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Researching the Art of Teaching-ethnography for educational use PETER WooDs (1996) London, Routledge 198 pp.
L37.50 (hardback), L11.99 (paperback) This book is presented as 'a follow up to Inside Schools (Woods, 1996)' and it certainly provides us with some sense of the methodological journey that Peter Woods has travelled in the last decade. It also, in the useful framing introduction, helps us to locate this journey with reference to some reflections from Woods on his own life and research career. This particular `ethnographer's self and the notion of the `self within qualitative research surface in every chapter of the book.
It is an interesting, frustrating, pastiche of a book. One might almost imagine that this 'pastiche' might be deliberate, because one of the recurring themes of the book, addressed head-on in chapter 3, called `Seeing into the life of things', is symbolic interactionism meets postmodernism. Here Woods focuses on the uses of evocative texts such as the novel, drama, and poetry within the research process. For Woods such `new methods provide us with some navigation instruments that might enhance our view'. Here we have one of the most readable of educational ethnographers, a researcher drenched in Mead and Blumer, sticking firmly with `the promise of symbolic interactionism' (the title of chapter 2), welcoming post-modernism but hardly embracing it, and providing also the occasional warning about losing sight of the existing methodological gains of qualitative research.
The sense of 'pastiche' is probably more a consequence of the book being partly built around three chapters which are slightly revised versions of earlier publications: chapter 1 on the art...