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DOI: 10.1039/D3RP00272A (Perspective) Chem. Educ. Res. Pract., 2024, 25, 584-593

Representing chemistry culture: ethnography's methodological potential in chemistry education research and practice

Shauna Schechtel and Amanda Bongers *
Department of Chemistry, Queen's University, Kingston Ontario, K7L 3N6, Canada. E-mail: amanda.bongers@queensu.ca

Received 3rd October 2023 , Accepted 21st April 2024

First published on 22nd April 2024

Abstract

A goal in chemistry education research and teaching is to make chemistry education inclusive to our diverse students. Ethnography is one approach that can support this goal, because it supports researchers and educators in questioning what is considered ordinary by exploring chemistry as a culture. By exploring chemistry as a culture, we can understand how we represent the discipline of chemistry to our students in what we teach, how we teach, and who we teach. Questioning the ordinary aspects of research and teaching can help us work towards creating a more inclusive chemistry culture for our students, researchers, and instructors. Within this perspective, the authors explore ethnography as a research methodology and an approach to understanding experiences in practice. This perspective explores how different choices in research design, such as the research questions, theoretical framework, methods, and methodology framing, lead to different goals and representations of chemistry culture. This perspective aims to start conversations around what we can learn from different representations of chemistry culture for chemistry practice by questioning what is taken for granted in the learning theories chosen, approaches to interventions, and systematic barriers. In its potential to illuminate how chemistry culture is represented and transmitted to students, ethnography can help create more inclusive, accessible, and supportive spaces for learning and interdisciplinary research.

Introduction

Have you ever had a moment while grading or teaching where you have wondered: “Why is this happening?” Maybe you have been looking at an exam question and wondering why most of your students are arriving at the wrong answer. In your classroom, you might wonder why students ask a particular question or find a certain concept challenging. In these moments, we are challenged as educators to question what we take for granted in chemistry, learning, and the systems that shape them.

At the heart of the research methodology ethnography is this questioning approach that focuses on what is taken for granted in the culture being observed (Latour and Woolgar, 1986; Taussig, 2011; Van Maanen, 2011). In chemistry education, the motivation to explore what is taken for granted in the culture of chemistry as a discipline is motivated by creating more inclusive and accessible spaces for students learning chemistry. One of the key goals in DBER is to “identify approaches to make science and engineering education broad and inclusive.” (NRC, 2012; pg. 9). This goal is challenging for chemistry educators as we are less likely to question what we teach, how we teach and who we teach because it is normalized (Hammond and Brandt, 2004).

Building a positive science culture, as called for by the Royal Society of Chemistry (Royal Society of Chemistry, 2023), will require looking inward and questioning what we take for granted in how we do science and which aspects of culture we may struggle to change (Lather, 2010; Rudolph 2014). For example, the Royal Society's inclusion of rigorous scientific research as an element of science culture, as rigour has been used as a weapon to decide what counts as science and what does not, including to discredit educational research (Lather, 2010; Lather, 2013; Rudolph, 2014). Defining science culture this way could unintentionally exclude those who do not fit the mould.

By turning inwards with our questioning, we can begin to understand who benefits, who is harmed, and by which structures of power (Lather, 2010). As a way to study and represent culture, ethnography can guide chemistry researchers and educators in thinking about our ethical responsibilities, the structures and goals of chemistry education, and its curriculum and teaching practices (Hammond and Brandt, 2004; Carlone and Johnson, 2012). This paper aims to share our experience with ethnography as a research methodology, worldview, and approach to exploring experiences beyond our own as chemists.

