Personal Essays from McLeod Ganj, India:
An Enhanced, Digital Approach to Telling Stories and to Learning in General
Applicant Name: Rachel Rueckert
Applicant email and NetID: racheladventure@gmail.com, rruecker
Mentor name and department: Dr. Gideon Burton, English Department
Purpose: I will publish an eBook of 5-7 personal essays about my field study experience in McLeod Ganj, India. This creative project will examine how digital publishing allows for easier access to information and how emerging social media can enhance the learning and storytelling processes.
Importance of Project: Telling stories is a part of the universal human experience, which is why I spent this past summer in McLeod Ganj, India, home of the Tibetan government in exile, recording stories to write personal essays for a creative honors thesis. However, in India I realized that conventional modes of publishing and storytelling are being called into question with the rise of emerging digital resources. To better under understand how these new tools can help the creative writing process, I made an academic companion blog to my thesis project to create a more immediate, authentic perspective of my experience. Now I would like to take that one step farther and publish an eBook of personal essays. My hope is that the essays I write will be more easily shared and accessed through this online medium, contributing to an academic body of knowledge on how learning can be enhanced in the digital age, while also exploring new opportunities for publication and sharing information.
Main Proposal: To put my creative project into academic context, it is necessary to understand that storytelling is vital to the human experience. For my particular location, McLeod Ganj, India, the home for thousands of Tibetan refugees and the 14th Dalai Lama, I found that this was undeniably the case. The Dalai Lama loves stories and encourages his people to tell them (Lama 29). In India, I saw their willingness to share those personal stories daily.
Unfortunately, many have failed to recognize just how beneficial creative methods, such as storytelling, are to the research process. In the book Method Meets Art, Patricia Leavy says that by doing arts-based research we can "bridge” instead of “divide the artistic-self and the researcher-self." There is a "profound relationship between the arts and sciences," and there are several viable reasons that more and more people are turning towards alternative methods (Leavy 2). Art-based research is a new genre that "comprises new theoretical and epistemological groundings that are expanding the qualitative paradigm" (3). In many ways arts-based research can capture and represent what traditional research cannot, some of the most fundamental aspects of human experience. Leavy also argues that arts-based methods look more at knowledge as a process of meaning-making (9-10). It allows questions to be posed in different ways, promotes dialogue, raises new questions, reaches nonacademic audiences in a way that standard methodology cannot, and crosses disciplines (18). Crossing disciplines is particularly relevant to my project, since I plan on presenting anthropological material in a creative way. Clifford Geertz, an extremely influential anthropologist, takes up this issue of representation in his book The Interpretation of Cultures. He says that all “anthropological writings are themselves interpretations” (Geertz 15). We cannot be native or express a native point of view because of our lack of context. This is critical to understand in ethnography, in travel literature, or in any attempt to translate a foreign experience from the original context. “Thick Description,” perhaps the most influential chapter in his book, suggests that the more layers you add to ethnography, the more holistic your findings will be. This applies to creative nonfiction, which my essays fall under, and the challenge I face of trying to balance the subjective and objective selves. Too often creative writers are prone to detachment and isolation, romanticizing their experiences because they are not really held accountable by a “real” audience, especially the people they are depicting (or perhaps exploiting). However, digital publishing allows for more “layers.” Blogging in particular tries to document things as they happen, and this can be used as an anthropological and aesthetic tool for continued discussion with potentially more authentic material. It is unique because it allows for immediate feedback from a larger audience—individuals who can enhance the learning process by giving valuable feedback along the way. One of the main advantages of an eBook is that you can create hyperlinks and reference other bodies of knowledge. By publishing an eBook, I will be able to link my essays to my blog, creating a more authentic, “layered,” representation of my experience.
