Abstract
Autoethnography and dialogic interviewing are valued qualitative research methodologies across multiple disciplines. However, their use in college classrooms as a focal point of student writing, learning, and empowerment is less documented than its use in research studies despite being powerful learning tools. I describe my use of these methodologies in a women’s and gender studies course. Grounded in compelling examples from students’ autoethnographic papers and dialogic interview reports, I analyze how these methodologies enhance engagement with new academic knowledge and skills, guide meaningful self-reflexivity, foster evocative writing, encourage peer-to-peer learning, and create strong classroom relationships.
Keywords
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The use of autoethnography in college classrooms as a focal point of student writing and learning is not well documented and is, according to Barr (2019), relatively “underexplored” (p. 1106). The same is true of using dialogic interviewing as a student-to-student course activity. I offer this analysis of a college course that centers these methodologies to provide an example of how these methodologies foster student engagement with new academic knowledge and skills, guide and intensify meaningful self-reflexivity, encourage peer-to-peer learning, and create strong classroom relationships. I illustrate how using autoethnography and dialogic interviewing in my WGS 304 course created a distinctive and exciting teaching experience for me and an empowering learning experience for my undergraduate students.
I begin with a description of my WGS 304 course, documenting the pedagogical context in which the students conducted their dialogic interviews and produced autoethnographies. I briefly review the methodological literature on autoethnography and dialogic interviewing that influenced the course design and framed course assignments. In the first analytic section, “Talk out and talk about,” I highlight examples from the students’ autoethnographic papers, focusing on their reflections on gender socialization, empowerment, and the experience of conducting dialogic interviews. In the second analytic section, I focus on examples of creative storytelling that students generated for their autoethnographies and that demonstrate the powerful insights about their own life experiences that the course methodology enabled them to gain. I conclude by summarizing the learning benefits and personal accomplishments that students in this class experienced because of using these powerful research methodologies.
Autoethnography, Dialogic Interviewing, and the WGS 304 Classroom
WGS 304, Topics in Identity, Knowledge, and Power, is a three-credit topics course at Roosevelt University that WGS faculty collaboratively developed to facilitate individual course designs around the core issues of identity formation, knowledge production, and power relations.
I was inspired to design my WGS 304 course to focus on ESD, despite knowing nothing about martial arts or self-defense, after meeting Amy Jones (Culture of Safety), an experienced ESD instructor, Black Belt, and social worker. Listening to Amy talk about how transformative ESD is for young women, I knew I wanted this learning experience for our WGS students. I also felt it was crucial to offer WGS 304 as an ESD course in our WGS curriculum, given the high rates of gendered assault and violence against college-age women (Bannister et al., 2015; Sinozich & Langton, 2014). I invited Amy to teach the hands-on ESD part of my WGS 304 course and she enthusiastically agreed.
ESD is a learning experience more expansive than traditional martial arts and is unequivocally feminist. ESD focuses on gendered violence (violence that serves to maintain structural gender inequalities), sexual assault, and harassment situations. It teaches physical self-defense skills using strategies adapted for all women’s body types and abilities as well as verbal defense skills that teach women to deal with situations they find especially challenging because of women’s gendered socialization to present themselves as polite or vulnerable. As Hollander (2016) explains, “ESD is a thoughtful process of empowering students through awareness of the realities both of assault and of their own abilities, both verbal and physical, to prevent and resist violence against them” (p. 210). After reading about ESD while preparing the course, I realized that it would be critical for my students not only to connect what they were learning in the ESD hands-on practices to relevant academic knowledge, but also to intellectually and emotionally process their learning, especially in relation to experiences of gendered violence. Consequently, I chose autoethnography as the most promising approach for student learning.
Two aspects of autoethnography particularly contribute to the kind of learning I hoped this course would offer. First, autoethnographies connect analyses of social and cultural issues to reflections and storytelling about personal experiences (Adams et al., 2015; Denzin, 2014; Ellis & Bochner, 2000; Holman Jones et al., 2013; Mitchell et al., 2005; Pillary et al., 2016; Salvo, 2019). This type of learning experience is powerful for students, especially those thinking about gender socialization and violence, because it deepens their critical understandings of “how the context surrounding self has influenced and shaped the make-up of self and how the self has responded to, reacted to, or resisted forces innate to the context” (Ngunjiri et al., 2010, p. 3). The resulting “creative scholarly work” (Wall, 2016, p. 4), I reasoned, would feel relevant to students and contribute to their personal development, because through the writing, they would better understand their lives and the worlds in which they live.
