Is This Research? Productive Tensions in Living the (Collaborative) Autoethnographic Process

Writing to Reach

One fervent criticism of autoethnographic research is summarized by Delamont (2009) who asserted, “Autoethnography is, whatever else it may or may not be, about things that matter a great deal to the autoethnographer” (p. 57). In the context of our interdisciplinary collaboration and developing friendship, a great number of things emerged that personally mattered a great deal to us including, of course, but by no means limited to our views on the integration of the arts into STEM education. However, for the very reasons outlined by Delamont in her critique of autoethnography, we saw no reason to share with our prospective readers “the minutiae of [our] everyday [lives]” (p. 57)—for example, the pressures Kelly experienced as a new mother nearing the end of her doctoral journey, and Nicki’s decision to follow a nontraditional academic career path (see Productive Tension 2). Instead, we carefully chose aspects of our shared experiences and individual perspectives that we envisaged might serve as a window to broader cultural questions. Like Jackson and Mazzei stated, we wanted “to shift [our] analysis away from the narration itself, and away from narrating ‘I’s that question not only what [we] know but also how [we] know something (about [our]selves, about experience)” (2008, p. 308). In other words, the writing process nudged us toward not just the what but the how—how we came to understanding of Self/Other. Therefore, though we were intensely aware of the fact that we were doing autoethnographic research, we were purposeful with the auto-experiences we decided to include, explore, and interrogate. As practitioner-researchers, we viewed our writing as a powerful means of reaching out to and connecting with our readers (Bochner & Ellis, 1996) and, in particular from Nicki’s perspective, as a way for the engineering education community to critically, systemically, and personally engage in the politically and economically situated, interdisciplinary, and liminal space of STEAM education (see Productive Tension 3).

To “reach” our audience, we used conversational and descriptive language that we felt would invite our readers to travel alongside us in our attempts to unpack and interrogate our experiences (Ellis, 1999). Ellis’ approach to autoethnography, evocative autoethnography, inspired us as we sought to bring ourselves, our vulnerabilities, and our readers into our writing. At the same time, we endeavored to balance this focus on resonance with what Anderson (2006) described as “theoretical illumination” (p. 388). In our case, this entailed a critical examination of the underlying goals and practices associated with conceptualizing and doing STEAM education. Through bumping up against each other, our students, colleagues, the public discourse, and academic literature from both our disciplines, we sought to reveal to our readers the inherent tensions and contradictions embedded in STEAM collaborations. We now understand this convergence as a type of diffractive movement where we began to “[mark our] difference from within and as part of an entangled state” (Barad, 2007, p. 89). Our purpose in doing this was not to overcome or solve these challenges, or to produce a grand theory of STEAM education but, rather, to draw the reader into a space richly decorated with what Geertz (1974) termed “experience-near” and “experience-distant” (p. 28) concepts, so that they, too, might find themselves compelled to consider the possibilities and pitfalls of STEAM-inspired learning.

As our article progressed through the review process, it became clear that we would need to provide a detailed account of our methodological process and a firm grounding in the theoretical literature in order for our work to be accepted by the engineering education community. With the awareness that we were challenging the traditions of research methodology in this journal, Kelly sometimes found herself internally struggling against her perceptions of a rigid and systematic quality to their methodological discussions while also striving to release herself to do what was necessary to bring their voices to the engineering community (see Productive Tension 4). In order to strike a balance between our (in particular, Kelly’s) evocative tendencies and the certain analytic expectations of qualitative research in an engineering education research context, Nicki suggested turning to Walther, Sochacka, and Kellam’s (2013) framework for qualitative research quality. This framework, which includes a process model and typology of six validation/reliability constructs (see also Walther, Pawley, & Sochacka, 2015), helped to focus our attention on (i) the social reality we were attempting to illuminate and our emergent theoretical representations of that reality (theoretical validation), (ii) the processes through which we sought to interweave data (e.g., previously written accounts of the transformative experiences we described) and “real-time” in-process exchanges to collaboratively explore that reality (procedural validation), (iii) the use of appropriate language, that is, to “call things by the right names” (Kirk & Miller, 1986, p. 23), in order to (co)construct meaning in our writing through dialogue both with each other and our intended audience (communicative validation), and finally (iv) a sustained commitment to what Kirk and Miller (1986) describe as the generation of “knowledge that is of interest on its own merits to those other than the friends and admirers of its creator” (p. 13; pragmatic validation). It was through working with this framework that we were able to more clearly see how writing and voice might be purposefully used in such a way as exploit the “overlaps” and overcome the “cleavages between the analytic and evocative traditions in autoethnography” (Williams & Jauhari bin Zaini, 2016, p. 3).

