Humanities Program Spotlight:

Class Takes on Community Project

This winter quarter Professors Galey Modan and Ray Cashman asked students in their team-taught English class—367.05 (The U.S. Folk Experience)—to step off campus and into the community to interview long-term residents and business owners around Ohio State's campus. The class, with support from both the Ohio State Center for Folklore Studies and the surrounding neighborhoods' University Community Association, expanded the students' knowledge of the complexity of communities outside the university.

As preparation, the students were taught the methodology behind ethnographic interviewing, with Professors Cashman and Modan sharing examples from their own work in the field. Students were given a name from a list of long-time residents supplied by the University Community Association, as well as asked to identify one resident on their own, and then sent out into the community to record their stories.

"Most of the students had no experience doing interviews or even talking with strangers, so they were pretty nervous at the beginning, but they've made really good connections with people," said Modan, associate professor of sociolinguistics. "They are starting to see what ethnography is all about. They feel what they are doing is not just for a grade in the class, but is going to have a larger place in the world outside the classroom." Cashman, assistant professor in folklore studies added, "They're generally having epiphanies about the world."

One of those epiphanies, the professors agree, is the idea that a community is a more complex entity than is first realized. "They are starting to see faction and fissions and tensions, and coming to a different idea of community than they came in with," said Cashman. "Community isn't necessarily all about mutual affection and everyone thinking the same way, but has more to do with a commitment to engagement and interaction."

Julie Stuart, a nursing major with a minor in English, said the class was challenging, but worth it. "It was nice to learn how to prepare questions, how to elicit narratives, and I think it will help me in future interviews for jobs or scholarship. Now that I've been on the other side of [the interview process] I understand the process better and I think I'll be a better interviewee," she said. The resulting oral interviews will be archived in both the Center for Folklore Studies Archives, as well as the archives of the University Community Association.