Comparing ethnographies of teaching when comparison seems impossible
Kathryn M. Anderson-Levitt https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5412-1818
UCLA and University of Michigan–Dearborn
A submission to the theme issue ‘Living in an era of comparison: Comparative research on policy, curriculum and teaching,’ edited by Ninni Wahlström, Linnaeus University.
Published as:
Anderson-Levitt, Kathryn M. 2018. "Comparing ethnographies when comparison seems impossible." Journal of Curriculum Studies 50 (5):602-623. doi:
10.1080/00220272.2018.1502809.
Biographical note. Kathryn Anderson-Levitt is professor emerita of anthropology at the University of Michigan–Dearborn and has taught in UCLA’s Department of Education since 2011. She has conducted ethnographic research on teachers, reading instruction, and the global flow of educational reform in France and Guinea and recently has studied how students learn to become teachers in the United States. She authored the book Teaching Cultures: Knowledge for Teaching First Grade in France and the United
States, and has edited the volumes Local Meanings, Global Schooling: Anthropology and World Culture Theory, Anthropologies of Education: A Global Guide to Ethnographic
Studies of Learning and Schooling, and Comparing Ethnographies: Local Studies of Education across the Americas (with Elsie Rockwell). She served as editor of
Comparing ethnographies of teaching when comparison seems impossible
Abstract. This essay examines comparison in a double sense. Focusing on ethnographies of teachers’ work in the published literature, I ask whether it is possible to compare ethnographic studies across national borders without losing the particularities of local context, and also without losing the distinctive theoretical perspective of ethnographers operating within different national traditions. Building on the volume Comparing
ethnographies, I explore as a tool an expansion of Noblit and Hare’s ‘meta-ethnographic’ approach. Because meta-ethnography aims to remain faithful to local contexts, it works for cross-national comparison; because it is meant as an interpretation of the
ethnographers’ interpretations, it can allow for national differences in scholarly traditions. I illustrate with a comparison of ethnographies of practices in Danish and in Japanese preschools, identifying ‘reciprocal’ translations, ‘refutational synthesis’, and ‘line-of-argument synthesis.’ The essay demonstrates that meta-ethnography’s interpretive approach does permit comparison across national contexts and scholarly traditions, and that it actually encourages ‘theoretical generalisation’, the ability to expand our
understanding, without obscuring local context.
Comparing ethnographies of teaching when comparison seems impossible
Is comparison even possible? Elsie Rockwell and I periodically asked ourselves that question when we were editing the volume Comparing ethnographies: Local studies of education across the Americas (Rockwell & Anderson-Levitt, 2017). We worried , for
reasons detailed below, that trying to compare ethnographic research, which is deeply embedded in different social contexts and also shaped by the academic contexts in which the ethnographers write, would distort readers’ understandings of the original texts. We carried on nonetheless because we were convinced that comparison is necessary, however challenging it is to an ethnographer’s commitment to stay true to local context. In this essay, I will argue that, although comparing ethnographic studies seems impossible, it can be done, and that lessons can be learned from small-scale comparisons inspired by ‘meta-ethnography’ and by arguments about generalisation within qualitative research.
In line with the theme of this issue, the examples this article cites are drawn from ethnographic studies of teachers’ work, especially the work teachers do to plan the curriculum and to carry it out in everyday classroom teaching. Some of the examples come from an essay co-authored with Belmira Bueno of the University of São Paulo (Anderson-Levitt & Bueno, 2017), and an extended example compares ethnographic studies of teachers’ work in preschools in Japan (Hayashi & Tobin, 2015) and in Denmark (Gilliam & Gulløv, 20175).
Ethnography and Education, 2018). An ethnographic study is usually a case study, and ideally it ‘gets close to reality,’ ‘emphasizes the little things’ and ‘looks at practice before discourse,’ as Flyvbjerg recommends for case studies (2001, Ch. 9). Ethnographic research is, as a result, inescapably context-bound.
There are many kinds of comparative work, and I limit this discussion to one particular kind. First, although school-to-school, urban-rural, and other kinds of
comparison are important, I focus here on cross-national comparison. Second, instead of examining studies deliberately designed to be comparative (e.g., Tobin et al., 2009), I focus on the practice of comparing previously published studies drawn from the vast pool of ethnographic books, book chapters and articles. Third, I focus on comparing studies published by ethnographers from different countries.1 Thus this article is actually about a double comparison, the act of comparing not only across the national settings of the studies but also across the national academic contexts of the study authors.2
In the sections that follow, I will first explain why comparing ethnographies—and drawing more general lessons from such comparisons—can seem impossible. In the second section, I will review why comparison is nonetheless crucial to our work as social
1 Given the international flow of scholars who may have grown up in one country, studied in another, and found employment in yet another, I refer to a scholar as ‘from’ a particular country if they are currently employed in that country. I do so on the grounds that there are national academic contexts and conventions that influence the content and rhetorical style of those texts that will be evaluat counted for purposes of retention and promotion (Heilbron, Guilhot, & Jeanpierre, 2008; UNESCO & ISSC, 2010).
