Graduate Students Becoming Qualitative Researchers: An Ethnographic Study 9781138087309, 9780367642228, 9781315110561

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Graduate Students Becoming Qualitative Researchers

Through conducting an ethnographic study about doctoral students from traditionally underrepresented groups who are learning to conduct ethnographic research, this volume offers unique insight into the challenges and experiences through which these students develop their skills and identities as qualitative researchers. Foregrounding the stories and perspectives of students from minoritized backgrounds including Latinx, Black, differently abled, and queer students, Graduate Students Becoming Qualitative Researchers identifies how the process of learning to conduct ethnographic research underpins doctoral students’ success, confidence, and persistence in the academy. Chapters follow students during a one-year ethnographic research course during which they learn about ethnography and also conduct observations, write field notes, interview participants, and gather artifacts. Offering important pedagogical insights into how ethnography and academic writing are communicated, the text also tackles questions of access and diversity within scholarship and highlights barriers to first-generation and minoritized students’ success, including impostor syndrome, stereotype vulnerability, and access to time, knowledge, and capital. This volume will prove valuable to doctoral students, postgraduate researchers, scholars, and educators conducting qualitative research across the fields of education and rhetoric, as well as the humanities and social sciences. It will also appeal to those interested in multiculturalism and diversity within the education sector. Char Ullman is Associate Professor of Sociocultural Foundations of Education and Educational Anthropology at the University of Texas at El Paso, U.S. Kate Mangelsdorf is Professor of Rhetoric and Composition Studies at the University of Texas at El Paso, U.S. Jair Muñoz is Doctoral Student in the Teaching, Learning, and Culture program at the University of Texas at El Paso, U.S.

Routledge Research in Educational Equality and Diversity

Books in the series include: High Achieving African American Students and the College Choice Process Applying Critical Race Theory Thandeka K. Chapman, Frances Contreras, Eddie Comeaux, Eligio Martinez Jr. and Gloria M. Rodriguez Community Participation with Schools in Developing Countries Towards Equitable and Inclusive Basic Education for All Edited by Mikiko Nishimura Experiences of Racialization in Predominantly White Institutions Critical Reflections on Inclusion in US Colleges and Schools of Education Edited by Rachel Endo International Perspectives on Inclusion within Society and Education Edited by Mabel Ann Brown Teaching to Close the Achievement Gap for Students of Color Understanding the Impact of Factors Outside the Classroom Edited by Theodore S. Ransaw and Richard Majors Graduate Students Becoming Qualitative Researchers An Ethnographic Study Char Ullman, Kate Mangelsdorf, and Jair Muñoz For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/ Routledge-Research-in-Educational-Equality-and-Diversity/book-series/ RREED

Graduate Students Becoming Qualitative Researchers An Ethnographic Study Char Ullman, Kate Mangelsdorf, and Jair Muñoz

First published 2021 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 Taylor & Francis The right of Char Ullman, Kate Mangelsdorf, and Jair Muñoz to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-1-138-08730-9 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-64222-8 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-11056-1 (ebk) Typeset in NewBaskerville by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents

List of Illustrationsvii Prefaceviii Acknowledgementsx 1 Who Gets to Become a Professor? Paving the Way for Diversity in the Academy 2 Situating the Study: Conducting Ethnographic Research With Doctoral Students on the U.S.–Mexico Border

1

24

3 Belonging and Becoming: Understanding and Overcoming Barriers to Participation in the Academy48 4 Learning to Do Research: Acknowledging Researcher Positionality in Ethnographic Research

82

5 Building Identity as a Scholar and Researcher: Identity Work, Impostor Syndrome, and Belonging

111

6 Recognizing the Role of Self-Belief, Motivation, and Personal Sacrifice in Doctoral Students’ Success

143

7 Being and Researching in the Third Space: Embracing Cultural, Linguistic, and Professional Hybridity175

vi  Contents

8 We Were Never Supposed to Be Here: Overcoming Resistance and Joining Communities of Practice

201

9 Learning and Not Learning to Become Qualitative Researchers229 Index265

Illustrations

Figures 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 5.1 5.2 7.1 8.1 8.2 8.3 8.4 9.1 9.2 9.3 9.4 9.5 9.6 9.7 9.8 9.9

Linda’s Field Notes, October 27 Linda, JoAnn, and Facundo’s Hybridity Slide Linda, JoAnn, and Facundo’s “Where Do We See It?” Slide Linda, JoAnn, and Facundo’s Theory and Data Slide Gloria’s Field Notes, October 7 Response to Gloria’s Field Notes, October 7 Facundo’s Field Notes, September 27 Josiah’s Field Notes, September 15 Josiah’s Field Notes, September 24 Josiah’s Field Notes, October 13 Wolbers, Dostal, and Bowers (2012) on Deaf and Non-Deaf Writing Israel’s Letter to the Readers 1 Israel’s Letter to the Readers 1 Israel’s Letter to the Readers 1 Israel’s Letter to the Readers 1 Israel’s Letter to the Readers 1 Israel’s Field Notes, September 15 Israel’s Field Notes, September 15 Israel’s Field Notes, September 15 Israel’s Letter to the Readers 1

96 100 100 100 129 130 192 222 222 222 224 245 246 246 247 248 248 249 249 250

Tables 1.1 Population of First-Year Composition Courses at Borderlands University 1.2 Meta-Study Participants 3.1 JoAnn’s Field Notes, September 17 4.1 Linda’s Field Notes, September 17 4.2 Linda’s Field Notes, September 17 4.3 Linda’s Field Notes, September 17 4.4 Linda’s Field Notes, September 24

11 18 66 92 93 93 95

Preface

We were completing this book during the time that a gentle Black man named George Floyd was murdered by a White cop in Minneapolis while three police officers watched. Protests against police brutality and systemic racism erupted across the nation, and the pain over Mr. Floyd’s death pulsed through us, as it did for people around the world. And sadly, George Floyd’s murder was one of many murders of Black and Brown people by the police in the United States in recent years. We want the Black Lives Matter movement to lead to real systemic change. We also want there to be changes in academia that will lead to graduate students of color becoming researchers, changing the face of the professoriate and creating transformative scholarship. This book, Graduate Students Becoming Qualitative Researchers: An Ethnographic Study, is a project that grew out of our deep curiosity about how it is that doctoral students from diverse backgrounds engage in the process of becoming qualitative researchers and scholarly writers. We received feedback on this study over the years as we presented early versions of chapters at various scholarly conferences, including the Ethnographic and Qualitative Research Conference (EQRC), the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) and the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC). We have benefited greatly from questions and comments in those venues. Of course, any errors are purely our own. This book begins by asking the reader what kind of person typically becomes a professor and highlights examples of two White male scholars whose work has been deeply influential in their respective fields. It moves to a discussion of who populates the professoriate today, who recently minted doctoral students are, and what university faculty positions look like now in the United States. From there, we historically situate doctoral education at the university where this study was conducted and explain a little bit about this research project. In the second chapter, we situate the study in the literature(s) and describe our methods in more depth. Then we devote each of the following chapters – 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8 – to one of the doctoral students in the

Preface ix study. In these chapters, we weave participant observation data from the ethnographic case study course they took, along with interview data and focus group data, in with the products they created for the course. We use those components to tell the story of each person’s becoming and belonging in a Community of Practice. We wanted to understand how they became qualitative researchers and scholarly writers. In Chapter 9, which is entitled “Learning and Not Learning to Become Qualitative Researchers,” we consider the students’ learning and identity work through the lenses of Communities of Practice (Lave  & Wenger, 1991) and Community Cultural Wealth framework (Yosso, 2013). In this final chapter, we also present what we understand about one student in the study who did not become a qualitative researcher. Char and Kate collected data while they were teaching and working as administrators. They used weekends, spring breaks, time away at conferences, and really any extra moment they could find to write. Jair collected data and transcribed interviews and focus groups while he was writing his portfolio/comprehensive exams and his dissertation proposal, all while teaching at multiple locales. He and his wife were also raising three daughters. The three of us completed our analysis and writing during the COVID19 quarantine, and unlike many scholars who return from sabbatical with a book manuscript in hand, Char and Kate work at a university that doesn’t offer sabbaticals. Jair studies in a department that doesn’t have fellowships, so he works hard to pay for tuition each semester, and sometimes he has to step out to save money for tuition. All of us used the quarantine as a kind of sabbatical/fellowship. The pandemic is a tragic event made worse by political mismanagement, and yet we are grateful that we were in a position to use this time to write. We invite you to step into Graduate Students Becoming Qualitative Researchers: An Ethnographic Study.

References Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation. New York: Cambridge University Press. Yosso, T. J. (2013). Critical race counterstories along the Chicana/Chicano educational pipeline. New York: Routledge.

Acknowledgements

We want to acknowledge all the Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC), the people with different disabilities, the queer people, and those who are a combination of all these very human traits, who should have been able to become qualitative researchers and scholarly writers and flourish in the academy.

From Char Ullman I offer my heartfelt thanks to the brilliant and courageous people who took our course and who talked with us about their experiences. I also thank those who didn’t finish talking with us. Thank you, Kate Mangelsdorf, for your deep insight, steadiness, and bravery. It has been a delight to collaborate with you, my friend. Thank you, Jair Muñoz, my doctoral advisee and friend, for staying up all night to transcribe interviews and write. I know that you were caring lovingly for las bebés, who were throwing up, crying, and laughing while you found slivers of time to work. And finally, I thank my wonderful wife, Carrie Hamblen, who became the Democratic nominee for New Mexico Senate District 38 while we were finishing this book. Her unconditional love and support are without equal.

From Kate Mangelsdorf I wish to thank the many students I have had over the years who have enriched my life. I  have learned from all of you! I  especially want to thank the students who participated in this research study for their generosity, enthusiasm, and openness. I wish to thank Char Ullman for her amazing perceptiveness, her patience, and her incredible wealth of knowledge. Our friendship has given me so much. And thank you, Jair Muñoz, for your insights, persistence, and humor. I have learned so much from collaborating with both of you.

Acknowledgements xi Finally, I thank my husband for his patience and love. He makes it all worthwhile.

From Jair Muñoz I want to thank and acknowledge my fellow Crip, Black, Brown, Queer colegas and friends who continue to fight for a voice in academia! For those who doubt whether academia is important . . . it is very important, now more than ever. ¡A seguirle con muchas ganas! I want to thank Char for being my mentor and my friend and for setting the example as to the kind of scholar I strive to be. ¡Sigue empujandome en este viaje! I want to thank Kate for her insight, tenacity, and patience. It’s been special delight and honor to have worked with you. You rock! Char and Kate, thank you both for making me part of this pivotal project. And I want to thank my partner, Ana, and my chaparras, Luna, Nova, y Amaia, minhas luzes no fim do túnel. They are one reason why Dad didn’t sleep.

1 Who Gets to Become a Professor? Paving the Way for Diversity in the Academy

Often, professors have been people like John. John’s father was a grocer who went to war and came back to run a successful small business in Vermont. His mother was an evangelical Christian whose good works included volunteering at a social service agency in Burlington, Vermont, and keeping close watch on the spiritual lives of her three sons. Although neither of John’s parents had gone to college, his mother made sure all her sons did. John studied philosophy at the state university and then taught high school for two years in a small Pennsylvania town. He went on for graduate study in philosophy at Johns Hopkins University. This White, middle-class family produced a son who became a philosophy professor, first at the University of Michigan and later at the University of Minnesota. He went on to chair the Department of Philosophy, Psychology, and Pedagogy at the University of Chicago, where he started the first laboratory school. He developed the idea of democratic pedagogy, theorizing that education should be a collaborative process of students developing their abilities, as opposed to teachers implementing a standardized curriculum. He wrote about democracy and the limits of individualism, the essential ways that social organizations shaped society, and the intractable problems of a class- and race-based society. After his time at the University of Chicago, he found a home in the philosophy department at Columbia University. where he became prominent in the progressive movement and, for a brief moment, the intellectual voice of the nation. He wrote no fewer than 40 books and 700 articles. Demonstrating his belief in the essential role of social organizations for a functioning democracy, he helped found the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), and the American Association of University Professors (AAUP). Along with W.E.B. DuBois, Ida B. Wells, and other Black leaders, he was even one of the White progressives who helped to found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). His name was John Dewey. On the planet from 1859 to 1952, he was a preeminent scholar of education and a revered university professor, and

2  Who Gets to Become a Professor? he influenced national policy. John Dewey is the kind of person who has historically become a member of the academy. Ken is another kind of person who becomes a professor  – sort of. While in high school in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania, he found himself deeply drawn to other languages and wide-ranging ideas about language itself. Supported by his father, who was a clerk at the Westinghouse Electric Company, and his homemaker mother, Ken spent one semester studying French, German, and the classics (i.e., Greek and Latin) at Ohio State University. After that first semester of college, his family moved to New Jersey, where he took another semester at Columbia University, this time in philosophy and classics. After two semesters of college, he promptly dropped out. He is said to have claimed, “It is now time for me to quit college and begin studying” (McLemee, 2001, p. 1). Ken was a fortunate autodidact. His family’s move to New Jersey meant proximity to New York City and the glittering modernist literary scenes of the time. While he had limited contact with the writers of the Harlem Renaissance or the Algonquin Round Table, avant-garde artists such as playwright Eugene O’Neill, photographer Alfred Stieglitz, and the poets Marianne Moore and William Carlos Williams became his teachers (Selzer, 1996). Greenwich Village taprooms were his classrooms. His working-class parents sent him money when they could, and for brief periods of time, he even had a patron. While working as an editor and music critic at influential magazines such as The Dial and The Nation, he translated Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice from German to English. Smitten with Ken’s lyrical translation, renowned poet W.H. Auden called it definitive, saying simply, “This is it” (Simons & Melia, 1989, p. 3). Ken did all that with what appears to have been one semester of college-level German. A member of a vibrant community of writers and artists, he published a novel and a work of literary criticism early in his career. Soon, he was a visiting professor at the New School for Social Research and the University of Chicago, where, notably, he was Susan Sontag’s teacher. He had teaching stints at Syracuse, Rutgers, Stanford, Princeton, and Harvard University. And for 20  years, he was faculty at Bennington College, a private women’s college in Bennington, Vermont, where he intentionally taught part time in order to give himself time to write. He was awarded 11 honorary degrees throughout his long career. One of the originators of the New Criticism movement in American literature, Ken developed a philosophical system that made language central, focused on humans as symbol-using beings capable of ethical action, and drew on components of drama in order to understand human communication. Some argue that he moved the field of rhetoric from an Aristotelian focus on persuasion to a focus on identification and the influence of the unconscious.

Who Gets to Become a Professor? 3 Kenneth Burke is the scholar in question. He was alive from 1897 to 1993, and like his quasi-contemporary John Dewey, he shaped a scholarly discipline. A celebrated scholar of rhetoric and a university professor who never earned a degree but taught at elite institutions, Burke1 learned “on the job,” so to speak, as part of a social network of modernist artists and thinkers. With limited formal schooling, few people could have achieved what Burke was able to do – transform a field of study. And Dewey’s career, while more traditionally achieved, was a mammoth one, having shaped multiple scholarly disciplines (i.e., education, philosophy, and psychology) as well as having had a profound impact on public policy. Both Dewey and Burke were stellar scholars. The future scholars who are the focus of this book walk in their footsteps while forging decidedly divergent paths for themselves.

How the Academy Has Changed Since the Days of Dewey and Burke Most of us can’t imagine Burke’s exceptional career trajectory happening today. As of 2020, many scholars with doctorates from prestigious universities in the United States are teaching as itinerant adjuncts, being paid a paltry sum per class, and while they are employed, many also qualify for welfare benefits such as food assistance. Harris (2019) notes that in 1969, almost 80 percent of university faculty were on the tenure track or were tenured, whereas today, 75 percent of the U.S. professoriate are employed outside the tenure track, working in temporary grantfunded positions or teaching one semester at a time, without long-term contracts. The most recent study of the racial and ethnic composition of the U.S. professoriate (Finkelstein, 2016) found that 41  percent of tenured and tenure-track appointments went to White men, and 35  percent went to White women. Asian men held 6  percent of the positions and Asian women held 4 percent of them. It gets worse from there, with Black women, Black men, and Latinos (men) all weighing in at 3 percent of university faculty. Latinas (women) comprised only 2 percent of the professoriate. American Indian/Native faculty, along with mixed-race people, represent only 1 percent (or less) of working academics in the United States. Finkelstein’s study (2016) takes scholars who have immigrated to the United States out of the equation, noting that often, though not always, international scholars come from more privileged backgrounds than those who are U.S. born. And while these figures take into account gender and race/ethnicity,2 issues of sexuality and ability among university faculty are not considered in these percentages at all. That is, intersectional identities are not taken into account.

4  Who Gets to Become a Professor? Summarizing multiple studies, Flaherty (2016) makes clear that while faculty have increased by about 65  percent in recent years, the percentage of part-time or adjunct faculty has gone up by an astounding 115 percent. She notes that minoritized people and women are disproportionately represented among adjunct faculty. That is, tenure-track positions are disappearing, just at the moment a more diverse group of PhDs is arriving at the doors of the academy. Perhaps in response to the waning of tenure-track positions, by 2016 the quotient of people earning doctorates in education had plunged from 15  percent of all doctorates awarded to 9  percent (National Science Foundation, 2018). In the arts and humanities, where the field of rhetoric resides, it has gone from 13 to 10 percent. But what if, in spite of the dismal possibilities of landing a tenure-track job, you are a person from a minoritized background who still wants to earn a doctoral degree and attempt to become a professor?

Gaining Access to Doctoral Education The first step for most people who want to become professors is to decide which doctoral programs align with their interests. Then, they would take the necessary steps to apply to those programs, such as requesting university transcripts, completing an application form, and preparing to take the required standardized tests. But what would you do if there were no universities with doctoral programs anywhere near where you live? Graduate study is expensive. Many people cannot afford to move across the country to earn their doctorates, and in-state tuition can be a deciding factor for many people in terms of where they study. If you were already paying state taxes that support higher education in your state, it would seem that there should be opportunities for you to apply to do graduate study within your state, wouldn’t it? Back in the late 1980s, Latinx3 activists in Texas pointed out that there were 700 doctoral programs in the White, Northern part of the state, but only 7 programs in the Browner borderlands region. Although 20 percent of the entire population of Texas lived along the border at the time, only 10 percent of higher education funding went there (Mangin, 1991). Activists were clear that it was a question of racial and ethnic inequity to have such limited access to doctoral education available to Latinx people living on the border.

The Legal Fight for Access to Higher Education Mexican American people living in communities along the border have long had to fight for K–12 schooling as well as higher education. More often than not, advances in educational access and equity have

Who Gets to Become a Professor? 5 come through the courts rather than legislative action. For instance, an early lawsuit (Salvatierra v. Independent School District, 1930) determined that Mexican students should not be segregated from White students in Texas public schools. In another case (Hernandez v. Texas, 1954), the court decided that people of Mexican descent are members of a “distinct class worthy of equal protection” under the 14th Amendment, a category previously only used for Black Americans. While there have been many lawsuits that have inched the state of Texas toward more equitable public education practices, one that is especially significant to us is LULAC v. Richards. In 1987, the League of Latin American Citizens (LULAC) brought the class-action lawsuit LULAC v. Richards against the then-governor of Texas, Ann Richards, holding that “the state of Texas discriminated against Hispanics by not providing colleges and universities located in the surrounding geographic area their fair share of funding” (Ortegón, 2014, p. 10). Although LULAC won that educational discrimination case in a lower court, it was taken to the Texas Supreme Court on appeal, and the lower court ruling was overturned in 1993. The higher court said that there was no evidence of intentional discrimination and that, furthermore, access to higher education was not a fundamental right protected by the Texas Constitution. That is, having public K–12 education immediately available in your community is a right in Texas, but higher education, especially doctoral education, is not. Although that lawsuit was unsuccessful, it had a decisive policy impact nonetheless. The year the lawsuit was filed, the Texas legislature responded by creating the Joint Committee on Higher Education in South Texas, which was tasked with conducting a study of the status of higher education on the border. The committee found that the quality and quantity of higher education options on the border were severely limited. And in turn, that research spurred the South Texas Border Initiative (STBI) legislation. Its goal was “to enhance the scope and quality of higher education institutions and programs along the Texas-Mexico border” (Flack, 2003, p.  1). The legislation included an initial reparation of $460  million, which went to nine borderland universities, and funding in some form has continued into the 21st century. The university where this study was conducted was one of those nine underfunded borderland universities identified in LULAC v. Richards. We pseudonymously call it Borderlands University.

Access Is More Than Funding When that initial infusion of resources arrived at Borderlands University, the then–university president took decisive steps to make higher

6  Who Gets to Become a Professor? education accessible to the surrounding Latinx communities. She knew that the region immediately surrounding the university included one of the most impoverished zip codes in the nation. First, she lowered tuition. Then she did things like establishing a no-interest loan program (up to $500), to keep students enrolled who might otherwise drop out because of a small but unmanageable expense (e.g., replacing brakes on a car). She also made sure that 100 percent of undergraduate students would be accepted. This was a radical move. Other universities only accept the top percentile of students, building their reputations by starting with already-successful students. Borderlands University accepts everyone at the undergraduate level, engaging students to work hard so that they can graduate with the same knowledge and skills obtained by those from more selective schools. Creating access to higher education without lowering academic standards means that sometimes students have to take classes over and over until they get the highest grade possible. It also means that it can take them longer than four years to graduate. As a result of these innovative policies, the school went from a student body that was 80 percent White to one that was 80 percent Latinx. Of the remaining 20  percent of the student population, 10  percent live in Mexico and cross an international bridge to go to school each day. The other 10  percent are students from other ethnic and racial backgrounds, and many from this group are affiliated with the military, which has a base nearby. This university is an example of a majorityminority institution. “Talent is everywhere,” the university president had long argued. In her frequent talks about Borderlands, she would remind her audiences that intelligence cannot possibly belong solely to White, middle-class men: Rather, brilliance crosses geographic and socioeconomic borders, as well as those of gender, race, and ethnicity. Serving the surrounding border communities was an essential step toward ameliorating what the president had called the opportunity shortage for Latinx students. “If you’re a public institution,” she has said, “then I think it’s your responsibility to serve the public” (Corchado, 2019). In 2019, just before the Borderlands University president retired, the university achieved Research I status. That means that faculty produce a high level of research (at least $5 million in research funding) and that 20 or more research doctorates and 30 or more professional practice doctorates are awarded annually. Before the South Texas Border Initiative Legislation, this university had 1 doctoral program – in mining engineering. As of 2019, Borderlands University had 22 different doctoral programs, and the 23rd is currently in the process of being approved. It has become one of only 131 top-tier universities in the United States with the Research I designation. Of those 22 doctoral programs currently in

Who Gets to Become a Professor? 7 place, we are particularly interested in two of them. We call one of the programs Teaching, Teacher Education, and Culture, and it is housed in the College of Education. We call the other one Rhetoric and Composition Studies, in the College of Liberal Arts. Doctoral students in those particular programs are the focus of this study.

