Making sense of human social behaviour for a specific group of humans can be achieved through ethnography that allows for a portrayal of some aspects of the existing culture and also makes possible the influencing of those aspects without controlling it. The choice of the kind of ethnography to be used will depend on the type of research agenda. A non-political agenda is comfortable with a conventional ethnography. A political agenda with a focus on exposing how power is located and works to control social relationships demands a critical ethnography. Critical ethnography does not claim to be better than conventional ethnography. What critical ethnography strives towards is providing insights into questions of social existence otherwise ignored by conventional ethnography.
If the agenda is not explicitly political with the intent of unmasking existing oppressions and subordinations in society then the choice will be a conventional ethnography. Conventional
ethnography involves and describes what is, speaks for the subjects, assumes the status quo through affirming assumed meanings when others might exist and seldom reveals the perspective of the research subjects on the researcher.
On the other hand, critical ethnography challenges research, policy and various forms of human activity because it makes it possible to ask what could be; it attempts to connect the 'meanings of the meanings' to broader structures of social power and control; and resists symbolic power by displaying how symbolic power restricts alternative meanings that conceal the deeper levels of social life, create misunderstanding and thwart action (Simon and Deppo, 1986; Thomas, 1993;
Kincheloe and McLaren, 2000 ; Triclogus, 2001). I was interested in unmasking and giving voice to the social oppressions and subordinations that were part of my biology classroom and in working towards emancipation if possible. My choice then had to be a critical ethnography.
My interests lay in how teaching-learning processes in biology education continued to also
perpetuate social oppressions and subordinations. This interest emerges from my own development and growth in South Africa during apartheid - first as a person living and growing in South Africa and later as a biology teacher. In recent times South Africa has shifted from apartheid to a
democracy. What did this mean for the students in my biology class in a post-apartheid South Africa where oppression on the basis of race, gender, language and religion was no longer legally permissible. My experience, like Lather's (1986), directed my desire and need to know. I could begin to get to know by developing an understanding of the world of my biology students in the biology classroom, the school and the wider community.
Critical ethnography not only describes and analyses.Italso opens to scrutiny otherwise hidden agendas, power centres and assumptions that inhibit repress and constrain. Itrequires that commonsense assumptions such as the facts of a traditional biology education be questioned (Roman, 1992; Trueba, 1999).Itdoes this by taking ordinary events, like traditional biology lessons, and reproducing them in ways that exposes broader social processes of control, taming, power imbalance and the symbolic mechanisms that impose one set of preferred meanings or behaviours over others. Through this it reveals how domestication, social entrapment and contentment with social existence occurs. Contentment with social existence needs challenging because in this lies the roots of domestication of oppressions and subordinations. Domestication
also makes possible the excuse of a plea of ignorance, an ignorance that must be further excused since it caused no harm.Italso provides for an excuse of non-responsibility for existing social oppressions and subordinations such as racism, classism, sexism, etc. Critical ethnography does not provide the route towards emancipation. Rupturing the domestication of traditional biology
education creates then opportunities for students to resist domestication - if they choose to become agents of their own emancipation.
Existing power issues as recognised by Lather (2000) demand also that the critical ethnographic project engaged asks for whom was the research or inquiry conducted. How did the research process engaged with then empower some and silence some; who was empowered and who was silenced? Who decided the research agenda? These questions are crucial to any possible
involvement in areas of advocacy and agency. As a researcher I was both alerted and cautioned by Peshkin (2001) who drew my attention to the researcher, who when engaged in a process of selection by sampling, makes choices about who will participate in the research. These choices are bound by the recognition that one cannot research everything and that one should not even attempt to do so. Further, the research products then can only be the outcomes of what decisions have been made about what to sample - based on the researcher's perceptions.
