Why is ethnography appropriate for educational issues?
I have argued elsewhere that ethnography is a research strategy especially well-suited to answering particular research questions about learning, teaching and educational issues (Walford, 2008, Massey and Walford, 1998). It cannot, of course, answer all research questions—there will always be a place for statistical surveys and randomised control trials—but ethnography can answer a range of questions where we are concerned to document and understanding learning and teaching processes. This discussion identifies what might be seen as the minimum requirements for a research project to be called ethnographic, as opposed to, say, just qualitative or naturalistic, and also shows how these features make ethnography particularly relevant to studying education and learning. Fundamentally, there is a correspondence between the way in which children and others learn and the way that ethnographers go about their task. The parallels between the two processes are such that ethnography is well suite
