Observing schools in disadvantaged neighborhoods in France
pp. 635-652
in: Paul Smeyers, David Bridges, Nicholas C. Burbules, Morwenna Griffiths (eds), International handbook of interpretation in educational research, Berlin, Springer, 2015Abstract
Ethnography permits a renewal of interpretive frameworks as they have been defined and fixed at any given moment by a dominant ideology that saturates both public debate and the scientific community. Ethnography can change the conventional way of explaining some social situations or issues. It holds this power because it puts researchers in touch with the lived world of actors. In other words, provided that researchers are ready and willing to question their pre-established views, they find themselves facing a complex, ambivalent, multiple, partly indeterminate and shifting reality. Conventional interpretive frameworks therefore seem to them inadequate, reductionist, simplistic. The ethnographic experience challenges researchers to refresh their tools for describing and understanding, and that is what this chapter would like to illustrate through the author's research works on disadvantaged urban schools in France and in South Africa.