2 Many readers may take this double comparison for granted, but in the United States, where I am based, it has been more common to read ethnographies written by scholars from the United States, even
scientists. The third section, inspired by the approach of meta-ethnography (Noblit & Hare, 1988) and by insights about generalisation in qualitative research, offers a loose guide for conducting meaningful comparisons of context-bound studies. The fourth section illustrates with an example of what might be learned from such a comparison of published ethnographies on Japanese and Danish preschool pedagogies.
Comparing ethnographies can seem impossible
I begin from the assumption that meanings matter, and that meanings are made and re-made by local actors in particular contexts. Therefore, meaning is embedded in and particular to those contexts. This is an assumption held by scholars, sometimes called ‘interpretivists,’ who believe that reality is socially constructed (Berger & Luckmann, 1966). It is also an assumption held by ‘critical realists,’ who believe ‘that there is a real world that exists independently of our beliefs and constructions’ (thus avoiding a
relativist dismissal of such problems as inequity, injustice, and hunger), but who also hold that ‘knowledge of this world is inevitably our own construction’ and that ‘the meanings people attach to things have consequences for their actions and for the physical world’ (Maxwell, 2012, pp. vi-viii).
The danger of comparison, whether from an interpretivist or critical realist perspective, is that it tends to pull ideas and practices out of their particular context and thereby risks loss of meaning—that is, a mistranslation of the ethnographer’s findings. This concern about meaning as embedded in context contrasts with a positivist
that a supposedly uniform ‘variable’ such as ‘student-centred instruction’ or ‘critical thinking’ can be expected to mean different things in different contexts depending on how local actors have constructed its meanings.
Comparison entails drawing a more general lesson from the case studies compared—they are alike in this way or they differ on that feature—which suggests a pattern that may occur in other cases as well. Yet many interpretivists hesitate to
generalize, again because drawing a general lesson threatens to disembed a case from the context that gives it meaning (Eisenhart, 2009). Given these concerns, Flyvbjerg argues that ’[o]ften it is not desirable to summarize and generalise case studies. Good studies should be read as narratives in their entirety’ (2006, p. 241, italics in original). Yet how
can we compare ‘narratives in their entirety’ and how can we claim to learn from such comparisons without seeming to make some kind of generalisation? And if we do not draw some more general lesson, what is the point of comparing?
This can happen because I am not deeply familiar with theorists whose work is key to the argument (and perhaps implicit in it); it can also happen because the rhetorical structure is different from what I am used to and I therefore fail to notice some key point
(Mauranen, 1993). On the other hand, when I read work describing non-US settings written by US-based scholars, I feel more confident about my interpretation, probably because US-based authors knew how to ‘translate’ into US terms the practices or contexts least familiar to US readers. In such cases, I may not be reading through a fog, but there is still a danger captured by the old Italian saying, ‘that traduttore, traditore’, the that translators inevitably ‘betray’ the meaning of the original text; in other words, there may be no words or concepts in US English that can precisely convey the connotations of the words or concepts as understood by local people in the original context.
Yet comparing is essential
In spite of these misgivings, we must compare ethnographies, however
epistemologically impossible doing so may seem to be. In fact, we cannot stop ourselves from comparing, for ‘comparing is a fundamental part of the thought processes which enable us to make sense of the world and our experience of it’ (Phillips, 1999, p. 15). As researchers, we inevitably make implicit comparisons of research conducted ‘elsewhere’ with what we know ‘at home’. Because we do it implicitly, we should strive to do it explicitly, self-consciously, and systematically.
We must compare also because comparing published research is valuable. One reason is to make use of prior research—our own and other scholars’. There are
work,3 and if we do not learn by comparing one study to another, they are relegated to the status of ‘little islands of knowledge’ rarely or never visited (Glaser & Strauss, 1971, p. 181).
More importantly, we compare because ‘without comparison we … become victims of the bounds of thinkable thought’ (Nader, 1994, p. 86). Comparison expands our vision, and does so in two ways. First, comparison can offer a window onto practices ‘elsewhere’that were previously unknown to the comparer. A classic example is
Margaret Mead’s demonstration, using the single case of American Samoa in the 1920s, that adolescence was not a time of emotional turmoil for the girls she encountered on the island as it was understood to be in the United States (1928). In a simpler example, when I showed US teachers the handwriting of six-year-old children in France who had learned to write in cursive with Bic pens within narrow lines (3 mm high), they were surprised to discover six-year-olds demonstrating a fine motor coordination that they had previously assumed impossible. Second, as many have argued, comparison serves as a mirror to make visible what we take for granted in our own practices; it helps us make the familiar strange. In the case of the French children’s handwriting, the US teachers became
explicitly conscious, perhaps for the first time, of their own practice of asking six-year-olds to write detached rather than cursive letters with fat pencils between wide lines (8 mm high). As I will argue below, comparing to discover the previously unfamiliar and comparing to notice the taken-for-granted are important ways to build ‘theory’, if by ‘theory’ we simply mean tentative understandings of the cases at hand.
