Composition Forum 49, Summer 2022
http://compositionforum.com/issue/49/

Pedagogical Approaches and Critical Reflections: Adapting the Discourse-Based Interview in a Graduate-Level Field Methods Course

Rachael Jordan, Mika Stepankiw, and Rebecca J. Rickly

Abstract: The discourse-based interview (DBI) allows researchers to explore writers’ tacit knowledge. This article describes how we taught and learned to adapt a DBI-based interviewing process through the reflections of both the professor and two graduate students in a graduate-level course, Field Methods in Technical Communication. By participating in a large-scale research project focusing on how online PhD students viewed their education post-graduation, current graduate students learned about planning, conducting, and analyzing interviews. The authors reflect on how they not only learned qualitative methods, but how the experience made them feel like part of a research community (as well as an academic community). Taking a dialogic approach, the professor and both graduate students weave narratives, reflections, and the voices of their participants to share their experiences in uncovering tacit knowledge using a DBI-inspired process.

Learning about the discourse-based interview (DBI) and learning to conduct a DBI (or even something like a DBI) are seemingly simple processes, yet we know what often seems simple can be surprisingly complex. Here, we share our stories of teaching and learning a DBI-like process as part of a graduate course in field methods, which used a DBI-inspired interview process to explore how the graduates of the first online PhD program in Technical Communication and Rhetoric felt about their degree.

Setting the Scene: Some Institutional Background

Texas Tech University (TTU) has offered an MA in Technical Communication (MATC) online since 1998. (The onsite MA started in 1992, and the PhD in 1994). Surprisingly, when the director of graduate studies in Technical Communication and Rhetoric (TCR), Joyce Locke Carter, initially tried to take the PhD in TCR online in 2005, she was met with quite a bit of resistance from various accrediting agencies. Why consider taking a solid program and putting it online? What about student isolation? How can we ensure students have the same experience? Specifically, “How will they get it all online?” Carter worked hard designing an online program where students would “get it all,” even if we didn’t know exactly what “it” was. From making sure that online PhD students had frequent forms of “checking in” with the powers that be (initially the graduate director, then their committees: from a first year review to annual reviews to dissertation committee reviews), to creating a two-week long face-to-face (f2f) May Seminar where students participated in a “hands on” class as well as multiple opportunities for professional development and mentoring, to creating cohorts that had built-in bonding activities, Carter tried to capture what f2f students got that online students might not. Now that the online PhD has been in existence for over 15 years, Rebecca “Becky” Rickly thought it was time to see if the graduates did, indeed, feel like they got “it”-the experiences and benefits of a traditional f2f PhD program. When she found out she was teaching the English 5389, Field Methods in Technical Communication graduate class in spring 2021, Becky decided to make investigating “it” the collective class project.

Getting at this mostly tacit information would be challenging. In Lee Odell, Dixie Goswami, and Anne Herrington’s article about the DBI, the authors begin by acknowledging that much of our knowledge is “personal and tacit,” gained through repetition and not by learning rules or reading explanations (221). Graduates of the online program have been (as Michael Polyani described) “dwelling in” their careers, many of them moving from positions of teaching to administration or working in professional communication, and determining how well the online program prepared them for these positions would be a large part of the class. Becky remembered being excited by Odell, Goswami, and Herrington’s article, which she read as a graduate student, recalling that the article described how the researchers used the DBI to understand the tacit knowledge that undergirded routine tasks in the workplace. While our situation was quite different, she thought that this class might adapt some of the components associated with the DBI and integrate them into the more traditional interview process.

Stepping Back to See “It”

As Neil Baird and Bradley Dilger note in the introduction to this issue, in a traditional DBI, a researcher will pose alternative rhetorical choices about texts to a writer, which stimulates the interviewee to share tacit knowledge. While we don’t follow the procedure of considering alternatives in our research about “it” (as the original authors do in their article on the DBI), what we do is ask those who have graduated with an online PhD to reflect on their time in the program in light of who they are now, what they do now, and so forth and then inquire about specific experiences that influenced them/prepared them for the work they do now. By reminding them about the origins of the program, as well as the original goals, then asking them to reflect on their experiences and their goals (as well as the work they do), we were able to tease out tacit knowledge about the program. However, the interviews weren’t solely retrospective. The interview questions asked participants not only to reflect on their past experiences, but they encouraged participants to discuss specific choices they made while in their program, such as classes they took, how they participated in the May Seminar, which projects and professors influenced them, and what their job market choices were after graduation. The questions also encouraged participants to make connections between these various aspects of the program that they may or may not have thought about before, or knowledge and experiences they may have taken for granted. In this way, we harnessed the disruptive power of considering choices at the heart of Odell, Goswami, and Herrington’s method—choices that students may not have been aware of as they moved through the program. We asked not only how participants felt about “it” upon looking back, but also worked to have participants uncover the tacit expertise they gained from the program in the classroom and beyond. By triangulating our findings with our own experiences—as a professor who has been part of the program’s inception and working in it until now, and two online PhD students, one in academia and one in industry—we are able to get a fuller picture of the success of the online program, particularly in how it compares to what these students might have experienced in a more traditional, f2f program.

