James D. Dyer

Dr. Kim De Vries

ENG 5870

Spring 2009

Midterm

Question #5, The readings in this class have focused the ways that ethnography is particularly suited to those researchers who are truly wondering, seeking, curious.  Share your experiences in your classroom observations, and connect these observations to the texts we have studied—is actually constructed from a piece of Patricia Hample’s essay, “Memory and Imagination”, though it is not perjury, Patricia Hample’s observation of the way that we think and act allows for mistakes in citation, and I would suspect that this is just a case of Purcelle-Gates having read Hample’s essay before she wrote this, and, a small piece of it stuck in her head.

Ethnography is not for researchers who already know what they are seeking or for those who have strong hypotheses to test. Rather, it is for those researchers who are truly wondering, seeking, curious about some aspect of literacy as it occurs naturally in sociocultural contexts (Purcell-Gates 94).

Hample says, right at the end of her essay, that memoir is travel writing:

But I cannot think of the memoirist as a tourist. This is the traveler who goes on foot,l living the journey, taking on mountains, enduring deserts, marveling at the lush green places. Moving through it all faithfully, not so much a survivor with a harrowing tale to tell as a pilgrim, seeking, wondering. (Mind Readings, 190)

I cannot fault her for this in any way, nor do I wish to, I’m just making an observation about the way our brains work. We store up words and phrases, bits and pieces of this and that, and use them unconsciously. I can’t even be certain that Purcelle-Gates ever read Hample, or that if she did, she read it before writing this piece about ethnography, though I know from looking at works cited in each piece, and from the publication date of Hample’s work that it was written first, and it is the sort of thing that Purcell-Gates would have been likely to read, and that line about seeking, wondering, or wondering, seeking, either way it is phrased stuck in my head since 2001 when I first read the Hample essay.

I suppose part of the point I’m trying to make here is that there is nothing new under the sun, but the real point is that we each assemble what we have read, observed, or learned in some other fashion into our own unique view of the world, and our own unique subjectivity for further learning and observation. Everything we read, or see on TV, or experience directly, or experience secondhand through listening to someone talk goes into the databank of our minds. There it is filtered, shifted around in unpredictable ways determined by each of our particular pathologies of experience, and then it is turned into knowledge by us taking that distillate out of our heads and writing it down.

This is a much more complex process than most people ever want to think about, but it imperative for the ethnologist to think about the process as much as they think about their observations because the process is the observation. I am observing another graduate instructor’s ENG 1001 class, and I am observing an upper division creative writing class that I am a registered student in, and I am observing the ENG 1001 class I’m teaching’s blackboard. now, I am observing these classes through much different lenses because my experience of each is significantly different from either other classroom experience. In one, I am simply an observer who pops in every couple weeks, takes notes, talks a little, and leaves. In the next I am there presenting my poetry and responding to others poetry most days that the class is in session, and no one except the professor knows that I have any other agenda. In my own class, I am observing the classes interactions on the blackboard, though I may try to video at least one, and preferably two class sessions before the end of the semester.

Each of these classrooms is a distinct subculture under the umbrella of American university culture. Each is distinct for several reasons, one is my position in the group, another is the nature of the classes, another is the individual students in the classes and their level of engagement and comfort in that space and at the particular times that I see them, Then ther is the blackboard, which gives me access to everything that these students have written in a writing intensive class over the past couple of months, but this class is the one that I have the hardest time reading a s a culture.

Why? I think that Percy’s observations about the packaging of experience have something to do with it, and the fact that I am consciously trying to break the experience package in every way I can think of. I had them read “The Loss Of The Creature,” early in the semester, and I hold class outdoors on Friday mornings. they talk well in small groups, but not in the classroom, yet, they are writing like mad online, so the culture that is forming is sort of weird. I know that my pedagogy is working because they are writing so much I cannot keep up with them, and most of what they write is good. I told them to work, and they are doing it at a prodigious rate, and I see them around campus in each other’s company, so they are forming cultural bonds within the class, but knowing them is hard.

I think that with this class in particular, I am living in the hyphen, like Brueggemann talked about. I told my students that I was going to be doing ethnography in our classroom, but I don’t think that any of them know what that means, so I am both instructor and observer, and I am “the cool teacher” too because I do weird stuff, like take them outside, and ask them strange questions.

Frank talks about one of her student teachers going to “the candy store” that a student’s parents ran out of their house, I have not gotten that close to any of my students this year, but they have written some amazingly personal stories in their essay one assignments, and they continue to engage in a very personal way online, with each other and also with my responses to their work. This is revealing in a peculiar way, this generation is much more comfortable communicating online than in person, and I understand the reasons for that but it still strikes me as odd. Maybe it is that the package provided by the computer mediated communications media allows a feeling of anonymity that allows for a level of confidence in their writing that they don’t get in papers that they have to actually hand in, but at the same time, they are more reluctant to actually speak in class.

I am truly wondering, searching, and curious. I am not entirely sure what I am searching for either which fits in well with an ethnographic perspective. I don’t know what i have to learn, I just know that I have a lot to learn, and every opportunity that I come across, I try to learn something. This is an interesting class because if has interesting readings, and it forces me to actually examine what I and other people are doing each and every day. And then I have to try to make sense of it in a comprehensible theoretical framework…that is the hard part.