Ethnographic Research in Schools: Historical Roots and Development with a Focus on Germany and Switzerland
Creators: name: Sieber Egger, Anja
name: Unterweger, Gisela
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2018

description: More than three decades ago, George D. Spindler (1984) wrote about what Daniel Yon (2003: 411) later called a “meteoric rise” of ethnographic research in education. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, a huge corpus of studies and literature in a field we call today “ethnographic research in education,” “anthropology of education,” “educational ethnography,” or other related terms has emerged worldwide. Going through parts of this,1 it becomes clear that there is not one theoretical perspective nor is there one empirical focus, and, consequently, there is also no single tradition and history of educational ethnography. The scope varies widely, from country to country, from discipline to discipline, and also within the disciplines2 (Delamont and Atkinson 1980; AndersonLevitt 2012b; Bollig et al. 2015). What’s more, there is a huge variety of empirical and local settings as well as of topics; we can find studies located in preschool, primary, and secondary schools, in institutions of higher education (Beach et al. 2004: 534) in India, Switzerland, or the United States. We can find studies on informal learning settings as well as a wide range of topics – from how a curriculum or policy is developed and realized at the university or primary school level to how an elementary school teacher and pupil interact with each other in their everyday school life. Furthermore, the impact and interplay of social categories like social class, gender, or ethnicity are highlighted, and questions of migration, postcolonialization, democracy, and education are investigated. Although the traditions in the United Kingdom and United States seem to be dominant and mainstream – not only because of the “hegemonic Englishlanguage literature” (Anderson Levitt 2012b: 3) but also because of the “prosperous mainland position” (Larsson 2006: 192) – it is obvious that in other countries, too, educational ethnography has become an important part of the field of educational research (Larsson 2006: 193; AndersonLevitt 2012a). However, these discussions rarely find their way into the AngloSaxon 3 traditions (Larsson 2006: 193; AndersonLevitt 2012a). <br> To structure the article, we use a region, languagebased approach, and we mainly focus on the studies of formal learning settings in schools. Following this introduction, we illuminate the AngloSaxon traditions in the USA and the UK. Different authors mention a gap between these two countries, based on two disciplines: cultural anthropology and sociology. These two disciplines have also influenced the emergence of what we call the German Sonderweg (i.e., “special pathway”), as we will show. After the Sonderweg discussion, we will turn our focus to the situation in Switzerland. As Larsson (2006: 192) affirmed for the Swedish history of<br> educational ethnography, Switzerland too can be seen as an island that orients itself toward the mainland debates. Concomitantly, Switzerland claims for itself a multilateral situation. Witht his consideration, we move to our conclusion.
description: +repphzhbib2018F