Week 6 post

During the course of my service learning I have created two different field notes that share similar patterns. One pattern I notice right away is my presence as an observer and a participant. As a participant, I am usually not as involved as I would like to be in the organization. Most of my time is spent walking around asking for things to do or generally being disappointed that I couldn’t do more. As far as being an observer, I give in to detail how certain groups of people interact with each other yet I don’t go in depth about what they look like nor do I input word for word what was said in their conversations.

What I believe would address these patterns/ themes in my fieldwork is primary sources such as interviews that I may have with other volunteers and several house less people. Talking to volunteers may give me more insight as to how their own volunteer experience has been going, possibly showing some similarities with my own experiences and understanding how they feel about the organization and their place in it. As far as interviewing house less people, I could maybe get some information on how they feel about the quality of the food, the size of the organization, possible problems they ran into at Food Not Bombs and their involvement with the volunteers. After carrying out these interviews, I can come to a conclusion about the patterns I see in my fieldwork and potentially change the way I participate in the community.

As far as secondary sources go, reading Selections from Fieldworking: Reading and Writing Research, made me realize that almost everything should be mentioned in your fieldnotes. In many situations, the ethnographer sets the scene almost as if he/she is telling a story. They mention the time and location, the dynamic of conflict, the physical and emotional appearance of all subjects and their presence in that community. I’ve found many of the fieldnotes in this article interesting because it made me realize that I should not be shy when it comes to writing about the community.

However, the problems that I have found with some secondary sources is that they may be bias towards a certain group of people based on their position in the community and or the ethnographer may not be too involved in the community. After reading the Sample Ethnography from the online course reader, I’ve realized that the ethnographer has a pattern of not talking about their presence in their service learning. As a reader you get a good story line where the ethnographer goes into detail about the setting, the conversations that people have around him/her and a large description of the food they serve.

Yet there isn’t much detail about the ethnographer’s conversations with certain people and his emotions/reactions to them. Although I understand staying neutral in these situations is vital, as mentioned in the Deal Model for Critical Reflection, it also emphasizes the importance of how the volunteer is feeling in these types of situations. If the ethnographer isn’t self aware of their own emotions and does not share their own experiences, we as readers won’t have a good sense of their perspective on house-less people and food insecurity. This creates an even larger problem because it makes it harder for readers to connect with the ethnographer and even change their own perspectives on these topics. With that being said, I will do my best to implement all of these strategies into my fieldnotes to create a well written ethnography.