In the last chapter, I asked the question of what education is for, and in approaching an answer to my own question, I showed how the question was to be answered by approaching preconceived notions about what education was for, through expanding dialogue about such notions.

Originally I had desired to write an ethnography about "critical consciousness," having convinced myself that it was the substance out of which education should be made. I was inspired by radical educators such as Paulo Freire and Ira Shor, and by radical researchers such as Michelle Fine and Peter McLaren. More theoretically, I was inspired by Jurgen Habermas, whose theories of the public sphere and of communicative action presupposed rational argumentation as the basis for empowering learning. Furthermore, a local university whose education program was renowned for developing critical pedagogies was associated with some of the schools I was studying.

However, upon studying the schools I had chosen, what I decided was that the rhetoric used to described critical consciousness at these schools was somewhat of an epiphenomenon -- that the most important thing about schooling, as I told the principal at the school within Valley USD where this rhetoric was most in use (and who nodded in agreement), was that it was disciplinary. I could envision an ethnography that centered around classroom management and the managerial paradigm, that the structure of managing classrooms was what made classrooms what they were, that if there was any student resistance to classroom management, that it too would become epiphenomenal to the main activities of schooling, which were the scheduled activities. The rhetoric of critical consciousness, on the other hand, perhaps served as a means for its believers to declare solidarity with each other as teachers, and only peripherally as a way of producing critical consciousness: at least it did at one school I taught at. School might be "for" the production of critical consciousness for such people in an idealized, subjunctive sense, when, at the same time, the real sense of school (at such a school) is that school is "for" the perceived immediate learning needs of students. These needs might be needs as simple as reading competency in English, or grade-level understandings of mathematics that will allow the students to survive in middle school.

So my interest in the environment under question also became an interest in the managerial discourse that determines the goings-on in these places. Is a place that is as "managed" as the Valley Unified School District also a place devoid of critical consciousness? I began to rethink the pretext for examining these schools, that they were something more than the source of money they were for me when I was working toward a teaching credential, or when I was working on my Master's degree, but they were something less than my theoretical fantasies indicated. Does the problem extend from managerial practices -- should I start with an examination of practices at schools, starting with the managerial pretexts of schooling, and work from there to an understanding of where "critical consciousness" enters the picture?

From that point I began to work on a theory of schooling that had a "latent" and a "manifest" side to this question of what school is for, to accomodate both what I was seeing in schooling routines, and the potential of schooling I suspected was somehow "there." Most obviously, there are manifest purposes to schooling, such as 1) that school acts as a holding place for students while their parents earn wages, or 2) that teachers press students to learn in order to earn a reputation for producing intelligent students or high test scores or to earn some other publicly-recognized mark of success. One might start to understand the latent side of the question, however, by observing the communication that would occur in any school setting, and within this communication one would observe an overall theme, around which the social drama would occur, and then beside the manifest themes of managed schooling, as I have described above and as they exist in each classroom, school and district, there would be numerous subtexts that would indicate latent themes in the observational details of school existence, thus the potential of schooling. The theorist is thusly relieved of the pressure to produce hard evidence of "critical consciousness" or any such "critical" mark, and thus may probe communication in schools as it produces latent themes of the purpose of school, themes that could be dominant themes if society were to grant school a different set of dominant purposes. But even the latent themes of "what school is for" have existed manifestly, they have to bear some communicative mark or sign, otherwise they don't exist.

The problem that proceeded from my theoretical dilemma (as it was outlined above) was a practical problem. How would I put myself in a position within the school system, so as to observe such latent themes? Perhaps the first thing to be said about school systems is that they are based largely upon hierarchical principles. When I was a long-term substitute teacher at Southern Elementary School (not its real name) at the beginning of the 1997-1998 school year, and thus considered potentially a "real teacher," one of the first things I was given in the required school meetings I attended was a hierarchical chart showing where the academic direction of the school came from, from the State through its curricular experts to the District, down to the school, to the teacher (through the teachers at the top of each hierarchy, the unit leaders), and finally into the student. So one might safely conclude that a school constitutes a social group that is based on status distinctions.

