Contributions of Urban Ethnography to Educational Research

Abstract

This paper explores the use of urban ethnography in educational research and discusses its contributions, tensions, and dilemmas to answer the following question: How can urban ethnography be incorporated to explore and understand educational phenomena in public spaces? This essay seeks to contribute to current debates about educational research and its need to reinvent itself in times of uncertainty and complexity through the analysis of urban ethnography with a mobile orientation. The document is organized into three parts: first, we analyze the boundaries between the school/the educational; second, we define some tools of urban ethnography in relation to the study of educational phenomena; and third, we look at the contributions, tensions and dilemmas faced by educational researchers when employing urban ethnography. To conclude, the need to promote ethnographic invention is emphasized to develop new educational research strategies that allow progress in two directions: questioning the spaces and forms used in the study of educational and school processes in urban space, and promoting the generation of devices to retrieve data of a diverse nature in adherence to collaborative, artistic, decolonial and critical positions based on the co-creation of knowledge.