Second, autoethnographies advance the goals of social justice and feminist education. Crafting a critical academic analysis while reflecting on personal experiences illuminates moral and political perspectives, which can challenge “hegemonic ways of seeing” (Denzin, 2006, p. 422). The resulting autoethnography is therefore also potentially feminist, especially when the author’s writing is “evocative,” showing “struggle, passion, embodied life . . . situations in which people have to cope with dire circumstances” (Ellis & Bochner, 2006, p. 436). Evocative personal storytelling, as a component of autoethnography, is an especially meaningful activity for learning in undergraduate education because it not only encourages students to consciously reflect on and construct their own lives in their writing, it also provides opportunities to create, recreate, and name their identities: to self-represent and situate their positionalities in light of new learning is a critical act of agency and empowerment and, especially for those students whose positionalities are marginalized or who have experienced gendered violence, it is a resistance to silencing and normalizing. As the student writing below will show, in a WGS class focused on violence prevention, gender socialization, and empowerment, many students wrote in evocative ways about life struggles and coping with “dire circumstances.” Not only did they write about these struggles, they also discussed them in their dialogic interviews.
The students conducted dialogic interviews during the eighth week of class, providing them with an additional source of knowledge and data to include in their autoethnographies. By engaging in these semi-formal, two-way dialogues grounded in issues on which we were focusing in class, students were able to critically question ideas about course concepts, share their stories about their experiences as data-gathering, and in doing so, co-construct meanings (Way et al., 2015). This polyvocal process resulted in “intersecting autoethnographies” (Breault, 2016, p. 2) that emphasized new perspectives and insights.
Course Overview
WGS 304 met one time per week for two and a half hours in the Spring semester of 2019. Among the twelve students in the class, some identified as cisgender women, some as lesbian women, and some as gender non-conforming. All the students were able-bodied. As with most of the WGS courses I have taught, there was religious, ethnic, and nationality diversity. Amy created and taught the six-week curriculum for the ESD sessions, which met on alternating weeks. I designed and taught the nine academic class sessions.
I assigned five articles to supply the foundational knowledge that would inform the dialogic interviews and the five short autoethnographic essays that students combined into their final autoethnography. Four of the required articles provided background information on ESD and the history of women in the self-defense movement (Jones & Mattingly, 2016; Rouse, 2018) and on self-defense and gender socialization, race, and vulnerability (Noel, 2009; Speidel, 2014). Students chose the fifth article from a selection of qualitative studies about communities where martial arts or ESD was taught as a strategy for social justice and activism (Ballan & Freyer, 2012; East & Roll, 2015; Follo, 2017; Jordan & Mossman, 2017; Law, 2011; Velija et al., 2013).
Students were required to summarize each article, analyze the research on the self-defense movement and empowerment described, examine their own life experiences in relation to the social and cultural issues that the articles presented, and use their analyses to reflect on and analyze their experiences learning ESD. I wrote prompts for each article to guide students’ attention to salient points and to encourage them to write a relevant evocative story about one of their own life events.
The articles also served as a basis for the dialogic interviews. Through lectures and readings, students gained knowledge about feminist and dialogic interviewing strategies that would enhance non-judgmental interactions, elicit insights, push for deeper explanations, and encourage self-reflexivity (Anderson & Jack, 1991; Bloom, 1998; Way et al., 2015). We also talked about the ethics of the interviews, and how, as an epistemic community, we all have ethical responsibilities toward each other (Bloom & Sawin, 2009). Central to this ethical responsibility was respecting each student’s privacy about what would and would not be disclosed about a dialogic partner in the class or the autoethnographies (Ellis, 2007; Ellis et al., 2011; Tombro, 2016). As a class, we collaboratively constructed the dialogic interview questions. To facilitate the pairing process, I assigned students to the interview pairs, which students told me they appreciated. I gave students the option to prepare individual or co-authored reports when they talked about the interviews in class.
As the student excerpts will show, the trust that had already been established by sharing their autoethnographic essays in the class proved a strong foundation for the dialogic interview relationships to foster even deeper affinities among students. Indeed, as the main emphasis of our class discussions, the autoethnographic essays provided opportunities for students to receive classmates’ feedback on how to develop their storytelling, make their writing more evocative, enhance how each story connected to the issues analyzed, and maintain ethics. Thus, we used much of class time to ensure that the essays displayed a balance between analysis and ethical storytelling, creating the basis for strong autoethnographies for publication. In the conclusion, I will talk more about the benefits of focusing our class sessions on student writing. But now, I turn to the student autoethnographies.
“Talk Out and Talk About”: Learning From the Dialogic Interviews
The extent to which students discussed their dialogic interviews in their autoethnographies was a testament to how much they loved doing them. It was an interview research experience that led to the kind of personal insights the methodology promises while practicing a new research method. The students used the dialogic interviews particularly to interrogate, explore, and redefine the academic concepts of gender roles and empowerment.
