaction. (2) Stimulated recall allows teachers to re-view classroom interaction. In talking about what has happened, teachers can present rationalisations of classroom events and explain how they addressed these events. Stimulated recalls also allow teachers to construct narratives in which they detail lived teaching experiences. Both stimulated recall and narratives document personal educational knowledge of teachers. (3) Video diaries allow teachers to tell stories from places outside of school, places in which they think about teaching and prepare for classes. There, teachers operate with self-technologies that scaffold the transformation of personal knowledge into practical knowledge. A conclusion outlines how data from these three technology-enhanced fields can be integrally analysed.
In diesem Beitrag denkt und schreibt das interdisziplinäre Autor*innenteam im Rahmen von autoethnografischen Trialogen zum Thema feministische Lehre beziehungsweise Lehren innerund außerhalb der Geschlechterforschung. Verbindend ist dabei die Suche nach einer feministischen Lehrhaltung und -praxis, die mit und/oder ohne den Begriff Feminismus respektive Feminismen gelingen kann. Diese Diskussion erfolgt vor dem Hintergrund verschiedener disziplinärer Perspektiven der Autor*innen. Angeregt wurde dieser Austausch durch voneinander unabhängige Erfahrungen der Autor*innen, dass das Wort Feminismus (F-Wort) bei unterschiedlichen Akteur*innengruppen (z.B. Studierende, Fördergeber*innen) im Kontext von Lehre und Forschung auf Widerstand und Unbehagen stößt. Diese Erfahrungen werden im Beitrag mittels theoretischer Referenzpunkte kontextualisiert. Dabei fokussieren wir auf aktuelle Gesellschaftsdiagnosen, die aktuelle Genderdiskurse als »rhetorische Modernisierung« (Wetterer 2003) identifizieren und einen »neuen Geschlechtervertrag« (McRobbie 2010) konstatieren, welche antifeministische Tendenzen beinhalten und wo Feminismen als etwas Überholtes in die Vergangenheit verlegt werden (McRobbie 2010). Vor dem Hintergrund dieser gesellschaftlichen Rahmenbedingungen diskutieren wir in diesem Beitrag die Frage, ob feministische Lehre und Forschung möglich oder notwendig ist, ohne das F-Wort anzusprechen und somit subversiv zu agieren. Wir wollen in diesem Beitrag bewusst nicht feministische Wissenschaft als Kanon oder Teil eines Kanons präsentieren, sondern zeigen in unseren Trialogen, dass wir Wissenschaft als historisch entlang von patriarchalen Machtlinien gewachsen verstehen, und es wichtig und notwendig ist, in die Gestaltung der Wissenschaft als soziale Produktion einzugreifen. Mit und ohne F-Wort.
There is a significant gap between technological advancements of digital touch communication devices and social science methodologies for understanding digital touch communication. In response to that gap this article makes a case for bringing the communicational focus of multimodality into dialogue with the experiential focus of sensory ethnography to explore digital touch communication. To do this, we draw on debates within the literature, and reflect on our experiences in the IN-TOUCH project (2016–2021). While acknowledging the complexities of methodological dialogues across paradigm boundaries, we map and reflect on the methodological synergies and tensions involved in actively working across these two approaches, notably the conceptualization, categorization and representation of touch. We conclude by honing in aspects of research that have served as useful reflective route markers on our dialogic journey to illustrate how these tensions are productive towards generating a multimodal and multisensorial agenda for qualitative research on touch.
This article addresses recent transformations of European education governance, in particular, the ways in which the parliamentary steering chain has been supplemented with an incentive-based mode of soft governance. The article argues that this new soft governance makes use of technologies that are designed to measure performance. In order to capture the impact of these tools, the article suggests that new performativity-based approaches to policy and reform studies have been introduced that take inspiration in the turn to materiality. The article seeks to provide a theoretical overview of these performative approaches and examines the performative effects of data visualizations and the way the governing through (data) visualizations become a governing through affects. The article explores how affects, such as shame, may be seen as an effect of certain modes of soft governance that may operate by concealing their own traces by making people and nations voluntarily co-opt themselves into the governing processes.