During the Field Methods course, we discussed whether Becky should participate in the interviews given that she taught most of the students who agreed to be interviewed, and initially, we decided to let only the students conduct interviews so that the participants would be more likely to be honest about their experiences and feelings. However, when we decided to continue the study after the initial class, Becky started conducting interviews as well, being conscious about her positionality as a former teacher and now as a colleague.

Interviewing is an art, but we believe it is one that can be taught. Odell, Goswami, and Herrington were trying to illuminate tacit writing knowledge via the DBI; we wanted to learn the ins-and-outs of conducting interviews in general, gain practice in conducting interviews, and reflect on how best to get at the tacit knowledge that the online graduates had. Since tacit knowledge is something that is difficult to put into words and requires “looking back” at choices, the ability to discuss creating the interview protocol, the interviewing process, and the interviews themselves as a community helped the students articulate what they were learning about this important qualitative skill. In essence, we adapted the DBI to suit our purposes, with the goal of understanding how students felt they got “it” (and what “it” was) in their online program. In the following pages, we examine our positions as we teach and learn a DBI-like interview, both in class and as part of a larger project, then reflect on our experiences in the class and beyond.

Positioning the Course

Field Methods is part of the methods-rich curriculum at Texas Tech.{1} When it was first offered in 2003, the course focused primarily on field methods used in industry: contextual inquiry, participatory design, user experience, etc. As the course evolved, it became a bit more theoretical, less focused just on industry, and more rooted in general qualitative research as a scaffolding for more contextual applications.

How the Field Methods Course Integrated the “It” Project

Becky: When I got a last-minute assignment to teach the Field Methods course in Spring 2021, I was a little panicked, and I asked to see a syllabus of a colleague{2} who’d taught it most recently. He used Clay Spinuzzi’s Topsight 2.0, Laura Gonzales’ Sites of Translation, Cheryl Geisler and Jason Swarts’s Coding Streams of Language, as well as multiple articles and chapters. I decided to keep these texts and add Sarah Tracy’s Qualitative Research Methods. I wanted to give students some “nuts and bolts” background (which Spinuzzi’s book did), as well as more grounding in qualitative methods (which Tracy’s book did), and an example of how these methods might be applied, analyzed, and represented (which Gonzales’ and Geisler and Swarts’s books did).

Given my goals for this course, which were to familiarize students with the theories and methods used in field research, as well as gain some practice with these methods (and acknowledging the mess that’s often part of research), I decided to ask the class to participate in a large-scale research project I had been thinking about doing based on Carter’s unpublished manuscript entitled “It,” which discussed the history of the online PhD program in TCR at TTU.

In the “It” manuscript, Carter noted that when trying to get the online PhD program accredited, some of the biggest pushback came from the notion that the online students wouldn’t get something that the f2f students got. I remember spending a lot of time as a graduate faculty member in 2005 discussing what it might be that f2f students got that online students didn’t, and, as a result, we came up with various activities like the two-week May Seminar where students came to Lubbock to take intensive courses f2f that were more difficult to teach online, such as usability or design. Students took these courses from 1:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. every day for two weeks.{3} In addition, during the mornings in the May Seminar, we offered professional development opportunities that ranged from how to select a dissertation committee to actually presenting a conference talk and receiving feedback. Every year, the new cohort chose a name for themselves, and in following years, they sponsored some of the May Seminar “bonding” activities.

One of the things I firmly believe about teaching research methods is that students should have an opportunity to “try on” what they’re learning, even if they fumble it a bit or it doesn’t “fit.” In this course, I wanted to help them see how “real” research in a “real” study might be planned, conducted, analyzed, and presented. As Pamela Takayoshi, Elizabeth Tomlison, and Jennifer Castillo wrote, “[t]he steps involved in the messy and subjective parts of knowledge construction remain largely untold in our professional conversations” (109). I wanted to help students see these messy and subjective parts of a research project, but I wasn’t sure if they would be on board. Thankfully, Rachael and a few others from my Research Methods overview course (English 5363: Research Methods in Technical Communication & Rhetoric) seemed to think it would be a good idea.

What I proposed was that we, as a class, interview graduates from the online PhD program to determine (1) what they thought “it” was, and (2) if they got “it,” and if so, (3) where and how they got it. In their influential article on DBI, Odell, Goswami, and Herrington discuss how DBIs can help us understand tacit knowledge, so it made sense to center the research around this type of interview. In this article, they also note that we gain expertise by continual immersion in an activity. My hope was that students would gain expertise in interviewing by participating in multiple interviews.

What We Did

Becky submitted an IRB (which was approved, then revoked—because they decided that this research was programmatic self-study, thus no IRB was required) and gathered the names and /emails of graduates of our online program. She wrote an introductory email and sent it to the online PhD graduates, and then she included the ones who agreed to participate in a file.

