Slide 11
Slide 11 text
This is a methodological experiment, a poesis of talk, of weak theory (Sedgwick, 1997), of
paying attention and spacing out (Stewart, 2005), a sideways move in educational research
drawing heavily on the diffuse field of new ethnography (Goodall, 2000) and new
ethnographic writing. The data, dialogue, conjecture, and findings are based on two
iterations of observations at a South Central US middle school implementing a computer-
based space-science curriculum called Alien 911!. A version of educational research which
traces, and performs (Pollock, 2006) the way things flash up and circulate, dive into and
drown in tangles of attribution, and inter-implication. The experiment attempts to
demonstrate a kind of writing and research which lingers within the ethnopoetic re-
presentation crafted out of fieldnotes, conversations, and interviews. In doing so we hope
to create moments of engagement which leave readers with respect for the
interpretational polysemy and at times, illegibility, common to classroom-based research
contexts and infused with circulating local, historic, academic, and social discourses
(Stewart, 2008). In this article we use new ethnographic writing and new ethnography as a
way of analyzing and re-presenting observations, interviews, archival research, and
artifacts. Our findings trace, and perform (Pollock, 2006) the press of social and societal
forces that flash up, circulate among, and collide with curricular goals, learning outcomes,
motivational trajectories, teacher expectations, and technological tools.
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