Ethnomethodological Research in Education and the Social Sciences: Studying ‘the Business, Identities and Cultures’ of Classrooms

Abstract

Ethnomethdology is interested in the study of the methods by which members of a culture make orderly sense in and from their experiences. This chapter begins with an outline of the analytic elements of ethnomethdology, conversation analysis and membership categorisation analysis, and summarises the domestic, work, and institutional domains to which it is applied. The chapter describes and illustrates applications of ethnomethdology to educational phenomena. The argument is developed that this orientation draws attention to a need to attend to the details of the pursuit of curricular goals in the sites in which those goals are enacted – e.g., classrooms – to disrupt the utopian assumptions that curricula and other policy instruments (e.g., assessments, professional development programs) are acted out uniformly or in a transparent, pre-determinable relation to policy statements. The chapter concludes with some challenges facing ethnomethdologists wishing to expand the influence of their work in areas such as education.