Therefore, knowing the dangers of comparing, we nonetheless embrace the attempt to compare ethnographies. As Niewöhner and Scheffer argue, ‘the impossibility to compare objects in their totality or thickness (or to translate from one entire context to another) should not stifle productive comparative research’. Rather, they argue, the impossibility should ‘instigate “‘problematic comparison”’’ (2010, p. 4) whereby we can learn as much from the difficulty or even impossibility of comparing two particular cases as we can from a more successful comparison.
How, then, to compare ethnographies?
Comparing is essential, but if comparing ethnographies to expand our
understanding risks losing the meaning of each study because it uproots the findings from their context, how are we to proceed? How should we go about comparing published ethnographies? In this section I offer five suggestions that borrow from and build on the approach called ‘meta-ethnography’ pioneered by Noblit and Hare (1988), and that also draws on the literature about generalisation within qualitative research.
(Thorne, Jensen, Kearney, Noblit, & Sandelowski, 2004). However, a small but growing number of ethnographers of education have practiced meta-ethnography (e.g., Aspfors & Fransson, 2015; Kakos & Fritzsche, 2017; Savin-Baden & Major, 2006).
1. Interpret interpretations rather than aggregating findings.
Noblit and Hare (1988) begin by advising against aggregating the findings from the ethnographies selected for comparison. As they explain, the logic behind the synthesis of quantitative studies as carried out in the process of meta-analysis is to add up the findings from many comparable studies so as to calculate the average effect size of the treatment or phenomenon in question. However, aggregating the findings of a set of qualitative studies does not make sense because aggregation requires that the units or
categories be comparable. If meaning is made in context, that assumption cannot hold; for example, in a set of qualitative studies of racial school desegregation in US
schoolsdiscussed by Noblit and Hare, the very word ‘desegregation’ had ‘many different meanings in the schools studied’ (Noblit & Hare, 1988, p. 22). Aggregating ignores these differences, stripping away contextual information and converting emic categories to etic categories, thereby distorting the meanings of the findings.4
However, if the goal is not to identify, compare and somehow aggregate the findings of published ethnographies, what exactly is the task? Noblit and Hare remind us that, from an constructivist interpretivist perspective, an ethnographic study represents the ethnographer’s interpretation of people’s behaviours and ideas. They reason, then,
4 Even in the synthesis of quantitative studies, aggregating findings reduces their meaningfulness.
that ‘the synthesis of qualitative research should be as interpretive as any ethnographic account’ (1988, p. 11); . cComparison of ethnographies in the form of meta-ethnography should be an interpretation of other ethnographers’ interpretations (p. 14).
Further developing the idea of interpretation, Noblit and Hare propose that the analyst look for the key ‘metaphors’ that each ethnographer usesbest represent each ethnography. They explain that they use the word ‘metaphor’ to referare referring to ‘what others may call the themes, perspectives, organizers, and/or concepts’ of a study (1988, p. 14), but they use the word metaphor quite deliberately. A metaphor is an
analogy (a word that Noblit and Hare use almost interchangeably with metaphor). To use a metaphor is to write as if one phenomenon is, in some sense, the same as another. For
example, I will mention below the vivid metaphor ‘soft pedagogy’ (Gilliam & Gulløv, 2017, p. 56) a term that describes certain ways of teaching as if they are yielding and
smooth, like a gentle touch or a piece of silk. However, almost all language is
metaphorical, for even ordinary words often grew from analogies. For example, I will mention ‘learning expertise’ as a metaphor below, and it is instructive to discover that the etymological roots of ‘expertise’ connote ‘trying’ and ‘experimenting’.
The particular metaphor matters; it carries a load of connotations that influence
perceptions and behaviours. Thus to speak as though ‘argument is war’ leads people to interpret and to carry out an argument differently than speaking as though ‘argument is dance’ (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980, pp. 4-5). It is because metaphors carry so much
meaning that Noblit and Hare “prefer to think of the key terms and concepts as metaphors
rather than literal descriptions” (1988, p. 81). They argue that metaphors better capture
summarize the “essence” of the study in a few words. Therefore, they claim, “a
metaphoric explanation maintains the complexity of the case, while at the same time
facilitating reduction of the data.” (1988, p. 33).
Since the particular metaphor chosen carries a particular load of connotations, it has the possibility, of course, of obscuring as well as enlightening. On this point, Noblit and Hare acknowledge that more than one interpretation is possible. However, they build
on other theorists to argue that some metaphors will offer more economy, cogency, range,
apparency, and credibility than others (1988, p. 34), and that on those grounds the
synthesizer may even introduce metaphors not used by the original ethnographers (p. 47).
For example, I will mention below the metaphor ‘soft pedagogy’ (Gilliam &
Gulløv, 2015, p. 56) a term that implicitly compares ways of teaching to something
yielding and smooth, like a gentle touch or silk fabric. I find it useful to look at key
concepts as metaphors even when they are such ordinary words—words like ‘sources’
and ‘expertise’—that they may not seem at first like metaphors at all. In fact, nearly all
language is metaphorical and the analogies buried in the original root of a word
(connecting ‘expertise’ to the notions of ‘trying’ and ‘experimenting’, for example) can
be instructive.