As part of the class, everyone read Carter’s unpublished “It” piece, then discussed what we thought “it” might be. Becky got some great resources from Carter, who masterminded the online PhD program—Excel sheets, surveys, and so forth—and this data was put into a “resources” folder so that the students in the class could attempt to contextualize their research. We read about planning and conducting interviews in both Spinuzzi and Tracy, and then together, we wrote an interview protocol and drafted emails inviting participants to schedule an interview. We practiced on one another, then each class member scheduled two to four interviews (depending on whether they were MA or PhD students).

Finally, we interviewed roughly half-about 25-of the graduates on Becky’s list over the Spring 2021 semester. Students in the class were able to situate their hands-on research in the context of what they’d read in the course for a final project. Between the course, the final projects, and re-igniting the desire to study this aspect of our program, Becky offered the students in the class the opportunity to continue the research over the summer and conduct interviews with the remaining graduates. Mika and Rachael stepped up to stay on the project.

Mika: In addition to being an online PhD student, I’m a working professional writer. Given that TTU’s program appeals to the working professional (in addition to the academic), I was intrigued by the project during the Field Methods course. My initial experience interviewing graduates made me excited to hear what others might say about the program and their experience. Thus, when Becky asked for volunteers to continue with the project after the semester ended, I happily offered my assistance (and was curious about what tacit knowledge I would discover through the process).

Rachael: Mika and I are in the same cohort, but we hadn’t taken a course together before Field Methods. We knew each other through our cohort’s Slack channel interactions, and I was so excited when I saw that she was the other student staying on to continue the project with Becky as well.

Becky: The three of us met throughout the summer and fall of 2021, continued to interview the rest of the graduates (another 20 or so-people won’t stop graduating!), and will seek to publish more detailed findings, as we explain below.

Positioning ourselves

We each came to the course from different positions: Becky was a “seasoned” professor who loves teaching the Research Methods overview course, but it was the first time in just under 20 years for her to teach Field Methods. Rachael and Mika were both graduate students in their first year, but Rachael was in academia, while Mika worked in industry. Our positionality influenced how we approached the course and the continuation of the project, so we engage it throughout this article.

All Alone.... But Together Online

Becky: When I’ve worked on projects with students before, we always were able to meet f2f at some point. However, due to COVID-19, the Field Methods course had to be completely online. We met every Thursday evening via Zoom from 6:00 p.m. to 8:50 p.m. While most of the students had taken online classes before, this one had a significant amount of reading, a lot of hands-on experiences that were new and perhaps even frightening, and a very pressing schedule for this project to work. We were all juggling plates on poles, trying to keep the plates spinning and not crashing down around us. Luckily, I was excited enough about the project to get everyone started spinning.

As noted earlier, I knew a few of the students from the Research Methods course, but many of the students were new to me. Some were MA students, but most were PhD students. They came from all over the US, and one from Pakistan. About two-thirds of the students were in academia, and the rest were in industry. Even though I worked in industry before getting my PhD, I often struggle to make my courses relevant to both industry and academia; the only other time I’d taught this course, it was, in fact, focused on industry. I’d added more of an academic focus for this course, and I was worried that I’d gone overboard.

Rachael: Whenever I pictured getting a PhD, I always envisioned myself sitting alone at a desk, the early morning sun seeping through a window, as I read or typed away at a computer. I knew that I would have classes, professors, and classmates, but the vision I always conjured in my head was a solitary one: reading, alone. Writing, alone. Researching, alone. Somehow, I had it in my head that the only interaction I would have with my peers would be a competitive one. The grad school stories that had been passed down to me from colleagues were all of students trying to “one-up” one another, or make one another feel not “good enough,” or faculty who made students cry during qualifying exams and dissertation defenses. Despite these stereotypes, I decided to apply to a program when I was teaching full-time, had two kids, and was years removed from completing a master’s degree. I knew I would probably be alone, especially as a handful of online PhD students, but I would have my family and my colleagues as support. The program had an amazing reputation, with competitive acceptance rates, and I knew my peers would probably be working, just like me. I didn’t expect to make friends, or connections and was preparing myself to become the “lone scholar” I had seen in my head.

I was so wrong.

When I logged into our first Zoom class for Field Methods, the only experience I had interviewing was in Becky’s Research Methods course in Fall 2020. As part of the course, I had been tasked with interviewing a faculty member in our program, which was an incredibly useful assignment on many levels, including that I was in my first semester of the online PhD program. I live in California, have been teaching a five-five load at a public university for ten years, and though I’ve presented at multiple conferences, I had never taken a research class. I’m ten years removed from completing my master’s degree in creative writing and my only publications are short stories and poems. Outside of literary theory papers, I had never learned how to conduct the type of research employed by technical communication scholars. In that initial course, I felt like I was entering a whole new world, and it was a wonderful introduction to the field. Since my favorite unit in that Research Methods course had been about qualitative methods, especially community-based and participatory-action research, when I saw Field Methods on the spring schedule, I immediately enrolled.

Mika: Before taking the Field Methods course, I had not taken any courses with Becky or Rachael. In fact, I was only vaguely aware that Rachael and I were in the same cohort of the online program at Texas Tech. This was my first research course as part of the online PhD program, and unbeknownst to me at the time, the Research Methods Overview course normally preceded taking this course.

