No Pain, No Gain: Student Playwriting as Critical Ethnographic Language Research

This paper discusses the possibilities of working with high school students as researchers of culture and language in their own school communities. It features a short ethnographic play by Timothy Chiu entitled No Pain, No Gain, which dramatizes the difficulty of preparing an oral presentation in a second language. Chiu's text was created in an ethnographic playwriting workshop that was designed to provide high school students with an opportunity to represent their own experiences of language learning. After presenting the play in its entirety, the author talks about some of the language learning issues it raises, and layers Chiu's grounded theoretical analysis with the sociological and linguistic analyses of Bourdieu (1982/1991), Lippi-Green (1997), and Norton (1995, 2000). This is followed by a discussion of the implications of Chiu's play for teachers working with multilingual classes. The article concludes with a discussion about how having students create and perform their own ethnographic texts is ‘useful’ to them (Smith, 1999) and thus assists language researchers in negotiating the politics of researching Other people's children.