Autoethnography – Page 7 – Silence and Voice

Autoethnography Research Project Proposal ~ Feedback Requested

I have an assignment for my doctoral program that I want to share here and possibly (hopefully) generate some constructive feedback. We have a short period of time for this project / assignment, so I can not take the usual time to work out all the issues before I begin. As I am not accustomed to discussing this early in the process, some suggestions and possible direction for identifying potential participants will be most appreciated.

This project is a small-scale research project that is intended to:

Get some experience doing what we have been studying, namely research itself
Write about educational research methods after using some of them
Set personal learning objectives and then reflect on how they were met

I have never publicly discussed this process before I have it completed, and as my program at Lancaster University in E-Research and Technology Enhanced Learning focuses on participatory and networked learning, I thought I will work with my tutor and colleagues in the cohort as well as share this experience here on my blog.

While this is intended to be an original piece of research, it is within the context of a class, so the (proposed) research headings are slightly different than a pure research paper.

Working Title
Educational Explorations of Autoethnographic Inquiry: A Tale of 2 Teachers

Research Problem
Autoethnography is increasingly used as a research method, pushing the boundaries of qualitative inquiry by focusing on a phenomenon in the life of the researcher as the central aspect of study, and publishing the findings as a cultural critique. With online technologies making the entire research process more transparent and potentially interactive, the process and research intentions themselves may be explored more fully, as the steps can be studied as part of the process, rather than by looking only at the final, published product. Little is known about what the researcher learns and wants his or her readers to learn within the process of autoethnographic research.

Literature Review
This will focus on autoethnographic inquiry, what it is, why it is done, and what is learned through it. I am planning to focus around the work of Carolyn Ellis, Art Bochner, Deborah Reed-Danahay, and Jean Clandinin and Michael Connelly.

Purpose & Research Design
The purpose of this case study is to understand the intentions and learnings of researchers who engage in autoethnographic inquiry. This will be a qualitative research design, with a constructivism philosophical worldview. The strategy of inquiry will be case study. The research methods will be interview.

There are no expected ethical issues in this research. Participants will remain anonymous, with fictitious names being used and the transcripts from the research secured in my password-protected computer.

This research is important to me because I am interested in learning more about how autoethnography can be used as a method in online and distance education, particularly for its seeming relationship with reflective practice and transformative learning. This is part of a large research interest of mine, which I am seeking to begin exploring in this smaller research project. I hope to better understand this to ultimately help improve the effectiveness of online teaching and learning practice.

Methods
As this is an exploratory case study, there will be 2 people interviewed for this research. I will reach out to my network of colleagues and distribution lists to locate 2 people who have published autoethnographic inquiries (I have not actively looked for potential participants yet). Interviews will be conducted over the phone. Open-ended interview questions will be used:

Why did you choose to use autoethnographic inquiry?
Who is your intended audience?
What intentions did you have for your readers?
What role did technology play in your research?
What did you learn in the process of this autoethnographic inquiry?
If you were to conduct further autoethnographic inquiry, what would you do differently?

Interview results will be hand-transcribed and sent back to the participants for their review and approval.

Data Analysis
I will look for themes between the results; though need to develop this section more (for possible hand-coding?).

Findings and Next Steps
TBD

Personal Learnings
I will explore what I learned in doing this research project. I do need to develop personal learning objectives, though am not sure about the format for them and how many are realistic given the time and scope limitations.

References
Listed as used.

Planning for Not Planning to See in Ireland

I am in Ireland now for a few days of vacation with my friend from college, James. I have been here once before, though it was a number of years ago and was for a somewhat short period of time (as if the four full-days I am here now after my trip to Lancaster is a long period!).

Whatever the case, I have planned for this trip by doing something I have never done when traveling before—planned to not plan for everything.

Let me attempt to clarify.

I believe I am a first-class travel packer, and have packed only and everything that I need for my trip (there is nothing in my bag I have not used, and nothing I really needed that I should have brought). While this accounts for the physical items, I am focusing now upon the non-physical—the thoughts and experiences that come along with and attend to seeing something new with someone who I have seen a lot with over the past 20 years.