Conceptualizing culture for chemistry education

Ethnography can be broadly defined as writing down culture (Ingold, 2017). As researchers, our definition of culture is critical in drawing from an approach like ethnography. Culture can be as simple as understanding how a group of people behaves, communicates, and what they believe (Creswell, 2013). Teaching chemistry can be viewed as a transmission of the culture of the discipline of chemistry. Investigating chemistry culture questions what is taught, how it is taught, who is taught, and who is allowed to teach (Hammond and Brandt, 2004; García and Guerra, 2008). These ideas of what, how, and who may sound familiar in chemistry education because these questions reflect many of the goals outlined by the National Research Council's discipline-based education research (DBER) guidelines (National Research Council, 2012). The goal of DBER is to help students better learn a discipline's expertise in terms of knowledge, skills, and thought processes. The alignment of ethnography with the goals of chemistry education research is the first step in seeing the value that each adds to the other.

Ethnography is a means of representing culture, as it cannot be “put on a slide for inspection” or “read from an instrument” (Van Maanen, 2011). What connects a field like chemistry to a methodology like ethnography is that in both cases there is a choice in how something is represented. In chemistry's triplet, different representations (macroscopic, sub-microscopic, and symbolic) capture what is happening with reactions and molecules (Johnstone, 1993). Similarly, we cannot see or measure culture directly; culture is something that we experience, therefore we need tools like language, pictures, and affect to represent it.

Culture is dynamic and as educators, our representation of it is transformed by our lived experiences, approach to communicating, and the words we choose (Van Maanen, 2011). Questioning our representation of culture as chemistry educators becomes important because, based on our assumptions, certain aspects of culture are made visible, and others are silenced. This can be seen in critiques of ethnographic work from anthropology in cases where the researcher was not critically reflexive on their worldview (Van Maanen, 2011; Denzin and Lincoln, 2018).

The work of questioning in ethnography becomes about unpacking the assumptions we make through teaching chemistry to understand how our representation of chemistry culture can support or exclude students and teachers. These different representations reveal what we might be taking for granted as ordinary. For example, educators occasionally encounter students terrified of working with chemicals (Crosland, 2003; Kaiser, 2020; Chalupa and Nesměrák, 2023). The fear of chemicals is not new and has been associated with chemistry since its inception (Crosland, 2003). Yet, chemistry educators can take for granted what it is like to work with chemicals for the first time, and may not design their laboratories in a way that provides empathy and support for students to overcome this barrier. The chemistry triplet is another example of how educators may take the challenges chemistry novices face for granted (Johnstone, 1993; Talanquer, 2011; Gravelle and Fisher, 2012). This model is based on how trained chemists think and reveals how chemistry experts can take for granted the ease with which they move between macroscopic, sub-microscopic, and symbolic representations of knowledge.

We could learn much from looking at how we represent chemistry culture in our research and practice. Here, ethnography can be an additive approach to chemistry education because by questioning the ordinary, we can open up the possibility for more students, educators, and researchers to feel welcome in our field. In the following sections, we summarize the methodology of ethnography, provide examples of ethnographic studies in science and chemistry education, and propose future areas where ethnography has potential.

Ethnography as a methodology to represent culture

Many people associate ethnography with the research of anthropologists and sociologists who immerse themselves in cultures that are different from their own (Malinowski, 1922; Geertz, 1973; Taussig, 2011; Ingold, 2017; Denzin and Lincoln, 2018). Knowing the history of ethnography is important to understand the various approaches taken, as well as what has been learned from the failures of ethnography (Denzin and Lincoln, 2018). There is no one way to conduct ethnographic research, but there are many important decisions to consider when representing culture.

The culture of chemistry as a discipline is only made visible by how it is represented (Van Maanen, 2011). This means that culture is generated, not collected, as data. The representation of culture includes choices about the definition of culture, research questions, theoretical framework, approaches to data generation, and how the research is recorded in writing. The idea of representation appears in other research methodologies through how a researcher's epistemology is linked to choices of research questions, theoretical framework, methodology, and methods (Secules et al., 2021). With the aid of examples, the rest of this section will highlight how culture can be represented with different approaches.

