Final Feedback

Hello, everyone.

I thought I would compile some collective feedback in the form of revision questions that have been raised during our workshops over the past two weeks. While none of this is "new" information, it might be useful as a final checklist, of sorts.

Public Document Project and Poster

• Does the final version of your public document meet both community partner expectations and the expectations of the assignment?
• Is there any aspect of the document that could be interpreted as biased, careless, or overstated?
• How well does the public document empower your community partner to self-represent without being "othered"?
• How well does the poster tell the "story" of your group's involvement at your agency? Does it do more than simply advocate for the agency?
• Will it -- at a glance -- convey your group's process of navigating the public document project?
• Is your poster professional in its representation of both your agency and your project? Is it organized and focused?
• As you construct your poster, consider whether it is visually stunning from 10 feet away and 10 inches away, and whether all text is legible.
• Each group should e-mail me a title of your poster and/or public document project by 4/27 at 5:00 p.m. so that I can compile them into a program for our final showcase.

The "Big" Ethnography

Here are some questions that were raised during our in-class peer review:

• How can you use specific examples from your various information sources more effectively? In other words, how will you set up and punctuate quoted passages from agency documents and cultural artifacts, how will you excerpt interview transcripts, and how will you narrate your own observations without losing focus?
• How could you "up-draft" a section of your fieldnotes in order to illustrate some of your most compelling claims?
• How could you make better use of "intertextual citation" (FW 169-173) as a way of mediating voices in order to develop a single claim?
• If you had to do so, could you identify a guiding sentence in each section of your ethnography that helps us understand how that section (and its paragraphs) contribute to the overall development of your claim? Can you identify a thread throughout the ethnographic essay?
• How could you minimize or eliminate excessive "metadiscourse" as you weave together the different parts of this argument?
• Where in the draft is your language overly biased?
• How will you help your reader to strike a balance between "being there" (experiencing the space, time, and environment of your community agency) and "being critical" (able to recognize the dissonance you noted in your community agency)?
• If you have integrated images, tables, figures, or graphics, are they sufficiently captioned and then called out in your text ("figure 1", "table 2")? Are they appropriately cited in your Works Cited list?

The Blog Portfolio

As you convert your blog to a portfolio, keep in mind the following principles:

• Framing -- how can your Critical Reflection show your ability to think critically about the experience? How can it demonstrate your "consciousness of consciousness" and your understanding of key terms, concepts, and theories from the course? How can you help an unfamiliar reader understand the theory you are constructing on your own?
• Storytelling -- how can your Critical Reflection tell the "dual stories" of your processes of investigation and reflection? How can the overview page as a whole provide some window into the cultural performances of the agency you studied?
• Clarity and organization -- how will the structure of this page equip an outside reader to understand how all the parts of your blog cohere and are a part of the same research experience?
• Design -- C.R.A.P. (contrast, repetition, alignment, proximity)
• Usability -- do your visited links change colors when they shouldn't? Are all images placed where they should be in your posts? Do their placements interfere with the readability of your text? Do all linked documents open? Are their file names sufficiently compact?
• Linguistic accuracy (typos, homonyms, and missing punctuation can loom much larger in blog posts)
• If you still need to submit a signed consent form (for the interview and visual portrait), please do so by 5/3 so that you can link these projects to your portfolio.

See you at our Showcase, where we celebrate the culmination of some interesting and community-responsible projects!

-Professor Graban

Select, Reflect, Project

Hello, everyone.

For tomorrow's portfolio workshop in SE 045, remember to complete the first two steps on the "portfolio preparation" worksheet and be sure you have access to the files you would like to link -- either on storage media, or in your Oncourse workspace. Our reading in Fieldworking will help us to contextualize the portfolio, especially inasmuch as an ethnographic portfolio often tells two stories simultaneously.

The portfolio is as much a project of reflection as it is of gathering or selection but, as you already know, high-quality reflection takes a certain amount of critical distance, synthesis, and consciousness of consciousness, not to mention some skilled "up-drafting."

At this point in the semester, I'll offer one final reminder from Emerson, Fretz, and Shaw of just how complex (and powerful) is your writing task: "Ethnography is the peculiar practice of representing the social reality of others through the analysis of your own experiences in the world of these others" (Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes 10).

See you tomorrow,
Professor Graban

"The End is Near, Yet Still So Far ..."

Hello, everyone.

First, thanks to several of you for inspiring the title of this post in class today. Second, for those of you struggling to focus your issue question, or if you are uncertain that you can actually begin to answer it in an organized fashion, your best options are to:

1. try situating the issue question within your community agency;
2. try orienting your question toward the "leadership" definitions or the "citizenship" frameworks that we took from Blume, Magalhaes, and Battistoni;
3. try "up-drafting" sections from your fieldnotes in order to discover essential focal points (FW 427-441);
   
4. locate 1 or 2 final sources of information, either from academic archives or from community-based archives.

Finally, it's a busy time, so I thought you might appreciate some reminders of what is ahead for us in the next couple of weeks:

4/7 -- Final blog posts due!

4/7 -- Lou Malcomb is leading an optional information session on finding, interpreting, and treating statistics as "sources" for community research and writing at Wells Library Information Cluster #1. She will also be on hand to provide individual assistance if you are in search of specialized or unique sources for either your Public Document Project or your "Big" Ethnographic Essay. The session is optional, but I highly encourage you to attend.

4/12-4/14 -- No class next week, so that we can have one-on-one conferences on your "Big" Ethnographic Essay. Please use this time well for researching, drafting, and/or working with your group on the Public Document Project. Here is the current conference schedule:

Tuesday 4/12/11
1:20 Ashley Thomas
1:40 Morgan Metallic
2:00 Chelsey Brunner
2:20 Sam Adams
2:40 Michael Wey
3:00 Eden Faye
3:20 Corey Rosenblum
3:40 Cat Nichols

Wednesday 4/13/11
1:20 Maria Ficker
1:40 Mollie O'Reilly
2:00
2:20 Jacob Janicki
2:40 Broderick Thompson
3:00 Alyssa Alley
3:20 Talia Shifron
3:40
6:20 Jessi Daugherty

Thursday 4/14/11
1:20 Sara Troutman
1:40 Garrett Montgomery
2:00 Kristine Meade
2:20 Alyssa Rudner
2:40 Andrew Cook
3:00 Claire Robinson
3:20 Jack Pupillo
3:40 Cameray Boyden

All conferences are in BH 474. As a reminder, bring your completed triangulation heuristic and an outline, as well as any other questions you have. I have uploaded both the heuristic and a tool for outlining to our Oncourse Resources folder, if you need them.

4/19 -- an in-class workshop on converting your blog to a portfolio (we're back in SE 045). In advance of this workshop, I'll give you a short prep sheet with about 10 minutes' worth of instructions for preparing your files to be able to link them.

4/28 -- we are all dressing "snappy casual" for the end-of-semester poster presentation (otherwise known as "Friday office dress," "comfortable but put together," and numerous other interpretations that I can only imagine!). If someone can give me a concrete example of "snappy casual," that will help me know how to dress.

I'm quite excited by how your issue questions are taking shape. You may not feel or realize this yet, but you all have covered some incredible ground in your work as community researchers and writers! Good luck as you work through these projects, and see you in conferences.

-Professor Graban