Once analysts have identified each ethnography’s key metaphors, Noblit and Hare propose that the analysts ask whether they can translate the metaphors of one study into the metaphors of another study and vice versa. Thus they describe the synthesis of
capture the same idea or refer to the kind of teacher practice as the Japanese notion of mimamoru, glossed as ‘teaching by watching and waiting’ (Hayashi & Tobin, 2017, p.
19)?
2. Stay in touch with contextual details in each study.
Rather than isolating findings from their contexts, analysts comparing
ethnographies should attempt to stay in touch with the context of each study. As Noblit and Hare put it, an important step in meta-ethnography is ‘repeated reading of the accounts and … noting of interpretive metaphors,’ giving ‘extensive attention to the details … and what they tell you about your substantive concerns’ (1988, p. 28). Clearly, for example, an analyst would need to examine the ethnographic descriptions of instances of ‘soft pedagogy’ and of instances of mimamoru to decide whether the two metaphors have some meaning in common.
3. Look for similar interpretations and contested interpretations, but also for ‘lines of argument’.
Among the most useful ideas from meta-ethnography, in my view, is its
description of three possible outcomes when analysts seek to translate the metaphors of different ethnographies into one another. Noblit and Hare urge us not only to look for similarities and for differences, the standard outcomes of comparison, but also to recognize when two studies tell different parts of a larger story, such that when read together they offer a ‘line of argument’.
When the metaphors in different ethnographic studies are ‘directly comparable,’ Noblit and Hare refer to this as ‘reciprocal’ translation (1988, p. 35). For example, in Ruth Mercado’s ethnographic study of saberes docentes (teaching knowledge) in Mexico (2002), she uses the metaphor of voces (voices) to indicate that teachers did not make up all their knowledge for teaching themselves, but were rather in dialogue, in Bakhtin’s sense, with other people’s historical and contemporary practices. Meanwhile, in my ethnography of ‘cultural knowledge for teaching’ in France (2002), I referred to several ‘sources’ of teachers’ knowledge. The root of the English word ‘source’ is the French la source, a spring of water emerging from the ground. Each metaphor carries different connotations, but both point to the way teachers make use of multiple sets of ideas crafted by many people, past or present, as they carry out everyday classroom teaching. The metaphors of ‘voices’ and ‘sources’ as used in these two ethnographies can be interpreted as reciprocal translations of each other (Anderson-Levitt & Bueno, 2017).
synthesis’ signals either contexts that are different in an important way across the studies, or else differences in the theoretical perspectives used by the different ethnographers. For example, in a comparison of two studies of teachers’ collective work beyond the
classroom, one from Argentina (Petrelli, 2012) and one from the United States (Coburn, 2001), the metaphors for describing the teachers’ relationships to the state contrasted sharply (Anderson-Levitt & Bueno, 2017). In analysing how teachers ran two schools as co-operatives in Argentina, Petrelli insisted on las presencias estatales, the presence of the state inside the schools. In contrast, in describing teachers working to implement state-imposed reforms in literacy instruction in California, Coburn used the metaphor of ‘gatekeeping,’, implying that the teachers managed to keep the state outside, in the ‘environment’ beyond the school. This refutational translation raised the question of whether the state’s role was indeed quite different in Argentina and in California, or whether it was the ethnographers’ different theoretical lenses that led one to insist on the state’s power and the other to discount it.
The third possibility, a ‘line of argument’ synthesis, allows for the possibility that some ethnographies neither agree with nor oppose each other, but rather that they
the 1920s, Freeman’s representing views of senior men garnered in fieldwork decades later.
4. Use small but varied samples of studies.
As mentioned, there are thousands and thousands of published ethnographic studies on a topic like teachers’ work. Anyone who seeks to compare studies will have to grapple with the question of how to sample among them. I would argue that staying in touch with contextual details (suggestion 3 above) implies working with very small samples of studies. It is true that over the course of many years a person could develop expertise ‘based on intimate experience with thousands of individual cases’ (Flyvbjerg, 2001, p. 85), but it must be difficult to stay close to the contextual details of even so few as a dozen cases examined over a shorter period for the purpose of a synthesis.
Not all meta-ethnographers argue for small samples. Whereas Noblit and Hare’s original examples compared no more than two to six ethnographies, and one guide recommends synthesizing six to ten studies (Major & Savin-Baden, 2010), there are meta-ethnographies in the health sciences that synthesize 38, 43, even 112 studies (studies cited by Uny and Noblit, 2017). Recently, Noblit and a colleague argued that a meta-ethnography should examine an ‘exhaustive’ sample of studies on the issue in question, although their worked example included only four studies that met their
particular criteria (Hughes & Noblit, 2017). In other meta-ethnographies in the domain of education, the samples have often been small, for example, from two to ten
information appears in the written report and from my perspective the analysis resembles coding for themes rather than translating metaphors.
