“I felt as if I was becoming myself anew”: Transformative Learning Through Action Research Projects Carried out by Beginner Teachers

This article explores action research as a tool for promoting transformative learning of prospective teachers. Drawing on two B.A. or M.A. projects carried out at a university in Poland in which teacher-students used action research and the educational ethnography design to examine themselves as teachers and their practice, the article demonstrates the potential of such an approach for the transformation of students’ meaning perspectives and, eventually, of their personal and professional identities. The transformation the teacher-students experienced entailed their emancipation from the teaching models imposed on them in their institutions and the development of their personal teaching theories. This was followed by their transition to deliberate action, increased sense of agency, and readiness to assume responsibility for wider social change, consequently bridging the theory-practice divide. The author argues that despite the challenges of action research in the university context, its transformative potential makes it a valuable component of teacher education.

Worlds Represented: The March of the Penguins towards the Jug of Water

In the search for an understanding of the educational processes that take place in any classroom in the country and the world and that should reflect the complexity of the entire system, this educational ethnography Represented Worlds: The March of the Penguins to the Water Jug1, portrayed for two years how they experienced the transition, from third to fourth grade, two courses of students, one, in a private (private) high school and, the other, in a municipal (public) high school in the Antofagasta commune. The hypotheses raised are related to the way in which emancipatory social representations are constructed, articulated and communicated in social mobilizations. The ethnographic study shows the co-narrative between the events that occurred, at the national level, with which the penguin movement was conceived in 2010 and what was happening in two high school classrooms in Antofagasta. This ethnographic construction constitutes a proposal for the design and analysis of various ways of collecting and making the voice of the actors visible and as a response to the complexity of recording and characterizing dynamic representations in the face of unfolding events. In the last decade we have continued to develop this approach to understand and characterize the cultural, natural and social contexts that surround education, and for this reason, we share this starting point below.

The Argentine digital education curriculum: an analysis of the “critical” dimension of digital skills

In this article we analyze a corpus of documents belonging to the Digital Education curriculum launched in Argentina between years 2015 and 2019 as part of a broader reform, aimed at digital literacy and training in digital skills at school. The object of analysis of our study focuses in particular on the way in which the curricular texts conceptualize the critical dimension of digital skills. The methodology we have adopted articulates the content analysis approach with historical-anthropological educational ethnography, the latter being the theoretical-methodological framework that, in general, guides our study. As a theoretical framework, we recover the contributions made by the critical pedagogies on the competences curriculum and other developments developed by the field of educational technology and digital literacies. In the analysis, we stablish a dialogue between the curricular texts of the corpus and a series of broader technoeducational, pedagogical and cultural processes. Finally, we project an agenda of problems that is an alternative to the one dominant in the field of digital literacy.

Pandemic Poetry

Members of a graduate educational ethnography course created pandemic poetry. The instructor was pedagogically stretched in translating what had always been an in-person research poetry creation experience to a virtual setting, but the students responded with powerful poetic renditions. In this article, course members’ poetry is featured, and a brief review of the course materials used and guidance provided to the class, along with a methodological reflection, are offered.

NUEVAS LECTURAS A LA PERMANENCIA DE ESTUDIANTES INDÍGENAS EN UNA UNIVERSIDAD ARGENTINA

En este artículo se presentan resultados parciales de una investigación sobre las condiciones y características de la permanencia de estudiantes indígenas en una universidad argentina. Se trata de una investigación cualitativa, que utiliza herramientas de la etnografía educativa para indagar en las experiencias de estudiantes indígenas, becarios de un programa institucional que apoya su inclusión en el nivel universitario. Como parte de este programa, consta la presencia de tutores, que también son indígenas pero ya en la etapa final de sus carreras. El artículo discute la importancia del rol de estos tutores para apoyar la permanencia de los estudiantes. Se observan situaciones de visibilización étnica, ejercidas como formas estratégicas de uso de las identidades, que les permiten un lugar de reconocimiento en un espacio que hasta hace pocos años les era negado.NEW READINGS TO THE PERMANENCE OF INDIGENOUS STUDENTS IN AN ARGENTINE UNIVERSITYABSTRACTThis article presents results of an investigation about the characteristics of the permanence of indigenous students in an Argentine university. This is a qualitative research that uses educational ethnography to investigate the experiences of indigenous students of an action affirmative institutional program. As part of this program, there is a presence of tutors, who are also indigenous but in the final stage of their careers. The article discusses the importance of the role of these tutors to support the permanence of the students. Situations of ethnic visibility are observed, exercised as strategic forms which allow them a place of recognition in a space that until recently was denied.Keywords: Higher Education. Indigenous College Students. Continuance. Indigenous College Companion. Ethnic Visibility.

Writing Educational Ethnography

Researchers who use qualitative methods, especially ethnography in educational settings, have to make conscious decisions about how to write about their results, their methods, and their experiences as investigators. Since the 1980s, initially in the discipline of social anthropology, but later across all the social sciences, there have been vigorous debates about how texts should be written and also about how they should be read. Before that, qualitative and quantitative educational research was written up in a similar way: reported in a passive or anonymous style designed to create an authoritative account. Over the course of 40 years, ethnographic writing has developed new literary forms, polyvocal texts, and authors have become visible and individual in their own texts. A wider range of texting genres is now published, and reflexivity is central to writing and reading. The causes and consequences of those changes are analyzed.

Collaboration in Educational Ethnography in Latin America

There are epistemological, methodological, and textual dimensions of collaborative educational ethnography (CEE) in Latin America that have spread and consolidated over the last twenty-five years. The beginnings of CEE were marked by sociopolitical struggles (social resistance movements and repressive dictatorships) but also were enlightened by thinkers like Fals Borda and Freire, who foresaw social transformation through a theory/action/participation tie. The result was several educational ethnographic studies carried out by groups of researchers working in networks. To a large extent, they aimed to problematize contradictions between official school education and the sociocultural realities of teachers and students. This type of research also aimed to understand and intervene in social change processes, which encouraged the incorporation of teachers as researchers in ethnographic studies. Teachers’ participation in research processes opened debates about fieldwork, but more particularly about relationships between researchers and interlocutors. In short, the history of CEE in Latin America reveals a marked development of collaboration, from being enacted but not made explicit in the written ethnographic report to open, explicit, and declared participation of nonacademic collaborators of all sorts: teachers, children, youngsters, indigenous communities, and so on. The work of these collaborative teams not only differs in ways and degrees of research involvement (co-interpreting, co-investigating, co-authoring, and co-theorizing) but also in what a dialogic and sometimes contested research process entails in terms of knowledge production for counteracting Eurocentric, androcentric, adult-centric prejudices. Teachers’ participation, children/youngsters as active collaborators, and language as a topic of research and as a research tool are three main themes. The stance of the researcher in CEE inevitably connects with his or her interlocutors as situated others—subjects with agency and rights and capable of involving the researcher in a joint process of reflexivity. Moreover, collaborative experiences in educational ethnography create new and feasible possibilities for the development of knowledge not only in education but also in research approaches to ethnography.