Paper short abstract:

Assignments are a rich source for ethnological writing about everyday school life. This presentation revisits methodological implications of doing fieldwork in school in this digital age, specially when relying in diverse materials: student interviews, diaries, search logs and archive material.

Paper long abstract:

A proud construction of a hotel for insects, developing a successful recipe to explain history, a Finnish thesaurus of war propaganda in newspapers... A thread that connects these diverse achievements is the school and assignment context in which they happened. School assignments have emerged during my fieldwork as source material for three articles. In this presentation I will make sense of three diverse field sites (classrooms, digital environments, archives) and the resulting research materials to extract some methodological implications of school assignments for undertaking ethnographic work.

To make sense of school assignments I have borrowed Mary Soliday's "everyday genres of academia" (2011). Despite obvious differences with academia, school assignments constitute "socially informed and enacted moments". Thanks to their trial character, social and technological interactions, and presentational elements, assignments offer ethnographers an immersion 'in the thick' of the school experience. They allow to witness the repetitive and routinised, "templates" through which students appropriate a private understanding of diverse "bits" of course matter.

In my dissertation, school assignments relate somehow with cultural heritage. My aim is to inform how cultural heritage is meaningful in terms of learning communities that engage with it outside the traditional museum visit, in their everyday schoolwork. My fieldwork showed that during these brief intense periods students rely most on digital materials and methods. However, methodological dilemmas arise when organising fieldwork around digitally mediated assignments: digital learning environments can make them inaccessible, their ephemeral character hinders its collecting, and as archive material they are extremely fragmentary.