Description
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Unit 3
Inquiry into Community/Culture
Getting the Words Second Hand
Everything you hear directly is what we hear second hand. As we sit in the lobby of Sackett
Hall, Lee explains to us how it is to be deaf in a hearing world. . . . Although Lee grew up
struggling as a deaf child in a hearing home, her colleagues Ruth and Linda are among the 5
percent of the deaf population who come from deaf families. The deaf child born into a deaf
family has a distinct advantage in literacy, Linda tells me, a home environment rich in language.
Their home language is American Sign, and English is a learned second language. Lindas
parents and grandparents signed stories to her when she was a child, creating a context for
learning much the same as in any privileged home.
Bonnie S. Sunstein
Gangstas
They get on the bus in their Raider jackets, their ears plugged with huge brainstorms of rap
thats what they hear a tiny, metallic tish, tish, tish leaking from their earphonesthey board the
city bus in groups, talk loud . . . It would be a smart idea not to look at themno, I mean it
these are children, but they are children with machetes and guns and no point of ref-france, so
betta show me def-france, or you are outta breff, once I blow your brains to hell. . . . Keep your
eyes to yourself. Read your paperback. Read your magazine. Do not make eye contact. They are
children so wary of any dis they might smoke you for staring.
Richard Rodriguez
The Outsiders
ConVal is in some ways progressive. There are about 900 students and an administration that
consciously work to minimize the ultramacho sports culture that dominates many schools. . . .
Even so, the traditional hierarchies operate: the popular kids tend to be wealthier and the boys
among them tend to be jocks. The Gap Girls-Tommy Girls-Polo Girls compose the pool of
desirable girlfriends, many of whom are athletes as well. Below the popular kids, in a shifting
order of relative unimportance are the druggies (stoners, deadheads, burnouts, hippies or neohippies),
trendies or Valley Girls, preppies, sketeboarders and skateboarder chicks, nerds and
techies, wiggers, rednecks and Goths, better known as freaks. There are troublemakers, losers,
and floaterskids who move from group to group. Real losers are invisible.
Adrian Nicole LeBlanc
For this workshop, you will create a research paper on the theme of community/culture. Your
task is to collect different kinds of data (observation notes, interview notes, photos, stories,
letters, e-mail messages, poems, lyrics, employment applications, job descriptions, journal
entries, statistics, newspaper, magazine, and journal articles, book chapters, to name just a
few) and reach for an understanding of your subject that will allow your data to hang
together.
Every community and every place has a culture. You will be constantly asking yourself,
Wheres the culture of the community (e.g., members of an online community or a
reading club, senior citizens, Vietnam veterans) or the place you are investigating (e.g., a
community college student organization, a homeless shelter, a group home).
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Your goal is to find the culture
in the language & communication patterns of the community or place you are
studying
in its rituals and behaviors, and
in its attitudes, beliefs, and valuesor ideology.
Here is how Sunstein & Chiseri-Strater (2002) define a community with a culture of its own:
We consider any self-identified group of people who share language, stories, rituals,
behaviors, and values a subculture. Some subcultures define themselves by geography
(southerns, Texans, New Yorkers). Others define themselves by ethnicity or language
(Mexicano, Irish, Filipino). And others define their interests by shared rituals and
behaviors (fraternities, Girl Scouts, Masons, computer hackers). Whether its your
bowling league, your neighborhood pickup basketball team, your church, your
community government, or your book club, you simultaneously belong to many
different subcultures. (p. 6)
Data
For this assignment, you will continue to focus on inquiry-based writing. However, the focus
of inquiry will broaden to include field-based research as well as library and Web research.
Your goal is to give the reader a strong sense of the cultural group you have studied and your
research will come from the following sources:
interviews (at least 3)
observations
artifacts
library sources including books, articles, and reliable web sources
(at least 5)
Research Portfolio
Your research portfolio will contain all your datathe observation notes you made, the
interviews you conducted, the artifacts you collected, and the readings you completed.
Assignment 3: Choosing Your Field Site
Choose a site that is easy for you to access
If you cannot easily access the members of the subculture, you will not be able to complete your research. Also you may need special permission to conduct research at some places such as public schools or nursing homes. If you cannot quickly and easily obtain permission for your research, you will not be able finish your assignment. Some field sites contain a subculture that is so closely knit that you cannot step in enough to conduct your research. Such a site might have a culture that is too private or too hostile for you to talk to people or to just hang around and observe. Make sure your site has people that will be willing to give you information.
