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Introduction
from Dr. Nancy H. Hornberger
Guest Editor
The annual Ethnography
in Education Research Forum at the University of Pennsylvania
Graduate School of Education was first convened in 1980. At the
20th Forum, Saturday evening conversationalists Dell Hymes, David
Smith, and Frederick Erickson recalled the beginnings of the Forum
and of the Center for Urban Ethnography (CUE) which hosts it.
Hymes reminisced about the establishment of CUE with a grant from
the Center for Studies of Metropolitan Problems of the National
Institute of Mental Health, characterizing those beginnings as
"finding a home" for both the center and the cluster
of colleagues from anthropology, sociology, linguistics, folkore,
and elsewhere, all interested in urban ethnography. Smith recalled
the Forum's predecessor conference held in spring of 1978, the
Colloquium on Ethnography and Education, organized by Perry Gilmore
and featuring Shirley Brice Heath and Hugh Mehan as keynote speakers
and Margaret Mead in what turned out to be one of her last public
appearances. Both Dell and David recalled that it was Heath, then
on the faculty at Penn GSE, who subsequently suggested an annual
ethnography and education forum, to be modeled on the Boston University
Conference on Language Development for its in-house and student-run
qualities.
Thinking about the predecessor colloquium (selected papers are
published in Gilmore & Glatthorn, 1982), Gilmore recalls the
following:
I was a Research and
Development Associate at RBS [Research for Better Schools] …
[and]…had received a $40,000 grant from NIE to explore
ethnographic approaches to education...which in those days was
completely new to the educational research establishment. I
sought the funds after having been inspired by the work of people
like Dell and David and numerous others at Penn at the time
(Goffman, Heath, Szwed, Labov, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett,
Peggy Sanday and many others). Dell was very instrumental in
helping me plan that colloquium and select the speakers and
participants (Personal communication, 8/28/02).
Hymes was Penn GSE's
Dean at the time and Smith convened the Forum for the next six
years, 1980-1985, until he moved to University of Alaska. Erickson
followed Smith as Forum convenor for 14 years after that, from
1986 to 1999, when he moved to UCLA, and I have convened the Forum
since 2000. The Forum has been, from its beginnings, a schoolwide
and school-sponsored event, which could not have survived without
the generous support of Deans Dell Hymes, Marvin Lazerson, and
Susan Fuhrman, successively, and innumerable faculty, staff and
student volunteers, and well-wishers at GSE.
Most importantly, the Forum has always been student-run in every
detail, from the evaluation of proposals to the organization of
sessions to logistical arrangements for meals, lodging, book displays,
audiovisual equipment, and on and on. Heath had highlighted student
involvement at the time of her initial suggestion. Fred Erickson
recalls, "Shirley, in her memo to Dell, suggested doing something
like [the Colloquium] annually, with extensive student involvement
as in the previous conference and as in the Child Language meetings
at B.U." (Personal communication, 8/28/02). This trademark
student involvement is represented in an illustrious line of dedicated
and hard-working student Forum coordinators, beginning with Tenby
Owens in Folklore, followed by GSE students Marge Murray, Gil
Israeli, Frances Reimer, Eileen Storer, Marcine Pickron-Davis,
Wendy Hobbins, Anne Roberti, Angela Reyes, and, currently, Mihyon
Jeon and Diana Schwinge.
Linked from the beginning to the Center for Urban Ethnography,
the Forum has maintained a consistent emphasis on urban schools.
Perry Gilmore remembers:
One other thing that
clearly Dell and David were both committed to was a social justice
and activist agenda in their approaches to ethnography (though
at the time those words were not usually used)-- a commitment
to the people for whom and with whom the ethnographic work was
done. .. in keeping with Dell's concern to "Reinvent Anthropology"
and David's determination to purge any elitism from all of his
projects and his work. From the start, David made certain there
were teachers and parents presenting alongside well known scholars.
He was committed to giving voice to the range of participants...community
residents and practitioners as well as scholars, students and
aspiring researchers. In those days we were fully committed
to working with West Philadelphia schools (Dell and David had
a large NIE grant for studying literacy from an ethnographic
perspective...one of the first of its kind) and those community
folks were very well represented in many of the sessions. (Will
Smith, a young West Philadelphia singer and breakdancer - not
yet famous at the time, entertained, with several friends of
his, for the Forum audience - one of the Folklore students enlisted
him...and we passed the hat to collect money for them!) (Personal
communication, 8/28/02).
