Today I met with the three other girls in my group to discuss our oral history/collab research project. We tried to come up with a main topic but we had so many sub topics. Eventually we came to the conclusion that we wanted to research if it was worth the time, money, and heath to go to locally owned businesses compared to big corporations.

We kept discussing which was healthier becuase you would think that the smaller busniess would be healthier but really we do not know that without researching it.

We planned out who we were going to interview and it is starting to really come together!

Should access to healthy food be a right for everyone?

How has the quality of food and they way it is prepared changed over time?

Are there any healthier substitutes for corn?

Since Kevin's Law has the number of fatalities due to mass production gone down, gone up, or stayed the same?

What effect does college have on weight gain?

Is it actually better for your body to become a vegetarian or vegan?

Are school lunches in the United States nutritious?

How much false visual advertising exists in the fast food corporations?

What is used to make the photos look so nice? Is it even the real food?

What is organic? What does it mean?

This past week, well now about a week and a half ago, we were given two things to read over our spring break unless we did it before we left but lets be real, why do something ahead of time? pshh!
So these readings were about oral history, which is spoken and out loud, you know? Well in the first reading, What is Oral History? the main point is that speaking about things is important to pass on information in history. Oral history can be attained through story, simple communication, and mostly interviews. Towards the end they stress how to have a good interview and I found this quote to be important and useful for the future. "The best interviews have a measured, thinking-out-loud quality, as perceptive questions work and rework a particular topic, encouraging the narrator to remember details, seeking to clarify that which is muddled, making connections among seemingly disconnected recollections, challenging contradictions, evoking assessments of what it all meant then and what it means now. "

The second reading, Like it Was, again is about oral history and conducting interviews. This chapter was filled with information to help one write a biography on someone. It helps you to determine who exactly you want to interview and what types of questions to ask. They included practical tips for interviewing and I thought that all of this information is going to be very useful and I plan to go back to this site frequently to get ideas.

This article was very long and I am not sure that I remained focused throughout the entire thing, but I did manage to pick four quotes out from it to help define narrative inquiry. The first quote that I chose was pretty self explanitory and I bet many classmates also picked this quote.
1. "The four include the following: (1) a change in the relationship between the person conducting the research and the person participating as the subject (the relationship between the researcher and the researched), (2) a move from the use ofnumber toward the use of words as data,(3) a change from a focus on the general and universal toward the local and specific,and finally (4) a widening in acceptance of alternative epistemologies or ways of knowing." This basically states that there are a few different ways to write narrative inquiries.

2. "Within the framework of narrative research, researchers use a number of research approaches, strategies, and methods". I like this quote beucase they allow the reader to see that it is not simply handed to them. you must research and use different strategies to come up with the appropriate information.

3. "When the audience of research is presented
with numeric findings, the reader must provide a narrative to explain and capture the relationships presented with statistical values." To me, this quote is sayin that formulas, charts, graphs, and tables are too distracting for the reader and take up too much time and they should be avoided?

4. "What distinguishes narrative inquirers is their desire to understand rather than control and predict the human world." This kinda summed up the article. Narrative inquirers do all this research to understand and better write rather than simply predicting what they think happened or will happen.

While readin this article, I was tryin to understand what the article would be about other than the vague title "Narrative Inquiry" so as I began reading, I saw that the author felt it would be easier to explain through examples.. While reading I picked out four quotes that I found interesting. (in no particular order, here goes..

1. "As narrative inquirers, we share our writing on a work-in-progress basis with response communities. By this, we mean that we ask others to read our work and to respond in ways that help us see other meanings that might lead to further retelling." I thought this was a great quote to describe this class with our twitterives. We continue to work on the assignment day after day and rely on the feedback from others to make changes. This also applies to my Writing Children's Stories class because we are doin something simmilar by reading story ideas to the class to see what they think.

2. "We wrote that to experience an experieflce--that is, to do research into an experience-is to experience it simultaneously in these four ways and to ask questions pointing each way." I dont know if I interpreted this right, but by reading it I assumed they meant when you write about experiences, you must recall the moment and "research" it to remember vivid details so that the reader or audience can understand and experience it as if they were present?

3. This one is kind of broad but.. "Our purpose in giving this example is to demonstrate the use of terms that structure our three-dimensional narrative inquiry space" I chose this quote because it helped me to understand why they went back and forth between past and present. I usually get confused with these types of stories.

4. "Sometimes, this means that our own unnamed, perhaps secret, stories come to light as much as do those of our participants. This confronting of ourselves in our narrative past makes us vulnerable as inquirers because it makes secret stories public." okay again I could be way off, but, I think this is that we need to step out of our confort zone once in a while and tell our stories even if they are embarrassing.

Did I mention that I am terrible at intreperting things?