Microethnography in the Classroom
- PDF / 142,800 Bytes
- 16 Pages / 439.37 x 663.307 pts Page_size
- 44 Downloads / 283 Views
M I C R O E T H N O G R A P H Y I N T H E C L A S S R O O M 257
MICROETHNOGRAPHY IN THE CLASSROOM
Microethnography is concerned with the local and situated ecology among participants in face-to-face interactional engagements constituting societal and historical experience. Ethnographic microanalysis of interaction, as microethnography is also known, aims at describing how interaction is socially and culturally organized in particular situational settings such as classrooms. Microethnographers typically work with audiovisual machine recordings of naturally occurring social encounters to investigate in minute detail what interactants do in real time as they co-construct talk-in-interaction in everyday life. As such, microethnography offers a methodology for the investigation of face-to-face interaction and a particular point of view on language use in multiparty arrangements in complex modern societies (Erickson, 1992, 2004; McDermott, Gospodinoff, and Aron, 1978). This view stresses that the social and cultural organization of human communicative action (Erickson and Shultz, 1982) involves conversationalists contained in physical bodies, occupying space in simultaneously constraining and enabling social situations, who must reflexively make sense of each others’ actions as they act, without the benefit of an interpretive system that is shared completely among interlocutors. E A R LY D E V E L O P M E N T S
As an interdisciplinary research approach, microethnography has intellectual origins in distinct research traditions that converge in their interest in aspects of the organization of human social interaction. Among early influences is context analysis, the collaborative work of a multidisciplinary research group, including Gregory Bateson and Ray Birdwhistell, which pioneered the use of audiovisual records as primary sources of research data to study communicative interaction (see Kendon, 1990). Their work fundamentally shaped microethnography’s commitment to the examination of nonverbal behavior and the unspoken activities of listenership in the study of face-to-face interaction (e.g., Erickson and Shultz, 1977/1981; McDermott and Gospodinoff, 1979/1981; Streeck, 1983). A second intellectual root is the ethnography of communication, from which microethnography inherited a linguistic anthropological concern with culturally appropriate forms of
K. A. King and N. H. Hornberger (eds), Encyclopedia of Language and Education, 2nd Edition, Volume 10: Research Methods in Language and Education, 257–271. #2008 Springer Science+Business Media LLC.
258
P E D R O M. G A R C E Z
talk and with variation in the function-form relationship in language use within and across speech communities (e.g., Michaels, 1981; Shultz, Florio, and Erickson, 1982; see Wortham, Linguistic Anthropology of Education, Volume 3). Yet a third source of insight is Goffman’s studies on the “situational” (Goffman, 1981, p. 84) character of the interactional order. Based on the view that social interaction occurs within constraints of what particip
Data Loading...
