Collective Fieldwork Interviews in the Classroom Without Walls

Abstract

This article uses a course that meets from 10 p.m. to 1 a.m. as a context to critically examine collective collaborative fieldwork as an experiential pedagogy that helps students better understand and practice qualitative fieldwork interviews. A collective interviewing experience can provide each student with practice and establish a situation for relatively sustained learning-focused dialogue and debate about interviewing ethics. With this context in mind, I critically examine how interviewing participants in a group scenario can help students understand spurned interview requests, the effects on researcher-participant relationships, and the alteration of temporal and spatial scenes in which interviews take shape as well as teach students about the important nuances of translation during interviews. Taken together, these four issues offer important ways to think about team-based fieldwork projects as an alternative to lone-ethnographer models of research practices that are foregrounded in qualitative research literature and in fieldwork-based courses.