Graduate Students Becoming Qualitative Researchers

An Ethnographic Study

Char Ullman, Kate Mangelsdorf, Jair Muñoz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781351616430
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Educación superior

Through conducting an ethnographic study about doctoral students from traditionally underrepresented groups who are learning to conduct ethnographic research, this volume offers unique insight into the challenges and experiences through which these students develop their skills and identities as qualitative researchers.

Foregrounding the stories and perspectives of students from minority backgrounds including Latinx, Black, differently abled, and queer students, Graduate Students Becoming Qualitative Researchers identifies how the process of learning to conduct ethnographic research underpins doctoral students' success, confidence, and persistence in the academy. Chapters follow students during a one-year ethnographic research course during which they learn about ethnography, and also conduct observations, write field notes, interview participants, and gather artifacts. Offering important pedagogical insights into how ethnography and academic writing are communicated, the text also tackles questions of access and diversity within scholarship and highlights barriers to first-generation and minoritized students' success, including impostor syndrome, stereotype vulnerability, and access to time, knowledge, and capital.

This volume will prove valuable to doctoral students, postgraduate researchers, scholars, and educators conducting qualitative research across the fields of education and rhetoric, as well as the humanities and social sciences. It will also appeal to those interested in multiculturalism and diversity within the education sector.

1Who Gets to Become a Professor?

Paving the Way for Diversity in the Academy

Often, professors have been people like John. John’s father was a grocer who went to war and came back to run a successful small business in Vermont. His mother was an evangelical Christian whose good works included volunteering at a social service agency in Burlington, Vermont, and keeping close watch on the spiritual lives of her three sons. Although neither of John’s parents had gone to college, his mother made sure all her sons did. John studied philosophy at the state university and then taught high school for two years in a small Pennsylvania town. He went on for graduate study in philosophy at Johns Hopkins University.

This White, middle-class family produced a son who became a philosophy professor, first at the University of Michigan and later at the University of Minnesota. He went on to chair the Department of Philosophy, Psychology, and Pedagogy at the University of Chicago, where he started the first laboratory school. He developed the idea of democratic pedagogy, theorizing that education should be a collaborative process of students developing their abilities, as opposed to teachers implementing a standardized curriculum. He wrote about democracy and the limits of individualism, the essential ways that social organizations shaped society, and the intractable problems of a class- and race-based society.

After his time at the University of Chicago, he found a home in the philosophy department at Columbia University. where he became prominent in the progressive movement and, for a brief moment, the intellectual voice of the nation. He wrote no fewer than 40 books and 700 articles. Demonstrating his belief in the essential role of social organizations for a functioning democracy, he helped found the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), and the American Association of University Professors (AAUP). Along with W.E.B. DuBois, Ida B. Wells, and other Black leaders, he was even one of the White progressives who helped to found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

His name was John Dewey. On the planet from 1859 to 1952, he was a preeminent scholar of education and a revered university professor, and he influenced national policy. John Dewey is the kind of person who has historically become a member of the academy.

Ken is another kind of person who becomes a professor – sort of. While in high school in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania, he found himself deeply drawn to other languages and wide-ranging ideas about language itself. Supported by his father, who was a clerk at the Westinghouse Electric Company, and his homemaker mother, Ken spent one semester studying French, German, and the classics (i.e., Greek and Latin) at Ohio State University. After that first semester of college, his family moved to New Jersey, where he took another semester at Columbia University, this time in philosophy and classics. After two semesters of college, he promptly dropped out. He is said to have claimed, “It is now time for me to quit college and begin studying” (McLemee, 2001, p. 1).

Ken was a fortunate autodidact. His family’s move to New Jersey meant proximity to New York City and the glittering modernist literary scenes of the time. While he had limited contact with the writers of the Harlem Renaissance or the Algonquin Round Table, avant-garde artists such as playwright Eugene O’Neill, photographer Alfred Stieglitz, and the poets Marianne Moore and William Carlos Williams became his teachers (Selzer, 1996). Greenwich Village taprooms were his classrooms. His working-class parents sent him money when they could, and for brief periods of time, he even had a patron. While working as an editor and music critic at influential magazines such as The Dial and The Nation, he translated Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice from German to English. Smitten with Ken’s lyrical translation, renowned poet W.H. Auden called it definitive, saying simply, “This is it” (Simons & Melia, 1989, p. 3). Ken did all that with what appears to have been one semester of college-level German.

