This piece will most likely be extremely helpful in the collaborative research project.  Wendell Berry seems to be on a bit of a rant...although an informative rant, in his article "The Pleasures of Eating".  From interpreting his language, I feel that this piece was meant to shock it's readers into becoming informed.  He has made urban dwellers have been his main target and - although I have to question his idea of what exactly an urban dweller is - I can see his point.  
    Berry claims that "urban shoppers" are simply consumers who don't see themselves as part of the agricultural process - they eat whatever is easiest for them to get a hold of and whatever takes the least amount of preparation with little regard to what it took to get their food to that state.  They see it as a product, and don't appreciate or are unaware of the agricultural processes that are at the root of the product.  
    We have to face facts - I'm sure that this is not entirely the consumer's fault.  I'm sure inorganic farmers and corporate food production companies are banking on this.  They have recognized the psychological force behind their buyers, and use it fully to their advantage.  As long as the consumers who they have removed from the agricultural processes (through making their products cheaper easy to prepare) are seeing results, they will continue to turn a blind eye to the ethics of agriculture and what issues are prevalant with their food.  This is why "urban shoppers" are passively dependent upon corporate and inorganic food companies.  As long as they are blindly dependent, companies will continue to push through with their products.  Since the 1950s when mass production of food started to become commo, this cycle has been building and picking up more steam along the way.

This piece has left me with several questions that will pertain to our research project.
1. Are urban shoppers more likely to be pro-GMOs?
2. How can we make the "local farmer" more accessible to those who do live in cities?
3. is it even feasible for urban families to afford to stick to local farmers, given the common SES among ur

I'm not entirely sure what this reading has to do with our oral history project, but I'll take a stab at it. Perhaps this is the idea that as the people we are interviewing are telling us their stories, they will be further engaging with us their ideas and opinions of the particular subject.  Our interviews are supposed to almost take the form of a conversation (even though it is supposed to be a little more of a one-sided conversation, with us trying to get as much out of the interviewee as possible), and perhaps this is where the reflexivity is supposed to come into play.

Another possibility is that we are not experts on the subject matter that we are supposed to be researching, and we might not have our opinions made up about the controversy surrounding genetically modifed foods vs organic farming.  We might have to linger in the "in between", and sort through what we do know, our own experiences, and what we are going to be told through our interviews and other sources.  We have to pay attention to the thoughts that we have surrounding the subject, and be aware of how and why our thoughts

1. Should GMO foods be labeled?
2. What effect does the growth hormone that is injected into meat have on our bodies?
3. Is the FDA doing enough to keep consumers safe?
4. What are the implications of passing Kevin's Law, and why are so many against it?
5. Can a country thrice on organic food alone?
6. Do genetically inserted pesticides affect our health?
7. Is there any way to truly know if the food you are eating is organic, and what causes certain foods to slip through the cracks?
8. Is there a cost effective way to keep healthier foods in schools?
9. Do GMOs have any effect on childhood diabetes?
10. How can food labels be made more user friendly, and will processing corporations be willing to do this?
11. Should the place of origin be included on food labels? How would this affect businesses, and is there a way to protect businesses if this is implemented?

 Key points to remember for interview preparation:

1. Choose a person who genuinely wants to tell their story. You also should be genuinely interested.
    I suppose it would be kind of difficult to interview someone about something you could care less about, especially when the point of your project is to make others care about that topic/person.

2. Write a short list of questions
    Important word = Why.  Why questions are key for pulling details out of people's responses. Do not expect to read questions off of the list during the interview, it will take away from the fluidity of the responses.  It's okay for the interview to take an unexpected turn (something I am sure I will struggle with). Research your topic for a better list of questions.  Pictures from your narrator's past can also be a useful source for compiling a list of questions - they can help to evoke stronger memories, and give you more possibilities for discussion.

3. Write reasons why the person interests you.
    For more in-depth topics.

4. Analyze your questions lists.
    This will give you the opportunity to check for leading questions and decide which questions could lead to boring answers.

5. Practice questions.
    Obvious reasons. You won't be reading off of the question list, and it isn't a terrible idea to have a clue about what you will be asking.