A selection of papers on language legislation presented at the International Conference on Language Policy in Multicultural and Multilingual Settings, Mandalay, Myanmar, February 8 -11, 2016
Teachers develop their expertise progressively through experiences
of teaching and reflecting on these experiences. When teaching in class, personal educational knowledge of teachers provides the horizon to maintain their performance, to interpret classroom events, and to react to them. Out of class, personal educational knowledge is used to reflect upon personal performance and classroom events, and these reflections modify orientations for teaching. Personal educational knowledge incorporates concepts for teaching and reflection. How personal educational knowledge of teachers is structured and used in and out of teaching is subject to discussion in educational research to date, and empirical research yet struggles to trace how personal educational knowledge is transformed for teaching. Sensitising conceptual perspectives may clarify how knowledge is transformed for teaching and how knowledge and knowing differ.
Ethnography has established itself as a key strategy of qualitative research in education, because it is so versatile, flexible, and ambiguous. Its growing importance coincides with an increasing diversity of »discovered« educational realities. In the process, many basic assumptions have turned into genuine tasks of research. Where are the places and times of learning, education, and social work to be found? Who are the actors and addressees? How are education and learning performed and enacted? The contributions to this volume discuss the multiple challenges that ethnographic research has to confront when exploring the multimodality, plurality, and translocality of educational realities.
Ethnography has established itself as a key strategy of qualitative research in education, because it is so versatile, flexible, and ambiguous. Its growing importance coincides with an increasing diversity of »discovered« educational realities. In the process, many basic assumptions have turned into genuine tasks of research. Where are the places and times of learning, education, and social work to be found? Who are the actors and addressees? How are education and learning performed and enacted? The contributions to this volume discuss the multiple challenges that ethnographic research has to confront when exploring the multimodality, plurality, and translocality of educational realities.
The field of psychological anthropology has changed a great deal since the 1940s and 1950s, when it was often known as 'Culture and Personality Studies'. Rooted in psychoanalytic psychology, its early practitioners sought to extend that psychology through the study of cross-cultural variation in personality and child-rearing practices. Psychological anthropology has since developed in a number of new directions. Tensions between individual experience and collective meanings remain as central to the field as they were fifty years ago, but, alongside fresh versions of the psychoanalytic approach, other approaches to the study of cognition, emotion, the body, and the very nature of subjectivity have been introduced. And in the place of an earlier tendency to treat a 'culture' as an undifferentiated whole, psychological anthropology now recognizes the complex internal structure of cultures. The contributors to this state-of-the-art collection are all leading figures in contemporary psychological anthropology, and they write abour recent developments in the field. Sections of the book discuss cognition, developmental psychology, biology, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis, areas that have always been integral to psychological anthropology but which are now being transformed by new perspectives on the body, meaning, agency and communicative practice.
Over the past decades a new form of professionalism has emerged, characterized by factors of fluidity, instability and continual change, leading to the necessitation of new forms of professional development that support agile and flexible expansion of professional practice. At the same time, the digitization of work has had a profound effect on professional practice. This digitization opens up opportunities for new forms of professional learning mediated by technologies through networked learning. Networked learning is believed to lead to a more efficient flow of complex knowledge and routine information within the organization, stimulate innovative behaviour, and result in a higher job satisfaction. In this respect, networked learning can be perceived as an important perspective on both professional and organizational development. This volume provides examples of Networked Professional Learning, it questions the impact of this emerging form of learning on the academy, and it interrogates the impact on teachers of the future. It features three sections that explore networked professional learning from different perspectives: questioning what legitimate forms of networked professional learning are across a broad sampling of professions, how new forms of professional learning impact institutions of higher education, and the value creation that Networked Learning offers professionals in broader educational, economic, and social contexts. The book is of interest to researchers in the area of professional and digital learning, higher education managers, organizational HR professionals, policy makers and students of technology enhanced learning.
Many teachers see major difficulties in maintaining academic standards in today's larger and more diversified classes. The problem becomes more tractable if learning outcomes are seen as more a function of students’ activities than of their fixed characteristics. The teacher's job is then to organise the teaching/learning context so that all students are more likely to use the higher order learning processes which “academic” students use spontaneously. This may be achieved when all components are aligned, so that objectives express the kinds of understanding that we want from students, the teaching context encourages students to undertake the learning activities likely to achieve those understandings, and the assessment tasks tell students what activities are required of them, and tell us how well the objectives have been met. Two examples of aligned teaching systems are described: problem-based learning and the learning portfolio.
