Learning in the Wild: Fieldwork, Gender, and the Social Construction of Disciplinary Culture

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the creation and negotiation of disciplinary culture, through ethnographic fieldwork about socialization in a critical learning environment: scientific fieldwork. Field-based science has received scant research attention relative to its importance as a degree requirement, a professional rite of passage, and a site where sexual harassment and assault are disturbingly commonplace. We conducted a comparative ethnographic case study of two field-based geoscience courses, one each for undergraduate and graduate students. The data include 264 hours of participant-observation and 34 interviews with students and faculty. Three prominent qualities of the culture — eroding temporal and spatial boundaries, navigating challenging conditions, and normalizing alcohol — reflect and/or reinforce disciplinary norms of informality, togetherness, and toughness. We observed these qualities and norms could be leveraged for exclusion or inclusion; they are tools that, together, create a gendered disciplinary culture. Some women resisted the narrow definition of these norms, reframing toughness to include mental toughness, for example. Implications for course design and field leadership, as well as the possibilities and limits of disciplinary cultural change, are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Learning environments
• ethnography
• culture
• geoscience
• socialization
• STEM education
• gender
• symbolic boundaries
• disciplinary culture
• cultural change

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. This is distinct from organizational climate analysis, which focuses on perceptions and experiences.

2. This fact even affected our research process, in that we both found it difficult to identify places for private interviews with participants, ultimately opting to conduct interviews in our rooms, where we knew other students and instructors would not enter.

3. We thank an anonymous reviewer for this insight.

4. Women also demonstrated collaboration at the dormitories and apartments when completing their final group assignments. All but one of the women often spoke with one another to compare and contrast interpretations and depictions of the terrain. Meanwhile, the men, even those who were members of the same group, did not tend to talk with one another at all. The most extreme example of this was when one all-male group completed their assignments side by side, while wearing headphones and not speaking with or looking at one another.