History Bump

1)Read two or three ehtnographies (chronological, from different decades?) particularly favored in comp
2)Analyze them using White's tropes and forms, as well as for their methods and methodologies

Using what I find, I'd like to think about a few things:
How do the stories we tell in ethonographic work get represented as truth?
How do these qualitative methods promote, or not, the sense that comp is a research field as well as a teaching field, and the higher education politics associated with those distinctions
What do these authors claim about their ethnographies and how do compositionists take them up and make (other?) claims about them?
What do the tropes and forms I identify ala White say about the texts, and by extension, about composition in the uptake of those texts?

Preliminary bibliography:
Brandt, Deborah. Literacy in American Lives. Cambridge UP, 2001.
Cushman, Ellen. The Struggle and the Tools . Albany, N.Y. : State University of New York Press, 1998.
Heath, Shirley Brice. Ways with Words: Language, Life and Work in Communities and Classrooms. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1983.
Varnum, Robin. Fencing with Words: A History of Writing Instruction at Amherst College during the Era of Theodore Baird, 1938-1966. Urbana, Illinois: NCTE, 1996.
White, Hayden. The Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism. Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978.