ColemanReadingResponse1

One connection I made with __My Freshman Experience__ was the language. Rebekah Nathan mentioned how she learned various different languages while traveling all over and how language is a big part of her career. Language is also a big part of life. College students and college professors may both speak the same language but in actuality half the time we are speaking two different languages. With the generation difference the languages tend change a little so sometimes the professors just cannot understand why a student would do something or say something in particular or vise versa. Language seems to play a huge role in this story. Not only because she put herself in a students shoes to try and figure out what they thought but also because language plays a role in ethnography in general. This reading truly offers the insight into the difference of thought process between professors and students. It allows each individual to see the standpoint of both. Nathan realized the stressful task of becoming a new freshman, not knowing where anything is, having to know the whole campus and not just the building you work in, having to adjust to dorm life, following new rules and lastly the work load given. She saw the decisions students had to make on what clubs and organizations to join and the system they had to create of prioritizing their work. This all reminded me of moving in just a few weeks ago and the difficulties and exciting challenges I faced over the first few days.

__ On Ethnography __, I did not find as interesting. This mainly taught you the principles and information on ethnography. It was facts, not a story line. This reading involved issues such as learning the culture and background behind languages. I learned that children in South African villages know up to five languages sometimes before they even start school. Comparing languages and cultures seemed to be a big part of ethnography.

"I realized that I was starting to do ethnography, and to look at my experience with an anthropologist's eye; it was then that the idea of actually becoming a student occurred to me as a research project for my sabbatical year" (My Freshman Experience, Nathan, 4). Both stories talk about ethnographers focusing on the classroom or analyzing some type of schooling. In __ My Freshman Experience __, the professor chose to put herself in the shoes of being a student. She realized she couldn’t fully understand how a student felt or where they were coming from unless she put herself in their shoes. She asked questions to try and figure out what American students really did and the importance to them of college, what was important and what was not. I found this really interesting how she really threw herself into the situation to actually figure out what went through a college student’s mind and how culture affected a university.

“Ethnographers face loose and varying popularized definitions of “culture” in every setting. As they sort out and describe what actually happens as well as what locals and outsiders believe is happening or happened in the past, they keep culture as a verb” (On Ethnography, Heath and Street, 10). I found this statement ironic because in this text it was generally speaking about ethnographers however this is exactly what the speaker from __ My Freshman Experience __ did. It was almost as if she believed college students just did not care and was curious as to why some did not take notes in class or just choose to sleep in class, things that happened in the past, so she put herself in the present and became a college student to experience it herself. She used “culture” ethnographers refer to, to figure out what actually happens instead of just believing what is seen or said from the past. This concept showed me that instead of just making assumptions she wanted to find out the facts.

While reading __On Ethnography__, I came across three ideas scholars believe measure ones success. They are, “(1). observation and purposeful seeking out of experts as sources; (2). creation of one’s own strategies in problem solving; and (3). persistence in self-assessment an goal-setting” (On Ethnography, Heath and Street, 12). This is exactly what Nathan did to test her experiment and questions about college students. She observed other students from the perspective of being a student herself, created a strategy of doing research upon what happened in dorm life and what was said in the classrooms while being a part of this situation. She set goals and achieved them. Both __On Ethnography__ and __My Freshman Experience__ connect on many levels. However, __My Freshman Experience__ is more applying the principles given in __On Ethnography__.