Aims / 13
underdeveloped countries), this knowledge is easily available; sometimes
it is in itself a source of conflicts as it threatens long-established
beliefs. Perhaps it is not too optimistic to say that
... of all forms of scientific knowledge, ethnography is the most
open, the most compatible with a democratic way of life, the least
likely to produce a world in which experts control knowledge at
the expense* of those who are studied. The skills of ethnography
are enhancements of skills all normal persons employ in everyday
life. (Hymes,1981:59)
Ethnography and Education
Ethnographic studies of classroom interaction have focused on cultural
congruence of teaching styles, sociocultural rules of interaction,
acquisition of social competence required to participate in it, and
Communicationzmiscommunication in the classroom (see Trueba and Vright,
1981 for a review). Vith the expansion of bilingual education programmes
in the U.S.A, and other Vestern countries, these issues have become
politically controversial and more l∞ked into, especially the problem of
language proficiency assessment (Rivera,1983). These studies have helped
to
... bring the child's culture into the consciousness of the teacher,
but also (to) bring the teacher's culture into his own
consciousness (Guthrie and Hall,1981:11).
Lack of responsiveness and feedback from the pupils is experienced by
teachers when confronted with children from a different cultural
background; when these children are a tiny minority, the educational
system tends to force them into conforming to established patterns of
classroom interaction; when they constitute a sizable number or a
majority, as in multicultural countries, the system is forced to
reconsider some of its assumptions: responsiveness is then found to be
'highly situation-specific' (Au,1981), as are expectations (Gumperz, 1977),
'participation structures' (Philips,1972) and verbal productivity
(Labov,1970; Cole et al.,1978).