Integrating Qualitative Research into the Community College Linguistics Course: An Autoethnographic Inquiry

Abstract

This article presents an autoethnographic inquiry of a professor's journey when integrating qualitative research practices into the community college linguistics course. With the abundance of studies on undergraduate students’ quantitative research experiences in STEM and health sciences, the study addresses a gap in the research literature in humanities and social sciences and focuses on one professor's experiences through the theoretical lens of the ecological perspective and the methodological lens of an autoethnography. Analysis of the focal participant's and undergraduate students’ journal entries and interviews with students allowed for constructing a narrative account of the challenges and successes when preparing to teach, when teaching qualitative research to undergraduate students, and when reflecting about the participant's conceptual self from a critical standpoint.