The Fifty Minute Ethnography: Teaching Theory through Fieldwork

Ethnography is becoming an increasingly popular research methodology used across a number of disciplines. Typically, teaching students how to write an ethnography, much less how to undertake "fieldwork" (or the ethnographic research upon which ethnographies are based), is reserved for senior- or MA-level research methods courses. This article examines the pedagogical strategy of engaging first-year students in ethnographic field methods and the art of ethnographic writing and suggests how the use of a short ethnographic exercise (the fifty minute mini-ethnography) can enable students who are at the beginning of their undergraduate degrees to better understand the relationships between theory and empirical data.