visible how, and in what ways, an interactional ethnographic logic of inquiry
created a foundation for reflexive decision-making about future actions within the
ECTE Program.
16.3 Theoretical Arguments Guiding the Dialogic Process
of the Ethnography Team
Three conceptual arguments were central to the logic of inquiry that guided the
insider–outsider ethnographers’approach:Telling cases(Mitchell 1984 ),langua-
culture(Agar 1994 , 2006 ), andintertextuality as socially constructed(Bloome and
Egan-Robertson 1993 ).
Telling Cases: The concept of telling cases is grounded in an anthropological
perspective framed by Mitchell ( 1984 ), a British anthropologist, who argues that
ethnographic accounts constitute case studies of
...some sequence of events from which the analyst seeks to make some theoretical
inference. The events themselves may relate to any level of social organization: a whole
society, some section of a community, a family or an individual. What distinguishes
[telling] case studies from more general ethnographic reportage is the detail and particu-
larity of the account. Each case study is a description of a specific configuration of events in
which some distinctive set of actors have been involved in some defined situation at some
particular point of time. (p. 237)From this perspective, by engaging in the process of tracing the roots of episte-
mological differences between actors in the field-based team and the
university-supervisory team previously identified, the embedded ethnography team
constructed a research design that was based on a set of telling cases of the sources
of influence on different actors. By tracing the actors (i.e., school-based team and
university-supervisory team), the insider–outsider ethnographers were able
to identify what counted as (Heap, 1985 )lesson planning.
Therefore, by tracing different actors and analyzing what different actors defined
aslesson planning, the internal–external team created a series of telling cases of
particular chains of activity by particular groups of actors at particular points of
contact with each other and with other actors in their primary contexts (e.g.,
classroom, university). Through this process, the insider–outsider analysis team was
able to lay a foundation for a process of triangulation to build a telling case study of
what counted aslesson-planningand how it was conceptualized by each group of
actors, located in different institutional settings (i.e., classroomfield-based and
university-supervisory teams).
By tracing points of contact among particular groups of actors, two telling cases were
constructed. Thefirst telling case was constructed by identifying all references to email
exchanges in the archive between the Supervisor (Denise) and student-teacher (Brad) as a
tracer unit in order to explore what the university-supervisory team counted as
16 Researching the Intersection of Program Supervision and Field... 239