“Auto-Interviews”
Preamble
This post is a jotting down of some happenings/doings in a rhetoric course that I am teaching this Spring 2016 semester. The course is an upper-division undergraduate course called "Rhetoric, Technology, and the Internet". In the first 6 weeks of the course, we read and wrote our way through a small body of multi-disciplinary scholarship in rhetoric and society and technology studies. For about 3-4 weeks thereafter, we read and wrote our through auto-ethnographic and grounded theory research scholarship. All of this work was meant to help me help students develop research problems surrounding their "rhetorical experience" with a particular everyday technology in their lives. From there, they conduct an auto-ethnographic study of such a "rhetorical experience" with the aims of defining this relationship through their qualitative study.
On Auto-Interviews
Students have been collecting qual data (fieldnotes, artifacts, etc.) and writing conceptual memos for about 2-3 weeks now. During this week, I am having them draft, develop, and conduct an "auto-interview," wherein they interview themselves to elicit some of the tacit things they've already gleaned in/through their research thus far. I wanted the students to utilize an ethnographic method to help them tease out some more details about their developing substantive definitions of rhetorical experiences. Enter interviewing.
During Monday's class, I provided a short lecture on ethnographic interviewing; mainly pulled from Spradley (1979). I discussed what interview data can provide researchers, and then I defined descriptive and structural questions a la Spradley. I added rhetorical questions—ones that they have to answer! Along the way, I tried to provide some examples of each. Finally, I had them take 15 minutes to draft a mix of these questions.
For today's class (on Wed.), I am having them take 5 minutes to write out their research problem and then their list of these types of questions by hand on paper. Then, at their tables, (where their peers already have conducted peer review and had multiple discussions surrounding their projects already), students will have 5-7 minutes each to help each other piece together and cut out questions for them to answer over the remainder of the week (due by the next class on Monday). In short, students will help each other develop a good set of questions for them to develop a more systematic way intoexploring some dimension of their "auto-rhetorical" study about their rhetorical relationship with some technology.
