Ethnographic Monitoring: Hymes's Unfinished Business in Educational Research

This essay describes the process of Hymesian monitoring, a collaborative effort to understand voice in education, so crucial in Hymes's later work. A report of ethnographic monitoring in 1970s Philadelphia and a recent collaborative project in the Caribbean demonstrate how one can work from the voice of the pupil, through that of the analyst toward that of the teacher and back, checking what each party brought into the analysis and treating each of these voices as legitimate. [Hymes, ethnographic monitoring, Philadelphia, Barbados, ethnopoetics]