(Re) Visioning the Ethnographic Site: Interpretive Ethnography as a Method of Pedagogical Reflexivity and Scholarly Production

Abstract

This article uses and advocates the use of interpretive ethnography as a method of pedagogical reflexivity and scholarly production. Specifically, it seeks to further the discussion of the classroom as a cultural site that places the teacher as both participant and observer in the intense cultural negotiation of lived experience, curriculum, and politics of education. Using the constructive metaphor of pedagogy as drag, the project also suggests that similar to drag (and the performance of gender), pedagogy is about what teachers reveal and what they conceal in the classroom and why. To that extent, the article uses a series of reflective poetic excursions on the nature and experience of viewing and discussing the performance of drag. These excursions take the author away from the formal construct of the classroom but always bring him back to the constructed nature of pedagogy as drag, blurring the boundaries between place and space.