“What’s he writing in there?” Reciprocal field relations and relational curiosity in ethnographies of education

The notion of the ethnographer as participant observer, as an active agent rather than passive observer within the research field, is well established within conversations about method and methodology. Less well explored is the extent to which the inherent curiosity and inquisitiveness of the ethnographer might be reciprocated: how might this reciprocity be established and how might it contribute to the construction of knowledge? Through a focus on the ways in which one of the most visible aspects of ethnographic field work – writing field notes – was made sense of and then interrogated by research respondents during an eight-month ethnography of workplace learning, this article argues that reciprocal field relations characterised by a willingness for the researcher to be interrogated about their work in a manner akin to the ways in which the researched are, here described as relational curiosity, both sustains good ethical engagement in the field and enhances the empirical warrant of the ethnography

The Assessment of Trainee Teachers: An Ethnography.

Dominant discourses of quality assurance in UK higher education posit assessment as a transparent and rigorous process through the ascription of the two key and inter-related concepts of validity and reliability. Drawing on ethnographic research into the assessment procedures and practices of one teacher-training course in England (a part-time course for teachers in the learning and skills sector which is delivered on a franchise basis across a network of further education colleges), this thesis demonstrates that claims to assessment validity and reliability are contestable. The thesis draws on three complementary social practice theories (communities of practice, new literacy studies and actor-network theory) in order to reveal assessment as being a complex, localised practice characterised by contingency and improvisatory behaviours on the part of both tutors and students, mediated by a variety of genres of textual artefacts. These divergent and complex practices are shown to disrupt dominant managerialist discourses of assessment practice in higher education. They are also shown to disrupt dominant definitions of learning, teaching and assessment in higher education, which predominantly rest on models of individual cognition and transferable skills, and which this thesis critiques through the use of social practice accounts of learning within communities of practice. The thesis demonstrates that assessment is more contingent and complex than dominant discourses of assessment practice in HE allow, thereby problematising claims to reliability and validity. The thesis makes contributions to current literature and research in two ways. Firstly, it concludes by offering a series of suggestions as to how assessment validity and reliability might be enhanced or reframed. Secondly, it demonstrates how communities of practice theory can be used critically to explore pedagogic activity, including assessment, within formal educational settings

Le Sujet de l’Acteur. An Anthropological Outlook on Actor-Network Theory

In the past few years, the Actor-Network Theory of French philosopher and sociologist Bruno Latour has become a hotly debated topic in the humanities. From a philosophical perspective, his theory of things keeps being reevaluated: is it possible for ‘Human and Non-Human Actors’ (Latour) to be analyzed as equally important actors? Does Latour’s theory of a simultaneous ‘agency’ of things and concepts indeed move beyond a subject-object relation? If it does, how far does it in fact go? Is it possible to develop a common new ontology by moving away from the notion of substance, and instead reducing any kind of entities to what they reveal in the course of their (inter)action? The contributions to Le Sujet de l’Acteur are looking for interferences between the idea of ‘agency’ and cultural dynamics. How can we relate questions of (social) action with those of cultural manifestations? Focusing on questions of symmetry or dissymmetry between the world of ‘things’ and ‘human beings,’ the volume includes contributions from the fields of social studies, literary studies, and philosophy. Although the contents are categorized in systematic and historical aspects, all contributions draw on the importance of case studies for the theoretical framework, either starting with systematic questions that are then answered exemplary, or starting from historical cases as well as theoretical options