Defining culture

What makes ethnography distinct to each discipline and research study is how a culture is defined. For reference, an uncountable number of definitions of culture exist across and within disciplines (Baldwin et al., 2006; Jahoda, 2012). Within the various disciplines, some definitions come from perspectives such as psychology (Jahoda, 2012), K-12 classroom education (Brislin, 2006), education research (Creswell, 2013), science education (Hammond and Brandt, 2004), critical theory (Madison, 2012), and even broader society. Psychology defines culture as the implicit and explicit patterns of behaviour learned and expressed by a group (Jahoda, 2012). In education, culture has been defined as the game being played, referring to the beliefs, shared values, and assumptions in a context that shapes individual behaviour (Kessing, 1974; Brislin, 2006). Alternatively, culture defines the spaces where certain beliefs, actions, and values are reinforced and others are rejected (Brislin, 2006). While both definitions appear similar, the difference lies in what the researcher might prioritize in conducting their research on culture. The psychologist focuses on behaviour, so they often choose to conduct observations that require a protocol. In contrast, the educator may opt for more open-ended notes that describe what is rewarded and rejected in the learning environment. Both approaches are valid but answer different research questions based on the researcher's worldview and how they represent culture in their study.

Research questions

Methodologies help narrow or scope research questions towards a specific goal (Creswell, 2013; Denzin and Lincoln, 2018). Ethnographic research questions are about understanding an individual's experience within a cultural context such as the social, disciplinary, and historical structures of a group (Brandt and Carlone, 2012). To frame our research questions, it is important to consider the context of the research as that shapes our view of understanding culture. In the context of chemistry education, the culture that is being explored is the discipline of chemistry or science more broadly. A classroom or a laboratory is generally not considered a culture, but the transmission of chemists' beliefs, values, and actions to students is.

The choice of the wording of the research question communicates which aspect of culture is being taken for granted in a specific context, by a specific group and, therefore, represented in the study (Table 1). Some of these aspects of culture can be seen in ethnographic research questions; common phrases like cultural themes, cultural behaviour, language, cultural sharing group, approaches to thinking, and approaches to acting (Creswell, 2013; Creswell and Guetterman, 2019). For example, Latour and Woolgar (1986) challenged the idea that scientific facts generated in research are objective by exploring how the context through which scientific facts are constructed impacts how research is legitimized as fact. Through asking this question, they learned that some knowledge loses its context when it becomes accepted as a fact because scientists stop questioning it (Latour and Woolgar, 1986). In another example, Carlone et al. (2014) ask what counts as science in a secondary school classroom and how this impacts a student's science identity. With this question, they found that students turned away from science when their identity did not fit the mould of what counted as science in the classroom (Carlone et al., 2014).

Table 1 Examples of ethnographic research studies in science and chemistry education
Field Study Research questions Approaches to data generation
a Research question text in square brackets [ ] are paraphrased for clarity. b The term used in this paper is “subject position(s)”.
Science education Latour and Woolgar, 1986 “How are the facts constructed in a laboratory, and how can a sociologist account for this construction?” Participant observations, document analysis, and interviews
Buxton, 2001 [What is it like to be in a research laboratory, and in what ways was scientific knowledge being constructed?]a Non-participant observations, participant observations, interviews
Johnson, 2007 “What are these [cultural] values [inherent to university science], and were any of them more discouraging or difficult to navigate for women of colour than for other kinds of students?” Participant observations, interviews
“What meaning did Black, Latina, and [Indigenous] women make of these common practices?”
Carlone et al., 2014 “What is the nature of the available and celebrated [cultural norms and identities]b in each year of school science?” Non-participant observations (video), interviews, document analysis (student work)
“How did the students' consistent identity work position them in relation to the celebrated [cultural norms and identities] in each year of school science?”
Chemistry education Rop, 1999 “[What are] students’ perspectives of success in high school chemistry within the context of school culture?” Participant observations, focus group interviews
Document analysis (student work)
Zhang, 2022 “How do novice scientists make sense of their decisions and behaviours as they gain membership into the laboratory and the community of scientists?” Participant observations, interviews

