learning from the forum

last week, i attended both days of the penn ethnography forum. the forum is run, hosted, and housed by GSE. although i've been a student here for two years, i wasn't able to attend the forum last year, so i was extra excited to be able to attend both days this year.

the forum began early on friday, february 26 and ended on the evening of saturday, february 27. saturday is 'practitioner inquiry' day and most of the sessions were practitioner inquiry panels and presentations. while i did enjoy the forum, i also felt frustrated by many of the logistical elements of it, and that's what i'm going to talk about here.

things that i hope they work on for next year:
1. there were way too many sessions per time slot and this left a lot of session rooms very empty, which is unfortunate. i think it would be better for them to accept fewer presentations and panels and have fewer sessions per time slot next year.
2. most sessions had three paper presentations in one and these were very poorly organized. often, the sessions had little to do with each other, so people might have come in to listen to one but then felt totally not interested in the other two. also, the format of the sessions made it hard to feel immersed in multiple presentations, especially because they were often so different in topic. i think it might help them in organizing to have more specific categories for proposers to check off. that way, they might think about organizing sessions not just on topic, i.e. "immigrant literacies" but also by orientation, i.e. "action research" or "social justice and outreach."

things i learned about presenting:
i was actually kind of alarmed at how difficult it was for me to enjoy and understand what people were talking about. i think that when people are really immersed in their own research (which is to be expected), they often forget how to talk to people about that research. so, presentations tended to be unclear, not well-explained, or clinical in delivery. this is particularly confusing because we know (or many assume) that ethnography demands that a person feel personally close to the stuff they are studying. anyway, so here's my list of things i hope to do when i present my research:

1. be overprepared by practicing my presentation (this includes practicing what i'm going to say, talking along with my ppt slides, and practicing answering questions)
2. spend the first two minutes of my presentation telling the story of my research question and locating myself in the work. i feel this is a crucial step to giving the audience a way in to the work and strangely, most people seem to leave this out.
3. choose a small piece of the larger research to really focus on. it's impossible to share everything and if one attempts to, they are much more likely to lose the audience in all the confusion. not only will the presentation be more clear and digestible if it focuses on one small chunk, but the audience will get more out of it and be able to appreciate the work and ideas more.
4. don't be too focused on giving the right answers. research is messy and practitioner research is even messier, so it's important to remember that things don't need to be tied up in neat little packages because the real life of research isn't that neat. so, it's important to be comfortable sharing the things that didn't work and sharing the messy parts of the project.

so that's where i am right now. hopefully, i'll have a chance to put these ideas to action soon.