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An Ethnographic Approach to Education: What Are You Doing in

This Village?

Betül Yanık

which I engaged in my role as participant observer for seven months, as well as the difficulties I encountered,

and the strategies I developed. The practical experience I gained in the research provided me an important

foundation for my ethnographic research methods. As a result, the products of this study emphasize that the

ethnographic method doesn't necessarily relate to fixed rules; instead it usually occurs in three basic steps. These

are: initial, activation, and acceptance. The content of these three phases was determined by the sociocultural

structure of the society in which I became a participant. In this study, the decisive role of the community's

cultural structure in the research method and techniques is discussed in the framework of the three basic stages.

Keywords: Qualitative Research; Ethnographic Approach; Education

1. Introduction

for researches. Thus, the majority of ethnographic studies are focused on methods and techniques (McNiff, 2013;

Hammersley and Atkinson, 2007). While the ethnographic method is used in such studies, there are points to

take into account, problems that can be encountered, and research examples on these issues (Woods, 2005). The

practical benefits and suggestions that these sources offer to researchers who apply the ethnographic method are

indisputable. In other words, the notes and experiences of ethnographers are a guide for researchers. In this

respect, the research examples that people applying the ethnographic method offer, will play a key role in the

increase in diversity and the development in research techniques.

In this study, I discuss the ethnographic experiences and practical knowledge I obtained through my

research. I mentioned about the dynamic structure of the methods and techniques I used in my study, based on

understanding the school transition experience of pre-school students with regards to the cultural process. I tried

the research to the readers.

2. Method

This work is the product of research that investigates the transition of young children to pre-school within the

cultural processes of their everyday lives. How such children interpret the objects, events and behaviors within

their village culture constituted the basis of the study.

In this study, I discussed the ethnographic approach, which I consider an effective research model in

understanding cultures. The content of the article consists of the data that resulted from my researcher position

(ethnographer) while I was applying the ethnographic approach. These data were obtained from my researcher

diary and visual documents that I used as research techniques. The researcher diary enabled me to systematically

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3. The Village I Participated in and Its People

The village, in which I was a participant-observer for seven months, is set between two stream beds at the base

of a mountain in Turkey. In the flood disaster of 1971, many people in this village died, and many survivors

endured great economic losses. The government built new houses one kilometer away for those whose houses

were destroyed or damaged, and enabled the sufferers to settle there after the flood. This new settlement area

was referred to as the New Village among local people. Thus, the flood disaster led to the separation of the

village as Old and New.

For this study I decided to focus on the Old Village. My connection, and the reason I preferred it in this

study, started in the New Village where I had worked as a teacher for eight years. There, in the New Village, I

school and a cemetery are at the entrance of the village. Some houses are low in the valley, the rest are on the

mountain slope. The typical single-floor unpainted houses have a garden. There is a mosque for worship in the

center of the village, a small store near it, and behind it a carpet course building for women to attend.

The villagers used to make their living on breeding cattle. However, deforesting of the land around the

village and a water shortage led to a decline in this way of living. People continued stockbreeding and fishing

only for their own needs. Today, income is supplied by the males working in factories in the city. Females are

responsible for house chores and taking care of the children.

Traditionally, males dominated female-male relationships. Males don’t give permission for their wives to

work and earn money, and they don’t find it appropriate for their wives to go to the city by themselves and

without permission. The villages also deem it inappropriate for females to roam around in the village too much.

that changes according to the context. In this section, I attempt to set out the dynamic structure of the

ethnographic method under three groups. I discuss these groups under three titles, namely initial, activation, and

acceptance. In the initial section, I note how I entered in the village life and how the plans I made later changed

in the village culture. In the activation section, I describe my initial interactions with the villagers, my strategies

for introducing myself and the methods I followed in adapting to the village culture. Finally in the acceptance

section, I consider the process of how the villagers no longer considered me as a stranger and accepted me as a

member.

4.1. Initial

My initial purpose during the research process was to introduce myself and explain to the villagers why I was

contacted the staff of the village school and introduced myself to them. However, the apparently weak

relationship between the school staff and the villagers showed that the contact would give me no help. Instead, I

introduced myself to the village headman and asked for his help. The village headman was warm toward me, and

he arranged a guide to help me explore the village for one day.

