Post Your Breakthroughs Here!

After hearing from some of you today that you'd like to be able to post your "Ah-ha!" moments or other fieldworking discoveries here on the blog, I'm writing this new post in the hope that you will "comment" by sharing with us exciting news from your fieldsite or your interview experiences. YAY! Here's to some lightbulbs going off this weekend (in good way, as in, "I have an idea!"). 

And if you're stumped for what to wear to that crazy Halloween party, I know: go as a fieldworker. 

Cross Pollination

Hello Fieldworkers!

Thanks to most of you for posting your Verbal Snapshot to our class blog. YAY! The first foray into our virtual fieldworking gallery worked! I made an executive decision to move Stacy and Rachael's pieces into the vessel with everyone else's, so as not to "feature" some and not others (this is the power of the teacher, people). 

I urge you to scroll through your classmates' writing and to read it carefully, looking for things you like and ways you might revise or hone your own descriptive writing. 

I'd also like you to read my comments--about specificity in word choice, casual (colloquial) vs. serious language, and about capturing the tone of your fieldsite. Reading each others' fieldwriting is an important lens through which we can consider our own writing.

And, remember, this is academic writing. This is research writing. This is writing that needs to be reminiscent of Jennifer Toth and rhetorical forms (ethos, pathos, logos). Push yourselves to live up to that high standard!

I also urge you to take the poll I created (look to the right). Happy reading, and see you in the Library tomorrow at noon.

Coming Soon...

Once you have gathered enough data from your fieldsites, I will ask you to post pieces of your fieldworking  projects as well as questions to pose to the other Honors Program fieldworkers. This is also a site to facilitate cross-pollination in your research process; that is, another student may know a contact or have access to an event in your subculture. It would be great to share this kind of "cultural capital" with one another. 

The news from my section is that everyone has chosen a subculture to study and has taken their first set of fieldnotes. Research proposals are finished, and we are on to more fieldnotes and analysis and are beginning to talk about interviews. 

The subcultures that my students have selected for their fieldstudies are:

• Dominican Catholics 
  
• White Noise Records in Providence
  
• Tattoo Parlor in North Kingstown
  
• Girl Scouts of Westerly
  
• Independently-Owned Bakery: Seven Stars
  
• "Tomorrow's Fund" at Hasbro: Mothers of Kids with Cancer
  
• Shryne: Life of a Local Rock Band
  
• R. I. National Guard Band
  
• Professional Poker Players
  
• Underground Artists in Providence
  
• Theater Actors in Providence
  

Collaboration is Part of the Process

This is the space where our students can come together to talk about their projects, to pose questions to each other, to celebrate small victories ("I did an interview today!"), and to work out their analysis of data. It's a virtual classroom-away-from-the-classroom for both of our sections. YAY!