Telling the Story...

Ethnographic research's aim to "describe human behavior holistically" holds a lot of appeal for me, especially when it comes to educational research (92).  Given that teaching and learning occur and students and teachers exist "within social and cultural contexts" it seems that our best chance of making sense of things, figuring out the how and the why, is to recognize and explain these contexts as thoroughly as possible (92).  Understanding these contexts, we can come closer to understanding outcomes within them, and perhaps even move towards the possibility of more positive outcomes in the future.  It's odd, but reading the Purcell-Gates article and Emily's earlier post and thinking about the intentions of ethnographic research, I started to think of a piece of a Robert Penn Warren poem I really love:

All items listed above belong in the world
In which all things are continuous,
And are parts of the original dream which
I am now trying to discover the logic of.  This
Is the process whereby pain of the past in its pastness
May be converted into the future tense

Of joy.


Ethnography acknowledges that we each live in a world in which all things are continuous and tries to discover the logic of that world for its particular research subjects in their particular context.  Reading about Experimental and Quasi-Experimental Research, as Vellutino and Schatschneider explained the efforts taken to insure validity and isolate a given variable enough to establish a causal relationship, I couldn't help wondering if you could ever really do that in educational research.  It seems to me one field in which almost nothing occurs in isolation.  I find ethnographic studies particularly suited to educational research because they take recognition of that fact as their starting point.