Teaching Ethnography/ically: Entanglements of Knowing/Being/Doing in a Doctoral Research Course

Abstract

Since the 1970s and 1980s numerous books and articles on the processes and procedures of qualitative research are published each year, ranging from accounts of different traditions, methodologies, and methods to comprehensive treatments of single approaches or specialized research practices. A small corpus of literature exists on the teaching of qualitative inquiry with the teaching of ethnography rarely considered. The primary focus in these research literatures on methodology and how to do research promotes a divide between epistemology and methodology (Eisenhart & Jurow, 2011). Drawing on feminist poststructuralist and posthumanist theoretical tools this article examines the pedagogical practices and the entanglements they produce in a research course on ethnography in education for doctoral students. Through collective memory work among five faculty members and one graduate teaching assistant, we offer a historical overview and design of the yearlong course within a doctoral program in language, literacy, and culture and, through writing and diffractive reading as analysis, offer commentary on the entanglements of hanging out and hanging loose, going through thick and thin, and disturbing knowledge/power dynamics. This collective remembering and analytical work demonstrates that students’ understanding of ethnographic research as epistemological-methodological-ontological practice as the entanglements produce new knowing/doing/being.