Choosing not choosing: the indirections of ethnography and educational research

Abstract

This paper argues for the importance of ethnography in the conduct of educational research and the ways in which it can threaten, in a good sense, the certainties and dominance of performativity. The paper uses the poetry of Emily Dickinson to signal the importance of indirection in the conduct of ethnographic work and, more specifically, the ways in which she ‘chooses not to choose’ in her work. Her work is used to illustrate the complexities of meaning in what we see and hear in the conduct of research, the impossibility of mapping (in any ultimate sense) experience and identity and the indeterminacy we need to ‘hold’ in the stories we tell. The intention of the paper is to underline our necessary obsession with language in the processes of educational inquiry. The paper deliberately tries to echo its ‘message’ in refusing to ‘spell things out’ too closely for the reader.

Keywords:

• ethnography
• methodology
• language
• performativity
• audit culture
• Emily Dickinson

Acknowledgements

The authors thank Ian Stronach and Harry Armitage.

Notes

1. Performativity: ‘a totalising transformation of a particular social realm into a system governed by “output” measures, the quantification of qualitative criteria, and an emphasis on technique and procedural rules over content. Such a system has the potential to create an “inhuman” environment that nonetheless can function perfectly because of its technological smoothness. Over time, certain questions just stop being asked; it simply becomes “the way things are done”’ (Smeyers and Barbules, 2011, 9).

2. An initiative with which one of us was recently concerned (Frankham, 2011) suggests that ‘clean language’ should be employed in Master's level teacher development. Clean language ‘helps people to convey their own meaning, free of emotional or other distracting interpretation from others’. This promotes ‘better clarity of communications, neutrality and objectivity (absence of emotional ‘spin’, bias and prejudice), ease of understanding, and cooperative productive relationships’ (NWHC, 2009, p. 43). Personal and professional history, insight from theory, emotion and interpretation are all regarded as likely to ‘contaminate’ the learning process.

3. ‘Getting the right people to become teachers; Developing them into effective instructors; Ensuring that the system is able to deliver the best possible instruction for every child’. (Barber & Mourshed, 2007).

4. This reflects one of the categorisations it is believed the REF assessment exercise in higher education will employ in relation to ‘outputs’.