So far everything has been going smoothly for our collaborative research project! (I'm keeping my fingers crossed that this continues!)
I've done a lot of research on my own and I've been able to contribute to this project a great deal. I can see everything coming slowly together and I'm very excited about that!
0 Comments
I've definitely had some troubles while conducting our oral history project. At first, I had to conduct the interview, which didn't come out as great as I'd hoped it would. As I mentioned before in my previous blog post, it was very difficult to perform this interview. We had some distractions and I didn't get much out of it but it was still helpful.
After I recorded the interview, I tried to upload it on Weebly, but it said I could only upload audio files if I converted it to YouTube. Great. How the heck do I do that? I was so confused about how to do this. I did some research and figured out how to make an iMovie, but I was still confused. After about an hour of figuring it out I was able to finally upload the audio file to YouTube and I posted it to my Weebly. I thought I was all set to go, but Professor Mangini told me that my video link did not work. Apparently I had tried to upload the video too many times and there was a duplicate link on my site. Great. Another issue. Then I couldn't even remember my YouTube username and password! After finally figuring it out, I was able to post it correctly and my group was able to listen to the audio. I wrote the intro today in class for our oral history and I also added Katie's interviews to my oral history tab. Sam did the afterward and we are almost done! Finally! As I've blogged about before, we are doing an oral history report for our research project. Sam, Katie, Dave and I are including two interviews in our oral history.
Partner Duties/Collaboration I conducted the interview yesterday with a woman who lives the organic lifestyle. Katie conducted an interview with her sister, Victoria who is a junk food fanatic. Our goal is to compare these two interviews and prove that Organic eating is more beneficial for the health of people. Katie and I will both come up with introductions for our interviews since we know the most about them. Sam and Dave are going to provide each interview with an afterward once they view each interview. Our group is working collaboratively because all four of us worked together to find what our research question is, and we all came up with interview questions together. We are all working separately on this project because we are each doing different pieces, but in the end it will all be put together into one project. Interview Details Yesterday I interviewed the woman I babysit for because she is someone who lives the organic lifestyle. Although I wasn't really sure what to expect from this interview, I don't think it really went the way I wanted it to. The questions we had were really good, but the feedback didn't provide us with enough information. The woman's two year old daughter was also in the kitchen with us while I was doing the interview, so that was very distracting. Throughout the interview recording, you can hear her voice interrupting. The interview only lasted four minutes because of how impatient the little girl was and I felt awkward keeping her mother from her. I wrapped it up pretty quickly because I felt like I wasn't getting enough information out of her. Hopefully this interview will be good enough to use, but if it isn't we will need to shift our focus to Katie's sister's interview. For this blog post, we were asked to read Good, Clean, Fair: The Rhetoric of the Slow Food Movement by Steven Schneider. We were to find three quotes and talk about how we can relate them to our Oral History Project. This article was interesting and basically restated everything that we have been learning/researching.
Quote 1- “The rise of organic labels in supermarkets, the growth of local farmers markets, and the emergence of chains such as Whole Foods, Wild Oats, and Trader Joe’s all attest to consumers’ desire to avoid the perceived pitfalls of industrial food.” For our Oral History Project, we are interviewing someone who lives the organic lifestyle. We can use this quote to possibly introduce our interview. It shows us how people are beginning to eat organically because they are trying to avoid all of the negative things that are put into our food today. Quote 2- “The organization’s advocacy of artisanal foodstuffs and small-scale production also runs the risk of creating a movement limited to those who can afford it.” One part of our project that we are trying to include is a comparison of grocery receipts. One receipt of someone who eats and shops organically, compared to a person who just buys any produce. We also included some interview questions dealing with expenses and costs for the organic lifestyle. This quote would be a good introduction to that section of our project. We can either prove this statement wrong, or agree with it based on our findings. Quote 3- “By approaching how and what we eat in a more thoughtful and informed way, we also begin to think about the society in which we live through the same lens. Following this logic, Slow Food ‘asserts the absolute centrality of the role of food (a centrality which perhaps has been lost) if one wishes to interpret—and perhaps influence—the dynamics that underlie our society and our world’” This quote shows that once we start to think about eating healthy and making lifestyle changes, we will then begin to think about the rest of our society the same way. This quote really shows how much what we eat not only affects ourselves, but our community around us. This quote would be a great way to prove that eating organically can help your life in many different ways. As a group we collaboratively came up with interview questions for our Research Project Interview. My group members are Sam, Katie, and Dave. We are interviewing a woman that I babysit for who eats organic foods. We came up with questions to find out more about why she chose this lifestyle and how long she has been living this way.
Prior to our interview, we came up with five possible research questions: 1. What are the benefits of eating organic and locally grown products? 2. How does eating organic and locally grown foods affect your body as compared to products that are sold in the supermarket? 3. Is buying healthy foods financially beneficial? 4. Why are people chooding the foods that they buy? 5. Are consumers aware of the food industry? Here are the ten interview questions: 1. How long have you been eating organically? 2. What made you decide this? Did you have an experience? 3. how seriously do you take it? 4. Do you eat at organic restaurants? 5. Where do you typically shop for groceries? 6. Do you believe that the organic lifestyle is more expensive? 7. What is your average weekly spending at the grocery store? 8. What are some challenges that you've face with eating organically? What are the benefits? 9. Along with eating organically what else do you do to stay healthy? 10. When you started eating organically did you start noticing changes right away? We were to read Collaborative Writing in Composition Studies by Fontaine and Hunter. This article really went into depth about how collaboration is important in the field of writing. As an education major, I have become extremely familiar with the concept of collaboration because teaching is a field where collaboration is extremely important. Although I have had some cases where working in groups was actually a disadvantage. Some group members didn't do the work, which was reflected in our grade. In writing, collaboration is important because we learn from others. Hearing others speaking about certain topics that we might not completely grasp can aid us in finding a better understanding for it. In the article, it is stated that collaborative writing is a conversation, a dialogue, a tool for solving problems. In this collaborative research project that, I am working with Katie, Sam, and Dave. We all worked together to compile a list of possible interview questions for our interview that we will be conducting. We also spoke about possible research questions that will help guide our project. I believe that our conversation and dialogue will aid us in completing this project and we will all work together to complete it. Conversation is one of the biggest components of this project, and if we keep communicating like we are, I believe we will be successful.