Becoming Scholars How, then, do students from minoritized backgrounds become scholars – in our case, qualitative researchers – and, ultimately, part of the professoriate? We know that most of the extant scholarly literature on doctoral student writing and scholarly development, which we discuss in Chapter 2, focuses almost exclusively on two groups: White middle-class students and international students. That literature is mostly characterized by insider reflections on academia, scholarly advice, and reflections on mentoring. Some works are general descriptions of qualitative research, with a quick chapter on writing, and others advocate for the reform of doctoral education. None of this literature uses systematic ethnographic research to explore questions of how students engage in the process of becoming scholars and researchers.

The Process of Becoming This book explores how a diverse group of doctoral students from the related and interdisciplinary fields of education and rhetoric developed into qualitative researchers and scholarly writers over the course of one year. We began the study with eight doctoral students – six from education and two from rhetoric – who were enrolled in a two-semester course on conducting an ethnographic case study. In the first semester, students were introduced to ethnographic research while, at the same time, being thrown into conducting an ethnographic case study. The case (Stake, 1995) was to understand how identities, ideologies, and texts were coconstructed in two sections of a required first-year composition course at Borderlands University. These doctoral students became student researchers almost from the start, conducting participant observation; interviewing undergraduate students in the writing course, along with the instructors; and gathering artifacts such as student writing assignments and instructor feedback. Their job was to gather ethnographic data on how identities, ideologies, and texts were co-constructed in the writing course. In the second semester of the student researchers’ course, they explored the genre of the scholarly article, continued transcribing and analyzing their data, and presented their findings at two scholarly conferences: One that was graduate student friendly and one that was decidedly less so.

8  Who Gets to Become a Professor?

The Origin Story of the Study Over coffee, we found ourselves reflecting on doctoral students we had had in common over the years. At this point in time, back in 2015, when the idea for this project was emerging, we referred to Char, who is an associate professor in education, and Kate, who is a full professor in the rhetoric department. Both of us work at Borderlands University. Later in the book, that we will come to include Jair, who is a doctoral student in education, soon to be a doctoral candidate. He is also Char’s advisee. But back to us, Char and Kate. We noted that doctoral students in rhetoric typically had strong backgrounds in theory, as they frequently came from master’s programs heavy in literary analysis. In contrast, doctoral students in education often had substantial experience with research, as a number of them were research assistants on Department of Education grants run by faculty in the education department. Sipping coffee, Char said, “Wouldn’t it be great if we could bring them together into research teams so they could complement each other’s strengths?” Kate’s eyes lit up, and she said, “And we could co-teach the class.” As the conversation veered toward articles that might be exemplary readings for the course, we ended up focusing on the Journal of Language, Identity, and Education ( JLIE). We realized that the studies published there were a fertile ground where our two fields converged. We ended up drawing 90 percent of the articles we assigned in the first semester of the course from JLIE and we included the scope of the journal in our syllabus: Education plays a central role in promoting social development, stability, integration, and equity in a linguistically and culturally diverse world. Policy decisions in educational settings today often require an understanding of the relationships between home language/variety and school language/variety, ethnic and gender identity, societal attitudes toward languages/varieties, and differential performance across groups. This journal will seek out cutting edge interdisciplinary research from around the world, reflecting diverse theoretical and methodological frameworks and topical areas. ( Journal of Language, Identity, and Education, n.d.) As we engaged in the alchemy of course creation, we realized we could assign exemplary articles from JLIE and categorize them into the themes of identities, ideologies, and texts. We both were proponents of postmodernist epistemologies (Bakhtin, 1994; Bourdieu, 1977; Foucault, 1990, 2013, inter alia), understanding that identities, ideologies, and texts were co-constructed through social interaction. Both of us had also been influenced by Lave and Wenger’s (1991) and Wenger’s (1999) work on Communities of Practice (CoP), which put identity, practice, and artifacts at the core of learning. For Lave and Wenger, learning is situated in sociocultural practices and isn’t something

Who Gets to Become a Professor? 9 that is individual, happening solely between one’s ears. Rather, learning happens through legitimate peripheral participation (LPP), which means that “a person’s intentions to learn are engaged, and the meaning of learning is configured through the process of becoming a full participant in a sociocultural practice” (p. 29). That is, newcomers engage in the practices of the community through a kind of “cognitive apprenticeship” (p. 29), and they find ways of belonging, evolving their forms of membership as they move toward the knowledge and skills of experts. We even shared the same critique of CoP in terms of its inability to account for relations of power. We agreed that while the lack of a theory of power limited what it was possible to see using a CoP approach, combining it with a Foucauldian perspective that sees power operating in everyday social practices and functioning in capillary ways throughout the social body would produce a robust theoretical framework for the project. After coming to agreement about the articles from JLIE and our theoretical stances, we knew we needed to give the students a crash course in the doing of ethnographic research related to language (writ large). We decided to use a text that Char had recently co-authored with sociolinguist Judith Kaplan-Weinger, called Methods for the Ethnography of Communication: Language in Use in Schools and Communities (2015). In many ways, the book is a how-to guide for conducting ethnographic research in the Ethnography of Communication tradition (Hymes, 1974) in both classroom and community settings, which was what we wanted our student researchers to learn. A text about how to do the ethnography of communication constituted one leg of the first semester of the course, and examples of ethnographic and other kinds of qualitative research from JLIE related to what we were going to study (i.e., the co-construction of identities, ideologies, and texts) formed the second leg. The third leg was actually conducting the ethnographic research in teams.

Making the Study Doable We wanted the student researchers to be able to begin doing research as soon as the course began, so the two of us wrote the Institutional Review Board (IRB) proposal early in the summer and submitted it well in advance of the fall semester when the course started. “Co-Constructing Identities, Ideologies, and Texts in a University Writing Class” was the name of the study, and through it, we hoped our student researchers would address these three primary questions in the first-year writing classrooms, which we called RHET 1500: 1. How do students and teachers co-construct identities through classroom interaction, online communication, and the texts they produce for the course? 2. What language ideologies do instructors establish and implement, implicitly and explicitly, about language use in the course? What

10  Who Gets to Become a Professor? language ideologies do students express in their verbal interactions and in the texts they produce for the course? 3. How do students enrolled in RHET 1500, Expository English Composition, a required introductory writing course at Borderlands University, think about and construct the texts they produce for this course? How do instructors think about and construct feedback for the texts that students produce? Char and Kate thought these questions were particular enough while still being expansive enough to allow the student researchers to explore a variety of topics ethnographically. Kate, having previously directed the writing program at the university, was able to arrange for us to have our pick of six sections of the required introductory writing course at the university for our research site. The student researchers decided to collect data in two sections of the introductory writing course, one in the morning and one in the evening. This was to accommodate the student researchers’ busy schedules, as the majority of them worked full time, and many of them were raising children. We knew that our IRB proposal would have two audiences: The actual IRB review board, which, unsurprisingly, tends to favor quantitative and/ or experimental research designs (Walker, 2013), and our new students, the emerging researchers who were also likely to have had limited experience with qualitative research. That said, we described our research design to the Office of the Institutional Review Board and the student researchers at Borderlands University like this: Co-constructing Identities, Ideologies, and Texts is an ethnographic study that will likely be conducted in two of the more than 100 sections offered in the fall of 2015 in RHET 1500, Expository English Composition, a required composition course for undergraduates at a midsized university in the American southwest. LeCompte and Schensul (2010, p. 1) describe ethnography as “a systematic approach to learning about the social and cultural life of communities, institutions, and other settings.” Ethnographic research is conducted in communities where the researchers are the primary tools of data collection. In this case, the researchers will be graduate students enrolled in a course co-taught by Dr. Ullman and Dr. Mangelsdorf. The size of the research team will depend on the number of students enrolled in the course, so the number of researchers, along with schedule coordination, will determine the number of classrooms that will be studied. We anticipate there will be at least two research teams who will work with two sections of RHET 1500. Ethnography is a naturalistic form of research, focusing on observation of human social activities, and it has more in common with biological fieldwork than it does with the quantitative and experimental models that are common in other fields. The data that is

Who Gets to Become a Professor? 11 collected in an ethnographic study comes from interviews, participant observation, and artifact collection. In this case, that means interviews with students and instructors, classroom observation, observation of the course through the online platform Blackboard (e.g., discussions, messages, and all course assignments), along with instructor feedback. It also means analyzing students’ texts and manuals and training materials for instructors. The goal of ethnographic research is to use thick description (Geertz, 1973) to understand people’s ideologies, identities, attitudes, values, perceptions, and emotional experiences. The product of ethnographic research is “an interpretive story, reconstruction, or narrative about a group of people (a [classroom] community)” (LeCompte  & Schensul, 2010, p. 5). The ethnographic methods to be used include participant observation (Emerson, Fretz,  & Shaw, 2011), semi-structured interviews (Seidman, 2012), as well as informal participant observation and interviewing before and after class, along with artifact/document collection and analysis. It is likely that discourse analysis (Gee, 2011) will be used to analyze this data. Cultural-Historical Activity Theory, or what in the field is called CHAT (Daniels, Edwards, Engestrom, Gallagher, & Ludigsen, 2009; Conner, Steiner,  & Marjanovic-Shane, 2010; Van Oers, Wardekker, Elbers, & Van Der Veer, 2008) is a probable framework for understanding participants’ experiences.4 Making sure that we were clear about who the population of first-year composition students and instructors were at the university, we explained that there were typically 3,000 to 4,000 students taking RHET 1500 each fall semester, and ours would be a purposive sample of 50 to 60 students, along with two instructors and the director of the First-Year Writing Program. We had devised questions about the co-construction of identities, ideologies, and texts, and the people who could help us answer those questions were the students and instructors in first-year composition courses, as they were engaged in this co-construction. It did not matter which sections of the course we selected, as any of them would be rich sites in which explore our questions. We understood the population from which our sample came to be as follows:

Table 1.1  Population of First-Year Composition Courses at Borderlands University Population

Race/Ethnicity

Genders

Age Range

3,000–4,000 undergraduate students taking RHET 1500

Latinx, Black, White, and other races/ethnicities

Male, female, nonbinary, & transgender

Adults (18 and older)

12  Who Gets to Become a Professor? Char and Kate interviewed the director of the First-Year Writing Program at the beginning of the fall semester, and the student researchers interviewed the two instructors and the students in two sections of the composition course. Of course, the undergraduate students in RHET 1500 had the option of participating in the study or not, and at first, it was hard for the student researchers to get them to sign the consent forms. While many of the RHET 1500 students ignored emails asking them to join the study, once the undergraduate students learned that other people in the class were participating in the study, their views changed, and most of them wanted to participate.

Which Study Is Which? There are two studies discussed in this book. The first is the study we just outlined, Co-Constructing Identities, Ideologies, and Texts in a FirstYear Composition Course. Char and Kate designed it, and the student researchers, doctoral students from rhetoric and education, conducted it with the instructors and students of RHET 1500. The student researchers did this research during the first semester of the two-semester course on learning to conduct an ethnographic case study, which also involved reading about how to conduct ethnographic research and reading studies from JLIE. We discussed all the assigned readings in class and students wrote about them as well. In that first semester, the student researchers also wrote and submitted proposals to the Ethnographic and Qualitative Research Conference (EQRC), which would be held in the spring semester of the following year. All their proposals were accepted, and in the second semester of the course, they transcribed and analyzed their data, wrote their conference papers, and then presented their papers at the conference. During that second semester, they also wrote proposals to present their work at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association (AAA), which happened the following November. The EQRC is a very studentfriendly conference, and they received supportive feedback, which eased them into these sometimes-intimidating discursive academic spaces. For all the student researchers (except Victoria), regardless of where they were in their doctoral programs, presenting at the EQRC was the first time they had shared original research at a scholarly conference. At the AAA, they experienced a professional conference that can be less student friendly, and they were introduced to what it can be like to have a discussant read their papers ahead of time and write a paper critiquing each paper on the panel. The second research project that we detail is what we have come to call the meta-study: Graduate Students Becoming Qualitative Researchers: An Ethnographic Study – this book. Before the first day of the case study

Who Gets to Become a Professor? 13 course, Char and Kate were chatting, and Char said, “You know, I think we should be studying how these students are learning to . . .” Kate finished Char’s sentence with “. . . become qualitative researchers.” That is how the idea for the meta-study was born. What that means is that this research began as a pedagogical project, intended to teach doctoral students from two related disciplines how to conduct an ethnographic case study. Very quickly, it became a systematic ethnographic study looking at the processes of how doctoral students become qualitative researchers.

Ethical Concerns There are always ethical issues in studying one’s own students. First and foremost is the issue of coercion. Because Char and Kate held evaluative positions as the professors for the course, the doctoral students could easily have felt that they had to agree to participate in the study in order to earn a good grade in the course. Of course, we didn’t want that to happen. One of Char’s doctoral advisees, Jair Muñoz, had taken the first part of this course in its pilot version the year before, and she thought it would be excellent experience for him to be a preceptor in the course. So Jair, an advanced doctoral student in education, became a co-instructor for the course, but without grading authority. Char and Kate also asked him to become a co-researcher on the project. Jair presented the other doctoral students with consent forms to participate in the meta-study, while Char and Kate sat out in the hallway. Jair held on to the consent forms and did not reveal how many of the students had agreed to participate in the study until after Char and Kate had submitted grades for the second semester of the course. It turned out that all the students enrolled had agreed to participate.

Study Limitations Another issue with studying one’s own students is that somehow, when professors study their own students, everything seems to unfold perfectly in the reports of what they did (Cuthbert & Spark, 2008). All the students benefit from and succeed in the course or pilot program, and those looking for replicable classroom practices and/or program designs are left imagining that everything depended on those singular, brilliant pedagogues. Of course, this is not the case ( J. Weller, personal communication, Dec. 10, 2018). We know that even though Char and Kate did not know who was participating in the study, the students did, and this may have impacted their behavior in the course. Certainly, this is a limita­ tion of the study. However, in this case, the students progressed in different ways throughout the course, and not all the student researchers succeeded in the course, as you will see in Chapter 2.

14  Who Gets to Become a Professor?

Ethnographic Case Studies vs. Qualitative Studies You may be wondering about our discussion of the ethnographic case study, which is a specific kind of qualitative study, one that uses the ethnographic methods of participant observation, in-depth interviewing, and artifact collection to study a particular case. Earlier in this chapter, you might have also noticed that we switched from talking about our students learning to conduct an ethnographic case study to our striving to understand how they engage in the process of becoming qualitative researchers. There is thought behind this distinction. We understand the ethnographic case study to be a hybrid methodology. While we employed a methodological approach drawn from the Ethnography of Communication tradition, the study our student researchers engaged in was contained by the case. Focusing on the coconstruction of identities, ideologies, and texts – our case – was necessary in order for the student researchers to have time to do everything we had planned for them over the course of that jam-packed first 16-week semester. That is, they had to learn about ethnography while doing ethnography, conducting twice-weekly observations in two sections of the course, writing field notes, interviewing the instructors and students, and gathering online and in-class documents. They did all this while completing related assignments for the course, which we outline in Chapter 2. In the second semester of the course, we focused on data transcription, data analysis, writing two conference proposals, and producing preliminary manuscripts. However, this text is about graduate students becoming qualitative researchers, which is broader than their becoming ethnographers (A. Monárrez Rodriguez, personal communication, Nov. 15, 2017). While ethnography is most assuredly the mother of all qualitative research approaches (Lichtman, 2012; Williamson, 2006), we wanted the student researchers to see how ethnography is related to other qualitative methods they might decide to use in their dissertation work or in other projects. We wanted them to see the ethnographic case study as one important approach, among many, to qualitative research.

Ethnography as a White Thing Over the years, students at both the masters and the doctoral levels at Borderlands University had told Char that they saw ethnography as something White people do. The reason was less about the very real colonial history of anthropological research (Pels  & Salemink, 2000) and more about the time it takes to conduct an ethnography. They saw White people as the only ones who would have both the time and the money to commit to such a long period of study. Char, Kate, and Jair wanted

Who Gets to Become a Professor? 15 the student researchers to have the experience of conducting an ethnographic case study so that they could see ethnography as a qualitative method that was available to them, in spite of their limited access to time and capital. In many of our students’ minds, having a spouse and children was another barrier to conducting ethnographic research, as was the time it can take to apply for grants to fund such research. Sometimes, doctoral students of color would say wistfully, “I  would love to become an ethnographer, but my family needs insurance, and they get it through me. I can’t just get up and go.” Often, they came to see themselves as having to take the most cost-effective and time-effective approach to doctoral study, which usually ruled out ethnographic research. This is important. It can lead to doctoral students from minoritized groups seeing their own research as less valuable and impactful than that of those (usually White people) who are sometimes able to take their time to arrive at more profound insights through approaches like ethnography. These beliefs lay the groundwork for the imposter syndrome and stereotype vulnerability (Edwards, 2019).

Imposter Syndrome and Stereotype Vulnerability The impostor syndrome is the belief that, in spite of evidence to the contrary, one’s own academic work and accomplishments are fraudulent, requiring intensive image management to prevent exposure. The phenomenon was first identified in the 1970s among White women who were accomplished academics (Clance & Imes, 1978), and it has since been seen to resonate intersectionally with the experiences of people of color and those who are first-generation students and faculty as well (Gardner & Holley, 2011). Clance & Imes (1978) found that those with imposter syndrome work diligently to hide their perceived intellectual inadequacy and behave inauthentically by hiding their own opinions and sharing those they think are more acceptable. They also seek to be charming, as a cover for perceived incompetence, and they present themselves as lacking in confidence, knowing that people like them should not presume to feel as if they belong in the academy.

Generations of Scholars Gardner and Holley (2011) note that first-generation doctoral students are most commonly women and people of color. Those whose parents or caregivers did not have college degrees, which is the traditional definition of the first-generation college student (Choy, 2001) are also likely to have grown up in poverty. Many first-generation students have accrued significant student loan debt during their doctoral programs and work

16  Who Gets to Become a Professor? full time while earning their PhD degrees. Because they often have families and work long hours beyond research assistantships, the time they can spend with faculty is truncated, and they often take longer to graduate than those without these constraints. There tend to be fewer firstgeneration doctoral students in the humanities and more in professional fields like education and social work (Hoffer et al., 2003). We wonder if rhetoric, with one of its foci on technical communication, may fit into that professional framework as well. Edwards (2019), a highly accomplished Black first-generation female scholar offers a compelling connection between imposter syndrome and stereotype vulnerability (Steele  & Aronson, 1995). Stereotype vulnerability means that people whose racial groups are stereotyped as intellectually inferior sometimes perform less well in academic environments in which they are reminded of those negative stereotypes than they do in settings where that does not happen. Often, people of color must exert great energy to combat those negative stereotypes. Edwards (2019) argues, using an intersectional lens, that imposter syndrome and stereotype vulnerability combine in the experiences of many high-achieving women of color. Being a first-generation college student is often conflated with being a first-generation immigrant to the United States, but these terms are not the same, although they can, of course, overlap. Sometimes first-generation immigrants are understood as people who migrate to the United States, and their children who are born on U.S. soil are called the second generation. However, scholars have long seen that this distinction was not precise enough, as one could live in another country until the age of five and retain little memory of the native language and culture (Foner & Kasinitz, 2007). Sociologist Rubén Rumbaut originally called immigrant children who arrived in the United States more or less between the ages of 6 and 18 the “one and a half generation” (Rumbaut, 2004, p. 1166), which, over time, came to be known as the 1.5 generation and has since been divided into even more decimal points (e.g., the 1.25 generation, the 1.75 generation). The 1.5 generation refers to pre-adolescent immigrant youth who begin to learn to read and write in their native language and complete their K–12 schooling in the United States, most commonly in English. While this term for immigrant cohorts has been widely used in disciplines such as education, rhetoric, sociology, and anthropology, it has also been critiqued as partial, binary, deficit-oriented, and territorialized in terms of the social identities that are possible through this lens (Benesch, 2008). Many of the people in this study fall within this fraught terminology.

Who Were the Student Researchers? Posting fliers for the course on listservs and in elevators and stairwells led nine people to sign up for the course, with one person from gender

Who Gets to Become a Professor? 17 studies dropping it in the first few weeks, as she found the course too demanding. Both Char and Kate were curious as to how students go from being students to becoming scholars and researchers. We knew from our own experience that there was a lot of identity work involved in moving from graduate student to independent scholar: We also had guided many doctoral students making this journey, but neither of us had studied this process systematically before. There is an overview of the doctoral students who participated in this study in Table 1.2 MetaStudy Participants on page 18. There is a chapter in this book about each of these student researchers – except the last two, Estévan and Israel.

