The Problematic of Experience: Redefining Critical Work in Ethnography and Pedagogy

College English Mar 1998

The Problematic of Experience: Redefining Critical Work in Ethnography and Pedagogy

Min-Zhan Lu ; Bruce Horner

Abstract

his essay explores the convergence we see between projects in ethnographic research and composition pedagogy that emphasize the critical power of experience.Though their aims are usually described differently, both ethnographers and composition teachers confront similar ethical issues of representing the populations they work with and the changes that may arise from that work.Both thus face the challenge of negotiating differences and power.The course of these negotiations, we argue, depends on what experience is taken to mean and how it can be used.Signs of this convergence between ethnography and composition pedagogy appear in both the shared ideals and the shared dilemmas reported in recent accounts and critiques of such projects.We have in mind those projects which attend to the politics of their research and teaching methods in pursuit of their commitment to socially emancipatory ends.Many ethnographers and teachers might see themselves as working for socially emancipatory ends (if defining these in different ways), and presumably all would be concerned with methodology.For us, however, critical ethnography and pedagogy approach methodology not strictly in terms of its efficiency in producing or transmitting knowledge to inform subsequent (social) practice but in terms of its effects as social practice.Critical ethnography and pedagogy thus reject the possibility of a politically neutral stance or practice before, during, and after contact between researchers and informants, or teachers and students.

Journal: College English
Published: 1998-03-01
DOI: 10.2307/378557
Open Access: Closed
Topics: qualitative research