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Exploring Ethnographies

For this second unit, I am learning about ethnographies by reading ethnographic articles that highlight literacy. The article I particularly studied was “Learning to Serve: The Language and Literacy of Food Service Workers” by Tony Mirabelli. This article goes over the common misconception that food service workers are low skilled or incompetent, and highlights in detail the in-depth literacies associated with being a server. The author used multiple forms of research to gather information such as personal experience, field notes, observation, interviews, artifacts, and citations from historical and bibliographic literature. I found it helpful that the author used several different perspectives, providing more depth to the research; perspectives such as the general public, heavily experienced servers, and his own experience as a server. Overall this ethnographic article did an excellent job of showing the literacies involved in serving and how the general public’s assumption of serving being associated with incompetence and laziness is not at all accurate with the reality of what is actually expected from servers.

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Working with a Group

When I first found out I had to do a group project for an online English class, I was honestly quite concerned about whether it would work out or not. What if my groupmates are not cooperative? or what if our schedules never align? However, none of these concerns was a problem for my group because we all communicated, coordinated, and fullied our desired roles. Amy took the initiative by reaching out to everyone via the discussion post. After that, it did not take long for Sam, Joseph, and myself to respond and plan a time for us all to meet. We ended up being able to meet twice, once to assign our roles, and the other to put all of our work together. Although unfortunately, Joseph was able to meet with any of us in person, he made sure to communicate and fulfill his part in our group. Together we studied our ethnography article and completed our project in an orderly and productive fashion, making my overall experience, despite my preconceived notions, a pleasant surprise. I now have a better outlook on participating in group projects, (especially online ones) and will apply what I learned from this experience to future group project experiences.

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Literacy in Choir

The community I decided to explore was the choir community. I discovered that in this community, there are tons of literacies to be known such as knowing what voice type you are, knowing how to read music using a system of syllables called solfege, and understanding a choir director’s conducting. The four main voice types from highest to lowest are soprano, alto, tenor, and bass. A person’s voice type is usually determined by how high and low they can comfortably sing. If you do not know your voice type, you will likely fail trying to sing a part that is not meant for you to sing. Solfege is what most choirs use to learn new music. If someone just walked in a choir rehearsal and did not know solfege, they would be a pretty big disadvantage. A choir director’s conducting is what keeps everyone together, therefore if you are not with the conductor, you will stick out like a sore thumb. That would be really embarrassing! These are just some of the basic literacies a choir member has to know in order to be successful.

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Discovering Literacies

If you look in a dictionary, it tells you that literacy is the ability to read and write. Although that is technically correct, I found that definition to be too limited. After my readings, I discovered that literacy is a lot broader than just reading and writing. Literacy is actually knowledge in any particular subject. That means it applies to most things in our day to day lives. For example, I have to be literate in driving a car so that I can go to work and school. As you can see, literacy is not just a common thing in our lives, it’s an essential thing in our lives. In the reading of Hawisher and Selfe, I discovered that if you do not know anything about computers, you most likely will not be able to get a good job. It is evident that as human beings the more literate we are, the better off we are.