Cultural Inquiry Specifications Sheet

This assignment spans the entire semester. Remember to select one of the four options that are carefully described in the syllabus: autoethnography, youth culture geography, classroom/school constellation study, or popular culture interrogation. There are four components as well, with specific due dates in our syllabus. These four parts are meant to model the cultural inquiry process that you can take with you beyond this course and into your future professional work.

1. Initial Questions and Plans for Your Inquiry (June 2)
2. Working Portfolio (June 11)
3. “Performance of Your Work” (June 18)
4. Archaeology of Your Inquiry (June 25)

Make three copies of written assignments: One to share with me, and two to trade!

Initial Questions and Plans for Your Inquiry. For this assignment, I expect 1½ - 2 pages typed. Include the following: Which of the four options are you planning? What is your initial set of questions? Why is this a good inquiry for you at this time? How is this inquiry related to your professional work in education? What do you hope to learn about and challenge yourself to think about through this inquiry? What are your plans for how you are getting started right away (the working portfolio is due only one week from this assignment!)? What do you anticipate this project involving in terms of work, time, and resources? What sort of help might you ask from other class members in being able to do a good job with this assignment?

Working Portfolio. On this day, plan to bring to class everything you have been doing and collecting as part of your cultural inquiry. Things to include:

1. Logs on your readings: here you write about specific things in the material we have been reading for this course that you are applying to your inquiry; this may take the form of a reflection, an open-ended critique, a strategic plan, etc.
2. Data of your inquiry. This is possibly: notes (including diagrams) on what you have seen or what people have said to you; collections of short narratives that you have written; collections of photographs; collections of music samples; personal reflections on culture and identity and how it is played out in the educational process; etc.
3. A new set of questions. Now that you have been working on this inquiry, your questions have changed; indeed your project may be taking on a new direction. What are your new questions? How have they changed and why? (Changes should be in response to having thought about the issues of this course.)
4. New plans for what you will be doing for the next week on your inquiry.
5. Potential ideas for “performance:” how, where, why, and when you can share the most important aspects of what you have been thinking about in this inquiry? Identify something that could be a part of a class event on June 25.

I am expecting you to bring in a lot of stuff to share with others. We will meet in small groups to “workshop our inquiries” – to get ideas from each other on where to go from here.

Performance of Your Work. Performance means finding an audience that can speak meaningfully to your work. It may or may not mean to speak/dance/sing/perform as in a play or lecture. It could mean publishing a rewritten piece of scholarship. It could mean inviting an expert to give you guidance and feedback on what you have done so far. It could mean finding a way to combine what you have been doing with another person’s project so that a combined insight is communicated to a particular audience. … You want to find a way to demonstrate that your inquiry is forcing you to interact with the issues of our course in ways that are impacting on your professional development, and to bring your accomplishments to people beyond the course/project itself. Identify your “performance” and type up a “performance plan:” include a description of the performance; your reasons for the particular audience; how you are going to make the performance happen; and how you are going to interpret the value of your performance after it happens.

Archaeology of Your Inquiry. This is possibly the most important part of the inquiry process. You need to look back over the experience of the inquiry and identify what you have learned: What skills have you developed? Give examples and explain both why they help you to think about culture and education, and why they are important in your work. What ideas have become part of the way you understand and think about teaching and learning? Give examples and explain how they have helped you to become more sophisticated in your use of cultural concepts in your work. What potential audiences could benefit from experiences that address the cultural foundations of education? (Go beyond your specific performance idea to identify future possibilities and explain why they will be helpful to you in your work relevant to cultural issues in education.) What are your future plans for inquiries that have grown out of this course? Include ideas for two new inquiries that you plan to do in the next year, with careful plans for how you will accomplish these inquiries. Turn in the equivalent of a 3-5-page paper that addresses these questions.