• Introduction By using a broad selection of contributions from leading worldwide authors, in this handbook we have tried to provide an authoritative review and critical reflection on the state of the art of the ethnography of education. Our aim has been to offer the reader a definitive reference point and academic resource regarding what conceptually and empirically characterises current and past thinking about good educational ethnographic practices. In this final chapter our goal is to produce additional input of relevance to the needs of undergraduate and graduate students, academics, and others working in the field of education and education research. We have taken an opportunity for reflexive thinking about how the methodology has been appropriated, developed, and can provide a possibility of dialogic interpretations of education phenomena and research challenges. However, we are also considering the future. The concept of educational ethnography is now well established, but research conditions have changed in the past decade as have societies. Relationships and places of action in education are more global, multi-sited and mobile, and the handbook brings worldwide contributions addressing how we can approach this complexity. Thinking forward looking back Thinking forward whilst also looking back and considering the history of education ethnography is one of the key themes of the handbook. When doing this, and writing on the value(s) of ethnographic research in and to education as a science, Mats Trondman, Paul Willis and Anna Lund (this volume) recalled a 1907 debate on the meaning and use of ethnography that was held in Paris, involving leading social scientists such as sociologist Emile Durkheim, and political economist René Worms. As Trondman et al noted, Worms was one of the first speakers. He gave an account of ethnography as involving an assembly of materials and descriptions of primitive peoples and their activities. His conclusion was that ethnography was descriptive, a-historical and only suitable for the study of so-called ‘primitive societies’. Durkheim, who spoke after Worms, disagreed with this. Ethnography need not be restricted only to description and could provide a basis for both analysing and synthesizing understandings of the past in relation to the present. He was advancing an ethnography that included contemporaneity and history and that was not only restricted to so-called primitive societies. Ethnographers research civilisations and all human societies have their version of this so ethnography is applicable to any of them. Since 1907 most ethnographers have taken a position closer to the one expressed by Durkheim than that of Worms. Martyn Hammersley is amongst them. In his opening article in the inaugural edition of the journal of Ethnography and Education in 2006, as well as in his handbook chapter in the present volume, he has described how ethnography has been used for over 100 years, as a method to investigate the lived and experienced world and its cultural meanings and practices. In his description the method has had many driving forces and influences, and has been developed within research on different topics, in different kinds of institutions and disciplines, influenced by both modern and postmodern epistemologies as well as a diverse range of theories and methodologies such as phenomenology, existentialism, symbolic interactionism, ethnomethodology, Marxism, feminism and semiology....

Subject headings

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Utbildningsvetenskap (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Educational Sciences (hsv//eng)

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Utbildningsvetenskap -- Pedagogik (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Educational Sciences -- Pedagogy (hsv//eng)

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Sociologi -- Socialantropologi (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Sociology -- Social Anthropology (hsv//eng)

Publication and Content Type

ref (subject category)

kap (subject category)