In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Apprentice Ethnography and Service Learning Programs:Are They Compatible?
  • Tim Wallace (bio)

A Response to the Gitxaała Nation Program
Led by Charles Menzies and Caroline Butler

Charles Menzies and Caroline Butler title their contribution to this journal "Collaborative Service Learning and Anthropology with the Gitxaała Nation," yet they make a reference to "early ethnographic field schools [using] indigenous communities as a laboratory," seeming to imply that their program is not an ethnographic program. However, they next suggest that today's UBC schools (presumably they mean ethnographic field schools) are based on principles of collaboration and service learning. It seems that Menzies and Butler are trying to say that "early" ethnographic field school programs were a touch misguided but that theirs is not, because their goal is a collaborative partnership between the program leaders and the community, on the one hand, and the students, on the other. Nevertheless, in my opinion, their program is a hybrid ethnographic field school-community service learning program. Although I commend their success in producing a collaboration with the community that would host the students, in my opinion it has come at a cost—the deemphasis of critical ethnographic training needed for apprentice ethnographers.

In what follows I would like to share a few points from my reading of this interesting program. My own curiosity with field schools emanates from my eighteen-year experience (1994-present) designing and leading ethnographic field schools in Hungary, Costa Rica, and Guatemala. I am always searching for ways to improve what I do, and I was hoping to find some new ideas here for my own program (Wallace 2004). [End Page 252]

As a collaboration model, I think the Gitxaała program works fairly well, but as an ethnographic training model I have some concerns. Before elaborating, first I should explain what I mean by an "ethnographic field school," because there is a range of programmatic types that can fall under the category of field school, but in my opinion not all programs that are field schools are ethnographic training programs.

Ethnographic field schools, in my definition, are those in which there is a combination of ethnographic field method instruction combined with research practice in independent projects, participation in a group research project, or completing research "practice exercises." Completing an ethnographic field school within less than five to six weeks and emphasizing this kind of training program is a challenge. The Menzies and Butler program is only four weeks long and might perhaps better be classified as a community service learning program, where the research assignment activities are directly related to facilitating positive benefits for a local community in which the participants are working or studying. In this kind of program the emphasis is on collaborative assistance rather than ethnographic training. My experience as a program director leads me to conclude that it is difficult to combine ethnographic training and community service learning. Volunteer work and ethnographic work are quite different, and often students really need the latter first to be able to negotiate the former successfully. For me, the Menzies and Butler program seems to confirm this lesson.

A third type of field program is cultural immersion. Students have an intense experience living in another culture, receiving formal classroom coursework that is combined with field trips within the region or country where the program takes place. The program director teaches at least one of the courses and may recruit other local experts to teach. Frequently students are housed together in hotels or other indoor or outdoor facilities. The Gitxaała program does not seem to fit this model, nor does it fit a fourth type—a language training field school, such as the Tulane University Kaqchikel Summer language training program led by Judith Maxwell. Students combine cultural immersion with intensive language training in one main locale throughout the stay and have a few field trips. The program director is a director of residence life and makes sure the student experience is appropriate and on target, smoothing over any rough spots for students during the program. [End Page 253] A final one I would mention here, again probably not applicable to the Gitxaała Nation program, is the...

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