This ethnographic study of a beginning‐level German course at an Australian university examined the student experience of learning second language (L2) grammar in a flipped classroom. Students accessed explicit grammar instruction and completed grammar exercises prior to attending face‐to‐face classes; during class, the structures were briefly reviewed by the students and then applied in interactive task‐based activities focused on meaningful use of the L2. In surveys and interviews, learners reported that the opportunity to manage the pace and depth of their interaction with online grammar modules facilitated their learning and increased their confidence. Linking these outcomes to research that has shown that flipped teaching models reduce or assist in the management of cognitive load, the study presents a compelling case for flipping the L2 classroom. Although most second language classes emphasize interactive activities, the common practice of delivering explicit grammar instruction in class effectively incorporates instructor‐centered “mini‐lectures” into this space. If grammatical structures are presented in videos accessed online prior to class, what happens? To what extent can flipping instruction ease cognitive load and increase students’ confidence using the language?
Originally published 1992 What’s Wrong With Ethnography? provides a fresh look at the rationale for and distinctiveness of ethnographic research in sociology, education and related fields. Relativism, critical theory, the uniqueness of the case study and the distinction between qualitative and quantitative research are all examined and found wanting as a basis for informed ethnography. The policy and political implications of ethnography are a particular focus of attention. The author compels the reader to re-examine some basic methodological assumptions in an exciting way.
While Sweden is often viewed as a benchmark for equality within education, this book examines this assumption in greater depth. The author argues that Sweden’s education system – even prior to the global spread of neoliberalism in education, meta-policies and privatization – was never particularly equal. Instead, what became apparent was a system that offered advantages to the upper social classes under a sheen of meritocracy and tolerable inequalities. Combining ethnographic and meta-ethnographic methodologies and analyses, the author examines the phenomenon of structural injustice in the Swedish education system both vertically and diachronically across a period of intensive transformation and reform. This revealing volume offers a mode of engagement that will be of value and interest to researchers and students of injustices within education, as well as policy makers and practitioners.
Evidence receives elevated attention in teacher education today, and this attention fuels the urge to identify the impact of evidence for teaching. However, this identification turns out to be difficult: Evidence is only infrequently used by teachers to explain or justify action, and this empirically documented situation is argued to be due to a missing connection between evidence and contingent decision-making in teaching, and a lack of recognition of characteristics of teaching in research that produces evidence. The argument points to a schism between the knowledge researchers construct and the knowledge that teachers use for teaching. To address this schism, educational research requires a robust conception of knowledge, and a recognition of differences between knowledge-that and knowledge-how is argued to contribute to such robustness. The paper introduces a Foucault perspective that recognises this difference, and illustrates the relationship of knowledge-that and knowledge-how based on Foucault’s concept of care of the self. Care of the self is described from an educational perspective to highlight that teachers develop professional knowledge on teaching through reflective knowledge-how, and to describe evidence as a resource in this development when it enables the problematisation of personal knowledge.
This chapter begins with a brief review of how American anthropologists of education have traditionally thought about culture and ethnography. Then, it discusses two major changes, or “turns”, in conceptualizing culture since the 1970s and examines their implications for new forms of educational ethnography. Following the tradition of anthropology of education established by American cultural anthropologists Margaret Mead, George and Louise Spindler, Henry Trueba, Frederick Erickson, and Harry Wolcott, ethnography, as practiced in the United States, became the primary methodology for studying cultural features of education-in-context. Culture has come to be conceptualized in new ways, with implications for ethnography. The most profound change has been to conceive of culture as the interpretive, symbolic, or representational logics used by people in interacting groups to make sense of their lives. These logics may originate in one place and time and move across group boundaries and through time.
