ABSTRACT
Observational and interview data have always seemed to me to be mainstays of ethnographic work in education. In my early graduate school days, I remember reading the work of researchers I admire-Deborah Britzman (1991), Annette Lareau (2000), Signithia Fordham (1996)—passing in and out of the school communities they were learning about, observing, and interviewing along the way, and I carried these images with me as I embarked upon the first days of my doctoral dissertation study. Throughout the year-long ethnography, my hope was to hear and understand the voices of Katie, Jane, Alexandra, and Margaret, four first-year ESOL teachers, as I explored teacher knowledge embedded in practice. I asked: What are meanings of knowledge, pedagogy, and identity in the context of becoming a language teacher? I sought not only to develop my own meanings of the teachers’ lives, but to explore how they thought about their lives. This goal took me on a complicated journey, one that called into question my ideas about the relationships among representation and voice, objectivity and objectification, power, humanity and the nature of being human, praxis, connection and community, context and situatedness, validity, agency, and the politics of telling other people’s stories.
