Teaching
Teaching is the heartbeat of my work. My teaching practice parallels my ethnographic research practice — which at its core, is about establishing dialogic relationships. I believe that attentive listening, abiding curiosity and reciprocity are key ingredients in all pedagogical/ethnographic encounters.
Critical Childhood and Youth Studies
Qualitative Research
Culture, Identity and Education
The course has three goals:
1) to use contemporary ethnographic accounts of urban schooling as a means to interrogate and theorize about the connections between self, culture and society. We will not presume that society or culture precede or determine lives but that there are complex relations between personal meaning and cultural meaning, between individual lives and society that are made visible through these ethnographic accounts.
2) to consider the practice of ethnography – as an art, a science, and a craft. In an effort to learn about these habits of mind, you will be required to spend time outside of class engaged in some ethnographic observation and writing up field notes which you will share with classmates. Special attention will be paid to issues of representation and using ethnography in the context of educational evaluation and judgments. If you are not already involved in a research project where you are able to conduct fieldwork observations, then this may not be the course for you.
3) to consider educational ethnography – its past, present, and future – as a way of bridging theory and practice; analysis and advocacy on behalf of educational equity and social justice.
Visual Research with Children and Youth
The aim of the course is three-fold. First, it seeks to expand students’ knowledge about and critical assessment of the use of visual data and analysis in projects with children/youth. Second, it offers students an opportunity to learn about the co-production and complexities of one strategy of visual data analysis being used in my on-going participatory visual ethnography of transnational childhoods. Students will produce a visual narrative for an individual child as a means to condense and display salient themes and patterns in how a child is using his/her photos to tell about his/her life across several contexts, spaces and time. Third, through discussion of other visual narratives (and those that are produced in class) students will develop conceptual and methodological skills to be applied in their own visual research with children/youth.
Permission of the instructor is required and students will need to know or learn IMovie or Final Cut Pro.