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Classroom Ethnography on Critical Language and Literacy Teaching and Learning

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Reflections on Qualitative Research in Language and Literacy Education

Part of the book series: Educational Linguistics ((EDUL,volume 29))

Abstract

Using findings from language classrooms, this chapter aims to illustrate how ethnographic studies with poststructuralist and feminist orientations have informed and are informed by sociocultural literacy developments. It particularly argues for the pertinence of adopting an ethnographic perspective (Bloome, Classroom ethnography. In: Grenfell M, Bloome D, Hardy C, Pahl K, Rowsell J, Street B (eds) Language, ethnography, and education: Bridging new literacy studies and Bourdieu (pp 7–26). Routledge, New York, 2012) to critical language and literacy education (CLLE). CLL teaching – the cultivation of students’ ability to analyze and evaluate texts for transformed actions and critical social choices – is often bound up with contradictions and controversies regarding institutionalized power structures and the plural partial nature of knowledge. Ethnographic studies informed by poststructuralist and feminist theories have helped illuminate not only the inherent paradoxes in critical education and its ironic oppressive potential, but also the complex shifting interstices between power, identities, and agency within the classroom and wider social environment. This chapter describes some of the major changes in critical education as informed by such ethnographic perspectives, which include the problematization of the grandiose emancipation claims, the centering of emotions and relationality in critical praxis, and the attention to the embodied – lived and performed – CLLE practices.

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  1. School of Education, Bishop’s University, 2600 College, Sherbrooke, J1M 1Z7, Québec, Canada

    Sunny Man Chu Lau

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Correspondence to Sunny Man Chu Lau .

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  1. Faculty of Literature, Languages and History Department of English Language and Literature, Alzahra University, Tehran, Iran

    Seyyed-Abdolhamid Mirhosseini

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Lau, S.M.C. (2017). Classroom Ethnography on Critical Language and Literacy Teaching and Learning. In: Mirhosseini, SA. (eds) Reflections on Qualitative Research in Language and Literacy Education. Educational Linguistics, vol 29. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-49140-0_6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-49140-0_6

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