April 2012
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184 Reads
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59 Citations
Zeitschrift für Erziehungswissenschaft
Pedagogical ethnography This paper attempts to determine what role ethnographic field research can be awarded in the ensemble of possible research methods for Education Science. First the appropriate meaning of the term Pedagogical Ethnography will be discussed. The methodological implications and dilemmas which accompany this definition will be considered. In the second part of the paper, the author will attempt a brief description of the recent history of Ethnography in the German-speaking pedagogical research domain since the middle of the 20th century. What support and what hindrance did Pedagogical Ethnography experience through Educational Science? What encouragement from outside of the discipline had positive effects, what was lacking? Following this, the problem that Anglosaxon Cultural and Social Anthropology — as leading international disciplines — did not get adequate representation in German Ethnography and German Pedagogics will be discussed in detail. The next part of the paper focuses on the biographic framework of scientific research, where Ethnography turns inward on the field researchers and their own life-history. Field research is understood to be a kind of academic Bildungsreise, which is undertaken by people who are themselves on the edge of cultural categories. Finally, the author turns to questions concerning the scientific-journalistic authority of Ethnography. Here a possible schism between a humanistic-participatory and a scientistic-antihumanisit tradition is surmised.