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

"To Fink, or not to Fink...?"

I have to admit, because of my interest in metacognition research, I skipped ahead to the section that Emerson, Fretz, & Shaw called “In Process Analytic Writing: Asides, Commentaries, and Memos.” I’m interested in how the focus on using strategies to locate and re-construct detailed observations of lived experiences meshes with an observer’s ability to occasionally step back and take account of the big picture. I entered into the book with the assumption that it would deliver skills and strategies for providing the most detailed, objective sorts of fieldnotes humans can muster. Luckily, this isn’t the whole thrust of the book. The notion of presenting, or inscribing, a version of world, from selectively recalled and accented moments, rather than a “mirrored” reflection of the world one observes (p. 66) struck me as an appropriate way to balance objectivity and subjectivity as a researcher. So I was taken by the description of a student’s aside in which she not only gives her version, or impression, of an agency office, but also puts herself in the shoes of a hypothetical, distraught office visitor, whose hypothetical confidence in the agency would be shaken, as a result of the researcher’s feelings about its lack of orderliness (p. 101). I find this “speaking for the other,” driven by one’s own emotional and positional reactions, in situ, a compelling motivator for the practice of in depth ethnographic methods. I also think that getting this into a context and lifestyle, such that one can feel legitimate in posing hypothetical beliefs of other participants, goes a long way past Irving Goffman’s notion of having to be a “fink” to do proper ethnography (p. 154).

Thorne Lit Presentation

Sarah Childers
2/12/2008
EDPSY 582 B
Literature Presentation: Barrie Thorne’s “Learning from Kids”

Main Points / Summary

• Learning from children of your own culture requires adult researchers to “render strange” the experience of being a child. I.E. the challenge is to not assume that: children are incomplete versions of adults and so their behavior and language is legible to adults and not to interpret observations only through framework of own experiences as a child. [225]
• To “come into consciousness,” must look at children’s every day interactions and language in an attempt to understand the meanings that that the children give and take away from their interactions with one another.

Issues encountered in her fieldwork at two elementary schools

• Understanding and finding order in kids’ seemingly chaotic interactions on the playground.
• Managing her authority as an adult figure and learning to avoid language that kids’ associated with adult authority [i.e. not to ask what students were “doing” or to tell them that she was interested in their “behavior”]. She did not tell on the kids or intervene in play unless necessary for safety.
• Managing her relationship with the teachers in her fieldwork classrooms. Being at cross purposes sometimes with the teacher. E.G. Thorne would sometimes participate in the “underground economy of food and objects” or chat with students when they were supposed to be working. She sometimes felt guilty about this behavior. At the same time, sometimes she would collude with the teacher by engaging in an adult relationship in the classroom [e.g. making eye contact with the teacher above the kids head to communicate].
• Memories from childhood and legacy of past self affects fieldwork practices, including forming relationships with student subjects and interpreting student interaction [i.e. status among girls]. Thorne describes how the girls she met the schools brought up powerful memories of girls she knew [and the girl that she was!] in elementary school.

Terminology

• Studying down – studying a group with a social position lower than the ethnographers in order to “[seek] understanding across lines of difference and inequality” [224].

Linkages

To class readings…

• Link to Nespor: studied kids’ “every day” interactions at school; both looked at gender as well although for Thorne it was the thrust of the project; managed complex position as adult in kids’ world; focused on kids’ language; highlighted the role of the body in kids’ interactions and how schooling is organized [e.g. kids physicality with one another and meaning attached to physicality and schools controlling kids’ bodies]

To own research…

• Gender and feminist analytical frameworks are important to my work. I do research with students and so I also manage the “studying down” and “chain of remembering” issues.

Discussion question

• A take on a question Thorne poses: Are moments of remembering [when ethnographer was a child] a source of distortion or insight [for studying the lives of children]? [pg. 236] Thorne argues both? What do you think? In what ways is remembering distorting / insightful for noticing and for interpreting?

Additional readings

• Holmes, Robyn M. (1998). Fieldwork with Children. Sage Publications.

Response

I appreciate Thorne’s discussion of the role of memories in fieldwork practice. We have thought together in class about positionality and the effect on fieldwork practice. Memories and experience are clearly linked to social location. Given this, I was struck by how I had not seriously considered how my experiences as an adolescent would affect my fieldwork with adolescents. I have thought about and reflected upon the effects of my gender, race, age, position as a “teacher”, etc., but I had not thought about how my own memories of being the age of the students I want to study would affect every aspect of my experiences in the field. I was also interested in Thorne’s findings from her fieldwork at elementary schools, namely the role of the underground economy in the schools and the differences in the dimensions and role of the economy in each school depending on school culture. This finding demonstrates her focus on kids’ everyday activities and especially on the activities that they find important and meaningful.