“What do I want to see while here,” I was asked. What is usually a question that demands an extra 10 hours to be added to the day was instead replaced by something much simpler and perhaps even more complicated, “I want to see the things about Ireland that make people say it is such a beautiful place.” If only this can be easily planned for!

I want to see nature, landscapes, colors, and sites that I have only been able to see without feeling online. Those sites that I can re-experience with my own photos, but which may be meaningless by seeing them in those of other people.

I don’t quite know what these things may be before I see them . . .

What do I want to see? Seeing is not quite the right word—I want to experience things that I cannot see online, on video, through pictures, the phone. I want to experience things that technology can not reproduce; only reminding me of later.

Ever see a picture or hear some music or have a conversation and get transported through time and space to that or some other experience or history or memory? Take a look at the photos I uploaded to Flickr and you will see the physical memory of yesterday. Looking at them again now, I remember the feel of the wind, my fear of the heights, the rich colors, the peaceful brooks, the memory of great movies and even greater expansion and promise that have washed across these hills over the millennia.

That is the best I can do to share what I did yesterday. Know the pictures (while clear and colorful, if I do say so) hold only a glimpse of how rich the experience really was, and they all took place because I did not create a checklist of things I wanted to see and do while here. Let’s see what happens.

That is what I wanted to see in Ireland.

Travel Reading, Take 1

I am planning some travel to the UK and Ireland in another week, and while that means I tend to buy new clothes and supplies for the trip, it also means I look forward to getting and bringing some new books with me.

What to read? Always an exciting question to consider.

Recently, a number of colleagues, especially Sarah Stewart, Britta Bohlinger, and Ailsa Haxell, have recommended various books (and have helped Amazon meet payroll this week, undoubtedly), and I have a lot to choose from among the daily boxes that are arriving (mostly in the area of autoethnography, reflective practice, critical theory, and techno-cultural analysis).

Normally, I bring about 4 books, usually heavy research or cultural analysis texts, and about 2 dozen magazines. This time, I am intentionally packing lightly (I live for carry-on), so will choose with great care.

Thus far, one novel:

I have another week to choose the other 2 (I decided 3 will be the max), so let’ see . . . . Suggestions?

What is Autoethnography?

Yesterday, I revisited the TwitterGroups webpage where I recently created the Autoethnography Twitter Group. While there, I noticed a new feature that was incomplete, namely the Description area. I thought this was as good a time as any to put in a description of not only the group, but of autoethnography itself.

I am often asked what the $%^& is autoethnography, anyway, so thought now is as good a time as any to define it. Given this qualitative methodology and my upcoming paper at the 5th International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry, here is my definition of autoethnography:

Autoethnography is a form of qualitative research where the researcher explores his or her own experience as a focus of investigation. It acknowledges the power of the researcher to explore his or her own life more closely than others are able, and it connects the personal story to the participatory cultures while engaging the reader to share in the vibrancy of the experience.

How does this feel and seem and sound and look to you?

Autoethnography Listserv Discussion Heats Up

I have not been blogging much recently, as I have been slammed with the simultaneous wrapping-up of two classes I am teaching: Principles and Practices of Online Course Creation and Instructional Design and Research Process and Methodology. I do have a lot of material to share and reflectively work out on my blog, but for now I have been refining my lessons, correcting papers, and helping students with projects / research / practice.

One thing I have been reading with great interest in the last day or so has been the increasingly heated discussion on the Autoethnography Listserv. While autoethnography is a favorite qualitative research method of mine, I have never seen such an interesting discussion that revolves around some incidents that appeared to happen during the NCA conference in San Diego, held at the Manchester Grand Hyatt that has recently been embroiled in the Proposition 8 controversy in California.

The experience seems especially interesting, given the conference’s theme of “unCONVENTIONal.” This is well worth some attention in the wider community of scholar-practitioners.