Abstract
This review presents theoretical underpinnings supporting microethnographic-discourse analytic (ME/DA) approaches to studying educational phenomena. The review is presented in two parts. Part 1 provides an analytic review of two seminal reviews of literature that frame theoretical and methodological developments of microethnography and functions language in classrooms with diverse learners. Part 2 presents two telling case studies that illustrate the logic-of-inquiry of (ME/DA) approaches. These telling case studies make transparent how theoretical considerations of cultural perspectives on education inform decisions regarding research methodology. Telling Case Study 1 makes transparent the logic-of-inquiry undertaken to illustrate how microanalyses of discourse and action among participants in a physics class provided an empirical grounding for identifying how different groups undertook a common task. This case study shows how ethnographically informed discourse analyses formed a foundation to theoretically identify social processes of knowledge construction. Telling Case Study 2 makes transparent multiple levels of analysis undertaken to examine ways that creative processes of interpretation of art were communicated and taken up in an art studio class across multiple cycles of activity. Taken together, these telling case studies provide evidence of how ME/DA provides a theoretically grounded logic-of-inquiry for investigating complex learning processes in different educational contexts.
In the past six decades, researchers within and across disciplines have sought to develop theoretically grounded approaches to investigate and theorize the complex and developing social, communicative, and academic experiences of learners as they engage in local and situated cycles of activity, in and across times, events, and configurations of participants in formal and informal educational contexts. Many of these developing lines of research have sought to provide ways of responding to the calls of Review of Research Education (RRE) editors to reconsider long-accepted findings, the nature of data and analysis, and existing theoretical frameworks and paradigms. Today, as evidenced by this call, the process is ongoing.
The challenges facing researchers seeking to address this call were captured by a set of international dialogues over the past two decades. For example, Candela et al. (2004) report on dialogues over 3 days among 35 international scholars, guided by a range of theoretical perspectives and methodological processes, who were asked to address the following: What in the world happens in classrooms from qualitative research perspectives? Each participant brought a history of ongoing research focusing on classroom processes and practices that shape socially, culturally, linguistically, and academically diverse students’ opportunities for learning in classrooms in different national contexts.
Given this diversity of perspectives and methodologies, Candela et al. (2004) urged the participants to explore potential common understandings of learning in classrooms and the possibility of interconnecting their lines of research. This request led to a series of unanticipated challenges: We faced the initial difficulty of defining what “classrooms” are, have been, or will become. This led to a discussion of the various links between classrooms and their social contexts, which posed the problem of working on various spatial and temporal scales. The topic of learning was a constant preoccupation, as we considered that researchers still lack tools to connect specific teaching practices with student outcomes over time, and simultaneously to account for learning in other, non-classroom spaces. (p. 692)
They further framed an analytic problem of methodological actions in past research in the following way: There was agreement that studies focused on the “play-script transcript” version of fragments of teacher-student interactions do not exhaust the complex nature of classroom activities and processes, as has already been shown in a variety of studies. Focusing on classrooms, while also reconstructing within them the influence of processes from the surrounding world, became one of the challenges of a new research agenda. (p. 693)
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These challenges also pointed to the need for transparency in presenting the logics of inquiry guiding the lines of research.
In 2006, after a 2-year development process that included a taskforce and public debates, the American Educational Research Association (AERA) recognized the need for transparency in reporting the logic of inquiry guiding a research process by publishing the “Standards for Reporting Empirical Social Science Research in AERA Publications.”
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These standards framed a research logic of inquiry as follows: Reports of empirical research should be transparent; that is, reporting should make explicit the logic of inquiry and activities that led from the development of the initial interest, topic, problem, or research question; through the definition, collection, and analysis of data or empirical evidence; to the articulated outcomes of the study. . . . These standards are therefore intended to promote empirical research reporting that is warranted and transparent. (p. 33)
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The arguments framed in this introduction provide a foundation for our approach to presenting the microethnographic discourse analytic logic of inquiry that has guided studies in classrooms at different levels of schooling as well as in different disciplines and (inter)national contexts. In this chapter, we will make transparent the theoretical, epistemological, methodological, analytical, and reporting processes and practices that guide the logic of inquiry of ME/DA as an epistemology (cf. Kelly, 2006).
Goals for Presenting ME/DA as an Emergent Logic of Inquiry
Our goals for presenting this microethnographic discourse approach are twofold, given that microethnographic discourse analysis (ME/DA) is an interdisciplinary logic of inquiry that has developed over the past four decades through the contributions of a growing range of international and interdisciplinary researchers and educators. 4 Our first goal is to present an analytic review of two seminal reviews of literature published in the first decade of RRE, which frame theoretical and methodological developments in microethnography (Smith, 1978) and the functions of language in classrooms with diverse learners (Guthrie & Hall, 1983).
Through this process, we identify how ME/DA is situated in these historical and developing lines of research. Additionally, we will make transparent to readers new to these lines of inquiry, as well as to experienced researchers, what has been learned about ethnographic and discourse lines of research from these two historical reviews.
Our goal in taking this approach is to make transparent a process that ME/DA researchers have undertaken: an “if . . . then . . . ” logic. This epistemological process, as we will demonstrate, supports an exploration of the relationships among theories, epistemologies, and methodologies that frame particular actions central to constructing warranted accounts of learning as a communicative (discourse) and social process in classrooms (Heap, 1985, 1991, 1995).
By engaging in an if–then logic of analysis, as we analyzed the conceptual processes and theories inscribed by Smith (1978) and Guthrie and Hall (1983), we identified theoretical and methodological arguments to explore how they relate to, and inform, the developing microethnographic discourse analytic logic of inquiry presented in this chapter. We asked ourselves the following interrelated set of questions. If we take this theoretical perspective or methodological process, then what are the conceptual perspectives we need to consider in our own research? What actions in the conduct of our research does this entail? How do these theoretical and methodological processes identified relate (or not) to those guiding the developing the microethnographic discourse analytic logic of inquiry? And finally, how do they inform the conduct of ME/DA research in different disciplinary and social contexts in and out of schools?
