Humanities Homework Help

 As soon as possible after you experience the teaching encounter you proposed in the previous assignment wherein your cultural teacher taught you how to DO something new, take some quality time to write thorough field notes about your experience. What did your brain understand? What did your body understand? What did you see, feel, touch, smell, hear, taste, and intuit? Write as many field notes as you can, but at least write 1,250 words. Do not worry about grammar or intelligibility. Just write! 

Don’t know what I mean by field notes? 

Here is an example from Allaine Cerwonka (not required reading): Improvising Theory 92-93, 100-101, 149-151.pdf download who took field notes in the form of emails to her professor. Her project involved riding along with police officers (cops) in Australia.

Here are some field notes (not required reading): Santa Ana Jail field notes.pdf download I took of my visits to the Santa Ana Jail.

Here are some more field notes (not required reading): Boy Scouts Field Notes.pdf download of my participation in a Boy Scout troop with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Here are some field notes from a former student download from only a little while ago (April 2020) who proved that embodied fieldwork is possible even when you are not in the same room with your cultural teacher.

What Jason means by “Sensorium:”

Cultures around the world have different ways to break up the bodily senses into different groups beyond the basic 5 that many U.S.-raised students learned in kindergarten: taste, smell, touch, vision, and hearing. Of course, many of you are not going to have much in the taste/smell category, but that is okay, you still probably covered 5 or more senses, even if they aren’t so easily distinguishable.

For example, if you describe how sparsely a building is decorated, that would be a sort of “spatial” sense different from the “artistic” sense of describing what clothing people are wearing. If you did describe taste, there are many different senses involved in that, such as the “strength” of the taste,  the “texture,” the “fullness,” the “saltiness/sweetness,” etc. Also the “temperature” of the room could be a different sense than the “tangibility” of cloth against one’s skin. And I haven’t even mentioned all the metaphysical senses such as the sense of “tension” in the room, or the “spiritual” sense of an otherworldly power. That’s 10 senses right there!

I just want you to start thinking with more aspects of your body than simply your eyes and ears. If you only used your eyes and ears, you might as well just watch a film about an experience rather than having your body BE INSIDE the experience. So the more effort your field notes show toward getting data that you could not get from watching a film, the more points that you will get on the sensorium rubric item even if you don’t have exactly 5 discernibly different senses, or all 5 “kindergarten” senses.