Real time field notes

During the EPSRI, classroom observers take field notes to document the events they observe.  The primary purpose of the field notes is to help later researchers locate events in the video record:  text is more easily searched or scanned than video.  Two other purposes of the field notes are to inform other observers of what happened in their class while they were not there, and to provide a journal space for the active observer to record developing thoughts and interpretations of what they see.  There are both technical and intellectual challenges that go with these purposes.  This post addresses the intellectual issues.  The technical issues are addressed elsewhere.

As an observer, your mantra is to write down what you see happening so that other people can find it in the video later.  This sounds straightforward but can be quite difficult in practice.

1. Translating your perceptions of classroom events into text is not so easy.  You're not taking dictation; you're seeing and hearing things happen and trying to quickly capture the essence of what you see and hear in writing.  Some people are able to semi-transcribe parts of what they're hearing, which can be useful, especially if you're hearing something really remarkable.  However, no one can keep this up for long.  Normally it is both more useful and more feasible to concisely summarize what you're seeing and hearing.  I imagine that journalists get good at this kind of writing.

2. You're seeing and hearing a lot.  Interactions are complex events, including talk, gestures, response patterns, etc.  You can't attend to more than a fraction of all this, much less write it down.  What's even more challenging is that your sense of "what's happening" may be informed by, yet removed from, the observable evidence, including things like what you think the instructor means for the learners to be doing and what the learners seem to be understanding as the nature of their shared activity.  It is easy to be overwhelmed by all you are seeing and thinking about, and experience field-note paralysis as a result.

3. The action moves very fast.  Every time you stop to think, you miss a little something.

4. You are documenting classroom events for later researchers whose interests are unknown to you.  Thus, you can't really know what will help them find what they're looking for.  

5. Field notes are interpretive:  they not only document events, they begin to identify what the events may mean.  This is not an extra burden; most likely you won't be able to help yourself.  

6. While you are juggling all of this, your partner-Scholar is observing another group in the same room, and you might want to read about what they are observing.

All of these pressures make the job of taking field notes exhilarating and exhausting.  

Here's an example (from field notes I took myself) that I think illustrates some of the above issues.  I was observing a class of secondary teachers who were performing energy theater (called "ET" once here) for each other.  The scenario they were modeling was a car driving on a road.  SV is Stamatis Vokos; all the other names are of participating teachers.

Second group (Amina's group) has energy going into and then out of the road.  1:44 Nina has lots of questions about their theater.  1:48 I am having trouble following the content of the conversation BUT it is really apparent to me that they are working the hell out of the ET representation.  They are taking it seriously as a model, asking questions about the details.  1:49 SV: "What I just saw Janel do here is I will take this seriously enough to make a modification of something and see where that takes me.  That is the ultimate compliment we can pay to each other. This kind of argument cannot happen very easily when we are only talking with words."  This meta-moment seems like an interruption -- Nina goes right back to asking content questions.  But he's right and it's cool; they are really using the representation for everything it's worth.  1:54 Jim's group:  One object-circle is INSIDE the other.  Eep!  1:56 "The car is on the road," is their explanation for that.  Why isn't anyone calling them on this??  

The above example brings up an issue that we EPSRI directors have discussed extensively, which is the likelihood of the field notes containing material that would not be appropriate for everyone to read.  My excerpt, for example, uses a very colloquial voice and makes at least two comments that critique the participants, or perhaps the instructors (it's not clear who I think should be "calling them on this").  It can get a lot more raw than this; sometimes as an observer I am frustrated, or mystified, or having an epiphany, or feeling critical of a particular person's actions, and that comes through in my notes.  The result is that field notes can't be shared freely.  Our policy in previous years has been that field notes are strictly private and may be accessed only by the observers of that particular class and the EPSRI directors.  If anyone else needs to know when something happened, they ask one of us, and we use the field notes to direct them to useful parts of the video.

I continue to be in favor of this system for two reasons.  The first reason is that I'm not at all sure that I am cognitively capable of producing notes that would be appropriate for wider audiences.  There is already so much going on, I can hardly keep up, and to add in the monitoring and revision that would be required would slow me down a lot.  The second reason is that I think that strong feelings are informative for us as researchers.  Passionate (or snarky!) outbursts are indicators that something is going on that really matters to the speaker.  The Energy Project is a research context in which we have the opportunity (and the burden) of locating our own research questions, and part of your job as an EPSRI Scholar is to articulate your interests and teach them to the rest of us.  I think this happens most effectively when we have a safe place to say what we really think in that moment.

Many qualitative video researchers don't face these challenges because they don't take real-time field notes.  Often, observers are either in the room holding the camera and thus not writing, or are not in the room and thus not observing in real time.  When researchers don't take field notes in real time, part of their later process includes watching the video and writing notes recording the events in it (creating a content log).  This takes more post-EPSRI time than the Energy Project can support, so we rely on real time field notes.  

Cognitively, content logging is a very different process than taking field notes.  One difference is the lack of time pressure: you can stop the video to muse on how best to characterize what's happening.  Another difference is the lack of access to information outside the camera frame -- whatever else may be going on in the real world right then that could inform what's going on.  Thus the content of a content log tends to be pretty different than the content of field notes.