11.7: Learning from a Better Experience

Most of what I’ve discussed in the last two sections (Risks and Benefits; Historical Context) I learned after I’d struggled with the research project I described earlier. Although I couldn’t know then what I know now, at least you can know some of it. In the same spirit but on a happier note, I’ll finish this essay by describing a—not to put too fine a point on it—better ethnographic project, one that embodies what I learned. The goal is for you to see what these concepts look like in practice. Although this project was much bigger and more complex than what you’re doing, you should be able to see what it looks like to design and conduct a study that incorporates the kinds of care and respect for participants I’m calling for, and to see how various forms of writing contribute to making that happen.

My PhD dissertation, called Grassroots Democracy in Process: Ethnographic Writing as Democratic Action, merged my interests in doing and teaching ethnographic writing. I had taught ethnographic writing in my courses for years, studied what other ethnographic writing teachers do, and studied ethnographic theory and practice in other disciplines. What would happen if I did ethnography in a course where I was teaching ethnography? How would what I’d learned about research ethics, collaborative knowledge-making, and authority play out as I tried both to enact and teach them? I was also interested, as a teacher whose scholarly work speaks primarily to other teachers, in exploring the difficulties of being both the instructor and the researcher in the same setting.

In order to do what I’d learned—and, because I’d already started publishing articles about research ethics, to practice what I preached—a key goal of the project was making sure that the students’ needs never became subordinate to mine. I needed to collect data: fieldnotes
from every class and conference, transcripts of interviews, the
students’ writing, course materials, and so on. I also needed not to to
push their projects in ways that fit my expectations. Most importantly,
I needed to make sure that the students’ learning was always the focus
of our activities.

For the most part, we could say that I was trying to build the kind of reciprocal relationship that Ellen Cushman calls for. Anthropologist Robert Jay probably describes what I was after a little more precisely: a relationship of collaboration and trust. The goal, that is, wasn’t simply to return favors to participants, but to establish a relationship in which we all worked together on a common project that benefitted all of us equally as a result. As early as 1969, anthropologists were beginning (and I can’t overemphasize that word—even forty years later many anthropologists don’t fully subscribe to this position) to privilege the well-being of their research participants above even their own research agendas. Jay declares:

In future field work I shall place first a mutual responsibility
to my whole self and to those I go to learn from, in agreement

with my desire to relate to them as full equals, personal and
intellectual. I shall try to use my relationships with them to
find out what topics are relevant to each of us, to be investigated
through what questions and what modes of questioning,
and for what kinds of knowledge. I should wish to make
the first report for them, in fact with them; indeed it may be
that written reports would seem to us redundant. (379)

Jay might sound preachy (he does to me), but his point is important. Ethnographers always have to remember that our work can have serious implications for our participants. As such, we share the responsibility to make those implications: (1) as positive as possible; and (2) collaboratively determined with our participants. By engaging our participants as collaborators, we make sure their needs are just as important as ours; our studies serve their aims as much as ours; and they benefit from participating in them as much as we do.

In my project, students collaborated as fellow researchers primarily by reading, responding to, and discussing every word of my fieldnotes during the semester. Every two weeks, I’d distribute all my notes. They’d read them for homework, and then we’d discuss them. They corrected any mistakes or misattributions in the notes. The discussions would focus on issues they saw recurring or emerging, what they found interesting or anomalous, and questions they had either about the method or the data. Thinking through all this information with the students was stimulating; they had ideas and noticed patterns I wouldn’t have, which I carefully credited them with in the dissertation. More important than the direct benefit to me was the sense of collaboration this practice generated among them. Because the group really understood the project as a collaboration rather than an imposition, they spoke candidly about contentious issues, and were willing to trust that when I asked them to do seemingly strange activities, I wasn’t just experimenting on them.

I also designed the course so that everything students did for my study helped them with their ethnographies; everything we did served two purposes at once. When they read and commented on fieldnotes, for example, they were collaborating and helping me understand our class, but they were also learning valuable lessons about fieldnote-taking and data presentation. About halfway through the semester, I asked them to interview each other about our class; the transcripts provided me with insights into their thoughts about the semester, while at the same time allowing them to practice interviewing techniques. An exercise late in the semester, in which they reflected on what they thought somebody would need to know in order to do well in the course, helped them learn to synthesize and make claims about vast amounts of data, while showing me what struck them as important, annoying, useful, and distracting about the way we conducted ourselves in class.

By the end of the semester, I had a pretty good idea what my ethnography would say. Its central claim, that involving my students in my project helped them do theirs better, seemed clear and supportable. However, I also knew from my last experience that the obvious claim certainly wasn’t all there was to it, and I needed to write and think a lot more about what I’d learned. I was lucky I had lots of time—more than a year—to write slowly and revise extensively; also, I was lucky to have two readers who worked very hard to provide feedback. The upshot of that long process was a project that made a much better claim than the one I’d started with. Yes, the ethnographies from that semester were better than ones I’d read before, but there was more to it than simply that they’d participated in somebody else’s study while doing their own. I realized, after months of writing and rewriting, that all the writing we’d done (fieldnotes, comments on fieldnotes, interviews, in-class exercises) had been the catalyst for the students’ improved work. That is, the fact that we wrote with, for, and about each other all semester long had helped the students understand what they were engaged in much more richly than they would have otherwise.

You shouldn’t be taking my project as a model for yours. But you will, I hope, see one way of working with and through the major concepts I’ve laid out in the essay (the lessons to be learned about writing: the significant ethical issues that arise from representing other people; and the possible benefits of ethnographic research and writing). Rather than seeing this part of the text as instructions, I’d rather you feel inspired, or provoked—either way, prepared—to think your way through your own projects. The best feature of ethnographic writing is that whatever happens, it’s important and interesting as long as you make it so by writing well about it. That’s the hardest thing about it, too; nobody can provide you with a precise formula for the writing. You have to work that out by drafting, working with feedback, and revising.