1. WA4, introduction and example
Interviewing Tips
Explore Storycorp
WA4 in sound? Try it!
WA4 video?
2. Groundwork Activity on page 299 (FW)
3. The Cultural Translator: body language and culture, words and culture, ethnopoetics (?), insider language, verbal performances (+ groundwork activity on page 351)
4. East Caney (again)–watch and listen
Take a look at the updated schedule and other details at www.convergingliteraciescenter.wordpress.com (or “commerce week on writing” at blogroll)
For literacy scholars, the Commerce Week on Writing is a research paradise! The artifacts, interviews, and other notables are coming to US!
Take advantage. Here’s a review by our own Caroline. Should provide a good model for you. As you prepare your reviews, please post them to your blogs. And let me know if you have one you feel is well formed for larger audiences. I’d like to circulate those throughout the Commerce Week on Writing. And after.
Here’s Caroline on the songwriter’s night at Cowhill (10/15/09): http://convergingliteraciescenter.wordpress.com/reviewing-cwow-photos-video-reviews/
1. WA2 due, unless you get feedback on it from someone in the Writing Center. If you do that and submit a feedback form (available in the Writing Center), you can submit it on Thursday, October 1. Otherwise, turn it in today. Submit a hard copy or submit a link to where it can be found at your blog. I’ll circulate a list.
2. For the most part, your research projects are falling into one of three categories: (a) those making extensive use of life histories to understand literacy (ala Brandt), (b) those studying literacy in a contemporary context (ala Moss, Mirabella, Barton and Hamilton, Smith and Wilhelm, Skilton-Sylvester), and (c) those working to investigating literacies via archival materials (ala Gold). All three categories of research will make use of interviews, fieldnotes, and archival materials. However, the research projects falling into the first category will emphasize the interviews, those in the second will emphasize fieldnotes, and those in the third will emphasize archival materials.
Today, we’ll talk about fieldnotes. Soon we’ll talk about interviewing techniques and how to make extensive use of archival materials–not just those presented in the Special Collections at Gee Library and in their Digital Collections but also at the fieldsite itself. Archives are merely artifacts from which we can extrapolate something of the past. Diaries or minutes from meetings or rule books or guidelines or handouts or newsletters or personal letters or diplomas or photographs or certificates or trophies or a million other things.
3. Fieldnotes are “the observations written by a researcher at a research site, during an interview, and throughout this data collection process” (Fieldwork, 501).
4. Take fieldnotes over oral history from Special Collections at Gee Library (see “Research Journal #7”)
5. Before next time, take fieldnotes at research site or over relevant archival materials. After your Research Proposal is approved, you will be expected to submit fieldnotes each week.
English 102-Honors 