Equally, the Forum has
from the beginning excelled in nurturing ethnographic research
and researchers in schools. The Forum is known for its friendly
and supportive atmosphere for fledgling researchers and for the
spirit of relaxed and open dialogue embracing newcomers and oldtimers
alike. An important and unique annual feature of the Forum in
that regard are the Data Analysis sessions. In comments read at
a memorial session for David Smith, held at the Forum in 2001,
Fred Erickson recalled:
The other thing to
which David's vision and spirit contributed was the ways in
which the Forum welcomed newcomers to research… For me
the hallmark of the Forum's welcome to newcomers is the Data
Analysis Workshop, a kind of session which Jeffrey Shultz and
Roger Shuy initiated at the Forum and which Jeff has continued
to this day, with the help of Nancy Hornberger and others over
the years. I know of no other academic meeting in which presenters
can not only share work in progress but get wise advice on analysis
in progress. Early in the Forum's history, David Smith saw the
wisdom in that idea and supported it. Since David's time as
Forum Convenor there have been other initiatives that also welcome
newcomers--the early career scholar meetings focusing on minority
issues in education that have been hosted by Michele Foster
and Vivian Gadsden, the teacher research activities initiated
and continued by Susan Lytle and Marilyn Cochran-Smith. These
continue David Smith's vision and sense of resonance for these
meetings, in the same spirit as do the Data Analysis Workshops
(2/20/2001).
In addition to the Data
Analysis Workshop (and the Work-in-Progress paper sessions, which
present work at a stage somewhere in between data analysis and
paper sessions), the Forum has over the years developed a number
of plenary speaker slots, each with its own character and history
becoming a Forum tradition. We publish papers from the plenary
speakers at Forum 2002 together here in Penn GSE Perspectives
on Urban Education. Though this is the first time, to our
knowledge, that Forum plenary papers have ever been gathered together
for publication, we expect and hope that it will not be the last.
It seems altogether fitting that the venue for publication should
be Perspectives, a kindred student-initiated effort focusing
on urban education research.
The Keynote talk is the longest-standing of the Forum plenary
sessions and is generally held on the first evening, a Friday
(and in the early years, a second keynote was held on Sunday morning).
A glance back through our (incomplete) Forum program archives
reveals a distinguished roster of keynoters including, in order
of appearance: John Ogbu, Frederick Erickson, Sondra Perl, Stanley
Aronowitz, Laura Nader, Clem Adelman, Henry Trueba, Gloria Ladson-Billings,
Regina Sirota, Patti Lather, Suzanne Carothers, Edward Hall, Shirley
Brice Heath, Geneva Gay, Margaret Eisenhart, Concha Delgado-Gaitan,
Jean Lave, and in 2002, Luis Moll, whose talk is featured in this
issue of Perspectives.
The teacher research activities, alluded to above by Erickson,
which were initiated and nurtured by PennGSE faculty members Susan
Lytle and Marilyn Cochran-Smith (now at Boston College) beginning
in the mid-1980s to the present, have developed into a Practitioner
Inquiry strand, with numerous designated sessions and a Saturday
morning invited plenary talk. For many years, this Saturday morning
plenary was delivered more often than not by the inimitable and
prolific Lytle and Cochran-Smith themselves, but of recent years,
outside speakers have also graced this early morning event, including
Denny Taylor in 1990, Karen Gallas in 1996, Susan Noffke in 2000,
Dixie Goswami in 2001, and last year Sonia Nieto and her colleagues
Stephen Gordon and Junia Yearwood, presenting work from the same
Inquiry Group project as is reported in the Nieto, Felix, and
Gelzinis piece included in this issue.
The most recent plenary speaker tradition to emerge has been the
Saturday evening conversation, which began in the early 1990s
as a wrap-up session led by the Convenor, and gradually evolved
into the conversation format. Erickson recalls:
For the first few
years I made fairly informal remarks in that session and led
audience discussion. (A title of one of my talks was "I
was in the bottom reading group.") Then I began to have
a guest that I would interview, with audience discussion. Perhaps
the first of those guests was Ned Hall (Personal communication,
8/28/02).