Questions regarding the interview:

If the interview is not working out the way you intended, is it worth going back for another try, or should you try to find another person to use as a source for your oral history project?

When you are putting together a written piece from an interview, are you supposed to write everything word for word?

If a film maker can edit an interview, does a person creating a written piece or using a recording have the right to edit things out for effect, or does this make the piece less genuine?

    This reading has definitely helped me to expand my understanding of what oral history is.  The first thing that was reinforced was that there are different ways of going about an oral history project.  It can be a formal or informal interview.  It could be rehearsed or on the fly.  It can also be a collaborative piece - which was something that I had no previously considered.  An example given in the article is that John G. Nicolay and William Herndon took recollections from different people about Abraham Lincoln, and several of them were oral accounts.
    I especially liked the idea of having a similar theme to interviews with different groups of people.  The article mentioned interviews with people who are illiterate, and I think that this makes writing more accessible and is an important way to include other persepctives that would have not otherwise been involved in the history of an event.  It is certainly giving me more ideas about the different options that are out there for our oral history project.
    The article states that in an interview, "the questions of the interviewer, deriving from a particular frame of reference or historical interest, elicit certain responses from the narrator, deriving from that frame of reference, that persons sense of what is important or what he or she thinks is important to tell the interviewer".  This made me realize how important the conversational aspect of an interview needs to be. The interviewer has to act as a driving force, constantly pushing the narrator and affecting the narrator's responses.  As scary as it is to engage in such an unpredictable pattern, I am kind of excited by the idea of doign something that I can't necessarily plan until I'm blue in the face.  Allowing the narrator's emotions to come through and change the course of the interview as necessary gives oral histories a genuine quality that

“With this sense of Dewey's foundational place in our thinking about narrative inquiry, our terms are personal and social (interaction); past, present, and future (continuity); combined with the notion of place (situation). This set of terms creates a metaphorical three dimensional narrative inquiry space, with temporality along one dimension, the personal and the social along a second dimension, and place along a third.” (50).

            This could be one of the most helpful things I’ve read all semester.  Clandinin and Connelly have given us a blueprint for understanding the interactions that exist within narratives. I feel that this has also given me direction for writing my own narratives and engaging in narrative inquiry.  I will have a better understanding of what a writer is trying to accomplish and what I am expected to feel from a piece.  I can see how context is so important, and the idea of place/situation gives us that context. 

“Moreover, his encounter with Ming Fang led Michael to wonder about himself, his family, and his community life and how his story of himself in relation to other cultures was shaped by family and community stories on the rural landscape.” (52)

            I feel that this directly connects to what I will have to do as a teacher for every single one of my students once I have my own classroom.  I will have to place myself in their shoes by remembering and cross-referencing my own past to gain a better understanding of what kinds of backgrounds they come from, as well as what kind of dynamic this might bring to the class.

“Working in this space means that we become visible with our own lived and untold stories.” (9-10).

                This quote resonated with me because of what we are going through in our class now with the Twitterive assignments.  We are putting ourselves in the three dimensional space that has been described in this reading by sharing our Twitterive projects (which put ourselves in a specific place).  Many of us have included all three dimensions in our projects without even realizing that this has happened.  While projects are being shared and I find that I have more and more in common with my classmates, I find myself doing exactly what “Michael” from this reading had done with Long Him and the Chinese woman he was working with.  I am analyzing and comparing and contrasting my experiences with the experiences my classmates are describing to gain a better understanding of our perceptions of our experiences. 

    This reading was very difficult for me to understand at first.  The idea of “narrative research” is a completely new concept to me – I now know that the only research I’ve ever really experienced was quantitative, not qualitative like this reading describes.  It was difficult for me to grasp the idea that there is a type of research which “allows wondering, tentativeness, and alternative views to exist as part of the research account,” (25).  I’ve always viewed research as a pathway to find something that is definitive and absolute – not something that necessarily allows for interaction.  I think that in order for me to really get a good grasp on the meaning of this reading, I would have to see an example of narrative research.

