What I think is really happening

H&S Chapter 5

H&S make suggestions about the value of transcriptions to be able to see what is really happening (versus what we think is happening) in a particular situation: “[T]ranscription shows how far apart the ideal and the manifest can be for all of us: We claim we do one thing in language while others see and hear us do something else entirely” (p. 91).

This leads me to really value the qualitative methods in addition to participating/observing that lead to ethnographic data, especially participant interviews. If we all think we’re doing one thing and everyone else sees it as something different (exaggerating here but you get it), then there will be numerous interpretations of our actions, and no single one of them can really be said to be “the truth”. I think this ties in very well to the idea of culture as a verb (culturing? That sounds like something to do in a petri dish - perhaps we can compare our observed settings and populations to petri dishes?)… If I observe a setting, I am inherently coloring that observation with me-colored glasses. I think studies that involve researcher-participant-observation followed up with in-depth interviews about particular behaviors would be particularly interesting, especially when it comes to seeing how classrooms work from different perspectives.

I understand the distinction between “what is happening” and “what we think is happening”, but I think these are not discretely bounded entities, and it is not as easy as one may think it is to tell the difference. I am more in line with the idea that “what is happening” is ALWAYS only “what we think is happening”, so perhaps uncovering why we think a certain way also goes back to “doing” culture (or petri dish culturing, etc.).