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Alice's Reading Notes for class 1/26

alesnick's picture

These are offered as conversation starters (in your minds as well as in our class), not as complete or definitive.

FRANK: idea that an ethnographic approach is a tool for suspending judgment, making the familiar strange, and seeing from the "meaning perspectives" of insiders to a cultural space. 

An ethnographic approach depends on forming over-time interpretations that recognize multiple perspectives.

What kind of authority does this approach offer?

What do you think about the way Frank positions herself socio-culturally in relation to why an ethnographic stance is valuable to her?

 CARINI

Importance of a process that neither over-emphasizes nor ignores aspects of child's experience and expression.

"All language is value-laden"

Descriptive Review engaged multiple perspectives rather than trying to collapse them into one unitary one.

Step 8, in which the group critiques its own process asking if they were respectful of the child and family -- so wonderful to build in this kind of meta-level self-assessment as normal and natural.

What do think about the process of "the discipline of description?"  What are the roles of imagination, memory, language, culture, experience within it?  how does it contrast with more familiar modes of assessment of students?