Hitt CCR 635 27 February 2012

Ethnography: Academic Writing & Literacy Studies

Lillis & Ethnography.

What is involved and at stake in academic writing?

Ethnography as method.
Talk around text: talk is collected and analyzed as data. 359 + Benefits Talk allows researchers to look beyond the text and value participants perspectives (361). Limitations Writer-insider talk only provides glimpses of writers perspectives. Contextual understanding is limited. *Academic writing research treats text & talk differently (361).

Ethnography as methodology.
One way of avoiding some of the limitations to talk around text is to use talk methodologies aimed explicitly at developing longer conversations between writer and researcher (362). Cyclical dialogue: 1) opens up space to explore academic writing, and 2) helps to develop shared information/discourse. 363-5
+ Benefits Thick description: observation that forms a detailed picture of places, people, and resources (367). Thick participation: the researcher establishes trust, providing opportunities for more data (372). Limitations These include considerable debate on a number of counts, notably the need to avoid nave or realist descriptivism or the parallel danger of reading micro data through macro social/critical theory (372-3).

Ethnography as deep theorizing.

The notion of practice is used as a way of linking specific instances of language use with what individuals, as socially situated actors, do, both at the level of context of situation and at the level of context of culture (374). Linguistic ethnography: language and the social world are mutually shaping (Rampton). Indexicality: how language bits index aspects of social context. Orientations: how people orient to what is said and written socio-historically (376).

tl;dr
To move away from a container notion of context and toward contextualization, we need to engage with ethnography as methodology (381).

Hitt CCR 635 27 February 2012

Purcell-Gates & Literacy Practice.

Research strategies and techniques havent been shared widely enough for us to build on each others work in productive and principled ways (440).

The Cultural Practices of Literacy Study (CPLS) does 3 things: 1. collects data on literacy practices across cultures, 2. stores data in a database for future cross-case analyzing and theorizing, 3. provides models of literacy instruction (440). Theoretical framework: Literacy is always socio-culturally situated within relationship of power & ideology (441). New Literacy Studies

Common data collection procedures: field & participant observation of literacy engagement semi-structured interviews photo documentation of public texts and textual artifacts (441-42).

How does the CPLS collect, store, and provide models?

1. Coding: Literacy practice data from the CPLS case studies are coded at the literacy event levelobservable or reported instances of reading and writing (442). Social activity domain: Where did the literate act occur? Genre theory: Whats the social function of the text?

2. Function & Purpose: Within genre theory, the terms function and purpose are often used interchangeably in discussions of the semiotic relations between features and structures of texts (form) and the function, or social purposes, of genres (446-47). Driving the composition: What is the writer trying to do? Function codes: How do literacy practices vary across cultures? Purpose codes: How do literacy events mediate social activity? 3. Database: Responding to the need in cross-case analysis to maintain the layered complexity for each case as well as the requirement that each case be understood on its own terms, we have built a database that will allow this as well as allow principled crosscase analyses (452). two data types: 1) case study data, and 2) flat database
Is it possible to analyze literacy practice data across contexts? (451)

Works Cited

Lillis, Theresa. Ethnography as Method, Methodology, and Deep Theorizing: Closing the Gap Between Text and Context in Academic Writing Research. Written Communication 25.3 (July 2008): 353-88. Purcell-Gates, Victoria, Kristen H. Perry, and Adriana Briseo. Analyzing Literacy Practice: Grounded Theory to Model. Research in the Teaching of English 45.4 (May 2011): 439-58.

Hitt CCR 635 27 February 2012

Q & A.
Lillis made it clear that she values ethnography as methodology over method, and though she references limitations to methodology (e.g. considerable debate on a number of counts), she quickly glosses over them. Are there particular contexts when ethnography as method is more appropriate? What are the limitations of ethnography as methodology? What would it mean to do ethnography as deep theorizing within a Rhet/Comp context? Lillis acknowledges that it is both a radical (355) and abstract (374) notionAre there examples we can model? What do we make of the goals, practices, and uses of the CPLS project? What are the benefits of having a database of various literacy practices? The limitations? What does it mean to transplant data (that we didnt conduct) into our own studies? And to echo Jason in his blog post, what are the ethics of the CPLS database?