11.4: Learning from Somebody Else’s Experience

You can, of course, learn from other people’s experiences, too. I want to tell you the story of my first ethnographic project. The project, a study of a graduate-level literature course, should help you see in concrete terms what I’ve been describing: the kinds of writing involved, and some of the ethical issues that arise from talking about real people and real events, with real implications.

Fall 1996 semester: for a research methods course (most graduate students are required to take at least one methods course, in which we learn to do the professional scholarship we’ll have to do as faculty), our major assignment, which would span about eight weeks, was to pick a course in our department, negotiate access to the course with the professor, and do participant-observation research for about five weeks, leaving the last three weeks to write an ethnographic description of fifteen to twenty pages.

The first half of the research methods course had gone smoothly. We studied ethnographic techniques: negotiating access (convincing participants to let us study their cultures), interview strategies, ways of taking fieldnotes, and types of data analysis. We read two full-length ethnographic studies—Elizabeth Chiseri-Strater’s Academic Literacies and Bonnie Sunstein’s Composing a Culture—as well as two books that theorize the importance of writing to ethnographic research: anthropologist Clifford Geertz’s Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author and sociologist John Van Maanen’s Tales of the Field: On Writing Ethnography. I’ll return to the Geertz text later; for now, suffice it to say that our entire class believed we’d been well trained to do participant-observation research, and to write interesting and ethically responsible accounts of our experiences.

I decided to approach a professor I had taken a course from before; the course I wanted to study examined relationships between jazz music and literature in the 1950s. I had really enjoyed working with him, and he had some teaching habits I wanted to examine while I wasn’t a student in his course. He was intrigued by the idea, and because we’d developed a solid working relationship, he quickly granted access. His only request, one you shouldn’t be surprised to encounter, was that I share the final paper with him.

The fieldwork went fine. Over five weeks, I attended class three times each week for fifty minutes; took fieldnotes on the nine students and the professor (an average of five handwritten pages per day); interviewed everybody, some more than once (a total of fifteen interviews, averaging about twenty minutes). The professor gave me copies of his syllabus and all the assignments, as well as examples of work students had done earlier in the semester so I could see the kinds of topics they were interested in researching. In all, I had hundreds of pages of notes, course documents, students’ work, and my own journals.

By the time I was done with the fieldwork, I knew how I would focus my description and analysis—which, in retrospect, was part of the problem. What I found, in brief, from my research was what I thought I’d find—a professor who knew his material inside-out, who worked hard to involve students in conversations, who cared as much as anybody I’ve ever known about his students, but who at times responded to students’ comments in ways that seemed dismissive or sarcastic. As a result, the students were sometimes confused about how to respond to the professor’s questions and discussion prompts, which frustrated the professor into sometimes sounding even more sarcastic, hoping to lighten the mood but often doing just the opposite.

I had plenty of evidence to write a good paper demonstrating what I’d learned.

We spent two weeks drafting and revising the papers, and receiving extensive feedback from classmates and the professor of the research methods course. All the feedback emphasized readers’ needs for more direct evidence: anecdotes from class meetings; sections of interview transcripts; relevant pieces of the syllabus and course materials. By the time I submitted the final draft, I believed I had represented the central issue of the class in a readable, interesting, and believable way. My professor, Wendy, (mostly) agreed. She gave me an A- on the paper, an A in the course, and I thought I’d had a positive learning experience.

I had, but not the one I anticipated. Here’s what Wendy wrote about my study in a textbook that incorporates a lot of the work and experiences of graduate students in her courses:

I have had a classroom mini-ethnography cause consternation
to a colleague who had allowed one of my students to
study him. Consent forms were signed. Classroom reports
were drafted and commented on and shared: novice work,
much learning. The teacher who was portrayed in the classroom
study was—with some reason—much dismayed to read
his portrait. I was able to assure him that the student had
no intention of publishing that work. (He didn’t, particularly

after talking to the teacher, whose work he actually admired
no matter how his report played out, and he had even less intention
of doing so when he realized his informant was upset.)
(Bishop 122)

Wendy’s description is much more careful and rational than mine was; I wrote in my journal, after the professor reacted to what I’d written:

I can’t believe this guy! I can’t believe he called me, at home,
after midnight last night to yell at me about my paper. We
were on the phone for an hour while he disputed everything
I said, except the actual facts! Was I wrong when I said [ . . .
], or when I described his way of [ . . . ], or [ . . . ]? [I’m leaving
out specific details to protect his identity]. Everything I
said was right! It’s not my fault if he’s offended by his own
behaviors.

Once I calmed down (a few days later!), I began to understand the professor’s reaction: not so much that I’d included specific unflattering details, but that I’d made him look unprofessional (while I thought he looked quirky and interesting). He was an award-winning faculty member, understandably concerned that a published version of my paper could harm his reputation—an example of what I meant before when I talked about some of the ethical problems that arise from ethnographic writing. In retrospect, I wish I had shown him a draft of the paper while I was working on it so that he’d had a chance to respond, and perhaps clarify, what he believed were misrepresentations and misunderstandings on my part. I also learned a hard lesson about seeing situations from the perspectives of all participants; while my paper represented the students’ frustrations at length, it didn’t account for the professor’s nearly well enough.