Well I’m Jean Conteh and I’m a senior lecturer in primary education and I have a

very long experience of teaching, came into being an academic with many years of
primary teaching and I think in all of my research I would say it was ethnographic
and I’m often asked what does that mean because that word is used in many
different ways. And I think sometimes PhD students and research students are quite
shy of ethnographic research because they think it takes a long time and it’s very
involving and it’s very difficult to do in a sort of fairly small scale project. Ethnography
comes from the tradition of anthropology and so you imagine setting off to some
distant sort of country and spending years collecting artefacts and so on.
But it’s not really quite like that, I think in ethnography you can kind of take an
ethnographic approach to your research and I would say it was a very valuable way
to think about doing research for people in education and for people who are
teachers or who’ve been teachers. There’s a quote from someone called Hugh
Mehan who says that anthropologists you know, historically set off to make the
strange cultures familiar, whereas ethnographers try to make familiar cultures
strange. So I think that’s a very nice nutshell because what it means to me is that
you’re often trying to research something that you actually know quite a bit about
already, because of your background, professionally or personally or whatever, but
what you’ve got to do as taking an ethnographic position, is try to detach yourself
and understand your own perspectives so that you can think about the perspectives
of other people, other participants. So, an ethnographic approach would be one
where you would be very aware and you would try to analyse your own sort of
identity and your own kind of knowledge that you’re bringing to the situation. And
then one key aspect of this approach would be that you try to then understand all the
perspectives of the different participants.
So if it’s in the classroom it would be the teacher, any other adult help, the children of
course, and what are all these different groups of people thinking and understanding
about what’s going on. So that leads to another kind of famous quote about
ethnography which is, I think every essay I read says it’s a thick description and what
does that mean? Because another criticism often is ethnography, oh it’s just
descriptive, all you do is describe things. So that might kind of make people feel well
it’s not a very kind of analytical critical kind of methodology but actually describing
things can be very critical and very analytic and I think the idea of a thick description
which is from someone called Clifford Gates is that you try to think about it as layers,
different layers of things that are going on.
So not just the participants with what they might be thinking, how they might be
viewing the situation but also what are the layers maybe outside of the immediate
context that might be influencing what’s happening. So what are the policies in
relation to this particular educational kind of phenomenon, what are the resources,
what are the relationships between people that are outside of the immediate setting?
So you get this idea of the layers that surround and weave through the context. So
ethnography you know often you start with something that seems quite small and
you end up going not just deeper and deeper into it but also kind of higher and
higher above it, into all of these layers. So this sometimes people will call taking a
critical stance on ethnography because you’re trying to understand all the political,
social, historical and cultural influences on a particular perspective. So I think that if
you take those particular angles on any research question, it gives you this sense
that you’re taking an ethnographic position to try to understand things in a much
different kind of way than if you took a more positivist stance or a different kind of
theoretical starting point. It means that you obviously have to spend time and the
kinds of data collection that might be useful, participant observation is the key, and
you know often ethnography and participant observation are seen as more or less
parallel, interviews, field notes, just collecting, writing what you see and what you
hear all around you.