As the title of this section suggests, we have come to articulate this approach to autoethnography as “writing to reach.” While, on the surface, writing to reach might be interpreted as similar to evocative autoethnography, which seeks to “evoke an emotional resonance” with the reader (Moriarty, 2014, p. 47), here we extend this notion to include a consideration of the expectations of a specific target audience and, at times, the need to reach out to each other. As we describe above, through writing to reach our engineering education readership, we sought to both meet and challenge their (and at times, our) expectations of research with the goal of striking a careful balance between familiarity and discomfort. Without this attentiveness, we worried that we would lose them—our first concern was the editor, then the reviewers, then the journal readers (see Productive Tension 5). From a methodological perspective, however, writing to reach has enriched our understanding of how both evocative and analytic approaches and, more broadly, how our different theoretical perspectives might be thoughtfully considered in the qualitative inquiry process. Acknowledging these different perspectives required an openness and vulnerability toward each other, because in order to stay true to our process, it became necessary for us to not shy away from complex or controversial topics. Rather, we found the need in our collaborative research to foreground a type of relational ethics. To be mindful of how differences could easily develop into inhibitive rather than productive tensions in our process. Quite simply, reaching out to each other brought us to more deeply consider tensions that surfaced throughout the process and develop even more nuanced understandings of self, other, and process. With these things in mind, writing to reach encompassed a movement toward our audience as well as within our research (i.e., reaching each other).

Contributing to the Conversation

In order to faithfully contribute to the broader STEAM conversation, we felt it was important to situate our writing in the context of our experiences co-teaching the studio. Anderson (2006) indicated one of the five essential criteria for analytic autoethnography as being a “full member in the research … setting” (p. 375) or what he calls a complete member researcher. Along these lines, our membership in the research setting might be viewed in terms of our respective disciplinary cultures as well as the classroom/course that served as the site of our inquiry. Both of these membership spaces were important, existing in tandem, as it was our respective backgrounds that afforded us the opportunity to teach the interdisciplinary design studio, while it was the studio itself that brought forth a heightened state of consciousness of what it meant to be in our disciplinary cultures and how we were becoming researcher-practitioners in the culture of STEAM education. Ellis, Adams, and Bochner (2011) explained, “When researchers do autoethnography, they retrospectively and selectively write about epiphanies that stem from, or are made possible by, being part of a culture and/or by possessing a particular cultural identity” (p. 276). In our experiences, a convergence of perspectives (Ngunjiri, Hernandez, & Chang, 2010) cultivated epiphanies when our unique knowledge and disciplinary identities collided and shifted. We noticed this in writing our collaborative autoethnographic study, and we continue to be aware of such cultural belongings as we write this methodological paper.