This chapter suggests the need for more educational ethnographers to embrace the mobility turn. Researching the Internet has raised important and useful questions for those of us choosing to identify as ethnographers. Moving beyond ethnographic accounts of the Internet is one of the reasons for thinking about the significance of life in a mobile modernity for ongoing ethnographic practices in educational spheres. The notion of a mobile modernity invites attention to the continuities and changes characterizing the past century or so. It emphasizes the importance of linking deliberative movement to “the complex of ideas, political forms, economic structures and cultural patterns” that have dominated Western societies since the Industrial Revolution and have increasingly impacted so called non-Western nations. These modernist ideas and structures are marked by commitments to capitalist production built around the confluence of the nation-state and the military-industrial complex.
Materialist process ontologies, often subsumed under the term new materialism, such as the Deleuzian materialism of Rosi Braidotti, the agential realism of Karen Barad or the posthumanism of Donna Haraway, are becoming increasingly recognized in qualitative research. In this article I argue and illustrate that these theories allow for a reconfiguration of analytical research tools without using the representationalist epistemological framework these tools are often embedded in. Karen Barad’s concept of ‘exteriority within’ is of particular help for this task. I illustrate the research practices of two research projects, which included multiple methods of data collections (interviews, observations, re-enactments), a process of analysis I call referencing and a writing technique I call rebuilding worlds.
This book presents a critical analysis of the corporate university. The author's personal narrative unfolds between the reality of the corporate university and the rhetoric of the entrepreneurial university, which allows the author to reveal how the corporate university is structurally antagonistic to the activities of entrepreneurial intellectuals. The book not only explores the internal contradictions of the corporate university, but the complicity of its bureaucratized intellectuals in reproducing the iron cage of bureaucracy. Drawing on the legacy of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Barrow argues that entrepreneurial intellectuals, whether as individuals or in small groups, must take direct action to improve their own conditions by steering a tenuous course between the market and the state.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Ecological-University-Feasible-Utopia/dp/1138720763/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1509559803&sr=8-2&keywords=-+ronald+barnett+-+The+Ecological+University
Universities continue to expand, bringing considerable debate about their purposes and relationship to the world. In The Ecological University, Ronald Barnett argues that universities are falling short of their potential and responsibilities in an ever-changing and challenging environment.
This book centres on the idea that the expansion of higher education has opened new spaces and possibilities. The university is interconnected with a number of ecosystems: knowledge, social institutions, persons, the economy, learning, culture and the natural environment. These seven ecosystems of the university are all fragile and in order to advance and develop them universities need to engage with each one.
By looking at matters such as the challenges of learning, professional life and research and inquiry, this book outlines just what it could mean for higher education institutions to understand and realize themselves as exemplars of the ecological university. With bold and original insights and practical principles for development, this radical and transformative book is essential reading for university leaders and administrators, academics, students and all interested in the future of the university.
Public Universities are in crisis, waning in their role as central institutions within democratic societies. Denunciations are abundant, but analyses of the causes and proposals to re-create public universities are not. Based on extensive experience with Action Research-based organizational change in universities and private sector organizations, Levin and Greenwood analyze the wreckage created by neoliberal academic administrators and policymakers. The authors argue that public universities must be democratically organized to perform their educational and societal functions. The book closes by laying out Action Research processes that can transform public universities back into institutions that promote academic freedom, integrity, and democracy.
Education has moved higher up on the policy agenda and serving the public good has acquired new meanings. This entails demands to provide policy and market with instruments to enable evidence-based or at least evidence-informed choices in a so-called competitive global knowledge economy. This has, not surprisingly, led to a struggle about ‘evidence’ and the right to decide how ‘what works’ can be defined in education, which has consequences for school, professionals and educational research.
The chapter explores this issue by means of Danish examples located within larger transnational agendas. Evidence discourse was initially a bottom-up professional strategy within the medical field. It was, however, reworked and launched into education in a more top-down move that has largely bypassed professionals.
From this perspective, the author argues that the field of education and its professions may profit from adopting evidence as a floating signifier. This is, admittedly, a difficult endeavour as the evidence discourse is currently at odds with a majority of mainstream paradigms and understandings of school and teaching within the teaching profession and educational research. Taking the approach of the floating signifier could, nonetheless, be strategically useful in the struggle to expand the meanings of evidence to also reflect the experiences of professionals and the span of contemporary educational research. Three analytical distinctions are proposed in order to facilitate manoeuvring evidence as a floating signifier: evidence-based vs evidence-informed knowledge; global vs local evidence; and external vs internal evidence.