Education and Racism - Book Report/Review Example

Running head: Evaluation Evaluation ___________ ________________________ ________________ Evaluation Introduction This paper has the primary objective to critically evaluate two papers posing specific questions in respect of each of the two papers. The two papers are instances of qualitative research and essentially follow the ethnography as methodology. The two papers are: The Smile Factory: Work At Disneyland by John Van Maanen and It's A Question Of Trust: Balancing The Relationship Between Students And Teachers In Ethnographic Fieldwork by Lisa Russell. While the former paper is an account of a natural ethnographer of the social organization of Walt Disney Park in its various dimensions, human, visitors, society, entertainment, attitudes, workers, management and business; the latter is an account of a young ethnographer probing the delicate relationship between students and teachers and what influencing factors go on to strengthen or weaken such relationships. In both instances of qualitative research the researcher is present in the field and interacts with his/her research environment and subjects to form findings. This paper essentially discusses the merits of the methodology adopted and the validity of conclusions reached through the specific questions in respect of each paper. Russell's Paper The age factor of the ethnographer and the difference made by it Russel rests upon the man argument that ethnographic research is of a very personal nature; thus the personality and personal dispositions of the researcher become an important element (Stapleton, 1984). Russell found, as an ethnographer that her gender, nationality, use of language, size and age determined the manner in which the two sets of participants on the trust divide line, i.e. the students and the teachers, related and interacted with her.Russel acknowledges due to her personal characteristics as a researchers it was apparent that she was able to establish rapport and gain trust much faster when compared to others.Russel goes on to clarify that these trust relationships altered and formed to maturity throughout her fieldwork, finally determining the type and quality of data collected.Russel says Being English, white, aged 23-24 and female influenced students' and teachers' behaviour and affected the nature of the information gathered. I am a white, female, novice ethnographer conducting fieldwork in another country. My age (23-24 at the time of fieldwork), smallness in height and build influenced how students and teachers interacted with me. (Russel, 2005) The ethnographer clearly reveals her research object, though veiled, at many places as gaining an insight into deviant behaviour of non conformist students. She utilized the information gathering tool of 'hanging around' a group of students identified by each school as not being able to 'cope' in school. Ethnographers deemed that shadowing students for a day was an effective way to immediately gaining trust. However the real identification of the researcher with the researched came with her engaging in activities such as playing cards and eating lunch with students sitting on the yard floor during recess which convinced most researched students that ethnographer was after all not a teacher. Due to her age, which was more near to that of students when compared to that of teachers Russel claims that her degree of connection with the students was greater compared to her relations with teachers. In fact her age worked as a passport for her to gain entry into such students' activities.Russel acknowledges that obtention of equal insight from both teachers and students would have been problematic since she wanted to acquire a valid in-depth view of the students' perspective. This revealed her veiled preferred research objective which lay in students' constituency. Russel bases this singling of her research object on the notion that the relationship between the researched and the researcher is unique in ethnography has been recognized (Hammersley, 1992; Spradley, 1980). The researcher is immersed in the field for some time and enters into close and prolonged interaction with people in their everyday lives (Hammersley, 1992), thus making the connection a personal and individual one: Rather than studying people, ethnography means learning from people. (Spradley, 1980: 3).Russel says that her profile and capabilities and the situation warranted that she utilizes one unique relationship with one set of researched viz.students.In this her young age stood out as one of the most enabling factors. For instance Russell proves the point of her age helping her by stating that ,"Females may have discussed intimate issues more readily due to my gender, but my age also contributed to the participants feeling comfortable when discussing intimate secrets. Although I was denied access to certain significant sites such as the males' toilets, males still shared areas of their private lives with me. Some discussed their home lives; others mentioned their sexual behaviour.Given our relative closeness in age, some males felt they should impress me by informing me how they engaged in adult activities. The students' sexuality and mine influenced the students' behaviour and thus data collected. Some males experienced ridicule due to my presence; classmates would infer that I was their girlfriend. Some males would flirt with me and embellish the idea of sexual innuendo. One male would joke about our being alone during interviews. Some females laughed at the boys' attempts at chatting me up. Such instances were an effect of my age, sexuality and attempt to fit in with the teenagers". (Russel, 2005) Thus the fact that Russel was young enough to be classified as an elder student improved her data quality substantially. Crossing the threshold of Naivety and the quality of the research if done by an experienced researcher Russel clearly claims naivety and novice status on all counts prior to entering the fieldwork. She has no experience of fieldwork research and no experience as a teacher; however she does not explicitly state or emphasize the fact that her