Week 1 Practical: Orientation: observational method basics

The course's baseline method — log what you see, corroborate before you classify, never intervene — introduced before any fieldwork begins.

22 February 2027

Before the practical#

Bring nothing except a notebook. The course’s observation log template is issued at the door — printing your own in advance defeats the point of week one, which is calibrating everyone to the same one.

In the practical#

Three exercises, each run against a short recorded excerpt from a previous cohort’s fieldwork (nothing live — that starts in week 4): log the excerpt cold, compare notes with a neighbour before either of you has seen the course’s own transcript, then compare both against the transcript. Discrepancies at each stage are the material, not an embarrassment.

The course’s baseline protocol comes out of this:

1. Log what you can verify against the recording, timestamped, before you interpret it.
2. Corroborate the log against at least one other observer’s before either of you decides what happened.
3. Classify only after the first two are done — never before.

Skipping the order is the single most common reason a case file gets sent back in week 6.

Afterwards#

Nothing formal is submitted this week. This course cares whether you can produce a log that a second person, given only the same recording, would produce the same way — that is the standard fieldwork will hold you to from week 4 onward.