Uses for Journal Keeping: An Ethnography of Writing in a University Science Class

This text reports on an ethnographic study of journal-keeping in a university science class. The author spent a summer semester attending a general education class in geology as a participant observer, took extensive notes, interviewed class members and the professor, and analyzed journal entries and other documents related to the class. She provides an example of ethnographic methods to be of use to other composition researchers, especially in her careful attention to reflexivity, that is, the effect of the researcher and the research on data. The book provides a detailed exploration of journal keeping from the perspective of both the students and the professor, as well as case studies of how two students in particular used journal keeping. Journal entries are examined not simply as texts produced by individuals for a class assignment, but as the outcome of a socio-political process, including the goals of the general education curriculum, the goals of the geology course and its instructor, the students' personal and educational goals, the institutional constraints on the professor, the methods of the researchers, and the dynamics of classroom interaction.