Often, students begin the writing process without ever thinking about a potential audience

Take that one interesting idea/pattern and develop an “umbrella” statement or a broad focus statement

Search for patterns in your list, and make a new list of those patterns. Keep an eye out for things that strike you as meaningful and interesting and that happen again and again.

The first step in finding a focus is to read through all of your fieldnotes two times. As you read, notice when and where you become particularly interested in what you have written. Circle, mark or note these passages in some way. Write a brief summary of each idea/passage on a separate sheet. After you identify what interests you most, move on to search for patterns that will lead you to focus.

The purpose of writing a research proposal is that it will help you clarify your own ideas and questions.Â

As Harry F. Wolcott says in Ethnography: A Way of Seeing, “Ethnography begins with a researcher’s ability to frame an appropriate question or to recognize what contribution ethnography can make toward understanding some larger issue” (242).Â

As you go through the process of selecting your site and writing your proposal, keep one very important thing in mind: you are ethically obligated to let the people you are studying know what you are doing when you begin and you should seek to establish some kind of mutually beneficial, reciprocal relationship.

No matter how excited you are about a group or site, if you don’t have access to a community, you cannot conduct ethnographic research

The “insider” perspective is challenging because it can be quite difficult to see yourself and your friends with the eyes of a researcher and observer when you are not confronted with anything unfamiliar, if you are simply doing what is “normal.” You also may find that it becomes awkward to talk and write about some of the observations you make.

As you try to piece together the complexity of what it all means, you can and should engage in the process of double and triple checking your own interpretations of information at your site by delving into other insider and outsider perspectives and complimenting it with secondary sources of information; in ethnographic research this is called triangulation.

These things speak to the strong message of hierarchy and authority sent through the way the furniture is organized in the classroom space and how well it connects to the students’ existing beliefs about the positions they and their teachers occupy in that space.Â

The entire place and space, all of the people and interaction, all of the rituals and rules and the various forms in which they manifest themselves, are “readable” texts, suitable for observation and analysis by the ethnographer and writer – namely by you.

But, even before you choose a research site, it’s a good idea for you to consider the primary object of focus for ethnographic research—the cultural text.

An ethnographic writing project is one that requires the melding of both primary and secondary research.

These sorts of actions are categorized as primary research, research that involves direct collection of data from real world interactions.

The point is that when we have only two positions from which to choose, we are often led to make judgments since it is human nature to consider our own perspective as the “right” one.

Rather than presenting data in terms of two-sided notions, ethnographic writing works to multiply the levels of possibility, to confound the binary divisions in our culture.

If you use email, participate on Facebook/Instagram/Snapchat/TicTok, or follow YouTube algorithmic paths, you have been gathering and experiencing with certain rhetorical strategies of the vernacular in online settings.

What is usually lost somewhere between fourth and tenth grade is the importance of creativity and style in writing.

Despite the claims that this kind of work will be “new” to you, it is most likely that you already have some experience with ethnographic writing.

ethnography and ethnographic writing are recognizable in the following fields and disciplines:

You will be choosing a project, a research site that, even if you have personal connection with, you cannot already know everything about because your observations will commence from this point forward

Engaging with your research from an inquiry (questioning, not answering) perspective

ngaging Communities breaks this process down into steps so that you can get somewhere in the few weeks that you likely have (not the months or years an ethnographer has) to go from choosing and entering a site, to writing fieldnotes, to conducting academic research, to translating your observations into an ethnographic essay.

Defining culture is a sticky, complicated business

The patterns often reveal belief systems and power structures, two of the key ways humans organize themselves into/as cultures.

Ethnography, then, quite literally, means writing culture.

Culture can be part of what we do; it may be understood as a “total way of life.”