According to Qualley, reflexivity is a response triggered by a dialectical engagement with a theory, a person, a culture. The engagement is an ongoing and recursive as opposed to a single, momentary encounter. Reflexivity does not originate in the self but it occurs in the response to a person’s engagement with the other. Reflexivity is a bi-directional process. It deals with cause and effect and the relationship they have with each other. When we reflect, we fix our thoughts on a subject and we carefully consider it. Reflection is an unidirectional thought process. When we reflect, we are simply thinking about one thing and responding to it.
As a researcher, we can either be reflexive or reflective. A reflexive researcher will continue and ongoing response with the material. Reflexive research will find out why certain things happen by researching the causes and effects of what they are researching. A reflective researcher will simply think about certain material and respond to it. A reflective researcher will interpret the material they are reading and use their own judgments. Usually, reflective material will have limited conclusions and limitations of the study. We were given to articles to read for homework and we needed to discuss how these articles will relate to our next assignment. We are conducting research based on the movie Food Inc. We are able to choose our own route and what exactly we want to discover about the food industry.
The first article we had to read was an Intro to Qualitative Research. Hancock's definition of qualitative research is concerned with finding the answers to questions which begin with: why? how? in what way? Quantitative research, on the other hand, is more concerned with questions about: how much? how many? how often? to what extent? Although we are not sure what we are researching yet, these two different research methods apply to the way that we will research. Our interviews will be mostly composed of questions beginning with how?, why? and in what way? Qualitative research is concerned with the opinions, experiences and feelings of individuals producing subjective data. These questions will help guide how our interview will go. The answers will be based on the interviewee's opinions, experiences and feelings. The second article was Situating Narrative Inquiry. There are four components of a Situational Narrative Inquiry according to Pinnegar and Daynes. The four turns are a change in the relationship between the researcher and the researched; a move from the use of number toward the use of words as data; a change from a focus on the general and universal toward the local and specific; and a widening in acceptance of alternative epistemologies or ways of knowing. When conducting research and interviews, our knowledge on the subject will widen and we will get a better understanding of the material. The data we collect will help us come to a conclusion and it will answer our posed research question. Once we figure out what we are going to research these terms will definitely apply throughout our project. This past week has been extremely eye opening for me! Wow. I never really knew how bad our food was for us! I can honestly say that I haven't eaten meat in the past week due to watching the movie Food Inc. and reading the articles written by Michael Pollan and Wendell Berry. This has opened me up to a whole new world of eating healthy. I have been sticking to fruits, vegetables, and lots of fish. It's not even difficult for me. This weekend my friends had a BBQ and they were all eating hotdogs and hamburgers and I stayed far away. I almost wanted to throw up. I couldn't even look at the burgers knowing what is actually put into them. I'm usually really addicted to eating chicken, I think I'll be able to get used to it but if I need to, I think that I might try and stick to getting chicken from a poultry farm. The Pleasures of Eating Healthy gave us a ton of suggestions. After reading this I decided I'm going to contribute some plants to our garden at my house this summer. My mom already has tomato plants and cucumbers, but I want to add more vegetables. I'm excited to start this new healthy lifestyle!
The past two days in class we have been watching Food Inc. It has opened my mind up to the food industry and it showed me what we are really consuming every day! Professor Mangini gave us a list of 17 discussion questions and we were to answer three of them. Here are the ones that I chose to discuss!
1. (3)Whose responsibility do you think it is to inform us about what is in our food? I believe it is the producer’s responsibility because they are the ones creating the food and adding all of the stuff that we are unaware of. 2. (9)Do you think eating healthy should be a right, a responsibility, or a privilege? I think eating healthy should be a right, but also a responsibility. Some people just don’t enjoy healthy foods, but they should still have the choice to do so. The prices of healthy foods are just so high and it makes it really hard for people to afford vegetables and fruits. Like the movie said, its cheaper to buy a bag of chips than it is to buy carrots, and thats just wrong. It shouldn't matter what your family's income is, you should still be able to have the right to a healthy life. There is no reason that processed foods should be healthier than fruits and vegetables that come from the ground. It's not fair for the families who are under privileged. 3. (17)There is a lot of research showing that healthful food makes people feel better, have more energy, and stay well. Do you think if more people knew about this research, they would make different choices? Yes. I had a personal experience with this. I never really liked eating healthy foods when I was in high school. I always chose eating chips or pretzels over fruits and veggies. My mom always told me to start eating better but it wasn’t until after I had gained some weight that I started listening to her. I started weight watchers and I began eating really healthy and suddenly I had way more energy and the fat was melting off of me. I was amazed. I never knew that eating healthy had such an effect on so many parts of your body. My mind felt clearer, my body had more energy, and I had lost weight. I believe if more people were informed like me, they would make better choices. | AuthorArchivesApril 2012 CategoriesAll |
RSS Feed