The if–then approach also demonstrates a conceptual stance central to ME/DA research, whether in situ, in constructing data sets from archived records, or in reading the published work of others (Green et al., 2015; Skukauskaite & Grace, 2006). This stance is framed by Heath (1982) as stepping back from ethnocentrism—that is, stepping back from the known to learn from others’ perspectives, a stance that guides an anthropological approach to ethnography, and thus to ME/DA (see also Green & Castanheira, 2019; Green et al., 2012; Heath & Street, 2008).
Our second goal is to present two telling case studies (Mitchell, 1984) of how a microethnographic discourse analytic logic of analysis was undertaken by two researchers (Kelly and Baker, contributing authors to this intergenerational author team). Through the (re)presentation and (re)examination of the decisions and actions that Kelly (Kelly et al., 2001) and Baker (2001; Baker & Green, 2007) undertook in their microethnographic discourse analytic studies in two different, discipline-based secondary Advanced Placement classrooms (Physics and Visual Arts), we demonstrate how the microethnographic discourse analytic logic of inquiry informed an iterative, recursive, and abductive process of analyses of opportunities for learning afforded to and being constructed by members of these two classes.
Our adoption of the telling case studies
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is grounded in the theoretical developments in social and linguistic anthropology that have informed members of the ME/DA research community in the past four decades.
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Underlying the adoption of telling case studies is the following argument by Mitchell (1984), who defined anthropological case studies as the detailed presentation of ethnographic data related to some sequence of events from which the analyst seeks to make some theoretical inference. The events themselves may relate to any level of social organization: a whole society, some section of a community, a family or an individual. (p. 238)
In this argument, what becomes evident is that the goal of telling case studies, from an anthropological perspective, is the construction of theoretical understandings of how actors in particular social contexts draw on and/or make present to others local and situated processes and practices as they engage in particular events in and across times with particular configurations of participants.
By tracing the actions of particular actors and analyzing the sequence of events through particular theoretical lenses, the anthropologically guided ethnographer seeks to develop valid connections among actions, objects, actors, and activities to construct theoretical understandings of what is being interactionally, socially, discursively, and situationally accomplished by participants. The process that the ethnographer engages in, therefore, is one of analytic induction (not deduction, or a priori defined phenomena); that is, by undertaking a set of analytic processes, the ethnographer seeks to make theoretically valid (i.e., grounded) connections between and among the phenomena analyzed (Corsaro & Heise, 1990).
This definition of case studies, as telling cases of analytic induction, therefore frames the goals of ME/DA researchers as well as how they bound units of analysis and make theoretically valid connections between and among phenomena of classroom life that are the focus of such research (Green et al., 2012; Heath & Street, 2008). This conceptual process, as we will demonstrate through these two telling case studies by Kelly and Baker, supports analysis of what constitutes a process of analytic induction of what is being constructed in the moment-by-moment and over-time discourse and the interactions of students with their teacher in purposefully designed cycles of activity at different levels of scale. 7
In taking a telling case approach, we also seek to address one additional set of challenges identified through international conversations that this chapter addresses. In ongoing dialogues undertaken over 10 years, Kumpulainen et al. (2009) and researchers from AERA and EARLI (European Association of Research on Learning and Instruction) identified the following challenge facing researchers seeking to undertake new and developing research studies in classrooms: What has become clear among the research community is that although great accomplishments have been achieved in research on social interaction in learning and instruction, we still lack a coherent understanding of how methodologies illuminate learning and education as a social process and also how these conceptual tools “work” in empirical studies . . . [and that] there is a need for opportunities to discuss and demonstrate how these methodologies are used, how they become alive in the actual research studies of classroom interaction. (p. 1)
Through the telling case studies approach, we will make transparent how the exploration of what was happening in the two Advanced Placement classes (not classrooms) required an iterative, recursive, and abductive logic of analyses guided by a microethnographic discourse analytic logic of inquiry.
The first telling case study (re)constructs the logic of analysis that Kelly developed (i.e., a microethnographic discourse analytic logic in use) to examine how students in four self-selected groups interpreted and undertook a guided physics assignment in a high school Advanced Placement Physics Lab (Kelly et al., 2001). The second telling case study (re)constructs Baker’s analyses of how students in an intergenerational (Grades 9–12) Advanced Placement Studio Arts class, with students who had participated from 1 to 4 years (Baker, 2001; Baker & Green, 2007), engaged in learning studio art processes and practices.
These telling case studies also make transparent how the analytic logic constructed by these researchers supported their investigations of how and in what ways particular learning processes, practices, and conceptual knowledge were introduced to, and constructed with, students in these classes. By holding the level of schooling (secondary education) constant and varying the academic area of study (Physics and Visual Arts), we seek to make transparent how ME/DA, as a logic of inquiry, can be undertaken to examine social, epistemological, and communicative processes, practices, and conceptual systems in different educational contexts (Kelly, 2016a, 2016b).
Analysis of Foundational Reviews of the Roots of Microethnography and Functions of Language in RRE: 1973 to 1983
In this section, guided by the arguments about transparency in reporting perspectives presented above, we trace the roots of the core principles guiding microethnographic and discourse lines of research that were introduced by Smith (1978) and Guthrie and Hall (1983) in the first decade of RRE (1973–1983). These historical reviews provide a foundation for understanding the roots of, and thus situating, ME/DA in the theoretical and methodological development of studies of the social construction of learning in classroom contexts. 8
To step back from our current understanding of the lines of research known as ME/DA, we posed the following questions of Smith (1978) and Guthrie and Hall (1983):
How and in what ways did the author(s) bound the review?
What actions and conceptual perspectives were inscribed in the research identified?
What issues were raised through the review process to inform readers about challenges and issues to consider in engaging in a particular research logic of inquiry?
What directions for future research were identified?
Through this analytic process, we also investigated the challenges or methodological concerns raised by these authors, which we then triangulated (Denzin, 1978; Green & Chian, 2018) with actions, theories, and processes of the microethnographic discourse analytic logic of inquiry.
Smith (1978) and the Roots of Ethnography/Microethnography in Education
In his chapter titled “An Evolving Logic of Participant Observation, Educational Ethnography, and Other Case Studies,” Smith (1978) frames his goals as follows: To provide a context and logic for the discussion of the genre of research that is becoming known by such varied labels as educational ethnography, participant observation, qualitative observation, case study, or field study. (p. 316)
We identified a challenge facing researchers in this early period that converges with the challenges presented in the introduction to this chapter. Smith (1978) argued that although there was an emerging body of research across different traditions, there was limited understanding of the processes involved in the evolving logic of participant observation and other ethnographic processes or phases of research.
