Mid Sweden University

This study was carried out at a Swedish municipal lower secondary school, with one class in focus. The ethnographic research design comprised four months of observations during lessons and breaks, and two weeks of audio-visual recordings in year 8 (when the pupils were 14 years old) followed by 18 semi-structured interviews with the same pupils one year later. Aiming at getting as close as possible to the pupils’ informal conversations and interactions with classmates out of the teachers’ (and researcher’s) supervision and earshot, an innovative staging of recording devices was applied (Rönn, 2021). Goffman’s (1959) theatre metaphor, in which people’s behaviours are considered as being enacted either on the “backstage” or “frontstage” of social life was applied as theoretical framework. The concept “backstage” was used for pupils’ interaction with peers out of the teachers’ sight – inside the classroom as well as outside and after school.

The findings showed that pupils activities backstage, comprised e.g.

a) logging intoclassmates’ Google classroom accounts and write original texts for peers,

b) swapping computers with peers behind the teacher’s back and write original texts for classmates,

c) taking pictures of their completed individual assignments and forwarding them to peers who reformulated the texts “in own words”, and

d) sharing leaked National Tests on the class’ informal Snapchat-group.

Consequently, some pupils’ “individual” assignments were produced in collaboration with peers in backstage spaces. According to the pupils, the teachers were not aware of this, which was confirmed by their teachers.

The findings illustrate how ethnography as method can be used to develop and refine Goffman’s (1959) theory. In his theater metaphor, backstage activities are face-to-face and synchronous. However, this study show that pupils’ backstage activities can take place in different backstage spaces, each one with its own interactional patterns; synchronous face-to-face interaction (inside the classroom), synchronous person-to-person interaction (phone calls after school), asynchronous person-to-person interaction (e.g. forwarding pictures of completed assignments to peers) and asynchronous person-to-people (communicating through the class’ Snapchat group). By applying ethnography, four backstage spaces (which pupils can swap between) have been identified. This is similar to Hillyard (2010), who demonstrated examples of expanding Goffman’s theory of etiquette into etiquettes (plural), and thus how theory conceptually can be refined as a result of empirical research in applying ethnographic ideas in practice. Through applying ethnography, a contribution to the expanding Goffman’s theoretical framework was made.

Goffman, E. (1959/1990). The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. London: Penguin.

Hillyard, S. (2010). Ethnography’s Capacity to Contribute to the Cumulation of Theory: A Case Study of Strong’s Work on Goffman. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 39(4), 421-440.

Rönn, C. (2021). Gaining Access to Students’ Informal Conversations with Peers: An Explorative Approach on Educational Research and Staging of Recording Devices. In L. K. Sarroub & C. Nicholas (Eds.), Doing Fieldwork at Home: The Ethnography of Education in Familiar Contexts. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers