Across our combined 15 years of experience as methodologists and research methodology instructors, we have found that the concept of 'failure' is only a small portion of methodological literature and is similarly missing from scholarship on teaching and learning social science research methodology. We define failure in terms of our inability as…

In this case study, a team of doctoral students--Luis M. Andrade, Angela Hoppe Nagao, Esmeralda Medrano, and Josephine Macharia Lowe--in a community college leadership program participated in a service-learning field project as part of an organizational theory course to analyze comparative outcomes of a college orientation and preparation program…

Despite tertiary institutions acknowledging that reflective practice is an essential component of undergraduate dance teacher training, there is often a disparity between the tertiary students' reflective skills and the more sophisticated reflective ability needed to navigate the twenty-first-century workforce. This paper charts the evolution of a…

Qualitative research is an inherent part of the human services profession, since it emphasizes the great and multifaceted complexity characterizing human experience and the sociocultural context in which humans act. In the department of human services at Emek Yezreel College, Israel, we have developed a three-phase model to ensure a relatively…

Writing has special importance in anthropology. Writing fieldnotes is a central methodology for documenting and analyzing culture, and written personal reflections upon this process are viewed as providing insight into how knowledge is produced by a "situated" researcher. That said, there is little discussion in the discipline about the…

A case study is presented of embedding research in a final year undergraduate, field-based, physical geography module. The approach is holistic, whereby research-based learning activities simulate the full life cycle of research from inception through to peer review and publication. The learning, teaching and assessment strategy emphasizes the…

Notwithstanding its iconic status within geography, the debate continues about how fieldwork should be taught to undergraduate students. The authors engage with this debate and argue that field studies should follow the teaching of research methodology. In this paper they review relevant literature on the place of fieldwork in geography training,…

Background: Graduate teacher education programs focus on developing professional teachers' pedagogical skills and professional knowledge, however they may also require a thesis. Completion of the thesis necessitates that graduate students have an understanding of educational research; this is often not well understood by teachers nor is it an…

Describes a two-semester course in fieldwork taught by the author in several universities. The first semester is entirely classroom-based, with students required to read heavily on all aspects of research design, methods, analysis, and problems. The second semester is a structured, qualitative fieldwork study. (GC)

Qualitative research procedures may be characterized by the practice of empiricism that is sensitive to individual perspectives of reality. The many techniques that may be used are malleable and situation-specific in their design--contingent on those aspects of social phenomena that are chosen to be studied. Practical curriculum design for…

This study of the self-directed, interpretive, and creative reading elements of the Wisconsin Design for Reading Skill Development was conducted to gather descriptive data about implementation strategies being developed and practiced by field test teachers and to gather evaluative information about the usability of various management and…

By using small-scale artificially created archaeologic sites, a teacher can provide students with a time-efficient approach in which to master some basic archaeological techniques. In an artificially created setting, the students can become familiar with conditions they might meet in the field. In a short period of time, students may be exposed to…

Notes that one-semester field methods courses in sociology often lack adequate time for students to learn appropriate techniques and still collect and report their data. Describes how undergraduate students bypass this problem by using multiple observations of a single event to quickly form a corpus of ethnographic data. (JDH)

Outlines an approach to teaching fieldwork that the author has used in graduate seminars. The course, which requires students to engage in data collection, is organized to follow the stages of an actual research project. (GC)

Comments on the preceding article by Bogdan, and discusses how to help college students in qualitative methods courses to develop analytic and synthetic skills in the presentation and formulation of research problems. (GC)