In the context of the design studio, in which we located our retrospective autoethnographic exploration, we observed our students grapple with (mis)conceptions about the other—art education students realizing their engineering peers brought creative and holistic systems thinking perspectives to their projects, while the engineering students developed profound understandings that art was more than just pretty pictures. Alongside the students, we found ourselves searching to make sense of our own disciplinary backgrounds and those of our counterparts. It was, in fact, our collaborative teaching experiences that made visible many assumptions and understandings of our disciplinary cultures, as we traversed both inter- and intradisciplinary spaces throughout the semester. For instance, Nicki found herself reflecting on her embarrassment when she found herself unable to effectively articulate to an engineering student that artists might contribute more to their collaborative assignments than aesthetics. She also acknowledged the perceived hierarchies that often place engineering above the arts. Kelly, on the other hand, unpacked her own limited perceptions of the sociotechnical complexities that are inherent to many problems faced by engineers and was embarrassed that she had not done a better job communicating to Nicki and the students how the arts are more than aesthetics. The more we engaged in the interdisciplinary space, we witnessed the dialogue shift away from the superficial toward understanding the nuances and layers of disciplinary culture—of each other. This shift was instrumental to our belief that we had something to offer to the existing conversations on STEAM education. Further, it was pivotal to our research collaboration, as it brought us to be more open and vulnerable in our dialogic writing. Rather than shy away from conflict and embarrassment, we allowed ourselves to enter vulnerable spaces, so that we could contribute to the conversation as our most “flawed” selves. In this way, interdisciplinarity was vital to both our emergent understandings and growth within and beyond our disciplines—as practitioner-researchers and autoethnographers.

Similar to this notion of being in the research setting, Delamont (2009, p. 60) discussed the role of academics who, she described, should commit to doing research in the world rather than “sitting in offices inside the university contemplating ourselves and our bodies” (see Productive Tension 6). It was through our desire to join the conversation that we began to think critically and reflexively (Anderson, 2006) about ourselves as practitioner-researchers, and through this, we problematized our own understandings of STEAM education. It was not enough for us to simply share our experiences, rather we used collaborative autoethnography to inquire individually and as disciplinary others—pushing each other to “dig deeper” ⁶ into our epiphanies and consider encounters with our students and entanglements in/with our disciplines. We felt and still feel compelled to consider how our bodies encounter other bodies ⁷ and we contend this can happen in the world and in our offices—after all, our offices are part of our worlds. Inspired by the words of Denzin (2006), we strove to be “self-reflexive but not self-obsessed” (p. 421) and we also attended to Anderson’s (2006) argument that “(analytic) ethnographers must avoid self-absorbed digression” (p. 385). Through the process of a simultaneously sequential yet iterative writing approach, we unpacked why we were unsettled by the STEAM discourse and the cultural (or disciplinary) structures that were promoting these perceptions. It was through spiraling inward, outward, and between that we were able to understand the embodied insights that being in the research space afforded us.

Along these lines, being in the research setting was critical to our goal of contributing to the broader discourses surrounding STEAM education. Although Delamont (2009) critiqued autoethnography for focusing on “social scientists who are not usually interesting or worth researching” (pp. 59–60), we felt that our practitioner experiences and inquiries in a complex and emerging educational space offered something interesting (and novel) to the conversations we encountered. As we listened to the voices of STEAM, we began to realize the incompleteness of what was being said and felt provoked to join the conversation. The conversation felt lopsided, one-sided even, and focused on the arts as bringing creativity to STEM fields, thus innovation, thus economic development. Through our experiences, we saw much more than a panacea for creativity and felt the arts were being unfairly used as an accessory to the STEM garment rather than as a worthwhile and equal component. Perhaps we were remiss in thinking that our experiences were interesting and worth researching (see Productive Tension 7); however, at the very least, we were speaking to different questions and raising different concerns than our counterparts. And don’t all researchers bring value judgments to what we find to be interesting and worth researching? If we play it safe by not opening ourselves to be the subjects of our inquiries, we might see other conversations as one sided rather than the beautiful, if not beautifully discordant, polyphony (Bakhtin, 1984) of voices of multiplicity and difference that comprise our postmodern world.