Similar to Rachael, I had completed a master’s degree at another institution almost ten years before I was admitted into the PhD program at TTU, but unlike Rachael, my master’s degree was in professional writing and technical communications. In my master’s program, research was integrated into other courses, and there were no dedicated qualitative methods course. Still, there were opportunities to engage with research, and even at the beginning of the master’s program, I had designs on completing a PhD. Thus, I volunteered time with one of the professors and gained familiarity in content analysis and other methods, then used similar methods for my thesis project. That said, most of the research discussed in my master’s program was more quantitative, and interviews were not a significant part of the research methods we discussed unless it was related to usability research.

Where my experience further differs from Rachael’s is that I have been in industry since I graduated with a bachelor’s degree, working as a professional writer in a variety of contexts and fields-from translating complex oil and gas research into laymen’s terms to writing fundraising proposals and research articles that support advancements in health and medicine. Throughout my career, I have conducted a variety of interviews with various end goals. This experience ranged from my interviewee being a subject matter expert who would help inform a process to my interviewee being a patient who had a positive experience receiving health care.

Reflections on/(Re)learning the Process of the DBI

Uncovering tacit knowledge is at the heart of the DBI, but what we discovered as we taught and engaged in/with these interviews was, like the interviews themselves, more complex. By becoming more proficient as interviewers, we became more confident in ourselves as researchers. We also found that the class-or the interviews-did not occur in a vacuum, but in a rich, collaborative atmosphere we hadn’t acknowledged before.

Interviewing and Agency

While about half of the class had been in Becky’s Research Methods overview class where students interviewed a faculty member, half of the class members were completely new (in fact, it was one student’s first course in the program!), so we had to spend a lot of time talking about how to prepare for, construct, and conduct a DBI-inspired interview. While Becky had made the original connections to the online PhD graduates, the class did everything else collaboratively-from writing an email to set up an interview time, to constructing the interview questions and protocol, to practicing the interviews on each other, to actually conducting the interviews via Zoom.

Mika: Although I have a decent amount of experience interviewing people, I found the interviews for this project to be different. For my job, while I often had a few questions that absolutely needed answers, for the most part, the interviews were simply a conversation with me asking follow up questions.

For this project, the parameters were different. We created a protocol with a set of questions that needed answers, and in the beginning, I was uncertain how that process would be and how rigidly I had to follow the protocol. We sent out a survey to get some preliminary information from the online PhD graduates. (See Appendix 1 for the information sheet that went out to first 25 students for the class, then later about 20 more students as our research continued, Appendix 2 for the pre-interview survey, and Appendix 3 for the interview protocol). I reviewed participants’ survey answers and searched online for additional information about my interviewees keeping the interview protocol in mind. Even so, the first interview was challenging, as I navigated how strict to be with the wording and order of questions. It was an interesting place to find myself in-quite experienced at conducting interviews, and yet nervous and uncertain about the process. Furthermore, during my first interview, I found that the interviewee would (unknowingly) skip ahead in the protocol or answer questions that I had not yet asked. Because I was trying to follow the protocol and be a good fellow researcher, part of me felt compelled to still ask these questions even though I thought they had already been answered. However, about halfway through our interview, I decided to be less restricted to the protocol, and we ended up having more of a conversation, which is where I think some of the best nuggets of information came from.

Rachael: I was definitely a little bit nervous about being a student myself and interviewing graduates. Would they be honest with me? Would they not want to “color” my experience in the program by sharing their own? Overall, the interviewees were gracious with their answers and didn’t seem hindered by the fact that I was currently a student in the program. For example, after I asked one participant if they had any questions for me, Paul{4}responded, “No, you’re doing great!” In response to an earlier question, Paul had shared, “Much like yourself, much like a lot of people in the program, certainly at that time, I was in a non-tenure track position.” That is, many interviewees used our shared experience to launch into their responses.

One aspect of the interviews that surprised me was how flexible I ended up needing to be with our interview protocol. At first, I was incredibly concerned with giving each participant the same exact interview experience by sticking with the protocol questions in order and the way we developed them as a class. However, like Mika, during my first interview, I realized that the interviewee was inadvertently answering questions that came later in the protocol. As I continued to interview more people, I became more adept at being flexible and adjusting the protocol so that I wasn’t asking for repeat information. Concerned about this possible issue, I asked about it during class and was comforted that other classmates had experienced the same thing. Becky reiterated that as long as the questions were getting answered, and we were using interviews to discover participants’ tacit knowledge about “it,” that is what was important. I needed to remember that we are all human and respond in different ways, and there wasn’t a way to make the interview an exact carbon copy for each person.

Becky: During my first few interviews over the summer, after the course was finished, I was surprised at how much I went “off script.” Because I knew the interviewees fairly well from their time as PhD students, and because it was my first time to really catch up with them since they’d graduated, while I was aware of our purpose, I ended up “chatting” what now seems a bit too much (the opposite problems that newer interviewers tend to have with sticking to the script doggedly). I realized that I needed to be a little more focused after the first few interviews I conducted during the summer, and the remaining interviews were, I think, more productive for the project (and still enjoyable for me).

