Abstract
Facing Unexpected in School Ethnography I research the transition of vocational high school students during three years of apprenticeship. I aim to describe the negotiation of students' identity, negotiation based on interactions and praxis of all school actors.
When schools closed, and the teaching/learning process changed, I had three last months of my research in front of me. Students were allowed to come voluntarily back to school for only three weeks in May.
I lost the opportunity to do the planned intensive observation of all subjects they learned. I had participatory observed the negotiation of the pupils' identity offline up to mid-March last year.
Since then, the negotiation has moved to the online environment. I could not continue my plan.
I started to observe a different side of the students' approach to studying; their learning habits during the time of rapid change of teaching methods and didactics. I lost the possible data from observing the students and their educators, but I found all new data through participant observation of a unique and unprecedented situation.
I am in front of a problem of analysing digital data, connecting them to the rest of my observation and a problem of negotiating identity online. The data have an entirely different form.
I am looking for an analysing methods for the digital data as well as for connecting completely different types of data together. Moreover, I am looking into the problem of the epistemological question of identity negotiation in the online environment.
I must find out ways to connect my findings and to reflect the two different research materials.