The Team working on the preliminary
drawing for the website.
At
the lowest points of the research process,
At
the lowest points of the research process, the faculty members
worried about whether the fieldnotes (and the backlog of unwritten
notes) could support the book-length project, the student researchers
were frustrated by the style and content of the weekly meetings,
and the graduate students felt torn between the student researchers
and the faculty. We emphasize that these frustrations reflect
strains imposed by a collaborative project that suffered from
little prior planning and overtaxed the lives of all involved.
We also note, however, that we can trace some of these frustrations
to the tension between collaborative and authoritative models
of our process. If faculty members sought to rely on a collaborative
model as much as possible, they also saw moments when they wanted
or needed to direct others’ work. If student members enjoyed
and needed a measure of autonomy in deciding what to observe, they
also sought guidance and direction from those with more experience
and knowledge about ethnography, writing, and the university itself.
(Chapter 3)
