HOLDING TENSIONS: Consultant-Ethnographer, A Nuanced Approach to Working with Organizations and Beyond

By: Erica Joos


As a former educator-turned-project manager at Creative Generation, I hold the tension of currently working in a professional role that my former teacher colleagues (and myself) were often so skeptical of. In this post, I explore how Jill Schinberg’s consultant-ethnographer (CE) framework helps me balance this divergent experience, wherein Creative Generation’s objective to be in co-creation with our collaborators is actualized as we “understand, document, and interpret” important contextual information to successfully see projects through with integrity and care.

A Former Arts Educator’s Perspective

When posed the question “How are you balancing divergent or converging influences on your work and honoring differences and similarities between people and experiences in the arts & cultural education space?”  my mind travels back in time to Fall 2019. 

To paint the picture:  I sit at lunch with my elementary school teacher colleagues and air grievances over our school district’s most recent choice to hire (and spend precious budget dollars on) outside education consultants. “They don’t know us and they don’t know our students,” we’d say. “Some of them have never even stepped foot inside a classroom, and here they are, telling us how to do our jobs!'' were just some of the commonplace criticisms we’d share. As teachers at a public arts integration school, there were so many contextual nuances of our curriculum and pedagogical approaches that had been designed and iterated upon for decades, and it seemed the consultants took no time or care to understand them. They had an agenda and frameworks of their own to deliver with no questions asked. 

While our school context was unique, the experience of teachers feeling tension with external education consultants is commonplace in schools (and organizations) across the world. The tension between outside interventions which feel far removed and out of touch with one’s work on the ground is normal, and frankly, expected. 

Trading Places 

Fast forward three years to Fall 2022, and I’m leading a professional development session with a group of teachers at an arts integration high school. Now, as Project Manager at Creative Generation, I oversee a handful of our site-based projects where I co-facilitate strategic professional development sessions and work alongside educators, school leaders, and students to help realize their organizational visions and goals through an arts-integrated lens.

To be clear, I am not a consultant. However, in the eyes of many important stakeholders in these contexts, the optics of someone from an external organization sharing externally designed frameworks and content can certainly appear that way. 

Alas, the unintended tension that I hold is revealed: How do I possibly approach my job with integrity, while knowing all too well the sentiments, experiences, and judgements of the teacher partners I stand before? 

And while Creative Generation is founded on demonstrated ethos of values-forward practices, it is really our heuristic and ethnographic approach to working and co-creating with our collaborators in service to their mission that enables us to meet this tension.

Meeting the Tension: Consultant as Ethnographer

By definition, an ethnographer is someone who studies the customs of people and allows the context of a place to inform their research. In her article “Consultant as Ethnographer: Conceptualizing a New Approach to Nonprofit Arts Management Consulting,” Jill Schinberg articulates a solution to a tension that so many organizations face with external advisors by integrating the wisdom, experience, and desired outcomes of their clients in their consulting approaches:

“Rather than offering prescriptive solutions, ethnographers, who embed themselves within a culture, seek to understand, document, and interpret. They may ultimately offer solutions but do so with the organization, whereas archetypal consulting practices work for an organization. Thus, ethnography applied to the consulting process provides a more nuanced approach to client organizations and possibly the profession.”  (Schinberg, 2021)

Not only does this approach allow me to more authentically “show up” in my work as the multi-hyphenate, teacher-project manager-creative that I am; I also believe an ethnographic approach to consultancy has implications that could upend pervasive and violent inequity and injustices in arts education and the related systems at-large. And while this may seem intuitive for some, especially folks in the arts world, this considered and contextual approach to consultancy is far from commonplace, and it is my great hope that this methodology disseminates in our sector and beyond to meet this tension head-on.