lesson-planning. This telling case, therefore, was constructed to make visible the pro-
cesses involved in identifying a defined situation, and in identifying what was learned
about what the supervisory team expected to see in Brad’s lesson plans. This telling case,
therefore, focused on uncovering the university expectations about lesson planning.
The second telling case shifts the angle of analysis of factors contributing to the
differences in perspectives on lesson planning from the point of view of the
supervisory team to a focus on the development of an approach to lesson-planning
as team—building activity for the third grade instructional team. This analysis
involved identifying what was inscribed in both an email from the mentor-teacher
to the supervisor, and in an interview of Brad by an embedded ethnographer. By
shifting this angle of analysis and sources of data, we constructed a contrastive
telling case in which we held the phenomena of interest constant—i.e., lesson
planning dialogues between and among different sets of actors in order to construct
more complex understandings of previously observed epistemological differences
by Katz and Isik-Ercan ( 2015 ).
16.4 Languaculture
Central to the exploration of the roots of epistemological and conceptual differences
identified in the Katz and Isik-Ercan ( 2015 ) study, and underlying the conceptu-
alization of the nature of emic-etic/insider–outsider points of contact, is Agar’s
argument about actors as bringing different languacultures to new social spaces,
whose cultural processes and practices the ethnographer-as-an-outsider seeks to
enter and understand. For Agar ( 1994 )“[c]ulture is a conceptual system whose
surface appears in the words of people’s language”(p. 79).
Agar ( 1994 ) captures the underlying theoretical arguments about language–
culture relationships in the following:
Language, in all its varieties, in all the ways it appears in everyday life, builds a world of
meanings. When you run into different meanings, when you become aware of your own and
work to build a bridge to the others,“culture”is what you’re up to. Languagefills the
spaces between us with sound; culture forges the human connection through them. Culture
is in language, and language is loaded with culture. (p. 28)This relationship between different languacultures, as the analyses in this study will
show, was a central construct to uncovering what was happening at points of
contact between actors from different systems (classroom/field placement and
university ECTE program) or roles within a common system (university ECTE
supervisor and other members of the supervisory team). From this perspective, what
becomes potentially visible when there is a difference in meanings of common
concepts is not merely a personal perspective; rather it is one grounded in, and
guided by, particular roles and relationships as well as institutional norms and
expectations for particular actors (e.g., supervisor within the ECTE program). Thus,
240 L. Katz and J. Green