Doing Gender
Gender ideologies and roles, particularly how they function with regard to gendered violence and feelings of vulnerability, were central areas of focus in this WGS course and in the course readings about ESD, and as a result, in the student autoethnographies. Noel (2009) explicated West and Zimmerman’s (1987) concept of “doing gender,” which explains that gender is socially constructed and performative; individuals are socialized to practice gender-appropriate norms of masculinity and femininity based on binary sex differences determined at birth. Noel’s updated explanation articulates how gender is intersectional with regard to differences of race, class, sexual orientation, and gender identity. In the dialogic interviews, the students took up the challenge to understand how doing gender and intersectionality had influenced their lives. They discussed how they were raised to comply with or challenge doing gender, how ethnic and other family backgrounds influenced gender, and how feminism has been a source to help them both resist gender norms and question why they sometimes complied with these norms.
JZ and Sammi both wrote in their autoethnographies about comparing how they each learned gender norms growing up. Using “us” and “we,” they created portions of their autoethnographies that intersected and showed how their dialogic interview created shared understandings. JZ, who is Chinese American, wrote about telling Sammi how being raised with strict ethnically influenced gender norms made her feel “boxed in.” Sammi, who is White, wrote about telling JZ that what made her feel boxed in was having grown up in a small conservative town, unlike JZ, who grew up in Chicago. Sammi experienced schools that “taught gender stereotypes” and put students “in particular boxes based on gender.” JZ wrote that she enjoyed learning in the dialogic interview that despite their ethnic and childhood differences, they both grew up “wanting to make decisions based on doing the opposite of what family members expected from us.” According to JZ, We both tried to rebel against gender and social norms even when we couldn’t label what exactly we were rebelling against. We both talked about going through a phase of not liking pink because it was a girl color that people expected you to like just because you’re a girl.
Having not known Sammi before this class, JZ concluded that she found it “both surprising and nice to relate to Sammi” across their differences and to share their childhood rebellions against gender norms.
Lizzie’s autoethnography described her dialogic interview with Karen and how they analyzed the effects gendered ideologies have had on “the messages that are behind the things that we wear, our makeup, and how our hair looks.” Lizzie wrote that Karen’s thoughts about how, if she “got a short haircut it would ‘tell the world I’m gay’,” morphed into their discussion about their “intentions with makeup” in relation to pleasing men. Short haircuts and makeup, they discussed, convey a narrowly scripted message to peers about how they “do gender” with regard to sexuality and desires. This conversation, Lizzie felt, was “eye opening”; it led them to question why they “feel good when we have a dress on or when we are made-up.” As feminists with knowledge about “men who run the commercialized makeup industries . . . we think it [their relationship to makeup and clothes] is very interesting.” Lizzie also observed that by “talking about gender and my experience as a young girl, I had to check things that I said” such as about what she believes is “appropriate” and modest for young girls to wear. She explained that when she voiced that opinion in the dialogic interview, “Karen and I stopped and realized that by saying that, I was in some ways unintentionally sexualizing a young girls’ body, or at least feeding into that narrative.” Lizzie concluded: “I think that was one of the most interesting parts of the interview, to talk out our thoughts but then talk about those thoughts.” In others words, the dialogic interview created a context for Lizzie and Karen to “articulate opinions they may have never before uttered . . . in terms of identifying the discourses that guide their thinking” (Way et al., 2015, p. 5). Lizzie’s autoethnographic writing illustrates how, together, she and Karen explored life experiences that caused them struggle, made connections between themselves and gendered social forces, and experienced small epiphanies (Denzin, 1989) and shifting perspectives.
Rethinking Empowerment
Empowerment was a central concept of discussion and analysis in WGS 304. According to Carr (2003), “empowerment praxis” is ideally explored within a group (p. 19). As a process, feminist empowerment is not ever an outcome and is never “given” by another. The process entails understanding one’s intersectional and socially structured starting position. From this starting point, people can develop new knowledge and consciousness within a collective engagement that then ideally can lead to community political action and change. This empowerment process is repeated cyclically over a lifespan, contributing to “a praxis, a cyclical process of collective dialogue and social action that is meant to effect positive change” (p. 18). Based on my lecture on Carr’s (2003) article and a class discussion on Jones and Mattingly (2016), who describe empowerment as the ability of people to improve their own lives by controlling the environments in which they live, students explored their emerging understandings of empowerment. The dialogic interviews in particular played a strong role in deepening student thinking about empowerment and in doing so, helped to “disrupt the type of metanarrative that can emerge from solitary [traditional academic] writing” (Breault, 2016, p. 3).
