Chapter 6: Listening Closely To Ethnographic Experience: Locating Researcher Identity as Participant Listener

This chapter provides a narrative account of the fieldwork experience of a differently–abled researcher in multimodal drama–based adult ESL classes. It chronicles a shift in the researcher’s positioning—from participant observer to participant listener. This repositioning enabled the researcher to transform putative limitations into a fully engaged listening to the research site. The chapter provides a reflexive account of how listening mediated the generation, interpretation, and representation of multimodal ethnographic data, and how the account of what was heard (and felt) in lieu of what was seen could be construed as an alternative and entirely legitimate way of developing ethnographic understanding.