Random Week 6 Thoughts

As the person in the class who loves the practical instruction, I really enjoyed getting back into the "ethnography manual" book again.  The guidelines and suggestions for note-taking were excellent and easy to understand.

For whatever reason the readings this week got me thinking about who should be doing ethnographic research.  I started thinking that the best person to study a culture in depth would be a person living in that culture.  After all, they already know the daily living activities and they can probably interpret member meanings better than an outsider.  Wouldn't this be ideal?

But that got me thinking that a member doing research on their own culture may not work out so well simply because they are too close to the subjects.  I think there is something good in having the detachment of an outside professional.  Is the outside, trained opinion better than the thoughts of the insider?  I guess I don't know if the outside opinion is better, but it is different.

I'm sure this is a thought process you have all gone through long ago, but as a newbie to the subject I thought I'd get it out now.  Still mulling it over...

See you Tuesday!

Anne

IMMIGRATE ASSIMILATE

This is in response to Holly’s entry of Tuesday, Feb 5. There was an excellent article on the Opinion page of last Sunday’s P.I./Times, Feb 3, 2008. If you don’t have Sunday’s paper, you can get it on the web by googling Immigrate Assimilate, Amy Chua or using the following URL.

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/opinion/2004159071_sundayimmigration03.html

She asks, “What happens when ethnic pride erodes national identity? Yugoslavia found out, Iraq’s finding out. Are we - The United States - heading that way?” I had never looked at it in that light, but it really made me stop and think about it.

Marcia

Loving it!

I really enjoyed Sullivan's compilation of research on delinquent behavior (well what I took the paper to be doing!). It was something that is of great interest to me. As I read the chapter I found myself refering to the references and attempting to develop a reading list that was related to Juvenile Delinquency. I also like the fact that rather than discarding previous (old 1930's) research they built on it! It seems that the authors for ethnographic works are more interested in building on (turtle on top of turtle!) than there peers who seem to often spend alot of energy on disproving others findings. That being said I do think that we should not accept all research as good and have to have an ability to acknowledge research that may not be "good".
I really enjoyed Corsaro writings and think he raised some great questions and insights. I like the idea of longitudinal international ethnography. I was very interested in his observations of the students change from headstart to kindergarten. The little girls struggle to be like the majority was telling to me as an educator in that I HAVE to be aware of all the reasons for behavior and not isolate it to a classroom context!

Segregation/Desegregation

I've noticed in a couple articles related to racial differences, that some of the writing seems to support benefits to segregated settings. In one of the Nespor chapters there was an interview segment with an African American girl who said that before she was bused out of her local community for school, she was a good student and was seen by her teachers as capable. But once she moved to the school in a caucasian neighborhood, she related negative experiences with teachers and the school. There was also a clear theme in the Nespor book about how the African American community was destroyed through urban renewal efforts. This was not only the physical boundaries that defined their community, but their sense of togetherness as well.

This week in Corsaro's piece, in his discussion of Zena, he also discussed difficulties related to integration. He stated that Zena's difficulty with the transition to an unfamiliar peer culture was largely unsuccessful and was possibly disruptive to her educational experience, based on declining academic performance and negative perceptions of her by the teacher and other students. He also said that the priming effects through the Head Start did not lead to positive transitions later, as the interaction norms in that setting were completely different (and even offensive) in the first grade classroom. In terms of positive outcomes for Zena, Corsaro said she would be returning to her neighborhood school the following year, where she would have more in common with her peers.

In my career and education, I have not spent much time on critical theory or inter-racial issues, outside of having a general understanding that people have different perspectives and things go better when you can be open to those. However, there is also a general understanding that segregation is "bad", though a sense of community is "good". I am having a hard time reconciling these things in my mind. This extends to my personal concerns around the inclusion and integration of people with disabilities in schools and local communities. Benefits tend to go along the lines of acceptance by others increasing with more exposure. The downside is that integration appears to have been made into an overarching goal without allowing for groupings that have a sense of identity associated with them.

Last week I was talking to someone who supports 5 people with developmental disabilities in a large local corporate office. They were hired 8 years ago through a policy that looked a lot like affirmative action. They choose to have lunch together, which is seen as a bad thing by the person providing support. She commented that in other settings where there is only one person who is developmentally delayed, they are "forced" to have lunch with the other employees, which was seen as a positive. It really made me wonder about the importance we place on personal choice, and how we still think that we should impose our values and choices on others under the pretext that they don't know what's best for them. Hmmm.

I would like to hear what other people think about how to merge the ideas of desegregation with the benefit of increased exposure, acces, and understanding, with the benefits of a sense of community and personal choice.