Therefore, in this section, we focus on the roots of the theoretical and conceptual processes that Smith identified as central to engaging in ethnographic research by 1978. The researchers identified were guided by different conceptual traditions 9 grounded in anthropological and sociological perspectives on ethnography. They included educational ethnographers as well as scholars in other social science disciplines. The lines of research in education identified by Smith focused on different dimensions of education as a social phenomenon: schools and communities (e.g., Spindler, 1963; Wolcott, 1967), school and interorganizational educational systems (e.g., Lutz, 1962; Smith, 1977), schools (Rist, 1973), classrooms (Cazden et al., 1972; Delamont, 1976; Rist, 1973; Smith & Geoffrey, 1968), and curriculum and program evaluation (e.g., Smith & Carpenter, 1972), among others.
Smith (1978) further argued that although these studies constituted a growing body of work, there was a parallel body of work focusing on what was entailed in engaging in participant observation. The processes identified at the time (1978 and earlier) were based on reflexive processes, represented by what he framed as the researcher’s “creative processes in learning from a fieldwork project” (p. 329). This state of affairs, he argued, required further exploration to make transparent what constituted this social science approach as a methodology. To support this argument, Smith identified phases of ethnographic studies that he and others had experienced:
Identifying the origins of the problem
Identifying major seminal bodies of work that frame methodological processes and issues
Developing awareness of competing theories
Identifying the multiple phases required in designing and engaging in a study
Developing guiding models and theories
Constructing ways of recording the researcher’s thinking, decision making, and interpretive asides during phases
Engaging in conscious searching of records to construct data and literature to inform analyses as well as interpretation of records and analyses
Smith also introduced what he termed as “new ethnographies,” which shifted the focus from a more holistic study of a group or community to analyses of audio and video tapes of classroom events, a direction that he framed as microethnography.
This argument foreshadowed Mitchell’s (1984) arguments about multiple ethnographic studies that focus on different levels and participants in societies. Smith’s chapter also foreshadowed Agar’s (1994, 2006a) argument of ethnography as an iterative, recursive, and abductive process, in which decisions are made throughout an ethnographic study. This process, Agar (2006a) argues, requires the ethnographer to step back and begin to trace the pathways leading to, and roots of, the processes being experienced by the ethnographer (and participants) to develop a grounded understanding from the point of view of participants—that is, the perspectives, not perceptions, of insiders (participants in the event).
As a part of his presentation of processes and practices in the conduct of ethnographic inquiry, Smith (1978) identified ways of framing decisions in phases of analyses and writing. The following sets of decisions and actions also frame a process of transparency in reporting on the conceptual decisions guiding the researcher’s logic of inquiry that we drew on in the two telling case studies that follow:
Make transparent how “the case” is an instance of a class of events.
Present an initial overview of the process of analysis.
Describe the process of concept formation.
Describe how outliers (to a set/class of events) were addressed.
Present a discussion of ways of clustering the multiple dimensions identified in participant observation and analyses.
Describe the data level(s) that raise issues of access.
As indicated in these actions, a key issue Smith identified was the need to define what constitutes a case within a class of events—that is, what the case is a case of (e.g., a color, an action, a place for particular actions) and what will be included as an instance of a particular phenomenon. 10 He indicated that the ethnographer needs to consider outliers that are beyond the set of cultural processes in a particular class of phenomena (a set of cases) and what issues outliers raise for reporting on the different classes (sets)—that is, what is included and what is not, and what questions outliers raise about the claims being made.
Smith (1978) also included concept formation as a process and thus framed a conceptual argument that an ethnographic approach does not start with, or is limited to, what is observed and analyzed in predefined (a priori) ways based on prior research. Rather, this process involves a principled approach to clustering the multiple dimensions that were identified through an in-time and over-time analysis of such phenomena. This process Smith further describes as involving multiple levels of data construction at different levels of analytic time and social scale. Through different forms and levels of analyses, Smith argues, ethnographers construct classes (i.e., sets of phenomena) and develop ways of clustering them to build warranted accounts of the phenomena and processes being studied.
In examining the issues and directions Smith inscribed, our authorial team identified the importance of making transparent what counts as access to particular educational sites and how access is (re)negotiated with particular actors at particular levels of an organization. Smith argued that if there are limits to access, then the data presented are suspect. His review also led him to conclude that there is minimal overlap in reference citations across research traditions focusing on observation in classrooms as well as language related to school performance, a point also made more than two decades later by Candela et al. (2004) and Kumpulainen et al. (2009).
Readers of Smith’s chapter, therefore, are afforded a unique opportunity to develop a deep history of ethnographic inquiry in education and other disciplines, which makes visible differences among ethnography of education, undertaken by researchers in other disciplines; ethnography in education, undertaken by education researchers to address areas relevant to educators; and ethnography for education, designed to support transformation in education to address issues of equity of access for diverse learners (cf. Bloome et al., 2018; Dixon et al., 2000; Green & Bloome, 1997).
Guthrie and Hall (1983) on the Functions of Language in Classrooms
We selected Guthrie and Hall (1983) for two reasons. First it provides a four-decade review (1950–1983) that parallels the history of ethnographic research by Smith (1978). Like Smith, Guthrie and Hall (1983) examined developing theoretical and methodological directions central to studies on how language functions to support and/or constrain learning in classrooms with linguistically, culturally, socially, and academically diverse students. Second, they complement and expand Green’s (1983) RRE review of 10 National Institute of Education–funded studies of how language use in classrooms and other education settings was supported and/or constrained by actions of teachers with students as well as how students learned academic and social processes in classrooms (Cazden, 1986, 1988, 2017; Cazden et al., 1972; Gage, 1974). The lines of research Guthrie and Hall (1983) inscribe in their review are central to understanding the microethnographic studies of the 1960s to 1980s and the microethnographic discourse analytic logic of inquiry underlying Kelly’s and Baker’s telling case studies, which follow this section. They also link this developing line of research to the perspectives on ethnographic research identified in Smith (1978), as (re)presented in the following: One approach to the study of children’s language use in and out of classrooms has been known variously as microethnography (Erickson & Shultz, 1977, 1981), constitutive ethnography (Mehan, 1979), or ethnographic monitoring (Hymes, 1981). There are other types of research labeled microethnography, notably the method devised and employed by Smith & Geoffrey (1968), and Rist (1973). However, here we are concerned with the system of microethnography incorporating a sociolinguistic perspective and focus. (p. 64)
In Table 1, we present a detailed description of the key concepts and processes that Guthrie and Hall (1983) identified at the intersection of microethnography and sociolinguistics, concepts central to the telling case studies by Kelly and Baker presented in the next section of this chapter.