The Class as a Research Community

Rachael: I realized, during class, that even if I had been conducting the interviews on my own, I wasn’t experiencing these interviews on my own. Instead, our class had become a research community participating in, and reflecting on, our research experiences both individually and collectively. During our class Zoom sessions, Becky gave us the space and opportunity to share how interviews were going. I got to hear how other students had interview “no-shows,” which made me feel more prepared when the same situation happened to me. We used the Zoom chat function to share successes, questions, and challenges that came up during our interviews. Since I had some time between conducting the first interview and my last two, this allowed me to learn from other students’ experiences and even helped me anticipate different ways that the interviews could go that I hadn’t experienced yet. For example, one student shared that after the interview, their participant emailed to share they would like to see and correct the transcript. This experience taught me a valuable lesson in the ways we need to think about and accommodate participants’ comfort level, risk, and privacy.

Mika: After the initial interview I conducted, the next interviews felt more like conversations, and I found that I was still able to get the answers to questions without having to strictly follow the protocol or the exact phrasing of each question. For example, as the interviewees naturally mentioned parts of their doctoral program experience (such as developing cohorts) that were earmarked for questions later in the protocol, I was able to more naturally insert these questions into our conversation. This led to a more natural cadence instead of sounding scripted or robotic, which I believe allowed the participants (and myself) to be more open.

Part of this, I think, was because we discussed these issues and how “messy” research can be during the class. Once I learned my classmates shared the same experience and difficulty, it felt like I was among a like-minded community. Becky was also very open about discussing the fact that research is rarely (if ever) a neatly defined project, and sometimes the research itself shifts as you learn more.

Truth be told, before the class, I questioned my place in the program as an industry professional. To me, there always seemed to be a divide between industry and academia-you choose one path, and that defines you (and what you are capable of) for the rest of your career. Thus, I felt a bit like an imposter when trying on the research hat. However, the pure fact of being a part of the research experience versus simply reading about or listening to the experience broke down those self-imposed barriers. I also learned that another classmate who was in industry, like me, had conducted research like our “it” project as part of her job. And another one of my interviewees had made a shift from industry to academia. Between Becky’s candidness, this shared experience with classmates (and in particular Rachael as we stayed on the project), and the exposure to others in the field, the Field Methods course welcomed me back into a community that I felt like I had drifted away from while living in the industry world.

Rachael: Since taking Field Methods in spring 2021, I’ve definitely gotten more comfortable with interviewing. We are on the precipice of summer 2022, and I’m a year away from completing coursework. One struggle for me in my first initial interviews during class was that I talked too much and needed to give more space and time to my interviewees. I feel like I’ve gotten better at making a connection with participants while not overriding the conversation. With many participants, I’ll chat with them for 20 minutes or more after the interview ends because they end up asking me about my own experiences or research interests once I stop recording. It was surprising, at first, that interviewees who had graduated cared about a current student. Again, those images of an “every student for themself” came into my mind when I thought of former graduate students now in the field, but many of the interviewees were genuinely interested and engaged with my experiences in the program so far and offered incredible advice. The interviewees offered tethers of community I had not anticipated.

Mika: This experience gave me new insight into research, especially with interviews: it is not always clean cut. Sometimes, it’s messy, and learning how to work through that process is invaluable.

Overall Reflections/What We Learned

Learning to conduct a DBI-inspired interview as part of a class project was sometimes intimidating, messy, and frustrating, but all of the students in the class were glad to have participated in the process. Investigating “it” gave them real insight into how a large research project moves (or, at times, doesn’t!). By conducting, and yes, sometimes stumbling, through multiple interviews, students became more aware of what a good interview looks and feels like. As Rachael notes, our class became a research community, helping each other with problems, listening to concerns, and supporting one another by sharing both interviewing successes, such as becoming more familiar with the protocol or experiences with particularly engaged participants, and interviewing challenges, such as one-word responses or technical difficulties.

All three of us were surprised at how eagerly the graduates of the online program welcomed the chance to interact with current students. They wanted to talk about the program and their experiences in it, and through these interviews, the current online PhD students were better able to situate themselves in a program changed by COVID-19. And the online students, most of whom had not had the “traditional” experience of a May Seminar, were fascinated to learn more about their predecessor’s experiences. For example, Paul shared, “without May Seminar, I don’t know if the connections are the same... there were just lots of opportunities for both structured scholarly or a classroom or presentation,” which suggested the importance of the returning, in-person May Seminar. Through these interviews, not only did we learn about graduates of our program and their experience with “it,” but the current students started to find their place in the program.

Becoming Part of the Larger Community

Mika: Part of what encouraged me to continue research on the project was hearing from graduates what their experience was. Their excitement in the program and all it had to offer—from the May Seminar to the cohorts to the faculty engagement—in turn made me excited to be a part of the same thing. Their motivations, experiences, and goals were things that I could understand and connect with, and that in turn made me feel more like part of this community that I had (until then) felt a bit like I didn’t belong to anymore. Not only that, but participants asked questions of me and my experiences. They were curious about where the program was now, and each one offered to connect with me after the interview ended. They, too, wanted to hear what we learned from this project.

