“Seeking meaning in self: the dialogical process of storytelling and educating the professional practitioner”

PurposeThe paper seeks to illustrate the impact, a narrative based approach to learning in practice could have in relation to management education, where reflexive critiques may provide a platform for integrating more closely the appreciation/analysis of the nature of management development with the experiences of practice.Design/methodology/approachCollaborative ethnography seeks to connect the self with others and the social with context; it is a method which embraces the opportunity to understand/appreciate lived experience in moments of learning.FindingsThe use of storytelling as a method to aid reflexive dialogue forces the student to move away from their pre-existing assumptions and practices and provide them with the power and conviction to seek out and recognise new meaning and differing alternatives of practice. The implication of this position in terms of an educational agenda involves challenging the “self-conceptions” of what it means to be a “practitioner” (Alvesson and Willmott, 1992; Martin, 1992; Zubizarreta, 2004).Practical implicationsThe authors argue that focus must be placed on methods through which learning resides in action. Recognising action in learning allows for the development of management education which re-directs thinking and conceptualising towards understanding the social tensions, complex relations and connections in the co-construction of knowing.Social implicationsThe article has sought to exemplify how storytelling can contribute to professional and personal development in new and more enriched ways. This reflexive-style paper presented a perspective from which the writers' values and beliefs are informed, as opposed to making a claim for authenticity and authority in regards to the subject area.Originality/valueThe paper highlights the need to explore imaginative modes of management education practices (Hjorth et al., 2018). Teaching students to simply tell stories is not the goal; rather, it is about sensitising students to the aesthetics of organising and the potential of approaching learning from sensuous and experimental perspectives.

Relacja, zobowiązanie, współpraca. Założenia i wyzwania badań etnograficznych wśród osób niewidomych

The article presents the main assumptions and conditions of collaboration between the author and the vision-impaired research participants over several years of ethnographic research (2011–2017). Adopting the perspective of philosophy of dialogue, the author follows different stages of rapport, focusing on mutual expectations and emotions, as well as relationship dynamics and its underlying conditions in general. The author’s long-term research was inspired by concepts developed by Luke Lassiter in his collaborative ethnography and by Anna Wyka in her social research through shared experience, both of which marked the author’s ethical and methodological choices, including invitation extended to research participants to comment on the research findings. The second part of the article is based on research participants’ impressions and reflections on their role, engagement and relationship with the researcher.

The Interpretation of “Local” Literacy Practices through Ethnography

Ethnography is a practice of inscribing local practice into texts, developed in the context of social anthropology. Local literacy practices often remain hidden, dependent on context and shaped by histories and cultures. Literacy is entwined with how lives are lived. Collaborative ethnography enables an approach that permits researchers to collaboratively develop research questions with participants and, rather than researching on people, researchers work with people as coresearchers. Local literacy practices are situated in homes and communities as well as within everyday contexts such as markets and mosques. Community literacy practices can be collaboratively understood and studied using this approach. Communities experience and practice diverse and multiple literacies, both locally and transnationally, and mapping this diversity is key to an understanding of the fluid and changing nature of literacies. Literacies can be understood as being multilingual, digital, transnational, and multimodal, thus expanding the concept of literacy as lived within communities. Threaded through this analysis is a discussion of power and whose literacy practices are seen as powerful within community contexts. Collaborative ethnography is a powerful methodology to excavate and co-analyze community literacy practices. Other methods that can explore local literacies include visual and sensory ethnography. Power sharing in terms of the design and architecture of the research is important for hearing voices and working equitably. There are many concepts introduced within, including the idea of literacy practices, the link between literacy and identity, the importance of an understanding of multilingualism, and the importance of situating literacy in communities.

Staying with discomfort: Early childhood teachers’ emotional themes in relation to children's peer-culture aggression

This research examines one lead teacher's and two assistant teachers’ emotional discomfort as they participated in an eight-month collaborative ethnography of 19 children's peer-culture aggression in an early care and education classroom in the USA. Two questions guided this analysis: (1) What are the emotional themes of teachers in relation to children's peer-culture aggression? (2) How did the teachers utilize an ethic of discomfort when responding to children's peer-culture aggression? Collaborative ethnographic procedures, along with a post-structural account of teacher emotion, were used in a qualitative thematic analysis to determine salient themes and patterns. The data consisted of participant observation, field notes, video recordings of children's play, audio-recorded teacher team meetings, classroom artifacts, informal discussions, and a data-revisiting journal. Over the course of the study, the three teachers moved from resistance to emotional discomfort with children's peer-culture aggression, to a less resistant and more reflexive position toward emotional discomfort and child aggression. This shift occurred as the teachers began to release the goal of certainty and instead acknowledge and accept the unknowing and complexities associated with an ethic of discomfort. The implications center on the importance of teachers’ openness to “staying with” emotional discomfort, as well as making time and space to uncover a range of teacher and child emotions.

