An Interactional Ethnographic Approach to Video Analysis, Archive Development and Search and Retrieval: Groundhog Day and Classroom Video records as Telling Cases

Prof. Judith Green

Gevirtz School of Education
Univeristy of California, Santa Barbara

Date: Friday, January 27, 2006
Place: Humanities and Social Sciences Building, Room 1173
Time: 2:00 pm — 3:00 pm (Reception to follow)

Abstract:
Over the past 3 decades, technological advances in video recording has revolutionized research on teaching-learning processes in classrooms. Today, educators across K-20 make video recordings of life in classrooms and other educational settings for multiple purposes, including training, researching core educational processes, and more recently for exploring longitudinal development of knowledge. The revolution has been a boon to education research and professional development at all levels of the system. At the same time, the explosion of video recordings has led to a number of theoretical, conceptual and practical problems in analysis, and archiving such materials as well as searching and retrieving records (video, text, and other) from such archives.

In this presentation, I present an approach that colleagues and I have developed over the past 3 decades that provides a means of creating a conceptually organized archive, a systematic approach to analyzing video records at multiple levels of scale, and an ethnographic framework for searching and retrieving video records that are intertextually tied. The goal of this presentation will be to make visible what an enthnographic approach affords researchers concerned with understanding human activity, whether in a lab, a classroom, or a community setting. As part of this discussion, I will make visible the ways in which technological advances have supported new directions and identify areas that are still needed, if researchers are to examine the patterns and practices that enable people to socially construct the events of everyday life. My talk with make visible a dynamic relationship between video analysis and technological advances, point to areas still in need of development
to support analyses, archiving, search and retrieval at multiple levels of scale. In this talk I introduce a language and set of practices that researchers across disciplines interested in human activity have used to analyze video records in different social settings, including law courts, physical education settings, social situations, or K-12 classrooms.

JUDITH GREEN has been teaching for more than 3 decades across levels of schooling (K-6, higher education). She received her M.A. in Educational Psychology from California State University, Northridge (1970), where she learned about child development and language development. She received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, where she explored the relationships between teaching, learning, culture and language. With colleagues, she has published articles on ethnographic research in research handbooks for the National Council of Teachers of English, the American Educational Research Association, and the International Reading Association, and has published research based books and articles on classroom discourse, and on the social construction of literate practices. Her most recent research focuses on how classroom practices support access to students across academic disciplines. http://education.ucsb.edu/people/green.html

Host: Professor B.S. Manjunath, ECE