At the same time that I argue for a small sample, however, I acknowledge the need for variation across the studies examined. Given the social construction of reality, we should expect variation across cases even when they are situated in seemingly similar settings (Maxwell, 2012). This is particularly important when comparing ethnographic studies across national borders. The temptation is strong in a cross-national study to assume, explicitly or implicitly, that one case or one study represents the whole of a nation or even the whole of a larger region, such as ‘Asia’ or ‘the West’. It is true that ethnographers occasionally claim that a case is as ‘typical’ as any other case of some larger population (Eisenhart, 2009), and it is possible that such a claim is defensible (Maxwell, 2013, p. 98). However, to avoid the easy slide into stereotyping, I argue for deliberately looking for within-nation variation.
Those were variations that mattered in the context of that particular study. As another example, when I sought to compare the structure of reading lessons in France, Guinea, and the United States, I knew that not all lessons were taught in the same way in each country. Educators I had worked with in the field had labels for the most common varieties of teaching (at that time, ‘traditional’ versus ‘whole-language’ lessons in the United States, and mainstream versus ‘analytic’ lessons on France). Therefore, to compare across three countries I included ethnographic descriptions of two kinds of lessons from the United States, two kinds from France, and one from Guinea (Anderson-Levitt, 2004). No single ethnography can represent even a subset of a nation, but
nonetheless varying a small sample of ethnographies in a purposeful way would guard against easy stereotypes.
5. Understand comparing ethnographies as a contribution to ‘theoretical
generalisation’.
There are two meanings of generalisation that are not compatible with comparing ethnographies. One is the notion of a general ‘law,’ sometimes called ‘nomological generalisation,’ which offers ‘explanation and prediction based on context-independent theories’ (Flyvbjerg, 2001, p. 26). Law-like generalisation is found in some natural sciences, but interpretive social scientists do not pursue it because context always matters in human affairs (Flyvbjerg, 2001) and because contexts vary widely (Maxwell, 2012). Prediction is a particularly elusive goal because human beings can break ‘rules’ and surprise one another. The other kind of generalisation that does not suit comparing ethnographies is ‘statistical’ or ‘probabilistic’ generalisation,’ that is, drawing an
inference about the larger population from a sample. Ethnographic work does not rule out statistical generalisation (Eisenhart, 2009), but its samples are usually far too small to permit statistical analysis (Small, 2009).
theory in a second, different case (Glaser & Strauss, 1967). The logic also aligns with Lincoln and Guba’s notion of ‘transferability’ (1985): if enough contextual information is available, an analyst can determine, subject to empirical verification, whether a lesson from a first case might apply to a second case. Meanwhile, when moving from case to theory, the analyst is saying: ‘This case, too, must be now be taken into account in future theorizing’. In the case of Mead’s description of adolescence in Samoa, in any future theorizing about psycho-biological development, her description would have to be taken into account, even if only to argue that it was wrong.
From this perspective, to compare ethnographies is to build theory. When two cases translate easily into one another, the theories behind each authors’ respective metaphors could be said to replicate each another. Thus the reciprocal translation of ‘voices’ in Mercado’s study into ‘sources’ in my study affirms the understanding that, when teaching in the classroom, teachers make use of multiple scripts or templates that can be traced to different actors or historical reforms. Even so, the replication as reciprocal translation may add nuances. In this example, the metaphor of ‘voices’ emphasizes how teachers enact the scripts, while the metaphor of ‘sources’ emphasizes the scripts’ deep historical roots.
When two cases do not translate, as in the example of the Argentine teachers coping with the presence of the state in their co-operative schools contrasted with the US teachers keeping the state outside metaphorical school gates, we must make an
If, instead, the contrasting metaphors reflect not real differences on the ground but rather differences in the theoretical lenses through which each ethnographer viewed her case, then the analyst comparing the cases must either choose one theory and reject the other, or else find a way to reconcile two quite different perspectives on the power of the state.
Finally, when different cases extend the ‘line of argument,’ neither aligning nor conflicting with each other, but rather telling different parts of a larger story, we have to stretch or extend our theory to account for that larger and more complex story.
An example: ethnographies of preschool pedagogy in Japan and Denmark Consider as a more extended example how we might learn by comparing two ethnographic portraits of preschool pedagogy, one drawn from a set of ethnographic studies in Japan and the other from a set of ethnographic studies of Danish schools and preschools. The portraits come from two volumes, Teaching embodied: Cultural practice in Japanese preschools (Hayashi & Tobin, 2015) and Children of the welfare state: Civilising practices in schools, childcare and families, (Gilliam & Gulløv, 20175) on preschools and schools in Denmark. I compare these two volumes not to conduct a full meta-ethnography, but simply to demonstrate some of the suggestions above about how to go about comparing ethnographies.
