We had parent conferences last week. They’re a time for me to learn more about my students, just as much as they give me a chance to report on their progress. For the parents who don’t make it to the meeting, I give them a call some time during the following week. But the phone calls aren’t nearly as informative as what I learn from simple eye contact.

We pick up a lot of information in face to face conversations - things that are never discussed. The handshake, tone of voice, posture, and bundles of other qualitative data tell us lots of things in addition to what’s said in a meeting. The parents are my informants, and they help me understand a lot of other things I don’t clearly see in the day to day classroom doings.

Teachers need to be interpreters of classroom experience, which is what I was doing with parents in our meetings. We need to understand not only what’s happening in the classroom, but we need to also understand what the students and parents think is happening. I listen. I look at the classroom like an ethnographer much of the time, and I suppose I was feeling a little bit like an anthropologist last week when I saw this post by danah boyd, writing about doing ethnography with teenagers, trying to understand how networked communication technologies shape their lives.

Boyd talked about the difficulty of “going native” and learning about her informants when they moved between spaces. She said:

I was not able to truly move between the spaces with teens. I couldn’t follow an individual teen from morning to night, going to school, activities, home, etc. with them because of different structural limitations (think schools, laws and IRBs). My views of teen life were necessarily staccato, not seamless. And I found this deeply frustrating.

I know how she feels. Teachers can only imagine the lives that students live outside of school. And this makes it hard to see them completely. She illustrated this problem of getting to the bottom of things with a story that Clifford Geertz shared in his essay Thick Description:

“There is an Indian story - at least I heard it as an Indian story - about an Englishman who, having been told that the world rested on a platform which rested on the back of an elephant which rested in turn on the back of a turtle, asked (perhaps he was an ethnographer; it is the way they behave), what did the turtle rest on? Another turtle. And that turtle? ‘Ah, Sahib, after that it is turtles all the way down.’” (Geertz 1973)

I’d heard this little story before. And I’d also heard the term ‘thick description’ in my graduate coursework on teacher research, but I didn’t know that Clifford Geertz had anything to do with either of them. I liked the story because it challenges the belief in first causes. And right now I’m hearing a lot about teacher effectiveness as if it is the be-all, end-all of education reform. I’m on a campaign against cause/effect beliefs about what schooling can, but isn’t, doing.

Danah Boyd said that this layered view of culture suggests that we can perhaps understand “a layer or two,” and she said that she finds it hard to gain a purchase in a world that keeps shifting between digital and physical spaces. Maybe I’ve just got used to the fact that I’ll never have the whole story. The classroom piece, which I’m certainly a big part of, is a mystery without access to the other pieces. This wouldn’t be quite such a problem in a monocultural society where we might reliably depend on a common set of assumptions about family life. The computer mediated social experience of kids isn’t a huge factor, in my mind. It simply adds another layer of complexity.

I got curious about Geertz, and his essay [ pdf ] with the little story in it. He makes an argument for a semiotic view of culture, rather than viewing it as “mental phenomena which can be “analyzed by formal methods.” He used Gilbert Ryles’ question about how we recognize the difference between a blink and a wink as an example of how significance is assigned to behavior. We do it on the fly, as participants in a particular place and time. Geertz said that

…man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning.”

In the US right now, teachers are paying too much attention to test scores and other objective performance measures that are reported to people outside the classroom. And increasingly, we rely on them to tell us what our own students are learning. But there’s so much other information that we have. It’s the stuff we work around in the classroom - behavior and attitudes, history and habit - in a word, culture. And it’s mostly out of order, so it doesn’t lend itself to easy analysis. But we can’t, and shouldn’t, ignore it because it tells us about who our students are, and who they think they are. And it is those cues which enable us to make the human connections with kids that have real meaning.