The Saturday evening
conversation continues to be the final session of the Forum, followed
by a celebratory dinner for all. At the 1998 Forum, Fred Erickson
and George Spindler held forth in a conversation/interview that
looked back over the 50 or so years of educational ethnography
in which George has been such an active and foundational leader
and participant. Subsequent Saturday evening conversations have
continued the retrospective theme and informal character of the
Erickson-Spindler conversation: the aforementioned 1999 Hymes-Smith-Erickson
conversation commemorating the Forum's 20th anniversary was followed
by Teresa McCarty and Galena Dick looking back (with me) on the
30 year history of the Rough Rock School in Arizona (2000); David
Barton, Brian Street and I reviewing our own and others' trajectories
of ethnographic work in literacy over the past few decades (2001);
and, in 2002, Kris Gutiérrez and Ray McDermott (and I)
dialoguing about the paths that brought them to classroom ethnographic
research. A transcription of the 2002 conversation is also included
in this issue of Penn GSE Perspectives on Urban Education.
Another evolving tradition of the Forum has been the setting of
a theme, which appears to have happened once in 1987, was picked
up again in the 1999 anniversary year which celebrated A Generation
of Ethnography in Schools, and has continued to the present,
with the 2002 theme being Dialogue across Time, Space, and
Perspective.
Ethnography in Education Research Forum 2002
Professor Luis Moll, our 2002 Forum Friday evening keynote speaker,
has his Ph.D. (1978) in Educational Psychology from UCLA and is
Professor at the University of Arizona College of Education, where
he has been since 1986. He is a key figure in the increasingly
significant work in sociocultural psychological approaches to
education, having argued forcefully, from some of his earliest
writings, for the applicability of Vygotsky's ideas to educational
research and practice. He is particularly known for his application
of the notion of "zone of proximal development" to create
instructional settings which lead children to build on strengths
to achieve new learnings, a prime example can be found in bilingual
instruction, the creating of lessons in which children can build
on their strengths in one language while learning the other. One
of his very early publications on this topic, the 1986 "Ethnographic
Pedagogy: Promoting Effective Bilingual Instruction" co-authored
with Stephen Díaz, is a truly ground-breaking piece of
research and a classic in the bilingual education literature.
Professor Moll is also widely known for his work of the past few
decades on "funds of knowledge," by which he and his
colleagues refer to the intellectual and social capital held and
shared among members of Mexican American communities of the US
southwest -- a concept which put forward a resource, rather than
deficit or problem, view of these communities at a time when it
was rare to do so. Moll and colleagues have engaged in a program
of research not only to document and interpret these funds of
knowledge, but also to put them to use in improving education
for Mexican American students. In recognition of his outstanding
contributions to educational research, Dr. Moll was invited to
give the Distinguished Lecture at the 1999 annual meetings of
the American Educational Research Association and was nominated
to the National Academy of Education that same year.
Luis began his Friday keynote with reminiscences of his own first
attendance at the Ethnography Forum in 1979 or 1980, when he presented
the ethnographic pedagogy research I mentioned above. Moll credits
the Forum's space for open discourse about qualitative research
in education as having a profound influence in "nurturing
his anthropological imagination," informing the interdisciplinary
approach to research he has followed ever since. The heart of
his keynote talk focuses on the concept of educational sovereignty,
or the need to challenge the status quo for hundreds of thousands
of Latino students in U.S. schools, an oppressive status quo made
up largely of coercion and control; he suggests and describes
a couple of approaches in his own work which go some way toward
informing and promoting educational sovereignty, including the
funds of knowledge work and, more recently, the documentation
and analysis of children's routine accomplishment of biliteracy
development and of the language ideologies mediating that development.
Sonia Nieto is Professor of Education at University of Massachusetts,
Amherst and holds her Ed.D. (1979) in curriculum from the same
university, as well as an M.A. (1966) in Spanish from New York
University. Author of two remarkable and enduring books Affirming
Diversity (1992; 3rd Edition, 2000) and The Light in Their
Eyes (1999), activist and advocate for educational equity
and social justice, and a popular and sought-after speaker, Professor
Nieto is above all a classroom teacher who has never left behind
her love for classrooms and the teachers and children in them.
She is a leading figure in the field of multicultural education
and critical pedagogy and was named the 1997 Multicultural Educator
of the Year by the National Association for Multicultural Education.
She has been honored as an Annenberg Institute Senior Fellow (1998-2000)
and was awarded an honorary Doctorate in Humane Letters from Lesley
College in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1999.
At the 2002 Forum Saturday morning plenary, Nieto presented a
moving and powerful dialogue with two teacher colleagues, Stephen
Gordon and Junia Yearwood, who had participated with her during
the 1999-2000 school year in a year-long Inquiry Group project
with eight veteran and highly respected teachers from the Boston
Public Schools, exploring what she had come to call her burning
question: "What keeps teachers going - in spite of everything?"
