Reporting Ethnography to Informants

The value of reporting research to the people who agree to participate in it has been accepted as commonplace in the last ten to fifteen years, especially in applied disciplines such as education. However, there are few detailed accounts of what actually happens when university researchers and school practitioners engage in conversation over knowledge about schooling. There is even less evidence about how, when, where, or for whom the process might be valuable. In this article, Reba Page, Yvette Samson, and Michele Crockett provide such an account. They first describe their experience with teacher seminars in which they reported their research to members of two high school science departments in whose classes they had studied curriculum extensively. They then interpret these experiences from three orientations.