Analytic Constructs Derived From Guthrie and Hall (1983)
As indicated in Table 1, the concepts presented frame how social interaction, as a multidimensional phenomenon, like language (cf. Halliday, 1973), can be characterized as a set of options (Gumperz, 1972, 1977). From their perspective on interaction, Guthrie and Hall (1983) frame the following: In the mutual construction of their discourse, actors select what they want to say next (semantic options), how to say it (social options), and the form it will take (linguistic options). They even exercise options about what to attend to, how to interpret their environment, and how to define what is going on. At the basis of these choices is a series of factors that can act as constraints. At the most general level, these include social and cultural facts such as social status and cultural norms. At the most-narrow level are facts that are within the interaction itself, such as prosodic and phonological variations. (p. 59)
They further argue that constraints also operate at the local level and that these constraints (e.g., norms and/or rules for participation) are always in context. These levels of constraint do not act in isolation; rather, they are interdependent and mutually interacting and are experienced in terms of situation, social context, and task. Moreover, “the influence of any constraint depends on the actor’s consciousness, which lies at the center of all social interaction” (p. 61).
If we extend the conceptual arguments about language and interaction (re)presented in Table 1, then it becomes important to consider what influences how students will interpret what is being proposed to them in and through the interactions, as well as how they interpret what is required to participate (Bloome & Egan-Robertson, 1993; Bloome et al., 2005; Green & Wallat, 1981b; Gumperz, 1981; Lin, 1993). Thus, in Table 1, we (re)present core constructs that are central to understanding why Guthrie and Hall (1983) frame the following limits to research, focusing on particular moments in classrooms: “The complexities of human interaction are so great that one cannot, with confidence, point to independent variables within a particular situation as having caused any observed differences” (p. 63).
In their chapter, therefore, Guthrie and Hall (1983) provide a rich review of conceptual arguments about how different researchers have theorized language, interaction, contexts, social processes, consciousness, and personal interpretations, among other human processes that influence what can be made available to and interpreted by (or not) students in and across times, events, cycles of activity, and configurations of different actors. The challenges that Guthrie and Hall raise converge with those framed by the education researchers presented previously and lay a foundation for understanding the decisions and actions that guided Kelly and Baker in the (re)examination and (re)presentations of their telling case studies, as demonstrated in the next section.
Telling Case Studies: Making Transparent Microethnographic Discourse Analytic Logics in Use
As the telling case studies presented in this section will make transparent, the concepts and processes presented in both Smith (1978) and Guthrie and Hall (1983) are central to the microethnographic discourse analytic logic of inquiry. Additionally, they inform the iterative, recursive, abductive logic of analyses undertaken by Kelly and Baker.
Telling Case Study 1: Common Task, Uncommon Take-Up
In this telling case study, we describe the multifaceted and multilevel approach to analysis undertaken by Kelly and his team of sociolinguistic-based analysts (Crawford and Green) to trace the ways students in his Advanced Placement Physics Lab were introduced to new technology-based processes. These laboratory processes were designed by Kelly to guide the students’ work in four small groups (teams) as they engaged in explorations of physics concepts and processes explained in more detail later. Thus, through this telling case study, we (re)construct the actions that Kelly took as designer and instructor of the laboratory experiences as well as researcher.
This telling case study (re)examines Kelly et al.’s (2001) original study that focused on identifying the actions, interactions, discourse, and ways used by students to negotiate the technology-oriented physics task. Kelly’s goal for the original study was to develop an understanding of how students constructed common knowledge (Edwards & Mercer, 1987; Mercer & Hodgkinson, 2008) of a physics problem and the epistemic processes and practices involved in undertaking the problem.
To step back from the presentation of different analyses undertaken by his research team, Kelly and colleagues (2001) (re)analyzed the original published report to make transparent the logic of analysis that they undertook to examine how and in what ways each group of students engaged in the following actions:
How students formed self-selected teams of three to four people
How each team interpreted the task
The ways in which each team engaged with the technology for collecting sources of data related to the physics problem inscribed in the guide constructed by Kelly in his multiple roles of designer, instructor, and research team leader
How the participants in the team negotiated what knowledge of physics was critical to accomplishing this task and whose knowledge was accepted (or not) as these Advanced Placement students engaged with the problem over time
As this telling case study will make transparent, to examine what forms of common knowledge as well as how common and individual knowledges were being proposed, recognized, and taken up (or not) in the process of learning from the technology-enabled physics problem, Kelly and the sociolinguistic/microethnographic research team undertook multiple levels of analyses, including the following:
Constructing multiple forms of transcripts to map and thus create texts, which were then analyzed to seek evidence of how the developing task and events identified were being constructed by the different groups, in order to develop an empirical/grounded understanding of the group’s interpretation of the developing tasks.
Tracing student interactions, actions, and discourse to examine how and under what conditions, and in what ways, the students proposed and thus displayed (or not) understandings of scientific knowledge and epistemic processes and practices.
Engaging in contrastive analyses across groups that required different forms of (re)presentation of what was being constructed in and across times and interactions among the members of each team.
Developing theoretical understandings of what constituted common knowledge across groups as well as individual student knowledge and collective knowledge within groups.
Although these multiple levels of analyses were limited to examining one laboratory experience (1 day), Kelly’s telling case study, with its close focus on developing segments of classroom life within and across groups, was designed to provide readers with an opportunity to examine critical dimensions of the microethnographic discourse analytic logic of inquiry. It also creates a foundation for understanding studies in Kelly’s larger program of research, which have been undertaken over the past two decades. This program of research has led to the identification of new and previously unexamined dimensions of processes in classrooms that shape students’ access to, and understandings of, knowledge and epistemic practices of science and engineering within and across different levels of school and classroom contexts (e.g., Kelly, 2008a, 2008b, 2016b; Kelly & Cunningham, 2017; Kelly & Licona, 2018).
