No one could deny the interest and attention that language in education has attracted in recent decades. That interest itself arose from a century wide preoccupation with language and the part it played in human systems of interaction and communication. But, the study of language in education has its own history and traditions. This history can, of course, be traced back for centuries well before the last one and would involve the philosophy of human thought. However, language in education as we currently know it has, however, only come about in the last fifty years or so, and is intimately bound up with the growth and development of research and scholarship over this period.
For the first half of the twentieth century, research in language and education was mostly characterised by a model which mirrored that of the physical sciences. Here, a psychological paradigm was dominant, and with it, a focus on psychometric testing, statistics, and a broadly positivistic approach to scientific enquiry. For language, structuralism was still influential, a tradition which looked for the meaning of language processes in the structure and form of language itself. The behaviourist perspectives emerging from the 1930s did nothing to attenuate the centrality of linguistic form as the established object of academic research. Education took a similar approach, and was preoccupied with intelligence tests and empirical methods of analysis to measure the psychological processes of learning. Theory formation itself was developed and tested in ways analogous to the normative sciences in search of the rules of human behaviour. However, all of that changed from the mid-century point.
Linguistics, the ‘science’ of language, was first rocked by the Chomskyan revolution, with its claim that language was an innate characteristic of the human brain, of a Language Acquisition Device (LAD), and consisting of ‘deep’ structural properties which generated speech. Differences between languages – individual ‘tongues’ – were simply the ‘surface’ phenomena of these structures. This discovery subsequently founded an entire new paradigm, one which studied the ‘universal grammar’ apparent in all languages. The core of such an approach was, however, no less analytical, with a focus on the predictable transformations of grammar in their universal forms. However, another perspective entirely was about to explode onto the scene, one which took an altogether different track.
In retrospect, it is easy to see how the 1960s represented an ‘opening out’ of human relations. The age of communications was born and, with it, easier access to other peoples and cultures, and a growing curiosity to raise horizons beyond conventional boundaries. These boundaries need to be understood as social, cultural, and psychological. In educational research, the new epistemological zeitgeist turned its back on the psychometric methods of the past, and instead adopted more socalled ‘qualitative’, approaches. Disciplines such as philosophy, sociology and history – as applied to education – challenged the established dominance of psychology. All of these fields encouraged more naturalistic approaches to the study of education and, increasingly, researchers became interested in the ‘culture of classrooms’ and the socio-historic factors impinging on the processes of teaching and learning. The discipline of language in education itself was born as a new focus within such a changing perspective: the speech event became a unit of analysis, as did the study of ‘the rules of use without which the rules of grammar would be useless’ (Hymes: 1972/67).
These are the roots of our book – language, ethnography, and education – and it seeks to bring the three traditions together in a new way. Of course, and from what is stated above, it is clear that language and education have existed side by side for some time; and also that ethnographic approaches, with their anthropological heritage, have long since been one option for researchers wishing to study education from a naturalistic perspective. From the 1970s, with the birth of the ‘new’ sociology of education (see Young, 1971), there developed a preoccupation with classroom discourse, the way it was constructed, and the individual and contextual factors at stake in the teaching/learning environment. And, borrowing from anthropologists, there grew up, side by side with this focus, a group of researchers intent on providing ‘thick descriptions’ of the cultures of learning they saw during their ‘participant observations’ of schools, classrooms, teachers and pupils. The key central focus of the book is, however, literacy.
Until the 1980s, literacy was seen mostly in instrumental terms; that is, as a prescribed set of skills, techniques, and know-how required to be ‘literate’. However, one realisation emerging from the new socio-cultural mood was that such prescriptions were at best arbitrary, and at worst ideological. Street (one of the contributors to this volume) announced a major shift in our perceptions of literacy in work stemming from the 1980s (see 1984, for example) when he contrasted what he termed an ‘autonomous’ view of literacy, one which saw it in the kind of absolutionist terms described above, with a more ‘socially constructivist’ perspective. The latter version of literacy is more sensitive to the notion of a range of literacies possible in any one context – as many, in fact, as represented by those present in it. It probably goes without saying that the study of such literacy events from this more socio-culturally sensitive perspective necessarily involves naturalistic or ethnographic approaches to some extent. But, what exactly is ethnography, and what does it bring to literacy that other perspectives do not? This book sets out to answer these questions and to show the possibilities of an ethnographic understanding of literacy.
