A lot of social science treats race (I prefer the term “ethnicity,” because it highlights the sociocultural rather than biological nature of it) as an independent variable, a category that people are born into, and that to some extent determines the character of their experiences. This is most explicit in quantitative sociology and policy analysis, where you look at some kind of outcome — test scores, say — and see how ethnicity comes out in a statistical model. Does your dependent variable correlate better with ethnicity, compared to socioeconomic status or whatever else you’ve measured? (That is, is it “more about race” or “more about class”?) Is the correlation statistically significant, or is there a good chance that it might be just coincidence?

As an ethnographer, not only am I asking different questions, but I’m approaching the whole project in a different way. The scale I’m looking at is not big-data correlation but the lived experiences of particular human beings, and on that scale, ethnicity is messy and can mean a variety of things at different times and places. It’s complicated. In my own case, sure, I’m white all the time, but when is it useful to say that I’m doing what I’m doing because I’m white? And I’m not working-class, so can you say that what makes me white is (by definition) something I have in common with people who identify as white and working-class, or is mine a different kind of whiteness? Who can answer these questions better, me or an outside researcher studying me? And couldn’t there be times when I’d define my ethnicity in a different way? If in a particular moment I think it’s important to note that I’m Jewish, does that count as ethnicity? (Are ethnicity and religion distinct categories?)

The ethnographic approach, as I practice it, is to stay agnostic about these things as much as possible, and let the analysis be guided by what happens in the field. My dissertation proposal mentions ethnicity just once, in an overview of different ways people define identity, so it was never my intention to look at ethnicity specifically. But people ask me about it when I tell them what I’m researching, and sometimes the data does take you there.

Read more ›

I’m soon to graduate with my PhD, but I’m not on the academic job market. You might be wondering about the same question that this book is asking:

So in the spirit of the currently ongoing Beyond the Professoriate virtual conference (#beyondprof on Twitter), here’s one thing I’d love to do. It’s a role I see for myself in K–12 education that builds on my teaching experience, as well as the knowledge of ethnography and other qualitative research methods that I’ve gained through my doctoral coursework and research.

I believe research and professional development can be transformative, if they’re used as tools by teachers, for teachers.

Read more ›

After reading this piece on the NPR website, as well as the research article it reports on, I felt I had to write to the ombudsman. The text of my letter follows.

Dear Ombudsman:

In the story “Mexican-American Toddlers: Understanding the Achievement Gap” on last week’s All Things Considered, I was disappointed not to hear a response to Bruce Fuller from an expert on bilingual and multicultural education. Including this perspective would have highlighted two significant problems with the piece: first, that Dr. Fuller’s research is framed in a highly anglocentric way, and second, that some of the claims he made on the radio are not supported by his research. Read more ›