Rachael: Like Mika, part of what has led to my sense of connection and support is continuing this research project and conducting these interviews beyond the Field Methods course. It’s been really useful to interview graduates from the program. After conducting a few of these interviews, especially the ones in which the interviewees took an interest in my own experience within the program, made me begin to see how I was part of a larger community. Being in this online program meant that, even when I was sitting alone at my kitchen-counter-turned-desk, I was participating in a tradition that reached back to the very first cohort in 2003. I realized I’m part of a community that spans both time and geography, and these interviews brought me closer to the people that make up that community. As someone who has not yet experienced an in-person May Seminar{5}, I’m getting even more excited to attend one. Honestly, the May Seminar was one of the main reasons that I chose Texas Tech for my doctoral education. I needed the flexibility of an online program, but still wanted that in-person contact. As one graduate, Mona, pointed out, the May Seminar helped “emphasize synchronous elements in order to build cohort and build a community... the experience at Texas [Tech] convinced me that you need some synchronicity.” Two weeks seems like the perfect amount of time to be away and be in an intensive learning environment.

Finding Ourselves

Rachael: The interviews have also been inspiring. I’ve spoken with multiple graduates of the program, particularly women, who had children while in the program. I have two kids myself, so to hear about their successes and how they managed the workload with their families has been incredible. For example, Mona shared, “I had young children at that time, and I could not have done it without the support of my spouse,” and how, in the end, “it made my girls think they could do anything because they watched me do the hard [work] for a reason.” Hearing positive “end result” stories was empowering for me as a parenting graduate student.

In a way, I’ve also been able to make my own connections through these interviews. A former graduate is currently giving me feedback on a manuscript because of a conversation we had after the interview where we talked for about an hour and a half. I’ve also followed multiple people I’ve interviewed on Twitter and am able to see the sorts of academic conversations they are having there and to see who else in the field they are connected with. Through these “follows,” I’ve found information on conferences, publications, and other conversations happening in our field.

Mika: One of the things I noticed from my batch of interviews is that while we originally sought to focus on graduates who currently held academic positions, just like research, this distinction was not always clean-cut. For example, one graduate worked for a university in technology, yet she taught a course here or there. Through the process, we decided to expand our parameters a bit to include those in industry as well.

Given my schedule during the summer due to summer courses and changes in my job, I had less time to contribute to interviewing people. However, the three of us met quite often over summer 2021, and I could hear about the experiences that both Becky and Rachael had during interviews. If anything, this made the experience more genuine. Research is not something that necessarily starts neatly at the beginning of a semester and ends during the final weeks. Some research lasts months longer than expected, especially as you seek to share your results.

What I appreciated greatly about Becky’s approach to all of this was that she shared in our experience. This was a real research project—not something that had been conjured up in order to get a grade. We got to be a part of the project from the beginning, helping to construct the interview request, the initial survey, the protocol, and the analysis. And Becky was quick to admit that this research process would be messy, and that just because it’s messy doesn’t mean that it’s not worth doing it. To me, she imparted some of her wisdom to us, helping to make the concept of research—something I had not done in a very long time—less intimidating.

Rachael: Working on this project is accomplishing multiple objectives: I’m getting to see what working on a larger project is like, I’m working on my own collaboration skills since there are three of us on the project, I’m getting practice with interviewing, I’m getting practice “networking” and making connections with alumni, I’m getting more excited for CCCC’s because I know many of the people I’ve interviewed may be there, I’m feeling even more confident in my program, I’m getting advice from scholars in the field, and I am getting to be a part of a research project through multiple stages.

I’m also getting to see how the choices that faculty made about our program, its curriculum, and the May Seminar affect me as a current student. Through reading Carter’s “It” piece and conducting these interviews, I got to “peek behind the curtain” of program development. This new knowledge, of course, affected my own experience in the program. For example, learning what I did from Carter and former graduate students about the importance of May Seminar, I started to become much more active on my cohort’s Slack channel months before May Seminar was supposed to begin. I began reaching for the social connection that so many former students said was a strength of the program. Would I have done that either way? Possibly, but there is no denying that reading about and participating in this project helped to give me confidence and more motivation to reach out.

Mika: As Rachael mentioned, reading Carter’s “It” helped elucidate the origin story of the online program and May Seminar, which made me understand the program in a different way. Through the interviews, I could also see over time how faculty responded to what the graduate experience was, whether that was by adding more professional development or ensuring that classes were relevant to both the academic and the industry professional. Without reading “It,” I doubt I would have been aware of all the forethought and effort that went into making the program as comprehensive and remarkable as I think it is.

Reflections on the Process/Ourselves

Becky: I think I felt badly about not doing interviews during the course, and I sort of jumped in with both feet over the summer—thus both Rachel and Mika ended up not getting to do as many interviews as I did. But the experience was really good for me as a teacher: I was reminded of the joys and pitfalls of conducting interviews, especially those done over Zoom, because online interviewing is, for better or worse, the future.