Situating the Physics Lab Study Within an Ongoing Program of Research
In this section, we (re)construct Kelly’s logic of analysis to demonstrate how the analysis of micro-moments of interaction led to the identification of various ways in which the students sought to propose, communicate, evaluate, and legitimize knowledge claims in their small groups. Underlying these processes was Kelly’s background in physics, which led to the importance of examining how the local and situated processes and practices related to ways of knowing physics as a discipline.
This process involved multiple angles and forms of analyses in the original study, not just a single transcript analysis (Alexander, 2015). These analytic processes involved examining different phenomena as they were being constructed, including the following: analysis of teachers’ discursive work, analysis of available texts (guide sheet) by student take-up, analysis of student engagement with the technologies (i.e., computer probes using software that embody concretized physics and mathematics knowledge), and students’ interactional and discourse processes within and across particular phases of the developing events of the lab session.
In constructing this telling case study of his logic of inquiry, Kelly (re)analyzed the transcripts archived from his team’s earlier work to further explore how the local and situated epistemic practices were formed in this endogenous community, in ways that reflect the processes and practices of science communities in general. Specifically, through this (re)analysis, Kelly makes transparent how he and his team examined how the laboratory community (students, with their teacher) constructed, extended, modified, and changed their understandings of the physical phenomena.
Kelly’s Logic of (Re)Analysis of Epistemic Practices and Knowledge Construction
To establish the context and make transparent the affordances Kelly created as designer and instructor of the laboratory experiences, we now foreground his goals for the design of this laboratory task for the Advanced Placement physics students. In this way, we make visible what is often an invisible, or unexamined, context in studies of teaching-learning processes, when studies solely focus on what is happening in a particular event, a concern that will be further explored in Telling Case Study 2 by Baker.
Kelly’s goals for his design were grounded in his understanding of the epistemic processes and practices as well as conceptual knowledge of the discipline of physics: to provide the students with opportunities to recognize the affordances of the real-time graphing capabilities of the computer-based laboratory, to create situations that encourage interpretation (i.e., to “talk science”) across different media, and to produce representations of physical phenomena. The students were encouraged to make sense of the physical events (linear and oscillatory motion) through a series of verbal and written prompts (teacher lab guide sheet, student talk), symbols (real-time, computer-generated graphs), and embodied motion (students’ imitation of motion through the physical movement of their hands).
Kelly engaged a discourse analysis team (Crawford and Green) to support the analyses of how students made sense of the science. Working together, this team produced a series of timelines and transcripts that served as graphic (re)presentations of different dimensions of the social processes and epistemic consequences entailed in the students’ actions and meaning-making processes. For example, the team created timelines (see Figure 1; Kelly et al., 2001, figure 3, p. 144) to examine how four small student groups organized their time to accomplish the academic tasks framed by the teacher’s lab guide sheet.
Timelines of Four Physics Student Groups With Phase Unit Activities Marked
Analyses of these timelines (a visual text of developing activity flow) provided a basis for examining the question “On what was time spent, by whom and in what ways, leading to what progression of understanding of concepts and processes?” This level of analysis, a mesolevel focusing on actions being undertaken, formed a foundation for contrastive analyses across groups, and thus for examining how the common task was taken up uncommonly by each group. As Figure 1 demonstrates, this approach to contrasting a group’s take-up and engagement in this task, (re)presented as timelines, reveals the ways the students’ initial thinking, false starts, and knowledge claims were embedded in sequences of activity. It also makes transparent how the time spent engaging in particular elements of the lab guide sheet differed across groups, leading to different potentials of future understandings of these physics concepts.
To examine the students’ interactions at a more microlevel, the analysts created transcripts of talk and action (cf. Green & Kelly, 2019; Green & Wallat, 1981b) that (re)presented discourse beyond the speech mode. This approach to (re)presenting discourse and the interpretive processes being proposed, recognized, and interactionally accomplished by the participants included recognizing and examining the signs and symbols used by the students in the activities, the proxemics (the distances between and among group members and artifacts), and the prosody (pitch, stress, intonational contour, pause, and juncture) of the conversations (e.g., Bloome & Theodorou, 1988; Gumperz & Herasimchuk, 1972). Figure 2 (Kelly et al., 2001) provides an illustrative example of one of these transcript formats that supported multiple levels of analysis, drawing on different inscriptions of discourse and configurations of participants, and the developing interactional processes.
Sequence of Interpretation of the Meaning of Constant Velocity Across Visual and Symbolic Forms
While a complete set of transcripts constructed and analyzed is beyond the scope of this chapter (see additional transcripts in Kelly et al., 2001), Figure 2 provides a focused exploration of how the analysis team created graphic texts that (re)presented particular levels of information that served to contextualize the discourse processes.
For example, Figures 1 and 2 (Figures 3 and 7, respectively, in the original publication; Kelly et al., 2001) were designed to provide a basis for examining how the group came together and the sequences of decisions and actions leading to the production of knowledge claims and engagement in epistemic practices (Kelly, 2016b; Kelly & Chen, 1999). This level of sociolinguistic analysis was informed by the following microethnographic question: How and in what ways were the students engaging in and with the technology-generated texts as well as the actions and verbal/nonverbal interactions within the group? Importantly, the transcription process shown in Figure 2 made it possible to identify the nonverbal communication, the eye gaze, and the proxemics of the groups, and thus their orientations to particular dimensions of the lab task (cf. Bloome & Theodorou, 1988; Green & Bridges, 2018; Gumperz, 1982).
In creating the text in Figure 2, the analysts provide evidence of how this form of transcription created a foundation for exploring how the participants’ use of reference and gestures was critical to identifying the developing actions and texts being constructed by them in and across time and flow of activity in this developing event. By analyzing the video record in concert with this approach to transcribing, these researchers were able to develop inferences about the referents of the students’ multimodal (Gumperz, 1981) conversations at important junctures in the conversations. This analytic process, therefore, laid a foundation for examining the complex meaning-making process that involved the coordination of words, symbols, and objects as they were developing in and across phases of the group work.