Akiko Hayashi and Joseph Tobin’s Teaching embodied builds on the prior studies Preschool in three cultures (Tobin, Wu & Davidson, 1989) and Preschool in three cultures revisited (Tobin, Hsieh & Kurasawa, 2009) to look closely at teaching practice
videos themselves. The authors were US-based ethnographers at the time of the research, although Hayashi has now returned to her native Japan, and in this English-language volume they offer an interpretation of Japanese practices for US-based and international readers. As the title, Teaching embodied, suggests, the authors give considerable attention to embodiment in the sense of ‘the teacher’s use of her body as a pedagogical tool’ and more generally ‘tacit knowledge’ and ‘intuitive action’ (2015, p. vii). They also include chapters on how teachers learn and develop expertise, using the 25-year span of the larger project to consider learning over the course of a career. The subtitle’s references to ‘cultural practices’ points to the authors’ main purpose, ‘to provide a thick, nuanced description of the cultural dimensions of Japanese early childhood education; and … to make an argument for the utility and power of culture as an explanatory construct’ (2015, p. 3). In this use of the word ‘culture,’ they do not mean that every educator throughout Japan uses the same practices and holds the same beliefs, but that the practices they point to are widely understood by educators in a variety of schools, public and private, and are even echoed in texts from the Ministry of Education. Here, I focus particularly on the first three chapters of the volume, which analyse teachers’ practices in classrooms.
Laura Gilliam and Eva Gulløv’s volume, Children of the welfare state(2017), consists of co-authored and solo-authored chapters by the two authors. The volume draws on multiple ethnographic studies of childrearing by teachers and ‘pedagogues’5
conducted by Gulløv and by Gilliam between 1995 and 2008, focused variously on ‘nurseries’ for children from 6 months to 3 years of age, on ‘kindergartens’ (ages 3–6), and on schools (ages 6–16) in both affluent and working-class areas in and near
Copenhagen. The book also includes a chapter by Dil Bach examining childrearing inside the homes of affluent families, and a chapter by Karen Fog Olwig analysing interviews with older children looking back on their kindergarten experiences. The volume is translated from the original Danish book, Civiliserende institutioner: om idealer og distinktioner i opdragelse, published by Aarhus University Press in 2012, meaning that it
was originally written by Danish academics for Danish readers. The book’s Danish title, which could be translated ‘Civilizing institutions: ideals and distinctions in education,’ makes the authors’ purpose clear, to analyse the ‘civilising missions’ taking place in ‘schools, day-care institutions and families’ carried out in the Danish welfare state by ‘parents, pedagogues, teachers and school principals’ (p. 1). The authors use the word ‘culture’ much less often than Hayashi and Tobin, preferring to write about the ‘state’ and ‘institutions’, but like Hayashi and Tobin they make clear that they refer to practices and beliefs that while not universal are widely shared across families and school settings in Denmark. In order to compare this volume with Hayashi and Tobin’s focus on 4-year-old classes, I focus here on Gulløv’s ethnographies of teachers’ and pedagogues’
practices in nurseries (Chapter 3) and Gilliam’s ethnographies of 6-year-olds in first grade (Chapter 5), but draw from the entire volume.
I chose these two books because they are rich with description and, since each draws from multiple studies, because they offer broader contextual information than can usually be found in a brief journal article. In addition, they permit cross-national
similar enough to permit comparison even as the difference in their perspectives makes the comparison more interesting.
Because I compare only two volumes I am not, strictly speaking, following my own advice to sample ethnographic cases purposely from within each nation. However, it is worth noting that of the three preschools highlighted in Hayashi and Tobin’s study, the first was the same school as studied 20 years earlier and represented continuity, while the second was selected on the advice of local participants as a school representing a ‘new direction in early childhood education’ (Tobin et al., 2009, p. 10). The third was a completely unique case, the only school for the deaf in Japan using sign language as its main language. Meanwhile, Gilliam and Gulløv’s volume includes specific studies of both affluent and working-class areas in and near Copenhagen. One could argue, then, that each volume represents variation within categories important to insiders, though not necessarily exhaustive of all important categories.
I am on even less certain ground than for the Japanese case when interpreting the classroom descriptions and quotations in their book.
Metaphors: interpreting interpretations
Table 1. Comparing two ethnographic studies: reciprocal and refutational translations of metaphors, and extending the lines of argument
Metaphors in the book
Teaching Embodied Kind of translation
Metaphors in the book
Children of the Welfare State
learning expertise
extending the line of argument
teaching embodied pedagogy of feelings
shūdan seikatsu (‘social
mindedness’) reciprocal
civilising children to be social
mimamoru (‘teaching by
watching and waiting’) reciprocal soft pedagogy
collective self-regulation refutational self-regulation
gyarari (‘the gallery’)
seken no me (‘eyes of society’)
refutational [individual] autonomy
extending the line of argument
the resistant child the paradox of civilising exclusion
Reciprocal and refutational translations
(1978), orient their volume around the concept of ‘civilising practices’ (the volume subtitle) through which teachers and pedagogues guided the children ‘to be social’ (p. 56), for example, by learning to empathise with other people (p. 56) and to control themselves (p. 57).