experience as a student came in handy in her interactions with students.However, it must be remembered that she was specifically dealing with deviant students and how far she had deviated as a student would have been the determining factor. Russel follows Munns(1996) and acknowledges that an over identification with teachers would have threatened the complex relationship between the researcher and the students especially when researching disaffected youth, given the differential status and distance between the teachers and students (Munns, 1996). Ethnographer, nevertheless, felt that being accepted by teachers was important to gain access and teacher insight. Experience can be one from which a researcher has memory racks from past experiences as researcher or teacher or experience can also be the one from which current field work is inormed.Russel claiming no past memory racks relies on this ongoing experience as reducing her naivety and build her confidence. Russel says," My relationship with teachers in general varied from one school to the next; I found relations improved as my confidence as an ethnographer grew. Interactions in the third school were more intimate than in the previous two; this may be attributed to the teachers' higher level of interest in their students or it may be explained in terms of my heightened confidence and greater experience that facilitated how I responded and gained information."(Russel, 2005) In fact her strategy to gather information warranted that she appears to belong to correct side depending from one situation to the next and depending upon whom she was interacting with. While age helped her identify with students; Russel often found gaining trust of teachers difficult as she had no experience being a teacher or a researcher who had researched teachers. This experience based deficiency had some consequences concerning the methodology. Russel often reveals her awkwardness caused by lack of experience, for instance, in following words," Despite the teachers' polite intentions I didn't want to draw attention to myself - I wanted to fade away into the background and observe typical behaviour."(Russell, 2005) Fading away in the background would have reduced her to a mere spectator who lacking interactions with the researched would have been forced to obtain her own interpretations of field notes and situations. A situation Russell says is not desirable at many places in her paper.Russel elaborately quotes Walker (1988) and incorporates how ethnographers prior experience as a teacher helped the field staff readily accept him and enabled them to place and relate to him. During his fieldwork Walker remained a 'researcher' and he treats himself being in the role of an 'experienced outsider', as he could he could fit reasonably well into staffroom situations and staff discussions due to his past experience. Russel says that in Walkers' terms she would be categorized as an 'inexperienced outsider'. She goes on to relate that she "sometimes found staffroom situations awkward, having no previous teaching experiences to draw upon. Furthermore I wanted to avoid being asked tricky questions by teachers, such as how students behaved in other classes, given that I had told students that any rule-breaking or unruly behaviour would not get back to the teachers. Thus my lack of experience as a teacher and researcher, together with the aim of the research, made me feel uneasy in certain situations".(Russel,2005) However Russell has clearly reported the numerous advantages that flowed from her naivet attitude and young age. She says it allowed her deep penetration into deeper thought patterns of deviant students and her novice's viewpoint allowed her to evaluate all these deep points of analysis with a fresh perspective that often worked to improve analysis which could have been produced by experience. The place of Russell's work in Ghepharts research traditions Russel's paper though beginning in naivet and inexperience began with a natural method of enquiry.It was able to collate and present qualitative arguments pertaining to the issue in hand in meaningful manner.It had no confusion between the qualitative data and quantitative data. Relying mostly on qualitative data and its analysis the paper was able to well establish substantiated conceptual insights that reveal how broad concepts and theories operate in particular cases. The paper also had an emphasis on situational details unfolding over time allowing qualitative research to describe processes. The clear abd structured arguments in the paper gave detailed descriptions of actual actions in real-life contexts that recover and preserve the actual meanings that actors ascribe to these actions and settings. The above qalities of this paper was enhanced by the fact that Russel maintained a distinctive reflexive stance all through the process of emerging out of naivet. Reflexivity is essentially a deconstructing exercise comprised in identifying points of commonality and context in viewpoints of the author, other, text, and world. Reflexivity is also used to dissect cross sections of representational reality and have modern expressions of reflexivity are found in critical theory, standpoint theory, textual deconstruction, and sociologies and anthropologies of knowledge, power, and agency ( Ashmore, 1989; Bourdieu&Wacquant,1992; Clifford, 1988; Collins, 1986) A reflexive method comes in very handy in knitting together the gendered, cultural, rational, and other hegemonies and centricities which the field is possessed of. Thus reflexivity can provide ready base for building more representation and analysis into the field situation. Positional reflexivity involves in the researcher taking up an analytical (uncertain) position and positioning in the world s that he or she could probe the specific, unseen, privileged, or, worse, exploitative relationships between analyst and the world ( Anderson, 1989; Denzin, 1994; Lather, 1986; Lincoln & Guba, 1990).Russell at several places finds herself in similar position and finds that her personal characteristics as a researcher influenced the researched ones and the research to such an extent that