Beyond records and representations: inbetween writing in educational ethnography

ABSTRACT

Ethnographers are particularly interested in writing. They have paid particular attention to the practices of making field notes and to the ways in which their public texts represent those that they have encountered and studied. To date there has been less attention paid to the kinds of writing that used to make sense of experiences in the field. We call this inbetween writing. By examining our own processes of inbetween writing, and drawing on the work of James Clifford, we have produced a nine-part heuristic of inbetween writing. We argue that the heuristic could be used in research methods education to highlight the importance of writing to ethnographic sense-making and knowledge production.

KEYWORDS:

• Writing
• ethnography
• methodology
• education
• arts education

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. For example, see http://www.mhhe.com/socscience/english/tc/blummalleyhawkins/blumANDhawkins_module.html and http://www.asha.org/Publications/leader/2003/030318/030318b.htm.