ABSTRACT
In an earlier review, Green and Bloome (1997) drew attention to the different ways in which ethnography has infl uenced research in education. They made a useful distinction between ethnography as practiced within anthropology and the rather different use of ethnography when adopted and deployed as part of educational research. Classic ethnography has traditionally been predicated on prolonged immersion in the research setting(s). It operates inductively using extensive periods of observation and participation to build a deep understanding of the relevant distinctions and categories that structure social life in ways that are familiar to community members but alien to the researcher. The classic ethnographer starts as an outsider and works their way in. This approach to research has led to the development of a range of procedures and research tools which have become core to the discipline. By contrast, it is more usual for education researchers to borrow more selectively from the tradition often in pursuit of more narrow and specifi c research purposes. To capture some of these distinctions Green and Bloome draw a contrast between “doing ethnography”—the traditional extended and open-ended engagement with a particular community; “adopting ethnographic perspectives”—a more closely focused study of certain aspects of community practices and social life, predicated on understanding the logic of that activity from participants’ point of view; and “using ethnographic research tools”—adopting particular methods that derive from that tradition, such as participant observation, or open-ended interviews, but deploying them with more limited objectives in mind.
