Doing Ethnographic Research. Kimberly Kirner
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beginning ones at the start of each chapter.
Every chapter begins with a reflection, starts with the basics, and then builds toward more complex and challenging activities, ending with a culminating activity that integrates all the skills you’ve built so far. At the end of the workbook, you’ll find culminating experiences, which are complex activities that require you to use many skills you’ve built all at the same time. These also teach you the major forms of communicating your research to others and allow you to practice important skills for professional development, such as grant writing and presenting your research to an audience. The workbook includes everything you need to do the activities, including step-by-step instructions, examples and non-examples, problems, reflection questions, grading rubrics (for the culminating activities, which tell you what to focus on for a good grade!), and graphic organizers when needed. Every activity becomes more valuable when you use Appendix N (Activity Reflection Questions) to understand your strengths and areas for improvement in learning new concepts.
If you are a student (or a professional, such as a social worker or educator) using this workbook on your own to teach yourself qualitative methods, you will want to carefully use the rubrics to self-assess your work and review Appendix A (Notes for Instructors), which might give you more ideas about how this workbook is typically delivered in a class environment. You will also find strategies to help you maximize your learning without a classroom environment by reviewing the “Strategies for Independent Learners” in Appendix A. Finally, while it takes extra time, you will want to reflect on your own learning process using the workbook’s reflection prompts in each activity. In test-runs of the workbook with other students, the reflection and self-assessment process helped students learn how to learn, and students developed stronger strategies for mastering concepts and skills over time. This can help you become a better learner, not only in methodology but in all subjects.
Acknowledgments
Kimberly Kirner: In all my work, I first give thanks to and for my parents, one of whom is the coauthor of this book! My parents modeled for me a strong work ethic and a passion for making a difference in the world, and this has shaped my entire career. Second, I would like to thank my advisers and key professors from University of California, Riverside, who shaped my development as an anthropologist across my entire student career. Gene (E. N.) Anderson was always an engaged, supportive adviser, from the time he took me on at the beginning of my bachelor’s work, through my honors thesis, and eventually as my doctoral adviser. Gene is a brilliant scholar who has never lost his excitement for learning, doing fieldwork, or writing; I can never aspire to his prolific level of reading and publication, but I like to think I picked up his never-ending thrill of pursuing new knowledge. His works and guidance, so often in hours-long conversations at his office throughout my entire student career, developed my passion for ethnoecology and cultural ecology, as well as allowed me to have a very individualized space for processing theory. My other doctoral committee members, David Kronenfeld and Maria Cruz-Torres, were also instrumental in my development, each providing a different piece to the methodological and theoretical puzzle my work demands. David’s research and coursework formed my training in cognitive anthropology, and his guidance and insights continue to shape my work. Maria was a model for me as a female anthropologist conducting doctoral work in a male-dominated subculture. Her work and classes in political ecology built my understanding of the integration of political and economic systems in the lives of communities and their places, but more than this, her caring support and the courage she showed in her own research helped me know I could also walk such a path.
Jan Mills: Thank you to my daughters, Kimberly and Brooke, who taught me so very much about providing for children’s needs and how differently those may be expressed. I want to thank my father for teaching me the importance of freedom and giving back to the world; my mother, who taught me the importance of family and independence; and my sister Jackie for sharing the sacred journey. Also, thanks to the children, families, and staff of Rialto Unified School District, who taught me the importance of community. Finally, thanks to Helen Howard for her unending belief in my capabilities and Diane Williams, who was my supervisor so long ago and who trusted me to creatively teach “outside the box,” thereby allowing me to reach so many students from diverse backgrounds.
Collectively, we would like to thank our students, who have taught us how to teach, even as we have taught them.
About the Authors
Kimberly Kirner: I grew up fascinated with other cultures and nature, so I suppose it was inevitable that I would eventually become a cultural anthropologist. Yet I initially began my BS in biomedical sciences, intending to become a surgeon. While volunteering in a hospice program for terminally ill women with no surviving family, I realized I was much more interested in my patients’ stories and the impact of social systems on the human experience than I was in my patients as medical cases. I found anthropology to offer the most compelling union of social and natural sciences and switched majors. I then continued in anthropology for the rest of my student career, eventually receiving my doctorate in cultural anthropology from University of California, Riverside in 2007.
As an applied anthropologist, my research primarily focuses on using anthropological approaches, theories, and methods to work toward solving environmental problems and related issues in human well-being and health. More specifically, my research is in the application of cognitive anthropology (decision-making studies, cultural model theory, and ethnoscience) to critical policy and systems studies and to community-based or grassroots efforts at improving the lives of human and other-than-human beings. I am interested in the relationships between cultural knowledge systems and worldview, identity and community, and behavior. My research has focused on the ethnoecology of the American West and contemporary Pagans (contextualized by American political and economic systems) and issues of cultural competency for minority religious practitioners in the American healthcare system. In addition to my academic work, I work as a practicing anthropologist in organizational capacity building, program design, and program evaluation, particularly for organizations focused on mental health and social services. When not working, I can be found riding my horses, hiking, creating visual art, and reading works by mystics.
Jan Mills: As a child, I didn’t sit still but was constantly outside exploring the rural environments in which I lived. My second favorite place to be was in school, learning with fascination about the natural world around us. I became a mother at the tender age of twenty, and my learning then took a back seat to parenting, which became my new focus of learning. From community college to a four-year university and over a decade of time, I finally achieved my BA in sociology, with a heavy concentration in psychology and child development right up until my last semester, when I finally had to choose one discipline for my BA. Being aware of my talent and intuitive skills for working with children, I immediately went into the teacher credential program at California State University, San Bernardino and received such a strong education in instruction that twenty-five years later, teachers are still learning what I learned long ago.
I finished my doctorate in education at Oregon State University in 2010, having begun while working as a teacher in a first-grade classroom in a public school. My doctoral research focused on how, in my role as a teacher, I could co-create a more functional learning environment for the whole group by helping develop students’ individual capacities to self-regulate their behavioral choices (helping develop their executive functioning skills). In the role of observing participant using an ethnographic self-study approach, I conducted research on classroom management covering an entire school year, seeking to identify the most effective interventions for a large group of highly disruptive primary students with high needs. My ongoing research focuses on the dysfunctional behaviors that have increased in the classroom over the past decades, increasing in both severity and in sheer numbers of students. Though there have been periods of time when I’ve left the classroom to do administrative work in education, I’ve always felt pulled back to the elementary classroom, where children need me most. My personal interests include backpacking and hiking, reading for pleasure about current work in quantum physics, and sustaining a positive relationship with an Energy greater than myself.