Agenda, 12/8

Peer Review your Final Ethnographic Project

1. Fieldsite: What is the fieldsite here? It might be an actual place or some organization made up of people or it might just be the life histories of the people themselves. Whatever the fieldsite, it should be described in enough detail for you to know it well and be ready to enter it with the researcher. That means the researcher should have described it well enough in her ethnography. Do you feel she/he has?

2. Statement of Problem: What is the research question here?

Is it sufficiently grounded in the relevant research in literacy studies? If not, what suggestions can you offer from our readings that might help bring the scholarly nature of the research question forward?

Is the research question clearly stated? what might help clarify the question for you?

3. Methods: The researcher should make the research tools as clear as possible and tie those methods to the overall research question. What methods did the researcher use? Interviews? Surveys? Fieldobservations? Some combination of the above? Something else? How did she work to treat the participants with the care and respect they deserve? How many participants were involved and how? How much time did the researcher spend in the field? What’s the relationship between these methods and the research question?

4. Interpreting the Fieldwork: What recurring themes emerged from the research? Does the researcher effectively foreground those themes in terms of her research and connect them to the research question? Do you need to see more here?

5. What contribution does this study make to the larger scholarly conversation in literacy studies? Who does the researcher cite from our course readings and how does it work in terms of this study? Comb our course readings for relevant quotes and arguments. Offer at least two suggested quotes that might work well in terms of bringing the researcher’s current study into conversation with the larger scholarly conversation.

6. Is it interesting? Star the most interesting part and explain what makes it so interesting.

7. Are there areas of the study you’d like to hear more about. Mark those areas and explain what you’d like to hear more about and why.

8. How about the current organizational structure? Any recommendations there?

9. The title? Any recommendations?

10. Anything else?

Findings: What are the recurring themes