As I reflect now, I’m grateful to have re-discovered the DBI as a way to bring to light underlying tacit knowledge, and I was pleased that we were able to take the original concept of the DBI and adapt it for our context. I think that the process of working through Carter’s “It” piece gave students a window on the choices that faculty made in establishing the online PhD program. Their experiences were initially bounded by these choices, and understanding the purpose of these boundaries allowed them agency in determining whether or not to be limited by them, paralleling the role of choices in the original article by Odell, Goswami, and Herrington. Through reading about the program, creating and conducting interviews, and working together, online graduates (as well as students in the class) were able to tease out what “it” might be, and how one might get “it.”

I think that having graduate students participate in a large collaborative project was an excellent idea. The class did a great job working out a protocol, revising the invitation email, scheduling and conducting interviews, and generally coping with the “nuts and bolts” of interviewing. It was challenging, though, to become, in essence, a project manager in addition to being a teacher/researcher. I wish there had been more time to “practice” the interviews before actually doing them; I think students would have learned earlier that a DBI-like interview is more than simply reading questions off a script, but a focused conversation to get at tacit knowledge.

Rachael: To Becky’s point, my practice interview did not go well. Both my classmate, who was an MA student, and I were having Wi-Fi issues and were cutting in and out of the Zoom session. We both ended up turning off our cameras and became disembodied voices across the screen. Since we were having the technical difficulties, I really did “read questions off the script” and didn’t get to practice asking the follow-up questions that were geared more toward uncovering that tacit knowledge. My practice only skimmed the surface. This experience was an immediate lesson in how choices can affect the interview process even if those choices, like turning off video, were made out of necessity. Having more than one practice interview would have been helpful for me to see how interviews could unfold differently.

Mika: I think if we were able to practice the interview process more beforehand, we could have gotten rid of the jitters and bumps associated with interviewing people we had no familiarity with. Seeing how different practice interviewees approach answering the questions may have helped in further refining how we as interviewers approach the process as well as seeing what types of technological issues could arise.

Rachael: Possible technical difficulties aside, I also ended up thinking a lot more about the embodiment of the interviews than I thought I would, especially since the interviews all took place over Zoom. Surprisingly, all of my interviewees decided to be on video. I had anticipated that some interviewees would be more comfortable with audio only, but all elected to keep their videos turned on. What this meant is that I was given a glimpse into a slice of their lives—some were in their offices on a campus, some were at home, and some used a virtual background. I conducted all of the interviews from my office space on my own campus because it had a more reliable internet connection and my children wouldn’t run into the background sword fighting or asking for food. Zoom video also meant I was able to see interviewees’ body language, facial expressions, clothing, and aesthetic style choices during the interviews. I kept my video on as well and had to make some decisions about what I wanted to “show” my interviewees. I have multiple, highly visible tattoos unless I cover my arms, have a visible nose piercing, and obviously dyed, bright red hair. Of course, these markers are also tied up in my gender identity. I am a queer cisgender woman and wondered if I’d be taken seriously by interview participants, especially since they knew I was a current graduate student. As a woman, in public, my body is a source of critique and comment, and I know that, from my students to my colleagues, people make assumptions based on physical appearance. Before my first interviewees, I wondered if my tattoos and piercings would affect my interviewees’ reception of me as an interviewer. Though tattoos and piercings are becoming more commonplace and seem to be a nonissue at my current campus in Southern California, I did not know how my own embodiment would affect my interviewees’ perception of me. I kept my tattoos mostly covered, but, on a few hot days, they were visible without long sleeves. In the end, no one commented on my physical appearance at all.

Something I did not immediately think of, however, was my whiteness. As part of the information we gathered on our participants, we did not ask for demographic information such as age, sex, sexual identity, race, disabilities, or other demographic information. Though some of my interviewees disclosed some of their identity categories during the interview, most did not. Since we did not collect demographic information, I do not want to make assumptions about the identities of the people I interviewed, and don’t have insights into how my own whiteness may or may not have affected the interviews I conducted. However, it’s important for us to think about how our various positions of privilege and power may or may not affect how we interview and how our interviewees may respond to us. I had thought about aspects of my identity that I assumed could disadvantage me as an interviewer—my “alternative” aesthetic and that I’m a current graduate student—but I also needed to consider how my privilege in being a white, able-bodied, cisgender woman could affect the interview as well. We are never “neutral,” and our positionality is important to consider at all aspects of the research process.

Mika: To me, incorporating real-world interviews into the course was the best way to be exposed to research and learn how to do it. Even though we practiced on each other, I think it would have taken considerably more practice in order to get to the same level of comfort that we got to when interviewing just one or two of our actual participants. During our practice sessions, it was like experiencing the interview in a vacuum. The protocol was easy to follow; the order made sense. The answers to the questions were not necessarily like the answers we would experience in a real interview, especially as some of the questions were irrelevant (and therefore not answered) to our own experience. For example, no one in the class (including my interview partner) had experienced a May Seminar or knew anything about what to expect. So when answering questions like what stood out about the May Seminar, we were unable to respond with any realistic answers. We had no context or related experience and thus could not understand if our knowledge was relevant. In the real interviews, I received detailed answers, such as from Charolette, who shared how the faculty at the May Seminar “really went out of their way... to be friendly and make connections with people,” which provided the most ample opportunity to make connections with faculty. This is not something that even crossed my mind as a possible response.