For Janessa, their interview discussion with Giselle about empowerment was particularly insightful as they worked through different definitions and understandings of this concept. Janessa wrote that they initially described empowerment to Giselle as “having the knowledge and putting that knowledge into action for oneself.” This definition recognized that knowledge and using that knowledge for change are parts of the empowerment model. Upon hearing Giselle respond that for her, “Empowerment is like a feeling,” Janessa experienced “a spark of connection [that] was immediately ignited within me.” Janessa felt that Giselle’s “five-word phrase” highlighted how their own definition of empowerment had suggested that to experience empowerment, you had to “pull yourself up by the bootstraps . . . even though I did not truly believe in that.” Giselle’s use of the word “feeling” moved Janessa to rethink how “empowerment is innate and comes naturally.” Empowerment is within each of us. Janessa quoted Giselle, who further explained that “It’s good to have that feeling and to believe that you’re powerful,” because it “Creates opportunities for you to give yourself.” In other words, empowerment is not something that someone gives to a person, but rather, it comes from within, from life experiences and the self, and opens the world of opportunities. Janessa then restated Giselle’s definition: “empowerment is an experience that allows oneself to feel strong so that they can have access to opportunities not visible before.” Concluding that “I could not agree more with Giselle’s definition,” Janessa illustrates in their autoethnographic writing both the value of peer-to-peer learning in a dialogic interview for rethinking one’s own perspective and the importance of autoethnographic writing for making sense of it. If I interpret Giselle and Janessa’s articulation of “access to opportunities” as engaging in personal and social change, then they have added in interesting insights based on their growth through self-defense experiences into Carr’s (2003) empowerment model through their discussion.
In their discussion of empowerment, Maggie and Haneen, according to Maggie, “both said that as our sense of empowerment has grown, so too has our self-confidence.” Like Giselle and Janessa, they agreed that feeling strong and confident is critical to the empowerment process. With attention to how self-reflection leads to better understandings of the relationship between the structural and the personal, Maggie continued by describing in her autoethnography how the discussion enhanced her understanding of empowerment: Haneen said that empowerment helps to “take you out” of feeling pressured by societal norms, which I thought was a great way of thinking about it; when we become more secure in who we are, we often stop thinking of ourselves as needing to be more or less like those around us—it’s about being yourself instead.
Lexi redefined and expanded her understanding of empowerment and as a result of her dialogic interview with Mickey and she analyzed what she learned in the interview: I told Mickey that I had not really thought about empowerment in the physical sense or how it related to my body before taking this class. Prior to this class, I had thought of empowerment in terms of the mental side of it and my patterns of thinking.
However, Lexi continued, “In our interview I said that, ‘empowerment is not just mental and that it relates to my physical ability, and how I see my body as well’.” Lexi then went on to analyze her own previously voiced definition of empowerment in an example of how the dialogic interviews can encourage fresh insights, expanded explanations, and deeper reflections. Her revised definition encompasses how empowerment is expressed in the feminist self-defense literature and Lexi embraced this understanding because learning this literature gave Lexi a tool to have more control over herself and her environment. She wrote, This [self] quote highlights how my thinking surrounding empowerment has changed. I am now able to see empowerment in a more intersectional way through learning about how it impacts many different parts of my life experience, not just the mental part that I previously put so much of my focus on.
Sammi wrote about how she and JZ discussed empowerment, especially in relation to feminist self-defense. Sammi’s example again illustrates how dialogic interviews created intersecting autoethnographic accounts, new insights and perspectives, and peer-to-peer learning.
They agreed that although their definitions of feminism had not “changed that much” because of the class, that “what makes up our definition has changed.” Sammi noted that JZ explained to her that while previously “she didn’t think of self-defense as necessarily being a part of feminism, but sees it as more a part of it now.” Sammi then said she then spoke about how for her, empowerment had never necessarily meant being powerful physically, “but I now see how self-defense and learning more about your strength can lead to empowerment. This is something that I had not even thought about before this interview.” As a result of this enlarged view of the role of self-defense in empowerment, and empowerment in feminism, Sammi realized that I have changed my understanding of all the aspects of empowerment and feminism just from what we had learned in the class. I realized that while it might not be a huge aspect of empowerment for me, it is an aspect that has changed me and my outlook on myself.
These examples of the autoethnographic discussions focusing on empowerment and on doing gender illustrate the power of talking through interrelated academic concepts and personal experiences using dialogic interviews as a student–student assignment. The interviews especially created a context for the manifestation of epiphanies (Denzin, 1989), resulting in refocused self-perceptions and deepened self-understandings. The process of being listened to and questioned in a safe and systematic way heightened the possibility of these insights taking place. As the above sections illustrated, and the subsequent section will also show, students were well aware of the value of the dialogic method for fostering both self-knowledge and community.
