Education and Ethnography

Jacqueline Gallo is a PhD candidate in the Faculty of Education.  She uses an ethnographic approach to research school transition for girls in Catholic missionary schools in East Africa.

Jacqueline’s research is informed by over a decade’s experience in schools.  Working in the US she found that many of her pupils didn’t feel ready to leave secondary school, and she became interested in why that was.  She now applies this experience to the Ugandan context, where she spent fifteen months living with a community and working with girls in a Catholic secondary school. The girls she works with are among the 1% of girls who achieve a secondary education, and they face numerous challenges to successfully completing and exiting school.

Ethnography, Jacqueline argues, allows her to take a holistic approach to her research. It allows her to dig deep into the lives of the girls she works with to really understand what is happening around them.  Jacqueline is interested in what it takes to live a dignified life, and it’s important to her that her research contributes to answering that question.

Despite all its advantages education is not a panacea for the girls Jacqueline works with. They can become disconnected from the traditional way of life experienced by their out-of-school contemporaries. They might experience high expectations from their families regarding their careers, while also being pushed towards teaching or nursing jobs that don’t offer the salaries to meet those expectations. Jacqueline does a lot of work exploring what the girls want from their futures, emphasising the importance of her research being useful to the girls as well as to her. To Jacqueline ethnography is a way to give agency to the subjects of her research and show their multi-dimensionality as people.

To hear more about Jacqueline’s research and her time in Uganda watch our interview with her on our YouTube page.