Who Is Missing? Estévan finished the year-long course and participated in the focus group interviews, but we were not able to interview him. He was working on a manuscript he called “No Hablo Español: Exploring the Complexity of Complicity, Language Ideologies, and Uncertainty in a Borderlands English Composition Course.” In it, he focused on one student in the first-year composition course, whom he identified as an emergent bilingual student (García, Kleifgen,  & Falchi, 2008) who formally rejected the use of Spanish at school but who translanguaged in his notetaking. While Estévan had expressed enthusiasm to be interviewed when we spoke in person, we couldn’t arrange for an interview with him. Over time, our emails, texts, and phone calls went unanswered. He signed up for an independent study course with Char in the fall of 2017 but never responded to communications or turned in any work. By the next September, he had simply vanished from the doctoral program. The scholarship on Chicana/o and Latina/o (or Latinx)3 experiences in graduate school has been extremely limited, as you will see in Chapter 2. In the past 20 years, only a few qualitative studies have trickled out to help scholars understand their experiences (Gándara, 2012; Ponce, 2003). In her book Critical Race Counterstories Along the Chicana/Chicano Educational Pipeline, Yosso (2013) titled her final chapter “It’s Exhausting Being Mexican-American” (p. 129). In it, she explores how Chicana/o doctoral students navigate the academy. Indeed, that chapter title is apt. Estévan shared with Char, who was his advisor, that he had some serious health issues, and his progress in the doctoral program had slowed because of this. Char, Kate, and Jair also knew that Estévan always had a demanding full-time teaching position, usually in the K–12 system, and that he simultaneously taught a huge number of classes at the community college – sometimes up to five a semester – as an adjunct. This was on top of his part-time doctoral study. He shared with Char that he typically slept no more than three hours a night. Throughout his extended doctoral journey, Estévan experienced far too many personal tragedies. His father passed away. A  romantic

Education

Rhetoric

Education

Education Education

Education

Education Rhetoric

2. Gloria

3. Josiah

4. Linda 5. Victoria

6. Facundo

7. Estévan 8. Israel

Program

1. JoAnn

Study Participants (Pseudonyms)

Table 1.2  Meta-Study Participants

Latino Chicano

Chicano

Hillbilly/ White Latina Colombiana

Chicana

Black

Self-identified Ethno-race

Man Man

Man

Woman Woman

Man

Woman

Woman

Gender Identity

42 32

51

33 43

36

39

34

Age

Non-degree student; accepted after the class Part time 7th yr. Part time 1st yr. Part time

3rd yr. Full time 1st yr. Full time 3rd yr. Part time 2nd yr. Part time 5th yr. Full time

Year & status in program

Yes Yes

Yes

No Yes

Yes

Yes

No

First Generation in College?

2nd generation Colombian citizen; international student; temporarily without documents in U.S. as a youth 1.25–1.5 generation; temporarily without documents as a child Born in the U.S. 2nd generation

Born in the U.S.

2nd generation

Born in the U.S.

Immigrant Generation

18  Who Gets to Become a Professor?

Who Gets to Become a Professor? 19 relationship that he was deeply invested in ended. He was put on administrative leave for assigning Foucault in one of the early-college high schools because some evangelical Christian parents objected to his teaching a text written by a gay person. And the final affront was the death of his infant nephew, his godson. The child, who was just under a year old, rolled off the bed, hit his head on a tile floor, and died. Both Char and Jair have attempted to contact him numerous times, but to no avail. That’s why you will see Estévan mentioned in observational data throughout the book, but he doesn’t have his own chapter. We needed to mention something about him here. And while Israel didn’t become a qualitative researcher either, Jair was able to conduct an interview of sorts with him, and while what we know about him is far from complete, we discuss him in the final chapter of the book. Israel is the only person with whom we did not complete a member check.

The Methods of the Meta-Study All the doctoral students in the course saw these objectives in the syllabus for the first semester of the course. The syllabus explained that they would: • Study and engage in ethnographic research in an undergraduate rhetoric and writing classroom setting; • Observe the co-construction of identities, ideologies, and texts in the research site; • Collaborate with their fellow research team members; • Conduct interviews; • Observe classroom practices and take field notes; • Transcribe interview data; • Share their data with the research team; • Work as part of a cooperative team to analyze data; • Write a draft of a manuscript; • Make a presentation in class about theory and initial findings; • Write and submit conference proposals based on original research from working on this research team; and • Acquire the expertise to conduct qualitative research in other research settings. Indeed, they accomplished all these things to varying degrees, as you will see. It was a busy time for everyone. Char, Kate, and Jair formulated research questions for the meta-study. They were: 1. How are the student researchers developing an understanding of the practice of ethnographic case study research throughout the course?

20  Who Gets to Become a Professor? 2. How do the student researchers develop an understanding of themselves as researchers? 3. What are the identity processes involved with students moving from conducting ethnographic research to presenting their own original research at scholarly conferences? The data sources to address these questions included participant observation in the two-semester course the student researchers took, the assignments they produced for the course, individual interviews, and two focus group interviews. After we had almost-final drafts, we did member checks with the participants – JoAnn, Linda, Gloria, Victoria, Facundo, and Josiah. Given that all three of us – Char, Kate, and Jair – were present at each class session, two of us were available to take field notes while the other person led the class, and we rotated these roles. It was important to us that the student researchers learned to conduct an ethnographic case study because of the perception that ethnography was only for privileged White students.

Who Gets to Become a Professor? Redux Who gets to become a professor today? Some of the people in this study have already done so. Others continue to be in the process. Of course, we hold high hopes that everyone in this study will become part of the professoriate in the future. At the same time, we know that the barriers to earning a doctorate, being selected for a tenure-track academic position, earning tenure, and finding a sense of belonging in the academy are formidable. That is especially true for students of color. In this book, we introduce you to six people who have engaged in the processes of becoming qualitative researchers and one who didn’t. You will learn about the one who didn’t become a qualitative researcher in the final chapter. We look at the life experiences that brought these students to pursue doctoral degrees and the practices they employed in a year-long course intended to teach them how to become ethnographic case study researchers and scholarly writers. We offer an ethnographic understanding of how they engaged in the process of becoming. Their transformations are complex and multifaceted. As we reflect on their stories, we consider them to be people transformed. They are all scholars in the process of becoming.

Notes 1. Having grown up in a working-class family, Burke achieved middle-class status during his career and by all accounts was heterosexual, cisgender, and

Who Gets to Become a Professor? 21 able bodied. He also came from a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) background. 2. These studies elide race and ethnicity, which is problematic, as one can be Black, Latinx, Asian Latin, and so on. Hull and Bell (2015) captured intersectionality succinctly in their 1982 book, All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men: But Some of Us Are Brave. Following Alcoff (2006), we see these identities in the United States as “temporal, historically and culturally located” (p. 10). 3. We use the term Latinx to refer to all people of Latin American heritage in the United States, as the term is inclusive of cisgender and transgender people. We use Latina to refer to cisgender women, Latino to refer to cisgender men, and Latinx to refer to the group as a whole. Some of the participants in this study identify as Chicanx, a term which attempts to be gender-inclusive using the same linguistic process. 4. Extract taken from IRB proposal, written 2009, Ullman, Mangelsdorf, Muñoz.

References Alcoff, L. M. (2006). Visible identities: Race, gender, and the self. New York: Oxford University Press. Bakhtin, M. M. (1994). The Bakhtin reader: Selected writings of Bakhtin, Medvedev, and Voloshinov. Austin: University of Texas Press. Benesch, S. (2008). “Generation 1.5” and its discourses of partiality: A critical analysis. Journal of Language, Identity, and Education, 7(3–4), 294–311. Bourdieu, P. (1977). Outline of a theory of practice (Vol. 16). New York: Cambridge University Press. Choy, S. P. (2001). Students whose parents did not go to college: Postsecondary access, persistence, and attainment. Washington, DC: National Center for Education Statistics. Clance, P. R., & Imes, S. A. (1978). The imposter phenomenon in high achieving women: Dynamics and therapeutic intervention. Psychotherapy: Theory, Research and Practice, 15(3), 241–247. Conner, C., Steiner, V.,  & Marjanovic-Shane, A. (2010). Vygotsky and creativity: A  cultural-historical approach to play, meaning making, and the arts. New York: Peter Lang Publishers. Corchado, A. (2019, June 16). How UTEP’s president made the university into a national research institute and a model for educating first-generation students. Dallas Morning News. Retrieved from www.dallasnews.com/opinion/ commentary/2019/06/16/utep-president-natalicio-made-university-nationalresearch-institute-model-for-educating-first-generation-students Cuthbert, D., & Spark, C. (2008). Getting a GRiP: Examining the outcomes of a pilot program to support graduate research students in writing for publication. Studies in Higher Education, 33(1), 77–88. Daniels, H., Edwards, A., Engestrom, Y., Gallagher, T.,  & Ludigsen, S. (2009). Activity theory in practice: Promoting learning across boundaries and agencies. New York: Routledge. Edwards, C. W. (2019). Overcoming imposter syndrome and stereotype threat: Reconceptualizing the definition of a scholar. Taboo: The Journal of Culture and Education, 18(1), 3.

22  Who Gets to Become a Professor? Emerson, R., Fretz, R. I., & Shaw, L. L. (2011). Writing ethnographic fieldnotes. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Finkelstein, M. J., Conley, V. M., & Schuster, J. H. (2016). Taking the measure of faculty diversity. Advancing Higher Education, 1–18. Flack, T. (2003). Presentation on South Texas border initiatives. Austin, TX: Retrieved from www.thecb.state.tx.us/reports/pdf/0592.pdf Flaherty, C. (2016, August 22). More faculty diversity, not on tenure track. Inside Higher Ed. Retrieved from www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/08/22/ study-finds-gains-faculty-diversity-not-tenure-track Foner, N., & Kasinitz, P. (2007). The second generation. In The new Americans: A guide to immigration since 1965 (pp. 270–282). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Foucault, M. (1990).  The history of sexuality: An introduction. New York: Vintage Books. Foucault, M. (2013). The archaeology of knowledge. New York: Routledge. Gándara, P. (2012). Over the ivy walls: The educational mobility of low-income Chicanos. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. García, O., Kleifgen, J. A., & Falchi, L. (2008). From English language learners to emergent bilinguals. Equity matters. Research review no. 1. Campaign for Educational Equity, Teachers College, Columbia University. Gardner, S. K., & Holley, K. A. (2011). “Those invisible barriers are real”: The progression of first-generation students through doctoral education. Equity & Excellence in Education, 44(1), 77–92. Gee, J. P. (2011). How to do discourse analysis: A tool kit. New York: Routledge. Geertz, C. (1973). The interpretation of cultures: Selected essays. New York: Basic Books. Harris, A. (2019, April  8). The death of an adjunct. The Atlantic. Retrieved from www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/04/adjunct-professorshigher-education-thea-hunter/586168/ Hernandez v. Texas, No. D-406, 347 U.S. 475; 74 S. Ct. 667; 98L. Ed.866 (Supreme Court of the United States, 1954). Hoffer, T. B., Sederstrom, S., Selfa, L., Welch, V., Hess, M., Brown, S., & GuzmanBarron, I. (2003). Doctorate recipients from United States universities: Summary report 2002. Chicago, IL: National Opinion Research Center. Hull, G. T., & Bell, P. (Eds.). (2015). All the women are White, all the Blacks are men: But some of us are brave. New York: Feminist Press. Hymes, D. (1974). The foundations of sociolinguistics: An ethnographic approach. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Independent School District v. Salvatierra, No. 8515, 33 W. 2d 790 (Court of Appeals of Texas 1930). Journal of Language, Identity, and Education. (n.d.). Aims and scope. Oxford: Taylor & Francis Group. Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation. New York: Cambridge University Press. LeCompte, M. D.,  & Schensul, J. (2010). Designing and conducting ethnographic research: An introduction. New York: Altamira Press. Lichtman, M. (2012).  Qualitative research in education: A  user’s guide. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

Who Gets to Become a Professor? 23 Mangin, K. S. (1991). Texas jury faults state on equal access to top universities. Chronicle of Higher Education, 38(14), A25–A26. McLemee, S. (2001, April 20). A puzzling figure in literary criticism is suddenly central.  Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved from www.chronicle.com/ article/A-Puzzling-Figure-in-Literary/15407 National Science Foundation, Center for Science and Engineering Statistics Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences. (2018, March). Doctorate recipients from U.S. universities (NSF Publication No. 18–304). Retrieved from www.nsf.gov/statistics/2018/nsf18304/static/report/nsf18304-report.pdf.N Ortegón, R. R. (2014). LULAC v. Richards: The class action lawsuit that prompted the South Texas border initiative and enhanced access to higher education for Mexican Americans living along the South Texas border (Doctoral dissertation). Northeastern University, Boston, MA. Retrieved from https://0-search-proquest-com. lib.utep.edu/pqdtglobal/docview/1476380823/A5C5ED02B4164DC9PQ/1? accountid=7121 Pels, P., & Salemink, O. (Eds.). (2000). Colonial subjects: Essays on the practical history of anthropology. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Ponce, P. A. (2003). Pioneer Chicana and Chicano doctorates: An examination of their educational journey and success (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). University of California at Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA. Rumbaut, R. G. (2004). Ages, life stages, and generational cohorts: Decomposing the immigrant first and second generations in the United States. International Migration Review, 38(3), 1160–1205. Seidman, I. (2012). Interviewing as qualitative research: A  guide for researchers in education and the social sciences (4th ed.). New York: Teachers College Press. Selzer, J. (1996). Kenneth Burke in Greenwich village: Conversing with the moderns, 1915 – 1931. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Simons, H. W., & Melia, T. (1989). The legacy of Kenneth Burke. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Stake, R. E. (1995).  The art of case study research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Steele, C. M., & Aronson, J. (1995). Stereotype threat and the intellectual test performance of African Americans. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 69(5), 797–811. Van Oers, B., Wardekker, W., Elbers, E., & Van Der Veer, R. (2008). The transformation of learning: Advances in cultural-historical activity theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Walker, L. (2013). Tensions between practitioner researchers and university human research ethics regulatory boards. In  Critical issues in higher education (pp. 147–160). Rotterdam: Sense Publishers. Wenger, E. (1999). Communities of practice: Learning, meaning, and identity. New York: Cambridge University Press. Williamson, K. (2006). Research in constructivist frameworks using ethnographic techniques. Library Trends, 55(1), 83–101. Yosso, T. J. (2013). Critical race counterstories along the Chican/Chicano educational pipeline. Abingdon, UK: Routledge.

2 Situating the Study Conducting Ethnographic Research With Doctoral Students on the U.S.–Mexico Border

Ethnographers have long sought to protect the confidentiality of our participants and our field sites (O’Reilly, 2004; Rossman & Rallis, 2011, inter alia). Usually this is based on the ideas of protecting personal privacy, preventing harm, and upholding the integrity of the research project (Bresler, 1995; Ebbs, 1996). Protecting people’s privacy is an essential part of being able to build rapport with people as well. In this study, we have employed pseudonyms for all the participants and the university and its programs, in order to protect people’s confidentiality. At the same time, if a reader is familiar with El Paso, Texas; Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, Mexico; and Las Cruces, New Mexico, it would not be difficult to guess exactly where this research was conducted. This is, perhaps, the difference between confidentiality and masking. We strove not to mask the context of the study, but rather to protect our participants’ confidentiality (Murphy  & Jerolmack, 2016). We hope this was successful. Kenneth Burke suggests that literature is one way to specify situations beyond our experience, writing that the act of situating is a kind of “correct magic, magic whose decrees about the naming of real situations is . . . the closest possible approximation to the situation named” (1957, p. 5). We suggest that this ethnographic study of people learning to become ethnographic case study researchers and scholarly writers is intersubjective, and it is as close as we can get to other people’s lived experience, given the constraints of our situatedness. We don’t necessarily see ourselves as painting an accurate portrait of consensual reality. Rather, we see this study as deeply situated and mediated through our positionalities.

Positionalities “There is no enunciation without positionality,” Stuart Hall (1990) wrote. “You have to position yourself somewhere in order to say anything” (p. 230). We agree wholeheartedly. We also argue that our positionalities are determined not only by the social categories we inhabit and move

Situating the Study 25 through, but also by our life experiences. We understand that our scholarship is mediated through intersectional, multiple social positions and that our standpoints are partial. Regarding standpoint theory, Wylie and Sismondo (2014) argue, “[S]ystems of inequality structure our lives in ways that generate not just individual but systemic differences in what we are positioned to experience and to know” (p. 2). We know that’s true. We also align ourselves with hooks (1990) and her important advice for Char and Kate that, as White scholars, we must interrogate ourselves and our work to ensure that it doesn’t “perpetuate and maintain racist domination” (p. 8). We are positioned in a university of approximately 25,000 students situated on the U.S.–Mexico border, which is federally classified as Hispanic serving. The criterion for a Hispanic-Serving Institution (HSI) is having 25  percent of undergraduates who identity as Latinx; Borderlands is well above that, with a student population that wavers at around 90 percent Latinx, including those students who live in Mexico and cross the bridge each day. This has been true since the former university president flipped the student body from majority White to majority Brown in the 1980s, with the rather radical thought that a public university should serve the public whose taxes support it. As of 2017, the Institute for Educational Science reports that 76 percent of faculty positions at U.S. universities are held by White people. Borderlands University reports on its website that 58.1 percent of our faculty are Latinx, which is unusual nationally. We have decided to quote ourselves as we discuss our positionalities, as we have quoted the participants in our study. CHAR STATES:  I

am White. I  am queer. I  am a cisgender woman. Having grown up in a Swedish immigrant neighborhood in Chicago, my family moved to the suburbs as part of White flight in the 1960s. My father was a high school graduate, and my mother was trained as a cadet nurse during WWII, through a program intended to address the wartime nursing shortage. She was trained in a hospital, at a time before nurses were required to have bachelor’s degrees. I was a firstgeneration college student. Both my parents grew up impoverished during the Great Depression, but I grew up middle class. Soy hispanohablante y manejo el idioma como mi segundo idioma. [I am a Spanish speaker, and it is my second language.] I began learning Spanish in the late 1980s, when I spent a year in southern Mexico, and later, I lived in Quito, Ecuador, for two years, where I taught English as a foreign language (EFL). I have taught English to speakers of other language (ESOL) in Chicago, Illinois, and Tucson, Arizona. I have I have also worked in publishing, having been a project editor who developed ESOL books for adult learners. All the schools I  have graduated from were public ones. I am a tenured associate professor

26  Situating the Study in the department of Teaching, Teacher Education, and Culture at Borderlands University. KATE WRITES: I am a White cisgender heterosexual woman who has lived closed to the Mexico–U.S. border for most of my life. When I was growing up in Tucson, Arizona, my father was first a journalist and then a journalism professor at the University of Arizona. He came from an impoverished family in the Midwest. My mother was a housewife with a master’s degree who came from an affluent family in the Northeast. Our household was highly literate, and though money was tight, my father had a steady income. But the family life was also extremely unstable; both my parents were alcoholics, and my father was extremely abusive to my siblings and myself. I  have had a disability, severe scoliosis, almost all my life. Though I started studying Spanish in elementary school, I am not fluent. School was my escape, the place where I  was accepted and appreciated and could succeed. After receiving my PhD, I was hired at Borderlands University, where I have spent my career and am currently a tenured full professor in Rhetoric and Composition Studies. JAIR STATES:  I am a Chicanx cisgender man. I grew up in El Paso, Texas, in a working/middle class, predominantly Mexican American neighborhood, one of the oldest in the city. Both my parents are teachers at the elementary school level. My mother is retired, but my father continues to teach at the elementary level in a neighboring school district. My mother is from Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, and my father is from Ojinaga, Chihuahua, Mexico, both places that I grew up in too. I am a second-generation college student. I don’t choose English or Spanish as my first language since I grew up with both. We would translanguage interchangeably while also using the Mexican American vernacular, including Cholo and Pachuco. I also studied Portuguese in Borderlands University, making me trilingual. I have attained all my degrees at Borderlands University: My bachelor’s in creative writing and my master’s in reading education as an instructional specialist. I am currently working on my dissertation proposal, which will be an ethnographic study looking at the school-to-prison pipeline on the border. I am adjunct faculty for three academic institutions: Borderlands University and two community colleges. All three of us worked continually to keep our own and each other’s biases in check throughout data collection, analysis, and the writing of this book.

Situating This Study in the Literatures Much of the scholarship on graduate students becoming researchers and scholarly writers assumes that graduate students are White men, usually

Situating the Study 27 WASPs (Gardner, 2008), who come from upper-class backgrounds (Naidoo, 2015). Typically, they are in their twenties, single, and have no children. They attend graduate school full time and have fellowships, along with families who support them financially with little effort (Offerman, 2011). They are assumed to be heterosexual, cisgender, and able bodied. Of course, that’s not the whole picture. In fact, that hasn’t been even most of the picture for quite some time. As doctoral education has become more accessible to students from different backgrounds in English-dominant countries such as the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia, some of the reasons for graduate study have changed. Today’s graduate students often have significant work experience and might be pursuing a doctorate in order to be promoted or to change careers entirely. Many are balancing the demands of graduate school with caring for families and working full-time jobs ( Jackson, 2019; Leyva, 2011; Stringer, 2015). According to the Council of Graduate Schools, 43 percent of doctoral students in all disciplines attend school part time, with the highest numbers in the fields of education, business, and the health sciences (Okahana  & Zhou, 2019). As of 2018, more women earn doctorates in the United States than do men (National Center for Education Statistics, 2018), and many are the first in their families to earn college degrees. Often, those first-generation students are learning how graduate education works while they study. They tend to be in debt and strapped for money, and they may be unaware of the importance of networking or be frightened by the very thought of it (Gardner, 2008; Gardner & Holley, 2011). Back in 1976, only 7 percent of doctoral students in the United States identified as people of color. As of 2015, that number was 30 percent (National Center for Educational Statistics, 2016). There are other kinds of difference as well. Doctoral students might have physical or neurological differences. Their first language might not be English. They might identify as queer, gender nonbinary, or transgender. Many of them are decades beyond their twenties. Not surprisingly, they can face challenges to becoming researchers and scholarly writers that those students of yore did not. Still, much of the literature on doctoral students’ research and writing development focuses on that vision of the “traditional” doctoral student (Blockett, Felder, Parrish, & Collier, 2016; Gardner, 2008; Gardner & Holley, 2011). As we dig into the literature, you will see that there is still much to be learned about doctoral students and how they become qualitative researchers and scholarly writers. The field is rife with how-to books that simplify the research process into discrete steps (Aurini, 2016; Thomas, 2015), along with advice books that break the thesis and dissertation process down into easy-to-understand chunks while they counsel students on time management and how to deal with difficult advisors (Bloomburg & Volpe, 2015; Casanave, 2014; Foss & Waters, 2007). These texts clearly

28  Situating the Study have a niche and can be especially appealing to doctoral students who feel rudderless. There are also a myriad of textbooks on academic writing skills. Some address academic writing in general (Swales & Feak, 2012) or particular genres (Feak & Swales, 2011; Swales & Feak, 2009). Still others offer academic publishing advice (Aitchison, Kamler, & Lee, 2010; Curry & Lillis, 2013; Day, 2008; Mullen, 2006; Paltridge  & Starfield, 2016). Typically, they present research as a decontextualized, linear procedure and writing as simply sitting down and “writing up” results.

