An Ethnography and Interviewing Primer

My students found this video, assigned for homework and discussed in class, very helpful in preparing them for fieldwork and thinking about the action of ethnographic research. Even if you don't assign it to them, it might help as a suggestion for some of your your students who feel nervous or unprepared to do interviews and observation.

An Ethnography and Interviewing Primer: http://vimeo.com/1269848#

PBS as Literacy Group

Check out our Project #2 site!

http://shannonmarielouise23.wix.com/pbs-as-literacy#!home/mainPage

Sincerely,

Shannon, Elise, Brandon, and Lauren

Gee Video

Will found this video of short part of an interview with James Gee. Might be of interest. There are many other Gee vids out there.

Related to Glenn

Temple Grandin, in the video posted here, calls for farms and stockyards to post webcams of their lots to help break down the barriers between producers and consumers.  I think she has a point.  You can find a number of farm webcams through a Google search.

In the video, Grandin takes the viewer on a tour of a slaughter plant.  It is graphic.  She talks about the changes made to make the slaughter of cows more humane.  The changes are the ones that she designed to help cows.  I think the video is worth a watch, though you may find it a little long to show in class.  She has many other videos posted on YouTube, including many about Autism.

I hope this post helps.

Further Reading

I always like to do further reading about texts that pique my interest and wanted to share some ideas!

Many of you saw a Berger/animal connection (no pun intended), so you may enjoy Carol Adams' text The Sexual Politics of Meat. 

Even though Swales attempts to define the term discourse community in pragmatic terms, he does touch upon a critique of it being a utopia. Joseph Harris has a great chapter titled "Community" in his text Teaching Subject, A: Composition Since 1966, New Ed. Harris' book is available as an e-book via Alice. Harris states the term is ill defined and proposes a new metaphor takes its place.

Michel Foucault!!

A brief primer of Foucault's ideas on power and discourse(s).

Writing Commons on Genres

Writing Commons is an interesting site. Worth checking out. It is pretty basic, so is appropriate for first years and students who are struggling with writing. They have a section on Genres that discusses genres in three discourse communities. Note: I do not necessarily agree with what they say!