THE ETHNOGRAPHIC STUDY

The Ethnographic Study



The Ethnographic Study

Introduction

During the final quarter of the 20th century, ethnographic research methods became widely accepted in a number of fields, including the field of curriculum studies. In curriculum studies, for instance, acceptance of ethnographic methods permitted researchers to study the so-called hidden curriculum phenomenon empirically and conceptually. Ethnographic methods also served as a foundation for a range of other qualitative research strategies that segments of the curriculum studies field enthusiastically embraced. One example would be curriculum theorist Elliot Eisner's educational criticism approach to inquiry. To be sure, Eisner based his educational criticism approach to inquiry on criticism in the arts, but at least in the early years, educational critics often borrowed and adapted their empirical research strategies from ethnographic research (Wolcott, 2003).

One other difference between the present and the past is that today fields other than anthropology have begun appropriating both the ethnographic research label and the ethnographic methods that sociocultural anthropologists developed to do their field work. As has already been noted, one of these fields is curriculum studies. Like other educational researchers in the final quarter of the 20th century, many curriculum scholars became dissatisfied with the quantitative research methods that the educational research community had been using throughout the previous three quarters of the century. These researchers found a ready-made storehouse of alternative methods—and a well-articulated rationale for using them—in the sociocultural anthropologist's ethnographic research. Some educational researchers within and outside of the subfield of curriculum studies even began to use the term ethnographic research as a synonym for qualitative research (Wolcott, 2003).

Discussion

The Subfield of Education

Because ethnographers have always studied cultural socialization and the phenomenon of cultural transmission, they have always, in a very real sense, studied education. Tribal cultures' formal initiation processes, for example, can legitimately be seen as analogs for schools in contemporary Western culture, even though ethnographies of these tribal “schools” reveal that the sacred cultural beliefs transmitted in them are radically different from the career-oriented formal curricula taught in most Western schools (Wolcott, 2003).

These apparent differences caused some anthropologists to take a closer look at Western education. This closer look resulted in a rethinking of schools and schooling in Western society, a rethinking that portrayed schooling as an extended initiation rite through which students of different races, classes, and genders were socialized into the roles their culture expected them to play. During the 1960s and 1970s, in fact, works such as Ray Rist's The Urban School: A Factory for Failure helped generate and empirically ground numerous discussions in the curriculum field and elsewhere about the so-called hidden curriculum of schools (Wolcott, 2003).

The Emergence of a Formal Field of Study

Not surprisingly, the sort of studies of schools and schooling alluded to above resulted in the creation of an identifiable academic field of study called educational anthropology. The field has its own journal—appropriately named The Journal of Educational Anthropology—as well as a founding hero, Stanford University anthropologist George Spindler. One of Spindler's students, Harry Wolcott, produced an early educational ...