Authors in both volumes also observed that teaching ‘the social’ should be done with a light hand, although perhaps lighter in Japan. For Japanese teachers, the ideal is mimamoru, ‘teaching by watching and waiting’ rather than intervening (Hayashi &
Tobin, 2015, p. 19), which the ethnographers call a ‘pedagogy of restraint’ (p. 46). The metaphor of mimamoru connotes ‘watching and guarding’ (p. 17). Educators explained the practice as allowing children ‘time to struggle by themselves’ for the sake of their emotional development (p. 21). Similarly, in Danish preschools, the ideal is ‘to support and carefully cultivate [children’s] autonomy through a soft pedagogy’ (Gilliam & Gulløv, 20175, p. 56). As noted earlier, the word ‘soft’ evokes different metaphors—of smoothness and yielding—than mimamoru, but like mimamoru, ‘soft’ in this context connotes avoiding direct confrontation or dictating to children. As practiced, soft pedagogy means ‘ignoring minor breaches of institutional rules, shifting focus, telling jokes, getting the child to participate in group activities, suggesting possible solutions and alternative behaviour and praising children who solve problems themselves’ (p. 64). The rationale for soft pedagogy, ‘a cultural idea of children as active participants in their own socialisation process’ (p. 56), parallels in some ways the developmental rationale for mimamoru.
Gulløv describe ‘self-regulation’ (20175, p. 11) or ‘self-control’ (p. 58) as an important part of ‘being social’, using the terms to refer to individuals restraining their own aggression and other anti-social behaviours, as in Elias’s volume. Their references to ‘autonomy’ explicitly refer to ‘individual autonomy’ (p. 65), not to group
self-governance. In contrast, although Hayashi and Tobin also refer to self-regulation in Japan, they modify the term as ‘collective self-regulation’, adding that the juxtaposition of ‘collective’ and ‘self’ is not an oxymoron in Japanese (2015, p. 72, my emphasis). They also cite the Shinto concept of seken no me, which literally means the ‘eyes of society’ (p. 75), and they point to a teacher in a video who says to two boys who had been fighting, ‘The gods, too, are watching’ (p. 75-76). Inspired by one educator’s reference to the gyarari (‘the gallery’) of children observing fights from the side lines in their video, Hayashi and Tobin micro analyse how the children on the side lines act as important peripheral participants in such interactions (Chapter 3). Thus, whereas the ethnographers in the Danish case describe teachers as emphasizing individual self-control and soft pedagogy as a way to cultivate children’s individual autonomy, in the Japanese case, the ethnographers say teachers see self-control as a collective accomplishment. Line-of-argument synthesis
In addition to converging on these points of similarity or difference, each volume also covers territory not covered by the other, as indicated by blank spaces in the upper right corner and the lower left corner of Table 1. In this way, each extends the ‘line of argument’, that is, our broader understanding of teachers’ work in with young children.
describe how teachers develop ‘expertise,’ which one teacher compares to becoming a skilled chef (p. 130). In contrast, the Danish volume does not discuss how pedagogues or teachers have learned to do their work.
As mentioned earlier, Hayashi and Tobin also give extensive attention to teaching as an ‘embodied’ practice, in the sense of ‘the teacher’s use of her body as a pedagogical tool’ (2015, p. vii). They also examine what they call ‘intercorporeality,’ how ‘young children learn to attune their bodies to group life’ and how teachers help them do so (p. 12). While the Danish volume notes, for example, how teachers respond to children jumping off tables and playing with their food, it does not develop as systematic an understanding of these practices.
Another realm explored at length by Hayashi and Tobin is what they call the ‘pedagogy of feeling’. They refer to teachers’ explicit and implicit efforts to elicit in young children such socially appropriate feelings as omoiyari (‘empathy’) and its inverse, amae (‘acting in a way that invites help and concern from others’) (p. 43). In contrast, Gilliam and Gulløv do not offer such explicit descriptions of teachers seeking to instil emotions.
On the other hand, Gilliam and Gulløv tell us much more than the Japanese case does about ‘the resistant child’ who did not comply with group norms, and about the dilemmas such children created for teachers. They point out that when soft pedagogy fails and teachers could not achieve the ideal, which is ‘to gently and without obvious
authority make the children want to do what is expected’ (20175, p. 246), then they exercised power overtly. Teachers experienced the ‘need to use power … as a
discuss at length the way in which the very goal of ‘civilising’ children inevitably created ‘distinctions’ (20175, p. 17). As a result, teachers could not help but participate in a kind of ‘exclusion’ of the ‘uncivilised’ (e.g., p. 253)—for example, of the child who never fit in and whose parents removed her from the school, of ‘the impossible bilingual boys’ (children of immigrants) in an older class, or of parents who did not rear their children as expected in Denmark. Gilliam and Gulløv refer to this dilemma as the ‘paradox of civilising’ (p. 28): ‘The very attempt to integrate the ‘uncivilised’ into the civilised way of life simultaneously has an exclusive or indeed counterproductive effect’ (p. 29) when those who feel excluded resist the norms.
