Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Lewis, Joseph David

Titel

“52 Days to Timbuktu”: Languages, literacies, and learning in Zagora, Morocco. A narrative ethnography

Ort / Verlag

ProQuest Dissertations Publishing

Erscheinungsjahr

2006

Link zum Volltext

• ProQuest

Quelle

ProQuest Dissertations & Theses A&I

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• This dissertation study examines, through narrative inquiry, the communicative practices of men in Zagora, Morocco and considers how those practices serve to position each individual within his community, country, and world. The writer takes up the interplay between the "global" and the "local" in Zagora, with a particular focus on the learning and teaching of English. Through the privileging of local narratives in Zagora, the study critiques Western assumptions about schooling, language learning, and "literacy," including a too-celebratory view of English as the "international language." The study is a narrative ethnography (Chase, 2005), each chapter centering on a specific person or group of people in Zagora. In addition, the study explores how post-colonial perspectives might inform, influence, and ultimately call-into-question the crafting of an ethnography such as this. Working especially from the writings of Edward Said, the writer employs different modes of narrative representation and offers "contrapuntal readings" (Said, 1993) to those representations. This is an attempt to attend directly to the "crisis of representation" (Marcus and Fischer, 1986), the history of "Orientalism" (Said, 1978), and continuing trends of neo-imperialism. The writer seeks, at once, to "read" Zagorans and their communicative practices through narrative representation, and to "read against" those very representations. Finally, the study explores, again through narrative inquiry, how the writer's own communicative practices and qualitative research practices have been influenced by the community of Zagora and the specific participants in this study. Throughout the dissertation, the writer narrates many of his own experiences in Zagora, as a Peace Corps volunteer, English teacher, and qualitative researcher. He provides various readings of these experiences, contemplates issues of gender, class, race, ethnicity, and religion, and ultimately seeks to question experience as an objective source of evidence in qualitative research (Scott, 1999).