A member of a vibrant community of writers and artists, he published a novel and a work of literary criticism early in his career. Soon, he was a visiting professor at the New School for Social Research and the University of Chicago, where, notably, he was Susan Sontag’s teacher. He had teaching stints at Syracuse, Rutgers, Stanford, Princeton, and Harvard University. And for 20 years, he was faculty at Bennington College, a private women’s college in Bennington, Vermont, where he intentionally taught part time in order to give himself time to write. He was awarded 11 honorary degrees throughout his long career.

One of the originators of the New Criticism movement in American literature, Ken developed a philosophical system that made language central, focused on humans as symbol-using beings capable of ethical action, and drew on components of drama in order to understand human communication. Some argue that he moved the field of rhetoric from an Aristotelian focus on persuasion to a focus on identification and the influence of the unconscious.

Kenneth Burke is the scholar in question. He was alive from 1897 to 1993, and like his quasi-contemporary John Dewey, he shaped a scholarly discipline. A celebrated scholar of rhetoric and a university professor who never earned a degree but taught at elite institutions, Burke¹ learned “on the job,” so to speak, as part of a social network of modernist artists and thinkers. With limited formal schooling, few people could have achieved what Burke was able to do – transform a field of study. And Dewey’s career, while more traditionally achieved, was a mammoth one, having shaped multiple scholarly disciplines (i.e., education, philosophy, and psychology) as well as having had a profound impact on public policy. Both Dewey and Burke were stellar scholars. The future scholars who are the focus of this book walk in their footsteps while forging decidedly divergent paths for themselves.

How the Academy Has Changed Since the Days of Dewey and Burke

Most of us can’t imagine Burke’s exceptional career trajectory happening today. As of 2020, many scholars with doctorates from prestigious universities in the United States are teaching as itinerant adjuncts, being paid a paltry sum per class, and while they are employed, many also qualify for welfare benefits such as food assistance. Harris (2019) notes that in 1969, almost 80 percent of university faculty were on the tenure track or were tenured, whereas today, 75 percent of the U.S. professoriate are employed outside the tenure track, working in temporary grant-funded positions or teaching one semester at a time, without long-term contracts.

The most recent study of the racial and ethnic composition of the U.S. professoriate (Finkelstein, 2016) found that 41 percent of tenured and tenure-track appointments went to White men, and 35 percent went to White women. Asian men held 6 percent of the positions and Asian women held 4 percent of them. It gets worse from there, with Black women, Black men, and Latinos (men) all weighing in at 3 percent of university faculty. Latinas (women) comprised only 2 percent of the professoriate. American Indian/Native faculty, along with mixed-race people, represent only 1 percent (or less) of working academics in the United States. Finkelstein’s study (2016) takes scholars who have immigrated to the United States out of the equation, noting that often, though not always, international scholars come from more privileged backgrounds than those who are U.S. born. And while these figures take into account gender and race/ethnicity,² issues of sexuality and ability among university faculty are not considered in these percentages at all. That is, intersectional identities are not taken into account.

Summarizing multiple studies, Flaherty (2016) makes clear that while faculty have increased by about 65 percent in recent years, the percentage of part-time or adjunct faculty has gone up by an astounding 115 percent. She notes that minoritized people and women are disproportionately represented among adjunct faculty. That is, tenure-track positions are disappearing, just at the moment a more diverse group of PhDs is arriving at the doors of the academy.

Perhaps in response to the waning of tenure-track positions, by 2016 the quotient of people earning doctorates in education had plunged from 15 percent of all doctorates awarded to 9 percent (National Science Foundation, 2018). In the arts and humanities, where the field of rhetoric resides, it has gone from 13 to 10 percent.

But what if, in spite of the dismal possibilities of landing a tenure-track job, you are a person from a minoritized background who still wants to earn a doctoral degree and attempt to become a professor?

Gaining Access to Doctoral Education

The first step for most people who want to become professors is to decide which doctoral programs align with their interests. Then, they would take the necessary steps to apply to those progr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Who Gets to Become a Professor? Paving the Way for Diversity in the Academy
• 2 Situating the Study: Conducting Ethnographic Research With Doctoral Students on the U.S.–Mexico Border
• 3 Belonging and Becoming: Understanding and Overcoming Barriers to Participation in the Academy
• 4 Learning to Do Research: Acknowledging Researcher Positionality in Ethnographic Research
• 5 Building Identity as a Scholar and Researcher: Identity Work, Impostor Syndrome, and Belonging
• 6 Recognizing the Role of Self-Belief, Motivation, and Personal Sacrifice in Doctoral Students’ Success
• 7 Being and Researching in the Third Space: Embracing Cultural, Linguistic, and Professional Hybridity
• 8 We Were Never Supposed to Be Here: Overcoming Resistance and Joining Communities of Practice
• 9 Learning and Not Learning to Become Qualitative Researchers
• Index