A focus on time-lapse ethnography: learning to teach

ABSTRACT

This article makes the claim that developing ethnographic work through follow-up interviews can add to our understanding of researched phenomena and explores how using concepts from Bourdieu and theories on the social construction of time strengthen the research design and add a stronger longitudinal diachronic element to data analysis. Extending an ethnographic study of learning to teach by interviewing respondents nine years after the study and after the completion of their teacher education course is shown to develop insights around the initial research findings by focusing on the temporal aspects of data. Adopting this methodological approach can develop small-scale qualitative work and contribute to an accumulation of research findings to avoid simply revisiting familiar research ground.

KEYWORDS:

• Longitudinal ethnography
• social construction of time
• learning to teach
• capital

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Alaster Scott Douglas http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0972-4315

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a Santander Scholarship & Mobility Support Grant.