CLER Capacity Building Series

Hanging Out Methodology:

The Challenge of Conducting Ethnographic Research and Publishing it in the Field of Second Language

How do you research and investigate ‘identity,’ especially when it comes to the field of second language, which is dominated by psychometric, surveys and interviews? This interactive workshop is a response to this question and it is divided into parts. In the first part, I will share my experience with how to conduct ethnographic research that aims at investigating how people think and perform their identities and how these identities in turn influence what and how people learn as a second language. I will introduce what I am calling ‘hanging out methodology’ and show concrete examples of how I made use of it in my research. In the second part, I will introduce, especially to novice scholars and graduate students, a program where you can publish an article in 12 weeks. For the second part, if you have a piece of research you want to turn into publication, bring it along.

Awad Ibrahim is an award-winning author and a Professor at the Faculty of Education, University of Ottawa. He is a Curriculum Theorist with special interest in applied linguistics, cultural studies, Hip-Hop, youth and Black popular culture, philosophy and sociology of education, social justice, diasporic and continental African identities, and ethnography. He has researched and published widely in these areas. He obtained his PhD from OISE, the University of Toronto, and has been with the Faculty of Education of the University of Ottawa since 2007. Before that, he was in the United States where he taught in Bowling Green State University in Ohio. Internationally, he has ongoing projects in Morocco, Sudan, Saudi Arabia and the United States. His current projects include an ethnography of an inner-city high school in Ottawa and another project on the daily struggle of ‘becoming citizen’ in Canada. He has more than a 100 publications and among his books, Black Immigrants in North America: Essays on Race, Immigration, Identity, Language, Hip-Hop, Pedagogy, and the Politics of Becoming Black (2020); Internationalizing Curriculum Studies: Histories, Environments, and Critiques (2019); In This Together: Blackness, Indigeneity, and Hip-Hop (2019); Provoking Curriculum Studies: Strong Poetry and the Arts of the Possible in Education; The Education of African Canadian Children: Critical Perspectives; The rhizome of Blackness: A critical ethnography of Hip-Hop culture, language, identity and the politics of becoming; Critical Youth studies: A reader; Global linguistic flows: Hip-Hop cultures, youth identities and the politics of language. For his high school students, he is known as Dr. Dre.