Martin Forsey

Ethnography as participant listening

Anyone involved in ethnographic research knows that in practice participant listening is an important technique employed by ethnographers, particularly among those of us who live in an ‘interview society’; yet its importance is barely acknowledged in the ethnographic literature. It is curious that ethnographers seem not to have reflected much on a gap between what we say we do and our real life practice. Based partly on my own research into schools and schooling, alongside the work of various other practitioners, I argue the need to better acknowledge the importance of engaged listening for ethnography, and the ways in which personal style (visual learners versus aural learners) impacts ethnographic data production. I also examine the use of interviews in social research, exploring ways in which we might construe ‘the interview’ conducted with an ethnographic imaginary as an ‘experience-near’ event in Western settings: they offer truly ethnographic moments.Anyone involved in ethnographic research knows that in practice participant listening is an important technique employed by ethnographers, particularly among those of us who live in an ‘interview society’; yet its importance is barely acknowledged in the ethnographic literature. It is curious that ethnographers seem not to have reflected much on a gap between what we say we do and our real life practice. Based partly on my own research into schools and schooling, alongside the work of various other practitioners, I argue the need to better acknowledge the importance of engaged listening for ethnography, and the ways in which personal style (visual learners versus aural learners) impacts ethnographic data production. I also examine the use of interviews in social research, exploring ways in which we might construe ‘the interview’ conducted with an ethnographic imaginary as an ‘experience-near’ event in Western settings: they offer truly ethnographic moments.

Broadening the Mind? Australian Student Reflections on the Experience of Overseas Study.

Internationalization of higher education is usually accompanied by rhetorical flourishes that are always going to be difficult to live up to. The research reported here is based on surveys and focus group interviews with students at our home university that asks what students expect to learn and really learn from the university study abroad program. In emphasizing what the students surveyed and interviewed for this study reported learning, or thought they might learn, we are able to offer suggestions that can narrow the breach between the rhetoric and the practice of international education and suggest ways of ensuring that students gain as much as possible from their experiences while studying abroad.

Flipping the sociology classroom: Towards a practice of online pedagogy

Profound changes are under way in university learning and teaching. Online education is taking hold as never before, catalysed in no small part by the advent of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), free university units offered online to anyone with an internet connection. MOOCs appear to be intensifying the trend towards ‘flipping’ the classroom, which involves students engaging with course materials online – usually short videos and readings – then coming to classes constructed as workshops or symposia in which they are invited to practically apply their new knowledge in a variety of ways. This article reports on the ways in which MOOCs have allowed us to critically re-examine pedagogy and practice in the sociology classroom and to test our own assumptions regarding effective pedagogy via an action research project interrogating student reception of a flipped sociology class. Based on preliminary surveys, participant observation and formal interviews gauging student perceptions and initial reception to this particular class, the research reported here offers important correctives to debates that are usually based more on supposition than empirical evidence.

Revelatory moments in fieldwork

This essay prefaces a collection on revelatory moments of fieldwork engagement. Drawing upon brief vignettes from our own research experiences, we argue for the methodological significance of memorable events encountered in ethnographic studies. In addressing this relational production of knowledge, we are particularly interested in the role of emotion, discomfort and surprise in ‘fieldwork’ as understood in anthropology. The case materials illustrate moments of experience drawn from three studies conducted in different decades between 1980 and 2011, thereby marking important shifts in the methods and aims of the discipline, conceptions of where fieldwork is appropriately done, and the role of self-knowledge on the part of the researcher. We make the case for the value of revelatory moments and the epistemological approach that enables their apprehension.

Learning to Stay? Mobile Modernity and the Sociology of Choice

Abstract Linking physical and social mobilities to a modernity typified by increased foci on individualization, consumption, workplace flexibilization and the need for further (and further) education, this paper argues the need for mobility scholars to pay greater attention to the role played by educational institutions in family formation and the decisions associated with where to locate oneself in relation to these institutions. The research project under consideration took place in a remote Australian resource boomtown, an epicentre of global capital concentration and a concomitant mobile modernity. It focuses on educational decision-making that absorbs increasing amounts of energy among middle-class families in various parts of the globe, exploring the sociological implications of this and the links with physical and social mobilities.

