Reading the Forum

The only picture of me speaking at the
Forum because the students
were speaking the rest of the time.

Last week I had the chance to present on Practitioner Day at the Ethnography Forum. My presentation was Literacy in an Out of School Space: What Counts Here? Well, I say MY presentation, but really, I was just the person who wrote the proposal. In reality, the four students and park ranger with whom I presented were the bringers of knowledge, and I was the person who clicked the button when the slides needed to advance.

And we made people cry.

Not the bad kind of crying, where people are sad. The good kind of crying, where people are so amazed by the insights of the youth that the experience is cathartic for the participants. Behar (1996) writes about this sort of ethnography in The Vulnerable Observer: Anthropology that Breaks Your Heart, saying, "I think what we are seeing are efforts to map an intermediate space we can't quite define yet, a borderland between passion and intellect, analysis and subjectivity, ethnography and autobiography, art and life" (p. 174). The students presented their ideas in a traditional way, but as students, they're not the ones whose voices are typically heard in educational research. That was my goal with this presentation - not just to share my interpretations of their experiences but instead to have them share.

The students were looking at their ways of understanding audience in relationship to blog posts that were responded to by adults from around the country - some who agreed with them, and some who didn't. Their take-aways for teachers were:

1. Place-based learning is memorable. (This because none of the four will ever forget that Robert Hemings, Thomas Jefferson's slave, was absent from a museum exhibit, and that led to deep discussions about what it means to write the Declaration of Independence when a slave is bringing you your slippers)
2. Big audiences are good for revision. (This because all four students felt that the responses from people from around the country led them to consider deeply what they'd written and what they meant, and if the audiences' responses indicated that those two matched)
3. Teachers have to be very aware of what it means to put student work out to a wide audience. (This because, as one of the students said, "It's scary. Really scary." Also because, as another student said, "When you know your work is going to be read by a lot of people, there's a lot that you won't say. A lot of topics that you're not willing to go into."

The more time I spend thinking about research, the more I realize that I want to keep positioning myself in this interpretive mode of education research (Erickson, 1986). As Behar (1996) asks, "Can we speak in a way that matters, in a way that will drive a wedge into the thick mud of business as usual" (p. 166)? As I keep looking at youths' writing with them, can I help to make visible the writing practices that they find useful and inspiring? If I do that, can I help to speak back to writing practices that are imposed on youth by external sources? Practices that look more like this.

I was so incredibly impressed by the students' presentation, by their intelligence, and by their generosity in sharing their time for the Forum.

References:

Behar, R. (1996). The vulnerable observer: Anthropology that breaks your heart. Boston, MA: Beacon.

Erickson, F. (1986). Qualitative methods in research on teaching. In M.C. Wittrock (Ed.), Handbook of research on teaching (3rd ed.). New York, NY: MacMillan.