Theoretical frameworks

Theoretical frameworks communicate what the researcher believes about the participants, context, analysis, and the research broadly (Creswell and Guetterman, 2019). In ethnography, the theoretical framework allows the researcher to best represent the taken-for-granted aspect of culture in the research question (Van Maanen, 2011). For example, in realist ethnography, the researcher will use the theoretical framework to select data to close off alternative representations of the culture being explored (Van Maanen, 2011). A critical ethnography would be more focused on questioning systemic issues and mechanisms of power (Barton, 2001; Madison, 2012). Ethnography is versatile, and a variety of theoretical frameworks have been applied to it, such as ethnographic case study (Meier, 2012), post-structuralism (Slovin, 2020), and feminist ethnography (Johnson et al., 2011; Creswell and Guetterman, 2019) to highlight a few.

Some common theoretical frameworks that have been applied in chemistry education are learning theories such as constructivism (Bunce and Cole, 2008; Cooper and Stowe, 2018), cognitive apprenticeship theory (Bongers, 2022), and meaningful learning (Galloway and Bretz, 2015b) to name a few. Beyond research, our chosen learning theory speaks to how, as educators, we view the role of the students, the role of the instructor, and what learning is (Davis and Francis, 2023). With these assumptions around learning in our classroom, learning theories can also show what we take for granted. With constructivism, we believe knowledge is constructed on a student's prior experience, but we can forget that the construction of knowledge takes time. In cognitive apprenticeship theory, where knowledge is defined by the “expert” who is the instructor (Davis and Francis, 2023), we may struggle to question our expertise and ignore a student's perspective on learning. Whether for research or teaching, our choice in learning theory can uncover what we might take for granted in our classrooms.

Data generation

Observations are the method of data generation most associated with ethnography. Breaking down observations into the different approaches highlights that each approach answers different research questions. There are three approaches to observations: direct, non-participant, and participant. In the context of observation approaches in ethnography, participant refers to the role the researcher plays in the site. Non-participant observers will often be off to the side writing notes, while participant observers are engaging at the research site and interacting with the people within their cultural context.

Direct observations are structured and quantitative and focus on studying what happened or what happened most frequently (Guest et al., 2013; Wei et al., 2018). One example of direct observations is the classroom observation protocol for undergraduate STEM (COPUS) (Smith et al., 2013; Stains et al., 2018; Reisner et al., 2020). These observations are made quantitative because they focus on framing the results through frequencies rather than describing the experience. A research question using direct observations might be: What approaches are students’ using to ask questions in an organic chemistry lecture?

Unlike direct observations, which have a structured checklist protocol, non-participant observations are open-ended notes that aim to describe the experience (Creswell and Guetterman, 2019). Non-participant observations involve observing the participants rather than engaging in the activity with them. This is valuable for answering questions about how something happened or for understanding a process (Buxton, 2001; Creswell and Guetterman, 2019). An example research question that would be suited for non-participant observations is: How do students and TAs interact in a tutorial that uses peer feedback?

Participant observations occur when the researcher participates in the community being studied while collecting observations, for example, if they are the instructor (Latour and Woolgar, 1986; Van Maanen, 2011; Lareau, 2021). With this approach, research can answer questions about what an experience is like. An example research question could be: What is it like for science majors to experience general chemistry lectures?

Interviews (e.g., with students) and document analysis (e.g., exam analysis) are additional approaches to data generation that provide a different perspective on the experiences generated in the observations. In ethnographic studies, interview questions arise inductively from the observations generated, meaning that interviews can be open-ended and are not completed from a protocol generated before the observations (Creswell and Guetterman, 2019). It is difficult to challenge our assumptions about our classrooms and teaching, so interviews and document analysis can allow for alternative perspectives to emerge to help understand our observations.