Dialogic Interviews: Methodological Reflections
Dialogic interviews, like feminist narrative interviews, are intended to create a context that fosters a mutually supportive experience for expressing and exploring ideas. Using them in this class was important. It gave students an introduction to a rich experience in qualitative interviewing. In their autoethnographies, several students wrote specifically about the methods of the interview, focusing on how they conducted the interview and on their interactions with each other. I found it especially compelling that their methodological reflections expressed that they valued what they learned from each other through this interview process. Their insights show that it is indeed true that “dialogue is facilitated when participants feel accepted” (Way et al., 2015, p. 7).
Lexi described the interview method she and Mickey used in some detail. She admitted that “when Mickey and I first met for our dialogic interview I was feeling nervous about being interviewed for a class.” However, she continued, “Once we started talking I felt more relaxed and began to treat the interview as if it was just a conversation between two friends.” As I had recommended to students in class, Mickey and Lexi began the interview by deciding how they wanted to construct the interview together, agreeing to “structure our interview like a more casual conversation using the questions we selected to guide us, but being open to any direction the conversation may wander.” As they got deeper into the interview, “We took turns answering each question and letting the conversation flow in different directions as we did so.” Lexi concluded, “I believe that it was this conversational approach that allowed us both to open up to one another on a deeper level.” Lexi’s description of their interview reads like a textbook in feminist methodology, where rapport-building and a focus on the process of “the dynamic unfolding of another’s viewpoint contribute to creating the trust that allows for each person to feel safe enough to narrate the personal construction of her own experiences” (Anderson & Jack, 1991, p. 23; see also Bloom, 1998).
Lizzie too described how she and Karen “bounced back and forth using the questions to guide our talk.” Feeling “comfortable talking to Karen,” they each “opened up and shared experiences that were very hard in our lives.” Importantly, Lizzie also described that being able to open up in the interview resulted in an interview that was “almost therapeutic yet still formal enough to feel like an interview.” Many of the students voiced the idea that an interview is “almost therapeutic” in their analyses of their dialogic interviews. Some students found the interview healing or therapeutic because they opened up about a traumatic experience for the first time and others because narrating their life experiences, especially the difficult ones, led to personal insights.
JZ, for example, found it healing to talk to Sammi about their “experiences about harassment that we have encountered in public spaces especially when males will . . . intentionally show penis pictures or touch themselves while making eye contact with you.” Having had these kinds of experiences since they were younger, JZ continued, “it was relieving in a sense to talk about these experiences and understand that we both experienced a sense of shock at such harassment,” especially when they were younger.
Lexi as was able to talk to Mickey about her past experience of gendered violence and her subsequent process of healing in ways she had not expected: I told Mickey that while I did not fight back before, I am learning how to do it for myself now. I surprised myself in that moment as I talked so freely about my past and how the course has allowed me to heal through the experience of fighting back. I knew that this class was having an immense healing impact for me in that sense, but I was very surprised and joyful at how easy it was for me to open up and share the feeling of that healing with Mickey. The main thing I am taking away from this interview is how powerful it felt to share parts of my life and my story with Mickey, and the inspiration to share more of these things with others.
The power of sharing personal stories was a theme in Shan’s autoethnography. She and Yelitza’s dialogic interview created an opportunity to identify their emerging confidence, self-assurance, and lessening feelings of vulnerability. Shan recalled “sitting in the room with Yelitza just talking about the class and how amazing and powerful we felt and realizing that for the first time in my life I associated physical strength with myself.” For Shan, locating strength inside and physically was a meaningful first-time-in-life epiphany and indeed, one that many of the smaller women wrote about.
While qualitative researchers generally avoid using the term therapeutic when describing interview outcomes for participants, many of the students expressed both in class and in their autoethnographies that their dialogic interviews did in fact feel healing and therapeutic. They appreciated how narrating their experiences gave them a sense of visibility, which felt therapeutic, because such storytelling is able to “validate the meaning of their pain, but also allow participants and readers to feel validated and/or better able to cope with or want to change their circumstances” (Ellis et al., 2011, p. 280). According to Pasupathi et al. (2016), telling stories of violence and traumatic experiences, especially for the first time, is healing and “has positive benefits for the teller” (p. 52).
In sum, the dialogic interviews created a space for students to “talk out and talk about” and open up to a trusted classmate. This methodology not only led to new conceptual learning and healing, but to the realization that there is “power,” as Lexi said, in being able to share with another what before felt unspeakable. Lexi’s statement that she was inspired to “share more of these things with others” is in keeping with both the political and feminist hopes of these methodologies and the activist promises of the feminist empowerment process. In our class discussions, all of the students expressed appreciation for their dialogic partner and gratitude for the continually coalescing community of the class. It is no surprise, given how close students had already become in the class, that these dialogic interviews, as Maggie said of her interview with Haneen, “solidified the sense of community I felt.”
