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Week 2- Research Progress

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This was an odd week. I got the paperwork signed by the associate superintendant, who oversees the program and the 3 other teachers and the person who handles partner relations. I know that I'd like to work with a small group of students, and as I meet with groups I'll decide on a group of students that will be a good fit for this paper. I am thinking of focusing on a group which is interested in working in the field of gender activism. Their project is student driven, so it may change directions, but the begining ideas involve working with 3-4 community parnters who focus on raising awareness surrounding gender related issues. The work of this group of students this week is to choose non profits to work with. They will choose one group to work with and create an arts based or social media campaign to raise awareness or create change. I'm excited to work with this group for many reasons, but mostly because there are possibilities for some intereseting art projects, and because it's a project that surrounds social justice issues and the students who joined this group because they are passionate about gender issues. 

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I still need to sit down and give myself daily/weekly goals. I'm finding that it's very difficult to draw or write field notes on the fly, unplanned. I will need to sit down each day and choose a time to observe. I'll need to decide on a method to record teacher meetings. Recording observations is difficult during most of the day because it's impossible to divide my time both mentally or physically. If I'm drawing, why am I drawing as opposed to recording what is said? What are the main points that I should be focused on recording? How am I leaving time to reflect on my observations and narrow down what is important during my reflections?

FIELD NOTES activity- still life

Since I'm doing arts based reasearch, I decided to draw my still life as one of my observations. I realize that the point was to practice writing about the still life from different angles, but I thought I'd be silly not to include drawing as one of my observational techniques, since I'm actually using drawing in my own research. I realized too late that the assignment called for 5 objects, so I'm cleverly counting the shadows as characters in this metaphorical story. I gave myself 5 minutes to write the observation after I changed position, and found that it was enjoyable I could have gone on for longer, and while I enjoyed pausing to reflect, I found my mind wandering and making connections to the objects, which I recorded on the right side. "Should I take more peppers home to dehydrate?" On the left I spent an awful lot of time recording what was going on around the still life, the place, the contect, even the history of the objects as well as my perception of them. Because I feel like I successfully recorded the basics of what the objects were in my still life, the written observation was free to make more meaningful and nuanced observations. 

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