Now a social group that is based on status distinctions might not appear to present special difficulties to the researcher who merely wishes to study it in order to understand the status distinctions in some merely-overt description of hierarchy, leaving it at that. If I had wanted to stop research with the chart I was handed at Southern Elementary, my research task would have been much easier. But my task was to start with a notion of ritual, and ritual is, as I outlined above, the connectors between communication, the political, and what-the-researcher-is-doing-there. Within this framework, schools can be studied from the "fly-on-the-wall" perspective, in order to understand the managerial perspective per se, and perhaps to understand a little of the resistance of that-which-is-being-managed, but not much. The procedure for gaining permission to do such research illustrates its bias -- one gains permission from the District authorities, the principal, and finally the teachers one wishes to study, assuring all of the above authorities that one's intentions are the best and that the identity of the participants will remain confidential to protect the schools from the perceptions and effects of negative publicity (even though the schools in question may be deserving of such publicity). Even so, the rhetoric of research would have to conform to the rhetoric that the adult authorities of a school would use to protect the order of the classroom, in order to retain the permission of the teachers one is observing. The "fly on the wall" researcher will use a defensive rhetoric in order to maintain his or her place in the classroom. Perhaps Michelle Fine or Peter McLaren had the experience and theoretical positions to be ethnographers in the "normal" way without feeling obligated to defend the schools they were researching, and yet turn out critical ethnographies of noncritical schools. I didn't feel that the school environment I was studying would produce an ethnography that would get interesting results, results that would reveal anything new about the schools I was studying, if pursued thusly. So I tried a different role than (mere) observer, one less estranged from the school setting -- the role of ethnographer as substitute teacher. So, in order to get an ethnographic perspective that would reveal a new angle of more than merely disciplinary schooling, a new story of its meaning, end, or purpose, I joined the substitute teaching corps (once again, I should add.)

The issue of roleplaying within educational ethnography is dealt with in great detail by Mary Haywood Metz ("What can be learned from educational ethnography?" Urban Education 17:4 (Jan. 1983), 391-418. Metz's goal in the above essay is to show how "the problem of subjectivity" is managed by a working qualitative researcher, an ethnographer. The problem that is the subject of immediate focus as she enters the field, importantly enough, is that of the effect of latent roles on data gathering (p. 396). Ethnographers may play the formal role of "field worker" when they enter social situations, but there are other, latent, roles, that the social situation inscribes upon the ethnographer. These latent roles, as Metz describes, are connected to the race, gender, age, and perceived intelligence and social position of the ethnographer. But, as Metz continues in ethnographic work, she discovers that actually playing a role in the school setting may actually form part of the database. She warns at first that:

Ethnographers familiar with the literature I have cited know that one of their first duties is the careful scrutiny of deed, word, and thought for signs that their cultural or personal biases are affecting either their interaction with others in ways that will skew the data...(pp. 401-402)

Thus, it was not just an interesting sidelight of the research but an indication of the teacher's impact on the class that I blushed and wished momentarily to disappear in a sixth grade class when I had my pencil and notepad in action as the teacher prissily told the class, "Everyone put down your pencils. When I speak I want your full attention." Similarly, my suppressed and suffused feelings or anger and moral disapproval when a teacher shouted at a student over some tiny infraction, or when a teacher greeted students belligerently at the start of a class hour were probably very accurate parallels of the feelings the children experienced in the same situations. (pp. 403-404)

Classrooms are very private places. Strong norms establish them as the territory of single teachers who let other adults in rarely and often reluctantly. (p. 403)

I started this ethnography at Local Elementary School, a school containing mostly Latino and Asian-American students, which serves some of the economically poorer students of Valley Unified School District. In the beginning, I went to the school, made an appointment with the principal, and proposed my ethnographic project as a mere matter of participant-observation. In response, the principal gave me blanket permission to observe such classrooms as a mere participant-observer, so I developed a routine where (1) I would follow the class from the line-up before the class began, introducing myself to the teacher as soon as possible (usually as the teacher was shepherding the students through the doorways of the portable classrooms I was visiting), tell her or him my purpose "I'm conducting an ethnographic study with the Ohio State University, I'm not here to evaluate you, and if you need any help, just ask." I thought, at the beginning of my survey of southern California schools, that it would be safest if I adopted the role of teacher's helper. (2) I would offer to the teacher to introduce myself in front of the teacher's class. It usually soon became evident from the classroom procedings that I would have to introduce myself -- students would otherwise ask about why I was there, in an Nth grade classroom taking notes in a corner. Usually, (3) I would introduce myself to the class, "hi my name is Sam, I'm here to write a book about your school, I'll be observing and taking notes, I'm not here to get anyone in trouble or to evaluate anyone." And then I would stay through the day or until lunch, compiling notes from a desk in a corner of the room, going out to observe the children play at recess. In another school, I used the same routine (after having gone through an elaborate routine of getting a note from my advisor and permission from the assistant principal of elementary schools and the principal of that school), and, interestingly enough, at one point during the lesson I was observing, the teacher came over and remarked to me that the students were behaving differently because I was in the room, and that it had nothing to do with what I was doing there. My interaction with this teacher occurred at another school beside Local, and in it, the teacher remarked that it was my mere presence that caused them to be more "hyperactive" than usual. So, despite my best intentions, and my offers to "blend in" as a teacher's helper, the teachers in many of the classrooms I observed identified me as the "other" merely by my presence. Perhaps it is this identification that prompts Geoffrey Maruyama and Stanley Deno to remark, in a Sage manual simply titled Research in Educational Settings, that "few teachers eagerly welcome research" (ix), beside the one ostensibly given, that few teachers research theory. In some circumstances, I was greeted with the reaction teachers might have had to an evaluative observer, that I was given the reflex a teacher might give to an evaluative observer appointed by a university granting the teacher his or her credential. Such observers, commonly employed by California unversities, observe teachers to evaluate the quality of their teaching, or principals who observe teachers to see that students are "well-behaved."