Creative Storytelling: The Personal Is Political
Autoethnography, as a creative scholarly work, calls for evocative writing while maintaining a focus on the academic issues. To inspire students to write creatively while connecting with the substantive course issues, I encouraged them to include storytelling through personal narratives, photography, original artwork, and poetry. In other words, I asked them to not simply report on an experience in a traditional academic voice, but to narrate a compelling story of it. I therefore gave students writing tips for narrative storytelling, such as about using vibrant descriptions of locations and people, including details that give depth to descriptions and recollections, and providing sufficient context, “backstory,” and information about motivations so that the underlying message of the story is clear. While the students produced many evocative pieces, space permits only two examples. Giselle’s story experimented with creative storytelling and explored the myths and realities of “stranger danger” and gendered violence in women’s lives; Shan’s poem dealt with sexual assault and reflected on the personal transformation that she experienced in the class.
The narrative storytelling excerpt from the beginning of Giselle’s autoethnography is a good example of scholarly creative writing. It includes evocative storytelling that is balanced with a critical response to the Rouse (2018) and Noel (2009) articles about women and self-defense. These articles debunk the myth of “stranger danger,” a myth because there are much higher rates of assault and violence from intimate partners and in women’s own homes, than from strangers (Rouse, 2018, pp. 28–29). Giselle’s story is engaging because she tells about her childhood, introduces her Latina culture and family, and shows changes in how vulnerability and stranger danger affected her while growing up. In her personal narrative, Giselle affirmed Rouse and Noel’s argument about the prevalence and persistence of the belief in stranger danger and showed how this prevalent myth shaped her beliefs. Furthermore, she employs conventions of evocative storytelling such as introducing characters, crafting a plot, describing scenes with details, and establishing the chronology: In the summer when school was out my mom would drop me off at my Tia’s while she went to work. I would be so excited to spend the day playing with my two older cousins. I loved going over to their house in the summer mostly because we had a lot of options of things we could do. They had a small playground set in the backyard, a big driveway with a basketball hoop, and a wooden swing that my Tio had put together for us. When my Tia had time, she would take us to the park across the street. It was a fairly big park; there’s soccer fields, tennis courts, two playgrounds, a walking path that looped around the whole place. Best of all, there was a library next door with computers and internet access. Well, as we got older, the desire to adventure out on our own to the park and library down the street persisted more, as it would for any kids our age. Before letting us out on our own, our parents reminded us of “stranger danger.” In other words, we were told to not talk or go with any adult we did not know. They told me to kick, scream, and even bite them if I had to, if any one tried harming me. One day, after my cousins had just got out of school for the summer, they wanted to show me a couple things before we headed out to the park. They said they learned what to do in a “stranger danger” situation and oh how excited they were! We practiced our yelling and shouting, making sure we were loud enough for the neighbors to hear us. We’d practice our stomping, even grabbed one of my Tio’s shoes to pretend it was a stranger’s foot and try to stomp as hard as we could. As much as the idea of being in a situation like that can be scary, it was all giggles and laughter when we were practicing outside in my Tia’s driveway.
Giselle’s autoethnography continued with an analysis of the myth of stranger danger from her perspective as a college student. She described how her parents still tell her that she should only go out late at night or to places she doesn’t know if she is “accompanied by a man of the family” and they will ask one of her male cousins to go with her. She continued, “If I insist that I am fine going on my own, it is more than likely that they will say: ‘no, porque eres mujer’. Ultimately meaning, no because you’re a woman.” She both understands and “rolls her eyes at” this “gendered ideological reality” in her life. Giselle then analyzed why she and her college friends, despite knowing that stranger danger is a myth and that intimate partners and acquaintances are greater dangers for them, nonetheless continue to envision “a stranger [who] jumps out of nowhere . . . specially when it comes to walking alone at night” as many of the students who work after school have to do when returning to their dorms or apartments. Giselle wrote that this image persists because college-age women are always being warned not to walk alone at night; are always being confronted with statistics on sexual assault of college-age women; are always themselves talking about “the existence and magnitude of a rape culture in the United States” (Noel, 2009, p. 23); and are always being reminded to be careful in the “frequent emails from campus safety regarding an incident in the area whether it was a robbery, physical assault, and sexual assault.”
Taken together, Giselle’s personal narrative and subsequent analysis illustrate how persistent the perspective is that girls and women (not society, not perpetrators) are responsible for learning to stay safe against all [gendered] odds. And so, fear inhabits the minds of college-age women; it’s a constant physical presence and unceasing voice in their heads. Giselle’s lighthearted story of stomping on Tio’s shoe, with its darker undertones, is juxtaposed powerfully with her academic analysis of the lived experiences of fear of assault that college-age women experience in daily life. Not surprising, several students wrote personal narratives about their experiences of sexual assault because, as Maggie wrote in her autoethnography, “we live in a world where many women do not wonder if they will be sexually assaulted, but rather when they will be assaulted.”
