Video-Enabled Educational Ethnographies: The Centrality of Recordings in an Interactional Ethnography

Abstract

Central to conducting an Interactional Ethnography (IE) to study the social construction of learning in-situ is the collecting, archiving, and analyzing of digital records, particularly video and audio recordings. In this chapter, I first situate IE’s approach to recordings within conceptual and methodological frameworks and outline the logic of inquiry and flow of the analytic process adopted in my IE studies across university professional education programs (medical, dental, speech language, and initial teacher education). I then highlight design considerations for the video ethnographer starting from equipment options and placement to considering approaches to transcription and maintaining a digital archive. In the final section, I draw on one of our studies (Bridges, Hmelo-Silver, et al., 2020) of educational technologies in problem-based medical education to illustrate how IE’s logic guided the analytic process undertaken. In particular, I share how we built warranted accounts and theory-informed interpretations that led to new conceptualizations of the learning processes – all of which were made visible through an Interactional Ethnography.