Indeed, the above story is about me, not about the schools or classrooms I visited, and I offer it as one of the more interesting stories that can be gotten from this brand of research. There are indeed other interesting stories of researcher subjectivity in qualitative research. Peter McLaren's essay "Field Relations and the Discourse of the Other" (Experiencing Fieldwork pp. 149-163) relates how he was "kicked out" of the school he observed in order to write Schooling as a Ritual Performance, because some of the teachers at his school were afraid of him in his role as observer, and these weren't even teachers he was observing. Having read this essay before doing my research contributed to my nervousness about the role of "non-participant" observer in public schools. I wasn't merely looking for adminstrative definitions of order when I went to a particular school to do research; I was looking for expressions of student culture, too. But adopting the "fly on the wall" attitude of an adult observer of children, in this environment, produced more of a story about me than it produced a story written, or an act performed, by the children themselves. Much of this development has to do with the fact that I wasn't looking for "anything particular" in the school environment -- in Framing Dropouts, Michelle Fine, for instance, looked for dropouts, and in Jocks & Burnouts Penelope Eckert was looking for customs that defined the two primary student cultures of the school being studied. I was doing some preliminary study of the classroom environments at this school that looked as if it was going to remain a preliminary study.

In doing the ethnographic study, however, I noted that there was one class that interacted with me on the recess playground -- I got to appreciate its love of soccer, and I allowed them to interview each other and the faculty and administrators at the school, with my tape recorder and microphones. (None of these tape recordings amounted to anything important in terms of dissertation data.) The use of this technology, of course, created an added diversion from the routine of everyday school life, which focused on print media and "reading skills." I was a liminal figure in that situation, an exception to the daily routine (especially with the tape recorder, which the children considered a toy), but a liminal figure with little understanding of what I was doing. By the time I was to exploit the cultural capital I had built up with the students and teachers of the school, I had run out of money and had to work as a substitute teacher, in another district. And so the process of my becoming an ethnographer had to start all over again, this time in a different role: The Sub As Ethnographer.

What I discovered, as a substitute teacher doing an ethnography, was that the substitute teacher could be a liminoid figure within the classroom space, a pretext for student atttitudes that indicate leisure. Perhaps it would be safer to say that this liminoid personality of the substitute teacher role is the respect in which substitute teaching is important as a role in its own right; substitute teaching introduces an element of "play" into the "traditional" classroom, where the class must struggle to create a routine amidst the absence of the regular teacher and his/her replacement by a teacher who has to be "filled in" with the rituals of that classroom in particular and of classrooms in general. It cannot be assumed, in the environment in which I conducted my study, that I had been "filled-in" on the narratives guiding these rituals through any exposure I might have had to a long period of mutual familiarity between me and the students of any class, through my attendance at any faculty meetings of a specific, or through any specific teacher-preparation program, all of the above rituals constituting ritual "advantages" in experience accruing to regular teachers. So to a certain extent, more or less, as a substitue I was more of a "stranger" put in charge of a class than the regular teacher was.

Thus the presence of the substitute teacher within the daily routine of the classroom contains within it the potential for a sort of "play" not necessarily seen in the regular teacher's purview of ritual events. This notion of play, and subsequent labeling of the substitute teacher as "liminoid" figure, may be nothing more than a theoretical translation of a common notion about students who are trying to get away with "misbehavior" when a substitute teacher, an ostensible faux authority-figure, is put in charge of a classroom where they are ordinarily expected to behave in a "disciplined manner." Within this role of authority-figure, the substitute represents a danger to the authority complex of the school, and thus substitute teaching is a dangerous profession. But the sub's role and presence in the classroom may also be an indicator of possibility -- the possibility that the substitute teacher may be able to see something interesting in the student body.

Chapter 2
Chapter 4