Exploring Ethnographic Logics in Languaculture Groups:

1. Exploring Ethnographic Logics in Languaculture Groups: Developing A Transparent Logic of Inquiry International Research Methods Summer School Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick, Iremland June 14, 2013

2. Permission to use these materials is granted. We request a written statement about how these will be used and would like you to add to this document. We are hoping that this will become an open source guidebook Judith L. Green Gevirtz Graduate School of Education University of California Santa Barbara Center for Education Research on Literacy & Inquiry in Networking Communities (LINC) With LeAnn G. Putney University of Nevada Las Vegas With contributions by members of the Santa Barbara Classroom Discourse Group 1990-present

3. Interactional Ethnography An Ethnographic logic of inquiry Explores how members of a sustaining social group construct langaculture(s) through their everyday interactions within and across times, events and actors A discourse-in-use approach to studying the social construction of processes and practices of everyday life in social groups

4. Why View Ethnography As Epistemology —A Philosophy of Inquiry? • We begin the discussion of the logic of inquiry with recent dialogues at the intersection of education and anthropology about ethnography as a philosophy of inquiry (Anderson-Levitt, 2006) and as epistemology, not method (Agar, 2006b; Heath & Street, 200x; Green, Dixon & Zaharlick, 2003; Green & Bloome, 1997; Heath 1982). • The view of ethnography as epistemology frames the need to examine the interdependent relationship between theories of language and culture guiding the methods, given that • theory cannot be separated from method, • theory implicates methods, and • methods constitute theory/theories about the phenomenon/a under study (Bateson, cited in Birdwhistell, 1977). • This ethnographic epistemology, Agar (2006b) argues, constitutes an iterative, recursive and non-linear process of inquiry that requires abductive reasoning.

5. Languacultures, rich points and frame clashes • From this perspective, the ethnographer, like any newcomer entering an ongoing community or social group, brings his/her own languaculture to the task of perceiving, interpreting, and understanding what is happening; • The ethnographer’s languaculture Agar calls languaculture1 (LC1).

6. Frame Clashes • When the ethnographer cannot understand what is happening, a frame clash occurs that makes visible cultural knowledge and meanings of the group and individuals-within-the group that differ from those of the ethnographer. • At such points, what Agar (2006a) calls rich points, a potential opportunity occurs for learning what insiders understand and know, or how they interpret the interaction. He argues that the insiders’ languaculture is languaculture 2 for the ethnographer (and newcomers alike).

7. Agar argues that the ethnographer’s languaculture is languaculture 1 and the group being entered is languaculture 1.

8. From Frame Clash to Understanding: Locating the Roots and Routes of • Given the ethnographer’s goal of constructing warranted claims about insider meanings, actions, knowledge, processes and practices, the ethnographer needs to wonder abouthow the observed phenomena that led to the frame clash were developed by members and how such knowledge was made available to new members. • These questions require the ethnographer to explore the roots and routes leading to what may appear to an insider as ordinary actions, meanings, or interpretations, but which, for an ethnographer, lead to a frame clash between what he/she expected and what was experienced.

9. Mapping the roots and routes This analytic process requires in time analysis of the processes, practices, sources of knowledge, among other cultural phenomena constructed by participants of a social group The in time analysis provides a referential and social analysis that the ethnographer uses as an anchor for backward mapping to the roots ofor forward mapping in time to uncover routes to cultural knowledge necessary to understand the phenomena as members do (Green, Skukauskaite, & Baker, 2012). In this way, the ethnographer follows the data and moves backward, forward, and at times sideways, across times, events, and spaces to uncover the interrelated web of knowledge necessary to resolve the frame clash.