Professionalism in Further Education: International Perspectives

Notions of professionalism, and what makes a professional, are problematic in the context of further education teachers, and this is the case both in the UK and across international boundaries. Despite arguments that the FE teacher is, in fact, a ‘dual professional’ (e.g. see Orr, 2008), the ‘Professionalisation’ agenda in England and Wales (Standards Unit, 2004) implied that FE teachers lacked professionalism, and this made them ‘poor’ teachers, something which could be addressed through more rigorous, ‘professional’ standards and training. Similar arguments are now emerging in Australia, where the mandatory ITT qualification for the TAFE (FE) sector is a Certificate IV Training and Assessment, broadly equivalent in level and content to the now defunct PTLLS qualification in England and Wales. This paper explores notions of professionalism UK and Australian contexts with contrasts drawn between voluntarism/regulatory frameworks and professional body frameworks. It is located within a broad range of literature exploring contemporary concepts of professionalism amongst further education teachers, including work by, for example, Gleeson and James (2007), Lucas (2004), Lucas and Nasta (2010), and Tummons (2014a, 2014b). In terms of empirical evidence, the paper reports on data drawn from a documentary analysis of government policy documents, standards for the education of teachers, and regulatory frameworks in both England and Australia. It contrasts the understandings implied through voluntary and professional frameworks, and those published by professional bodies. The paper finds strong similarities between the conception and training for FE teachers in both countries. Documentary analysis implies that whilst there is an expectation and assumption that FE teachers are, and should be, professional, this is not necessarily translated through Initial Teacher Training requirements, some of which fail to address concepts of professionalism at all. Further, it offers evidence to suggest that where notions of professionalism are addressed, the concept is described in largely reductive and utilitarian terms. The paper moves on to consider the implications of this for teachers, students, and wider practice within the sector. It argues that meaningful understandings of the notion of professional, which are effectively applied in practice, are fundamental to broader understandings of key issues in further education, such as those associated with in/equalities and in/exclusion in education contexts. The paper concludes that such understandings are unlikely to be drawn from utilitarian, CBT based teacher-training programmes

Mapping academic practice: a Latourian inquiry into a set of lecture slides

How is academic work accomplished within a curriculum that has been established through a digital education infrastructure, and what, exactly, does an academic member of staff do within this digital context? Reflecting on the empirical findings of a three-year ethnography of a distributed medical education curriculum delivered across two university campuses in Canada, this paper demonstrates that the ways in which work that has typically been characterised as academic is enacted within this curriculum, positioned as a socio-technological network, through a heterogeneous network of people and materials. Drawing on the philosophical anthropology of Bruno Latour, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence, this paper positions the individual academic member of staff as one amongst many network elements within the digital platform across which academic work is generated and circulated. The paper argues that studies of digitally-mediated higher education can equally rest on small and localised instances of practice as well as on cross-boundary or institutional explorations, and offers ways of thinking that are informed by Latour’s philosophical anthropology

“I’ve got a mountain of paperwork to do!” literacies and texts in a cycle technicians’ workshop

Derived from an ethnography of working cultures and practices at a bike shop in the North of England, this paper rests on a critical application of social practice theories of literacy (Literacy Studies) in order to explore the complex and heterogeneous literacy practices of cycle technicians. Drawing on a series of vignettes constructed from the ethnographic data, the paper demonstrates the variety of experiences of both formal and informal learning that underpin the literacy practices of the cycle workshop. In addition to providing an account of a qualified and specialist workforce that is under-represented in extant research literature, the paper also provides an exemplar for ethnographic research as a vehicle for exploring literacy practices. The paper also suggests that ongoing debates concerning transferable workplace skills can be enriched through considering situated, contextualised literacy events. The paper concludes by arguing that for cycle technicians, and perhaps other occupations as well, Literacy Studies can generate rich and complex accounts that unpack the textual practices found alongside the occupational expertise and competence being observed

Theorising the everyday work of cycle mechanics

Drawing on interim findings from an ethnography of a cycle mechanics’ workshop, this article demonstrates how the work of the mechanics rests on not only specific and contextualised craft expertise but also on distributed networks of both people and things, within which highly specialist instances of expertise or competence manifest alongside more generic, even mundane, instances of subjectivised, experiential knowledge or habit. Through an analysis of ethnographic data using a composite theoretical framework, designed as a mosaic consisting of three different but equal components, the article provides descriptions and theorisations of everyday work that reconcile contextualised situated accounts of craft expertise with the wider sociotechnological and cultural networks within which such contextualised spaces are located