Qualitative Inquiry and Ethnography

Background: People coming to therapy as part of their recovery from torture may choose not to speak or write about their experiences, yet the process of seeking asylum requires that they must hand over their life stories for a true–false adjudication with potentially life and death consequences. When people have been silenced and speaking has become dangerous, there are major ethical challenges for the activist practitioner who, along with the person who has experienced torture, sees the importance of stories not only being understood and shared in ways which are factual but which contain truth. Methods: I share my experiments with writing as a form of inquiry, specifically ghostwriting and ventriloquation. Findings: These have the effects of (1) moving the therapeutic process into a collaborative inquiry between the client, an asylum seeker, and me as both counsellor and expert witness; (2) letting fictionalised tellings of 'real life' reveal the hidden and complex life stories of clients and counsellors and (3) sharing stories which would otherwise remain hidden and risk perpetuating oppressive practices. Implications for practice: Ghostwriting and ventriloquation offer the practitioner-researcher ways of speaking from a first-person position, from 'within' experience rather than a distanced 'about-ness' position. In this dialogical writing, I use actual and imagined inner and outer voices to enable the sound of talk and thought to be reflexively and empathically heard and felt by readers. Relational ethics are considered in how to imagine the other and manage ownership of stories without reproducing oppressive practices.

This article describes and analyzes the experiences of two tenured university professors at two different US universities
located in the Midwest as they collaborate to design and carry-out innovative pedagogies related to teaching doctoral level qualitative research methods courses. One of the primary elements of the innovations under examination is the
form and function of educational technologies (ETs). ETs are understood to be tools for data collection, data analysis and
data display, as well as conceptual conduits for understanding socially constructed knowledge. The authors also argue
that ETs have epistemological histories (and futures) and innovative pedagogies for graduate education ought to
include robust experimentation with multi-genre/multi-modal texts (Bakhtin, 1981; Bochner and Ellis, 2002; Janesick,
2010; Willis, 2008) that use ETs. Blogs that include audio and visual data representations, social media tools for
communication and collaboration, as well as iPad and iPhone technologies are all ripe for experimentation as they relate
to creative qualitative inquiry (CQI) and the creation of new innovative pedagogies.

Keywords: Qualitative Inquiry, Innovative Pedagogies, Graduate Education, Multi-Modal Texts, Multi-Genre Texts.

In stylistics, the Ethnography of Speaking Model can be understood as a qualitative method used in the field of communication as well as cultural anthropology to analyse the use of language and the communicative process. While communication is the main function of language, it is common knowledge that the study of communication is one of the major goals of linguistics just as understanding communication is important in anthropology as the way we communicate is part of one’s cultural repertoire for making sense of and interacting with the world. Represented by the mnemonic SPEAKING, the model was developed by Dell Hymes as a tool that can be used to assist with the identification and labelling of components of interactional linguistics. The founder of this model Hymes believed that in order to speak a language correctly, one needs not only to learn its vocabulary and grammar, but also the context in which words are used. Thus through this model, Hymes offers a theoretical basis for language study that accounts for both linguistic variation from individual to individual and relative linguistic coherence across the social realm, while also offering a methodological heuristic for investigating communication (Johnstone & Marcellino, 2010), an approach popular to  stylistics study.