10. Rich Point: What is this an artifact of?

11. Why Sociolinguistics – Ethnography Of Communication? • Sociolinguistic (ethnography of communication) theory provides ways of making visible the ways in which individuals-within-the-collective as well as social groups-within-the-collective • Contribute to • Interpret • understand • participate in • learn through (or fail to learn) What participants socially propose, recognize, acknowledge, interactionallyaccomplish as socially significant that shape what members can • Know • Do • Understand • Predict • And/or use as a linguistic, cultural, social and/or material resource in future moments in time or events across time and actors

12. Situating, Contextualizing and Grounding Analyses Constructing warranted accounts of the developing languacultureinvolves examining • Who can say or do what • To and with whom • When and where • In what way(s) • For what purpose(s) • Under what condition • Drawing on or using what cultural, material, social and linguistic resources • With what outcome • And, with what consequences for By identifying the intertextual and intercontextual relationships within and across times, actors and events, the ethnographer examines the • Roles and relationships • Norms and expectations and • Rights and obligations that shape, and are shaped by, • what members say to, and do with each other, in what ways… with what consequences for…

13. (Re)orienting the focus • Scene: T shifts orientation from talking to a coach who had entered to take a group of students out of the class for testing to talking to the whole class sitting at their desks okay so you are right when you talked about asking questions about la paloma cuz you've been there you have a little bit of history about that place

14. Exploring What Students Inscribe The first essay was written by Israel, a student who entered the class half-way through the school year (Castanheira, et al., 2007). As you read this identify what Israel inscribes: • Our community has a lot to do over the year. Sometimes our community gets different during the year. What I mean is like the first day I walked in the door. I was new and nervous just me thinking who am I trying to make friends. I came in the door. Other students explained how to do the Writer's Workshop. I didn't understand the three logs. Other kids and the teacher explained. Now I'm just part of everyone else (Israel, 1992).

15. What Does Arturo Inscribe? The second essay was selected from a class in 1995 (three years after Israel’s). We selected Arturo’s essay from published work from our ongoing program of research (Yeager & Green, 2008) to make visible how Arturo viewed the situated and constructed nature of language-culture relationships within the developing collective (the Tower Community). Community • In our tower community, we have our own language as well as the languages we bring from outside (like Spanish and English) which helped us make our own language. So, for example, someone that is not from our classroom community would not understand what insider, outsider, think twice, notetaking/notemaking, literature log and learning log mean. If Ms. Yeager says we are going to “make a sandwich”, the people from another class or room would think that we were going to make a sandwich to eat. Of course we aren’t, but that is part of our common language. • To be an insider, which means a person from the class, you also need to know our Bill of Rights and Responsibilities which was made by the members of the Tower community. And if Ms. Yeager said, “Leave you H.R.L. on your desk,” people would not understand unless someone from the Tower community told him/her and even if we told him/her that H.R.L. stands for ‘Home Reading Log,’ they still would not understand what it is and what you write in it. If we told a new student, “It’s time for SSL and ESL,” he would not understand. • These words are all part of the common Tower community language and if someone new were to come in, we would have to explain how we got them and what they mean. We also would tell them that we got this language by reports, information, investigations, and what we do and learn in our Tower community. (Arturo 1995).

16. Formulating Collective Actions so i want you all to participate in coming up with the themes what theme that you want us to keep in mind when we go to one of those places to research it

17. Why Ethnography of Communication – An Interactional Sociolinguistic Perspective? • Interactional Sociolinguistics (cf. Gumperz) draws on ethnography of communication to identify • How the local patterns of discourse-in-use within and across groups (disciplines, events, etc.) lead to a situated set of communicative interpretations demands and communicative repertoires • How the ways in which members construct and display social and academic identities through their choice of ways of communicating and participating shape potential identities for others as well as self

18. On Contextualization Cues • Interactional Sociolinguistics (cf. Gumperz) takes a hearer’s perspective, focusing on the ways in which people use contextualization cues to communicate meaning and intention • Pitch • Stress • Pause • Juncture • Intonation contour • Proxemics (distance between and orientation of people) • Kinesics (body movement, including gesture) • Eye gaze • Lexical choices • Grammatical choices • To identify what members propose to each other, how they

19. Hymes On Ethnography of Linguistic Work: Focus on Social Life • Hymes argues that the linguistic aspect of ethnography in the study social life requires the researcher to ask: • What communicative means, verbal and other, were used by participants to conduct and interpret a particular “bit of social life” • What is their mode of organization from the standpoint of verbal repertoires, • What counts as appropriate and inappropriate, better and worse, uses of these means, and • How are skills entailed by the means acquired, and to whom they are accessible.

