A year of fieldnotes

For the past year and a half, I've been doing fieldwork in nine different schools in the Seattle area. I have mountains of fieldnotes. For the past week I've been reviewing all of my fieldnotes in order to write something like a finished product. I've been looking through the notes that are in the raw "jotting" form described by Emerson et al. as well as the various versions of complete, detailed notes that I wrote up (often in my car in the school parking lot) immediately after visiting a classroom.

In light of our readings for this week, it's been really interesting for me to notice what kinds of things I pay attention to in my "jottings" and what kinds of things end up being salient enough that they make it into the more polished notes emerging from the jottings. It's also been interesting to revisit the notes from fieldwork conducted a year or more ago. When I've done a good job of taking notes, I feel transported back into the moment simply by re-reading the notes. Here are some observations of my own notetaking processes and some reflections about what I think I would like to do better during fieldwork ... my analysis of some lessons that I'm learning by doing our readings ...


Patterns in my note-taking processes
Both Emerson and Goffman commented on the way that different fieldworkers attend differently to actions, dialogue, physical spaces, emotions, etc. My jottings consist almost entirely of verbatim records of classroom discourse. I note who was speaking, and I keep track of exactly what was being said. Often I make notes in the margins about typical patterns of discourse, like the fill-in-the-blank sort of intonation that teachers sometimes use when they say a sentence with rising intonation at the end making it sound like a question (even though a question has not been posed). I also make notes in the margins about the types of questions that teachers and students are posing to one another. Clearly, I am very interested in how people communicate in classrooms and in how people ask questions and press each other for information.

When there are pauses in the conversation in a classroom I make other sorts of notes off to the side of the main record of conversation. These notes consist of my thoughts, intuitions, questions, and emotions at the moment. I ask many questions of myself and of my notes. At the top of my note-taking pages I often record details about the physical space like arrangements of desks and access to (working) technology. I also make counts of people (like how many boys and girls in a physics class or how many students of color in an advanced placement class). While these notes do not make up the bulk of my pages of notes, these contextual notes are the parts of my notes that give me a sense of time-travel when I re-read my notes now, over a year after beginning fieldwork.

Fieldnotes as time machines
When I re-read my fieldnotes it feels as if I am traveling back in time to the actual day of the observation. In many cases I can re-read the dialogue and actually hear the voices and the excitement (or the boredom) expressed by those voices as they talked through some science lesson. The context notes that I make in the margins of my paper or at the top of each page have been extremely useful for helping me to reconstruct my memories of particular classrooms, particular children, and particular lessons. When I read my notes about the physical classrooms I can see the space in my mind. When I read my questions that I wrote in the moment as rhetorical questions to myself or to the conceptual framework guiding the research I am struck by how little threads of theory were emerging even at the very beginning of fieldwork.

What I can do better in my fieldnotes
Looking back at my own fieldnotes in light of the readings for this week, I can see that there are plenty of things that I could do better. First, I am definitely generalizing, which Emerson et al. caution against. In my next round of classroom observations I'm going to try to write specific, focused details rather than generalizations and see if I can break myself of the habit of writing too many generalizations. Second, I am really focused on discourse, which I think is great for the sort of study that I'm doing right now, but I wonder if I'm missing other observations because I'm spending so much time listening and capturing dialogue. The next time I'm in the field I'm going to give myself a break from discourse for a few minutes each class period to try to capture some other observations, especially body language and expressions (a form of communication that is currently absent from my notes). Finally, I'm going to try to be even more disciplined about wasting no time between writing the initial jottings and the subsequent detailed notes. I haven't been as disciplined about that part as I should be. All of the authors this week acknowledged that this step is one of the most important, and most difficult, parts of fieldwork. It's true, like Emerson et al. said, that for every hour in the field, there is at least another hour of note-writing later in the day. It's really hard to make myself do those subsequent hours sometimes, but I'm going to try.

See you all next week after I return from Texas ~~ Melissa