Choose a site with a distinct culture
Places like airports, malls, and restaurants may cause problems for you because the people who frequent them have no connection to the sites. The more public a site is, the more difficult to research. Here are a few important questions that you should ask yourself: Do people at the site share feelings of belonging Would they identify themselves as part of a group linked to that site
Choose a site that you can step in or step out
Sites such as your church or your job will be too difficult to research because you have such strong loyalties and commitments to the people there. You are so much a part of those subcultures that you may not be able to remove yourself enough to write about them. It may also be more interesting to find out about something new or unfamiliar. Moreover, strong negative feelings about a site can hinder your research. If the subculture at a site makes you very angry, upset, or repulsed, your feelings can get in the way of research.
Be unconventional and creative
If you have an original idea for a field site that sounds interesting to you, I am willing to work with you to make it happen. Research can be enjoyable if you are excited about your topic of study.
Assignment 3: Data Analysis
The mere recording of data is not important unless you connect it with some larger idea.
At critical points during the research process, you will need to take time to reflect on the data in your research portfolioto look at your observation and interview notesreflect on what youve learned so far and begin to analyze and synthesize the data that are most important to your work. You need to read and reread and reread your data looking for recurring themes, meanings, images, metaphors across your data and see if they form patterns. These patterns will help you develop theories (or form interpretations). Theory may sound like a scary word or a word that belongs only to physics. But theory, in reality, is a continuous, unconscious part of everyday life. In the following excerpt titled School Dance and Theory, Graves, an anthropologist, offers the metaphor of school dance to show us how developing theories should be part of your research process.
I think doing research is like chaperoning an eighth grade dance. You cant wait to see which ungainly guy is going to dance with which ungainly girl. You have all those ideas and theories bouncing around like so many ungainly adolescents. So, you experiment by pairing them up. Thats where the writing comes in. You put two ideas on the page, right next to each other, and see if they dance. Its a bit herky-jerky at first but then they get a bit smoother as you work and rework them. Its exciting. When students do research they arent going to know anything until they write. They say, I cant write yet; I dont have an idea. Of course, its the theories that save time. You know a little better who to send out together on the dance floor.
In your research portfolio, you now have material from different sources:
interview and observation notes
notes from outside sources (books, journals, & articles)
artifacts
Remember, however, that gathering pages and pages of information wont help you unless you take the time to reread them and reflect about what they meanto you, to your research site, and to your participants. The following questions can help you select the data that are most important to your work (and give you a feeling of control over the research material that you have collected):
Which of your participants words explain larger ideas about the subculture you are studying
What information (that comes from your Web and library research) confirms your initial hunches/impressions
What artifacts speak about your research site and your participants
As you collect observation / interview notes and information from secondary sources, data will accumulate quickly. Try writing one- or two-line summaries on stick-on notes explaining what is important about certain pieces and then affix them to your data. Stick-on notes are particularly useful tools because their small size forces you to write brief summaries and they are easy to replace as your insights change over the course of your project. Once you have your material captioned with a stick-on note, you can lay out your data to see what kinds of larger themes emerge.
Sample Research Project: Truckers Second Home
Rick, a first-year writing student, wrote about truckers and the trucking culture. He spent two Fridays at a truck stop and collected an interesting range of interviews from both truckers and employees at the truck stop. He gathered many occupational stories by inviting his participants both to brag and to complain about their jobs. During his research, Rick became sensitized to truckers musical tastes, cravings for home-cooked food, and their ways of passing time at the truck stop. To represent those features of the trucking culture, he collected CDs of particular songs, menus from the diner, trucking magazines, and pictures of the pinball machines at the truck stop.
In the process, he also read articles and books about trucking culture. Outside sources from other writers gave him an interesting imagethe image of the trucker as cowboy. And he was able to link his own findings with those sources that present a connection between truckers and cowboys.
The comparison between truckers and cowboys was something that surprised and attracted Rick at the beginning, but later he found out that it was a metaphor that did not reflect the realities of the trucking culture. Rick was particularly disturbed to find out how political the trucking industry actually is and how truckers face many of the same kinds of constraints in their work as office workers dosomething which does not match the metaphor of the open roadanother metaphor his outside sources gave him.
So truckers as cowboys did not become the central metaphor in Ricks paper. Remember that his big question, like your big questions, was whether truckers form a community with shared interests, values, and language. His analysis led toward his initial hunch that the truck stop is a kind of community and a subculture for many of the truckers who spend time there. One of the truck stop employees claims that the place is like the truckers second homea home away from homeand that provides the central metaphor for Ricks paper.
