The Theory, Practice and Politics of Critical Ethnography in CSCL

As a still-emerging interdisciplinary field of research and practice, CSCL has an opportunity to incorporate the full power of ethnographic analysis into its understanding and scaffolding of collaborative learning. By challenging common sense understandings and revealing cultural assumptions embedded in system designs, the work of Diana Forsythe exemplifies the promise and peril of critical ethnography. Within CSCL several challenges must be confronted, including: the intensifying attacks on the value of qualitative educational research; the perception that ethnography is merely a methodology that any researcher can use regardless of context; and the pervasive, generally unacknowledged influence of positivism. The inextricable, reciprocal connections between method and theory necessitate an approach to ethnographic analysis that is explicitly grounded in social theory. Four strands of current theory and practice (design ethnography, activity theory, ethnomethodology, and situated learning) could all contribute to the development of a critical ethnography of—and for—CSCL. Exemplary Ethnography Anthropologist Diana Forsythe’s (2001) Studying Those Who Study Us: An Anthropologist in the World of Artificial Intelligence, provides an excellent introduction to the goals, concerns, and challenges of critical ethnography. Of particular interest is Forsythe’s participant-observer account of a three-year project to build a natural language patient education system for migraine suffers (2001, pp. 93-118). The developers envisioned an interactive computer system that would elicit a patient’s symptoms and medical history and use that information, in conjunction with the physician’s diagnosis, to present individually-tailored information about diagnosis and treatment. The project team included computer scientists, cognitive psychologists, physicians, and anthropologists. As a major author of the grant proposal—which explicitly proposed the use of ethnographic analysis to support system design—Forsythe began the project as a full-fledged co-investigator. In addition to documentation of project meetings, her fieldwork included observation of doctor-patient visits in neurology, informal interviews with physicians and patients, and extended formal interviews with migraine sufferers. Forsythe was simultaneously conducting ethnographic analysis of and for the system design project. However, as the project progressed she found it increasingly difficult to reconcile the roles of participant and observer because of the epistemological and practical tensions between the “relativist understandings of ethnographic data” and “the positivist expectations and procedures of normal system building”. Despite compilation of a rich body of ethnographic data about migraine and a shared intention to incorporate anthropological insights into an innovative system design, the resulting prototype “reflected much less ethnographic input than we had originally envisioned.” (2001, p. 98). Cultural analysis is particularly important in biomedical technologies because designers are generally unaware of the tacit assumptions about privileged perspectives and information flows they built into their systems. Once the system is designed, these assumptions are generally invisible and are unlikely to receive much scrutiny. Forsythe’s analysis of the migraine patient education system demonstrated how the designers’ cultural and disciplinary assumptions were embedded in every stage of development: project team selection, problem formulation, knowledge acquisition, writing system code, and evaluation of the prototype. The project team assembled for the patient education system included “half a dozen faculty members [including two doctors], two programmers, a research assistant, and about six graduate students.” However, Forsythe noted two glaring omissions from the make-up of the team: nurses and the intentional inclusion of migraine sufferers. Even though nurses view patient education as a vital component of their work, their absence from the project team “reflects the characteristic muting of nurses’ voices in medical informatics in relation to those of physicians.” The failure to consciously include migraine sufferers on the research team reflected a fundamental assumption of the project, that patients need information about migraine and that physicians, through an intelligent patient education system, should provide that information. It is assumed that the physician already knows what information the patient needs. Coincidently, the