Shan’s poem, Small, focuses on gendered violence, sexual assault, and the value that learning ESD has had for her. Her poem is a relevant ending to the examples from student autoethnographic writing because it addresses how the academic readings, hands-on self-defense classes, and process of self-reflection in the course coalesced to help her to rethink her sense of self as vulnerable because of her small stature and because of her experiences of past gendered violence and sexual assault. According to Faulkner (2017), poetry is a particularly powerful way for autoethnographers to express themselves, especially regarding feminist, social justice, social science, and political concerns because, poetry taps into the universal through radical subjectivity. The poet’s use of personal experience creates something larger from the particular; the concrete specifics become universal when the audience relates to, embodies, and/or experiences the work as if it were their own words . . . . Poetry that gives voice to gendered experiences can be a form of poetic consciousness-raising, a distinct form of political activity. (p. 91)
For all the small-framed women in the class like Shan, learning self-defense practices created confidence in themselves and taught them violence prevention and fighting skills that do not rely on physical size and strength. They learned, as Amy frequently repeated and as they read in Noel (2009), that “ideally, men and women of all body sizes and shapes should be able to learn martial arts because the techniques are designed to rely on skill, not strength” (p. 23). As a result, as many students also wrote in their autoethnographies, the voice in their heads that told them that being small is equated with being vulnerable, was contradicted, shifted, and replaced. Shan’s poem, therefore, spoke for and to many members of the class when she shared it with us.
Small Small is well, small. Small is fleshy and soft made of breakable pieces Small has never been synonymous with power or strength But that’s okay, because small is smart and proactive. Small avoids people and places that make small vulnerable Small is an easy target Small knows this because that’s what the boy who touched her butt in Eighth grade English class told her when she told him to stop. Small is fleshy and soft made of breakable pieces Pieces that broke and crumbled when she got a little too drunk that night And woke up with her clothes off and blood running down her leg. Here’s the thing. Small is soft and fleshy but small is also made of grit and steel Small is her Mother’s daughter, with bones carved out of the same metal as the baseball Bat her mother used to fend off the man who tried to break into their first-floor apartment Small stands on the back of every woman before her and small will be damned If small is not synonymous with strength and unbridled power. Small is STOP and get away from me. Small is Back the fuck up. Small soft and fleshy Small is strong.
Shan’s poem expressed how, in keeping with normative gendered discourses of size and capability, she had come to think of herself as the “broken” and “vulnerable” young woman who was sexually assaulted. Like all women, as Giselle also said, Shan too had learned to be careful, avoiding “people and places that make small vulnerable.” Her poem depicts memories about gender violence she experienced as an eighth-grade student and being the daughter of a mother who experienced violence; all women with this experience, Shan affirmed, are connected. Her sexual assault revealed in class, and then incorporated into the poem, reminds us of how women are typically blamed when they are sexually assaulted and as a result, how they internalize self-blame. In fact, Shan wrote in her autoethnography that initially she was wary of a self-defense course because I hate the idea of the burden of not being assaulted being on women, and as a survivor of sexual assault, I was nervous that I would have been made to feel like I should have done a million things differently.
But she overcame her reticence to taking the class because she was tired of not feeling “empowered to walk down a dark street at night by myself. I feel powerless, like an easy target. So, I took this class to take that power back.” Fortunately, Shan discovered in class that the ESD philosophy is explicitly non-judgmental and non-victim-blaming. Through ESD, she has been able “to take that power back.” She has come to know herself as a small “smart,” “proactive” young woman who is made of “grit,” and “steel,” and possessed with “unbridled power.” Small, as a metonym for herself, remains fleshy and soft throughout the poem—that is Shan’s physical self. However, her description of herself that starts with the heartbreaking breakable pieces ends with the strong woman with a powerful voice who can yell STOP and Back the Fuck Up. She is the empowered young woman with the skills to prevent violence and fight back.
As Giselle’s story and Shan’s poem show, as did all the stories and poems students wrote that I was not able to include here, creative storytelling “makes the world visible in new and different ways, in ways ordinary social science writing does not allow,” and make autoethnographers “accessible, visible, and present in the text, in ways that traditional writing forms discourage” (Denzin, 2014, p. 86). Retelling personal experiences and emotional or traumatic events without the burden of academic language or scientific notions of “truth” was especially compelling for many students because it felt less constraining and stifling. When students are empowered in a supportive academic setting to construct the past in ways that feel healing to them, such as through stories and poems, they can also transform how they consciously construct their identities in healthier ways for the future (Dodd, 2019). For survivors of gendered violence, the benefits of creative writing to aid in healing and establishing positive outlooks for the future are especially valuable (Williamson & Wright, 2018; Wright & Thiara, 2019).
