The previous section first dealt with action research methodology from the par-ticular perspective of educational action research in general, and then specifically, from the point of view of higher education. In an attempt to further expand the methodological framework employed in the current study, ethnographic research and critical ethnography are now turned to. Ethnographic research will be ad-dressed from the perspective of an approach rather than a method and critical edu-cational ethnography will be examined as an orientation within ethnographic re-search.
In qualitative research, both action research and ethnography could be treated as research designs of their own. As the dominant research design of this current study is that of action research, why, then, also focus on ethnography? This has been seen necessary for the purposes of the current study because of the methodol-ogically overlapping nature of its research questions.
Ethnography—originally regarded as a branch of anthropology that deals with the scientific description of individual cultures—has over the years diversified into new areas including many different kinds of interpretive and participative research.
The common ground shared by all these varieties is crystallized in Wolcott’s (1988, 188) statement indicating that ethnography literally means a picture of the
“way of life” of some identifiable group of people. The same underlying idea is exemplified by Eskola and Suoranta (1998, 104), who define ethnography as a form of observation that takes place in the natural conditions of social reality. Eth-nographic studies in education date back to the end of the 1960s according to Syr-jäläinen (1994, 72), who also places the roots of school ethnography in cultural anthropology. As the use of information and communication technologies is in-creasingly being integrated into school environments, the ethnographic approach has proved to be appropriate for studying such environments as well. One of the earliest examples related to foreign language teaching is Tella’s extensive ethno-graphic study (1991; 1992a; 199b) on the introduction of international communi-cations networks and electronic mail into foreign language classrooms. A more recent example is Kynäslahti’s (2001) ethnographic study of the Kilpisjärvi virtual classroom project.
As the process of doing ethnographic research typically involves field study in the form of such methods as participant observation and interviews, the two con-cepts—ethnographic research and field study—are often considered almost
syn-onymous. Are they then actually the same? According to Wolcott (1992, 21), they are not the same although he considers them to be interrelated. He explains that field study and ethnography draw upon the three techniques basic to all field-oriented research: experiencing, enquiring, and examining. He indicates that what distinguishes between them is that anyone doing ethnography makes a claim not only about procedures, but also that the result will be ethnography. Furthermore, he stresses that ethnography is the end-product for the culturally focused description and interpretation that characterize anthropological fieldwork. Wolcott summarizes his argument as follows:
“Ethnography, therefore, is field study plus something special in the nature of interpretive emphasis, just as field study, in turn, draws upon disparate fieldwork techniques but combines them into something more than the product of pursuing any of them alone.”
(Wolcott 1992, 21–22) (emphasis in original) As regards the context of education, there are three main approaches to defining ethnographic research. The first approach is to hold ethnographic research almost synonymous with qualitative research in general. For instance, Hammersley (1992) uses the term ‘ethnography’ in a general sense that he considers broadly equivalent to ‘qualitative method’. The second approach to dealing with educational ethno-graphic research is to place it under the general umbrella of qualitative research among other areas of inquiry such as phenomenology, hermeneutics, grounded the-ory, and action research (Tesch 1990). The third approach, which seems to be the currently dominant one, draws on the definition of ethnography as both a prod-uct—a description of the life of a group of people in the form of a written ethno-graphic account—and a research process, a way of studying human life (cf. e.g., Wolcott 1988; LeCompte & Preissle 1993). It is this third approach that bears a resemblance to action research in its emphasis on the written account and the proc-ess itself. An ethnographer typically is a participant observer, whereas in action research, as Bryman (2001, 275) points out, the investigator becomes part of the field study. Consequently, in educational action research the investigator is the teacher-researcher. This leads to the question of the teacher-researcher’s own val-ues and their impact on the process.
The question of the teacher-researcher’s own personal values and beliefs and their impact on the research process are reflected by his/her teacher personality.
The issue does not seem to have been very clearly discussed in educational action research literature. Therefore, this study turns to the field of critical ethnography where the issue has received considerable attention.
7.2.1 Links to Critical Ethnography
Critical ethnography is one of the currently prevailing approaches within the eth-nographic paradigm (cf. e.g., Carspecken & Apple 1992; Quantz 1992; Roman 1992). Quantz (1992, 448) demonstrates that critical ethnography is a recent devel-opment in educational research that is still evolving. He describes critical ethnog-raphy as an empirical project located within critical discourse rather than as a par-ticular set of methods for conducting research. Quantz asserts that critical discourse can be best understood in its historical context. It is characterized by a set of themes that reflect particular approaches to knowledge, values, society, culture, and history. The approaches to these themes distinguish critical ethnography from other approaches to ethnography.
Critical ethnography is recognized as having conscious political intentions that are oriented toward emancipatory and democratic goals. While pointing out that critical ethnographers are occasionally criticized for imposing their values on the group they are studying, Quantz (1992, 471) considers this criticism unfair. He ar-gues that it is never a matter of whether or not researchers impose their values but the implications of the values that they are imposing. He points out that research is never without vested interest and that all forms of research impose values. Quantz writes as follows:
“Research is never without interest; all forms of research impose values. Critical thought rejects the division of knowledge and interest as artificial and disingenuous.
Critical ethnographers impose a value system that requires the researcher to place any culture into a wider discourse of history and power, which serves an emancipatory interest, whereas other ethnographers impose a value system that requires the researcher to treat every culture as if it were independent of or, at most, interactive with history and power. From a critical perspective, these studies ultimately serve the interest of the status quo.”
(Quantz 1992, 471) Quantz (1992, 471) concludes his discussion of values and critical ethnography by stating that having an ethical orientation does not separate critical ethnographers from other educational ethnography; it is the pointed effort of critical researchers to reveal their own value perspective to the reader that may differentiate critical eth-nography from other forms of ethnographic research. This openness about the re-searchers’ values seems to prompt criticism more than anything else.
In his study on electronic literacies focusing on language, culture, and power in the online classroom, Warschauer (1999) uses a collaborative, critical ethno-graphic approach. In his study, Warschauer explores the role of the new digital technologies in the development of language and literacy and looks at how the na-ture of reading and writing is changing, and how these changes are addressed in the
classroom with culturally and linguistically diverse learners who are at special risk of being marginalized from the information society.
The critical ethnographic approach employed in Warschauer’s (1999) study is based on the rationale that it is important to critical ethnographers not only to un-derstand reality but also to work to change it. In the latter undertaking, he works in close collaboration with the classroom teachers involved in the study because as he says, “only in that way could any change be long-lasting and meaningful” (War-schauer 1999, 190). War(War-schauer also demonstrates that there also are many poten-tial dangers in attempting to do critical collaborative ethnography. Ethnography is admittedly a subjective research process, so the point is not to carry out a “value-neutral study” but rather to be cognizant of, and to reflect on, the values that one brings to research. In line with this kind of rationale, he gives a description of him-self as a person, his beliefs and values in connection with his discussion of research methods used (Warschauer 1999, 188–189).
Although the current study is not situated within the sphere of critical ethnog-raphy as such as it does not have the politically oriented intentions typically present in critical ethnography, this study, however, finds the openness of critical ethnog-raphers about their values a very important factor in contributing towards the va-lidity of such research. Similarly, it could be argued that in educational action re-search, the teacher-researcher needs to attempt to give a description of his/her teacher personality. For the current study, this will be done in the following sec-tion.