Tentative Schedule

Week 1: What is Ethnography?
2/17

1. Introduction to the course and to each other.
2. Don DeLillo passage about “The Most Photographed Barn in America” .
3. Quick-write responses to syllabus quotations.
4. An exercise in observation.

*Create a plan for conducting 15 hours of observations of different writing classrooms. Begin setting dates for
observations and seeking necessary prior permissions from instructors.

Loggers: Tina Bell, James Dyer

Week 2: An Ethnographic Perspective
2/24
READ: Introduction and Ch. 1: “Coming to Terms” in Harris’s Rewriting; “An Ethnographic Perspective” by Carolyn Frank and “Ethnographic Research” by Victoria Purcell-Gates, DUE: Commentary #1 on Purcell-Gates.

Discussion: Amble Hollenhorst

Logger: Adam Russell

Snacks: Keri Ortiz

Week 3: On Teacher-Research and Composition
3/3
READ: Ch. 2 “Forwarding” in Rewriting; “Composition from the Teacher-Research Point of View” , Ruth Ray, Commentary #2 DUE on Ray’s chapter.

Discussion: James Dyer

Logger: Amble Hollenhorst

Snacks: Faye Snowden

Week 4: The Problem of the “Other”
3/10
READ: Ch. 3 “Countering” in Rewriting, pp.54-72 and “Still-Life: Representations and Silences in the Participant Observer Role,” Brueggemann . Commentary #3 DUE on Brueggemann.

Discussion: Faye Snowden

Logger: Ned Weidner

Snacks: Amble Hollenhorst

Week 5:
A Rhetorical Perspective on Ethnographic Writing
3/17

Stephen North says that ethnographers are “serving as a kind of alternative reality brokers, they deliberately juxtapose one imaginative universe with another, struggling, in the effort, to make both more intelligible—to themselves, to us, to the inhabitants of those alternative universes” (Making of Knowledge in Composition, 279).

What does it mean when we say that the ethnographer is a “reality broker”? “Culture on the Page: Experience, Rhetoric, and Aesthetics in Ethnographic Writing,” Bonnie Sunstein, Commentary #4 DUE on Sunstein’s chapter.

Discussion: Tina Bell

Logger: Faye Snowden

Snacks: Ned Weidner

Week 6:
Writing and Teaching as Performance
3/24
READ: “Revising,” in Rewriting pp.98-123 & Erving Goffman, “The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life”, Commentary #6 on Goffman.

Discussion: Maria Shreve

Logger: Maria Garcia

Snacks: James Dyer

Week 7:
Cesare Chavez Day — No Classes
3/31
READ: Ch. 4 “Taking an Approach” in Rewriting, pp.73-97 and “The Loss of the Creature” Walker Percy, Commentary #5 DUE on Percy.

Week 8:
Mid-Term Exam
4/8

Week 9:
Spring Break
4/15

The practice of placing individuals under ‘observation’ is a natural extension of a justice imbued with disciplinary methods and examination procedures. Is it surprising that the cellular prison, with its regular chronologies, forced labour, its authorities of surveillance and registration, its experts in normality, who continue and multiply the functions of the judge, should have become the modern instrument of penality? Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?  –Foucault, “Panopticism.”

Week 10:
Education and the Panopticon
4/21
READ: Michel Foucault, “Panopticism” available here. DUE: Commentary #7 On Foucault’s essay. Read the “Afterword” in Rewriting, pp.124-134.

Discussion: Ned Weidner

Logger: Keri Ortiz

Snacks: Maria Shreve

Week 11:
Observing Diversity in the Composition Classroom
4/28

“Imagining Educational Research? on the Uses of Fiction in Autobiographical Narrative Inquiry” by Allison Pryer  DUE: Commentary #8 on Pryer.

Discussion: Maria Garcia

Logger: Joel Manfredi

Snacks: Maria Garcia

Week 12:
Cultural Issues in Classroom Observations
5/6
“Don’t Believe the Hype” Ann Ferguson, from Bad Boys: Public Schools and the Making of Black Masculinity;  Commentary #9 DUE on Ferguson

Discussion: Adam Russell and Mike Calou

Logger: Joel Manfredi

Snacks: Adam Russell

Week 13:
What is Ethnography for?
5/12
Ethnography/Memoir/Imagination/Story, by Paul Stoller. Commentary #10 DUE on Stoller.

Discussion: Keri Ortiz, Joel Manfredi

Logger: Maria Shreve

Snacks: Tina Bell

Week 14:
Final Reflections
5/19
Presentations: 5-minute multi-media or visual final presentations synthesizing what you have read and learned from conducting classroom-based research.

Logger: Maria Shreve

Snacks: Everyone