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N O T E W O R T H Y
Penn GSE Hosts 27th Annual Ethnography Forum
Participants Examine “Educators and Ethnographers Negotiating Ideological and
Implementational Spaces”
Penn GSE Professor and Conference Co-convenor
Nancy Hornberger chats with two presenters at
this year’s Ethnography Forum, Penn GSE Adjunct
Associate Professor Rebecca Freeman Field and
University of Waikato Professor Stephen May.
It was standing room only at the Friday
brown bag session at the 27th Annual
Ethnography in Education Forum. In keeping
with this year’s theme, the lunch hour session
featured a lively discussion about the
intersections of language policy and classroom
practice. The special session was
organized by Educational Linguistics Ph.D.
students David Johnson and Francis Hult, cocoordinators
of the Forum.
Rebecca Freeman
Field, an adjunct associate
professor at Penn
GSE, addressed what
she called “the contested
terrain of duallanguage
education.”
Citing a number of
schools where duallanguage
teaching had
begun to flourish in the
days before No Child
Left Behind (NCLB),
Freeman decried the
chilling impact of that
legislation and argued
for “authentic accountability”
that would
consider more than test scores. Echoing
Freeman’s concerns, Kate Menken C’91
GEd’94, an assistant professor at City College
of the City University of New York, described
NCLB as “an implicit language policy that
seeps into classrooms.” In her study of ten
New York City high schools, she found that
tests are now shaping policy—dictating what
is taught, when, by whom, and how. Pointing
to one school that had improved its academic
standing while maintaining dual-language
classrooms, she argued that achievement
and dual-language learning don’t have to be
oppositional.
Shifting the focus to higher education,
Arcadia University Associate Professor Ellen
Skilton-Sylvester Gr’97 noted that, by and
large, language policy at the university level
CANDACE DICARLO
is unreflectively English-only. That said, she
found good news in at least one university
writing program in which Korean-speaking
tutors were actively encouraged to use
Korean in their sessions. What Skilton-
Sylvester found heartening was that, rather
than representing an ad hoc arrangement
depending solely on teacher initiative at the
classroom level—like many of those
described by Freeman Field and Menken—
it had the official imprimatur of the college
administration at the institutional level.
Stephen May, a professor of education at
the University of Waikato (New Zealand),
focused his remarks on what education
researchers need to do to inform the debate
about language education. He emphasized the
need for more critical ethnographic studies of
actual multilingual classrooms. Given the
public penchant for quantitative studies, May
argued that ethnographic researchers need to
widen their scope, engaging in quantitative as
well as qualitative analysis. “It’s not enough,”
he said, “to throw up our hands and say the
debate is ill-informed. We need to use studies
strategically to influence the debate.”
Like the brown bag session, the two-day
Forum focused on the gaps between overt
policy and classroom practice. In addition to
traditional paper sessions, the Forum offered
Data Analysis discussions, in which participants
brainstormed about analysis methods
of sample data sets, as well as a wide array
of Practitioner Inquiry presentations.
Convened annually by GSE Professors
Nancy H. Hornberger and Kathryn Howard,
the two-day conference kicked off with a
keynote address by Marcelo Suarez-Orozco, a
professor of education at New York
University. Suarez-Orozco spoke on forces of
globalization and flows of change involving
people, goods, and ideas—and their significance
for the education of linguistically and
culturally diverse populations in both the
developed and developing world.
4 | Penn GSE | Spring 2006