1. How can a series of committee meetings and informal colleague conversations be characterized as ethnography?
Ethnography requires prolonged, immersive fieldwork, participant observation, and engagement with the cultural practices of a group over time. You formed a committee, held brainstorming sessions, and talked to colleagues. This is standard curriculum development—not ethnography. By relabeling it as such, you’re invoking a methodological rigor that your process simply did not include. What specific ethnographic techniques, such as field notes, sustained observation, or attention to tacit cultural dynamics; did you actually employ?
2. Where is the boundary between your role as researchers and your role as the subjects of study?
You describe the department itself as your ethnographic field, yet the data came from your own discussions as committee members. In ethnography, the researcher is typically an outsider or a participant-observer who maintains analytic distance. Here, you are both the ones generating the curriculum proposals and the ones analyzing the culture that produced them. How did you avoid conflating your own advocacy for sustainability with a neutral observation of departmental culture?
3. What constitutes your data, and how was it systematically analyzed?
You mention “qualitative data were gathered by creating a committee… who engaged in discussions.” Ethnography relies on systematic data collection, recorded interactions, artifacts, interviews, detailed field notes. You present no evidence of how discussions were documented, coded, or analyzed beyond being refined into framework components. Without a transparent analytic process, how can readers assess whether your findings reflect collective insight rather than committee consensus shaped by a few vocal members?
4. If your approach was inductive, why does the framework appear as a predetermined structure rather than emergent findings?
Inductive analysis in ethnography means themes emerge from close engagement with participant perspectives. Yet your framework, with its neat categories of curriculum modification, guest lectures, certifications, and ubiquitous learning, reads less like an emergent cultural discovery and more like a pre-planned proposal. What themes actually surfaced from faculty and students that surprised you or challenged your initial assumptions about what sustainability integration should look like?