she was unable to leave field comfortably having seen the affairs of a research participant from a vantage point of view.Russel ,throughout the paper, maintains that her presence made substantial impact on the behavior of participants-both teachers and students however hard she tried to fade into the background. Thereby she was the reference and interpretation points for most situations. It was not just the research topic, past work, present field and present participants-most importantly it had the researcher playing a pivotal role. Russell explicitly says that, "I documented the effect of my presence and developed a detailed reflexivity account". (Russel, 2005) This made her findings most credible and engaging. This was paper in Ghephart's research traditions and ranked amongst most compliant of such tradition. Van Maanen' Paper The main strengths and weaknesses of Van Maanen's accounts of work at Disneyland Quality research is a natural approach to world phenomena. Researcher places himself in the middle of the field and lends meaning to the activities of participants through his/her perspective. Another approach for the researcher is to present the phenomena as it is observed with enabling representations which make for better understanding of the entire phenomena. In the latter approach the researcher is not attempting any interpretation other than the objectivity as observed in the field. According to some researchers qualitative research is a situated activity that locates the observer in the world. Van Maanen's description of the Disneyworld is rich captivating structured and empirical. It not only makes you feel with impact the Disneyland right here but also propels you to read on. However it is important to note that Maanen calls it an attempt in natural ethnography; however as things reveal it turns out to be a descriptive exercise with the perspective of employees; it is felt that this perspective is so pervasive that the entire organizational culture at Disney is sought to be dissected from this point of view. As Maanen says," The work-a-day practices that employees adopt to amplify or dampen customer spirits are therefore a core concern of this feeling business. The happiness trade is an interactional one. It rests partly on the symbolic resources put into place by history and park design but it also rests on an animated workforce that is more or less eager to greet the guests, pack the trains, push the buttons, deliver the food, dump the garbage, clean the streets, and, in general, marshal the will to meet and perhaps exceed customer expectations."(Van Maanen, 1991) Judging a quality research as having main weaknesses and strengths can mean entering in to the realm of criteria which list out such strengths and weaknesses or judging structures which might lead to such strengths and weaknesses. For the time being it can be assumed that a list of possible positive aspects of a research paper can be reviewed and strengths and weaknesses of the Maanen paper can be listed out. For one, the paper is highly descriptive of facts and does not adequately cover cross section of the employees. Secondly the smile factory and the load on it is put way too mechanically and the fact is ignored that resourced and well maintained park is providing uninterrupted entertainment to the hundreds of thousands that visit it each day in peak hours. Maanen has ignored the possibilities of probing the customer viewpoint adequately. After all the customer does not buy a Disney ticket to interact with the staff; the customer is so much interested in availing the entertainment goodies laid out in front of him that he would obviously want the staff not to intrude way too much. Without probing customers' viewpoints to excavate this Maanen simply focuses on the refrain that corporate culture is too mechanical affording little private leeway to employees in this feeling business.Maanen rightly insinuates that feeling business is on corporate papers for the world to see and that feeling is rather mechanical on any typical visit to Disney.However,Maanen has not bothered to probe another critical aspect i.e. on such a mass and commercialized scale how far can an individual customer's experience be personalized and actually loaded with touted feeling. The role of researcher's prejudices against Disneyland influencing his account of its practices and knowing such prejudices do the readers alter their view of findings Maanen is typically adopting a bystander's point of view and his bird watching is restricted to perfunctory customer-staff interactions and limited staff to staff interactions. It is obvious because of this apparent bias Maanen looses objectivity (see above paragraphs) ,on the one hand ;on the other hand, Van Maanen (1991) is not reflexive enough about his bias towards Disneyland. This bias was so much evident in each paragraph of the paper that it appeared as if it was a management paper written for a strategic human relations' vantage point of view. On the other side of the coin, the copious details furnished within the paper appeared as if it was a detailed description of Disney carrying an incipient objective as to how to make Disney a happier place for customers and Disney staff. It was more fitting a publication for an informative newspaper with its minute details. Nevertheless the neat structure of the paper and its careful choice of words ensured some degree of textual reflexivity and Van Maanen was able to drive home the key points. At places the description was so minute and detailed that the reader felt that he was transported to Disney. This ensured good readability of the piece which was not onerous but succinct. According to Geertz (1988) cited in Bate (1997, p.1163) "Good ethnography is about communicating the impression of having truly being there". If researcher had a direct negative link with the field situation earlier than the time it turned a research field for him; it is important that a fresh and renewed look is taken at the field keeping aside the past inventories of experiences. These inventories can be used to ratify present findings on case to case basis. But here Maanen begins and