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