I have been moving all week, and had very limited net access, mostly just through my phone. That has slowed me down, but I am going to be done with the memoir of this semester very soon, and I will…

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James D. Dyer Dr. DeVries Ethnography Spring 2009   In ethnographies, memoirs, novels, and films anthropologists tell other people’s stories. In so doing, as Adamu Jenitongo once reminded me, we also tell our own stories. Many scholars may well object…

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Dr. Kim DeVries ENG 5870 Spring 2009   I Don’t believe the hype, and because of the life I’ve had, and the way I was raised, I never did. The truth is, all of us are at risk in one…

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James D. Dyer Dr. Kim DeVries ENG 5870 Spring 2009 Working “at the edge of incompetence” is what Elliot Eisner (in Saks (Ed.), 1996,p. 412) calls the risky practice of courting the unknown in one’s research practice. If we can…

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James D. Dyer Dr. Kim DeVries English 5870 Spring 2009 “It programmes, at the level of an elementary and easily transferable mechanism, the basic functioning of a society penetrated through and through with disciplinary mechanisms.”   I would say that…

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In the end, ethnology is an extremely personalized research method, and is useful specifically for that reason, but that is also its greatest weakness, so I would suggest that in addition to teachers being ethnographers in their own right, they also read many different ethnographies by others in order to get perspective on the workings of many classrooms.

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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.

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I have read it many times, and I have thought about it a lot even in between readings. It is one of my favorite pieces of philosophy, and also one of the most difficult to grasp, but that is exactly…

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  James D. Dyer De Kim DeVries ENG 5870 Spring 2009 Goffman, Ethnography and the Classroom   I have thought that Goffman’s work was fundamentally important to the social sciences since I first read it six or seven years ago,…

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  James D. Dyer Dr. Kim De Vries ENG 5870 Spring 2009   Re: Sunstein—She missed something here:   […] it is useful to ask such key focusing questions as: 1. Where is the culture? 2. What is the researcher-writer’s…

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