Thursday, October 11, 2012

Sample Summary

As with several other examples of summaries, this is derived and adapted from another blog I maintain.

An article by Michelle LaFrance and Melissa Nicolas, "Institutional Ethnography as Materialist Framework for Writing Program Research and the Faculty-Staff Work Standpoints Project," appears in the September 2012 issue (64.1: 130-50) of CCC.  In the article, LaFrance and Nicolas discuss institutional ethnography (IE), a method for investigating how workplaces form themselves and situate the people who work in them, arguing that it is a valuable means for interrogating institutional practices that are often overlooked. They outline the ways in which IE works to point out how institutional practices differ for people who perform different functions within an organization; they call it situated variability. To do so, they give a brief overview of the history of IE and of its undergirding concepts before situating it in relation to already-existing methodologies. Throughout, they deploy examples from their own experiences within institutions, using them to develop a particular ethos that speaks well to the common audience of the journal, and making the article a particularly effective call to use IE as another tool for those involved in the teaching of writing to look into how the context in which they teach influences the teaching they do.

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