Through the different levels of analysis of discourse and interactions, the analysts were able to develop an evidence-based narrative that traced the students’ reasoning as they worked through the laboratory exercises. What these levels of analysis made possible to understand, and develop warranted accounts of, is that the students working in small groups did not always, or even often, come to a common interpretation without considerable discourse and interactional work. The analyses included the ways in which different members within a particular student group reopened topics, a process that led the analysts to develop evidence of the variations in students’ understandings of the physics topics. By examining key referents to physics concepts in the conversations of particular students across the groups, the analysts were able to identify the subset of students who articulated the canonical knowledge in the moment, and for whom resolution was achieved among the group members.
These figures and descriptions of the actions of the research team made transparent how the microethnographic discourse analytic logic of analysis supported the team in identifying social processes of learning the disciplinary knowledge of physics. Thus, in Telling Case 1, we presented a logic of analysis undertaken by Kelly et al. (2001) that made transparent how ME/DA, as a logic of inquiry and analysis, theoretically and conceptually framed a multifaceted and multileveled approach to analysis, to trace sources of common knowledge as they were being constructed (Edwards & Mercer, 1987; Mercer & Hodgkinson, 2008) in and through the discourse, actions, and understandings within and across groups (Guthrie & Hall, 1983).
The telling case study also provides evidence for the importance of reporting on how and why iterative processes of ethnographic analyses were necessary to examine how knowledge claims were asserted, considered, tested, (re)formulated, and revised by the students in each group. This telling case study of the analytic processes undertaken by Kelly and his research team, therefore, frames the importance of an iterative, recursive, and abductive process central to tracing developing differences in the social construction of events and knowledge within and across groups. The research team thus engaged in the epistemic practices of ME/DA to understand the ways in which the students were learning through engagement in the epistemic practices of physics.
Telling Case Study 2: Analyzing the Social Construction of Studio Artist Processes and Practices
In Telling Case Study 2, we (re)construct the analytic logic of analysis that Baker (2001) undertook to examine how intergenerational participants (1–4 years in the program) were afforded opportunities to develop understandings of creative processes in an Advanced Placement high school Studio Art class. As in Telling Case Study 1, we present the logic of analysis for exploring opportunities for learning that raised additional analytic issues and for further demonstrating the iterative, recursive, and abductive processes of the microethnographic discourse analytic logic in use. Specifically, we focus on developing a theoretical and empirical argument for the necessity of examining an often invisible mediating factor of classroom life: the developing histories and perspectives of students and teachers across times and events.
Through this (re)analysis of Baker’s (2001) original study and subsequent studies (e.g., Baker et al., 2008; Baker & Green, 2007), we unfold the reflexive processes that Baker undertook through a multilayered process of (re)analyzing archived records. In exploring Baker’s reflexive analytic process, we identified a shift from his original focus on the teacher and the opportunities for learning she provided through her discursive actions to a focus on the communicative processes of students with their teacher. In this way, Baker shifted from the role of observer-as-analyst to one of hearer/listener-as-analyst (cf. Bakhtin, 1986).
This shift in focus, as we demonstrate in this section, supported a (re)examination of the histories of class members, and their views on core discipline-based practices. Through this process, Baker raises questions about what an outsider (the researcher) may or may not be able to see, hear, or understand (e.g., the embedded social and disciplinary assumptions of particular classroom practices). By examining a key event from the 2-year ethnographic study, the third cycle of public critique, we foreground how, and in what ways, Baker identified the discipline-based practices that were being constructed in the class (e.g., an iteration of public critique). Additionally, by examining the developing processes and practices for conducting and participating in this event, we demonstrate how Baker then engaged in a process of backward mapping (Agar, 2006b). His goal through this form of mapping was to identify the sources of differences in the teacher’s actions and discourse that shaped how she engaged students with different histories in successfully participating as artists in public critique.
Importantly, the telling case offers a second example of how the logic of ME/DA led a researcher to develop theoretically and empirically grounded claims about how the teacher—and, in this case, some of the experienced students—provided access to students for learning local disciplinary knowledge, processes, and practices. Specifically, we will (re)present the layers of analyses undertaken to examine the roots of observed differences in two students’ performance of public critique, a 3-day event. This cycle of critique provided the students with an opportunity to present a series of drawings to the teacher and peers, engage in a public conversation about the artifacts (i.e., drawings) constructed by each presenter, and examine the processes and practices used to construct them.
What is important to note for this telling case study is that Baker was entering the second year of a 2-year ethnographic study in a field outside of his disciplinary background (English language arts). Therefore, in many ways, he represented a second-year student in the intergenerational (1–4 years of participation) Advanced Placement Studio Art class taught by an experienced (29 years) Visual Arts teacher. We present this telling case study to raise issues of limits to certainty, when interpretations by the analyst do not match the teacher’s interpretation of student performances, based on the teacher’s knowledge of the history of the students in the class (particularly points of entry) as well as of the disciplinary expectations within and beyond the class (Baker & Green, 2007).
Through Baker’s telling case study, we (re)construct the key components of Baker’s logic in use and reflect on many of the points Guthrie and Hall (1983) argue for in Table 1. For example, we explore how Baker’s initial analysis of the student performances led to a “rich point” (Agar, 1994), an unexpected moment that requires further examination to gain understanding. We also explore how his lack of knowledge of particular social contextual factors of the situation became visible only after he engaged in further discussions with the teacher about the students. By challenging his initial assumptions of the discursive patterns that he had identified and by (re)considering a collaborative analysis, he (Baker, 2001; Baker & Green, 2007) recognized the limits to certainty. This process of analysis led to the following questions:
What analytic processes guide researchers-as-observers in interpreting what is happening, particularly in considering the perspective of participants (insiders)?
Moreover, what background knowledge of the teacher’s/teachers’ and students’ histories is critical to consider in order to understand what the ethnographer, as an outsider, is seeing, hearing, and understanding and, thus, is able to develop as warranted accounts of the phenomena under study (Heap, 1995)?
Entering the Studio Art Class: Historical Roots
Baker and the studio art teacher, and one her colleagues, originally met during a summer institute designed for teachers (the National Writing Project), and through their dialogues, Baker grew interested in how the creative process was introduced to an intergenerational group of students by this studio art teacher. Their mutual interest in the creative process led to ongoing conversations and the 2-year collaboration in which Baker recorded classroom life on video and in field notes (cf. Corsaro, 1981, cited in Evertson & Green, 1986; see also Emerson et al., 2011) during his cycles of observation: the first 2 days of the class, continuous days each week, and whole cycles of activity across the 2 years of public critique. Through this process of entering each observation day, recording the flow of events in field notes and videos, and archiving and analyzing these records of classroom life, Baker strived to achieve his goal of gaining an insider’s perspective (understanding) of what constituted studio art and the work of artists in this classroom community.
