Poststructural Temporalities in School Ethnography

Poststructural temporalities, as the ways subjects (humans) and objects (non-humans) become in relation to the idea of time we hold on to, are critical to the ways that contemporary ethnographic practices produce knowledge. Ethnography, as a complex research practice not only ascribed to anthropology, has provided a rich theoretical space to think of the ways we know and who we are as knowing subjects. Poststructural temporalities imply being critical about dominant (humanist) notions of time that allow for specific social orders and hierarchies to persist as real, intelligible, and easily available to be described in schools: Only certain bodies and identities make sense (teenagers, adults, children, teachers, women, principals, etc.), their relations (student/teacher, men/women, White/Black), and representative concepts to be lived as real (deviant, normal, progress, future, mature, gifted, etc.). Poststructural temporalities, as action and force, allow for the appearance of truths awaiting to become intelligible. Poststructural ways of thinking time promise to move away from traditional frames to understand the social, biological, cultural, and affective school subject, which might turn into a political experience of the now. Uneven time, meaning something different from the traditional concepts of linearity, regularity, and the exhaustive and restricted units of prescribed segments, allows us to decline the regular idea of “telling an experience.” Sites, experiences, subjects, and objects become connections and entanglements to write about. Definitely, the now cannot be inhabited by the Cartesian subject. With these ideas in mind, poststructural temporalities in school ethnographies are political in such a way that those unintelligible relations between humans, matter, and affects being produced in schools right now might show up.

School Ethnography

School ethnography is a qualitative research method through which the researcher immerses herself in the life of the school, usually for an extended period, and through observation, interviews, and analyses of artifacts and documents explores questions about life in school. The school ethnographer gathers data in the form of fieldnotes, interviews, images of school life, and texts that are part of the school and continually analyses all of this data in order to discover or produce meaning from the patterns that emerge: the routines that shape school life, for instance, and the disturbances that upend these patterns. Finally, the researcher creates a written product. The school ethnography, as a product of research, often emulates the research process by immersing the reader in the life of the school and by making transparent the challenges and delights of the research. By drawing on social theories that seek to understand systems of domination and oppression, school ethnographies can expose how inequalities circulate through the everyday life of schools, affecting students’ and teachers’ experiences and shaping policy and curriculum. Many school ethnographies highlight the positionality of the researcher as not-quite insider and not-quite outsider as a way to foreground the ways that power relations shape research in schools, influencing all stages of the research process, including the selection of a site, the researcher’s behavior in the field, the kinds of data that are recorded as fieldnotes, the approach to analysis, and the writerly decisions that shape the final product. Through this recursive and reflexive approach to research, school ethnographers lay the groundwork for social change that is grounded in a comprehensive, detailed, and complex portrait of life in the school.

School Ethnography in Chile

In Chile, ethnographic studies of schools started 30 years ago. At the time, most of the educational research in Latin America was done through quantitative methodologies, which didn’t show school processes in their proper contexts. In this scenario, a group of Latin-American educational researchers came together to develop a critical qualitative research network, in which Chile adopted the form of the first school ethnography research team in the country. From that, a new means of research was developed, aimed towards understanding everyday life in schools, which was what the “black box” quantitative research was unable to see. This innovation allowed these ethnographers to understand schools as a singular and complex reality. They took up a Latin American critical-historical epistemological approach, understanding that schools require a thick description, historically contextualized, that also considers the structures that determine a school’s singularity. Chilean school ethnographies in the last 30 years have focused on the ways in which concrete social relationships take place in situated historical contexts, from the dictatorship of the 1980s to current neoliberal educational policy. They have allowed the visualization of the effects that more general political, economic, and social transformations have had in the schools’ daily organization and practices. In this trajectory, there have been different approaches to educational policy; some take on a critical perspective and others aim to inform and influence policy. School ethnography has addressed a variety of topics, from school failure in its beginnings, to youth culture, civic engagement, ethnicity, learning and development, and gender and educational policy. This diversity, however, has a common interest: the subordinated or excluded cultural forms and subjectivities, which are the consequence of power relationships and normative structures that are reproduced in schools.

Teacher’s ethnic teasing: Playing with ambiguity and exploiting in-group communication

This article discusses the issue of ethnic teasing used by a teacher and his students in a multiethnic classroom of a German middle school. The teacher and his students exploit the resources of the racist discourse for multiple in-group rituals. Based on a school ethnography and conversation analysis, this case study attempts to interpret the teasing practices, which are performed in a classroom where ethnicity matters greatly. The teasing interactions here, questioned in the local context, seem to be a part of a working consensus, helping to regulate interpersonal relations in class. These vague and risky practices infringe the politeness norms: they are based on a daily face-attack ritualization through which a partial weakening of the discriminatory effect might be achieved.