Alternatives to Berlin (Paper Topic)

My research question: “How do we help students understand their own social constructions?” (Or maybe “What's the best way of helping students understand their own social constructions?”) In short, this paper will (1) discuss Berlin's pedagogical goals (2) show how the stage of the students' intellectual development could inhibit them from carrying out the assignments Berlin poses in Chapter 7's “Codes and Critiques” (or, show why the assignment are too hard) (3) use scholarship on the teaching of ethnography, various ethnographic methods, as well as assignment examples from my thesis on the writing in a Textile and Apparel Management class to show how ethnography can be a viable alternative to meeting Berlin's pedagogical goals.

I begin with an outline of those goals, and a summary of the “Codes and Critiques” class in chapter 7. As I've discussed previously, as much as I believe in the soundness of Berlin's pedagogical goals as outline in the second half of Rhetorics, Poetics, and Cultures, I see them as much too difficult for first-year composition students. I plan to use William Perry's Forms of Ethical and Intellectual Development in the College Years and Belenky et al's Women's Ways of Knowing to show the intellectual development of college students at the freshman level. To summarize, these books: both posit schemes for understanding college student cognitive development, differing primarily in that Perry focused his study on males and Belenky et al on females. In both schemes, the student begins in a stage Perry terms “dualism” (66) and Belenky et al term “received knowledge” (35). In this stage, the student sees the teacher as an Authority who possesses Truth. It is the student's job to give back the Truth. This is usually where the student is at around their freshman year of college. After this stage, the student is able to move to “multiplicity” or “subjective knowledge” where he or she understands that there are a multitude of opinions with equal value. Then the student achieves “relativism” or “procedural knowledge” where he or she gains understanding of the processes involved in obtaining knowledge, such as using supportive evidence to understand complexities. It is only after the students have progressed through these stages that they are able to achieve Commitments in relativism (“an affirmation of personal values in relativism”), or “constructed knowledge,” where he or she sees is able to clearly integrate external complexities with his or her own views. It is also only at this point that the students can tolerate ambiguity and complexity. Students don't usually achieve this until graduate school or beyond.

What's important to note here is that what Berlin is asking students to do most certainly comes in the later stages of development. My goal is to show how ethnography can be a stepping-stone into the kind of thinking Berlin wants his students to do. I begin with a review of literature on teaching ethnography to show how the pedagogical goals of teaching ethnography are similar to Berlin's: close examination of social phenomena, and observation and analysis of trends and patterns. I also see a research component to ethnographic writing, where students could match up their own findings to books or journal articles. By way of example, I use my thesis project, an ethnography of a textile and apparel management class in which students do two ethnographic projects. I can show the successes students had with these projects as well as the way they described their thinking in completing them. I can also use as examples some fascinating autobiographical assignments coming out of Sociology departments aimed at teaching “the sociological imagination,” or teaching students how social forces bear on their lives.

Essentially, I think that an ethnographic writing project is a lot more fun and significantly less scary-sounding than Berlin's assignments, while preserving their intellectual rigor. I'm still thinking over what kind of ethnography (autoethnography and performance ethnography are options too) or how much ethnography I would want the students to do. I'm also considering crafting writing assignments or a syllabus.

I will bring the works cited page and the map to class.