Ethnography and Phenomenology: More or Less

In this internecine moment for public education, administrators would do well to provide ongoing professional development in ethnographic and phenomenological research methods for all staff who work directly with students and for administrators with curricular responsibilities.

Ethnography

Grounded in cultural anthropology, ethnographic research can make visible mismatched values and beliefs held by teachers and by students. For example, students may believe a teacher is mean and inflexible; the teacher values their learning and feels responsible.

An ethnographic perspective would bring such issues of classroom culture to the forefront as a learning opportunity. The approach could be taken up by a colleague or an administrator, and safe and sane strategies could themselves get refined through ethnography.

Phenomenology

This approach has a mystique among teachers. My experience in tracking its philosophical webs of nuance is thin, but as a practical matter, I’ve found it very useful.

Chao Vang, my doctoral student who is now a diversity administrator in higher education, used phenomenology to explain the essence of the experience of being a first-generation Hmong-American undergraduate at CSU Sacramento.

Chao and I looked for models of then-recent studies using this method and found two that intrigued each of us. One was done to excavate commonalities in the experience of undergoing police training in use of lethal force. The other was a phenomenology of divorce. To qualify for a phenomenology, the individual must have been fully engaged in the experience.

In this post, I want to focus on the concept of mediation as it has relevance to ethnography and phenomenology.

Mediation

Mediation is primarily understood as a method of dispute resolution. A neutral third party, a mediator, facilitates negotiations between disputing parties to help them reach a mutually acceptable agreement. To “come between” two things and reframe the interaction as a union mediator would do in work stoppage indeed captures the essence of mediation.

Many translators specialize in specific fields such as legal, medical, technical, or literary translation. This work requires familiarity with industry-specific terminology and concepts to produce accurate and reliable translations. The translator reframes the terminology in plain language and produces agreements, Translators frequently use computer-assisted translation (CAT) tools, glossaries, and translation memory systems to enhance accuracy and efficiency.

Teachers mediate complex concepts for students as translators mediate complex legal ideas for laypeople as texts mediate communication between a writer and a reader, a teacher and a learner, the past and the present.

(Im)mediation

Significant differences in purpose exist between 19th and 20th century phenomenology as I’ve come to understand it. Hegel's 19th century work is more interesting for me because it focused on how consciousness directly encounters and makes sense of experience in the present moment. Immediate means instant embodied mediation through the senses. Note that Hegel’s work is hotly debated. I wish not to debate and have no special knowledge beyond its appearance now and again in my research.

For Hegel, as I understand him, phenomenology was about tracking how immediate experiences build upon each other to create understanding in the now. I see the researcher watching consciousness unfold in real-time, how the mind moves from sensory awareness to increasingly complex forms of understanding through what he called the dialectical process—what cognitivists might call friction or stickiness.

In contrast, 20th century phenomenology, particularly through thinkers like Husserl and Heidegger, approached experience more like archeological digs. Rather than focusing on the immediate flow of consciousness, they were interested in uncovering the essential structures that make experience possible in the first place. It's as if they were asking: What has to be true about consciousness and being for us to have similar experiences at all?

This shift becomes especially relevant for English-Language Arts teachers when we look at how language factors in. For Hegel, language was primarily a tool to lock in and express immediate experience.

But 20th century phenomenologists saw language as both revealing and concealing. They recognized that our very descriptions of experience shape how we understand it. They were interested in peeling back layers of meaning that accumulate in our everyday understanding of experiences built up by retrieving and retelling them.

This perspective is relevant to studies of experiences like lethal force training, divorce, or coming to Sac State as a first-generation Hmong student. It’s also relevant to teachers who want to help students revise phenomenon like “teacher as examiner” or “teacher as threat” or “teacher as inquisitor.” Over time telling stories of better memories can change experiential frames.

Think of it this way: Hegel was like someone watching a river flow by and describing its immediate movements. Studying students in the middle of things through close observation, reflective interviews, think alouds, and video analysis is Hegelian.

The 20th century phenomenologists were more like geologists studying the riverbed, trying to understand what shapes the water's flow in the first place. Both approaches yield valuable insights, but they operate at different levels of analysis.

This evolution reflects a broader shift in philosophy from studying direct experience to examining the conditions that make experience possible. It's the difference between describing what we see and investigating how we are able to see at all.

The 20th century approach has been particularly influential in fields like psychology and cognitive science, where understanding the structures underlying experience is crucial. But both approaches continue to offer valuable perspectives on how we make sense of our lived experience.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

What does it feel like to experience going on stage to collect a trophy? To catch a fish? To read an interesting book? What is it like to work in a writing group with a rubric? What is it like to be a high school teacher doing final grades? Or student or parent receiving the document? These methods raise interesting questions of value to teachers, I think.

Hegel’s Writing Task

Hegelian (Im)mediation writing tasks might help student writers come to internalize the knowledge that words we say to ourselves during an experience mediate how we remember it. Words we look for when we retrieve the experience locate it in a phenomenological category. We can write expressively about our experiences relying on our own deeply held words. Two examples to close on…

Among the Redwoods

There, again, again, shafts of light piercing waves of soft green-needle silence. There, on my palm, redwood bark transmitting concentric rings of history into flesh and bone.

Somewhere far above, from the clearing, (can they see me, do they feel this gentle trembling?) birds circle in wind I cannot hear but imagine like breath held too long, like time stopped.

Here, beetles trace paths redrawn by centuries.

My neck aches.

How to find blue sky through a living skyscraper shot through with bolts of solar radiation, and why do my eyes keep watering? Not tears but something else, something about eternity, about how this tree feasts on decay, about pine-scent sharp in lungs, feet pressed into soft decomposition of needles dropped before the first California mission was built.

God lived and died on your watch, stars circled overhead, still—you grow, still—you reach, still—you stand proudly, here, right here, where my hand presses, caresses, my fingers finger as if my fingers could translate bark into braille.

Understanding slips away like shafts of sunlight through needles, like water through detritus, like thought through consciousness, until immediate sensation is all that is left, bark to skin, dust to dust, until the universe reclaims me.

Weeping Willows

Green twilight here, beneath these boughs, sounds (is it sound or is it movement?) of leaves stroking water, tireless swimmers, tireless caress of water. Light sifted, filtered, dappled on skin and grass, on my thoughts, until green flows like the river, like memory, like time unstoppered, spilling from Croce’s bottle.

Watch the willow dip, how it bends to whisper secrets to the current, how it flirts with the other willow, Narcissus, the water-willow, the mirror-twin that ripples and reforms, never quite the same yet always identical. Always moving, always still. What a world!

Standing here, beneath these boughs where other brothers and sisters have stood, watching the courtship of tree and river, shade settles cool against bare arms. Somewhere the hour burns bright, bitter, sirens, neon, but here, here time pools, spools, fools you like a river.

Willow branches write their cursive script on water, on air, on my brain, and I can't tell which is real, I can’t tell any more, the tree that reaches down or the tree reaching up, I scratch my head, watched and being watched, edges blurring like watercolors, like music, like molten lava.

Here, weeping willow, meet your reflection and your maker in the sky, a trinity, a reality and two illusions, a high-octane blend into a single weeping presence at the boundary between earth and water, earth and sky, between what is and what is not. I taste a suspicious word on my tongue under the influence of this tree.