Revisiting ‘ethnographic monitoring’ as a force for democratisation and social impact in adult literacy and language learning

ABSTRACT

We document and reflect on the use of ‘ethnographic monitoring’ (Hymes, Dell. 1980a. “Ethnographic Monitoring.” In Language in Education: Ethnolinguistic Essays, edited by Dell Hymes. Washington, DC: Centre for Applied Linguistics) and its deployment for democratisation and social impact within our project Unlock. In Unlock we study the literacy and language learning trajectories of adult Dutch-as-L2 learners in and outside school. The ‘monitoring’ is a collaborative process of researching, co-creating and implementing learning practices together with practitioners and learners. We describe how we situated these practices within an ‘empowering academic collaborative centre’ as a platform for sharing experiences and emerging knowledges amongst academic and non-academic experts.

Furthermore, we engage with more recent calls to substantiate participatory research on language in social life in terms of citizen science/sociolinguistics (i.a. Bucholtz, Mary, Dolores Inés Casillas, and Jin Sook Lee. 2016. “Beyond Empowerment: Accompaniment and Sociolinguistic Justice in a Youth Research Program.” In Sociolinguistic Research: Application and Impact, edited by Robert Lawson, and Dave Sayers. London: Routledge; Rymes, Betsy. 2020. How we Talk About Language: Exploring Citizen Sociolinguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Svendsen, Bente Ailin. 2018. “The Dynamics of Citizen sociolinguistics.” Journal of Sociolinguistics 22: 137–160. doi:10.1111/josl.12276), linguistic citizenship (i.a. Rampton, Ben, Mel Cooke, and Sam Holmes. 2018. “Sociolinguistic Citizenship.” Journal of Social Science Education 17: 68–83; Williams, Quentin E., and Christopher Stroud. 2015. “Language & Citizenship.” Journal of Language and Politics 14: 406–430. doi:10.1075/jlp.14.3.05wil), and ‘pedagogic subjectivation’ (i.a. Simons, M. and Masschelein, J. (2010). “Governmental, Political and Pedagogic Subjectivation: Foucault with Rancière.” Educational Philosophy and Theory 42(5–6): 588–605) to question the possibilities and limitations of our approach. Based on our experience with different collaborative platforms, we argue ethnographic engagement with learners and practitioners has democratic potential. Combined with curated moments of reflection and deliberation, it enables co-analysing insights and negotiating the research process. Arguably, this trajectory can be an avenue towards treating the citizen as a scientist and hold potential for the citizen-scientist to be treated as political subject.

KEYWORDS:

• Ethnographic monitoring
• participatory methods
• language learning
• citizen sociolinguistics

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Assisted in the initial stage by one other ethnographer, Dr. Jenny Louise Van der Aa. Unless specified otherwise, mentions of ‘I’ in the ethnographic material refer to Hannelore and ‘the ethnographers’ refers to both Hannelore and Jenny.

2 All proper names of organisations (Open House, Gaia, etc.) and persons (Elisa, Patricia, etc.) are pseudonyms.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by KU Leuven.