Learning Through Observation

Ariana Porter ’19 Warren, Minn.
Major/Minor: Elementary Education; Coaching

Among the beautiful fresh flowers and plants at a Moorhead floral shop, Ariana Porter ’19 waited for customers. She wasn’t an eager employee trying to be helpful, but she did have a specific mission – to watch the pace and interactions at the business during a specific hour each week for eight weeks. She could see workers preparing bouquet after bouquet and business was booming, but to her surprise the flower shop door rarely opened.

“I thought there would be all these people coming in and out,” Porter explained. “And then I would go for an hour and only three people would come in.”

What Porter learned, and wrote about for her first-year writing course, was sales were high because of stealth customers, those who order online or on the phone. She looked at how technology has changed the way people in the floral industry interact with customers. Porter interviewed the flower shop staff about the changes and found that both online and phone orders have changed the method of interaction, but they don’t want it to change the quality of the service people receive.

That’s the same approach Dr. Karla Knutson, associate professor of English, took with her first-year Inquiry Written Communication course. She wanted to change the often-dreaded research paper without changing the quality of what the students learn. She developed the course around ethnography, the practice of observing human and cultural interactions and writing about them. Students chose topics from service organizations and churches to swing dance clubs and hair salons.

Knutson developed a course around ethnography, the practice of observing human and cultural interactions and writing about them.

“The students are creating their own research,” Knutson says. “They learn through discovery.”

The students could pick any group to study as long as they had an affinity for it. They started with observation time before they wrote a single word.

“The project is not thesis driven,” Knutson says. “Students engage in research as a process of inquiry and create an argument that is their own. They become the experts and can write with confidence. Through close observation and interviews, they hear personal stories about real people’s lives.”

And beyond the research, gathering those personal stories taught students valuable interpersonal skills.

“I was nervous because I’d never done something like this before and I had to interview all these people,” Porter says. “I think it also got me more comfortable with public speaking.”