The Fifty Minute Ethnography: Teaching Theory through Fieldwork

Ethnography is becoming an increasingly popular research methodology used across a number of disciplines. Typically, teaching students how to write an ethnography, much less how to undertake "fieldwork" (or the ethnographic research upon which ethnographies are based), is reserved for seni...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inThe journal of effective teaching Vol. 17; no. 1; pp. 28 - 34
Main Author Trnka, Susanna
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Journal of Effective Teaching 2017
Subjects
Anthropology
Assignments
Correlation
Ethnography
Foreign Countries
Research Methodology
Teaching Methods
Undergraduate Students
Writing (Composition)
New Zealand
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Summary:Ethnography is becoming an increasingly popular research methodology used across a number of disciplines. Typically, teaching students how to write an ethnography, much less how to undertake "fieldwork" (or the ethnographic research upon which ethnographies are based), is reserved for senior- or MA-level research methods courses. This article examines the pedagogical strategy of engaging first-year students in ethnographic field methods and the art of ethnographic writing and suggests how the use of a short ethnographic exercise (the fifty minute mini-ethnography) can enable students who are at the beginning of their undergraduate degrees to better understand the relationships between theory and empirical data.
ISSN:1935-7869