16.2 Why Interactional Ethnography as a Basis
for a Reflexive Research Program
The discussion of Interactional Ethnography as a logic of inquiry, and how it
supported reflexive actions and understandings within the ECTE program, is pre-
sented through a new study undertaken by the embedded ethnography team. This
study was a response to the need that the embedded ethnography team identified in
two previous studies—i.e., a clash in expectations about what constitutes the
practice of lesson planning that was identified in previous studies. The initial study
by Katz and Green ( 2012 ) had identified a conflict that occurred between the
supervisor from the ECTE program and the field-based team of two
teacher-candidates and one mentor-teacher. That study was extended by a second
one by Katz and Isik-Ercan ( 2015 ), as embedded ethnographers, who returned to
data associated with the point of conflict to further analyze the dialogues between
the supervisor andfield-based team, to see if they could identify the roots of the
conflict in the dialogues. This level of analysis, while extending their understanding
of elements of the conflict, also led to the need to gather additional information to
trace sources of influence on the supervisor’s interactions during the supervisory
conference, sources not directly visible in the dialogues.
Based on her understanding that the supervisor was part of a larger program, the
director decided to invite Green [second author] to engage with her team in a new
way, that is, to serve as a virtual external ethnographer, given that Green had
worked with her on the initial study (Katz and Green 2012 ). Based on her past
experience with Green, the director understood that Green would be able to ask
questions previously unasked by the embedded (internal) ethnography team to
enable her to identify and trace potential program actors, who influenced the
supervisor’s actions and to explore how these led to the frame clash between the
supervisor and thefield-based team. In taking this reflexive action, the director
made visible her recognition that as an embedded ethnographer she needed further
support to step back from what Heath ( 1982 ) callsethnocentrismin order to explore
further the sources of influence of different actors within the ECTE program; that is,
to create the possibility of identifying program factors that were invisible to her at
that time.
By creating an internal–external ethnographic study with members, who shared
a commonlogic of inquiry, she was able to formulate a phase for her study and to
seek new ways of uncovering factors that supported and/or constrained what guided
the supervisor’s interactions with thefield-based team. By making visible the logic
that the internal–external ethnography team developed for this phase of the study,
we make visible what is involved in taking an interactional ethnographic per-
spective, and how this process supported required additional data collection and
analysis processes, ones that moved the inquiry process from analyses of the
moments of interaction to exploring layers of contexts and actors within and across
contexts (e.g., the classroom, supervisory meetings, university courses, and
administrative contexts). By (re)constructing the logic-in-use, we seek to make
238 L. Katz and J. Green