International Students In 2017, international students earned almost 30 percent of all doctorates in the United States ( Jackson, 2019), but that number dropped dramatically to a mere 6 percent from 2017 to 2019 as a result of U.S. politics. While many international students start out planning to return to their countries after graduation, an increasing number remain in the United States in post-doc positions or tenure-track faculty positions (Simpson, 2016). Being able to think and write in academic English is increasingly required for most scholarly publishing worldwide (Canagarajah, 2003; Lillis & Curry, 2010). Of course, many international students speak English as an additional language (EAL), a term used in Canada and one we think is more accurate than the assumption of monolingualism behind second-language classifications in the United States. The advice in books geared toward international students is similarly skills based and oversimplified (see Feak & Swales, 2009, 2011; Swales & Feak, 2009, 2012). This back-cover description of Swales and Feak’s Academic Writing for Graduate Students (2012) delineates the key tasks of doctoral writing as: Understanding the intended audience, the purpose of the paper, and academic genres; [it] includes the use of task-based methodology, analytic group discussion, and genre consciousness-raising; [it] shows how to write summaries and critiques; [it] features “language focus” sections that address linguistic elements as they affect the wider rhetorical objectives; and [it] helps students position themselves as junior scholars in their academic communities. The last point is important. It hints at the process of academic socialization through writing, even though most of the book follows a more “how-to” approach. The specific language sections look at common ways to define academic writing and concepts helpful to English learners. And finally, a key concept in scholarship on writing by international students is plagiarism. There are important cultural differences regarding the personal ownership of writing that make this topic especially

Situating the Study 29 salient (Abasi, Akbari, & Graves, 2008; Gu & Brooks, 2008). But overall, advice books for U.S.-based and international students share a simplistic approach to research and writing and make the sociocultural and socioeconomic contexts of students’ lives invisible.

Institutional Support for Writing Other texts are written for administrators and academic program directors, recommending cross-campus cooperation in the development of campus writing centers (Simpson, 2016). A number of studies have looked at the effectiveness of writing workshops or writing courses for doctoral students (DeLyser & Louisiana, 2003; Fredericksen & Mangelsdorf, 2014; Sallee, Hallett, & Tierney, 2011). Others have explored the impact of intensive writing boot camps (Lee  & Golde, 2013; Simpson, 2013), writing groups (Aitchison, 2009; Aitchison & Guerin, 2014; Phillips, 2012), and feedback systems (Caffarella & Barnet (2000). Still other works offer advice to dissertation chairs as they work with their advisees on academic writing (e.g., McAlpine & Amundsen, 2011; Belcher, 2009; Paltridge & Starfield, 2007; Walker & Thomson, 2010). Most of this literature explores programmatic structures and curricula and offers ways to fix the “problem” of succeeding in academic research and writing.

Giving and Getting Feedback There is some interesting scholarship on doctoral students and feedback. Kim (2018) writes about the feedback network, which she describes as the oral and written feedback students receive from multiple sources – peers, faculty, friends, and mentors. As students draft and revise, they receive repeated cycles of feedback, which work together to enculturate them into academic discourse communities. Caffarella and Barnett (2000) conducted a qualitative study with 45 doctoral students and learned that students found feedback from faculty and peers to be vital to their becoming successful academic researchers and writers. At the same time, those students said feedback from some professors could be frightening and/or frustrating. Professors often focus on technical aspects of writing  – citation styles and grammatical rules – while staying mute on content and higher-level thinking (Basturmen, East, & Bitchener, 2014). Sometimes various professors give contradictory advice, which can lead students to write one way for a particular professor and a different way for another one (Casanave, 2002). Ideally, feedback should lead to what Maher, Feldon, Timmerman, and Chao (2014) call pedagogical support networks, which prevent students from feeling isolated and inadequate. Without a doubt, learning to conduct qualitative research and produce scholarly writing requires continuous development over time (Mantai, 2017).

30  Situating the Study

Finding Mentors Mentoring is vital to student success. There is a significant body of literature that demonstrates how finding a mentor, especially one from a similar background, can lead to success for minoritized doctoral students (Berg, 2016; Blockett et al., 2016; Figueroa & Rodriguez, 2015; Gardner, 2008; González, 2006; Kumar & Johnson, 2019; Soong, Thi Tran, & Hoa Hiep, 2015). Sometimes, mentors expose the unwritten rules or tacit norms of the academy for first-generation students (Gardner & Holley, 2011). Other times, they help them form research teams, organize panels at conferences, and find out about grant funding opportunities (Rosales, 2006). The right mentor can share and/or support a student’s cultural background (Ramirez, 2006).

Practices of Exclusion While most studies on minoritized doctoral students don’t target research and writing per se, the implications are clear. Research and writing are embedded within academic structures that were not intended for women and people of color (Gardner, 2008), and they are fraught with invisible barriers (Gardner & Holley, 2011) and practices that can make people feel crazy (Gildersleeve, Croom, & Vasquez, 2011). In their discussion of doctoral students’ experiences with the social practice of writing, Kamler and Thomson (2014) write: Making the transition to “scholar/academic” is about the acquisition of knowledge and competencies. It is about taking up a position of expertise and authority. The doctoral researcher often has to adopt this new expert stance before feeling ready to do so. The transition can cause anxiety. Am I going to get there? Is it ever going to happen? Am I ever not going to feel like a fraud or imposter? (p. 16) This anxiety can be stark for minoritized students. As we mentioned in Chapter  1, it’s common for students to feel like imposters (Clance  & Imes, 1978; Gardner & Holley, 2011). The impostor syndrome involves feeling intellectually inadequate. As a result, students think they have to work harder than other people, never challenge authority, and mask their opinions to keep them in the good graces of their professors in order to succeed in their programs. Gildersleeve et al. (2011) use critical race theory to analyze students’ narratives about marginalizing and dehumanizing practices in graduate school. Students describe having their contributions to discussions ignored by faculty and fellow students. They recount being expected to represent Black and/or Latinx cultures as if they were monolithic and

Situating the Study 31 as if it were their duty to educate White professors and peers (Moraga & Anzaldúa, 2015). Sometimes they were purposely left out of student gatherings. Other times, they had advisors who saw them as mere tokens. All these experiences in combination can lead them to ask themselves if they are going crazy or if they are interpreting what’s happening correctly. Adding these experiences to the already-present internalized phenomena of imposter syndrome and stereotype vulnerability can result in their believing they don’t belong in graduate school (Gildersleeve et al., 2011). Indeed, an enormous amount of courage, self-regulation, and motivation is necessary for minoritized students to confront these obstacles (Naidoo, 2015).

Writing as Social Practice Recent research on doctoral students’ experiences recognizes the social and developmental nature of becoming a scholarly researcher and writer. Kamler and Thomson (2014) see research and writing is a social practice in which “language is understood as being in use, bound up with what people actually do in the social and material world” (p.  6). They examine the identity work involved in doctoral study, noting that when doctoral researchers write, they are in fact producing themselves as scholars. In actuality, “[T]hey write themselves into the institution” (p. 17). The socially situated nature of progressing through a doctoral program involves far more than skill mastery. Rather, it is a process of becoming an academic. Much of the research conducted from a socially situated perspective focuses on students intentionally learning new norms, behaviors, rituals, and belief systems. Hopwood (2010) suggests that there are three kinds of activities that are essential for doctoral students. The first is creating supportive communities of peers that provide feedback on writing and lessen the stress of doctoral study. The second is meaningful faculty feedback, and the third one is embodied: That is, students learn to become researchers and scholarly writers by doing academic work. They need to be apprentices who collaborate with their mentors to conduct, present, and publish their research. All these things  – peer-focused activities, excellent instruction, and apprenticeship  – can support students as they become researchers and scholarly writers.

Academic Socialization Aitchison and Lee (2006) write about what they call the sociality of writing, the concept that writing, rather than being a solitary activity, is instead situated in a network of relations comprising one’s fellow students, mentors, and professors. That network also expands to those who

32  Situating the Study are less immediately known, such as conference attendees, editors, and reviewers, as well as professors and students from around the world. When students work with their fellow students in writing groups, they are helping each other research and write their way into their academic discipline by creating and contributing knowledge and mutual support (Inouye & McAlpine, 2019). In a description of one writing group, Maher et  al. (2008) drew on Kamler and Thomson’s (2008) notion of discursive social practice, saying: We were not just learning how to write our dissertations; we were learning how to become writers, both doctoral writers and scholarly writers. The developing ideas of peer review in particular were crucial as the scaffold for us to cross from being students to being scholars. (p. 266) These writing group participants learned about writing, including the structure of a dissertation; how to become more confident; and how to think of themselves as worthy participants in their academic communities. Similarly, Wegener, Meier, and Ingerslev (2016), in their case study of a doctoral students’ writing group, found that students were creating both scholarly texts and scholarly identities. Aitchison and Lee (2006) examined a thesis writing circle at the University of West Sydney in which graduate students and professors met for three hours at a time over the course of ten weeks, simply to write together. In their self-formed group, they gave each other feedback on new work, read revised work, and discussed research questions and the structure of academic articles. The writing circle resulted in a leveling of roles, as newer students were positioned at the same level with more experienced students and with established professors. Aitchison (2009) found that students benefited as much from critiquing their peers’ work as they did from receiving feedback. Writing groups and peer feedback can make the writing and publishing processes more transparent and less stressful (Cuthbert & Spark, 2008). Crossman and Kite (2012) and Casanave (2014) suggest that writing groups can increase students’ openness to discovering new ideas and can inculcate them into their doctoral programs. This book, Graduate Students Becoming Qualitative Researchers: An Ethnographic Study, contributes to scholarship on the sociality of writing and conducting qualitative research. We strive to understand the processes by which doctoral students from minoritized groups become researchers and scholarly writers through apprenticeship with their professors, more experienced students, and each other.

Situating the Study 33

Situating the Course Our study of how a diverse group of doctoral students developed into qualitative researchers and writers over the course of one year was grounded in a two-semester class that we co-taught on doing ethnographic case study research. During the first semester of the course, the doctoral student researchers conducted interviews, did participant observations, and gathered artifacts in the two first-year writing classes they studied at Borderlands University. They also wrote a conference proposal and drafted a conference presentation. In the second semester, they transcribed and analyzed their data, studied the genre of the research article, and presented their findings at two scholarly conferences. Their focus was on understanding how identities, ideologies, and texts were co-constructed in the first-year writing classes. The primary text for the class was Kaplan-Weinger and Ullman’s (2015) Methods for the Ethnography of Communication: Language in Use in Schools and Communities. This book, aimed at readers new to ethnography, included chapters on the purpose and history of ethnography and the role of social theory. It also spotlighted conducting interviews and participant observations, gathering and analyzing artifacts, evaluating and interpreting data, and writing ethnographic texts. A  major focus was on the role of ideologies, both in the research process and as a topic of research. The book also presented ethnography as a recursive process in which scholars move back and forth between data and analysis. For instance, member checks (presenting your almost-final writing to the research participants for their feedback) is likely to require more interviewing and perhaps different ways of interpreting data. Although the curriculum for the course moved students through their research in a step-by-step way, we would often remind them that ethnographic research was cyclical and messy. We supplemented this primary text with articles on taking field notes, interviewing, data analysis, and transcription, along with in-class activities to help student researchers develop those practices. The other readings for the class focused on identities, ideologies, and texts, the three topics that they were researching in the first-year writing class. Almost all these articles came from the Journal of Language, Identity, and Education and served as models of the kind of ethnographic research and writing we wanted the students to learn.

The Collecting-Data Component This course had a lot of moving parts, especially in the first semester, when we were simultaneously introducing the students to ethnographic case

34  Situating the Study study research and essentially throwing them into doing this research at the same time. Our once-a-week, three-hour class sessions were focused more heavily on understanding research in the first half and on doing the research in the second half, though there was a lot of blending of activities as the need arose. The student researchers worked in teams of four, which enabled them to share the workload of conducting and transcribing interviews and doing participant observation. Members of each team would take turns doing this work, though they always tried to have at least two team members present at each observation. All of them would get together outside class to talk about how to understand their data and to write manuscript drafts. Though working in teams made the research collaborative, with everyone contributing their insights about the research, the students did have some problems finding time to meet outside class because of their demanding work and school schedules.

Course Assignments Assignment One: Research Journals The student researchers began this assignment in the second week of the semester, and it was a research journal that we called their Letters to the Readers. They completed five of these throughout the semester. Here is how we explained this assignment in the syllabus: Journals and Letters to the Readers. The first assignment type is a research journal. You will keep a journal that is a reflection of everything you have experienced in class discussions, conducting interviews, doing observations, and collecting documents, as well as what you have read for the course. Your journal is the kitchen of your ideas. You are cooking the soup of your insights, confusions, creativity, and developing ideas. Your Letter to the Readers assignment is a way for you to assess your own cooking/writing. In the letter that you will write to your professors, you will tell us which pots of soup you think taste better, were more filled with potential, or demonstrated something daring, successful . . . or not. One of the basic ingredients of your journal is the course readings. First, you will summarize the main ideas of what you read. You can’t reflect on the ideas unless you know what they are. Summarizing helps you do that. After the summaries, you will respond to these prompts: a. What did the reading make you think about? Reflect on what you have read. b. How does this reading apply to the research you are conducting right now?

Situating the Study 35 Your journal also includes your field notes. You will read through your field notes, and the field notes of your teammates, and start looking for emergent themes. Your journal also includes interviews. You will: a. Listen to your interviews and the interviews of your teammates; b. Select themes and think on paper about how the data you have collected might be categorized under those themes. Your journal also includes reflections on our class discussions. a. Reflect on our data discussions and write down ideas that come to you afterward. These can be informal; b. Write about things that confuse you, that you don’t agree with, things you’re starting to think might be interpretations of what’s going in the data you’re collecting. You should write two or three entries per week in your journal. You don’t have to include an entry on every category every week. It really depends on the week and what we are doing. Each entry will be about two pages long, double-spaced. How do you decide what to put in the Letter to the Readers? Read through your entire journal. a. Identify and star one passage from each of the four ingredient sections that seems most significant to you as a cub ethnographer. You might choose an entry that was written when you were well rested, and your thinking was especially clear. You might have discovered something revelatory, or perhaps you were struggling with an idea that was only partially formed. Or maybe you were feeling confused. Maybe you transcended the text and our conversations and came up with your own idea about something. This is a record of your developing thinking, not your final analyses. At week 9, when we shift from heavy readings to heavy data collection, your journals will focus on the research you are doing in the first-year writing class. Assignment Two: Interviews Here’s our explanation of this assignment from the syllabus: Interviews. When you conduct interviews, think about our in-class work on this topic, our readings, and what we described in the IRB,

36  Situating the Study which is on our course website. Remember, these are semi-structured interviews. That means the protocol is a place to start. You need to listen and be present and ask follow-up questions. We then provided the student researchers with an interview protocol for a three- interview cycle (Seidman, 2006), which they conducted with their study participants, the first-year writing students.

Interview 1 (early in the semester)   1.   2.   3.   4.   5.   6.  7.   8.   9. 10. 

Tell me about your first assignment for this course. Can you describe the feedback that you received on this assignment? What do you think your strengths and weaknesses are in composition? Can you describe the differences between this class and your high school English classes? What would help you to succeed in this class? Do you see yourself as a writer in English? Why or why not? Does Spanish have a role in the development of your academic writing in English? If so how? If not, why not? How do you think the instructor sees you? How do you think your classmates think of you? How would you describe this class to a friend?

Interview 2 (middle of the semester) 1. When you look at all of the assignments you have completed so far for this course, how do you think you’re doing? 2. Could we look at some of your assignments together? Could you show me how you think about the feedback you have gotten? 3. Additional questions will arise from the context of looking at assignments together. 4. In your opinion, what are the characteristics of good academic writing in English? 5. In your opinion, are there differences between speaking and writing in English? In Spanish? In a combination of both languages? Can you give me examples? 6. Have you done academic writing in Spanish? If so, do you think that experience helps you in English? Why or why not? 7. Do you think you could turn in a paper for this course that used both Spanish and English? Why or why not? 8. Would you want to turn a paper in for this course that combined Spanish and English? Why or why not?

Situating the Study 37

Interview 3 (end of the semester) 1. As you look at your work in RHET 1500 this semester, how would you evaluate what you have done? 2. Could you show me an assignment you feel is an example of your best work? 3. What makes it your best work? 4. Can we read through it together? 5. Questions will arise from the context of looking at this assignment together. 6. Is there a relationship between this assignment and any of the readings you have done for this course? If so, what are they? If not, why do you think that is? 7. How do you feel about academic writing in English after taking this course? 8. Do you think your biliteracy in Spanish has impacted your work in this course? If so, how? 9. Are there things you feel like you still need to learn about composition in English? If so, what are they? The student researchers also interviewed the instructors of the first-year writing course three times during the semester, asking questions about their preparation for teaching, how they felt about students combining languages, and how they felt the course was going, among others. Assignment Three: Transcriptions This assignment consisted of creating transcriptions of the interviews that were conducted with the first-year writing students. In the interest of time, we encouraged the student researchers to listen to the interviews and to just transcribe key sections. Assignment Four: Field Notes This assignment consisted of five sets of field notes, which the students wrote throughout the semester for their participant observations of the first-year writing classes. For this assignment, we referred the students to the chapter on field notes in Kaplan-Weinger and Ullman’s (2015) text, in which they distinguished between “raw” field notes, which consist of what the researcher sees and hears at the research site, and “cooked” field notes, which are more filled out with detail and understandable to the reader. They also emphasized the difference between recording what researchers see and hear and what they reflect upon. Char and Kate went to each research site and produced their own field notes to give

38  Situating the Study the student researchers models of thick description. Here is some of our explanation of the assignment: Field notes. You will submit five sets of field notes throughout the semester. All field notes must include thick description. We recommend you use a laptop or a tablet, but if you prefer to take notes by hand, see us and we can help you. You will record everything you see and hear in Times New Roman 12 pt. type, and you will double-space everything you write. You can either use double-entry field notes, or you can put questions, comments, and impressions in italics throughout your notes. Look at the example of field notes on our website for a model. Assignment Five: Theory Presentations This assignment, the theory presentations, was one of the most challenging for the student researchers because they were new to using theory in their research. Here is part of our explanation: Theory presentations. Your team will meet outside class to discuss what theoretical approaches you might explore, based on your emerging data. Reasons NOT to select a potential theoretical frame: 1. We like this author. 2. It looks like the easiest to read. 3. Everyone else is doing it. Reasons TO select a potential theoretical frame: 1. Themes are arising in the data that this author might help us explore. 2. You have read about each of the theorists and their concepts on Wikipedia for background, and you have read some of their original work. 3. You have talked with your instructors and discussed what might be good frameworks to explore, based on what the initial data is suggesting. You will also think about the theoretical frames that have been used in the articles we have read thus far in class. You will talk about your data. What are the themes that are arising? Have your computers close at hand so that you can google different theoretical ideas. Wikipedia is your friend at this stage in the process. You might find yourselves googling something like this: “Wikipedia Bhabha mimicry.”

Situating the Study 39 Doing something like this will get you started in terms of thinking about theoretical frameworks. Are you focusing more on power relations in the classroom? Hybridity? Heteroglossia? Citationality? Resistance? Social space? Linguistic capital? The goal of your out-of-class meetings is to select a theorist/theoretical framework for your study and to have good reasons for your choice, which come from your initial reading of your data. Then, your group will read all the Wikipedia entries you can that are connected with that theorist/framework. Next, your group will select a primary source reading by that author. You will read it. It can be articles and/or a book. Your group will prepare a 30-minute presentation for our class in which you create a PowerPoint, highlight the key ideas of that theorist/theory, and show us examples of your data that have led you to consider using this theorist/theory to understand your data. Your PowerPoint will include references. Assignment Six: Conference Proposal Writing a conference proposal was part of helping the students begin to make their research public. Conference proposals. You will submit your proposal to the 28th Annual Ethnographic and Qualitative Research Conference (EQRC), which will be held in Las Vegas, Nevada, Feb 1–2, 2016. You will need to carefully follow the directions for writing and submitting the proposal. Here are some general guidelines for conference proposals. They should: •

Be situated in and respond to current research and theory in the field; • Explain your research questions, methods, and analysis. • Connect to the field at large by raising new questions or suggesting wider implications; • Be focused, avoid unnecessary verbiage, and not promise more than can be given in the specified time period; • Be clear about the central point of the talk. Assignment Seven: Manuscript Draft This final assignment was one of the toughest because it required that students pull everything together: What they did, why they did it, and what they discovered. Manuscript Draft. Toward the beginning of this course, you read a number of articles on ideology, identity, and texts. While there is

40  Situating the Study not enough time in the semester to produce a full-fledged, polished draft of a research article, you should be able to compose several of the key sections in this draft. A standard research article includes an opening section in which the topic is introduced, and its importance is discussed. Next comes a literature review in which a theoretical framework is explained and research on the topic or question is given. A gap in the research is identified, and its importance is discussed. The research questions that drive the study are presented, and the research methodology is described, including the data collection and analysis. The results of the analysis are discussed and connected to the wider topic, along with limitations of this research study and areas for further research. NOTE: depending on your topic and approach, some variation in this structure can occur. For this draft, you are to concentrate on the areas that have been the focus of this course: the theoretical framework, research questions, methodology, data collection, and data analysis. Thus, by the end of the semester, you will have produced the gist of a research article. In the spring 2016 semester, you will take a group independent study with us, which will focus on turning your drafts into manuscripts. In the spring, you will also present at the Ethnographic and Qualitative Research Conference, and you will write proposals for the American Anthropological Association meeting, which are due in April. We demanded a lot in just a 16-week semester, but the student researchers rose to the challenge.

Course Progression The first semester of the course consisted of 16 three-hour class sessions, held in the evenings because most education students work during the day. During these class sessions, Char, Kate, and Jair would make brief slide presentations on topics related to the course readings, and then we and the students would explore these topics in whole-class discussions. About two thirds of the way into the semester, we focused less on the examples of ethnographic research that explored identities, ideologies, and texts and more on helping the students problem-solve research challenges, such as when the first-year writing students wouldn’t show up for interviews. We asked the students to describe how their research was progressing, which would lead to brainstorming sessions as they began to find patterns in their data and reflect on what these patterns might mean. Here are highlights of the class as it progressed over the first 16 weeks. You will see what we mean when we say this course had a lot of moving parts.

