In this plenary presentation, I will revisit and reconceptualise shadowing, a widely used yet rarely discussed learning and research practice. I will argue that shadowing is suitable both as a research tool and as a way to link classroom and workplace due to its specific nature and unique underlying mechanisms.

After briefly reviewing the underlying mechanism, affordances, and uses of shadowing, I will share my experience using the methods in research and teaching activity.

I will conclude that, especially in the latter context, we can exploit its potential only when shadowing is carefully designed and structured.

The lecture considers the period around the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th century, which is highlighted as particularly formative for the development of anthropological research and the idea of Bildung. This period saw the emergence of new conceptions of the human being that were  characterized by their openness to the new and by their view of the development of humanity as a process that cannot be determined in concrete terms. Against this background, the lecture will take a closer look at Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767-1835), a thinker who is well known as a classic of the theory of Bildung and a prototype of the educational politician, but whose ethnographic works in France, Spain, and the Basque Country are hardly known so far.

The lecture explores the question to what extent Humboldt’s approach to ethnography is characterized by the search for the new and an open horizon of human Bildung. It is shown that in his ethnographic work he was interested in the development of the whole of humanity, which he understood not simply as intellectual or technological progress but as a balanced unfolding of human capacities with regard to bodily practices, aesthetics, science, philosophy, history, and politics. Against this background, Humboldt’s research outlook is characterized as profoundly cosmopolitan. Unlike many other ethnographers, Humboldt did not study remote pre-modern peoples. Rather, he was concerned with the question of how peoples could modernize themselves in such a way that they did not become alienated from their traditional cultures. In his ethnographic work, he was therefore not only interested in language, customs, and life forms, but also in social inequalities, the social function of media, and the spreading of new inventions.

Finally, the lecture hints that Humboldt also incorporated some of the new anthropological insights from his ethnographies into his famous concept for the renewal of Prussian education. Although some of Humboldt’s ideas are outdated today, the lecture suggests that his thinking can still give important impulses to today’s educational ethnography. For the future he had in mind is far from being reached today. Overall, the lecture not only draws a new picture of Wilhelm von Humboldt but also sheds new light on the history of ethnography.

The lecture considers the period around the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th century, which is highlighted as particularly formative for the development of anthropological research and the idea of Bildung. This period saw the emergence of new conceptions of the human being that were  characterized by their openness to the new and by their view of the development of humanity as a process that cannot be determined in concrete terms. Against this background, the lecture will take a closer look at Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767-1835), a thinker who is well known as a classic of the theory of Bildung and a prototype of the educational politician, but whose ethnographic works in France, Spain, and the Basque Country are hardly known so far.

The lecture explores the question to what extent Humboldt’s approach to ethnography is characterized by the search for the new and an open horizon of human Bildung. It is shown that in his ethnographic work he was interested in the development of the whole of humanity, which he understood not simply as intellectual or technological progress but as a balanced unfolding of human capacities with regard to bodily practices, aesthetics, science, philosophy, history, and politics. Against this background, Humboldt’s research outlook is characterized as profoundly cosmopolitan. Unlike many other ethnographers, Humboldt did not study remote pre-modern peoples. Rather, he was concerned with the question of how peoples could modernize themselves in such a way that they did not become alienated from their traditional cultures. In his ethnographic work, he was therefore not only interested in language, customs, and life forms, but also in social inequalities, the social function of media, and the spreading of new inventions.

Finally, the lecture hints that Humboldt also incorporated some of the new anthropological insights from his ethnographies into his famous concept for the renewal of Prussian education. Although some of Humboldt’s ideas are outdated today, the lecture suggests that his thinking can still give important impulses to today’s educational ethnography. For the future he had in mind is far from being reached today. Overall, the lecture not only draws a new picture of Wilhelm von Humboldt but also sheds new light on the history of ethnography.

How do social practices change and how do connections between them evolve?  For those who subscribe to a ‘strong’ version of practice theory, there is no empty space: no period of human society that is not defined by interconnected complexes of social practices.  From this perspective, all contemporary practices are, in some way, linked to those that come before.  By implication, understanding how societies change depends on understanding how social practices merge, how they circulate from one location to another, and how they are more and less consistently re-enacted.

These are large topics in the sense that they are important for the formation of extended, far-flung relations between practices, and in the sense that the issues they raise are relevant across many disciplines and sites of enquiry.   This talk works through three ideas that help make sense of how social practices extend and change. These are ‘hybridisation’ (in which two or more practices merge to produce some new and emergent form); circulation (in which relations between co-existing practices change as new connections are made) and infusion (which is about how such connections are instantiated and reproduced in different sites and settings).  

This is not a comprehensive catalogue of possibilities but in working through some of these ideas my aim is to shed some light on innovation as an ongoing feature of how social practices change together, and at scale.

As digital educational technologies are used more widely at all levels of education, data science plays an increasingly central role in the background of educational practices. Key in data science is the reduction of ‘noise’, i.e. reducing what is referred to as meaningless data or removing outliers, so the models will work better. But outliers and other ‘rich points’ are often of central importance to ethnographers.

This talk reflects on how an ethnographic sensibility to noisy data can generate new insights on contemporary educational practices, and what this could mean for educational research in a digitally infrastructured world. It first traces the metaphor of noise in data science. It then reads several scenes from ethnographies in schools through the metaphor of noise to account for moments of rupture and repair.

Overall, the talk suggests that a major implicit struggle over education today is about noise: Who notices it, who feels pressure to reduce it, who celebrates it?

The talk ends by reflecting on methodological implications for ethnographically informed research in education as students and educators are woven into global networks of data flows: First, how classic participant observation remains central yet also changes; second, how the impetus to follow in multi-sited ethnography engages with new spaces; third, how digital methods can be embedded into ethnographic research.