Rieff "Mediating Materiality and Discursivity"

Mary Jo Rieff, “Mediating Materiality and Discursivity”

She points to North’s categorization of ethnography as a method that has not taken composition by “storm” and claims that there have been a number of ethnographic studies since North made that proclamation. However, she argues that ethnography as a “pedagogical method” has not been theorized enough. Her article “attempts to fill the gaps in our field’s focus on ethnography by exploring the intersection of contemporary rhetorical genre studies and critical ethnography and by exploring the implications for teaching” (36).

Key quotes:
She discusses genre as “dynamic discursive formations used to carry out particular social actions, language practices, and interpersonal relations. AS the embodiments of these social actions, they are tools for accessing cultures” (37). Genres connect to ethnography study: “Cultures or communities use genres to engage in rhetorical action and to carry out social purposes, and their uses of genres reproduces the social values and ideologies embedded in the genres” (37).

“Genres as social actions, give shape and substance to cultural sites and in turn enable and enhance the communicative actions of the participants in that site” (37).

How does genre relate to ethnography? “By studying genres, ethnographers can gain access to both the production and reproduction of an organization’s knowledge, power, and cultural perspectives”(39).

Ethnography originated in “travel writing” (dating back to Herodotus) (41).

Major Claims:
A good piece of this article is connecting genre to ethnography. She brings it around to students and why ethnographic writing or literacy research is valuable to the classroom/student learning: “Students not only gain access to a valuable research genre that functions for various academic communities, but they also learn a genre that is fluid and dynamic rather than the often-rigid and stabilized genres of the writing classroom” (44). Students doing ethnographic research are transformed into “social actors.”

Because ethnography is time-consuming and immersive, its parameters must be adapted for use in the classroom. The term “mini-ethnographies” (Bishop) is used to describe more focused , short-term studies undertaken by students.

“Unlike textual analysis, genre analysis examines the dynamic interaction of text and context, asking students to simultaneously examine the recurrent features of genres and the disruptions of these repeated rhetorical actions as well as to interpret and analyze the ways In which these features reflect and reveal these situations” (45).

She claims genre analysis can be used to help students master mini-ethnographies, providing an example of a student who did a mini-ethnography of the law community (46). In doing this work, students learn genres as well—field notes, activity logs, chronologies, progress reports, interview transcripts, maps (46).

The argument here is that the “genre of ethnography makes visible the rhetorical action of the classroom community—which becomes a research community, a culture of inquiry— as well as enacting and embodying the action of communities and cultures under investigation” (48). Genre analysis seems to be a way to make ethnography work for students, in other words.

This is a piece well-informed by the scholarship on ethnography in composition studies. I also think that ethnography can be a useful tool in the classroom. At the same time, I would like to get a sense of the limitations and challenges of engaging ethnography with students. She hints at that with the citation of Zebroski’s article. Zebroski was a professor here at SU, and we had a huge emphasis on ethnography in the Writing Program in the nineties. There was a mini-ethnography assignment in WRT 105. It was an approach that many people liked, and we even had an “ethnography fair” in the program where students did workshops with instructors on how to do ethnographic work. As Zebroski notes in his piece, students did often have trouble analyzing the patterns in their data and the language implications as well. Some of the accounts students wrote were more descriptive than analytical and the claims about community and language practices ranged widely in skill and insight.

Would more of an emphasis on genre analysis have made a difference? Yes and no. Some of the sites students chose to study did not have much of an emphasis on producing actual genres. Rieff’s piece assumes that generic activity is a focus. What if it is not? Is genre analysis as a method a panacea to short-term ethnography?

Those of us who teach service learning classes often have our students use methods for research that border on the ethnographic. We’re not doing mini-ethnographies per se, but through the use of reflections and journals and observations, we deploy some of these methods. What I’d like to see Rieff do more with here is an investigation of location, position, and power relations with respect to the position of the student. What are some of the challenges of students doing ethnographies that involve genre analysis?


Key works Cited:
Miller
Bazerman
Cintron
Min-Zhan Lu and Bruce Horner
Zebr