However, the practice itself was important as we worked out the kinks of the technology and ran through our “script” of asking the questions. That is a different type of comfort to get used to altogether. The actual interviews zigzagged in the questions and answers, and some of the most interesting bits of tacit knowledge that were uncovered came through this nonlinear nature, which included asking different questions or rephrasing questions as new information was uncovered, allowing participants to come up with specific information. Like a metal detector moving across sand to find buried (and perhaps forgotten) treasures, this zigzagging helped uncover hidden gems of valuable knowledge that were not easy to find.

Overall, I was delighted with the experience. Not only did the format of the class provide what I would consider to be a thorough experience in learning to work with DBIs, but it also made me personally interested in this style of research as well as comfortable with the notion that this is something that I could do outside of a class. Continuing on with the project is to me an added bonus as I get to see the research project from beginning to end.

Rachael: Learning about and conducting DBI-like interviews went beyond learning this useful research method. By practicing, then conducting, and staying on the project, I’ve had ample time to reflect and “wallow” in my experience as both an interviewer and researcher. What I realized is that practicing DBIs made me feel like part of a community and reoriented my initial vision of the “lone scholar.” Rather than writing and thinking in solitude, I’ve been invited into (and am becoming part of) a community.

Becky: I loved that the online PhD students, many of whom missed the first May Seminar because of COVID and had an all-online second May Seminar, were able to hear from former online PhD students about their experiences meeting face-to-face and creating community. An added perk that I didn’t expect was how much the students in the course, through the interviews aimed at getting information about graduates of our program, were able to reflect on their own experiences and positionality in the program.

I am thrilled that Mika and Rachael have been able to continue with the research after the course was over, and I’m really looking forward to finishing this research. We conducted about 20 more interviews during the summer and fall of 2021 and are currently in the process of transcribing the interviews. Once we’ve finished with these, our goal is to interview approximately 10 more graduates from the last 4 years of the program (focusing on those who graduated before the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted the May Seminar). We’ll analyze these transcripts together, but even now some trends we are beginning to see emerge involve:

• Social connections between graduate students

• The importance of an in-person component (May Seminar)

• A focus on research methods

• Technology use over time

• Individual projects/courses that were instrumental

• How cohorts create community

• Availability of faculty members

Rachael used her initial dataset from the Field Methods course to present on the importance of social engagement for creating inclusive online doctoral programs at the Conference on College Composition and Communication in 2022. Once we’ve been able to analyze the interviews, we three are, with Carter’s help, planning to write a monograph about “it” and online doctoral education that includes the voices of former graduate students. COVID-19 required many us to pivot online, and online learning is unlikely to go away now. We need research about how online programs can operate effectively, thoughtfully, and sustainably, taking into consideration not only the end goals, but also the tacit knowledge involved in identifying with a program, creating a community, and recognizing students as individuals.

Appendices

Appendix 1: “IT” Study Research Participation Information Sheet (PDF)

Appendix 2: Pre-Interview Survey (PDF)

Appendix 3: Interview Protocol (PDF)

Notes

1. Texas Tech University’s technical communication graduate programs have rigorous research methods requirements. All PhD students are required to take an overview course in research methods (English 5363: Research Methods in Technical Communication and Rhetoric), ideally in their first semester, and then three additional research methods courses before they graduate. These courses can be in or out of the department (some students, for instance, take a course in statistics from the Department of Educational Psychology). The department offers courses in usability/user experience, information architecture, rhetorical analysis, empirical research, field methods, and often special topics courses (such as narrative/feminist methods) that count as methods courses. (Return to text.)

2. Becky is grateful to Dr. Beau Pihlaja for sharing his excellent course materials for this class. (Return to text.)

3. This length of time was chosen because a semester is 15 weeks, and each class is three hours per week, which equates to 45 hours. Twelve days of classes at fours a day equates to 48 hours for the two-week intensive. The argument was that this intensive class met the class/time/meeting requirements of a normal course, thus we never had to petition for a truncated course. More recently, we’ve modified the May Seminar to last two weeks for first year students, and a week for 2nd year and beyond (unless they take the May Seminar course along with the first-year students). (Return to text.)

4. All participants have been given pseudonyms. (Return to text.)

5. By the time this piece is published, both Rachael and Mika will have attended their first May Seminar. (Return to text.)

Works Cited

Carter, Joyce L. It. Program in Technical Communication and Rhetoric, Texas Tech University. 2012.

---. Texas Tech University’s Online Program in Technical Communication and Rhetoric. Programmatic Perspectives, vol. 5, no. 2, 2013, pp. 243-268.

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