ABOUT
The Vermont Folklife Center is pleased to offer a hybrid online course grounded in ethnography: an approach and set of methods for understanding and representing human experience. The course content will present strategies and teach skills for community-based learning and inquiry that centers on ethical and collaborative engagement. The course includes an introduction to digital media making, with a critical lens on documentary work and the ethics of representation.
WHO IS THIS COURSE FOR?
People in public roles, including staff members of organizations doing cultural, community, or social-service work: This course will introduce investigative skills for collaborative research that can lead you toward a better understanding of the needs and perspectives of your constituency.
Educators working in K-16 education: For anyone working in an educational setting this training will offer you a framework for learning with places and people, developing social and historical context, collecting original research materials, and building new knowledge and understanding. This skillset can then inform the creation of personalized, student-led learning experiences and facilitate the development of transferable skills.
Students, community members, and YOU! For all participants, ethnography is an opportunity to help contribute to local knowledge for the benefit of community needs.
WHAT WILL YOU LEARN:
The activities of the course will prepare participants to:
Design a community-based research or interview project
Engage in different forms of ethnographic observation and documentation (site-visits, participant observation, interviews, field notes, audio-visual recordings).
Produce audio and digital projects for community-generated needs.
Analyze and synthesize research findings in collaboration with a community team with the aim of co-creating new knowledge and understanding
Exercises include:
Conducting mini-fieldwork trips and participant observation
Writing field notes and crafting ethnographic narratives of several ‘scales of attention’ (self, neighborhood, community)
Completing an interview for community partners (see below for a description of this year’s research focus).
Editing the written, audio and visual material into a digital story
Describing and preparing materials for inclusion in an archival collection
The course will include time for a discussion of participants’ project ideas plus group and/or individual feedback, if they wish. In-classroom and/or on-site support by VFC staff post-Institute to support project implementation is also included in the Summer Institute tuition.
Schedule
The class will meet in person (over Zoom) for approximately two online sessions each day, with some variation to allow for independent work time, office hours with instructors, and optional in-person field site visits. A more detailed version of the schedule will be released in early June.
Online meeting times are 10:30 am-12:00pm and 1:30-4:30pm daily (except on weekend days).
2021 Research Theme: Community Schooling
The context for this summer’s fieldwork practice and exercises is the “Vermont Town Schools Project,” an active community-based research effort supported by the Folklife Center. Currently in development, this project seeks to explore the relationship between towns and local schools through the creation of a community-led oral history collection.
Each participant will have an opportunity to record an interview for the collection and engage in real-life community dialogue as part of this active research process. An interest in the topic of community school is not a prerequisite; all fieldwork and interview skills practiced within the context of the Vermont Town Schools Project will be applicable to other projects.