Sample Research Project: Bingo Community
The following is an excerpt from a students initial notes:
Im intrigued by the superstitions that surface at bingo games. Although I am not particularly superstitious, I find myself rubbing my neighbors winnings or coding a particular game by marking an edge with the dabber, hoping that the game will bring me luck. There are mostly women at the games, and usually there is a mix of ages, although the majority is probably over 50. The men seem to accompany the women, not vice versa. Ever since I was a young girl, I have accompanied my mother and her friends to bingo games at various Catholic churches and volunteer fire stations in Western New York. Until now, however, I never took notes on what people around me were doing at these games. Theres also an underlying feeling of camaraderie in this group that doesnt seem directly related to bingo. But maybe it is.
It was not until Holly reread her notes that she realized there were four significant themes that she could pursue as she continued the project. The process of rereading enabled her to write the following analysis on a stick-on note: The bingo dabber is only one of the rituals I need to keep track of. I know that there are many others. Another note says, Gender: I counted so many more women than men. My experience tells me this is representative. Another says, Superstitions: bingo is a game of chance and people have their lucky charms. And another caption is a big question mark, which alerted her mind to a theme that later became the central point: Sense of community.
63.
Advocacyplan
Description
*Writeupaplanforincreasingawarenesstohelp
advocatefortheLatinopopulationthatcouldbeimplementedinaschoolsetting.
*Thegoalisthattheplancanbeimplementedinacounseling
settingandisnotjustatheoreticalplan.
*Again,thisplanwouldhaveagoalto
increaseawarenessandadvocatefortheLatinoculturewith
issuesrelevanttoaschoolsetting.
*Theplanshouldincludea
minimumoffivecurrent(publishedwithinthelastfiveyears)researchstudies
fromprofessional/refereedjournalsinthefieldofprofessionalcounselingto
supporttherationaleforthisplan.
*Thewrittenpapermustbewellorganized,
clearlypresented,withsalientpointsandathoughtfulsummaryoftherationale
forthisparticularplanforadvocacy.
64.
Analytical,interpretationessayononeofthefollowingplays
Description
Lookatanalyzingspecificallythesymbolicnatureofagivenplay,itsthemes,motifs,contextsandhistory.What
istheaimofaspecificplayWhatshouldweasanaudiencetakeawayfromthedrama,whatlessonormoral
Also,pleasetrytoincorporateagoodthesisintocriticalanalysis.ThispapershouldNOTbeabookreport,buta
hardfacedanalysisoftheaspectsoftheplay.Analyzecritiquegivesusreasonswhytheauthordoeswhat
he/shedoes.
Writeanacademicpaperanalyzingaspecificwork(orworks)andthesymbolicnature,impact,andinterpretive
motivesofachosendrama.Fiveoutsidesourcesarerequiredfourprofessional,onewebbased.Some
questionsthatoftenarisewhenwritingapaper,howdoestheplayimpactanaudienceWhatarethesocialand
historicalimplicationsofthisparticularpieceofdramaHowdothecharacters,plot,setting,risingaction,and
resolutionsayaboutsociety,people,history,andtheaterHowdoesthelive,nearlyimmediateaspectofdrama
contributetoourloveofthemediumWhatscenesorcharactersusecommonmotifstoallowtoaudienceto
understandthesymbolicnatureofthedramaUsespecificlinesofdialoguetoargueyourpointsandoutside
sourcestoinformthereaderaboutyourclaims.
Plays:Thetempest,Theimportanceofbeingearnest,WatingforGodot,Thepillowman(PICKONEorTWO)
Ideasonwhattowriteabout:
Compareanearlyplaywithalaterplay.Wereadanddiscussedthesetenplaysinchronologicalorder.For
example,howdoessayTheTempestdifferfromWaitingforGodotinplot,style,wordchoice,themesand
messageHowaretheysimilarHowhastheaterchangedovertheyearsUsetwoplaysthathaveatleast50
yearsbetweentheirdatesofpublication.Aperfecttopicforthisideacouldincludeacomparison/contrastpaper
betweenWaitingforGodotandRosencrantzandGuildensternareDead.Examineacharacter,theme,motif,
catharticexperience,throughoutbothplays.
Lookatafewmajorissuesinoneortwoplays:Gender,Power,Knowledge,Love,Politics,Religion,Marriage,
Race,Violence,Death,England,Ireland,History,SocietyorClass.Howdocharacters,plotandsettingreflector
examinetheseissuesHowandwhydocharactersrepresenttheseissuesIsiteffectiveHowsoHowdothese
themeshaveanimpactoncatharsisOntheaudienceorreader
WhatcanDramateachusIsthereaninstructivenaturetodramaDoaudiencesorgenerationslearnfrom
warningsaboutflawsofcharacter,dangersofemotionorrationalityPickaplayandshowushowitimpacted
societyorsocietalnormsormaybewhyitshouldhaveevenifsocietydidntcatchon.
