Using an ‘Ethnogram’ to visualize talk in the classroom

ABSTRACT

Ethnograms are used to visualize data gathered from students’ and teachers’ talk in the classrooms of a secondary school in the UK. A sample of talk data is portrayed in three example ethnograms. The ethnograms transform non-visual data into the visual domain for the purpose of analysis using visualization and abstraction. Using ethnograms the sound of talk, as it had occurred during lessons, became seen and thus visualized which students talked most or made the most noise, where teachers positioned themselves and the relationships between students’ talk and teachers’ positions in classrooms. Through visualizing talk, it became possible to see space in the classroom which was louder or quieter and identify students who were silent. Visualizing talk led to alternate perspectives and interpretations of the data and surprising findings to be surfaced. Ethnograms are therefore posited as a potential method for researchers interested in portraying data for further post-collection analysis or to see, for example, sensory data such as mood, emotion or smell. Ethnograms are shown to be an accessible and viable qualitative research method particularly useful for researchers who wish to qualitatively visualize the social interactions and behaviours of people for interpretation.

KEYWORDS:

• Ethnogram
• qualitative visualization
• educational research
• research methods
• student talk
• student questions

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the participants and the anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments.

Copyright

Photographs and illustrations are original artworks created by the author and are used as figures with permission.

Notes

1 An Echo Dot voice assistant is a digital ‘smart speaker’ that responds to spoken instructions. The Echo Dots were used as a data collection tool and were a focus of the one-year research study.

2 Alexa is the name given to the Amazon Echo Dot device’s artificial intelligence voice assistant software.