Identity, Metamorphosis, and Ethnographic Research: What Kind of Story Is Ways With Words?

deCastell, Suzanne; Walker, Tom

doi:10.1525/aeq.1991.22.1.05x1170z

Cited by 27 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 4 publications

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“…As such, it can be thought of as an ethnographic intervention [38] -or better, an ethnographic invention, in that it arose from the cultural context that it studied. Further, its cultural embedment allowed it to function as a feedback mechanism, creating a more self-critical environment for knowledge production and the potential to engage decision capacity.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Ethnographic Invention: Probing the Capacity of Laboratory Decisions

2007

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In an attempt to shape the development of nanotechnologies, ethics policy programs promote engagement in the hope of broadening the scope of considerations that scientists and engineers take into account. While enhancing the reflexivity of scientists theoretically implies changes in technoscientific practice, few empirical studies demonstrate such effects. To investigate the real-time effects on engineering research practices, a laboratory engagement study was undertaken to specify the interplay of technical and social considerations during the normal course of research. The study employed an ethnographic invention in the form of a decision model to structure reflection on ongoing social processes. A short series of interactions with one engineering researcher illustrates the deployment of the model in the form of an interview protocol. The cultural embedment of the protocol allowed it to function as a feedback mechanism, creating a more self-critical environment for knowledge production, and perturbing the system in research-tolerable ways.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Ethnographic Invention: Probing the Capacity of Laboratory Decisions

2007

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“…Since then, Heath has kept in touch with a number of the people from Trackton and followed them across the United States into jobs, new families, and new economic and social contexts. She has also used her new book, Words at Work and Play , to respond to some of the critiques of the earlier work (Assinck, ; deCastell and Walker, ) and her own reply at that time (Heath, ).…”

Section: Words At Work and Playmentioning

confidence: 99%

Society Reschooling

Street

2012

Reading Research Quarterly

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This essay offers a commentary on how the relationship between language and literacy practices in and out of school has been conceptualized. It draws upon two new books in the field. Shirley Brice Heath's new book, Words at Work and Play: Three Decades in Family and Community Life, which makes use of rich ethnographic accounts of children's educational and literacy development across three generations, following her initial study of families in Ways With Words, argues that “everyday, informal learning that all engage in will link with and complement the more formal directions” (p. 169). In The Great Literacy Debate, an edited book from the U.K., the authors argue that the government's National Literacy Strategy there did not succeed, a failure which they claim was to be explained in terms of problems with how literacy was defined. A key issue for the authors, in both the U.S. and the U.K., is their criticism of formal educational approaches to literacy and the recognition that school needs to take account of social factors outside of school in helping pupils acquire the reading and writing skills required by schooling. This essay draws out the notion of two “fields” in the approach to literacy as a way of characterizing the issues raised: the field in which “literacy” is defined and performed in education and the field of New Literacy Studies, with its emphasis on social practice in a wider context than schooling. In an attempt to broaden the international focus of the consideration of the possible link between these two fields—how literacy in everyday life can be linked with literacy in educational contexts—the article then extends to a consideration of a program in which ethnographic perspectives have been applied to help teachers build on adult learners’ prior literacies. The project developed by Rogers and Street (2011) is labeled Learning Empowerment Through Training in Ethnographic Research (LETTER) and has been applied in a number of international contexts, such as India, Ethiopia, and Uganda. The paper concludes by pointing to a direction in which a literacy strategy might build on actual practice of the kind described, taking account of the theoretical and pedagogical principles developed in the books and programs reviewed here.

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“… Heath's Ways With Words (1983) is a prime exemplar here, although no work is completely above criticism (e.g.,Cintron, 1993;deCastell & Walker, 1991). 14 I use the term L2 education here and elsewhere to signify all formal educational contexts in which additional, nonnative languages are learned.…”

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confidence: 99%

TESOL and Culture

Atkinson¹

1999

TESOL Quarterly

202

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Culture is a central yet underexamined concept in TESOL. In comparison to other fields such as anthropology and cultural studies, there has been little serious discussion and critique of the concept in TESOL over the last two decades. This article offers a reassessment of the notion of culture in TESOL, taking recent work in critical anthropology and cultural studies, and to a lesser degree TESOL itself, as a starting point. It proposes a revised view of culture that is intended to serve TESOL practitioners into the 21st century, or that can at least provide a takeoff point from which such a view may be developed. E xcept for language, learning, and teaching, there is perhaps no more important concept in the field of TESOL than culture. Implicitly or explicitly, ESL teachers face it in everything they do. Yet there has been remarkably little direct attention given to the notion of culture in TESOL over the past 15 years. The 1991 volume of TESOL Quarterly, for instance, devoted in part to describing major trends and concepts in the field, featured no general discussion of the concept; and only 10 full-length articles in the journal over the past 15 years have included the term (or alternate forms of the word) in their titles.One possible interpretation of this trend is that the field in general has adopted a received, commonsense view of culture that seems to merit little discussion, as it is so widely held in academia and the world at large. This appears in fact to be the case in several related fields, such as cross-cultural communication and psychology. A second possibility is that the standard notion of culture has fallen into such disrepute in recent years that TESOL practitioners and theorists have gradually come to eschew it largely or altogether, finding other concepts and categoriessuch as identity and difference -by which to treat some of the phenomena that were earlier dealt with under culture. This appears actually to be the case in parts of cultural anthropology and cultural studies.Whatever the truth in regard to general approach or approaches to

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Identity, Metamorphosis, and Ethnographic Research: What Kind of Story Is Ways With Words?

Cited by 27 publications

References 4 publications

Ethnographic Invention: Probing the Capacity of Laboratory Decisions

Ethnographic Invention: Probing the Capacity of Laboratory Decisions

Society Reschooling

TESOL and Culture

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