My male guide showed me around the village the first day and helped me by introducing me to the people

we met. However, the fact that my guide was a male limited my relationships with female villagers. Because I

couldn’t enter with my guide those places where females were, I had to introduce myself on my own. I soon

realized that introducing myself to the people was both exhausting and time consuming. I knew that I would

need a female guide to meet other people more easily. I saw that being in places where the villagers gather

around is a fast and effective method for introducing myself.

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Because my guide was a male, I went in the mosque alone. The women knew I was a stranger and stood up to

greet me. The women, who greeted me very warmly, showed me a place to sit and offered me tea. While

explaining to the large female group in the mosque who I was and why I was there, I tried to gain their trust by

telling them that I was a teacher in the new village. The women' positive attitude toward me and my research

eliminated my anxiety. I then visited the mosque every day, which helped me change my position in my research.

My role as a researcher changed positively after the mosque visit. I got the chance to meet many female villagers

Introducing myself progressed rapidly, thanks to the mosque. As I attended the events in the village I met

new people and told them who I was. However, becoming known by everyone in the village was not a fast

process. My uncovered hair indicated that I was a stranger to a village where females covered the hair and wore

long-sleeve clothes. Thus, many people stopped me to ask who I was, while I walked around the village on my

own. While these questions were typical at the beginning of the research, they changed in later periods. Some of

these questions are given below:

Whose family are you from? Whose daughter are you? What are you doing here? Did the government send

you? Are you going to give aid here? We need to know, are you a terrorist or an agent? Are you a

bookseller? Are you a doctor?

I answered every question that aimed at learning who I was and why I was in their village. But I had

the complexity of my researcher identity continued for some while. Some of the old people in the village thought

I was a doctor and told me about their pains and turned their backs to me. This decreased and changed as my

research progressed.

As I came to understand the village cultural structure, I started choosing long-sleeve clothes. Although this

was difficult in June, July and August, I realized that it improved my reputation among the villagers. In addition,

I also thought that covering my body with proper clothing would enhance my communication with the male

villagers. While it was normal for male villagers to communicate with foreign woman, it was unacceptable for

female villagers to communicate with foreign men. My communication with males was limited during the

gossip. Thus, I communicated with the males when they were with their wives. The event given below from my

village. I got a bit anxious when I found out that his wife was at the hospital. I knew that the villagers

wouldn’t find this appropriate. The man’s phone rang during our conversation and it was his wife. He had

a tough time explaining that I was there. He hung up by saying that we were talking about the village. After

a while the man’s mother-in-law came. She acted as if she didn’t know that I was there. But I realized that

she had come to control us.

My village experiences with female and male relationships give crucial clues for my study. The relationship

style I had to create with men gave me information about the cultural structure of the village. In the later stages

of the study, after I was no longer a stranger and was familiar to the villagers, I started to better understand the

cultural structure of the village. The change in my researcher position was evident in the behaviors of the

villagers. Some people who I came across on the road greeted me without questioning who I was and some

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characteristics of each individual I met.

4.3. Acceptance

The progress in the relationships with the villagers enabled my researcher position to completely change and for

me to be accepted as a member of the village. The villagers treating me as a member of the village became even

more evident after some started trying to gain control over me. As an indicator of this control, some women,

noting that I was not covering my hair, warned me that I will go to hell. Some villager statements given below

are about my hair being uncovered and that I will be punished for this after death:

and pressure of the village more clearly through the control that was imposed on me.

Having been accepted as a member also helped me better understand the tradition and values of the village.

I realized, for example, the tradition of using a nickname of one’s grandfather rather than the surname, after

people referred to me with the nickname they gave to me. Then I understood that the “Whose family are you

from?” question that the villagers had asked me when I began my research was actually to learn my nickname! I

learnt my own nickname after I heard some villagers talking about me as “the bookseller is coming, the author

came”.

Exploring the village also helped me understand the desires and interests of the females. They would

approach me by saying: “You walk around with your horse in your hand, your gun on your waist” and likened

my car to a horse and my notebook to a gun. Walking around by myself as a woman revealed the female

also offered information about their village by saying “Write this down too”. The villagers also had demands for

me along with their volunteering assistance. They wanted me to take their photos, or to drop them off in the city

center with my car. These mutual interactions helped us get closer and allowed them to accept me.

