Week 3: Ethnography

3 Ideas I Learned
 The concept of ethnography and its definition is very interesting. It means that it is a group of people or a community that shares the same culture. In schools today, as we are working on ethnography projects, it will be interesting to research and discover whether our student teaching sites can truly be considered as an ethnographic group. There are many schools that seem to be disconnected, but in truth after better research there are always different factors that connect the culture of the school and bring the communities together.
 I think that the high school is a very social place wherein students are able to enrich their social interaction skills with their peers as well as adults. It is mostly up to the adults to create what kind of social environment students are going to be exposed in. I have had the privilege to experience very different school environments. My CP1 site is a Title 1 school that had a very tense feel and atmosphere. The administration and the teachers are always under pressure to perform and provide the scores expected out of them. The students can therefore feel this pressure and their social experience become standardized just as their learning is.
 I think the concept of “being there” in an ethnography project is very important. Having done the research from paper information is very different from actually seeing the community and the interaction of the members of the school community. I think it will be very helpful that I attended the high school that we are doing the ethnography project in. I am very interested to see the difference with the community now to my own community when I attended the high school.

2 Questions
 A question that I have is how the students will actually think about the questions that we are asking them for the ethnography project. I am wondering if they are aware enough in their school community to answer them thoughtfully.
 I am also wondering whether the administration and teachers themselves do any ethnography research to impact their own lessons and the way they set up the school community.

1 Topic That I Want to Learn About
 I am very interested in researching more about the communities within the school community such as sports, clubs, etc. I want to discover what the real impacts of these are to the successful academic experiences of students.