Rapport and representation

The relationship formed with students as research participants or learners in the classroom is important to uncover what is taken for granted. If ethnography is being undertaken for research purposes, ensuring ethics is completed is the first step in any study. As there is a power differential between students and instructors in many contexts that can be explored with ethnography, time needs to be spent before conducting observations to build rapport with the community being observed. Building rapport is about making the process of research less extractive and mutually beneficial for participants (Lincoln, 1995). Without rapport, participants may be hesitant to share their experiences without the consequences of feeling judged or ignored (Lareau, 2021). Additionally, using video and audio recordings may seem like a strength to collect more participant data. The trade-off with more data is the camera may make participants feel uncomfortable (DeKorver and Towns, 2015) or perform to the camera rather than share their authentic experience (Taussig, 2011; Gregory, 2020). If opting to use a camera, the choice of where the camera is positioned can lead to uncovering different aspects of a classroom that are taken for granted. For example, a camera placed off to the side will uncover the taken for-granted between participants and the space. Whereas a camera that is worn will be limited in examining the interplay between participants and their learning environment (Taussig, 2011).

Understanding the findings for research & practice

The last way culture is represented is in how it is written and whose experience is shared in the data (Van Maanen, 2011). Within ethnography, this will depend on the primary source of the data: the participant or the researcher. Emic data presents the participants’ experience in the research site (i.e., laboratory), and etic data represents the researcher's experience in the research site (Creswell, 2013). To get at the taken-for-granted, the participants' and researchers' experiences must be balanced. Inviting alternative experiences can help an educator or researcher start to question what they take for granted. To support this multi-perspective approach critical reflexivity by the researcher can create space for participants' experiences in the findings (Lincoln, 1995; McLeod, 2011).

Current representations of chemistry culture

Although ethnography is uncommon in chemistry education research (Lyall, 2005; Loshbaugh et al., 2011; Chopra et al., 2017; Logan and Mountain, 2018; Belge Can and Boz, 2022), some key prior work has illuminated chemistry culture and the variety of ways this culture is transmitted to our students, from questioning the unusual occurrences, approaches to teaching reform, chemistry research practices, and systematic changes. In this section, we will walk through some examples of where chemistry culture has been explored in teaching and research. Within each of the studies that are broken down below, the methodology undertaken was ethnography with various approaches to data generation and analysis (Table 1).

Students' experiences and belonging

Studies that have explored students’ experiences of learning science include Barton (2001) who followed elementary students' experiences, who felt discouraged to participate in science as they felt like they could not belong. Similarly, a study that examined the experiences of women of colour in undergraduate science classrooms, revealed how these students felt pushed away from science due to its inaccessible support systems, narrow focus on what science can be, and science being decontextualized (Johnson, 2007). Here, ethnography allowed for an emphasis on the student experience in ways that could promote changes to make learning more inclusive and accessible to more students.

Recent chemistry education literature has called for a return or further exploration of the affective domain (Galloway, 2015a; Flaherty, 2020). Within this call, ethnography can help us look at how the language we use can impact belonging in our classrooms and laboratories (Van Maanen, 2011). As educators, the words and tone we use when answering students’ questions can communicate who is allowed to be a chemist (Latour and Woolgar, 1986; Buxton, 2001; Johnson, 2007; Carlone et al., 2014). In S.S.'s experience as a teaching assistant, she has seen students apologize for asking questions or preface them with phrases like “This might be a stupid question.” This hesitancy around asking questions may be connected to how we respond to student questions and how science is portrayed in society (Rudolph, 2005, 2014). In Johnson's (2007) ethnographic study of the experiences of women of colour in STEM classrooms, she explores how these students were often silent in classrooms. Here, the way the professors posed questions or ended lectures with open-ended calls for “any questions?” unintentionally favoured the more assertive students and those less concerned with drawing attention to themselves. With a special few garnering recognition from the professor, the remainder of the students were discouraged and felt alone in their confusion.

