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

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, NJJuly 16, 2007

Terrence W. Epperson,Social Sciences Librarian,

The College of New Jersey,[email protected]

mailto:[email protected]

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?

* * *

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 :-)

* * *

Nan 3:08:56 : can terry explain to us what it means by critical ethnography?

* * *

Nan 3:09:11 : what is it different from ethnography?

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murat 3:13:54 : sounds like critical discourse analysis

* * *

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?

* * *

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• 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

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)


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


• 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)


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)


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

* * *

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!

* * *

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

* * *

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.

* * *

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

* * *

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

* * *

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

• 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.

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

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