Equity versus Excellence: Responses to Neo-liberal Ideals in a Government High School

This article does not have an abstract

The problem with autonomy: an ethnographic study of neoliberalism in practice at an Australian high school

The research reported here demonstrates the need for greater subtlety in the practice of policy than appears to be evident in many parts of the globe. Based upon an ethnographic study of school reform, this paper heeds Appadurais call for those researching the ‘global diaspora of ideas’ to pay attention to the contextual conventions governing their translation. This allows us to contemplate how beliefs and practices produced as part of a global swirl of ideas are adapted to meet local conditions. In other words, it is study of neoliberalism in practice. A single-minded focus on neoliberal ideals, in particular on the apparent need for individual autonomy, caused various key players to lose sight of the pragmatic realities of running an education system catering for a diverse population spread unevenly across an enormous expanse of land. Contrary to a commonsense view of the public service as a stultifying force, I argue it can, and does, play a significant role in maintaining some level of commitment to equity.

Teachers and the re‐production of middle‐class culture in Australian schools

Based mainly on my own ethnographic research, which is committed to uncovering the constructed or ‘practiced’ nature of social life, I seek to demonstrate the ways in which Australian school teachers, administrators, students and parents are engaged in a re‐productive process that simultaneously reinforces and reinvents schools and schooling. Set against a backdrop of concern bordering on panic among some groups about middle‐class flow away from Australian government schools, this paper explores the practices of social class and its structurating effects. A sample is presented of the ways in which those working in Australian schools tend to direct their energies towards ensuring market share of middle‐class students, a practice emerging out of beliefs and experiences that lead teachers to find middle‐class schools ‘stimulating and encouraging places to teach in’, in contrast to the ‘disruptive’ and ‘wearing’ working‐class schools. The study raises important questions not just about how we want to organize our schools and education system, but ultimately about what sort of society are we seeking to re‐produce right here, right now?

The Strange Case of the Disappearing Teachers: Critical Ethnography and the Importance of Studying In-between

Critical ethnography first emerged as a distinctive research approach in education studies in the late 1960s (Anderson, 1989, p. 250). It has now achieved a degree of respectability and has taken its place as part of the qualitative tradition in universities (Jordan & Yeomans, 1995, p. 399). Critical ethnography reflects what Geertz (1983) identified as a ‘blurring of genres’. As the name suggests, it is marked by a confluence of interpretivist field studies and critical streams of thought (Goodman, 1998, p. 51). These converging streams, arising from a variety of sources and pushed along by the currents of Marxist, neo-Marxist and feminist social theory, swirl together into a dynamically enriched mixture of the methods and theories of anthropology, sociology and education. Not surprisingly the streams formed in different parts of the globe, while composed of all of the elements just named, are configured slightly differently. As Priyadharshini (2003, p. 421) recently noted in comparing British and American strands of educational ethnography, the Western side of the Atlantic is marked by a much stronger tradition of educational anthropology than in the UK. And these differences make a difference.

Education in a mobile modernity

The main contention of this paper is that education helps frame a modernity in which individual progress and achievement are increasingly linked to the sheer physical act of movement. Thinking of modernisation as a trajectory of progress and development symbolised by industrialisation and a reordering of ‘traditional societies’ through rational forms of governance, we can begin to recognise the importance of the disembedding of people and communities from local institutions and relations that these modernising processes continue to require. Individual education stories are filled with movement that often reflect a commitment to the mobility imperatives of modernity. Reflecting the different scales of practice evident in this mobile modernity, the empirical focus ranges from rural settings to urban mobilities and then out to transnational mobilities and the educational choices exercised by the global middle classes. The paper explores the profound and the mundane ways in which educational structures affect family and individual mobilities.