Peshkin (2001) also alerts the researcher to the lenses of perception as being those that include:
patterns - being that which occurs routinely and through their regularity give form and content to perception; time - being the framing segments and also history which is critical to understanding the present; emic - being the respect that must be accorded to others by taking them seriously in giving them voice; positionality - being the basis for how one 'sees' and this being done through assuming the lenses of the 'subject' - it is positionality that makes possible the acquisition of the emic voice; ideology - being the stances that frame the researcher's perspectives on the
foundational issues of what the research ought to accomplish and also the researcher's role in the research process; themes being the prominent factors in the research; metaphors - being that which directs attention to somewhere and in doing so enabling perception; irony - being the metaphor of opposites that enhances what a thing is and; silence - being directing the ear and eye to that what is not occurring within the research setting and is inferred from the researcher's sense of what s/he thinks ought to be happening. Research purposes act as the criteria when sampling decisions are made around what to include and exclude and what should be placed at the centre and what should be placed at the periphery. What I needed to bear in mind is that through using multiple lenses my perception would be enhanced.
Power positions spoken of by Lather (1986) in research can begin to be addressed by involving the student-participants wherever possible in the research process. I shared with the students my agenda of unmasking existing oppressions and subordinations in the biology classroom; they were privy to lesson transcripts which were also used to guide the student-participant interviews; and those students who were interviewed read through and commented the interview transcripts. In this way I guarded against my own enthusiasms, impositions and objectifications. I let the data speak to me.
Iterative readings of the thick data allowed for reflexivity as I thought through the data and its implications. This made it possible for the 'subaltern's' voice to be heard. This empirical analysis made it possible to generate an empirically grounded theory from the context-embedded data. In this way Lather's (1986) requirement of inquiry as a'fundamentally dialogic and mutually educative enterprise' (p 268) was obtained.
During this process students had to re-evaluate their understandings of themselves as oppressors, the oppressed and subordinated and the conditions required for an existence that tended towards social justice. I needed to also acknowledge, as part of this enterprise, that recognising conditions for emancipation would not necessarily translate into actual emancipation itself. The provocation of the students during the biology lessons engaged the student in trying to understand herlhis world, what shaped that world and what it was that the student needed to engage with to effect any desired change. Such direct student engagement with change allowed for Lather's (1986) catalytic validity through this project.
Biology education and education generally does not begin and end within the confines of a classroom - be it a biology classroom or any other classroom. Biology lessons began to challenge how life as experienced in traditional biology education gave commonsense validation to life even within the school and the wider community. Contradictions began to emerge as students responded to the oppressions and subordinations that were identified from the lessons. Student understandings through processes of socialisation came into conflict with what they verbalised around issues of oppression and subordination; what they believed was in conflict with how they lived their lives.
This was painful to both the students and me. The pain came from the knowledge of each of us could be both an oppressor and oppressed person. It is this pain that needs to be unmasked and known before there can even be any efforts towards emancipation.
For Kincheloe and McLaren (2000) a criticalist goal of any critical ethnography, in its various forms, is the attempt'to free the object ofanalysis from the tyranny offixed, unassailable categories and to rethink subjectivity itselfas a permanently unclosed, always partial, narrative engagement with text and context' (p 301). In starting from the position that education is
intrinsically political critical ethnography provides for an advocacy for the oppressed. This
advocacy may be obtained through various intersecting activities such as: documenting the nature of the oppression; documenting the possible process of empowerment as a journey away from the documented oppression; conscientizing (the catalytic validation) or accelerating the conscientization of the oppressed and the oppressors; a reflective awareness of the rights and obligations of humans without which there is no way to conceptualise empowerment, equity and any struggle towards liberation; sensitising the research community to the implications of research for a quality life through linking intellectual work to real-life conditions; and reaching that level of understanding of the historical, political, social, and economic contexts that support the abuse of power and
oppression, the neglect and disregard for human rights and ways of learning about and internalising rights and obligations that work towards social justice. Through such efforts a relationship between the intellectual activity of research and the praxis of the daily life of the researcher may be forged as happened in my biology classroom (Trueba, 1999).