20. Hymes On Ethnography of Linguistic Work: Focus on Language • In contrast, Hymes argues that if one starts from language in one’s study, the ethnography of linguistic work requires one to ask: • Who employs these verbal means, to what end, when, where and how? • What organization do they have from the standpoint of patterns of social life?

21. On What Ethnomethodology Adds To Our Logic of Inquiry • In this section, we shift the angle of vision from ethnography as a philosophy of inquiry to an interactional perspective grounded primarily in ethnomethodology. • Our goal is to add to the logic of inquiry an orienting perspective on ways of conceptualizing the relationships among, and accomplishments of, actors within a social system as well as of the social system itself as an on-going social construction. • These conceptual arguments from ethnomethodology provide a theoretical language and associated principles of operation for examining how particular moments in classrooms are socially accomplished in and through the interactions among participants.

22. On Ethnomethodology as Social Accomplishment? • Social Model: A Sociological Perspective • (Ethnomethodology)(James Heap, 1991) • A sociological approach to understanding action/discourse-as-action can illuminate what might otherwise be considered hidden dimensions and relationships, if we accept that: • The individual is defined as an actor in a social system • It is imperative to define situation as formulated by the actors • An actor defines his/her situation through interactions with others • An actor acts consciously • An actor has preferences • Each actor aligns his/her actions to the actions of others by ascertaining what they are doing or intend to do—in other words, by “getting at” the meaning of their acts • Social structures are stable and governed by rules (norms, values), which may, or may not, be complete and are observable through the actions of others

23. One added concept (Santa Barbara Classroom Discourse Group,1992): Blumer, a symbolic interactionist argues that people • Establish • Check • Modify • Re-establish • Suspend norms and expectations. Thus, norms and expectations are put in place and held in place, they are not static—once in place, always in place, but are continually being socially proposed, recognized, interactionally accomplished, and shown to be socially significant

24. Formulating the Social Task: Framing what is to be accomplished okay i want you to develop some themes for some questions some general theme what's an example of a theme that you might want to think about having when we go to these places we're all going to have the same themes i want you to know that

25. Brady Takes Action/T Repairs Frame Clash Brady to T (class as overhearing audience): B: what kind of plants do you have T: okay so one of them is plant life that touches this concept so that’s wonderful so how can we ask well we’ll come up with questions later so plant life at that particular habitat

26. Signaling Closings & Opening Next Steps so far we have plants that’s good what’s another one St raises hand T: Kari

27. How does this relate to learning and development? • It is precisely the experience of schooling that will transform the individual through the process of cultural development, enlarging the cultural capital of each one, and by this, transforming the cultural capital of the community. • The notion of the area of potential development[emphasis added] is the key element in this entire process: • It encompasses the most immediate forms of development (which can be identified with the more current interpretation of the zone of proximal development) and • also the possibilities that are held in the "future" and that reside in the knowledge fund of the collectivity and the forms that are being developed as a result of the cultural process of the group in which the individual is inserted. • We have two dimensions of development: one that resides in the individual and the other in the collectivity. • Both are interdependent and create each other. • Historically created possibilities of cultural development are themselves transformed by the processes through which individuals acquire the cultural tools that are or become available in their context.(Lima, 1995: 447-448)

28. Conceptualizing Language - Culture Relationships

29. Why Interactional Ethnography? Interactional ethnography is theoretically driven a approach to the study of classrooms as cultures Central to our approach to the study of culture is Michael Agar’s argument that language and culture cannot be separated and constitute languaculture. Building on this perspective, we understand culture as a conceptual system, whose surface appears in words of people’s language and actions across times and events

30. Languaculture: Culture Happens • Agar argues that • languain languaculture is about discourse, not just words and sentences, and • culture in languaculture is above meanings that include, but go well beyond, what the dictionary and the grammar offer.

