Revisiting the relationship between Ethnography, Discourse and Education

Abstract

The question of the relationship between ethnography, discourse and education has been an area of an ongoing development for the last four decades. This paper addresses a series of questions proposed by the editors of this special issue of Calestrocópio Journal. These questions led us to a reexamination of key arguments by Shirley B. Heath, Brian V. Street and Kathryn M. Anderson-Levitt, who have influenced how ethnography can inform epistemological approaches to studying language in use in everyday settings in and out of school. In addition, we revisited the distinction between ethnography in and of education, proposed by Green and Bloome (1997), in the light of a recent reformulation focused on Anthropology in Education, of Education and for Education. This article focuses on the logic of inquiry central to understanding ethnography as epistemology