Writing as Experience/Writing as Inquiry

In 1934, Dewey wrote about art as experience through which the process of engaging with/in the arts nurtures spaces where meaningful and aesthetic experiences might occur. In a similar way, Richardson (2000) and Richardson and St. Pierre (2005) presented a perspective of writing as a method of inquiry (and method of data collection and analysis). Through both of these conceptions, the notion of process is valued, as it emphasizes the artist/researcher as situated in a constant state of becoming—possibilities of what might be guide our movements, yet the ephemeral and shifting nature of the possible cultivates endless possible paths that might be forged. Grounded in poststructuralism, writing as inquiry disrupts the “single” text and, instead, embraces the multiplicity, ambiguity, and even contradictory qualities of our meaning-making processes (Richardson & St. Pierre, 2005). As we engaged in our collaborative autoethnography, our writing experiences were entangled with ongoing inquiries and epiphanies. We became conscious of the multiple experiential layers embedded in our collaboration and sought to allow the process of autoethnography to be visible through our writing, in other words, to allow the marinating to emerge in our product. One way in which we endeavored to do this was to bring a sense of our becoming into the text, or as Jackson and Mazzei (2008) explained, “positioning an ‘I’ that is becoming through the telling” (p. 309). For example, in one response to Kelly’s writing, Nicki expressed that, “I feel like it is only now, as we work towards a near-finished draft of this article, that I am beginning to understand the significance of being wide-awake and embarking on a critical and collaborative search” (Sochacka et al., 2016, p. 8).

The tension between process and product was one of the most salient challenges we faced on our methodological journey. As discussed above, we were conscious of the expectations held by our target journal as to what research, and research writing, ought to look like. However, we were not content to resign ourselves to a prescripted path and we often found ourselves wondering what we wanted our writing to become. This tension emerged as a lively thread in our conversations, as we felt increasingly comfortable in our emergent and shifting understandings of our experiences in STEAM education, yet uncomfortable presenting our work, our inquiries, as “finished.” When it finally came time to finish our writing, we experienced this stage of the process different ways. For Nicki, the finishing took place in the discussion and conclusion section, where she sought to synthesize what we had learned from our collaborative exploration and ground these “lessons-learned” alongside relevant literature. Nicki perceived this synthesis as necessary given her own conceptions of research and insight into expectations of the engineering education readership. After much discussion, Kelly agreed to a degree of synthesis while also seeking to preserve the inherent unfinished and performative nature of some of our ongoing inquiries. In the end, we agreed to leave some questions open and reiterate our own discomforts even as we “concluded” the paper. Once again, our different perspectives collided in ways that, we argue, ultimately strengthened the quality of our final product for our respective readers.

In discussing creative analytical processes/practices (or CAP ethnographies), Richardson and St. Pierre (2005) indicated a privileging of both the writing process and product (not one over the other), as they are intertwined, inseparable from one another—the process becomes product. Richardson (2000) also described CAP ethnography as blending the scientific and the literary. In this way, CAP ethnography might be viewed as analogous to a combination of evocative (literary) and analytic (scientific) approaches to autoethnography, where vulnerability, emotion, struggle, and creativity are valued qualities in the scientific research process. In seeking to achieve this balance, there were times when we each found ourselves questioning whether we should hold back the emotionality of the process in order to gain acceptance by what we perceived as our scientifically-oriented readership. Looking back, one might say that we approached these emotionally evocative areas of our article on a case-by-case basis. In some instances, our earlier accounts became naturally tempered as we delved deeper into our evolving understandings and grounded them in relevant literature. In other instances, we adopted a “pick your battles” approach and removed some of what we saw as justified but perhaps unnecessary critiques of our respective fields (see Productive Tension 8).

In autoethnographic writing, Ellis et al. (2011) noted the importance of merging both “aesthetic and evocative thick descriptions of personal and interpersonal experience” (p. 277). Similarly, Ellis et al. (2011) and Richardson (2000) argued that just as we cannot remove process from product, we cannot remove ourselves from our research. It was this mindfulness toward (re)presenting our embodied selves in the research space alongside a desire to immerse our readers into the actions and interactions in the design studio, which cultivated a wide awakeness (Greene, 1995) to our aesthetic/experiential/multivoiced process.

