Research Design

Before I explain why I followed an ethnographic-style research approach, it is important to explain the concept ethnography and its basic common features and then how the present study, that focused on literacy, used this approach in a more restricted and focused way in order to understand what is going on in particular literacy settings.

Ethnography is an approach to research that falls firmly within the category of qualitative research and ethnographic designs are qualitative procedures of describing, analyzing, and interpreting the research data. As a research tradition, ethnography developed as an approach

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within the field of social anthropology and later started to be applied within certain kinds of educational research, including language and literacy research. Creswell (2008, p. 473) explains the term ethnography as literarily meaning ‘writing about groups of people’. Ethnography refers to the research of people or cultures or to the study of people as they go about their everyday lives, while ethnographic research, particularly as it has developed in educational studies and in literacy studies, uses the research methods of ethnography to carry out more limited and topic- focused data collection.

Central to the first uses of ethnography was a concern to study culture, and to include attention to human behavior and beliefs, as well as language. Ethnographic descriptions can include attention to language, rituals, economic and political structures, life stages, interactions, and

communication styles. Shank (2006, p. 60) points out that in ethnographic research, researchers participate, over an extended period of time, in the lives of the people they are studying to try to see the world from their cultural perspectives and to understand the meanings in their rituals and cultural artifacts and activities. Gay, Mills and Airasian (2009, p. 404) explain ethnography as the study of the cultural patterns and perspectives of participants in their natural settings and ethnographers as engaging in the long-term study of particular phenomena to situate

understandings about those phenomena into a meaningful context. However, the term ‘culture’ has become a highly contested and controversial term within anthropological debates.

Ethnographic-style research as applied in this research has a narrower canvas than classical ethnography. It does not aim to illuminate ‘the total life of a people’ but to get in-depth insight into a particular subject (children’s early childhood literacy learning and practices) while drawing on the resources of ethnography to develop an in-depth understanding of the use with regard to a relatively small number of research participants.

When one is doing research that follows a certain design, the study should align itself along key features of the said design. Here I will refer to a few sources that highlight key features of ethnographic studies but will continue to point out that the present study was an ethnographic- style research concerned only with literacy and not all the features highlighted as common to ethnographic studies.

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Yin (1993, p. 46) characterizes an ethnographic approach as one in which the investigation seeks to:

gain a close-up, detailed rendition (‘thick description’) of the real world; challenge the logical positivist position by claiming that all evidence is relative and therefore cannot be independent of the investigator – thereby favoring participant-observation as a dominant mode of data collection; and permit and even encourage fieldwork to continue for long periods of time and in a reasonably unstructured manner, so that the regularities and rituals of everyday life can surface in a natural fashion

Mukherji and Albon (2010, p. 70) highlight some features that studies deemed as ethnographic have in common:

 There is a focus on a specific location, or setting or event.

 Within this specific location, setting or event, there is a focus on the full range of social behavior.

 A range of methods might be employed in order to understand this social behavior from

inside the location, setting or event.

 Data analysis involves a movement from rich description to identifying concepts and theories that are grounded in the data, which is collected in that location, setting or event.  There is an emphasis on capturing as much detail as possible and in so doing, not shying

away from the complexities of the issues in the research location, setting or event. This is viewed more important than the ability to make generalizations in ethnographic research.

Barton (2013, p. 1) points out the following:

Historically, anthropologists carried out long-term intensive studies of a whole culture and then wrote ethnography. Many of the studies of literacy are narrower and more focused, and they can be described as drawing upon ethnographic approaches without being full ethnographies.

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The present study, which focuses on children’s early literacy, used an ethnographic approach in a restricted and focused way similar to that suggested by Barton, above, or in a kind of a ‘micro- ethnography’ way. I identified particular configurations of literacy practices and events in different contexts to focus on what counts as literacy in those contexts. Thus, my study is an ethnographic-style research and not a full-blown ethnography. My study was restricted to focusing on observing and recording literacy practices and events in urban settings around Windhoek in Namibia. The study focused on three children as key research participants and studied their early literacy learning and activities in their classrooms and at home, by observing them and recording them during those practices over a year-long period. I collected

comprehensive narrative and visual data over the course of this one-year period to gain insights into what counts as literacy in these contexts, and which were different from each other.

During the first phase of the study that lasted for six months, from June to November (preschool phase), each of the three preschools and the homes of my research children were visited once for observation before further data was collected. In preschool and at home such an observation visit lasted from a minimum of 45 minutes to an hour per child at a time. The videotaping sessions for each child occurred during four intermittent sessions. The three participating preschools were visited twice each in October, and twice in November of the same year. Home recording for each child took place intermittently over four sessions within November of the same year. Each of the preschool recordings covered a literacy event and could last about two hours or more, while at home each session was covered in about an hour. The second phase (primary school phase) from January to June started with an observation visit of about an hour for each child. This was followed by four video recordings in school and at home for each child on different days of the week. The recordings of literacy events at school could last from 45 minutes up to an hour for one child at a time per session.

The current study applied a socio-cultural practices lens to access, understand and describe what counts as literacy in Windhoek urban settings of my research children. In answering the

question: ‘What counts as literacy and how is it supported during its early learning?’ the study considered literacies as social practices manifesting in everyday literacy events in which children participated in that setting. Literacy was viewed as being part of the life of my subjects. I entered

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selected sites and gathered data by way of recorded observation, field notes and conversation. I visited homes and preschool and lower primary schools to document literacy activities at these sites, with a particular focus on my identified research participants at these sites. The study identified the literacy practices which these children drew upon and participated in at home and in school. I therefore set out to identify situated literacy practices within and across settings, employing what Bloome and Katz (2003, p. 392) refer to as a ‘comparative situations theory- building methodology’. The data from multiple locations – the home, preschool and primary school – was compared to generate theoretical constructs about the nature of literacy within and across settings in order to answer what counts as literacy in each of them and how they relate to each other. The study collected detailed data during literacy events within and across these settings over a period of one year in order to identify the nature of literacy activities that children participated in during literacy learning and inferred what the literacy practices were that

sustained such events. On the basis of that analysis I determined what counts as literacy in these early childhood settings.