Thorne Lit Presentation

Sarah Childers
2/12/2008
EDPSY 582 B
Literature Presentation: Barrie Thorne’s “Learning from Kids”

Main Points / Summary

• Learning from children of your own culture requires adult researchers to “render strange” the experience of being a child. I.E. the challenge is to not assume that: children are incomplete versions of adults and so their behavior and language is legible to adults and not to interpret observations only through framework of own experiences as a child. [225]
• To “come into consciousness,” must look at children’s every day interactions and language in an attempt to understand the meanings that that the children give and take away from their interactions with one another.

Issues encountered in her fieldwork at two elementary schools

• Understanding and finding order in kids’ seemingly chaotic interactions on the playground.
• Managing her authority as an adult figure and learning to avoid language that kids’ associated with adult authority [i.e. not to ask what students were “doing” or to tell them that she was interested in their “behavior”]. She did not tell on the kids or intervene in play unless necessary for safety.
• Managing her relationship with the teachers in her fieldwork classrooms. Being at cross purposes sometimes with the teacher. E.G. Thorne would sometimes participate in the “underground economy of food and objects” or chat with students when they were supposed to be working. She sometimes felt guilty about this behavior. At the same time, sometimes she would collude with the teacher by engaging in an adult relationship in the classroom [e.g. making eye contact with the teacher above the kids head to communicate].
• Memories from childhood and legacy of past self affects fieldwork practices, including forming relationships with student subjects and interpreting student interaction [i.e. status among girls]. Thorne describes how the girls she met the schools brought up powerful memories of girls she knew [and the girl that she was!] in elementary school.

Terminology

• Studying down – studying a group with a social position lower than the ethnographers in order to “[seek] understanding across lines of difference and inequality” [224].

Linkages

To class readings…

• Link to Nespor: studied kids’ “every day” interactions at school; both looked at gender as well although for Thorne it was the thrust of the project; managed complex position as adult in kids’ world; focused on kids’ language; highlighted the role of the body in kids’ interactions and how schooling is organized [e.g. kids physicality with one another and meaning attached to physicality and schools controlling kids’ bodies]

To own research…

• Gender and feminist analytical frameworks are important to my work. I do research with students and so I also manage the “studying down” and “chain of remembering” issues.

Discussion question

• A take on a question Thorne poses: Are moments of remembering [when ethnographer was a child] a source of distortion or insight [for studying the lives of children]? [pg. 236] Thorne argues both? What do you think? In what ways is remembering distorting / insightful for noticing and for interpreting?

Additional readings

• Holmes, Robyn M. (1998). Fieldwork with Children. Sage Publications.

Response

I appreciate Thorne’s discussion of the role of memories in fieldwork practice. We have thought together in class about positionality and the effect on fieldwork practice. Memories and experience are clearly linked to social location. Given this, I was struck by how I had not seriously considered how my experiences as an adolescent would affect my fieldwork with adolescents. I have thought about and reflected upon the effects of my gender, race, age, position as a “teacher”, etc., but I had not thought about how my own memories of being the age of the students I want to study would affect every aspect of my experiences in the field. I was also interested in Thorne’s findings from her fieldwork at elementary schools, namely the role of the underground economy in the schools and the differences in the dimensions and role of the economy in each school depending on school culture. This finding demonstrates her focus on kids’ everyday activities and especially on the activities that they find important and meaningful.