Applying Linguistic Ethnography to Educational Practice: Notes on the Interaction of Academic Research and Professional Sensibilities

Academic concepts, methods and research knowledge are often criticised as irrelevant or useless for addressing problems of educational practice. Liat, a full-time Science teacher and part-time Masters student, expressed this sentiment in a recent seminar on ‘Discourse, Teaching and Learning’: ‘I’m four years into this degree [programme] and the academic world is truly irrelevant to that of the educational system. It’s all bullshit: research, research, research. Nothing at all relevant to schools, nothing.’ (We have translated this and all other quotations from the workshops from Hebrew; the original transcripts are available upon request.) This chapter is about our attempt to address this challenge by introducing educational practitioners to linguistic ethnographic research of classroom practice.