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
Excerpts from the online discussion of "Complicating Common Sense"
11-Jun-07
gerry 3:06:41 :
do people think we are doing critical ethnography in the VMT project?
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dennysj 3:08:08 :
Isn't this what we do when write about the VMT data?
Jim 3:08:19 :
Depends on what YOU mean by critical ethnography :-)
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Nan 3:08:56 :
can terry explain to us what it means by critical ethnography?
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Nan 3:09:11 :
what is it different from ethnography?
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murat 3:13:54 :
sounds like critical discourse analysis
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Jim 3:18:55 :
Terry, how might Critical Ethnography inform the kind of analyses we have been
lookint at for the last few weeks ?
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murat 3:26:24 :
Terry, I have a naive question for you: would you characterize Lucy Suchman's
work as an example of critical ethnography?
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gerry 3:48:53 :
What is an example of a CE evaluative criterion that might be useful to us?
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gerry 4:04:29 :
Maybe we all need to think about these questions and come back to them at the
CSCL conference
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)
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)
Classic Ethnography
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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
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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
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)
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)
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)
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
Ethnomethodology/Conversation Analysis
• Lucy Suchman Plans and Situated Actions (revised as HumanMachine 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)
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 Chatbased Problem Solving” (2007)
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)
Excerpts from the online discussion of "Complicating Common Sense"
11-Jun-07
Terry 3:15:32 :
Going back th Gerry's suggestion, I don't think I'm in a position to do a critical ethnography of VMT
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Nan 3:17:12 :
i would like to hear more why
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gerry 3:18:12 :
Could we do it together with you?
Terry 3:18:41 :
Probably!
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murat 3:19:47 :
I think that's relevant to VMT too. We do have an interesting contrast with respect to power relations in a class room
Nan 3:20:04 :
yes, absolutely
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gerry 3:20:30 :
We have seen how the VMT moderators and facilitators exert power also
dennysj 3:21:31 :
We have also seen how participants claim power.
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gerry 3:28:58 :
Suchman is interested in how technology helps to construct social reality at the level of interpersonal interactions
gerry 3:29:17 :
... which is largely what we do
gerry 3:30:09 :
... or try to do
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Terry 3:33:00 :
I think what I can do is present some evaluative criteria developed from outside CSCL and then apply them to VMT
gerry 3:33:10 :
ok
Jim 3:33:22 :
GO FOR IT
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gerry 4:02:28 :
If we put together the little pieces I refer to and expand them and fill in the missing pieces, might we have a CE analysis? -What would be missing?
Critical Ethnographic Perspectives on VMT
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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
The Big Picture
• So, now what?
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.