Critical ethnography in education: Origins, current status and new directions

Abstract

Interpretivist movements in anthropology and sociology have recently merged with neo~Marxist and feminist theory to produce a unique genre of research in the field of education known as "critical ethnography. " Critical ethnographers seek research accounts sensitive to the dialectical relationship between the social structural con-straints on human actors and the relative autonomy of human agency. Unlike other interpretivist research, the overriding goal of critical ethnography is to free individ-uals from sources of domination and repression. This review traces the development of critical ethnography in education, including a brief discussion of its view of validity; discusses its current status as a research genre; and describes criticisms and suggests new directions. Critical ethnography in the field of education is the result of the following dialectic: On one hand, critical ethnography has grown out of dissatisfaction with social accounts of "structures " like class, patriarchy, and racism in which real human actors never appear. On the other hand, it has grown out of dissatisfaction with cultural accounts of human actors in which broad structural constraints lik