Situating the Study 41 Early in the Course On the first day of the class, we led an activity in which the students explored their positionalities. We used this prompt from the KaplanWeinger and Ullman (2015) text: Get into groups that are diverse for your context. Listen carefully to each person as they respond to these questions. It may help to use a talking stick (e.g., an object like a pencil or a water bottle) to make clear who holds the floor. Don’t interrupt the person who has the floor. 1. Has your life been affected by race in any way? If yes, how? If not, why not? 2. Has your life been affected by gender and sexuality in any way? If yes, how? If not, why not? 3. Has your life been affected by your physical abilities in any way? If yes, how? If not, why not? 4. Has the “War on Terror” affected your social interactions in any way? If yes, how? If not, why not? (p. 21) This group activity resulted in thoughtful and revealing conversations, and we were able to return to the notion of positionality throughout the class as the students became immersed in their research. These first few weeks of the course also involved organizing the research teams, learning about the curricula in the first-year writing courses, and reading research articles that focused on the three themes of identities, ideologies, and texts. Students wrote their first two Letters to the Readers at this point. Midway Through the Course During weeks 4 through 8, students began interviewing the first-year writing students and their instructors, and they started to conduct participant observation in the first-year writing classrooms. We devoted parts of three of these classes to the practice of taking field notes, as this was one of the more challenging aspects of the research process for them. We continued to discuss the readings on identities, language ideologies, and texts, and the students completed two more Letters to the Readers and handed in their first sets of field notes. Parts of each class were also devoted to the student researchers sharing what they saw in the classes they were observing. The Last Part of the Course Weeks 9 through 13 began to focus more intensely on the students’ research. In particular, the students began to sift through their

42  Situating the Study observations, interviews, and artifacts to find themes in the data. At this point, we began to talk about possible theoretical frameworks that could help them understand what they were seeing and hearing. The two research teams and Victoria, who was working with her own data, presented their theoretical frameworks with data examples to the class. Discussions became especially lively during this part of the course as the student researchers grappled with complex concepts and tried to apply them to their data. At this point, they began to prepare proposals to submit to the Ethnographic and Qualitative Research Conference (EQRC), which would be held in in the spring semester. During the last few weeks of this first semester, each research team presented their study to the class for feedback. They also drafted and revised their manuscripts according to our feedback. The Second Semester The second semester of the course was less structured than the first because it was conducted more as a group independent study and less as an organized class. After meeting for the first several class sessions to talk about the goals for the semester and how to organize the research data, we met separately with the research teams to offer more in-depth and personalized feedback. During this semester, the students presented their research at EQRC in Las Vegas and wrote proposals to present their work at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) the following November.

Concluding Thoughts Conducting ethnographic research is challenging. Because the doctoral program in Rhetoric and Composition Studies doesn’t offer methodology courses, it was important for the student researchers from that program to take a course like this, in preparation for their dissertation research. The doctoral students in education are required to take Qualitative Research I  and Quantitative Research I. After that, they must take one advanced methods course of their choosing: Qualitative Research II, Quantitative Research II, or Mixed Methods Research, depending on their own research interests. Even so, with this exposure to research methods, many of them never move from learning about research to actually doing research before they get to the dissertation. In 2016, after Victoria had graduated with her doctorate, she wrote this in a note that Char found in her mailbox: I really, really enjoyed the case study class. I was glad I had the opportunity to be part of our great and engaging discussions, and I was

Situating the Study 43 amazed with the idea of a class where we could do research and be researched at the same time. I liked that the class had a second semester and that we had the opportunity to go to conferences to present our studies together and then discuss what we learned from those experiences. I love that we contributed to the field of knowledge of graduate students’ writing and research processes. From here, you will dive into the lives of six doctoral students, getting an inside look at their development as qualitative researchers and scholarly writers. Sometimes they took one step forward and two steps back. Sometimes they soared. Other times they faltered. But they were always in the process of becoming.

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46  Situating the Study Higher Education Research & Development, 33(4), 699–711. doi:10.1080/07294 360.2013.863850 Mantai, L. (2017). Feeling like a researcher: Experiences of early doctoral students in Australia. Studies in Higher Education, 42(4), 636–650. doi:10.1080/03 075079.2015.1067603 McAlpine, L., & Amundsen, C. (Eds.). (2011). Doctoral education: Research-based strategies for doctoral students, supervisors, and administrators. Houten, Netherlands: Springer. Moraga, C., & Anzaldúa, G. (Eds.). (2015). This bridge called my back: Writings by radical women of color (4th ed.). Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Mullen, C. A. (2006). Best writing practices for graduate students: Reducing the discomfort of the blank screen. Kappa Delta Pi Record, 43(1), 30–35. Murphy, A.,  & Jerolmack, C. (2016). Ethnographic masking in an era of data transparency. Contexts, 15(2), 14–17. Naidoo, D. (2015). Understanding non-traditional PhD students habitus  – implications for PhD programmes. Teaching in Higher Education, 20(3), 340–351. doi:10.1080/13562517.2015.1017457 National Center for Education Statistics, Digest of Education Statistics. (2016). Doctor’s degrees conferred by postsecondary institutions, by race/ethnicity and sex of student: Selected years, 1976–77 through 2014–15. Retrieved from https://nces. ed.gov/programs/digest/d16/tables/dt16_324.20.asp National Center for Education Statistics, Digest of Education Statistics. (2018). Doctor’s degrees conferred to females by postsecondary institutions, by race/ethnicity and field of study: 2015–16 and 2016–17. Retrieved from https://nces.ed.gov/pro grams/digest/d18/tables/dt18_324.35.asp Offerman, M. (2011). Profile of the nontraditional doctoral degree student. New Directions for Adult and Continuing Education, 129, 21–30. doi:10.1002/ace.397 Okahana, H.,  & Zhou, E. (2019). Graduate enrollment and degrees: 2008–2018. Council of Graduate Schools. Retrieved from https://cgsnet.org/ckfinder/ userfiles/files/CGS_GED18_Report_web.pdf O’Reilly, K. (2004). Ethnographic methods. New York: Routledge. Paltridge, B., & Starfield, S. (2007). Thesis and dissertation writing in a second language: A handbook for supervisors. London: Routledge. Paltridge, B., & Starfield, S. (2016). Getting published in academic journals: Navigating the publication process. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Phillips, T. (2012). Graduate writing groups: Shaping writing and writers from student to scholar. Praxis: A Writing Center Journal, 10(1). Retrieved from www. praxisuwc.com/ Ramirez, R. (2006). Maintaining a strong Latina/o identity while balancing trails. In J. Castellanos, A. M. Gloria, & M. Kamimura (Eds.), The Latina/o pathway to the Ph.D.: Abriendo Caminos (pp. 211–219). Sterling, VA: Stylus Publishing. Rosales, R. (2006). Manteniendo nuestra cultura (Sustaining our culture): Cultural and social adjustments of Latina/os in doctoral programs. In J. Castellanos, A. M. Gloria, & M. Kamimura (Eds.), The Latina/o pathway to the Ph.D.: Abriendo Caminos (pp. 201–208). Sterling, VA: Stylus Publishing. Rossman, G. B., & Rallis, S. F. (2011). Learning in the field: An introduction to qualitative research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Sallee, M., Hallett, R., & Tierney, W. (2011). Teaching writing in graduate school. College Teaching, 59(2), 66–72.

Situating the Study 47 Seidman, I. (2006).  Interviewing as qualitative research: A  guide for researchers in education and the social sciences. New York: Teachers College Press. Simpson, S. (2013). Building for sustainability: Dissertation boot camp as a nexus of graduate writing support. Praxis: A  Writing Center Journal, 10(2). Retrieved from http://praxis.uwc.utexas.edu/index.php/praxis/article/view/129/html Simpson, S. (2016). Introduction: New frontiers. In S. Simpson, N. A. Caplan, M. Cox, & T. Phillips (Eds.), Supporting graduate student writers: Research, curriculum, & program design (pp. 1–20). Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Soong, H., Thi Tran, L., & Hoa Hiep, P. (2015). Being and becoming an intercultural doctoral student: Reflective autobiographical narratives. Reflective Practice, 16(4), 435–448. doi:10.1080/14623943.2015.1023276 Stringer, H. (2015). The nontraditional student. GRADPsych Magazine. Retrieved from www.apa.org/gradpsych/2015/04/nontraditional-student Swales, J. M., & Feak, C. B. (2009). Abstracts and the writing of abstracts. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Swales, J. M., & Feak, C. B. (2012). Academic writing for graduate students: Essential tasks and skills (3rd ed.). Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Thomas, G. (2015). How to do your case study (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Walker, M.,  & Thomson, P. (2010). The Routledge doctoral supervisor’s companion: Supporting effective research in education and the social sciences. New York: Routledge. Wegener, C., Meier, N., & Ingerslev, K. (2016). Borrowing brainpower – sharing insecurities: Lessons learned from a doctoral peer writing group. Studies in Higher Education, 41(6), 1092–1105. doi:10.1080/03075079.2014.966671

3 Belonging and Becoming Understanding and Overcoming Barriers to Participation in the Academy

Early in the first semester of the case study course, we read Django Paris’ 2010 article “ ‘The Second Language of the United States’: Youth Perspectives on Spanish in a Changing Multiethnic Community,” which appeared in the Journal of Language, Identity, and Education. We began the discussion of each scholar’s work with an author photograph on our PowerPoint, hoping to remind students that not all scholars look like John Dewey and Kenneth Burke. JoAnn1 looked Django Paris’ photo up and down and declared, “Well, he’s lighter than a paper bag.” No one in the class responded to her comment, so Char asked JoAnn – who is much darker than a paper bag herself – to explain to the class what she meant. JoAnn said, “The idea is that if you hold a brown paper bag to someone’s face, and their skin tone is that color or lighter, that person is likely to experience more social privilege. If you’re darker like me, well . . .” she trailed off. Gloria said, “We have that too, in the Latinx community – colorism.” Folklorist Audrey Elisa Kerr (2005) documented the use of “the Paper Bag Principle” in Black communities, and JoAnn referenced it, reminding all of us that scholars of color in the academy tend to be lighter skinned than she is. In the history of U.S. slavery, racist ideologies led to darker-skinned people being forced to do the most demanding physical labor, and lighter-skinned people usually being compelled to do more intellectual or skilled work. Indeed, many of the most famous Black scholars have complexions that are lighter than a paper bag. Consider the likes of Angela Davis, Gloria Ladson-Billings, Melissa Harris Perry, Henry Louis Gates, Cornell West, Kwami Anthony Appiah, and Toni Morrison. All of them could fit in this category. JoAnn was putting the question to us: Even if she found ways of belonging and becoming a qualitative researcher at Borderlands University, would the social world of U.S. universities allow her to belong in the academy beyond graduate school? Before discussing the Paris essay, we had time for questions, and the student researchers shared their experiences about taking field notes

Belonging and Becoming 49 and interviewing study participants. JoAnn talked about how hard it was for her to see the classroom as a research site and not a classroom. While she felt comfortable in her identity as a teacher, having taught for at least 13 years, she stepped cautiously and self-consciously into the role of researcher. “You just don’t want to call yourself an ethnographer . . . in the beginning,” she said.

Teaching Is in the Blood “I was born in my mom’s classroom.” She smiled. Growing up, she spent lots of time in her mother’s home economics classroom, sitting next to the stack of papers her mother was grading. One of her older brothers tried to persuade her to think about careers other than teaching, by reminding her that she was also good at science. While she was still in high school, she told him, “I want to teach something that brings all of us together. I want to teach children, but I want to teach real-life shit every day. Stuff that combines math, writing, social studies, reading, and history.” JoAnn described being drawn to teaching family and consumer science, saying: I watched my mom do it. And she was really good at it. I  mean, inadvertently, I would help her. So, my mom would be going over her assignment, and I was like, “Mom don’t say this. Don’t do it like that. Do it like this. And let me show you how to do this.” And then I would do it. . . . I loved it, from watching my mom do it. JoAnn remembered that sometimes her mother would call her over and say, “You’re better at this, so why don’t you check out these grades.” While there was a set curriculum for most of her time in high school, she had a senior-year elective that allowed her to work with teachers in the child development lab school at her high school. It was affiliated with the Head Start program. She also got credit for working with her mother in her senior year. JoAnn made her senior year in high school a kind of specialization in teaching and early childhood education. Later, she realized that she had been her mother’s teaching assistant, even though it hadn’t formally been called that.

The Black Experience JoAnn’s mother was the very first Black home economics teacher hired at the high school in Brooklyn, Mississippi, in 1971. She did her student teaching at the high school and was hired to teach home economics there at the end of her internship. Her mother taught at the same school where she had done her internship for 44 years, and she

50  Belonging and Becoming was there until she retired in 2015. Home economics  – a course of study that later came to be called family and consumer science – was also the major JoAnn declared when she began college at Alcorn State University, an historically Black college in Mississippi, located about two and a half hours from her family home. Going there was her first time away from her very close family, and she was excited to have what she called “the Black experience.” Going to an historically Black college was a kind of counterbalance for her, in part because she had gone to a very White Catholic school, where she was one of just a few Black students. Even though she and her family are Baptist and her mother was a public school teacher, JoAnn and all of her siblings attended Catholic school through sixth grade. Her parents knew that the children would benefit from smaller class sizes, and her mother liked the idea that JoAnn would be able to learn about Catholicism at school and Baptist theology at home. JoAnn said that religion class at her school was really “an open discussion about different religions.” While some of her teachers were nuns, others were Baptist or Lutheran, and some didn’t have a religious practice at all. From kindergarten through sixth grade, she was one of only two or three Black students in each grade. Because the Catholic school didn’t go beyond sixth grade, she went to seventh grade at a public school that was 50 percent Black and 50  percent White. When she began seventh grade, another Black girl came up to her, and they had an exchange that helped her see how others saw her. “You think you’re White!” the girl said. “What makes me White?” JoAnn asked. “Oh, because you talk like that,” the girl said. “Well, how do I talk?” JoAnn asked. “You know, like, you use – you know the right way to say things,” the girl responded. This marked her coming to see how others saw her. JoAnn recalled: That helped me become aware that the way I  spoke was different than other people. As I  got older, I  realized that, in certain situations, I  use more standard English than people do in other situations. I  guess that was when it came about. I  never thought about being Black or not Black until then. Much has been written about what Signithia Fordham and John Ogbu (1986) have identified as “the burden of acting White,” which seems to be what JoAnn is referencing through this experience. Nasir and Saxe (2003) suggest that some minoritized students succeed in school in part by “masking their ethnic selves in the classroom” (p. 14), whereas there are others who maintain their ethnic and racial connections and reject school accomplishment. Moving beyond this binary, Fordham (1996) offers a more nuanced understanding in Blacked Out: Dilemmas of Race, Identity, and Success at Capital High. There, she documents the complex

Belonging and Becoming 51 identity work that Black youth are engaged in, and she uses ethnographic data to show the ways in which academic achievement and underachievement can both be forms of resistance. Fordham rejects this binary notion of school success being associated with Whiteness and in-group membership being associated with Blackness. Instead, she defines “acting white” (2008) as: behaving as if one were entitled to what is considered integral to being a U.S. citizen: living in any neighborhood one desires, matriculating at the school of one’s choice; being able to obtain the job that one desires and that meshes with one’s skills; marrying the person of one’s choice without regard for his or her racial identity; voting without any additional qualifications beyond residence and citizenship. (p. 233) This is more than true. At the same time, JoAnn’s classmate referred specifically to her style of speaking, which seemed to index doing well in school while it simultaneously called into question JoAnn’s status as a member of the Black community. Of course, this is true as well. In subsequent work, Fordham (2008) began to examine the cultural processes that lead the Black high school girls she studied to compete academically only with girls who are also “othered.” This allowed them to avoid academic competition with young Black boys or with White boys and girls altogether. JoAnn has spoken about knowing when to use Black English and “the standard,” making comparisons between speaking her two varieties of English and translanguaging, which is a language practice the research teams heard frequently during their classroom observations. What do we mean by translanguaging? Ofelia García describes it as “multiple discursive practices in which bilinguals engage in order to make sense of their bilingual world” (2011, p.  45). She sees translanguaging as using all the linguistic resources available in order to communicate and express oneself. Understanding languages as colonial constructs with socially created boundaries that allegedly correspond to the borders of nation-states, García sees translanguaging as a language practice going beyond traditional language boundaries. Bilingual and multilingual people quite naturally use all their linguistic assets, regardless of whether one language has higher social status, and another has lower status. In response to both the course readings and the participant observation she was doing in the research project, JoAnn came to frame her own use of Black English (or what she sometimes called African American Vernacular English or AAVE) and standard English as a kind of translanguaging.

52  Belonging and Becoming In reflecting on her decision to attend Alcorn State University, JoAnn realized that she wanted to be around other Black people who were going to finish college. At the time, she knew she could graduate from high school, but the college experience felt like an unknown, and she wanted to be with people who had the same mindset she did: She wanted to be around Black people who were going to work hard. She was aware of historically Black colleges because her mother’s seven aunts and uncles had all graduated from Jackson State.2 “I knew about football games, and I knew about the dancing,” she said with excitement in her eyes. “I was like, oh, I want some of that! And oh yeah . . . I want some education,” she said with a smile.

College Was Inevitable College was a given for JoAnn. With a mother who was an educator and a father who worked as a rig operator in the nearby oil fields, JoAnn called her family “mid-middle class.” She and all her siblings had attended private school, and when her parents were busy working, her older brothers picked her and her younger sister up and took them to dance lessons, piano lessons, and Girl Scouts. In her family, enrichment activities were normal. She also noted that gender roles in her family were not rigid, recalling that “my dad cooked and cleaned, and my dad helped with homework, like it was no big deal.” In thinking about her father, she said: He’s not very traditional. He had expectations for all of us, but it wasn’t like, “Oh you are a girl, so you can’t do what your brothers do.” He would say to all of us, “If you want to come, I am working on the car.” . . . We were all encouraged to just take part in whatever we liked. I felt really supported, and they provided lots of opportunities. We went on trips; whenever there was a trip for school, we were always going. We were in numerous activities. As JoAnn grew up, she slowly came to understand that her family had a prominent role in their community. Her parents both were members in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Her father was a trustee in their Baptist church and always “had a foot in politics.” He worked the polls on voting days, and they had family friends who were politicians. In their city of a little more than 45,000 people (U.S. Census, 2018), 53 percent of the population is Black, 40 percent is White, and the rest are Latina/o, Indigenous, or Pacific Islanders. The median household income in Hattiesburg, Mississippi is $32,000, and the percentage of people living in poverty is very high at 32 percent (American Community Survey, 2018). Growing up, JoAnn didn’t realize that having friends whose parents were brain surgeons or lawyers was not

Belonging and Becoming 53 common among Black folk or, indeed, among many people in Hattiesburg. Indeed, Mississippi, along with West Virginia, where Josiah grew up, are consistently ranked among the top-ten most impoverished states in the United States (American Community Survey, 2018). Her extended family had what JoAnn called “a pasture.” That was where they had cows, chickens, and pigs, as well as crops like greens, corn, and peas. She recalled her mother and her seven aunts and uncles discussing how to manage the land they inherited from their grandmother, and that was when JoAnn realized that they owned a lot of land – 400 acres. While remembering her mother talk about growing up without a lot of money, JoAnn and her mother realized that her grandparents had access to other kinds of currency. For example, they supplied eggs to the school cafeteria to pay for their children’s lunches. JoAnn’s immediate family had two refrigerators, along with two deep freezers, and they always had whatever kind of meat they wanted. Her great aunt, who had 13 children, would make banana pudding in a big Rubbermaid dish pan “because she had all these kids.” Her aunt and cousins lived in a house right next door to what they called the “function house,” where the extended family would hold events. JoAnn came to understand that not everyone in Hattiesburg had a function house. “As I got older,” she explained, “I realized we are not broke. We are well off. My mom explained that they were well off, and we were the recipients of it.” JoAnn went to Alcorn State right after high school, saying, “It was awesome. It was so much freedom! I didn’t realize how bound we were as high school students; like, rules, and we have to do this and that, and we have to look like this.” She took 18 credit hours her first semester, without realizing that most people took 6 to 12 hours. She also didn’t realize that other people were involved in social activities. She studied a lot that first year, and her high grades showed it. When she returned home for the summer after her first year at college, a friend of hers commented that she had been like “a flower waiting to bloom.” She recalled: I like school. I just like school. I had really good teachers; again, the experience was good. But to see professors who looked like me was just amazing. They were passionate about what they did, and they were great. I would be walking on campus, and I was in a sorority. I would see my teacher, who was in the same sorority, and you know, we would share all the secret signs. That’s pretty awesome. It was definitely a push. Everything was so rewarding. That first year of college seems like it was idyllic. But JoAnn reminded us that there was a disclaimer to all that emotional freedom and intellectual excitement. She stated, “I got pregnant during my sophomore year.”

54  Belonging and Becoming

Family Planning JoAnn took a semester off to have her baby and moved back to Hattiesburg to live with her family. She had to deal with the fact that she felt she had disgraced her family, and that was difficult for her. Although she comes from a religiously observant Baptist family, they did not shame her about the pregnancy. Her mother saw that JoAnn felt embarrassed about getting pregnant. She told JoAnn, “This is not what you planned, but it’s OK.” Once she saw that JoAnn was feeling better about having a baby, her mother said, “We’re going to have a baby.” During the semester she took off to have her baby, the family and consumer science program at Alcorn State had been changed to a nutrition and health degree. Because of that, JoAnn assumed that she would not be returning to school. But when she told her mother that, the response was simple and direct. “Uh-uh,” her mother said. “Wrong answer. Not an option. You can either have your baby and go back to school, or you can have your baby and go back to school.” JoAnn’s mother became her son’s primary caretaker, and her younger sister became his “sister-mom” to make it possible for JoAnn to continue going to college. Although the University of Southern Mississippi is located in Hattiesburg, JoAnn’s hometown, her mother thought she would do better being away from home, not wanting her to be tempted to spend all her time caring for the baby and not studying. Snapping into action, her mother phoned a White colleague who was an education professor at Mississippi State University in Starkville, about three hours from Hattiesburg. She had a conversation with her colleague that afternoon, and her mother’s friend, who soon became a mentor, told JoAnn, “I don’t know if you know this, but you are going back to school. Go back to school. You’ll really benefit from school.” JoAnn resisted at first, but eventually she gave in. Her mother’s colleague became her undergraduate advisor and she helped her pick her classes. Meanwhile, JoAnn’s mother made sure that completing school was her daughter’s sole priority. She didn’t have to work during that time, and JoAnn confided, “My mom never made me feel guilty. She supported me in raising my son. I had the realization that you are not kid anymore: You are somebody’s mom. And you have to take care of business.” She lived in the dorms Monday through Thursday, and she would wake up at three or four in the morning on Fridays to finish her homework and then drive three hours to spend a long weekend with her son and family. She would leave her family home in Hattiesburg for school in Starkville early each Monday morning. She did that for two long years. It was during that time that she met the man who would later become her husband.

