“Teaching the field work and observation: testimony on an experience (1970-1985) “, Jean-Michel Chapoulie, Genesis, 2000,Volume 39 “
This week, the chosen article tells of a learning experience : that of a teacher at the university, in a learning course of the field survey. How do you get students to faculty who are conducting their first searches the taste for the field, but also more fundamentally the necessary distance relative to the prénotions expensive to Durkheim. Chapoulie looks back on her experience and recounts through several years of teaching, the way in which it teaches students to work around preconceived ideas.
You can read an excerpt from the article this week
1 – The obstacle first to the adoption by the students from the point of view of sociology is their personal experience and naïve of the world; it must be pushed away, or rejected ;
2 – statistical investigations, and in particular those that are carried out while the Insee, the French population is the first medium that can allow students to break with this personal experience;
3 – The teaching of sociology has to go through the practical knowledge of the ordinary activities of sociologists : mainly : then the drafting of the questionnaires, the construction of cross-tabulations and, in particular, those which correspond to tris-n-uples, interpretation, collection and interpretation of interviews;
4 – teaching methodology, isolated from, any investigation with a substantial content is ineffective, if not harmful : the methodology of a survey must be chosen according to the objectives thereof and to take, into account the constraints of the objects and the circumstances of the collection of the documentation;
5 – A solid theoretical training – that is to say, a knowledge of the classical works that present the point of view of the “objectivant” of the social sciences – is a necessary prerequisite to any sociological research