Today was my second class in Ethnography Theory and Research Methods. Coming from an undergraduate engineering background, I have certainly struggled with the concepts presented to me over the past few weeks. While an obvious divergence already exists between this social science and the natural sciences, this dissimilarity is further intensified when contextually observed from my particular standpoint – that is: an undergraduate student thrown into a graduate level course. I suddenly found myself in virgin uncharted territory, and the feeling is actually somewhat refreshing.
For as long as I can remember, I have only ever been presented with a single pedagogical model. In this model, the instructor serves as the keeper of knowledge and his job has always been to pass this knowledge to students in the form of a lecture or tutorial. As I matured as a learner, I found that expectations increased in terms of the amount of preparatory work, self-study and other “practice” activities necessary in order to fully grasp the concepts communicated. At McMaster, Professors often stress that 3 hours of self-study is required for every hour spent in class. Even if this held true for some of my classes (many core engineering courses), I was often able to get good grades by spending only a modest amount of time doing homework. However, one thing remained undeniably true, new concepts were almost always first introduced by the professor and students were then asked to reflect upon them. Thus, this approach has always afforded me an advantage because the lectures provided a good basis for starting my exploration of a particular topic. Nevertheless, this ethnography course has shown me that this model doesn’t necessarily hold true for graduate classes (or possibly just graduate classes in ethnography?). Instead of being keepers of knowledge as previously described, Professors in this model serve as moderators and guide students (who are required to do ridiculous amounts of self-preparation) in their understanding of the concepts being presented.
The structure of this course is therefore radically different from any post-secondary experience I have been faced with thus far. First, there is the issue of the size of the class and its gender distribution. In total there are 10 students (myself included), and of those 7 are female and (only) 3 are male. This kind of pattern strongly contrasts the demographics that I’m used to in the engineering faculty. An observation that I immediately shared with the rest of the world as I stepped into my first calculus class.
Moreover, my uneasiness is further compounded by the humbling fact that I am the only “undergraduate” and “foreign” student in the room. The argument about being an undergraduate is in reality simply a technicality (I have completed all the requirements of my undergraduate degree, but convocation is not until November). However, my foreignness to the field of anthropology – and more generally to the social sciences – does put me at a palpable disadvantage relative to the rest of my peers. Even though their backgrounds span a great breadth of disciplines ranging from religious studies to sociology, they remain unified by the common theme of having a certain rooting in the arts and humanities. As such they carry an intellectual baggage that I can only dream of possessing, which also gives them a clear edge in terms of thinking methods and approaches to problem-solving.
Being a product of engineering school, I am obsessed with a desire to categorize, quantify and objectivize data. As much as possible, engineers (as most scientists) attempt to distance themselves from the topics they study in order to generate abstractions and solve problems. As long as human bias is minimized, experiments become replicable and norms, theories and other laws can be deduced – this is what I understand to be positivism. However, this worldview was immediately challenged as I began learning about anthropology, ethnography and the different schools of thought that exist within these disciplines. I have come to learn that the study of people and their cultures does not lend itself very well to such a rigid method. Instead, complexities and nuances that exist within various societies must be accounted for and presented to the reader through the lens of the researcher – that is my understanding of interpretivism. Hence, bias becomes inevitable and at times even desirable. If such a statement unsettles many self-respecting engineers at first, it is important to also remember the limitations of our own science. Indeed, many disciplines of engineering make reference to terms like “assumptions”, “judgment” and “risk” to illustrate the importance of human input in the design process. However, where engineering attempts to minimize such human factors (or to effectively quantify them), ethnography encourages one to embrace them so far as their existence is acknowledged in the work.
I am not sure if will ever fully embrace this new way of thinking, but it has definitely opened my eyes. I am currently torn between two places and across two disciplines. While my foundation remains strongly rooted in engineering and technology, ethnography appears to have promising tools that will help me shape a new way of looking at the world. Oh and happy birthday to me!
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