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Critical Ethnography in the Study of Comparative Education

In this essay I consider recent perspectives in educational research and in particular the use of critical ethnography in the study of comparative education. Since the term is relatively new, some introduction will first be given to other approaches, their origins, and their relationship to critical approaches in the field. The parameters of several approaches and their implications for the study of comparative education will be discussed, and suggestions will be made throughout for research applications of these approaches in comparative education. "Critical ethnography" refers to studies which use a basically anthropological, qualitative, participant-observer methodology but which rely for their theoretical formulation on a body of theory deriving from critical sociology and philosophy. 1 The theoretical forebears in this area date back to Marx, with his critique of bourgeois theories of society, and the positivist sociology of Comte.2 The fundamental criticism of positivist social science embodied in Marx's approach was that the distinction between the objective and subjective could not bring together the "is" and the "ought" in a way that made possible the construction of a theory of ethics and politics.3 These questions come down to us today in modern guise when we consider problems in educational research, but their basic core remains the same: Is it the task of social scientists to seek ever more diligently to define objective methods of researching the social world (or education), with possibilities for change seen as simply the result of "reading out the data" and making choices on the basis of some cost-efficient or technological rationale? Or is it their task to attempt to understand as accurately as possible the subjective understandings that actors have of their own version of "social reality"? Or, third, is there some way of seeing social science in Marx's terms that would forever blur the objective/subjective distinction and thus make necessary the redefinition of social research itself? These questions lie at the heart of any discussion of research methodology