DUE AUGUST 31 AT FIRST CLASS DOWNTOWN!
Purpose of assignment: To ground our discussion of American education and democracy in our own educational experiences.
To this end, you will write a brief ethnography of your own education. The ethnography will be a four to six pages, double-spaced, typewritten paper. Students and faculty will share portions of our ethnographies with each other in class.
Background: The literal meaning of “ethnography” is a portrait (graph) of a group of people (ethnos). An ethnography
- is a “social, political, and/or historical portrait of a particular group of people or a particular situation or practice, at a particular period in time, and within a particular context or space” (UNC, n.d.);
- is based on firsthand research, or fieldwork, among the people and activities the researcher is studying;
- may draw on sensory detail (the sights, smells, sounds, feelings evoked, etc.), and storytelling techniques, along with more objective description and analysis;
- requires the researcher to participate in the environment and activity under study at the same time s/he observes and analyzes all that s/he is seeing.
The assigned readings by Anyon and Delpit both offer examples of ethnographic narrative. Anyon describes teaching and learning at five elementary schools in different socioeconomic settings, with detailed, or ‘thick’, description of the physical environments, and exchanges between teachers and students. To support her argument for the significance of race and power in education, Delpit includes richly detailed ‘scenes’ of interactions between teachers and students, as well as a description of her own experiences in different educational settings.
Your task: For your educational ethnography, you will draw on your memories of your firsthand experience of your education to offer a portrait of education in your particular school(s) or other educational environments. If you are able to supplement your memory with conversations with your parents, teachers, classmates, or friends, or any “artifacts” such as school newspapers, yearbooks, etc., that would be helpful, but not necessary. You may choose to focus on one particular school that you have attended, whether it was elementary, middle, high school, college, etc., or you may offer a portrait of your overall education that includes snapshots from each of the schools (including home schools) you attended (see Delpit reading, p. xv, for an example of one-line snapshots from her experiences in different school settings; your snapshots would be longer), or you may choose to focus on an event or a theme or two that run through many of your educational experiences.
In your ethnography, you will be 1) giving details from your experience, and 2) making meaning of these details. Here are some questions to which you may consider responding (please do not try to answer all of these, but focus on ones that are particularly important to your experience):
- Where have you attended school—including the town/city/country?
- What have the neighborhood(s) and the physical space(s) of the educational environment(s) looked like?
- What did you notice about race, class, gender, the differently-abled, sexual orientation, religion, and other social identities in the life of the school?
- Did any of the issues about race and power raised by Delpit seem significant at your school? What did interactions reveal?
- Where would you locate your school(s) in the categories described in the reading by Anyon? Explain why you would locate your school(s) there?
- How would you relate your education to Freire’s contrast of “banking” education with “problem-solving” education?
- Based on your experience, what has been the purpose of your schooling?
- What was your experience of the transition from high school to college? Have you noticed distinctions between your educational experience in high school and college?
- What have you liked about your education? What have you not liked so much?
- What other issues have been evident in your schooling?
- What else seems significant about your education?
- How well or poorly do you feel your schools prepared you and other students to participate fully in democracy?
Be sure to draw on two to three concepts from the readings (Anyon, Freire, and/or Delpit) that help you to make your points. Cite the authors, including page numbers if you use direct quotations, following the guidelines with which you are most familiar, e.g., American Psychological Association (APA), Modern Language Association (MLA), etc. And, briefly explain the concept before using it!
Suggestion for your writing process: Begin by jotting down notes about significant events and memories of your own education. Then, read the pieces by Anyon, Delpit, and Freire; the readings may help to trigger other important and meaningful details from your education to include in your paper. Be sure to include a lot of “thick,” that is, detailed, description to support your perspective on your education. Keep in mind that the most successful papers are papers that focus on two or three points and then expand on them.
University of North Carolina Writing Center (n.d.). Anthropology.Chapel Hill, NC: UNC Writing Center. Retrieved July 26, 2011 from http://www.unc.edu/depts/wcweb/handouts/anthropology.html.