Hermeneutics of linguistic ethnography: teachers and students losing and finding their voices

On the basis of a major and extended 3-year fieldwork project for the ESRC Religion and Society programme, investigating the question ‘Does Religious Education Work?’, this chapter examines the multiple applications of linguistic ethnography to the interpretation of the teacher and student voice in the practice of educational research. Drawing upon the longstanding traditions of classroom anthropology, and interrogating these with the instruments of critical theory, psycholinguistics and poststructuralist accounts of decentred subjectivities, the chapter seeks to extend and enrich the hermeneutical potential of teacher and student utterance in the mapping and examination of first person research-subject testimony and dialogic interaction. It argues that prevailing assessments of the ‘transparency’ of teacher and student voice restrict the interpretation of data, over-privilege authorised styles of interview and focus-group analysis and unduly narrow the investigation of classroom values and interventions. A refurbished linguistic ethnography can overcome these methodological limitation