Career Exploration as Social and Emotional Learning: A Collaborative Ethnography with Spanish Children from Low-Income Contexts

Children’s career exploration is a critical aspect of career development. Through it, children explore the interplay between their different life roles, including those related to work (in a broad sense), learning, and education. Through career exploration, children can (re)construct the emotions derived from the interactions between personal and contextual factors by giving meaning to life experiences. This process involves cognitive and affective activities. Evidence suggests that children from low-income contexts are more likely to drop out of school and show lower educational aspirations. Providing career exploration interventions introduces an intentional learning that allows children to develop a higher level of career awareness and increase their aspirations for the future. The sample analyzed consisted of students between 6 and 8 years old from a low-income school in Seville (Spain). The data collection methods used have been those of collaborative ethnography (e.g., unstructured interviews, student productions, and photographs). Co-analysis was the chosen method for systematizing the information used in this research. Our results have revealed a system of influences which plays an important role in the different contexts and emotions that the children derive from their interactions with different spaces and socialization agents. In short, through career exploration, children mobilize exploratory behaviors, providing emotional responses. Collaborative ethnography has been shown to be a valid process for research on career exploration as social and emotional learning.

La construcción de las identidades étnicas y culturales en niños y niñas migrantes: Un enfoque desde la etnografía colaborativa

La construcción de las identidades culturales en niñas y niños migrantes requiere de un conocimiento profundo de las experiencias que se desarrollan en diversos espacios (la escuela, el hogar, la mezquita, las asociaciones vecinales, el centro cívico, etc.). Nuestra investigación reflexiona sobre los procesos de construcción de identidades culturales y la aportación de la etnografía colaborativa en su análisis. La utilización de este enfoque metodológico ha permitido la incorporación de la voz del alumnado migrante de Educación Infantil en la exploración de la construcción de sus identidades. Este artículo plantea como objetivo explorar las posibilidades de la etnografía colaborativa en el estudio de la construcción de identidades culturales mediante el análisis semiótico multimodal. Para ello, se ha utilizado un estudio de casos holístico y técnicas propias del enfoque Mosaic como los mapping, el retrato familiar, el roleplay y el autorretrato. El análisis semiótico social multimodal ha puesto en evidencia la difracción que se produce en los diferentes discursos de las niñas y los niños, evidenciando los conflictos en la construcción de sus identidades entre la cultura de origen y la destino, y ha mostrado cómo se configuran los estereotipos culturales en la etapa de Educación Infantil. Las conclusiones de este estudio subrayan la utilidad de la etnografía colaborativa y el análisis semiótico multimodal para el estudio de la construcción de identidades culturales en la infancia. The ethnic and cultural identity construction among pupils from immigrant families requires a deep knowledge of intercultural communication practices that are developed in different spaces (school, home, mosque, neighbourhood associations, civic centre, etc.). Our research analyses the intercultural communication of children in school and shows the use of a methodology that allows access to their cultural identities’ construction. The use of collaborative ethnography with children has allowed the incorporation of their voices in the exploration of intercultural communication. This article aims to explore intercultural communication in 5-year-old students through collaborative ethnography and analyses their identities construction through multimodal discourse analysis. A holistic-case study design has been utilised as well as mosaic approach techniques, such as mapping, family portrait, role play and self-portrait. The social semiotic multimodal analysis has shown the diffraction that occurs in the different students’ discourses, evidencing the conflicts in the identity construction among participants from immigrant families. Likewise, the results have shown how cultural stereotypes are configured in Early Childhood Education classes. The conclusions highlight the usefulness of collaborative ethnography and multimodal analysis for the study of intercultural communication and the identity construction in childhood.

Moving Ethnography

In this article, we describe how our work at a particular nexus of STS, ethnography, and critical theory—informed by experimental sensibilities in both the arts and sciences—transformed as we built and learned to use collaborative workflows and supporting digital infrastructure. Responding to the call of this special issue to be “ethnographic about ethnography,” we describe what we have learned about our own methods and collaborative practices through building digital infrastructure to support them. Supporting and accounting for how experimental ethnographic projects move—through different points in a research workflow, with many switchbacks, with project designs constantly changing as the research develops—was a key challenge. Addressing it depended on understanding creative data practices and analytic workflows, redesigning and building technological infrastructure, and constant attention to collaboration ethics. We refer to this as the need for doubletakes on method. We focus on the development of The Asthma Files, a collaborative ethnography project to understand the cultural dimensions of environmental health, and on the Platform for Experimental Collaborative Ethnography, digital infrastructure first built to support The Asthma Files but now available as a community resource for archiving, analyzing, and publishing ethnographic data and writing. A key finding is that different traditions and practices of ethnography require different infrastructures.

To Co-Opt or To Be Co-Opted? The Role of Professional Elites in Strengthening Professional Control Vis-à-Vis Clients

This article studies how professional elites, as exemplified by first teachers (FTs)—a new prominent position for teachers in Sweden—respond to clashes between market and professional logics, and how this affects professional control vis-à-vis clients. Based on a collaborative ethnography, findings suggest that the professional elites use different responses to the clashes between the logics. Professional control can be strengthened by FTs co-opting the market logic strategically in the interest of the profession. However, FTs sometimes also succumb to cliental influence, becoming co-opted themselves by the market logic, which weakens professional control. Tentatively, context needs to be highlighted in order to understand why different responses are used, and in this identity work and relationships to managers seem essential to create a foundation for FTs to respond in ways that increase professional control vis-à-vis clients.