So-called ‘New Literacy Studies’ (NLS), themselves over twenty years old now, have evolved considerably from their early founding principles. Ethnography also has been somewhat eclipsed as the most popular research paradigm in educational studies by a new focus on school improvement and achievement, and therefore a preoccupation with evidence-based practice and impact. Both ethnographic and NLS researchers have consequently developed new tools and methods. Within the field of ethnography, the work of the French social theorist Pierre Bourdieu has become extremely influential in a range of disciplines. It is probably therefore no surprise if educational researchers working in a qualitative framework should embrace many of his ideas and concepts. Similarly, NLS and language in education research have increasingly made use of his methodology. This volume brings together these three traditions – literacy, ethnography, and Bourdieu – and takes the reader on a journey.
Part I of that journey is entitled ‘Bridging New Literacy Studies and Bourdieu – Principles’. Here, the authors set out the building blocks for the book. This part is intended to provide basic theoretical parameters. It does this in a developmental narrative. Chapter 2 establishes the context of classroom ethnography. It shows conventional approaches and gives an account of its evolution over recent decades. Various theoretical perspectives are contrasted, and there is discussion of the principles of practice advocated by a range of practitioners. The idea here is for a standard history of ethnography in general and classroom ethnography in particular to be presented as a way of providing a contrastive base-line for what is to follow.
Chapter 3 then gives an account of New Literacy Studies – its history and current state of the art. This is an enormous field, but the core idea here is to indicate how NLS emerged and how its concerns and practice have developed over the past decades. A range of NLS issues are contrasted with conventional approaches to literacy and classroom ethnography.
Chapter 4 considers Bourdieu, language, and education. Bourdieu wrote extensively about education, language, and academic discourse. This chapter sets out what he had to say about each; and does so in terms of his own ethnographies. Key concepts are presented and their relevance to the themes under discussion addressed.
Part II, titled ‘Language, Ethnography and Education – Practical Studies’, includes a series of practical examples of NLS and Bourdieu used in ethnographic studies of language in educational settings. Individual contributors present, discuss and reflect on their use of these approaches in teaching, learning and teacher training contexts whilst highlighting a range of methodological issues.
Finally, Part III, ‘Working at the Intersections – In Theory and Practice’, offers a synthesis of Parts I and II from a theoretical and practical point of view. It also draws out a number of features concerning the use of classroom language ethnography incorporating NLS and Bourdieusian sociology.
Chapter 9 considers the practical examples in terms of the range of issues of theory and method. Questions of theory and practice are raised in terms of their inter-relationship in trans-cultural settings. The usefulness of both NLS and Bourdieu is addressed.
Finally, Chapter 10 extends and develops many of the questions and issues raised in the previous chapter in terms of a future practical research approach, and the principles and perspectives that might guide it. Issues of theory, methodology and policy are again salient in offering a framework for future research practice.
A book such as this can be read in various ways. Those well versed in NLS and Bourdieu may begin with Part II and the further exemplification to be found there of their applications in practice, and read out to the methodological synthesis of Part III. Those with mostly theoretical concerns might start with Part III and then consult Part II for examples exploring the perspective in practice. Whilst those wishing to extend their own language in education research in new directions will need to read through from Parts I to III in order to see the sequential development of theory and practice. Any one person's reading of the book will therefore be determined by their own particular background and intent; a principle which goes to the heart of the literacy event itself.
Of course, the literacy word itself has also developed a life of its own and, with it, a polysemic character; it is not uncommon to come across a whole battery of ‘literacies’ besides the original focus on reading and writing, for example, ‘emotional literacy’, ‘media literacy’, ‘physical literacy’, ‘computer literacy’, ‘aesthetic literacy’, ‘cultural literacy’, etc. The individual chapters in Part II touch on some of these literacies to a greater or lesser extent. However, our central concerns are both pedagogic and methodological. The authors of this volume believe that ‘classroom language ethnography’ is a new emerging field; one that is distinct from conventional approaches to literacy and education. It takes literacy in its broader sense and sets it within a socio-constructivist framework, and consequently takes an ethnographic approach to its study. However, that ethnography itself is informed by the principles of NLS, themselves extended within a Bourdieusian paradigm. What emerges is a genuinely new perspective. It is one with rich and developed traditions behind it, but is nevertheless quite new. By their synthesis, we believe a bridge can be built between those traditions, one that offers fresh and more fruitful insights on literacy in all its manifestations, therefore providing the foundations for a more robust science of language in education.