Complicating Common Sense: The Theory, Practice and Politics of Critical Ethnography in CSCL

1. Complicating Common Sense: The Theory, Practice and Politics of Critical Ethnography in CSCL Pre-Conference Workshop Presentation: Chat Analysis in Virtual Math Teams CSCL 2007 New Brunswick, NJ July 16, 2007 Terrence W. Epperson, Social Sciences Librarian, The College of New Jersey, epperson@tcnj.edu

3. Critical Ethnography Critical ethnography rejects the notion that we can somehow innocently write descriptions of others, whether in the service of understanding or of intervention. Instead, both the terms “we” and “other” are opened to question. Lucy Suchman “Making Work Visible” (1995) The critical ethnographer also takes us beneath surface appearances, disrupts the status quo, and unsettles both neutrality and taken-for-granted assumptions by bringing to light underlying and obscure operations of power and control. Therefore, the critical ethnographer resists domestication and moves from “what is” to “what could be” D. Soyini Madison Critical Ethnography: Method, Ethics, and Performance (2005)

4. Positivism Positivism is based on the idea that empiricism must reach the goal of positive knowledge—that is, prediction, laws of succession and variability. Positivists believe genuine knowledge is founded by direct experience and that experience is composed of social facts to be determined while reducing any distortion of subjectivity (theology or metaphysics) by the presence of the ethnographer. D. Soyini Madison Critical Ethnography: Method, Ethics, and Performance (2005)

5. Classic Ethnography Positivist scientific method Exotic, bounded field site Cartesian dichotomies Interrogation, extraction Neutrality Elicitation, analysis of facts Collective, individual consciousness Common sense as resource Fact/value dichotomy Objective reality is “out there” Context as container Critical Ethnography Reflexive Studying at home, studying up Embodied knowledge Dialog, collaboration Engagement, advocacy Everyone’s an analyst Unity of consciousness and activity Common sense as topic Unity of theory and practice Social construction of reality Context as construct

6. Critical Design Ethnography Because post-modern ethnography privileges ‘discourse’ over ‘text,’ it foregrounds dialogue as opposed to monologue, and emphasizes the cooperative and collaborative nature of the ethnographic situation in contrast to the ideology of the transcendental observer. In fact, it rejects the ideology of ‘observer-observed,’ there being nothing observed and no one who is the observer. There is instead the mutual, dialogical production of a discourse, of a story of sorts. Steven Tyler In Writing culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (1987)

7. Critical Design Ethnography [In critical design ethnography] the goal is to empower groups and individuals, thereby facilitating social change. In contrast to traditional ethnographic research in which the researcher seeks primarily to understand (not change) the conditions of the community being studied, participatory action research assumes a critical stance, in which the researcher becomes a change agent who is collaboratively developing structures intended to critique and support the transformation of the communities being studied. Sasha Barab, et al. “Critical design ethnography: Designing for change.” (2004)

8. Ethnomethodology/Conversation Analysis Durkheim's Aphorism: The objective reality of social facts is sociology’s fundamental principle. Emile Durkheim The Rules of Sociological Method (1895), cited in: Harold Garfinkel Ethnomethodology's Program: Working Out Durkheim's Aphorism (2002)

9. Ethnomethodology/Conversation Analysis Durkheim ceases to be a positivist if we understand that the "objectivity of social facts" was always understood by Durkheim as a social construction. Similarly, Garfinkel could not be a positivist because the study of the process of constructing social reality simply contradicts all of the assumptions made by positivism. Anne Rawls’ Introduction to Ethnomethodology’s Program

10. Ethnomethodology/Conversation Analysis • Lucy Suchman Plans and Situated Actions (revised as Human-Machine Reconfigurations) reuniting EM and ethnography • Emic (insider)/Etic (external) analysis CA directly addresses the issue of describing events from “the native’s” point of view. However, this approach to emic analysis is not based on reports to the anthropologist about categories and appropriate behavior, but instead relies upon the actions of participants themselves in the courses of their social lives. Goodwin and Heritage “Conversation Analysis” Annual Review of Anthropology (1990)

11. Ethnomethodology/Conversation Analysis Rather than impose an analyst’s version of organization on the data, we have shown that, by identifying members’ own organization of activity and using a coding scheme that reflects members’ perspective in the organization of activity, we could produce quantitative results that allow us to understand how sense-making procedures are deployed across multiple interactions of the same sort Alan Zemel, Fatos Xjafa, and Murat Cakir “What’s in the Mix? Combining Coding and Conversation Analysis to Investigate Chat-based Problem Solving” (2007)

12. Ethnomethodology/Conversation Analysis CA transcends the traditional disciplinary boundaries of social anthropology by providing a perspective within which language, culture, and social organization can be analyzed not as separate subfields but as integrated elements of coherent courses of action. Goodwin and Heritage “Conversation Analysis” Annual Review of Anthropology (1990)

14. Critical Ethnographic Perspectives on VMT Many “little pieces” are already in place VMT as design-based research Topics of interest to a much wider audience Relative isolation of EM/CA Let a thousand (carefully coordinated) flowers bloom

15. The Big Picture • So, now what?

16. References Barab, S., Dodge, T., Thomas, M. K., Jackson, C., & Tuzun, H. (2007). Our designs and the social agendas they carry. Journal of the Learning Sciences, 16(2), 263-305. Barab, S., Thomas, M. K., Dodge, T., Squire, K., & Newell, M. (2004). Critical design ethnography: designing for change. Anthropology & Education Quarterly, 35(2), 254-268. Garfinkel, H., & Rawls, A. W. (2002). Ethnomethodology's program : working out Durkeim's aphorism. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Goodwin, C., & Heritage, J. (1990). Conversation analysis. Annual Review of Anthropology, 19, 283-307. Madison, D. S. (2005). Critical ethnography: method, ethics, and performance. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage. Suchman, L. A. (1995). Making work visible. Communications of the ACM, 38(9), 56-64. Suchman, L. A. (2007). Human-machine reconfigurations : plans and situated actions (2nd ed.). Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Press. Tyler, S. A. (1986). Post-modern ethnography: from document of the occult to occult document. In J. Clifford & G. E. Marcus (Eds.), Writing culture: the poetics and politics of ethnography (pp. 122-140). Berkeley: University of California Press. Zemel, A., Xhafa, F., & Cakir, M. (2007). What's in the mix? Combining coding and conversation analysis to investigate chat-based problem solving. Learning and Instruction, 17(4), 405-415.