The Surprise of Love When she was going to Mississippi State, she rarely socialized. She doesn’t drink alcohol, and having a child gave her a single-minded focus

Belonging and Becoming 55 on getting through school. In comparison to Alcorn State, there were fewer Black people at her new school, and she focused on studying and seldom socialized. This was part of her mother’s strategy in sending her there. While her mother worried about her going to class all day and driving so much, JoAnn saw it as something that was her own decision. However, one evening, a girlfriend convinced JoAnn that the two of them should go out. She acquiesced, agreeing to be the designated driver. When they arrived at the bar, a man came over to them and told JoAnn that he really enjoyed dancing. JoAnn assumed that he wanted her friend’s phone number because her friend was thin and paper bag hued. But that was not the case. He was interested in JoAnn, who was dark skinned and queen size. They went on their first date the next night, started dating seriously soon after, and have been inseparable ever since.

Starting to Teach After graduating in 2006 with a bachelor’s degree in human development and family studies with a concentration in secondary education and family and consumer science, she was hired right away as a family and consumer economics teacher in Newton, Mississippi. She taught 9th through 12th graders for four years, and during that time, she earned a certificate in gerontology in 2007, along with a cooperative education endorsement in 2008. She did the gerontology certificate in part because she was interested in how learning happens throughout the life course. The other reason was that she thought it made sense to get as many credentials as she could. She worked at a small school, and the courses she taught were electives for everyone, which meant she had four class preparations each semester. Although she loved teaching and she loved her students, she was less than enamored with some of the administrators. She taught 220 of the 230 students in the school, and after a few years, she was tired. Her husband came to pick her up at school one day, and the principal invited her husband to go fishing with him. Eventually, the principal and her husband became friends, and he hired her husband to teach computing, even though he did not have a degree in teaching. JoAnn was in her fourth year of teaching, and her husband, who did not have the right credentials, started out making $5,000 more than she did in his first year of teaching. In a bizarre twist of fate, JoAnn was assigned to be her husband’s mentor. Needless to say, this was an untenable situation for her. Even though JoAnn loved what she was doing, there were other administrative complications, and they decided, as a couple, that her husband would join the military. He enlisted in the army and was assigned to a military base near El Paso, Texas, which is how JoAnn found her way to Borderlands University.

56  Belonging and Becoming

More Schooling Just Makes Sense Coming from Hattiesburg, which is 53 percent Black, to El Paso, which is 90 percent Latinx, JoAnn explained that their family experienced culture shock. However, that culture shock was “not because of the people in El Paso, but because of the military.” Many of the military personnel they met never left the post, which she and her husband thought was odd. This was because they looked down on the majority Spanish-speaking population of El Paso. JoAnn and her family were frustrated by the racist attitudes on base, and it wasn’t long before they moved away from the military base into the city of El Paso. JoAnn started looking for teaching jobs in El Paso but soon found out that she couldn’t teach family and consumer science in the state of Texas. Because she had worked with the Educational Testing Service (ETS) back in Mississippi and had been part of the team that created the certification test, which disqualified her from applying for a certification in family and consumer science in Texas. She believes that this barrier to getting certified in her field in a new state, in combination with that fact that she didn’t speak Spanish, made it difficult for her to find a teaching position in this mostly bilingual city. When teaching jobs didn’t happen for her, she decided to take the advice she had been given soon after her first child was born. She decided to go back to school. She was accepted into the master’s program at Borderlands University and enrolled in an instructional specialist degree program with a focus on early childhood education. While most of her coursework was online, she took all the face-to-face classes she could when they were available. The face-to-face classes she took that last semester were courses in research for classroom teachers, research methods, and scholarly writing. Char taught one of those research courses and could tell right away that JoAnn asked the kind of questions that researchers ask. Other faculty saw the same thing in her, and near the end of each course, all her professors suggested she consider applying to a doctoral program. She said, “No, I don’t think so. No, thank you,” over and over. Although she was getting encouragement from faculty to pursue a doctorate, JoAnn was highly skeptical, explaining: I was like, no. I was like, what do you do with a Ph.D.? That came from my previous experience with Ph.D.s at home. . . . I can remember sitting in professional developments with people who had just gotten their Ph.D.s, and I am like . . . This degree is supposed to be something that distinguishes you from someone else. I do not understand spending all my time doing that, and then I look like that. JoAnn assumed that all doctoral programs were like the ones people she knew had graduated from. It is indeed the case that most doctoral

Belonging and Becoming 57 programs available in Mississippi at the time, at least in education, were offered online and were less than rigorous. Most of the PhDs she had met had graduated from programs at Grand Canyon University, Liberty University, Capella University, or the University of Phoenix. She explained that until she came to Borderlands University, earning a doctorate had seemed far-fetched and probably a waste of time. In Mississippi, she found the Ph.D.s were self-important and not particularly knowledgeable. But things started to shift after a talk with one of her professors at Borderlands University: I think that one of the things that pushed me was Dr. Saenz, who took out a marker and drew a timeline on the board and started marking a list of potential jobs. I  didn’t know anything. So, she’s talking about think tanks and nonprofit organizations. I  realized I wasn’t constricted to one job, and there were other opportunities that this degree could introduce me to and then prepare me for. I really think that was the biggest thing. Even though she loved being in the classroom, she knew that her options as a teacher were limited. She had seen her mother work in the same classroom for 44 years, and she knew that moving to administration was the only path of advancement possible. She also knew that she really didn’t want to be a school administrator. Like many people, JoAnn didn’t initially see qualitative research as “real” research, because it is not usually predictive or replicable and did not involve working with large populations or statistical analysis. Because qualitative work is often narrative, she saw it as something other than research. Early on, when she was figuring this out, she said: There are things students say that are really important. How do I call attention to those things? There are things that teachers are saying that nobody is listening to. How do we call attention to that? There are things some schools do that work really well, but nobody is saying anything about them. Why? Why isn’t there a special place where you can read about these things, and then you could try it too. . . . I heard myself, and I was like, dumbass . . . that’s a journal. This is research. The questions she was asking in her master’s study were very much qualitative in nature. She affirmed: I was leaning toward qualitative work and not quantitative work, and although I didn’t have those words, and I didn’t have the tools, I just knew that whenever I would pick an article that was different, I was interested. It was always about a specific group, with a storyline or

58  Belonging and Becoming narrative.  .  .  . I would ask questions, and I  always wanted to know why things happened. When I started reading qualitative research, I was like, oh, this is a lot more interesting. I am more interested in the why for particular questions, as opposed to just generalization and numbers. JoAnn hadn’t really thought about research until her master’s program. In a master’s class that JoAnn took with Char, they read Shirley Brice Heath’s essay “What No Bedtime Story Means: Narrative Skills at Home and School” (Heath, 1982), and JoAnn was ebullient. She found herself deeply drawn to qualitative studies like Heath’s. She shared that she knew that were important things as well as dreadful things happening in classrooms and schools, and there were questions she wanted to explore. She noted: So when you have those questions and you don’t have anyone else to answer them, you have to study. Then I knew what to do. I wasn’t ignorant anymore. I have the questions, and I have been introduced to people that would help me answer these questions. I’m learning to see things in a way I never have before. That shift of learning to see things with new eyes seemed to have begun for JoAnn during that last semester of her master’s program. Even though she had both financial and emotional support for doctoral study from her husband and her parents, none of this was simple. She had to make great sacrifices to complete her doctorate, which included living away from her husband and her two young children for a year. When she called to talk to her kids while she was living in El Paso, her seven-year-old daughter cried so much that they decided not to even try talking on the phone for a while. They just sent messages back and forth. The guilt she felt about leaving her family was overwhelming. When she went home to Mississippi for a few weeks during the summer before her year away, she made schedules for her kids for the entire semester. She bought and wrapped gifts for their birthdays and hid them away, with directions for her husband about how to find them. She spent Thanksgiving with an older woman from the Black Baptist church she attended in El Paso and tried not to cry. She did all this to become the person her kids would call “Dr. Mommy.” It was during that year living in a studio apartment in El Paso, away from her family, that JoAnn took the case study course.

Teacher and Researcher at the Same Time JoAnn explained in her first Letter to the Readers that she had selected these five particular responses to the readings of the ten assigned thus

Belonging and Becoming 59 far because “I  had a personal story for each of these readings.” She explained, “I  think they will help me as I  conduct my own qualitative research.” This is what we had hoped would happen, but of course, it happens in different ways for different people, as this book makes clear. Throughout the case study course, JoAnn had expressed that she had her own way of understanding scholarly works, and it involved “pushing the readings through my life” first and then developing a more public understanding that she could share with other people, both orally and in writing. She reminded us throughout the course that “it has to come from my personal connection first.” In this assignment, she shared her thinking about her planned dissertation research, which she hoped to conduct at the child development center at a military base where she had been a training and curriculum specialist. In this Letter to the Readers, she shared that after reading those initial chapters and articles, “I spent time thinking about the community I plan to study, which is child development professionals working at the military base, and some of the advantages I have by once having been part of the community, as well as my fears and concerns as I prepare to go in as a researcher.” In discussing the second chapter of the textbook Methods for the Ethnography of Communication: Language in Use in Schools and Communities (Kaplan-Weinger & Ullman, 2015), JoAnn’s ideas about future research percolated for her about the military base and the issue of her being both an insider, having worked there as a teacher and administrator, and the process of her becoming a researcher in that same site, which automatically made her an outsider. In class, she talked about feeling like she was inside and outside at the same time. The identity work involved in moving from being a teacher to becoming a qualitative researcher who studies education can be confounding, especially when one is conducting research in a classroom context. It means entering the very familiar classroom space that one has inhabited as a teacher with a different role and set of objectives as a researcher. Rampton (2003) suggests that that doing ethnographic research in education “is a process of moving from the inside out, rather than the outside in” (p. 3). That is, the classroom is a deeply recognizable space for teachers, and that was certainly the case for JoAnn and all the study participants. In fact, most of them were teaching while they were taking this course. That means they had to move from a comfortable understanding of particular classrooms from a teacher’s point of view to looking at the same space through a researcher’s eyes, trying to make it look strange. Indeed, making this shift can be more difficult than entering a littleknown cultural context and coming to make it feel familiar. Lee and Roth (2003) remind us that “identity is work, and that this work is often highly personal” (p. 6). Because the case study course began with a “crash course” in ethnographic research, so to speak, the initial focus in the Letter to the

60  Belonging and Becoming Readers was on required readings. JoAnn did a good job of summarizing the readings in her first Letter to the Readers, but she struggled to reflect on them at first. Our feedback pushed her to go beyond display knowledge about concepts such as communicative competence (KaplanWeinger & Ullman, 2015), oppositional identities (Fordham, 1996), and Communities of Practice (Bucholtz, 1999) and to reflect on the ideas rather than just explaining them. In her entry on Mary Bucholtz’s 1999 essay “Why Be Normal? Language and Identity Practices in a Community of Nerd Girls,” JoAnn noted that she didn’t know much about the connection between language and identity before reading this piece. After summarizing the article, she gave herself a task. She said: From this article, I found the importance of making sure I make a conscious effort to familiarize myself and really get to know about the literature that is already out there on a particular topic as well as its counterarguments in order to become a well-informed and prepared researcher. Here, after just the second week of the course, JoAnn was making a commitment to becoming a qualitative researcher. She was already understanding the importance of knowing the literature on her topic. This was after having read the first few chapters of the text and a group of readings about language and identity. In that same assignment, JoAnn wrote that she had “slight discomfort” about Yuet-Sim Chiang & Mary Schmida’s 2002 essay “Language, Identity, and Language Ownership: Linguistic Conflicts,” a chapter from Enriching ESOL Pedagogy: Readings and Activities for Engagement. In this piece, the authors analyzed interview data from second-generation Asian immigrant students enrolled in a first-year composition course at a major research university. Because this study was conducted among first-year composition students and it dealt with issues of identity, we thought it would spark ideas among the student researchers and help them think about questions of language and identity in important ways. In her Letter to the Readers, JoAnn explained that as she selected the journal entries she was going to turn in, she had: Discussed how ignorant I felt that I had never really considered the types of issues/conflicts that English language learners (especially students) face. While living in El Paso and being in this doctoral program, I  have learned about and been exposed to some issues, but this article shed new light on English language learners and made me think about if and how students in El Paso handle a similar situation.

Belonging and Becoming 61 What was key in this essay was that many of the second-generation immigrant students in the study knew a lot about their native cultures (e.g., Korean, Chinese, and Vietnamese) as they had been raised by their immigrant parents in the United States, but they were less able to express themselves their home languages, as a result of English immersion programs in public schools and the parental push to learn English. For them, this meant that while they were developing advanced academic skills in English, they knew little about U.S. culture(s), and the opposite was true in terms of their home cultures and languages. This crisscross relationship between language and culture put them in a kind of identity limbo. JoAnn was right to think that this might be something of interest for her and her student researchers’ work. After talking about it in class, she saw that students at Borderlands University described this as the “ni de aqui, ni de alla” (neither here nor there) phenomenon, which they understood to be peculiar to living on the border. This article demonstrated that it wasn’t. At this point in her process, JoAnn boldly shared that she felt some discomfort at her own ignorance. In class, she said she “felt she was in an awkward space” reading this piece, as she had only thought about language and identity in terms of students who speak Spanish and English. She hadn’t thought at all about speakers of other languages. Similarly, JoAnn responded to Anthony Liddicott’s essay “Sexual Identity as Linguistic Failure: Trajectories of Interaction in the Heteronormative Language Classroom” (2009) in the Journal of Language, Identity, and Education by saying in class that this was something she had never thought of. Namely, that students learning a gender-marked language such as Spanish might be trying to state that they are in a relationship with someone of the same gender when a man says something like mi novio (my boyfriend). In this essay, the instructor saw the student’s coming out as a linguistic mistake, correcting it to mi novia (my girlfriend). “This makes me think back to the curricula I taught in family and consumer science,” she thought aloud, “and how I could’ve been teaching about family dynamics and leaving the gay kids out.” In both instances, JoAnn was reading these studies through her lens as a teacher. That is, she used the findings of this study to reflect on her own teaching practice. While there is nothing wrong with this, we also wanted the student researchers to start thinking about how the study was constructed or how the findings might inform their own research, which was being conducted in a similar context. JoAnn was not alone in her response to the study. Josiah connected to the essay by saying that many of his deaf students put their hearing aids in their backpacks, in hopes of passing. “I tell them,” he said, “I know you want to fit in, but the hearing aids won’t help you in your backpack.” Facundo noted that the findings

62  Belonging and Becoming of this piece seemed uninteresting or “meh” to him because this kind of language and culture ambiguity was “the air we breathe on the border.” Gloria reflected on how the history of film, her area of expertise, is deeply heterosexist. In reflecting on this classroom conversation in her Letter to the Readers, JoAnn wrote, “I really appreciated your [the instructors] asking directly in class about whether the Liddicoat piece as an example of good research. . . . I feel like I am in the process of reading research with a different eye.” This awareness began to develop in her Letter to the Readers. Lave & Wenger remind us that “one way to think of learning is as the historical production, transformation, and change of persons” (1991, p. 51). JoAnn was changing. As she reflected in her Letter to the Readers on the readings that dealt with identities, JoAnn said the most important concept she had learned about was positionality. “Before these readings,” she said, “I didn’t really think of myself in a certain position.” She elaborated on this by saying: Once I began to think of my own upcoming research, I went back and thought about the researchers’ position in each of the texts. I began to think about and wonder what the research would look like if it were someone else, even me, and would I have paid attention to the same details that they did. I’m still learning that the researcher has a certain position, and it’s from that position that makes the difference about the data collection and how the research or the “story” is told and presented. When did this “moment” happen? JoAnn wrote this in the third year of her doctoral program and in her reflections after the second week of the course. What she did was a powerful example of legitimate peripheral participation (Lave  & Wenger, 1991). It is an example of her coming to have a sense of belonging, which Lave  & Wenger argue is not only essential to learning, but also constitutive of it. Here, JoAnn moved from reading through the lens of a teacher to reading through the lens of a qualitative researcher. Lave & Wenger suggest that “changing locations and perspective are part of actors’ learning trajectories, developing identities, and forms of membership” (1991, p. 36). In classroom conversations and in her first course assignment, it was clear that JoAnn’s identity was beginning to shift. “I  don’t know if I’ll push through it,” JoAnn said in class, as the class prepared to talk about the last reading in the identities section. “I  didn’t have a way to relate to it.” The essay she was talking about, which overlapped the identities and the texts components of the course readings, was Sara Michael-Luna’s 2008 study published in the Journal of Language, Identity, and Education, entitled “Todos Somos Blancos/We

Belonging and Becoming 63 Are All White: Constructing Racial Identities Through Texts.” This ethnographic study was an analysis of a literacy event in a transitional bilingual first-grade classroom in the Midwest in which all the students were of Mexican origin/descent, save one girl from Argentina. The teacher was a man of Mexican-German heritage “who is often socially constructed as White” (Michael-Luna, 2008, p. 277), and although he grew up in a Spanish-English bilingual household, all his formal education had been in English. The researcher with whom he collaborated identified as Anglo American and had learned Spanish as an adult. The article centers on the teaching of a text about Martin Luther King, Jr., and the students’ racial identity formation through language use in the classroom. The book situated Black people as powerless and presented a simplified racial binary in which there was no space for these Latinx youth. As a result, during their interaction with the teacher over the text, all the Latinx children came to identify as White in relation to the text. Again, this piece was deeply related to the study the student researchers were conducting themselves, in terms of its being ethnographic and dealing with the co-construction of identities in discourse. One key difference was that it involved a collaborative research design co-constructed by the researcher and the instructor, which later proved important to JoAnn. Her comments in class about not being able to relate to the study had shifted by the time she wrote about it in her Letter to the Readers 2: This article made me stop and think about the type of texts I select for my classes of little people and if I  am guilty of forcing certain ideas on them. Dealing with race . . . I must admit I initially thought that the minibook from Scholastic was a decent try at introducing children to diversity. However, after reading this, I saw exactly what Michael-Luna brought out about the Black/White dichotomy presented to the children. I think as adults we take for granted how we can learn about various concepts and ideas. I think we also get in the groove of accepting what is given and prepackaged for us, because it saves us time and work, but I think we miss the damage or the negative consequences and signals that can and often are sent. Responding to the text first as a teacher, JoAnn went on, in the same journal entry, to respond to it as a researcher: This idea about how selected texts can play a major role in the construction of racial identities is huge and very important for the research we are conducting. This makes me conscious about paying attention to the interactions between the instructor and students as well as the selected texts that we will see in the classes we

64  Belonging and Becoming are observing. I am also interested to see if there are any particular institutional or classroom practices that may play a part in how they construct their identities. Here JoAnn was working out what her past as a teacher and her future as a qualitative researcher meant in relation to her present, which she had concretized in her reflections on the article she has just read. Lave and Wenger (1991) make clear that “learning, transformation and change are always implicated in one another, and the status quo needs as much explanation as change” (p. 57). That is, JoAnn’s thinking as a teacher and her thinking as a qualitative researcher are implicated in her thinking about the Michael-Luna article. In our in-class discussion of “Todos somos blancos,” JoAnn said, “The curriculum is always loaded.  .  .  .  [A]s educators, we should know that it’s loaded. But it offers a great space for us as researchers.” Us as researchers is what she said. This was an essential step in JoAnn’s process of learning and transformation. She was starting to claim her position as a member of a Community of Practice of qualitative researchers. And part of what happened for JoAnn as she read this particular essay was that she saw Michael-Luna presenting her with a new role, that of researcher-activist. This piece was an example of a researcher collaborating with the teacher and afterward, working with the instructor to improve the curriculum. JoAnn was taken with this new idea that ethnographic researchers – the community she wanted to belong to  – could conduct studies, get them published, and still work with teachers to improve curricula. Lee and Roth (2003) suggest that Communities of Practice need to reproduce themselves by creating roles for novices, but that this is not a oneway process. “By bringing their own uniqueness to a community,” they write, “the novice also always has the power to transform it even as they are being transformed” (p. 5). JoAnn was beginning to see how ethnographic research could have an activist component. The Michael-Luna article, which initially had been difficult for her to connect with, had now opened new possibilities for her: This article calls me to look at the relationship between the teacher and the researcher. I think the researcher and the teacher displayed a relationship much deeper than simply the researcher and the researched. It was after the observation that the teacher and the researcher were able to work together to take a look and discuss what was happening with the children in the class and the role the teacher played in those interactions. The researcher also assisted the teacher in creating a curriculum that was better suited to the class. I think of this as a way for the researcher to be an activist as well. (emphasis added)

Belonging and Becoming 65 As JoAnn read this study, she saw it opening a new possibility for her. She could see herself conducting ethnographic research that would lead her to work with teachers to improve instruction. Perhaps this was about combining her two identities as an established teacher and as a beginning ethnographic researcher. But maybe this was also about her beginning to see the kind of qualitative researcher she wanted to become. She was starting to see things in research that she might do herself one day. She was invested in becoming a part of the Community of Practice of ethnographic researchers, and at the same time, she was balancing it with her interest in improving instruction through working with teachers on curriculum. “Identity is not experienced by an individual as a detached entity,” write Lee and Roth (2003, p. 6), “but as a suite of emotions, of passions or interests which play themselves out in the field of their body and experienced community.” JoAnn was pushing at the limits of the idea of ethnographic research that we were presenting. And she was starting to see a new way of becoming an ethnographic researcher.

Becoming Aware of Patterns That same week, JoAnn wrote her first set of field notes from the RHET 1500 class that she, Linda, and Facundo were observing. We had the emergent researchers use double-entry field notes (Emerson, Fretz, & Shaw, 2011; Kaplan-Weinger & Ullman, 2015), and we talked about their initial jottings being “raw” and needing to be “cooked” within 24 hours. What we meant by “cooking” their notes was that they had to expand abbreviations, correct grammar and misspellings, and use the “raw” versions to jog their memories and expand their notes to include more detail, or thick description (Geertz, 2008). We also wanted their field notes to be understandable to us, their instructors and their co-researchers. We had them take field notes by creating a Word document with two vertical boxes and writing what they saw and heard in the box on the left-hand side, and what they were reflecting on or had questions about in the box on the right-hand side. They practiced taking field notes in class by watching short film clips as the stand-in for the community they were observing and then reading their notes aloud to their classmates. This helped them see that each of them observed different things and that having a research team in the class, all observing from different positions, would help them understand more. After they had had practice taking field notes on a film clip without words, we moved to a more complex scene with dialogue. Again, they shared their field notes with each other, and some people chose to put their reflections and questions in different color, leaving them in the flow of the observations. JoAnn used double-entry field notes throughout the course, as training wheels of sorts.