During the first year of the ethnographic study, Baker conducted a series of interviews with volunteer students. During an interview, one of the students stated, “If you want to know about the [studio] art class, you need to see [public] critique” (Field Notes, February 9, Year 1). Therefore, Baker, in consultation with the teacher, elected to begin the second year by entering and observing how the teacher initiated the class prior to and on the first day of the school year to trace the construction of the role that public critique played in the development of the student artists. Baker began video recording and writing field notes, focusing on the ways in which the teacher initiated developing events and cycles of activity in the class (Green & Meyer, 1991). These included materials, processes, and practices—particularly the social, semiotic (Gee & Green, 1998), and language (Bloome & Egan-Robertson, 1993) systems—as they were proposed, recognized, acknowledged, and interactionally accomplished by students with different histories in this course (cf. Bloome et al., 2005). The archived video records and Baker’s field notes were a basis for him to construct an index for his developing archive (Corsaro, 1985; cf. Green, Chian, Stewart & Couch, 2017).
Baker began a multifaceted process of transcribing archived video records by using an approach that members of his microethnographic discourse analytic community frame as running records of the developing class (times and flow of events and first drafts of transcriptions). These running records and field notes afforded Baker mesolevel opportunities to (re)construct the developing chains of events (shifts in activities), which were being constructed each day—a process that led to the construction of event maps of each day (cf. Baker et al., 2008; Green & Wallat, 1981b). An event map is a mesolevel, graphic (re)presentation of the flow of activity (see Figure 3) at particular levels of scale that include columns for clock time and for observational notes on the analysis of discursive and interactional signals of transitions from one event to the next. In constructing these event maps, as well as writing field notes, Baker identified the boundaries of events and created a second layer of field notes that included theoretical, methodological, and personal notes, which reflected his growing understanding of what was happening and what was being constructed in and across moment-by-moment and over-time interactions of the teacher with students, and students with others (cf. Corsaro, 1985, cited in Evertson & Green, 1986).
Timelines Leading to Cycles of Activity of Public Critique
This process led Baker to construct notebooks organized by days that included running records, event maps, classroom transcripts, and other artifacts (e.g., handouts). Baker also charted when the teacher invited speakers from earlier iterations of the course (e.g., alumni) to share stories and confirm discipline-based practices with the students. This process of indexing different records as they were collected provided a historical grounding for (re)visiting the developing history of the class as well as for adding reflexive notes (links to theory, hypotheses, methodological processes, etc.) for further consideration and analysis both in and over time.
Figure 3 presents a multilayered map of the history of the teacher and the placement of Baker’s years in her class as part of the teacher’s personal history as well as the history of the students participating for the first time each year (Timeline 1). This figure (the teacher’s and the program’s history timeline) formed an anchor for situating the 2 years of Baker’s ethnographic study of the class within this Visual Arts program (indicated by the years that are shaded in gray).
This level of analysis led Baker to seek deeper understandings of how students with different histories (years in the class, 1–4 years) understood and presented their work as artists during the cycle of activity in November titled public critique, an event in which students as artists engaged with others in the class in a form of public evaluation of their work.
Such critique, as Baker and the students learned over developing cycles of critique (presented in Figure 3), is a common practice of the studio art world, as framed by the teacher as she introduced intertextually tied cycles of activity (Bloome & Egan-Robertson, 1993) across the first 3 months of the class (see the timeline of cycles in Figure 3). In these intertextually tied events, she framed for the students how what they were engaging in was part of the world of studio art that they were seeking to enter. In this way, the teacher made the walls of the class permeable to support the students in developing visions of future sites for their work as artists.
What is also visible in the swing-out timelines (a term in Baker’s ME/DA community) is how Baker (re)presented the interconnections of the developing events in particular cycles of activity at particular levels of analytic scale. The swing-out timelines constitute a process for situating part-whole relationships of times and events to locate the point in the history of the class being analyzed. This zooming in and zooming out create a process that maintains the laminated (multilayered) and historical contexts of particular events and frames empirical ways of interconnecting particular levels of analysis (Green et al., 2012).
As indicated in Figure 3, Baker added a running record of the developing phases of actions that the teacher presented to the students on the first day of school as practices for being artists. In this analysis, he focused on the teacher’s ways of initiating a discourse of studio art as well as foreshadowing future events in which the students would participate, thus creating intertextual (Bloome & Egan-Robertson, 1993) and intercontextual (Bloome et al., 2005; Floriani, 1993; Heras, 1993; Yeager et al., 1998) (re)presentations of processes and events. Baker also included quotations within this timeline to foreground the observed intertextual/intercontextual references as well as the material resources that the teacher drew on (e.g., a video of an art event, letters from previous students) to introduce what counted as, and constituted, being an artist in this intergenerational program (cf. Durán & Szymanski, 1995; Putney et al., 1999). Additionally, Baker (re)presented cycles of critique that included the public critique in November.
In his original study, Baker (2001) had identified differences in student performance during public critique of two students, and through a conversation with the teacher, he learned that these students were both first-year students in the class. As indicated in Figure 3, the two students, Maya and James (pseudonyms), were both seniors in high school but first-year students in this class and program. As also indicated in this timeline of the cycles of critique, through a backward and forward mapping of the critique cycles, Baker identified Maya’s point of entry into the class as 1 month into the school year, while James entered on the first day. This process of tracing points of entry provided information that was not observable in Baker’s live observation of the students’ performance or in his initial analysis of what he was hearing or seeing. This multilevel process of analysis led Baker to a deeper understanding that what he had heard and observed in each performance was related to the two students’ levels of access to the developing processes of drawing techniques, materials, and practices of critique. That is, Baker learned that Maya did not have the same level of experience with critique as a practice as James.
