Welcome to the Schoolhouse.  This section lists resources that will help teachers at all levels guide their students through the tasks of fieldwork.

The resources in the Schoolhouse include: exercises, syllabi, curricular "units," assignments, techniques, and strategies from people who teach the everyday tasks of reading and writing research.





Classroom Assignments
1. A Primary School Lesson Plan: Everyone Eats Bread
2. A Middle Schoolers' Multicultural Writing Exercise: Tell About Your Favorite Place
3. "Fieldwork" for College students: Capturing a Group in Action

 

Research and Drafting
1. Positioning Yourself in Your Text

Researchers are often confused when their task is to write about others without losing their own voices. By keeping track of your own positions as they relate to the culture you're studying, you have an easier time keeping yourself in your text. These questions and considerations excerpted from FieldWorking: Reading and Writing Research should help you to identify your own positions in relation to your research. [more...]

 

FieldWorking Box Responses:
1. Engaging the Ethnographic Perspective

News articles often capture "cultural moments" in short detailed descriptions of events and people, often from one perspective. This exercise challenges students to look ethnographically at the stories that newspapers tell. By choosing an interesting news article, looking at the culture buried in its details, and questioning more deeply what the context would be, students hone their ethnographic skills.

* "The Perfect Thai Vacation: Sun, Sea and Surgery"
In a September 9 New York Times article... author Seth Mydans explores Thailand's burgeoning medical tourism industry. Student Jennifer Hemmingsen questions the American administrator, the hospital itself, the other patients, and the international tourism industry. [more...]

* "Pilgrims' Statue to Stop in I.C."
This article, written by Karen Heinselman, describes how a small, non-Hispanic, Catholic church in Iowa City was selected as a stop on the journey of a rare, 9-foot statue of the pregnant Virgin Mary as it moves from Mexico City to Grand Rapids, Michigan.
Student Vicki Grube questions the purpose of moving the statue of Our Lady of Guadalupe from Mexico City to Michigan, attracting midwestern pilgrims on its journey as she asks how it is moved and who is protecting it on its journey. [more...]


2. "Interviewing with an Artifact"

Everyone Eats Bread
Drs. Betty Belanus of the Smithsonian Center for Folklife & Cultural Heritage and Cathy Kerst of the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress developed this lesson plan unit for primary schoolers in Wheaton, MD.  Children learn the importance of bread--its different forms, ingredients, and the different reasons why people eat it in different cultures.  [more...]

Tell About Your Favorite Place
Marjorie Burdette, a teacher at Hillside Middle School in Manchester, New Hampshire, invites her ESOL students to write stories from "home." Sharing these reflections on individual experience and identity helps the students to better understand several of their similarities and differences. In this exercise, three of her students, Merima, DangA, and Mariam, originally from Bosnia, South Korea, and Iraq, respectively, describe their "favorite places." [more...]

Capturing a Group in Action
Michael Hoberman teaches composition at Fitchburg State College in Massachusetts where he uses this assignment cycle to help students begin to get the hang of looking at culture with an ethnographer's eyes . [more...]

Positioning Yourself in Your Text
Researchers are often faced with the problem of writing about the experiences and views of others while simultaneously maintaining their own perspective. By keeping track of your own positions as they relate to the culture you're studying, you have an easier time keeping yourself in your text. These questions and considerations excerpted from FieldWorking: Reading and Writing Research should help you to identify your own positions in relation to your research. [more...]

Engaging the Ethnographic Perspective
News articles often capture "cultural moments" in short detailed descriptions of events and people, often from one perspective. This exercise challenges students to look ethnographically at the stories that newspapers tell. By choosing an interesting news article, looking at the culture buried in its details, and questioning more deeply what the context would be, students hone their ethnographic skills.

* "The Perfect Thai Vacation: Sun, Sea and Surgery"
In a September 9 New York Times article... author Seth Mydans explores Thailand's burgeoning medical tourism industry. Student Jennifer Hemmingsen questions the American administrator, the hospital itself, the other patients, and the international tourism industry. [more...]

* "Pilgrims' Statue to Stop in I.C."
This article, written by Karen Heinselman, describes how a small, non-Hispanic, Catholic church in Iowa City was selected as a stop on the journey of a rare, 9-foot statue of the pregnant Virgin Mary as it moves from Mexico City to Grand Rapids, Michigan. Student Vicki Grube questions the purpose of moving the statue of Our Lady of Guadalupe from Mexico City to Michigan, attracting midwestern pilgrims on its journey as she asks how it is moved and who is protecting it on its journey. [more...]

Interviewing with an Artifact
Researching people means "stepping in" to the world views of others and "stepping out" of your own.  As they share their own artifacts and learn to interview others about theirs, students learn the value of honoring difference as well as the skills to write and read about it.  When they can confront "difference" as it appears in one anothers' possessions, they enter others' perspectives by "stepping out" of their own...[more...]

* A response from student Vicky Grube:
"My partner handed me a golden bracelet. I looked at my trade. Parading around my palm like minute circus elephants were some twenty small, smooth wooden balls held together by a cinnamon colored piece of thin elastic. This bracelet soughed about a world of timelessness, simplicity and meaning..." [more...]

* A response from student Kerry Reilly:
"The brown leather backpack is slightly worn. Not an everyday pack, but it hasn’t been coddled. It has carried books, lunches, bottles of water. It’s an art object, a one-of-a-kind, this pack with dashes hammered into the leather by a craftsman or craftswoman. 'The fabric is called manta,' Amy Leach, the owner, tells me..." [more...]

 

If you have lesson plans from the elementary to collegiate level that you would like to share with us please email your submissions to: xyz@fieldworking.com

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