Negotiating Emergent Ethnographic Decision Making: Mentoring and Being Mentored

• In Event: Teaching Ethnography Remotely: Centering the Social

Abstract

Purposes

I am a graduate intern that collaborated with two professors in the preparation and teaching of this online ethnography course. “Going remote” due to COVID-19 engendered many challenges and insights, as I was mentored during the development of the course and became a mentor to apprentices. I reflect on the fluidity of the ethnographic epistemology that allows for stepping back and re-evaluating decisions and choices made while addressing the question: How can collaboration in instructional planning guide apprentices through the ethnographic research process? Using field notes to reconstruct my role in preparing for the course, I provide a narrative of how I participated in emergent decision making about the ethnographic curricular scope and sequence in this virtual context. I also discuss the dynamics of interactions in planning and negotiating activities. I conclude by highlighting the significance of the online experience in being mentored and in mentoring others.


Modes of Inquiry & Data Sources

I employ narrative inquiry to understand my inner mental world as a doctoral student, an intern, a co-instructor for the first time, a mentee to two professors and a mentor to ethnographic apprentices. These data sources framing subpoints of the discussion:

Power relations

Drawing on my experience as a former course participant and now as a co-instructor, I discuss my role in negotiating how to contribute to the ethnographic experience of both co-instructors and apprentices. Ultimately, I negotiate power relations between myself and the two professors as well as the professors and the apprentices. Using vignettes reconstructed from my fieldnotes, I reflect on emergent moments of tensions and revisions among the course participants.

Virtual planning

Since course planning was conducted online, patterns of interactions created a new normal for collaboration. Frequently in these meetings, we discussed apprentices’ feedback, and we adjusted activities while creating space for the fluidity of ethnographic research. We often encountered challenges that disrupted our meetings or added to our agenda. In reflection and through our shared planning online, I bring out how we co-constructed our ethnographic agenda.

Emerging of new language practices

As I facilitated a group of three apprentices, my prior relationship with them required reflection. Using my notes, I reflect on my role as a facilitator putting into practice new language practices and adjustments in interactions.

Significance of the online experience

Through examples, I show how providing an intern the opportunity to co-instruct an ethnographic course allows for emergent opportunities and deepened understanding of teaching ethnographically.


Substantiated Conclusions

The online ethnographic experience created different epistemological perspectives for both instructors and course participants, which in turn resulted in new paths to follow and decisions to re-evaluate and adjust. The opportunity to intern provided me with a new transformed identity and enabled me to live, again, a co-constructed virtual experience with mentors and apprentices.

Scholarly Significance

This presentation contributes to the scholarly dialogue from a doctoral intern’s perspective and her experience of teaching ethnographically online.

Author

• Syonara Tomoum, University of Massachusetts - Amherst