Because telling stories in a creative way encourages reading from a broader audience, I am creating personal essays for my project. Philip Lopate argues that while there has been a long standing tradition of personal essays in Western civilization, we are undergoing a “revival” of this unique genre that looks at the “self-reflective process” and “its tolerance for fragmentary and irresolution,” making it “appropriate to the present era” (Lopate l-li). By writing personal essays, and in turn crafting them into an eBook format, I hypothesize that I will facilitate a larger readership to engage in the information I present while also contributing to a growing body of knowledge on how digital media enhances conventional learning processes. Since digital publication is a new frontier, my project will be helping educational institutions see how learning can be enriched through digital media. In addition, this format will enable the stories and material I collected to be shared with more people than conventional publications would.
For this project, I have already completed my field study to McLeod Ganj and received IRB approval for my creative project. My experience in India was a great success, and I now have ample amounts of material to craft these travel essays from my informal interviews and participant observations. As part of my methods, I published to my academic blog frequently both preparing for the field and while I was there.
To analyze my material and continue the online documentation of my learning process, I have continued posting at least twice a week to my blog. This has helped me to organize my thoughts, get critical feedback, and actually market my eBook to an interested audience during the writing process. I am now beginning the drafting stage of my project, working closely with my faculty mentor, Dr. Burton.
Anticipated Academic Outcomes: The essays themselves will be necessary for my honors thesis. However, I will also publish my essays in an eBook format and publish to popular ePub sites such as Lulu and Smashwords.com. A formal publication on my educational experience using digital media is also a possibility through one of the English Department’s undergraduate journals, Criterion or Literature and Belief. I also plan to present my eBook project at the annual BYU Inquiry Conference in March 2012, a venue that discusses cross-cultural learning.
Qualifications: Having already completed a successful field study to Ghana, I was much better prepared to conduct my project in India. I have taken most of the foundational undergraduate classes for my English major and anthropology minor to help prepare me for this project. However, there are a few courses that were imperative to my experience. My Peoples of India course (ANTHR 335) in particular helped me to understand some of the basic cultural practices and beliefs in India. As far as creative writing, I have taken Creative Writing (ENGL 218R) and Travel Writing (ENGL 306). In India I also took Creative Nonfiction (ENGL 317R) and Digital Culture (ENGL 326) through my faculty advisor, which introduced me to some of the budding discussion on digital media within contemporary education. I have also had extensive practice maintaining academic blogs.
Because my qualifications as an undergraduate are limited, I have been working with a faculty mentor, Dr. Burton, for over three years as I have developed field study projects to Ghana, and this time, India. Dr. Burton got his PhD from the University of Southern California in 1994 and joined the BYU English Department that same year. He has many interests in emerging digital media and maintains several blogs and websites, including rhetoric.byu.edu and Academic Evolution, for which he has won several awards. He enjoys engaging students in emerging technology to enrich their educational experience and advocates new forms of digital publication. Dr. Burton takes special interest in travel writing, and he has completed a field study to India himself.
Project Timeline: I have been working on this project since January, 2011. I have completed 90 days of field work and will now begin drafting. I am posting to my academic blog twice a week and plan to have 5-7 polished essays by December, 2011. My honors thesis and department journal submissions will be turned in by January 15, 2012. I will be presenting at the Inquiry Conference in March of 2012, and plan to defend my thesis that same month. I anticipate having my final eBook published by the time I graduate in April, 2012.
Fit with BYU Aims: The world literally was my campus. As part of the outcomes of a BYU education, my project fits with the aim, “intellectually enlarging,” which emphasizes being informed of the diverse cultures and nations of the world. This project helps me in this understanding and allows me to go forth and share the lessons that I learned with people who might never have the opportunity to hear or experience the stories I discovered.
Sources: Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books Inc., 1975. Print.
Lama, Dalai. The Art of Happiness: A Handbook for Living: New York: Riverhead Books, 1998. Print.
Leavy, Patricia. Method Meets Art: Arts-Based Research Practice: New York:The Guilford Press, 2009. Print. Lopate, Phillip. The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present. New York: Anchor Books, 1994. Print.
