Chapter 8: Self-Work and Apprenticeship: Reflections on an Ethnography of Monitoring and Evaluation in Rural India

The Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) publicly reports on the quality of India’s rural primary education system and its children’s basic learning levels across all states; ASER is produced via a groundbreaking model for citizen-engaged monitoring and evaluation (M&E). This chapter describes the author’s ethnography of the ASER M&E effort via field observation, interviews, and document data, which the author collected in several Indian states as a doctoral candidate. For researchers of educational M&E efforts, observing these data being collected in the field can unveil unique discoveries as these methods well position researchers to distinctively investigate the cultural and contextual issues that influence M&E. Thorough analysis of culture and context has long been associated with the strengths of ethnographic work in education and governance. In keeping with the focus of this edited volume, the author presents her development of her ASER study and explains key issues that arose during her ethnographic work: her positionality, research preparation, cultural competence, self-work, apprenticeship, and fieldwork dilemmas. In this chapter, the author aims to illuminate how the researcher—as the main instrument in ethnographic work—must routinely assess themselves, carefully prepare for cross-cultural work, and continuously reckon with their limitations and emerging fieldwork dilemmas. She also describes how consistent self-work and fieldwork apprenticeships facilitate the researcher’s bicultural understanding of the phenomenon under study. This chapter is a reflection afforded by time—the insights gleaned from a decade of thinking about the meaning and experience of fieldwork.