Thanks Katherine for sharing with us your interesting work!
Just some tentative responses here...
perhaps you might want to ask questions like:
How might your different status at different times have affected your
interactions with other members of the course and/or the way the activities
were organized?
e.g., the role-relationships, expectations about rights and obligations
(or expectations about appropriate behaviour) among you and
other participants?
But this also might have to do with your aim in doing
the observations and the recording of the actions and activities of the
group of which you're a part. Did your aim change as you went through
the different phases? Did your own perspective or emphasis change as a
result of what you experienced...? And it seems that an organizing
question might be to ask: What am I after? There seems to be a
dialectical relationship here: your presence and what you're after shape
what you come to see and describe; and what you come to see and
describe at one moment shapes what you're after and yourself at the next
moment... This is really a very crude way of putting it ...
I guess Martin would be able to fill us in with some of the concepts of
the hermeneutic circle between the researcher and her/his data... would
you take this up, Martin?
Thanks, and best,
Angel
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Angel M.Y. Lin
Doctoral Candidate
Modern Language Centre
Ontario Institute for Studies in Education
252 Bloor St. W., Toronto, ON M5S 1V6, Canada
E-Mail: MYLIN who-is-at OISE.ON.CA
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On Wed, 20 Sep 1995, Katherine Brown wrote:
> I am writing a chapter in my dissertation right now called "the experience
> of transformation" that takes as one level of the problem of transformation
> the transformation of the researcher from stranger to participant to
> participant observer to fieldworker-exiting-the field to person
> having to (re)enter theoretical literature with new understandings
> about the field setting and the theory, etc. It is a pretty interesting
> sequence of events to have to give an account of. I took photography
> courses to build up fieldwork tools for settings where videotaping might
> be intrusive, became increasingly interested in what was going on in
> the "darkroom community" of the photographic education program I was
> in, and saw many people in the program struggling to make sense of
> take a stand on digital imaging. Is it a threat? is it a tool? do we
> want it? do we need it? Is it photography? is it art? etc. So I got
> to see people learn traditional black and white photography, learn it
> myself, remove myself and return to the setting and take the courses again
> and again to watch groups of beginners go through the course(s), take
> intermediate courses, observe digital imaging courses, and talk with
> instructors, graduate students, faculty members along the way in different
> capacities. I have fieldnote, audiotape and videotape data, depending on the
> contstraints and requirements and affordances of the setting.
> (if you ever shoot video in a darkroom, use Hi8 and boost that filter!!!
> if people are wearing light clothing and standing near a safelight, you
> might get something on tape:)) SO I will be wrestling with questions
> of participant observation in my reflective ethnography and in looking at
> all of the levels of transformation that I looked at within/between
> the transmission of expertise and the transformation of practive in this setting.
> Hope to hear from others.
> Katherine Brown
> LCHC/Dept. of Communication
> UC San DIego
>
>