Being In/Being With

Another compelling aspect of our writing/research process consisted of our embodied methodological movements. As we have discussed, our collaborative autoethnographic journey was extended over several years, arguably beginning when we started meeting regularly to plan the curriculum of the design course in January 2012 and picking up momentum while we were teaching the course in fall 2012. Much of our sustained reflexive inquiry took place during 2013–2014, as we attempted to make sense of and interrogate the STEAM experience in writing the aforementioned collaborative autoethnographic articles, extending into the first half of 2015 as we revised our writing. In this way, our intensity of engagement in the research process waxed and waned. There were times when one or both of us pushed our chairs back from the computer for a week or even two, just as there were times when we lived, breathed, and subsisted on our research. In this spirit, we see the physical closeness of our bodies with our research and writing as a “being in” (similar to the being in our offices/the world we discussed above), while the physical distance denoted as “being with.” In retrospect, the tension (and entanglement) of being in/being with afforded us many insights and, quite possibly, kept us moving toward an end when an end seemed beyond our reach.

We viewed our process of being in/being with as reflective of our sequential-iterative writing movements, where we might take time during each other’s “turn” to work on other sections of the paper or simply let our words and epiphanies steep—infusing and flavoring our emerging understandings of lived experience. Thus, our seemingly linear sequential movement evolved into a more rhizomatic (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987) and iterative one, replete with multiple openings and potential lines of flight. Mitra (2010) called this steeping the “postscripted nature of (auto)ethnographic research, wherein one continually revises and reframes one’s argument, based on moments of clarity from reading reviewer-comments in the library or (in much less formal circumstances) taking a shower” (p. 4). It might also follow St. Pierre’s (1997) notion of the “physicality of theorizing” (p. 184). Through our process, we found that the iterative permitted us to continuously engage in/with our emergent dialogues and sit with our inquiries for sustained periods of time, allowing us deeper and sometimes more complex understandings of our individual and collective experiences. For instance, we continued to wrestle with the notion of engineering student identity through our final revision, spinning a web between our memories, data, and experiences to the literature. Even when we were not writing, our work shadowed us persistently, should we choose to engage. The notion of being with denotes that we weren’t physically engaging in writing; however, we were not distant from our research—incessantly connected with our thoughts and grappling with our embodied understandings of our research experiences. But it was often this physical separation that proved beneficial. The marinating that Kelly referred to in her e-mail above and the almost hermeneutic movement from the parts to the whole (text and context) as we considered the “so whats?” of the paper comprised instances where being with (rather than in) actually immersed us deeper in our STEAM experience inquiries. We found both movements to be essential to the process.

Finally, entangled within the previous section on writing as inquiry, we grappled with knowing when to stop—when is our collaborative autoethnographic study complete? (see Productive Tension 9). Of course, we cannot claim this struggle as resolutely autoethnographic or even ethnographic, as many qualitative researchers often become aware of numerous pathways left unpursued when their studies draw to a close. What becomes challenging is the auto-aspect of the methodology. Our inquiries and epiphanies are not confined to the years 2012–2015, or to the limitations of space allotted by the journal, or even the constraints of written language. Despite any physical separation, we are relentlessly in. Even as we write this article, we continue to make sense of our STEAM study, our methodology, our methods, and ourselves. And we are beginning to understand what Jackson and Mazzei (2008) meant when they described the “becoming I,” as “fragmented and incomplete” replete with “differences, contradictions, and folds” (p. 309). In this way, we feel our voices continue to echo beyond the imposed boundaries of our research (e.g., bounded publications, the studio’s conclusion, and the end of Kelly’s doctoral program) and are beginning to see boundaries as increasingly permeable through our ongoing dialogue/our ongoing becomings. It is worth noting that even our current perspectives differ (sometimes greatly) from those reflexive and theoretical lenses we donned even a few months ago. However, this is the nature of writing as experience/writing as inquiry. This is the nature of qualitative inquiry. The process does not function outside of us, the process is inseparable from us—it is part of our experiences, our being in/being with.