(This will also be the title of the book on this work, forthcoming
from Teachers College Press). Because the Forum paper was already
committed for publication elsewhere, we here include another equally
riveting paper emerging from that same project, this one co-authored
with two other teacher colleagues, Sonie Felix and Karen Gelzinis.
Each paper focuses on selected themes from among the eight which
emerged from the year-long inquiry. The themes Nieto, Felix, and
Gelzinis write on are: Teaching as Hope and Possibility, Teaching
as Anger and Desperation, and Teaching as Collaborative Intellectual
Work.
Kris Gutiérrez, Professor at UCLA's Graduate School of
Education and Information Studies since 1989, earned her PhD (1988)
in Rhetoric and Composition theory and Literacy and English Education
at the University of Colorado in Boulder. Ray McDermott, Professor
at Stanford's School of Education also since 1989, and at Teacher's
College Columbia for the decade before that, has his PhD (1977)
in Anthropology from Stanford. Professor Gutiérrez has
written a regular column for the LA Times Reading page
and received the American Association of Higher Education's Outstanding
Latina faculty Award in 1999. Professor McDermott wrote one of
the most cited dissertations in education, entitled Kids Make
Sense (1977) and received the American Anthropological Association's
Council on Anthropology and Education Spindler Award for Excellence
in Educational Anthropology in 2001.
In keeping with the 2002 Forum theme of dialogue across time,
space, and perspective, we invited Professors Gutiérrez
and McDermott to be our Saturday evening conversationalists, as
representatives of different generations of researchers, different
gendered perspectives, different disciplinary backgrounds, and
originally from different parts of the U.S., yet both of whom
have devoted a good part of their careers to ethnographic and
microethnographic research in urban classrooms. For me, the unifying
thread in Ray's and Kris' work, although they come at it from
different angles, is that they seek to understand and analyze
in detail those "third spaces" (Gutiérrez) in
which "kids make sense" (McDermott) in classrooms, especially
kids from ethnic and linguistic minority backgrounds who have
traditionally been least well-served by our schools.
As has become our practice for these Saturday evening conversations,
Kris, Ray, and I had outlined a set of questions in advance, with
the goal of providing some structure to the conversation while
also allowing for as natural a flow as possible, including digressions
and elaborations that might arise on the spur of the moment. Some
of the questions we used as guides in this particular conversation
were: What brought you to your interest in looking ethnographically
at learning? How have your interests and perspectives changed
over time? What are some of the projects you've been working on?
What have you found to be helpful in mentoring graduate students
and collaborating with teachers in doing ethnographies of learning?
As you read, you can judge for yourselves how well we kept to
our agenda. I think that what stood out to many of us about the
conversation were the ways in which, in their very personae and
interactional styles as well as what they had to say, Kris and
Ray did represent very different perspectives, and yet a common,
driving concern for children's educational success.
This issue also includes selected papers from among the rich offerings
of the nearly 100 sessions at the Forum:
Action Research
on Meaningful Family Involvement by Parents, Teachers and Students:
Using the Telling Strategically, by Barbara D'Emilio
Beyond "I":
Critical Literacy, Social Education and the "I-Search",
by Beth Rubin
A Pinch of
Old, A Dash of New: Teachers Blending Their Autobiographical
Voices, by Monica Taylor, Lesley Coia, Vinni Gallassio,
Jeanine Giovannone, Allison Leventhal, David Olah, & Maria
Premus.
As Penn GSE's longstanding
commitment to the improvement of our urban schools continues to
evolve and expand, I am thrilled to inaugurate what I hope will
become a new tradition for the Ethnography Forum, namely the publication
of Forum plenaries and selected papers each year in Penn GSE's
electronic journal, Penn GSE Perspectives on Urban Education.
I want to thank my colleague Katherine Schultz and her fellow
editorial board members, Judith Buchanan, and doctoral students
Anne Burns Thomas and Susan Goerlich Zief for inviting me as guest
editor and working with me and the authors to bring the issue
to fruition. We look forward to hearing back from you, the readers,
with comments, reflections, and suggestions on this first of many
Forum special issues.
Nancy H. Hornberger
26 September 2002
References
Gilmore, P., & Glatthorn, A. A. (Eds.). (1982). Children
in and out of school: Ethnography and education. Center for
Adult Literacy.
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