Students in Professor Jason Jordan’s communications course at Metropolitan State University of Denver were learning how to take ethnographic field notes.

Seated at a desk next to his mom, 9-year-old Nolan Kersey leaned in and whispered, “What’s ethnography?”

Mariyah Younger, 31, smiled at her son and helped him look up the definition — a research method in which someone studies a social or cultural group — on his tablet.

During class, Jordan tasked his students with wandering the university halls to take notes on their surroundings as if they were performing an ethnographic field study of the building.

Nolan and his mom walked through the Plaza Building on the Auraria campus, he with his tablet and she with a notebook and pen, documenting the world around them. They noticed Braille o

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