A complete analysis of the differences in their performances is beyond the scope of this chapter (see Baker, 2001). What is important to report about the analysis is that when Baker engaged with the teacher in a conversation about the two students’ performances, and the differences observed in the teacher’s responses to them, the teacher made visible that she was aware of what Maya had, and had not, experienced and that her interactions with Maya were designed to support Maya in undertaking critique for the first time (see Baker in Green et al., in press). Furthermore, Baker also learned that James was only a first-year student, although Baker had presumed that James was a more experienced student based on the discourse and actions he had observed during James’s presentation of his drawings. That is, James’s discourse reflected the teacher’s discourse that Baker, as observer-participant (Spradley, 1980/2016), had initially analyzed from the beginning of the school year. Because Baker had been transcribing and mapping the flow of activity for each day from the beginning of the school year, he expected to hear discourse of the drawing techniques that the teacher had introduced and descriptions of the creative process and other practices modeled by the teacher that the students had experienced within and across earlier intertextually tied cycles of activity.
Baker’s growing understanding of the roots of the differences between Maya’s and James’s performances of public critique was further extended when, at a later point in time, he engaged with the teacher in a conversation of process that focused on his interpretation of his observations of the performance of different students across the 3 days of critique. The teacher led Baker to understand the need to know the history of the students, not simply to base his interpretations on what he saw and heard in the moment, particularly given that some students had been there for 4 years and he had only been part of this intergenerational studio art class for 2 years. In other words, Baker, like the students, was developing understandings of, and knowledge about, what was being proposed, recognized, acknowledged, and interactionally accomplished by students with different years of experience with the processes, practices, and discourse of studio art (cf. Bloome et al, 2005).
For Baker, this growing awareness of what was observable by the teacher in contrast to Baker as a researcher (outsider) raised a question of access similar to that framed by Smith (1978). That is, it raised questions about access to what? Access, Baker learned, involved developing understandings of the history of participants in observed events, and discourse from different points of view, often information not directly recorded in field notes, on video, or during interviews. Baker’s telling case study, therefore, provides a grounding for examining and questioning what constitutes insider (i.e., emic) knowledge (cf. Heath, 1983; Heath & Street, 2008). Although Baker was alerted by a student to the importance of critique for the class, his telling case further demonstrates how a microethnographic discourse analytic logic of inquiry supported multiple levels of analysis and, at times, new data collection and (re)analyses, which proved critical to developing theoretically grounded interpretations of the developing processes and practices within the studio art class.
Thus, Baker’s and Kelly’s telling case studies demonstrate why no single analysis, or theoretical perspective, is sufficient to understand how students develop disciplinary knowledge of concepts, processes, and practices through educational opportunities afforded them in classrooms (Kelly, 2016b). That is, Baker’s, like Kelly’s, telling case study frames the importance of understanding the goals of the research and what each study provides educators and researchers (cf. Kaur, 2012; Morine-Dershimer, 2013; Nuthall, 2007). This issue, as Candela et al. (2004) and Kumpulainen et al. (2009) argue, constitutes the basis for a new research agenda, one that supports deeper understandings of the complex and developing lives of learners in different educational contexts.
Closing and Opening: On What Was Learned From the Telling Case Studies
Kelly’s and Baker’s telling case studies provide a basis for understanding the ongoing and developing nature of ME/DA-based knowledge construction as framed by Smith (1978), Guthrie and Hall (1983), and others. Kelly and Baker also demonstrate the critical need to understand the history of the participants as well as the relationship of the researcher with members of the ongoing community in which the researcher seeks to gain entry. Through these processes, the ethnographer-as-learner seeks to understand what members need know, understand, and interpret in order to participate in culturally relevant ways in a developing culture-in-the-making (cf. Bloome et al., 2018; Collins & Green, 1992; Green et al., 2012; Heath, 1982; Heath & Street, 2008; Walford, 2008; Yeager et al., 2009).
By presenting these two telling case studies, we created a foundation for understanding the need for triangulating different angles of vision on a particular event (participants, researchers, teacher) as well as undertaking multiple levels of analyses to construct warranted understandings of what was being observed and understood by the researcher (Green & Chian, 2018; Heap, 1995). We also made transparent the chains of decisions, actions, and theories that were guided by a microethnographic discourse analytic logic that constituted the particular approach to microethnography, that is, interactional ethnography, undertaken by Kelly and Baker (cf. Castanheira et al., 2000; Green & Bridges, 2018; Kelly & Green, 2019).
From the interactional ethnographic perspective, each level of analysis, as Smith (1978) and Mitchell (1984) argue, forms a basis for tracing a particular sequence of events at some level of society (an individual, a small group, a class) to learn from members what is required to participate in what Hymes (1972) framed as a “bit of life.” Moreover, this complex iterative, recursive, and abductive logic of inquiry supports identification of previously unexamined dimensions of classroom life as experienced by particular participants. It also provides a basis for engaging different participants in conversations of processes that need to be understood to gain emic or insider understandings of what is being heard, seen, and thus observed. These telling case studies, therefore, make visible how microethnography is an epistemological approach, which supports researchers in studying a particular group or phenomenon within a particular social context (e.g., literacy practices, epistemic processes and practices that constitute disciplinary knowledge, and equity of access to particular opportunities for learning in local contexts as well as across national contexts; Anderson-Levitt & Rockwell, 2017; Bloome et al., 2018; Garcez, 2008, 2017; Green & Bloome, 1997; Heath & Street, 2008; Skukauskaite et al., 2017; Smith, 1978).
Furthermore, the fact that Baker and Kelly had extensive archives, which supported multiple levels of (re)analysis, makes clear how archived records can support multiple studies at different points in time and, thus, the development of deeper theories of learning through multifaceted iterative, recursive, and abductive research processes (Green et al., 2015; Green et al., 2017). These telling case studies make it apparent how one study may lead to the need for further analyses and the creation of new data sets to construct an intertextual web of understandings that lead to deeper theoretically and empirically grounded claims (Heap, 1995) about what counts as learning processes and practices for particular participants engaged in particular events with particular configurations of actors at particular points in time within particular communities of learners.
Finally, by tracing the historical roots of ME/DA studies of the functions of language in classrooms, we also make visible the depth of recurrent issues in research that have led to the current epistemological approaches. In this way, we reiterate the editors’ call for this volume of RRE to address how ME/DA, as an emergent approach over the past four decades, builds on, and extends, the ways of studying recurring issues of student access to learning opportunities in the changing educational world of the 21st century.
