Returning to Classroom Moments: Ethnographic Sensibility in Practicum Teaching

ABSTRACT

This reflection conceptualizes return as a practice through which practicum teaching can cultivate ethnographic sensibility. Drawing on three interconnected educational experiences in China, I show how return shifts attention from teacher performance to the material, relational, and institutional organization of classroom life, redistributes interpretive authority, and keeps uncertainty analytically productive. Teachers oftentimes act before understanding is complete; yet, return allows later judgment to remain answerable to what the initial response left unseen.