ends by stating about his negative link with Disney. This has worked to limit the positional reflexivity and often leads to the question of validity. If this bias had been made the central theme and researched perhaps the paper would have sounded less biased and more objective. His bias is of primary importance in this research. Therefore, if he had given it central importance in his account, perhaps his report would have sounded less biased and more reliable. Van Maanen (1991), moreover, moved outside a paradigm of Technicity deliberately as paradigm did not support his findings.This is what Steiner (2002) said on his paper regarding Technicity Paradigm: "it is important to distinguish between people who operate outside a paradigm or who don't adhere to the rule and law of science because they are sloppy, careless or ignorant of the "right way," and those who operate outside a paradigm by conscious choice, by rejecting the limitations of the paradigm because the paradigm cannot accommodate their results or because it limits the approach they choose to embrace. The outsiders I am contrasting to paradigm insiders are the consciously unconventional; people who I like to say have the courage to be incompetent." Is Van Maanen's account of work at Disneyland an example of "good" research Several researchers have put forward their own systems of evaluating the worth of quality research (Hammersley, 1992; Murphy et al, 1998). For example, while some consider Lincoln and Guba to have completely reformulated quality criteria to fit an interpretivist approach, others maintain that they have retained the same basic criteria as used in quantitative research and remained within a positivist paradigm. Lincoln and Guba also believe qualitative or 'interpretivist' research is based on different ontological and epistemological assumptions from quantitative or 'scientific' research an that the qualitative research should be judged on its own terms, and they formulated an alternative set of criteria to assess the trustworthiness of a piece of qualitative research (Lincoln and Guba, 1990). Following Guba and Lincoln(1990) we have the concepts of credibility- whether or not the participants studied find the account true; fittingness or transferability, which is based on the idea that accounts may be transferable to other specified settings through the provision of thick description about both the sending and the receiving contexts; the notion of dependability, which is achieved through an auditing process called an 'audit trail', in which the researcher documents methods and decisions, and assesses the effects of research strategies and confirmability - the extent to which findings are qualitatively confirmable through the analysis being grounded in the data and through examination of the 'audit trail'. These concepts are tested to find out if the quality research is trustworthy research. Because of the biased point of view the credibility criteria is perhaps not being met by Maanen paper while it apparently meets all other concepts leading to trustworthy research. In the end one has to conclude with Bate (1997, p.1153) who had opined: "Expression is more important than precision", it really is how you recount your fieldwork, your narrative style-that determines whether people accept one's research or not or how engaging or persuasive the researcher is. "Proof, truth, validity are as much an issue of style as of content." Ibid (p. 1154) References Stapleton, M.G. (1984) 'Education and Racism: A Study of the Teachers' and Pupils' Relations in the Schooling of Black Boys'. Unpublished PhD Thesis, Aston University, Birmingham. Russell, L. (2005), It's a question of trust: balancing the relationship between students and teachers in ethnographic fieldwork, in Qualitative Research, Vol. 5, No.2, pp. 181-199. Hammersley, M. (1992) What's Wrong With Ethnography Methodological Explorations. London: Routledge. Spradley, J.P. (1980) Participant Observation. London: Harcourt Brace College Publishers. Munns, G. (1996) 'Teaching Resistant Koori Students: Towards Non-Reproductive Education'. Unpublished PhD Thesis, University of New England, Armidale. Walker, J.C. (1988) Louts and Legends: Male Youth Culture in an Inner City School. Sydney: Allen and Unwin. Ashmore, M. (1989). The reflexive thesis:Wrighting the sociology of scientific knowledge. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bourdieu, P.,&Wacquant, L. (1992). An invitation to reflexive sociology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Clifford, J. (1988). The predicament of culture. Cambridge,MA:HarvardUniversity Press Collins, P. H. (1986). Learning fromthe outsider within: The sociological significance of Black feminist thought. Social Problems, 33(6), 514-532. Anderson, G. (1989). Critical ethnography in education: Origins, current status, and new directions. Review of Educational Research, 59(3), 249-270. Denzin, N. (1994). The art and politics of interpretation. In N. Denzin & Y. Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of qualitative research (pp. 500-515). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Lather, P. (1986). Issues of validity in openly ideological research: Between a rock and a soft place. Interchange, 17(4), 63-84. Lincoln, E., & Guba, E. (1990). Judging the quality of case study reports. Qualitative Studies of Education, 3(1), 51-59. Van Maanen, J. (1991), The Smile Factory: Work at Disneyland, in P.J. Frost, L.F. Moore, M.R. Louis, C.C. Lundberg & J. Martin (Eds.), Reframing organizational culture, Newbury Park, CA:Sage, pp.58-76. Bate, S.P. (1997), Whatever happened to organisational anthropology A Review of the Field of Organizational Ethnography and Anthropological Studies, in Human Relations, Vol. 50, No. 9, pp. 1147-1175. Steiner, J.C. (2002). The Technicity Paradigm and Scientism in Qualiative Research, The qualitative Report, Vol 7, No. 2 (http://www.nova.edu/ssss/QR/QR7-2/steiner.html). Murphy, E., Dingwall, R., Greatbach, D., Parker, S. and Watson, P. (1998) 'Qualitative Research Methods in Health Technology Assessment: A Review of Literature', Health Technology Assessment,vol. 2, no. 16. Read More