when differences become visible to one or more of the actors, and the actor(s)
(and/or ethnographer) begin to wonder what is happening and/or what led to the
puzzling situation, Agar argues,culture happens. At such points, differences in
interpretation of a common phenomenon (e.g., lesson-planning), as argued in the
previous section, create a potential anchor for tracing the roots leading to the
differences.
With this process of tracing roots of the observed phenomenon, and the routes
taken in relationship to this phenomenon by particular actors, the ethnographer
creates a process for exploring the roots of the phenomenon grounded in the dif-
ferent languacultures. While Agar used this argument to address what happens
when an ethnographer enters a new social group, we argue that in the present study,
the concept of languaculture was a critical argument to understanding the observed
actions and references used in relationship to the professional practice that both
groups understood as lesson-planning. The initiating question for this chain of
analysis, however, came from the external ethnographer, who raised the need for
the insider team to locate additional records that made visible what people per-
ceived as important to identify and assess as the practices and processes of lesson
planning. By identifying the email trail and by examining other points of contact
(e.g., supervisory interview with Brad, the plans themselves, and email exchanges),
the external ethnographer enabled the internal team to further examine what
counted as lesson planning, to whom, in what ways, for what purposes, and with
what outcomes and consequences for different actors within and across the two
systems—i.e., the classroom as a professional practice space, and the university
team as a different space with professional practices guided not only by internal
dialogues and goals but as a space embedded in larger dialogues and practice spaces
(i.e., national policy dialogues, dialogues in professional organizations, interna-
tional policy dialogues). By conceptualizing each as a languaculture and tracing
points of contact where actors with different languacultures met, the internal–ex-
ternal ethnography team transformed their conceptualization from a dyadic rela-
tionship to one in which intercultural dialogues made visible both common and
clashing understandings of common phenomena,lesson planning,in these telling
case analyses.
16.5 Intertextuality as a Social Construction
While the previous two arguments were critical to framing how we theoretically
defined the purpose of the research and ways of viewing the historical roots of the
actors at points of contact, in this section we present the concept of intertextuality to
frame two additional angles of analysis. Intertextuality was critical to identifying
emails and other archived records in which the actors inscribed (spoken or written)
a common reference—planning/lesson-planning. The identification of this refer-
ence across archived records, as indicated previously, provides an empirical
grounding for the construction of the two telling cases, each focusing on, and
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