Chemistry culture in research laboratories

A key part of defining chemistry culture is our research within the laboratory. As many of our students are trained in undergrad for research experiences in either honours projects, summer research, or graduate work, it is natural to want to understand how research practices seep into teaching students chemistry. This interest in research communicating culture is seen in studies of culture in research laboratories (Latour and Woolgar, 1986; Buxton, 2001; Zhang, 2022). One study in a microbiology research group sought to understand the experience of scientific researchers in the lab and how their experience related to the social and disciplinary expectations of the research community (Buxton, 2001). In this research lab, success was defined as “having golden hands,” meaning that a person is characterized as having a natural ability with technical skill. Rooting success in a characteristic led to resentment because those who struggled with technical skills felt they must spend more time in the lab to obtain the same results as the students who did not make mistakes with their experiments. The choice of ethnography allowed this study to be fully immersed in the laboratory context and for the researcher to build rapport with the participants. This led to conversations where undergraduate researchers told stories about feeling pressured to work weekends to be seen as valuable team members.

Building on Buxton's findings, emerging research in chemistry education could explore this culture's potential impacts on K-12 or post-secondary teaching if we do not question the hidden curriculum. We want our curriculum to teach students how to think like real scientists (Cooper, 2013). However, if success in scientific research is fuelled by competition and overworking, do we want to unintentionally teach or model those values to our students? The hierarchy, social, and research expectations of research culture can transmit values we do not intend our students to learn (Hammond and Brandt, 2004). All learning environments have an explicit curriculum (i.e., the content knowledge and skills being taught) and a hidden curriculum (Meyer et al., 2016). The hidden curriculum is taught by reinforcing societal, cultural, and disciplinary expectations (Meyer et al., 2016). The students in Buxton's study learned that competition and overwork were required to be seen as successful as a scientist by others in the research laboratory. This framing of success in the context of the research laboratory is the hidden curriculum. The power of ethnography is how it reframes ordinary moments as unfamiliar and can push educators to question their practice (Kessing, 1974; Taussig, 2011).

Ethnography's potential for research and practice

The following section provides some examples of where we see the potential of ethnographic approaches for beginning to address current challenges in chemistry education.

Student experiences, classroom reform, and interventions

Chemistry culture is fresh in the eyes of the students, meaning that they may not take for granted many of the rules, behaviours, beliefs, and values that we do as chemistry educators. The power of examining student experience is that it allows us to question what we might be missing about the learning experience in chemistry. This approach can start conversations into questioning what knowledge is taught, how it is taught, and whose learning is supported (Hammond and Brandt, 2004). An example ethnographic research question might be: What can we learn from students' experiences in a flipped classroom? By asking this question, we might learn how students' experiences led them to make choices that either conform to or oppose expectations.

When re-designing learning activities or teaching approaches, ethnography is a powerful tool to ask, “Is this what my students need or want to support their learning?” A practice of questioning choices in design and elected learning theories elicits reflection on what you believe is the role of the student, the educator, and what counts as learning (Davis and Francis, 2023). Context plays a significant role in the design and success of any intervention or changes in teaching approach in science education, as revealed by ethnographic study (Hammond and Brandt, 2004). Changes in teaching practices are often unsuccessful when first applied to classrooms because of the disconnect between the learning context and cognitive goals (Hammond and Brandt, 2004). For researchers and educators, ethnography allows for data generation to occur in the spaces where students are learning, meaning that the educator can gather data on the context. This could be relevant in chemistry education to study implementations of active learning classrooms, where students' negative experiences do not align with positive learning outcomes (Deslauriers et al., 2019). In these ways, ethnography could benefit student-centered learning approaches and interventions such as active learning, flipped classrooms, course-based undergraduate research experiences (CUREs), and experiential learning.

By generating data in the naturalistic setting, ethnographic research presents authentic contexts which could lead to a better intervention design and teaching approaches. Naturalistic data generation also supports building a stronger bridge between research and practice.

