The Boring Fieldnote Exercise: Students’ Emotions as Data for Sociological Insight

• In Event: Methods: Innovative, Experiential, and Student-Centered Approaches to Teaching Undergraduate Research Methods in the Social Sciences

Abstract

It is common practice to ask our students about connections between their experiences and sociological concepts.

We can go a step further by having students construct their daily experiences as data, which can be put into conversation with concepts and theory. To illustrate such an approach, this presentation will focus on one week’s lesson plan.

I asked students to spend one hour doing “something" and another hour doing “nothing” (students tended to sit on a bench or lay in their bed). They wrote pre-reflections about what they expected to experience in both situations, as well as jottings about their feelings and what they noticed while doing “something” and “nothing.” They then read two academic articles on the concept of boredom, and connected their observations to the readings in the form of a fieldnote.

I designed this exercise to meet several learning outcomes. First, the exercise challenges students’ commonsense understandings of what “boring” means. Second, it asks students to think in typologies: moving from the broad concept to concrete instances. Third, it engages students in comparative forms of analysis: using their data in comparison with the readings, and comparing across the two hours. Finally, students share and connect with each other regarding their experiences, and hypothesize about sources of variation within the classroom. Overall, students treat their own experiences as data, from which they can analyze concepts and theory.

In course evaluations, this one's a clear favorite. Boredom turned into something else! I aim to show how "The Boring Fieldnote Exercise" can offer value in various contexts: in an introduction to sociology course, in the sociology of emotions, work, technology, and in sociological methods.

Author

• David C Joseph-Goteiner, University of California-Berkeley