Fieldnotes in team ethnography: researching complementary schools

Abstract

Ethnography has typically been seen as a singular research journey in which the lone researcher engages in the study of a community. However, increasingly within the social sciences, ethnographic research takes place in teams. This article explores the processes of using fieldnotes to develop team ethnography in a study of Gujarati complementary schools in a diverse English city. Complementary schools are also known as supplementary, heritage and community language schools. They are voluntary, usually run by local communities, and outside the state education sector. The article looks at how fieldnotes are used by researchers to constitute a team, contest interpretations and produce nuanced accounts of complementary schools. For the purpose of this article, a set of fieldnotes has been selected and presented as a case study to illustrate the role fieldnotes played in the team. The article explores their iterative use by the four-member team to settle upon particular research themes. We consider the role fieldnotes played in the team's reaching contested but shared accounts of social and linguistic action in one particular complementary school.

Conducting global team-based ethnography: Methodological challenges and practical methods

“…These authors show how one researcher was able to access the common shared experience of the expedition, while another focused on individual experiences at specific moments of the same expedition. They provide an important example of team ethnography where experiences are shared (Creese et al 2008;Mauthner and Doucet 2008) rather than divided (Mountz et al 2003). However, explicitly multi-national ethnography teams have been less examined (Marcus, 1995) and those who have written about team ethnography do not explicitly reflect on the fact that a team might also be a way to access multiple sites (Smets, Burke, Jarzabkowski & Spee, 2014).…”

“…Another recent trend in ethnography is a greater reliance on teams (e.g., Creese, Bhatt, Bhojani, and Martin 2008;Erickson and Stull 1997). explain, the myth of the "lone ranger" has progressively been softened and more ethnography studies now involve research teams (e.g., Creese et al, 2006;Prus and Irini 1980;Snow and Anderson 1993).…”

“…explain, the myth of the "lone ranger" has progressively been softened and more ethnography studies now involve research teams (e.g., Creese et al, 2006;Prus and Irini 1980;Snow and Anderson 1993). An increased interest in team ethnography is partly due to changes in the academic mode of production-larger grants and increasing competition lead researchers to do more teamwork projects (Creese et al, 2008;Mauthner and Doucet 2008). Beyond enabling researchers to share the work of large scale projects (Price, 1973), team-based research is also promoted because it brings diverse set of expertise, and can allow more interdisciplinary and thorough comprehension (Barry et al, 1999).…”

“…This section briefly outlines some important trends in organizational ethnography research towards multi-sited global ethnography (Falzon 2009;Hannerz 2003;Marcus 1995), and team ethnography (Creese et al 2008). The idealized image of ethnography Ethnography research has traditionally been carried out by a single ethnographer immersed in a single site, with the aim of gaining a very fine-grained understanding of a (usually) small scale society or community (Geertz 1973;Mead 2001).…”

Inside a Cultural Agency: Team Ethnography and Knowledge Exchange

“…At the other-and much closer to our own experience-are smaller-scale endeavors, where overlapping involvement in data collection and a collaborative approach to analysis lead to a deeper shared knowledge of the field and a more fluid and less temporally segmented process of knowledge production (Döös and Wilhemson 2014). Whereas in some projects there is just one researcher's perspective on each element of the fieldwork (Woods et al 2000, 85), a number of studies stress the benefits of being able to bring multiple perspectives on the same subject to the table in order to explore the differences and tensions between them (Creese et al 2008;Gerstl-Pepin and Gunzenhauser 2002). We support this position.…”