5. Discussion

Ethnography is an approach designed by social anthropologists to study culture and social science. This

approach aims at deeply understanding human activities, behaviors, and values. All ethnographic studies are

based on social relationships, a learning researcher, and first-hand natural observations over long periods of time

compiled in a shared context.

experiences under three stages as initial, activation, and acceptance. I tried to explain my research experiences

and strategies under these three stages.

In the initial stage, I emphasized my connection with the village and the process of being included in the

village. This stage, which was referred to as "accessing" in Hammersley and Atkinson’s (2007) items, was

referred to as "contacting" in various other resources. Suggestions such as resorting to formal or informal

organizations, accessing through e-mail, accessing someone through snowballing to get into contact with the

people in the research area, are among these (Crang and Cook, 2007). While some of these suggestions offered a

good experience for my study, other suggestions were not convenient for this village I was studying. Methods

including using technological devices such as sending e-mails were not useful. The main reason for this is that,

clearly, computers were rare in the houses of the village, and so the number of people using a computer was very

Journal of Education and Practice www.iiste.org

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was studying. The limitation of female-male relationships in the village prevented me from entering in female

settings together with the male guide. A similar limitation occurred in the study conducted by Marvasti and

McKinney on the lives and discrimination experiences of Muslim American people. It wasn’t easy for the

researchers to enter a mosque where they went to discuss the 11 September 2001 terrorist attack in America

(Marvasti, 2004). In my study, it wasn’t possible to enter every setting in the village together with the male guide.

Thus, I overcame this obstacle by seeking help from volunteering female guides.

In ethnographic studies, not only finding a guide or getting into contact but also explaining and clarifying

your project to people is crucial (Beattie, 2005; Berg, 2001; ). In this respect, while there are methods that can

identity engendered trust in the villagers, in the PhD study by Pakistani Muslim Robina Muhammed, born in

Britain (2001), on Muslim women in England, the researcher was accepted as a member of the group by the

women, whose beliefs were being studied, due to their skin color.

News resources, like the researcher’s identity, are crucial components of studies. Obtaining a news resource

indicates the transition to the second, activation, stage of my study. The activation stage refers to the researcher

taking action according to the people contacted, or in other words, the process of being included in the culture

through the information obtained from the news resource. In ethnographic studies the news resource can be

either a person or an institution. In my study, the place which helped me in finding out the time and place of

village events was the mosque institution. However, in the study conducted by Marvasti on homeless people, the

news resource was a person living in a shelter with the nickname “Ace” (Marvasti, 2004).

(Marvasti, 2004). In my study, in order to comply with and get closer to the female villagers who wore long-

sleeve clothes and covered their hair, I also preferred long-sleeve and covered clothes even in the summer season.

The language used by the researcher, along with the physical appearance, is also a crucial factor in

improving the relationships. Thus, in ethnographic studies conducted in different cultures, the ethnographer is

obliged to learn the language of the culture being studied. American William A. Corsaro and Molinari (2005)

conducted an ethnographic study on Italian small children and Corsaro learned Italian while conducting the study.

In my study, although we spoke a common language, Turkish, with the participants, I was careful in acting like I

was learning a new language. The reason for this was that as I spent more time with the villagers, I encountered

meanings within the social context.

nicknames given to me by the participants throughout my study are concrete evidences of my acceptance process.

The pressure imposed on little girls in the village to cover their hair was imposed on me as well. On the other

hand, the nicknames given by the villagers and referring to me with those nicknames are clear signs of me being

accepted in the village culture.

In conclusion, the three stages I put forward in my article reveal the transition of an ethnographer’s

researcher position. In my opinion, every researcher who conducts an ethnographic study undergoes these three

stages with various experiences. Other examples of ethnographic studies, like this study, will enable diversity in

the experiences. This diversity will enable many ethnographers to be guides in similar events they will encounter

in different places and times.

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Journal of Education and Practice www.iiste.org

ISSN 2222-1735 (Paper) ISSN 2222-288X (Online)

Vol.8, No.26, 2017

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