“In turning, narrative inquirers recognize that the researcher and the researched in a particular study are in a relationship with each other and that both parties will learn and change in the encounter.” (9) 

                Upon reading this, I noticed that I immediately put up my guard.  I didn’t want to even think about the possibility that the researcher and researched are meant to interact with each other.  I did not understand how it could be okay for “the researched” to change – this sent up red flags in my head and I argued y way through the majority of the reading because of this.  If “the researched” can change, how is it possible for any researcher or group of researchers to come to a conclusion?  How could you find any truth to what they find?  I thought that this directly contrasted with a later quote “By labeling the researcher or the researched as bounded, we mean that the knowledge of the researcher and the knowledge of the researched are separate and distinct from each other and even when the interact the distance between them can be maintained and guaranteed” (10).  If “the researched” and “the researcher” are meant to interact, how is it possible to truly maintain a distance from it? I cannot help but see these two things as completely opposing ideas.  It wasn’t until I thought about a narrative assignment given in The Writer’s Mind a year ago that I began to start to put some of the pieces together.  I remembered how we were meant to consider audience and develop an understanding of how they will interact with our piece.  I realized that the fact that they were interacting with the piece did not change what the piece was about, and the majority of the audience managed to come to the same conclusions about it.

“a recognition that in translating experience to numeric codes researchers lose the nuances of experience and relationship in a particular setting that are of interest to those examining human experience” (15).

        This piece of the reading was the part that really struck a chord with me.  I worked on a bit of research with another professor for several months, and my jobs were to transcribe recordings of classes, code the transcriptions and blogs from class responses, and help analyze the results from coding.  The coding process involved picking apart the transcriptions and classifying the phrases and terminology used into different categories.  Those categories were eventually turned into numbers, were all used in statistics.  Although I understood the reasons behind coding, even then I felt that this lost some of the complexity of the responses some of the students gave in their blog responses and in class.  It seemed as if it were too simple of a research method to completely understand the way in which students learn.  You lose tone and a real understanding of what is important to the students.

1. How has technology improved your writing?

                Technology may not have necessarily improved my writing as of yet; I still feel as if I am in the rudimentary stages of developing my knowledge of writing and technology.  I am still experimenting, and trying to understand the new avenues technology has given me with writing.  I can say that it has broadened my understanding of what writing is, and has therefore given me new resources for material.  I never considered using “tweets” as a source for writing pieces, and this has forced me to reconsider what I consider writing to be.  This could be looked at as an improvement in some small way, but I am not satisfied enough to consider it as such.

 

2. How has technology connected you or made you more mindful of your writing and place?

                Technology has connected me more to other people’s writing than to my own writing.  It is much easier for me to see how other people are interpreting assignments, discuss, and get collaborate with other people.  Because of this, I could say that technology has changed my “place” of writing – it’s not longer something that is simply shared between me and a professor, it is now something that is shared with the rest of the class and whoever happens to stumble upon my blogs, tweets, and sites, etc.    It is now written in a place that has the potential to receive immediate feedback.  This alone has made me more mindful of my writing – the fact that other people can see my work right away is pretty intimidating.   For me, it makes writing in itself more difficult to tackle, but has forced me to focus more on revision.

3. How has technology impacted your identity construction?

“Online, everyone has bulletproof social armor” “I was sick of being in awkward social situations I couldn'tlogo* of, so I joined SecondLife.”

                Two quotes jumped out at me after reading Rock My Network in reference to this question: “Online, everyone has bulletproof social armor”, and “I was sick of being in awkward social situations I couldn’t log out of”.  Online profiles have played such a huge role in identity construction for anyone who regularly uses them.  Frankly, I find Stites’s description of online identity construction to be pretty damn scary.  How could anyone retreat to “fake” identities as a way to avoid regular social pressures that exist in face-to-face conversation? 

                Through online profiles, we are now forced to analyze ourselves and to convey our characters in ways that we feel would best fit an environment – whether it is truthful to how we are in person or not.  I found a lot of fault in this at first, but then I thought, isn’t that what writing is? Isn’t writing the construction of another environment that we’ve envisioned and the dynamics of the relationships our characters have with one another and the environment?  This is exactly what we as writers are doing, especially in this class.  We are writing to provide an image of perfection (with our class requirements as a reference point) through our writing to our professors and to each other. This isn’t something that simply happens in online writing – it is something that can happen in any writing situation.