ABSTRACT
Flecker here catalogues the trade-goods carried on the golden journey by the grocers. It is unlikely that most ethnographers, especially those working in a Western country, would carry home data in such a colourful and extravagant array. However, the data ought to be as profitable as the sweets or candies, the aromatic oils, the resin of a tree that can make chewing gum, wood from the turpentine tree, olive and nut oils, spices, and fruit jellies and jams which Flecker’s merchants are trading. This chapter focuses on documents, interview talk, visual materials, soundscapes and multi-modality, and finally ‘traditional’ fieldnotes. In conventional school and college classrooms of all kinds, the researcher may be a very traditional ethnographer. If the pupils or students are expected to sit still, listen in silence and write a great deal, the ethnographer will probably keep written fieldnotes similar to those of classic studies. Where I have never collected data of a specific kind myself, I have used new examples from the work of other scholars, different from those in the two earlier editions. To balance my own practices and preferences, data on three other educational ethnographers are included. Walford (2007b and 2009), drawing on interviews with four experienced educational ethnographers, has compared and contrasted their accounts of exactly how they do their fieldwork. Connolly, Weis and Jeffery all focus on ethnographies in schools, while I am included, discussing the research on capoeira classes.