Systems and structures

The struggle to belong in the culture and to stand up for their ideas is nuanced and will vary from student to student (Brislin, 2006). As ethnography represents culture, a student's experience can be integrated to understand the larger systematic contexts of chemistry. In Johnson's (2007) study, students described feeling like their professors favoured students who wanted to pursue graduate studies. Additionally, they described that their instructors only cared about the science and not their students (Johnson, 2007). This speaks to things we may take for granted as chemistry educators or education researchers within the educational system. Chemistry education, especially in graduate studies, has traditionally followed the theory of cognitive apprenticeship. With this mindset, educators see learning as the mentee's role because knowledge is shared by the expert (Stewart and Lagowski, 2003; Davis and Francis, 2023). What could we learn if we came into mentorship or teaching relationships open to the possibility that we could learn from our students or mentees (Schechtel et al., 2022)? Challenging our everyday understanding of these relationships and structures in chemistry education might open up new possibilities for understanding how to teach content, what content to teach, and who we teach.

Critiquing chemistry culture – applications of critical theory

Ethnography is a methodology that allows for chemistry culture to be critiqued through critical theory and all its variations (Barton, 2001; Creswell and Guetterman, 2019). Beyond hearing stories of those historically excluded from science, ethnography allows us to question the structures, policies, and practices and begin discussing how to reshape them to be more accessible and inclusive (Mujtaba et al., 2020). A critical ethnographic lens allows us to explore what learning chemistry could be like if we tore down problematic structures and barriers (Brislin, 2006; Madison, 2012). An example research question inspired by the literature (Carlone et al., 2014) and reframed for chemistry is: How might a student's social identity shape their relationship to learning chemistry? Carlone's study looked broadly at science and revealed that students outside the dominant culture disengaged with science (Carlone et al., 2014). This arises when science education fails to recognize a student's knowledge, interest, and identity as valuable to science. What was observed within middle school science classrooms is that there is an “ideal science student.” Based on that identity, some students felt they were not allowed to learn because they did not fit that mold (Carlone et al., 2014). Through this example, we understand that societal structures (social, political, and historical) bleed into our learning spaces and impact culture. The motivation for ethnography is that it is one pathway to elevate voices excluded from science.

Taking a critical ethnographic approach acknowledges this methodology's imperial and colonial past in anthropology and allows researchers to elevate participants’ voices rather than silence them. In early ethnographic studies, researchers such as Malinowski saw himself merely as an innocent observer rather than questioning his worldview (Denzin and Lincoln, 2018). Part of this lack of questioning by Malinowski was because his research was published with the intention that his research participants would never read it, as they were not the intended audience for the research (Denzin and Lincoln, 2018). When his research notebooks were published, it ushered in a critical era of ethnography, which led to the development of critical ethnography and critical participatory research methods such as action research (Denzin and Lincoln, 2018). With the vast history of both these methodologies, further reading is required to fully respect the work of the scholars who established these fields (Grant et al., 2011; Madison, 2012).

Reflections on ethnography

Our desire as authors to construct this perspective came from the interdisciplinary conversations we had around ethnography and research in chemistry education. The challenge and reward of having such conversations was how to blend the education, anthropology, and chemistry education work on ethnography. Looking to prior literature in chemistry education, ethnography has been defined as a method (Lyall, 2005; Bunce and Cole, 2008; Teo et al., 2014; Abels, 2016; Dohrn and Dohn, 2018; Adbo and Carulla, 2019; Dunlop et al., 2020; Wu and Yezierski, 2022), and a theoretical framework (Bhattacharyya, 2007). The diversity in ethnographic approaches highlights that there is not one way to do ethnography, but each approach arrives at a different representation of the research design and outcomes. In studies drawing on ethnography as a methodology, different choices by the researcher will lead to different research designs that support different outcomes. Even things as small as our definition of culture will frame the participants' role in the data generation differently (Brislin, 2006; Taussig, 2011; Van Maanen, 2011). Within this paper, we hope to provide multiple definitions of ethnography as a methodology within chemistry education research and discuss how it could allow for different research questions to be asked and uncovered.