Conclusion
Looking at my growth through empowerment has been amazing and analyzing the transition of who I was to who I am has been a major piece in taking this course. The learning and exploration of empowerment through this class has truly been the most life changing experience I’ve had throughout college so far. Class discussions, readings, and the dialogic interview have been instrumental in my journey of empowerment and has helped me see myself differently. (Lizzie)
During the last session for physical self-defense, Amy organized a ritual ESD graduation in which everyone breaks a board accompanied by a deep, loud yell. Many students expressed to me at the beginning of class how nervous they were that they wouldn’t be able to break the board. Yet, when students approached Amy’s co-instructor from Culture of Safety, who assisted by holding the board to be broken while Amy coached and encouraged, they looked determined. Raising an arm to bring it down with a heel of the palm strike, each student simultaneously yelled “ When women learn or practice self-defense, they use their bodies in forceful ways. They kick, they pound, they elbow, they strike. They yell—not feminine screaming but deep, powerful yells. And what they yell is also unexpected. Instead of screaming “Help!” or “Please, no!” in a high, scared, feminine tone—as in “Please, don’t hurt me!”—they yell “NO!” from the diaphragm—as in “Don’t you dare hurt me!” They yell “Back off!” and “Leave me alone!” and sometimes “Fuck off!” Perhaps most important, they assert their right to safety, to self-determination, and to making their own choices—to agency. They declare, through their body language, their words, and their tone, that they are valuable and worth defending. (Hollander, 2009, p. 16)
As the student autoethnographic writing included in this article illustrates, the experience of learning ESD is transformational and empowering. ESD training research provides evidence of the many beneficial outcomes, time, and time again (Brecklin, 2008, 2014; Hollander, 2018; Jordan & Mossman, 2017). ESD training significantly reduces women’s risk of sexual assault because it improves “self-esteem, self-efficacy, assertiveness, and fighting skills” (Hollander, 2014, p. 25). My hope is that this course will become a regular part of our WGS curriculum—indeed in some format, would become a part of all college curricula—given its importance for college-age students (Gidycz & Dardis, 2014; Orchowski et al., 2018; Senn, 2011).
As the student autoethnographic writing included in this article also demonstrates, dialogic interviews and autoethnographies are powerful methodologies for learning in the college classroom. For my WGS 304 class, they more than delivered on their promises and potentials. They supported the baseline requirements for undergraduate education of learning new academic content and building skills in oral and written communication; indeed, these methodologies helped students to surpass such requirements beyond all of my expectations.
By writing autoethnographies and processing dialogic interviews, students engaged in conscious reflection on their life experiences in the context of the new academic learning connected to ESD. This learning experience resulted in the capacity for student to internalize and deepen their knowledge production, making what they learned more relevant in their lives (Warren & Rheingold, 1993). These qualitative methodologies also were beneficial because their centrality in the course disrupted the solitary act of writing and learning so dominant in traditional classrooms. The dialogic interviews, in particular, gave students opportunities to expand their conceptual understandings and engage in authentic peer-to-peer learning that they could then cognitively process through autoethnographic writing. Learning reciprocally in this way decenters the teacher as the expert in control of knowledge, creating a more feminist and empowering learning situation. With Barr (2019), I found that autoethnographic writing was not only “critical to student learning” but also “produced some of the best writing I have ever encountered” (p. 25).
Finally, having the student autoethnographic writing as the focal point of classroom discussions contributed to building a strong sense of group cohesion and community, crucial factors in a course focused on sensitive issues (Fraser & Russel, 2000; Fuller & Russo, 2018). Students knew that they were being listened to with empathy in class discussions. The classroom was filled with joy and sadness and laughter and tears when students shared their stories. By voluntarily revealing, and in some cases, breaking silence for the first time about experiences of gendered violence, the classroom community challenged “the default logic” in the United States, where we still “understand sexual, racial and gender harassment, abuse and violence as individual private problems” (Fuller & Russo, 2018, p. 180). Students came together in class not just to learn individually but to be part of a collective that created a foundation on which they could each learn to act differently in the world.
Dialogic interviews and autoethnographies are indeed powerful methodologies for a feminist college classroom. I would also venture to claim that they could be equally powerful methodologies for many, many more college classrooms.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Stephanie Farmer and Patricia Sawin for their support and insightful comments on the manuscript. The WGS 304 students are contributing authors because their research and writing is the heart of this article, without which, this article would not be possible. Amy Jones is also a contributing author, because without her as a co-teacher for the hands-on ESD portion of the course, neither this WGS 304 course nor the article would have been possible.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
