I love ethnography studies. I find that this type of research encourages researchers to go out and actually be with the people they are studying; really understand those participants values/ideas/frustrations/etc., and then it can lead to really enriching data. When I worked at ACT, I actually worked on one ehtonogrpahic study. We wanted to learn about how students perceived the check-in process for the ACT. We went and interviewed students during and after; reviewed tweets using specific hashtags; then interviewed the volunteer coordinators (mostly teachers) about what went well and what didn’t in their perspective.
The process was really enlightening. We went back to the ACT campus, we got those giant 2′ x 3′ sheets of paper, tons of markers, and listened through all of the data. We would code the data by common themes that the students and coordinators mentioned. We were able to identify several issues with the check-in process that we could target and change. So, we made a few changes, implemented them at a few test sites, and then did the entire process over again. We interviewed students and coordinators to see what went well and what didn’t. And, we kept doing this pattern until we got to a point where coordinators felt that the process was much less stressful (and much less of a workload for them), and we found a few ways to ease students anxiety such as literally setting up a hashtag for them to vent frustrations (which they found was for fun; it also served as data for other teams). I know the team has changed the process since I’ve left, but I found this experience really enriching. It was extremely vulnerable at the beginning, but the more progress we made and the happier people were, it made it worth it.
When I go to LaFrance’s and Nicolas’ piece about institutional ethnography — I see this work as potentially very helpful and very impactful. I think that ethnography typically takes such a long time to conduct (which I think is both a downfall and an advantages of this method), but it yields such great data. I really enjoyed reading this piece because there were elements that I could pinpoint of using during that study such as standpoint. One of the ACT members actually served as a coordinator to see firsthand the chaos these roles had to deal with. Another key concept was problematics which basically means that not all individuals will act in the same way in the same instance. I think that with long-term ethnographic studies you start to see more of that variability of individuals, which is important to shape your arguments in your research.
Overall, I really just had a lot of fun reading these articles because I have forgotten how much I love ethnographic studies; I love how they can be applied in institutional settings. I think I want to ponder if there is a way to do an institutional ethnographic study with my writing place. Thanks for assigning these readings!
Katie Rieger, Portfolio 