Ethnographic approaches emerging from teaching experience

In qualitative research a strong starting place to inform research is building from the researchers lived experience through reflection (Van Manen, 1997). Experience is what begins to flesh out how methodologies are linked to a researcher's worldview and beliefs (Creswell and Creswell, 2018; Secules et al., 2021) because they are rooted in experiences. From ethnography, experiences centring on teaching and research practices are easily transferable to the idea of questioning what is taken for granted in our everyday experiences. Think about your classroom or department: is there something that is considered normal that, if you told a non-chemistry friend, they would question? In our context, on the first day of teaching general chemistry labs, we were told that having two to three students (out of ∼1300) faint in the laboratory each week was normal. The first author immediately asked: Why are students fainting? Fainting was not normal from their lived experience of undergraduate labs or prior work as a TA in first-year labs. Through this questioning and collaboration with the course coordinator, we have reduced the number of students fainting to four for the entire four-month semester. This highlights the benefits of questioning what others deem ordinary, and that students’ experiences can be improved by asking questions. Additionally, what elevates the example experience is that the experience is a starting place which orients or guides the change in practice and not just the end result (Van Manen, 1997). While experience is excellent to frame the focus of exploring ethnography, being immersed in the field generating observations also shapes how a study or intervention may evolve (Taussig, 2011).

Experience re-frames observational data generation

In using observations to explore the taken-for-granted aspects of culture, the observation notebook is a tool to remind you to pay attention and to be present in your classroom (Taussig, 2011). Taussig explains the first authors’ experience in generating observations perfectly, in that the notebook of observations is like a memory box or photos on your cellphone (Taussig, 2011). The observations may be a collection of unconnected ideas to an outsider, but they were all moments that caught your attention based on your own worldview. For example, observations could contain moments when students were confused with a specific piece of content knowledge when they were engaged in activities, and what they said in conversations in group work (Guest et al., 2013). The observation alone may not indicate something is taken for granted but adding in reflection, reading literature, and conversations can transform the observation from an experience to an insight into something that is taken for granted (Van Maanen, 2011). Based on this experience generating observations in a classroom or laboratory your focus may change because the experiences with your participants change you (Taussig, 2011; Van Maanen, 2011).

Conclusions

While there are parallels between the way we think as chemists and ethnography, the strength of inviting this methodology into our field is we can begin to solve chemistry education problems from a more interdisciplinary perspective. By challenging our assumptions surrounding learning theories, expertise, research practices, and beliefs, chemistry education can adapt to be more inclusive and welcoming to new students and ideas. Ethnography is more than asking questions and looking at the world around you; it requires you to be willing to be critical of yourself, your research, and teaching (Secules et al., 2021). In adopting a critical lens to your own experience, the taken-for granted experiences start to be questioned. This questioning can inform an evolving teach practice or lead to alternative approaches to research, in terms of what we choose to explore. We can learn an immense amount within chemistry education, from turning to fields like education or anthropology to exploring beyond the traditional boundaries and assumptions of chemistry and chemistry education.

From a research perspective, ethnography reminds us as researchers that our epistemology (worldview) significantly impacts our choices in research design (Lincoln et al., 2011). For teaching, as we introduce new cohorts of students to chemistry culture, it is important to question how our choice of what we teach, how we teach, and who we teach reproduces rules and norms that indicate to students what counts and what does not in chemistry. In questioning, ethnography leads to trying to see teaching practices and chemistry culture from the perspective of a student or TA who might be new to the culture. The promise of ethnography in chemistry is that questioning the structures and approaches in the field has the potential to create a more inclusive, accessible, and supportive learning environment for everyone.

Conflicts of interest

There are no conflicts of interest to declare.

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to acknowledge the support provided by Dr Lee Airton from the Faculty of Education and Gender Studies at Queen's University. Lee graciously provided insight, mentorship, and training that was invaluable to SS. We would also like to thank Brian Gilbert, an education PhD student at the University of Calgary. Brian provided exceptional guidance through our many conversations about ethnography and resources to consult in creating this work. This work would not be possible without the support provided by these education researcher collaborators. Additionally, we would like to thank Dr Reyne Pullen for his advice in editing the manuscript. This work was funded by Queen’s University.

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