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Going to the Field The first-year composition class that JoAnn, Linda, and Facundo were observing had a bilingual instructor. JoAnn had wondered in her Letter to the Readers if she would see institutional or classroom practices that that had to do with the co-construction of identities. This was in response to the Michael-Luna essay that had impacted her so strongly. Not long afterward, she shared this with us: Table 3.1  JoAnn’s Field Notes, September 17 What You See and Hear

Reflections

Conversation between students at desks 27 & 28 in Spanish while teacher is talking and pulling up examples of pages from other students (at front of classroom). Teacher explains that they will be putting their assignments from the class on the page they are working on. She tells the students they need to “know that it should be a professional representation of you.” She shows samples of e-portfolios and discusses them with class. Explains that they are not to copy the examples, but she’s just showing them so they can get idea. Explains they are going to have link themselves to a discourse community. Tells them to make corrections/ revisions after they get graded work back because portfolio will be symbol of their best work.

Wonder why side conversations between students seem to be in Spanish? This happened a few times, but when some of them asked question or spoke to the presenter/teacher, they used English. Wonder if teacher would have a problem with them asking questions in a language other than English? Why did she not explain what she means by professional? Why not talk about audiences?

In this excerpt from her field notes, JoAnn was beginning to observe classroom norms and ask questions about how they were established. She continued to include questions in her field notes about how the teacher was teaching. These were the kind of questions to ask while observing another teacher in order to improve or evaluate teaching. Her position as a teaching and curriculum specialist at the child development center on the military base involved observing and evaluating teachers, and she had just left that position weeks before starting the case study course. These two identities – the experienced teacher observing another teacher and the emerging ethnographic researcher taking field notes  – were both present in her field notes. Of course, the goal was

Belonging and Becoming 67 for her to background the teacher-observation mindset and foreground the co-construction of identities, ideologies, and texts in her participant observation. JoAnn recorded translanguaging practices in her field notes, and she was starting to see classroom norms around language choice and language use emerge. These are called language ideologies (Schieffelin, Woolard, & Kroskrity, 1998), which can be broadly understood as beliefs people have about languages and how they are or should be used in society. Schieffelin, Woolard, and Kroskrity understand ideologies as not being solely about language, but rather, they see them “enact[ing] ties of language to identity, to aesthetics, to morality, and to epistemology” (1998, p. 3). Often, language ideologies are both conscious and unconsciousness, and they are always connected to political, social, and economic activities in particular social and cultural worlds. The student researchers in both research teams were seeing the same phenomenon. It seemed that they were seeing a language ideology that dictated when it was appropriate to use Spanish and when it was appropriate to use English that had been internalized as a norm among students in the study, across both sections of the course. The ideology appeared to be that it was permissible for students to use Spanish with each other in one-on-one or small-group conversations in the classroom, but that it was never permissible for a student to initiate a conversation in Spanish with the instructor in any setting. All whole-class conversations had to be in English. This was the language ideology that was starting to materialize for them. As the student researchers discussed this finding, JoAnn shared her thoughts about one student’s oral presentation. The RHET 1500 students had to give an oral presentation with a PowerPoint about a discourse community to which they belonged. The student text (Salome & Dulin, 2014) defined a discourse community like this: We have defined the concept of a “discourse community” as a social group that communicates, in part, using written texts but also shares common goals, values, writing standards, specialized vocabulary, and specialized genres. As we have learned, writing is a social act – an act of connecting with others for multiple purposes. (p. 77) JoAnn had written about one of the student’s discourse community presentations in her field notes, and in class she talked about it as another possible example of a language ideology. “This woman is usually very quiet,” she told everyone. Linda and Facundo smiled in recognition as they had seen it too. She explained that there were desktop computers for each student in the class, and all the computers were connected to

68  Belonging and Becoming a printer. Many of the students also brought laptops with them, and all of them used their phones to look things up in class, as their phones had better connectivity than the computers did. “Like with the printer,” JoAnn continued, “this student got the paper and delivered it to everybody. She spoke Spanish with each person, but when she encountered the teacher, who is a native Spanish speaker, she changed to English!” JoAnn described that this student almost always spoke Spanish in class, except for those brief interactions with the teacher. “So when she came up to present to the whole class,” JoAnn said, “I wondered what would happen.” She said the student had a presence, a confidence in English, and she shared, “I was surprised by her English.” We talked about whether this language ideology was a class policy or if it had just happened that way, and this led to a class discussion about how language norms are established. Because Linda and Facundo, who are bilingual, were on her research team, and JoAnn didn’t speak Spanish, having all of them observing the classroom at the same time was essential. After JoAnn raised the question of how the norm of students speaking Spanish with each other and not speaking Spanish with the instructor was established, Facundo said he had heard the instructor engage in Spanish one-on-one with a student. He shared that he thought the teacher had initiated the exchange in Spanish. He also noted that there were two students who spoke Spanish with each other a lot and that one translated for the other, but again, that was not in front of the whole group. The whole research team agreed that that no one had used Spanish in front of the whole class. This appeared to be a classroom norm and the production of a language ideology that they were observing unfold. Classrooms are complex spaces, and in a composition classroom where there is a combination of individual, pair, and whole-group work, one person cannot observe everything that’s going on. JoAnn reported that she had asked a student sitting near her how she felt about using Spanish to ask questions in front of the whole class. She reported that the student said she felt comfortable with doing it. Yet in all their observations, they never heard a single student use Spanish in front of the class or initiate a private conversation with their bilingual instructor in Spanish. She also wondered what the student’s response would have been if Linda or Facundo had asked her about this in Spanish. JoAnn, Linda, and Facundo examined all the documents for the class, including the syllabus, the course website, and the programproduced text, The Student Guide to Undergraduate Rhetoric and Writing Studies (2014), and saw that there was no written language policy anywhere to be found. JoAnn asked the instructor about it and learned that the instructor hadn’t thought about language use in the classroom in any conscious way.

Belonging and Becoming 69 These are detailed examples of JoAnn’s becoming. What we are describing and thinking about in this chapter is her process of becoming an ethnographic researcher. Her narrative of her own identity construction is both individual and collective, and it is a story that is both intellectual and emotional. Yuval-Davis (2006, p.  202) reminds us that constructions of belonging “reflect emotional investments and desire for attachments.” And the process of becoming and belonging is not a highway one travels by following a map, arriving at the destination, and saying, “We’re here.” Learning is a process that is not about moving from one stable identity stage to the next stable identity stage, without looking back. “Individuals and groups,” Yuval-Davis insightfully writes, “are caught within wanting to belong, wanting to become” (2006, p.  202). JoAnn’s story is one of back-and-forth movement in terms of understanding, the development of technique, reflection, a sense of self, and a sense of being part of a group of qualitative researchers. Learning is about yearning to become and belong. Over and over and over.

Translanguaging, Codemeshing, and Language Ideologies Making connections between what she was observing in the composition classroom and what we were reading and discussing in class came naturally to JoAnn when we talked about Suresh Canagarajah’s 2011 essay “Codemeshing in Academic Writing: Identifying Teachable Strategies of Translanguaging.” Using data from a larger ethnographic study, Canagarajah focused in this essay on the codemeshing practices of an international student from Saudi Arabia who used Arabic and French in writing a mostly English essay. The context was a course on the teaching of writing in the second-language classroom. JoAnn responded to this essay first as a teacher, saying: My first reaction was that I had to come to terms that I was not aware of my own ideology concerning translanguaging. After reading the first few pages of the text, I realized that my own ideology that surrounded translanguaging fit into the category that Canagarajah (2011) would have considered romanticized. I  realize I  was guilty of thinking that students just know how to translanguage and that they were great at it. I realize now that my ideas about translanguaging were more about how to create space that permitted students to translanguage. I thought I was doing a good job, but I didn’t realize that as Canagarajah (2011) explains, I was and would have been just as guilty because I was not looking for ways to “elicit acts of translanguaging through conscious pedagogical strategies” (p.  401). I also realized that I hadn’t thought about there being a difference between translanguaging orally versus in the written form.

70  Belonging and Becoming As she grappled with these concepts, JoAnn immediately thought about them in her Letter to the Readers in relation to the case study, writing: I also see how I  have started thinking about how the students we are observing experience writing. I  also am wondering if the students who are able to speak more than one language consider it a resource. I am also interested in seeing the students’ work to see if they employ any of the strategies discussed in the text. One of the biggest concerns I have is the implication that teachers can give communicative tasks in a range of contexts and genres. I agree with this, but I am also aware that this may mean that teachers are in a place to rethink their own beliefs about codemeshing. Another important implication, especially for me, is to learn from multilingual students, following their lead. Canagarajah (2011) states that there is still a lot of work that needs to be done when it comes to “developing a taxonomy of translanguaging strategies and theorizing these practices.” (p.  415). As I  read this, I  thought about the idea of allowing ourselves to be students while our students become teachers and how this will provide us with tools to add to our teacher resource toolbox. In this last entry, she has meshed pedagogy and research again. Perhaps she was seeing herself as an apprentice in two different worlds, both teaching and ethnographic research. Her teaching practice had not, at the time, included university-level composition classes  – although it would soon after she graduated – but her research did. In making a connection to this essay, she explained in class, “I write twice. That is, I write the way things make sense to me, and then I write it academically.” While this isn’t the same as translanguaging or codemeshing, it seems to be about using different varieties of English and, in particular, with Standard Edited American English (SEAS), which JoAnn discusses in the next section.

Overlapping Identities and Language Practices In her third Letter to the Readers, JoAnn introduced the excerpts she selected by saying, “Overall, these entries are reflective of issues I’m dealing with at this point in time as a mom, teacher, researcher, and student.” At this time, JoAnn had just begun living in El Paso without her family, and hearing her daughter beg her to come home was so painful, she had decided not to talk with her on the phone. Putting her identity as a mom first in this list makes sense as that part of her was probably the most in flux. Her teacher identity was still steadily in second place, but interestingly, the researcher part of herself was starting to supersede the student part. The reality for JoAnn was that some of the Communities

Belonging and Becoming 71 of Practice of which she was a part  – ethnographic researchers, teachers, and students – overlapped. And her identity as a mother has been deeply impacted by her membership in all three of these groups, especially those of student and ethnographic researcher.

Shifting Identities In her previous Letter to the Readers, JoAnn had labeled each reading as its own, distinct entry. By the time she arrived at Letter to the Readers 3, the readings and the reflections on data collection had started to intertwine for her. One of those readings was Bethany Davila’s “Indexicality and ‘Standard’ Edited American English” (2012). This piece dealt with college composition instructors in Predominantly White Institutions (PWIs) being asked to read anonymous student essays and then being prompted to make inferences as to the writers’ backgrounds. Most of the college composition instructors were White and middle class, and the students, while most were White, were also of different races, ethnicities, genders, and socioeconomic backgrounds. The instructors were asked what words, phrases, and sentence structures they thought indexed certain identities. What the instructors saw as “poor writing” indexed being a student of color, being poor, and being a woman. Davila (2012) engages with the notion of Standard American Edited English (SAES), identifying it as “a gatekeeper that often excludes nontraditional students from academia” (p. 181), noting the conflict that she and many composition instructors feel about enforcing the norms of SAES as they know it will be required in all the students’ other courses. In her discussion of this essay, JoAnn forwent her norm of giving a detailed description of the article and dove right into her reflections, writing: Standard Language Ideology (SLI) is the face of objectivity that serves as a way to support and approve of the idea that there is just one standard or “correct” form of English. Objectivity is dangerous because it not only fails to acknowledge differences, but it also diminishes the fact that students who are not privileged do not have access to the same opportunities. Standard Language Ideology is a way of completely shutting down the ability to question the idea that standards are socially constructed by those in power. I’m wondering if we have some SLI assumptions in our research groups (among us, the student researchers). That would be interesting to explore. In this entry, JoAnn embraced Davila’s critique of the Standard Language Ideology and questioned whether or not her fellow researchers might have consciously or unconsciously adopted it. This reflection is immensely important. At the same time that she was reading Davila’s work

72  Belonging and Becoming and taking in its findings, she was asking questions about how researcher ideologies might impact the data they collect. JoAnn spoke in class about an interview she had conducted the previous week. The young man she interviewed was bilingual and said to her, “My writing is getting more literate, and I feel good about where I am.” She asked him about his first assignment and feedback he had received. “When I got the feedback,” he explained, “she asked me if I checked my work.” JoAnn queried, “How did that make you feel?” The student said, “They [college instructors] have an idea of the kind of student you are. And what do I think the teacher thinks? Well, probably that I am a mess up.” JoAnn told him, “Well, if you step outside and look at yourself, it’s about moving forward and becoming a better writer.” This seems like an example of her thinking about the Davila piece while she was conducting an interview. Davila discusses indexicality and the ways it can be used “as a means of stereotyping, justifying inequality, and perpetuating oppression” (2012, p.  14). She notes that it is typically done in oral language, but in her study, she uses the concept to look at student writing. This excerpt from the Davila article rings especially true, considering what JoAnn did in this interview: Indexicality, of course, is inherently ideological. Linking language to identity and using language to constitute identity “relies heavily on ideological structures [that include judgments] about the sorts of speakers who (can or should) produce particular sorts of language” (Bucholtz & Hall, 2005, p. 594). All sorts of ideologies can contribute to indexicality; however, this project focuses on standard language ideology and Whiteness. (Davila, 2012, pp. 183–184) JoAnn said in her Letter to the Readers 3 that after reading the abstract for the Davila article, she started googling the author to find out about her racial identity. Even though the author identifies herself as White and middle-class seven pages into the essay, JoAnn couldn’t wait that long to find out. The Davila article had a powerful impact on her. JoAnn urgently asked in the class discussion, “What if this gets used the wrong way and is used to prove that Blacks write one way, and Whites write another way?” Victoria, who is from Colombia and who taught English composition at her university there, said, “When I  read my students’ work, I  look only at organization and the ideas and not at who it is.” JoAnn responded: But as I think of myself and my two ways of writing and how your positionality is important in this . . . I know my way of writing is seen

Belonging and Becoming 73 as less than. Victoria, you’re a damn good teacher because you think that way . . . but these articles are made for people like my colleagues who say, “Oh, another one of those papers.” And without missing a beat, JoAnn applied the ways teachers see “deficits” in the writing of students of color to issuing a caution to her fellow student researchers about the research project. She urged the group, “If we are in this position of producing research, we have to think what our research is being used to do.” Connecting this reading directly to the research project is important, but what JoAnn did was far more than that. By asking how this research might be misused, she moved herself from the periphery to full participation. She demonstrated that she has the beliefs, standards, and behaviors of an expert ethnographic researcher. That is, she wasn’t just learning the techniques of interviewing taking field notes – those are technical skills that she was still in the process of developing – but rather, she was showing us in this moment that she was becoming an expert conceptually. As Lave & Wenger suggest in their examples and as we see in ours, “There is very little observable teaching: the more basic observable phenomenon is learning” (1991, p. 92).

Yearning and Learning In the final two Letters to the Readers that JoAnn wrote, she told us about her process of developing the skills of participant observation, interviewing, and document collection. In this overall reflection on the entries from her fourth Letter to the Readers, she wrote: After revisiting my journal entries, I realized that in order to get over my fear and be prepared to pursue my new goal of teaching at the university level, I have to write. That’s how I am going to begin working towards getting over my phobia of publishing. These journals showed me I need to work on learning to love transcribing, analyzing data, and seeing writing as a process. It is significant that JoAnn talked about fear and phobia as she contemplated her “new goal of teaching at the university level.” It’s significant that she didn’t express her goal as becoming a scholar or researcher, but she begins with the more comfortable and familiar notion of herself as “teaching.” This back and forth between seeing herself as a teacher and as a researcher is something she did throughout the course. JoAnn spoke in class many times about how much she loved teaching. Since she has said she loves teaching, and that is what she had done in her professional career up until this point, we wonder if she believed she

74  Belonging and Becoming had to learn to love the discursive practices that are part of ethnographic research and writing in order to go from being a teacher to an ethnographer. She said: I absolutely hate transcriptions. It is so time consuming. I just like to listen to the recordings. I know that at this point, we don’t have to transcribe everything, but there is so much, and I  am having a hard time selecting what is key. I feel like I am going to leave something out or miss something. It is all so interesting, but I think I need to keep in mind that I am working towards finding what is helping me understand the students’ ideas and examples of the process of co-construction of identities in the class. I  can hear the hesitation in their voices when they are asked questions by the teacher in the class, but in interviews, they speak with authority and seem very sure about what it is we are talking about and what is going on in the class. This may be something I can ask them about in our next interview. How am I going to ask that without them feeling that maybe I am judging them or leading them? I will ask the group when we meet to share the information we have collected so far. Here, JoAnn noted that the “hack” we offered about listening carefully to recorded data and marking the points that are of the most interest as those that must be transcribed first had not worked as we had hoped. That is, the problem was not only the time-consuming process of transcription, but also the evaluative act of determining what data needed to be transcribed. As she was trying on the different discursive acts of the ethnographer, she decided that while she hated transcribing, she did like listening to her recordings. She also seemed to be internalizing the notion that she needed to keep the research questions in the front of her mind while gathering data. She was doing that when she said, “I think I need to keep in mind that I am working towards finding what this is helping me understand.” This hedging is marked with phrases such as “working towards finding” rather than “finding” and “helping me understand” rather than “understand.” This seems to signal her uncertainty about this new researcher identity. Again, this is not a linear process. It’s also interesting to see that listening to the tapes led her to compare students’ stances with her during interviews with their in-class stances relating to the teacher. She seemed to be trying to understand why transcription is important and how it might lead her to ask new questions. Her concern about avoiding judgment and leading questions was resolved in her mind by her plan to “ask the group,” an example of her coming to see herself as a member of a Community of Practice in which there are novices and experts. That is, she planned

Belonging and Becoming 75 to ask her research team about this, not her professors. At this point, she was beginning to see herself less as a student who goes to professors with questions, and more as a legitimate peripheral participant working on a research team. She shared: Now that I have finished transcribing a portion of the interview, I can see why it is so important. There were some things I had missed and forgotten about. Looking at the transcription also made me make notes about asking them about feedback in the next interview to better understand what they meant when they said it was not really helpful. Yes, these transcriptions are time consuming, but they really help as I go back and look at the data. I bet it will help even more when we start coding more in depth. This entry is another example of JoAnn coming to terms with transcription as a part of the discursive practices that comprise her new researcher identity. She noted that doing transcription made her think about how to clarify her questions for the future. She also reflected on the things she had forgotten about, but she didn’t express fear about that here as she had in the first journal entries. This seems to be what Wenger (1998) calls “identity as learning trajectory” (p. 149). That is, JoAnn is beginning to define who she is by where she has been and where she is going. She analyzed her own progress, saying: I really need to work on field notes. I know they said we were getting better, but I still feel like I am overwhelmed and not doing it right. It definitely helped when I took the tape recorder, but at first, I  think I  relied too much on it because my notes did not seem as thick. I  have to remember to keep writing and make notes about where things are, the movement of the class, and distinctions in time so I can then match the recording with the notes. I went back and looked at the feedback and saw I also need to go back and proofread my notes and make sure they are done in a way the others can look and understand what I am talking about. The sample field notes they posted in blackboard really helped, but now I  am trying to figure how I transform what I am in doing into something that looks like that. I  know they keep telling us practice makes perfect, but I  am going to revisit Emerson et al. (2011) to help me as well. After I did some rereading, I think that I still need to work on improving these skills, but Emerson et  al. (2011) also say that I  am in preliminary data analysis mode because it is for some reason I choose to jot down some things and leave out others. I have to make notes and work on my reflection part to help me in recognizing not just what I wrote, but why I wrote it as well.

76  Belonging and Becoming Here, JoAnn was taking her learning to become a researcher into her own hands. She reflected on herself as a learner of research techniques, identifying a pattern in her own behavior. She saw that her field notes were thick when she didn’t use the audio recorder and thin when she did. She developed a theory about her own practice of participant observation and reminded herself about what she needed to focus on (e.g., movement of the class, time), and she returned to a text to help her learn. This was a text from another class, which means she went beyond our class resources to help her address an issue in her own learning. This is an example of the ways in which her identity is what Wenger calls “an experience that involves both participation and reification” (p.  163). JoAnn’s own evaluation of what she needed to do to improve her research skills was an example of her reifying her emerging identity as a researcher. Here, she enthused: I love doing interviews! I  really enjoy spending the time with the participants and hearing how they see things and getting insight on their ideologies and practices that we never would have been able to know much less understand without these interactions. It is so funny. I contacted Janeth first and got no response. Just like they told us in class, once they hear their friends are participating in the study, others will want to as well. That is exactly what happened. When Haide told Janeth she could not do something after class because she had an interview with Linda, she looked at me and made the comment, “They didn’t even contact me, and I wanted to, but oh well.” I was so tickled because she said it in my presence. I knew for a fact we did contact her because I was the one that sent her several emails, but she never responded. I must admit I had kind of given up, but I see how important it is to keep my ears open for things like this because she did want to participate. The great thing is when I sent her the second, third, or maybe even the fourth invitation to participate, she opened the email in class while I was sitting next to her. She opened the email, looked at me, and said “Oh! Is this from you?” When I told her yes, she said “I would love to!” Finding an aspect of the research process that she loved seemed to be a turning point for JoAnn. As she imagined herself into being a researcher, she established her belonging in the group by reinterpreting the social skills she already had as some of the skills she needs to conduct research. She let Janeth save face and did not reveal the lie to her friends (i.e., that she actually had been contacted about the interview). JoAnn seemed to be using imagination to reinterpret what Wenger calls “mismatched forms of participation” (p. 186). That is, she was reimagining her social

Belonging and Becoming 77 skill, perhaps developed during her years as a teacher, as a skill that she could use as a researcher. She contemplated: All in all, I have to keep reminding myself that all of this is a process, and for me it is a new process. I can admit that I am in a position to feel like it is a possibility for me to publish, whereas before, it wasn’t. I just know that for me, I need step-by-step processes for the first few times so I can get the process down, and then I will be able to apply the process to other situations/research. I am going to keep grappling and asking questions so I can become better. JoAnn began her Letters to the Readers by expressing fear about academic publishing. Just three months later, she was able to consider it a “possibility” to publish in a scholarly journal. This seems like progress. And most importantly, after a short time, she can imagine herself as a member of an ethnographic research team. It is no longer a question of whether she is a member, but of how she will continue to move from novice to expert. She knew the path was to grapple with the questions. Indeed, what JoAnn needed in order to imagine herself as a researcher was, as Wenger (1998) says, to “engage in the learning that membership entails” (p. 277).

