Instructional Ventures: A Pragmatist Research Agenda for Studying Education in the Making

Abstract

Beyond promoting a mode of ethnographic inquiry that is conceptually informed and rigorously attentive to the actualities of human lived experience, this article encourages a more sustained, comparative analysis of the ways that administrators and instructors deal with education as a collectively developed venture. After (a) establishing an analytic frame for a more comprehensive approach to education as a socially engaged process, this article focuses on (b) the administration of educational programs and (c) providing instruction as activity “in the making,” using an ethnographic study of two Protestant Christian seminaries as an empirical, illustrative case. While providing an agenda for examining the ways that people generate and sustain instructional ventures in any educational context, the material presented here also represents an important focal point for theoretically, conceptually, and methodologically integrating research that attends to the ways that instructional (administrative and teaching) activities are accomplished in practice.