What we don’t learn from Teaching embodied is whether teachers in the schools studied in Japan felt that their pedagogy sometimes failed as well, or whether children were sometimes tacitly excluded. Although we have to entertain the possibility that the structure of the Japanese schools was so different from the structure of Danish schooling that such dilemmas did not arise for the Japanese teachers, it is more likely that Hayashi and Tobin simply did not investigate questions of status among children and power exercised by teachers, just as Gilliam and Gulløv did not explore a pedagogy of feeling or the development of pedagogical expertise.
Comparing as contributing to ‘theoretical generalisation’
It is easy to see how comparison of these two ethnographic volumes contributes to theoretical generalisation. First, the reciprocal translation of mimamoru and soft
pedagogy suggests a kind of replication. If we were constructing a theory about how teachers teach in preschools, we could begin with the premise that a Japanese
restraint,’ watching ‘without being either too much or too little present’ (Hayashi & Tobin, 2015, p. 23), although they cited teachers as offering somewhat different
rationales for doing so. We could then ask whether we find parallel examples of teachers refraining from intervention in preschools in other schools in these countries, and in other parts of the world, exploring the local logics behind similarities or differences.
At the same time, the ‘refutational translation’ of ‘self-regulation’ and ‘collective self-regulation’ identifies different mechanisms by which children are said to learn to inhibit their own impulses for the sake of group harmony, one relying on individual self-restraint and one on the participation of the group. This distinction between the Danish and the Japanese case may seem at first like one more confirmation of the individualistic versus collectivist dichotomy so often used to contrast the ‘West’ with ‘Asia,’ or indeed, the ‘West’ with everywhere else. However, it is important to remember that the
metaphors ‘collective self-regulation’ and ‘self-regulation’ represent how teachers interpreted what children did in each case, not what actually happened, and it is that representation of the teachers’ interpretations that is contrasted in the table. What
children actually did is a different matter. In the Japanese case, the ethnographers made a systematic analysis of what the children’s actual behavior as captured in video records, and they described how as ethnographers they saw other children participating
p. 120). Thus, the cross-national difference in the teachers’ talk does not necessarily mean that the Danish children actually exercised less ‘collective self-regulation’ than the Japanese children did. Rather, the teachers might have talked differently about self-regulation because they held different cultural expectations, or perhaps simply because the Danish teachers had not been given classroom videos to analyse and re-analyse as the Japanese teachers had. The comparison here leads not to a conclusion about the West individualism and Asian collectivism, but rather to a new question to be explored empirically.
The line-of-argument translations likewise identify other questions worth exploring: How have preschool teachers developed expertise over the course of their careers? How is preschool pedagogy embodied? Is there a pedagogy of feelings in other schools and in other parts of the world, and what is the logic behind its presence or absence? How do power and social distinctions matter—in fact, how do they come into being—in other preschool classrooms, or are these tensions that somehow do not arise in some classrooms?
Summary
highlighted theoretical emphases and gaps in each study, whether deliberate or unintended.
Conclusion
The dangers of comparing ethnographic studies are real, and they are heightened when crossing national and academic borders. Comparing tempts analysts to pull findings or themes or key concepts or incidents out of context and thus lose their meanings. There is a real possibility, for example, that in interpreting the interpretations of the
ethnographers I have distorted some key point about preschool teaching in Denmark or in Japan by ignoring crucial context.
Nonetheless, as Niewöhner and Scheffer advise (2010), ‘the impossibility’ of comparing objects ‘in their totality or thickness’ or of translating ‘from one entire context to another’ should not deter us from comparing. Comparing ethnographies is essential for expanding our vision. It offers windows onto practices and ideas we had previously not known about but which henceforth must be taken into account, and it serves as a mirror forcing us to notice our own taken-for granted ideas and beliefs. In these ways it enables us to build theory, that is, to grow our understanding case by case.
Therefore, in this article, I have suggested how to carry out the seemingly
work with small samples of ethnographies chosen purposefully for variation, and understand the work as a contribution to theoretical generalization.
The suggestions in this article are hardly a perfect plan. Because I have argued for comparing small samples of ethnographies to better stay in touch with context, this is no recipe for using a significant portion of the thousands of published ethnographies in the archives. At the same time, staying in touch with context is not easily accomplished. Even when the analyst rereads the ethnographic texts many times, it is difficult to see how the important context is or can be translated to readers of meta-ethnographies, whether in the brief example offered here or in other meta-ethnographies I have cited.
Attending to the context requires sound understanding of each ethnography and yet, particularly when reading about unfamiliar national settings and when reading ethnographers writing from unfamiliar academic contexts, the fog lingers. In other words, there is still serious danger of misunderstanding or mistranslating work conducted
‘elsewhere’, especially when we are not personally familiar with the research setting or with the academic traditions drawn on by the ethnographers. For example, I do not really grasp the work of the Argentine teachers in running co-operatives in Petrelli’s study, nor am I sure I am reading Elias’s work as Gilliam and Gulløv read it.
highlighting previously unrecognized aspects of the practices they studied and of their own theoretical perspectives.
In short, although comparing ethnographic research is fraught with difficulty, it is possible to carry out, however imperfectly, and it is an essential operation for breaking ‘the bounds of unthinkable thought’ (Nader, 2009, p. 86).
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