31. Languaculture Happens in Rich Points • Agar argues that rich points happen when, suddenly, you (or others) observing what is happening don’t know what’s going on or what is required to participate and/or to produce • Rich points signal where the languacultural action is

32. Rich Points Make Visible Differences in Understandings & Cultural Practices • When people do not share a common understanding of • what they are doing together, • what something means, and/or • what the expectations for action are, what occurs is called a frame clash (clash in frames of reference or interpretation) • A frame clash becomes a rich point, if people actively explore what happening and what is contributing to the differences in practices and/or understandings • Language is loaded with rich points, since language carries most of the rich and complicated symbolic work in which people engage

33. Jared’s Frame Clash to Rich Point • POINT OF VIEW: (Social Science Activity ‑ 3 Pigs project - conversation reconstructed by the teacher . This frame clash occurred prior to Jared revising his drawing of the three pigs’ events from the point of view of an ethnographer or detective)

36. Why Critical Discourse Analysis? • We draw on Critical Discourse Analysis(cf. Fairclough) to examine • How the discourse choices of the writers/speakers shape, and in turn are shaped by, the developing • oral, • written and/or • visual text being constructed by members of a class • How discourse choice simultaneously represent a text, a social practice, and a discourse process (cf. Fairclough) • How the choices among available discourse of writers/speakers inscribe particular social identities for self and others (cf., Ivanic)

38. Constructing Data: Making Visible the Invisible Discourse and Cultural Practices

39. Transcribing as (Re)presenting • Ochs (1979) and Green, Franquíz & Dixon (1998) argue that the ways in which language is transcribed represents the theories that researchers have about • social relationships (e.g., linear, collaborative, hierarchical, equal), • units of analysis (e.g., utterances, turns, topics, action sequences) • the ways in which units are related (e.g., continguous, tied across time, • what is being socially accomplished, produced, and constructed as a text (interaction as the construction of texts)

40. On The Dialogic Nature of Meaning Construction • Bloome & Egan-Robertson (1993), drawing on Bakhtin (1986) and Fairclough (1992), provide a conceptual argument about the ways in which language is a dynamic and complex process of meaning construction central to our developing logic of inquiry: • The meaning of an utterance or other language act derives not from the content of its words, but rather from its interplay with what went before and what will come later. When language is viewed as part of an ongoing dialogue, as part of how people act and react to each other, then it is seen not as meaning per se but as meaningful, strategic action that is materially realized. • That is, in order to engage in a dialogue, regardless of whether that dialogue is a face-to-face conversation or something else (e.g., an exchange of letters, this article), people must do so in ways such that others can understand their actions and intentions in the event. (p. 309)

42. An individual event map is, itself, embedded in and part of the larger flow of conduct of a group-- a part-whole relationship. • By locating events in time and space, it is possible to make visible where, in relation to what other types of activity, a particular event occurred.

43. IdentifyingPart-whole relationships:

44. Contrastive Analysis: What Counts as Academic Work Across Disciplines? • Hymes (1977) describes the task of analysis of ways of speaking as one of contrastive relevance. • By using a contrastive analysis approach, the ethnographer is able to demonstrate the functional relevance of the "bit of life, or language and actions within that bit." • This approach provides a way of demonstrating That a particular choice counts as a difference within the frame of reference... to discover what meaning and choices of meaning lead to changes in form. One works back and forth between form and meaning in practice to discover the individual devices and codes of which they are a part

45. On Event Mapping • Event mapping is a way of (re)presenting the flow of conduct between and among members of a social group. • Event maps (re)present the ways in which members structure their world in and through their interactions within a common activity. • Shifts in activity are identified retrospectively through contrastive analysis. • We contrast what is happening at one point in time with what follows it and precedes it.

47. Tracing Intertextually Tied Events Across Times and Configuration of Actors

48. Contrastive Analyses: Levels of Scale • Contrast can occur at any level of analysis, the size of the unit does not matter. The key is to show the relevance of this contrast in understanding what members are doing together. • An ethnographic perspective, then, involves analyzing the choices of words and actions that members of a group use to engage with each other within and across time, actions, and activity. • From this perspective, we construct (re)presentations of different patterns identified across times, events and actors

49. Discourse Practices by Subject Area (From Castanheira et al, 2001)

50. Domain Analysis: X is a kind of Y (Spradley, 1980)