Conclusion In her first Letter to the Readers, she reflected on Tom Boellstorff’s (2012) “Ten myths about ethnography,” a chapter from the book Ethnography and Virtual Worlds: A Handbook of Method, and she thought about what taking on this identity as an ethnographer meant. She wrote after the second week of the course: To be an ethnographer, you have got to be OK with other people saying, “You can’t prove that. . . . And you’ve got to say, “That’s not what I’m doing.  .  .  . I’m talking about a particular moment, particular people, and I’m trying to understand it. This is a cool way of saying, “What you do in Texas may not work in Mississippi. It may not work in Nebraska. We need to look at this particular context and the issues here. . . . And the context. That’s what I always ask myself. . . . [H]ow do I do this, if I go home. I’m trying to understand what the questions are that I need to ask . . . when I go home. Going home was on JoAnn’s mind throughout this course. Leaving her small children and her husband to engage in this process of becoming a Ph.D. was a supreme sacrifice. It’s interesting to note that she first said, “if

78  Belonging and Becoming I go home” and followed it with “when I go home” in the next sentence. That is, maybe it wasn’t a question of whether she would go home, but who she would be when she went home. In her final Letter to the Readers, JoAnn expressed her jubilance in finding out that her research team’s presentation was going to be included in the Ethnographic and Qualitative Research Conference (EQRC) in the spring. She wrote: Our proposal was accepted! I am so excited and scared at the same time. I know that we worked hard, but it seems that now we actually have the opportunity to share what it is we are working on. I know that we have been told since we entered the program that we are to contribute to the bigger body of knowledge, but this has just become real to me. I am nervous, but at the same time, I am excited about getting the opportunity to meet others and hear what is being done in other places. Presenting original research at a scholarly conference is a rite of passage in the process of becoming a scholar, and excitement and nervousness are entirely appropriate responses. The Community of Practice that JoAnn was a part of during this course existed within a larger context and was not autonomous. It was part of conditions that are “historical, social, cultural, and institutional  – with specific resources and constraints” (Wenger, 1998, p.  79). And it was connected to the work that a larger community of scholars is engaged in – the scholars whose work we read throughout the course and those we would meet at the conference – and JoAnn was becoming one of them. In her final entry in her final Letter to the Readers, JoAnn summed her experience up beautifully. She wrote: To be honest, I never saw myself where I am right now. It wasn’t that I thought I couldn’t or that it wasn’t within my reach. It’s just that it never crossed my mind because I had not been exposed to research in this way. Over the course of this semester, I have learned so much. Right now, I am in a space to want to go forth and share what I have learned. As I progress through this program, I now am able to see how much I have learned and the importance of being exposed to so many of these skills. I know this is what I need in order to go out and try my best to make an impact and make changes to our educational system. JoAnn wasn’t just thinking about presenting at the conference or getting a good grade in the course. She wasn’t even thinking about how this experience would help her in conducting her dissertation

Belonging and Becoming 79 research. She was standing in our classroom and looking out at the world beyond it, as an ethnographic case study researcher who would also be an activist. JoAnn’s particular process of becoming a qualitative researcher wasn’t something we could have predicted or understood on the first day of class. It was a back-and-forth process, and at many moments within the process, both JoAnn and we, the researchers, were not sure how it would go.

Epilogue Now, JoAnn is an ethnographic researcher. She has, since this course, conducted ethnographic research for her dissertation, “The Professional Identities of Child and Youth Program Assistants (CYPAs) at a Military Installation,” and she successfully defended it in 2018. She began a position as a data analyst for the State of Louisiana Department of Education in 2019 and, through that work, has collaborated on a research project with scholars from Louisiana State University and designed the qualitative part of a study of early childhood education in the state. In 2020, she accepted a position as an assistant professor of practice at the University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg. She has become Dr. Mommy.

Notes 1. JoAnn posted an image on Facebook with the hashtag #BecauseofthemIam, with images of five Black women activists of the civil rights movement. We chose the pseudonym JoAnn to pay homage to JoAnn Robinson, who was a key organizer of the Montgomery bus boycott and an activist in the Women’s Political Council as well as in Martin Luther King Jr.’s church, the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. 2. In May of 1970, Jackson State (now Jackson State University) was where police murdered 2 Black student protesters and injured 12. The Jackson State killings happened just days after 4 White student protesters were murdered at Kent State, and 9 were injured. Both events led to increased anti-war protests across the country.

References American Community Survey. (2018). Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office. Retrieved from https://data.census.gov/cedsci/all?q=poverty%20 rate%20Hattiesburg,%20MS&g=1600000US2831020&hidePreview=false& table=S1701&tid=ACSST5Y2018.S1701&t=Poverty&layer=place&cid=S1701_ C01_001E&vintage=2018&lastDisplayedRow=16 Boellstorff, T. (2012). Ten myths about ethnography. In T. Boellstorff, B. Nardi, C. Pearce, & T. L. Taylor (Eds.), Ethnography and virtual worlds: A Handbook of method (pp. 29–51). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Bucholtz, M. (1999). “Why be normal?”: Language and identity practices in a community of nerd girls. Language in Society, 28(2), 203–223.

80  Belonging and Becoming Bucholtz, M., & Hall, K. (2005). Identity and interaction: A sociocultural linguistic approach. Discourse Studies, 7(4–5), 585–614. Canagarajah, S. (2011). Codemeshing in academic writing: Identifying teachable strategies of translanguaging. The Modern Language Journal, 95(3), 401–417. Chiang, Y., & Schmida, M. (2002). Language, identity and language ownership: Linguistic conflicts of first-year university writing students. In V. Zamel & R. Spack (Eds.), Enriching ESOL pedagogy: Readings and activities for engagement, reflection, and inquiry (pp. 393–410). London: Psychology Press. Davila, B. (2012). Indexicality and ‘Standard’ edited American English: Examining the link between conceptions of standardness and perceived authorial identity. Written Communication, 29(2), 180–207. Emerson, R. M., Fretz, R. I., & Shaw, L. L. (2011). Writing ethnographic fieldnotes. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Fordham, S. (1996).  Blacked out: Dilemmas of race, identity, and success at capital high. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Fordham, S. (2008). Beyond capital high: On dual citizenship and the strange career of “acting white”. Anthropology & Education Quarterly, 39(3), 227–246. Fordham, S., & Ogbu, J. U. (1986). Black students’ school success: Coping with the “burden of acting white”. The Urban Review, 18(3), 176–206. García, O. (2011). Bilingual education in the 21st century: A global perspective. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons. Geertz, C. (2008). Thick description: Toward an interpretive theory of culture. In The cultural geography reader (pp. 41–51). Abingdon: Routledge. Heath, S. B. (1982). What no bedtime story means: Narrative skills at home and school. Language in Society, 11(1), 49–76. Kamler, B.,  & Thomson, P. (2014).  Helping doctoral students write: Pedagogies for supervision. New York: Routledge. Kaplan-Weinger, J., & Ullman, C. (2015). Methods for the ethnography of communication: Language in use in schools and Communities. New York: Routledge. Kerr, A. E. (2005). The paper bag principle: Of the myth and the motion of colorism. Journal of American Folklore, 271–289. Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation. New York: Cambridge University Press. Lee, S., & Roth, W. M. (2003, May). Becoming and belonging: Learning qualitative research through legitimate peripheral participation. Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung/Forum: Qualitative Social Research, 4(2) Liddicott, A. J. (2009). Sexual identity as linguistic failures: Trajectories of interaction in the heteronormative language classroom. Journal of Language, Identity, and Education, 8(2–3), 191–202. Michael-Luna, S. (2008). Todos somos blancos/We are all white: Constructing racial identities through texts. Journal of Language, Identity, and Education, 7(3– 4), 272–293. Nasir, N. I. S., & Saxe, G. B. (2003). Ethnic and academic identities: A Cultural practice perspective on emerging tensions and their management in the lives of minority students. Educational Researcher, 32(5), 14–18. Paris, D. (2010). “The second language of the United States”: Youth perspectives on Spanish in a changing multiethnic community. Journal of Language, Identity, and Education, 9(2), 139–155.

Belonging and Becoming 81 Rampton, B. (2003). Coming to linguistic ethnography from a background in teaching. LEF Colloquium on Linguistic Ethnography at the Interface with Education, 1–11. Salome, M. R., & Dulin, C. (2014). The student guide to undergraduate rhetoric and writing studies (17th ed.). El Paso, TX: University of Texas at El Paso. Schieffelin, B. B., Woolard, K. A., & Kroskrity, P. V. (Eds.). (1998). Language ideologies: Practice and theory. New York: Oxford University Press. Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of practice: Learning, meaning, and identity. New York: Cambridge University Press. Yuval-Davis, N. (2006). Belonging and the politics of belonging. Patterns of Prejudice, 40(3), 197–214.

4 Learning to Do Research Acknowledging Researcher Positionality in Ethnographic Research

Linda1 was 33 when she took the case study course, and she had recently started a full-time job teaching communications at an early-college high school in El Paso. In this model, high school students take community college classes in their junior and senior years, graduating with both a high school diploma and an associate’s degree. The classes are held at the high school, and their teachers are from the community college, and this model can save students a lot of money in tuition. Linda came to the doctoral program in Teaching, Teacher Education, and Culture with a master’s in communication studies, also from Borderlands University. She was in her second year in the doctoral program when she took our course. In her master’s thesis, she looked at how Latinx viewers perceived local television news anchors. She surveyed Latinx viewers about their attitudes toward Latinx and White newscasters. She found, using quantitative analysis, that although the Latinx viewers felt closer to the newscasters of the same ethnicity, they found White male newscasters to be most credible. Linda was aware of the power of Whiteness before doing this study. She was often mistaken for being White in El Paso. She has light skin, medium-brown hair, green eyes, and a Scandinavian surname, all of which marked her as White – until she added her mother’s Mexican last name to her father’s for official documents. “I  look White,” she explained, “and people think I’m White. White people don’t think I speak Spanish.” They also don’t know that her mother and all her mother’s family are from Mexico. Linda returned again and again to the topic of ethnic identity and it’s salient for her. Early in her doctoral study, she knew she cared about race, ethnicity, and gender issues in education, and in order to balance her academic work with full-time teaching, she knew she needed to manage these stresses. The case study course was demanding, and she worked hard to stay on an even keel.

From Spanish to English and Back to Spanish Linda was born just outside Chicago, Illinois, and moved to the border region with her parents when she was in first grade. The oldest of

Learning to Do Research 83 seven children, she was a kind of “third parent” to her siblings. Her father worked as an accountant in a maquiladora, an assembly factory located on the Mexican side of the border, owned by a multinational corporation. Linda’s father passed away when she was in her 20s, and even though he was White, “He spoke Spanish as if it were his first language,” she recalled. Her mother was from northern Mexico and spoke mostly Spanish at home, along with some English. Closer to her mother’s side of the family in Mexico than to her father’s side back in Chicago, Spanish was her first language. She spoke Spanish almost exclusively until she was about seven years old. She didn’t go to preschool or kindergarten, and she began school for the first time when the family moved to El Paso.

Schooling and English Linda grew up in a very religious Catholic household. Her parents were able to send all seven children to a Catholic school that was one neighborhood away from where they lived. Her parents were also able to pay for her undergraduate education. She described her family as middle class or even upper middle class when she was growing up. However, her father passed away when she was in her early 20s, and that’s when the family income changed. Although there are many different kinds of bilingual education programs in El Paso public schools, bilingual programs aren’t typically available in Catholic schools there. As a result, all Linda’s schooling was in English. During her elementary school years, she didn’t identify as Latina, explaining, “In elementary and middle school, it was about being White or being Americanized for me.” When she looks back on it, she just accepted that being White, being American, and speaking English were connected. Reflecting on this belief, she realized it wasn’t a conscious awareness. Flores and Rosa (2015) critique the ideology that connects Whiteness and U.S. citizenship with English, arguing that it has led to what they call an appropriateness-based model of language education. That is, “The onus is placed on language minoritized students to mimic the [W]hite speaking subject” (p. 155). It’s as if modifying minoritized students’ language practices will eliminate racial hierarchies that place middle-class White students on top. As a result, most U.S. schools encourage students like Linda not to identify with their ethnic, linguistic, or racial heritage. This is in spite of the fact that the White gaze (Flores & Rosa, 2015) will always position them as deficient. When she started at a Catholic high school in El Paso, her sense of her ethnic identity began to shift. At this school, many of her fellow students were Mexican nationals or transfronterizx students (de la Piedra,

84  Learning to Do Research Araujo,  & Esquinca, 2018) who cross the border every day to attend school. This made a big difference for her. She reflected: I was exposed more to the Latino culture because all of the students who were my peers would come over from Ciudad Juárez. They would cross the bridge every day, so Spanish was spoken more. They really had their ties to Mexican culture, so I was more exposed to it. . . . I would go visit them, and so then I started to develop more as a Latina. Transfronterizx students are constantly mobile, crossing national borders, languages, and cultures on a weekly or daily basis (de la Piedra & Araujo, 2012; Relaño Pastor, 2007; Zentella, 2016). They navigate new schooling experiences and social worlds in ways that are at once highly impressive and precarious. During high school, there was violence in Ciudad Juárez where she spent time with her friends. It was the time of the femicidios, horrific murders of almost 400 women and girls, most of whom were working in the maquiladoras (Schwartz-Marin & Cruz-Santiago, 2016). By 2008, the drug cartel–related brutality had risen to the level of “ultra violence” (Campbell, 2011), which led many Mexican parents to migrate to El Paso if they could. Many others worked hard to send their children to school in El Paso (Araujo & de la Piedra, 2013). Some Mexican parents, especially those from working-class backgrounds in less violent parts of the border, send their children to school in the United States with hopes that becoming bilingual and graduating from a U.S. high school will be an investment in their futures (Tessman  & Koyama, 2019). In northern Mexico, learning English at an international school is something that “is only available to some middleclass people, and to the wealthy” (Ullman, 2015, p. 204). As a result of going to school with and becoming friends with transfronterizx students, Linda said, “Mexico became more my culture.” She crossed the border on weekends and after school to be with her transfronterizx friends, and she felt connected culturally. She grew up feeling very close to her relatives who lived in Ciudad Juárez. That feeling was in stark contrast to the formality she felt with her White relatives in the Midwest.

Ni de Aquí ni de Allá Linda expressed a kind of duality when she talked about her ethnic self. “When I was younger,” she explained, “I felt caught between two worlds. You know, not White, but then not fully Mexican either.” Ni de aquí ni de allá (neither here nor there) is a common feeling along the border. Gloria Anzaldúa (1987), the renowned queer feminist Chicana theorist and poet who hailed from the border, wrote, “[A]lienated from her mother

Learning to Do Research 85 culture, ‘alien’ in the dominant culture  .  .  . The woman of color [is] caught between los intersticios, the spaces between the different worlds that she inhabits” (p. 20). Linda’s sense of being caught between worlds was perhaps in sharper focus because she could pass as White. Although she never deliberately attempted to gain acceptance by pretending to be White (Delgado  & Stefancic, 2017), she knew that being perceived as White gave her more opportunities. This was especially the case when she looked for work. “There are certain situations and contexts,” she recalled, “where you can be more White or pass as White.” Those situations allow you “to have opportunities that others don’t.” Linda shrugged her shoulders and said, “So it’s just . . . there’s that.” People who don’t know her well are surprised to find out she’s Latina, and some people even changed their stance toward her once they heard her speak Spanish. It is true that some forms of Whiteness are so closely associated with standard English that they become naturalized. However, Wee (2018) reminds us that “what counts as standard is deeply ideological” (p. 94), and there is no clear consensus as to what constitutes it. Nonetheless, ideas about standard English become so deeply normalized that they are “made to appear as the logical outgrowth of other facts of life” (Yanagisako & Delaney, 1995, p. 11). One such naturalized belief is that people who speak standard English do not have accents. But as Lippi-Green (2012) notes, the idea of a non-accent is a myth and is impossible because all languages have structured phonetic varieties. Accents are phonological markers for race, ethnicity, class, or region. Those who think they don’t have accents are people whose phonological peculiarities have the most social power. Linda remembered going on a school trip in high school and encountering people who commented on her accent because they assumed she spoke only English rather than being the Spanish-English bilingual person she is. The myth of the native speaker is an unearned privilege typically bestowed on those thought to be White Anglo Americans (Davies, 2003; Doerr, 2009). Linda reflected that “I’ve learned to identify more as a Latina.” She also expressed that her identity is “fluid, in flux, and always changing.” Her words echo the ways other Latina graduate students have seen their identities as attuned to “difference, fluidity, and flexibility” (Bañuelos, 2006, p. 105).

Family Ties The oldest of seven children, Linda often took care of her younger siblings. She described herself as being like a second mother to her six younger brothers and sisters, who she says saw her more as a mother figure than as a peer. Every day, she would help her mother clean, change

86  Learning to Do Research diapers, and watch over the younger children. She and her husband made a decision not to have children, in part because Linda felt she had already had a kind of mother experience in her own family. As is the case with many Latinx families, how each child identifies in terms of ethnicity, race, and language can vary (Guerra, 2016), and Linda’s family was no exception. She shared that the three older children “are more connected to the Latino identity” while, for the younger ones, that connection is less strong. The older children in the family grew up fluent in Spanish and English while the younger ones can understand Spanish but speak mostly English. This is a common pattern in many immigrant families, and scholars call it receptive bilingualism (Bialystok, Lukes, Peets, & Yang, 2010). Linda’s niece, who is the third generation from migration on her mother’s side, speaks only English. Skin tone also varies in her family. One of Linda’s sisters has darker skin than she does and has shared the intensity of the racism (and sexism) she experiences in her job as an engineer. Linda knows that her own light skin gives her opportunities that some of her siblings don’t have. She is deeply aware that skin color conveys privilege. “I was very shy and very quiet before high school,” Linda observed. But in high school, she found her voice, in part because of her supportive teachers. Those teachers encouraged her to get involved in extracurricular activities, such as being part of the debate team. Being on the debate team really brought her out of her shell. “I  flourished in that kind of environment,” she recalled. After graduation, Linda enrolled in Borderlands University, where she started out as a business administration major. She soon realized the classes didn’t spark her interest, so she switched her major to communication studies and minored in marketing, with an emphasis in public relations.

Becoming More Mexican During her college years, she continued to move closer to her culture, speaking Spanish with new friends and visiting their families in Ciudad Juárez. She met the man who would become her husband in college. Her husband grew up in Ciudad Juárez until his teenage years, when the family migrated to the United States, and becoming part of a Mexican family en español and celebrating holidays felt wonderful to her. It was unlike the family she had grown up in, where she was the sibling with the most Spanish proficiency and cultural knowledge. At home with her husband, Linda was more Americanized, comparatively. Thinking about how they use language at home, she continued: We do translanguage, but his Spanish is stronger than mine. You know, as we say, it doesn’t matter if I don’t say some of the words correctly, or I translate things wrong. I make up words too. But we are still

Learning to Do Research 87 able to communicate. We are still able to build our relationships – not just with each other but also with his family. And with my family too. Everyone is at a different level, so some speak Spanish; some don’t. We definitely translanguage. Somehow, we all understand. As an early-college high school teacher, she understood how important it was to acknowledge her students’ bilingual prowess and their ability to translanguage. After college Linda spent a few years working in public relations at several El Paso companies. This work was deeply unsatisfying to her. One of the companies she worked for was connected to a well-known and corrupt family in Ciudad Juárez. At the time, drug cartels dominated much of Juárez, and one of her bosses was married to the daughter of one of the drug cartel bosses. “It was starting to get kind of shady,” she recounted. “I was like, I don’t want to be here.” She thought about going back to school to do something different, so she decided to return to Borderlands University to get a master’s in communication studies, and at the same time, she began teaching speech part time at Rio Grande Community College. She felt that the coursework in her master’s program, as with some of her coursework she took when she was an undergraduate, had done what is was supposed to do – expand her mind. She was becoming more of a critical thinker, a growth process that led her to doctoral study. “My mind is still changing,” she commented. “I am thinking more critically, being exposed to different scholars and theories, seeing new things, and questioning things that I didn’t before.” Assimilation is one of those things Linda was thinking about in new ways. The belief that immigrants must speak only English and subtract their language and culture was something she had come to reject. This one-way cultural change and identity erasure has deep colonial roots. In her master’s thesis, she delved into the power dynamics of ethnic identification in mass communications, and it made her think about the interrelatedness of language, culture, and identities. However, she also felt like the quantitative methodology she used had left her with unanswered questions. “You have this data,” she explained. “You have statistics. You have numbers. But I was just left wondering. . . . What else is there? What does it mean?” Because she had only administered a survey, she didn’t really understand people’s perspectives beyond the surface. Reflecting on her previous academic work made her excited to conduct qualitative research in the doctoral program and to learn more about the “why?” questions.

Becoming a Teacher Once she started teaching communication studies as an adjunct at the community college, she knew that teaching suited her. The year she took the case study course, she had just started teaching high school at an

88  Learning to Do Research early-college high school, and she saw it as part of her social justice practice. When she thought about why she was studying for her doctorate, it wasn’t only about becoming a professor – although that’s still on the table. It was really about serving and empowering the Latinx community on the border. For her, that might mean continuing to teach at the early-college high school, working as tenure-track faculty at Rio Grande Community College, or something else entirely. “Doing this will allow me to be true to myself,” she explained, “both in my career and in my academic life.” She wove her teaching and research into one tapestry, one strand reinforcing the other, remarking: I like what I do. I like what I teach. In fact, it’s something I love. Everyone should have a passion for what they do. And I’m learning that I have a growing passion for research. As I research to help others or to plant seeds in others, I help them grow. Education is about questioning . . . bettering, giving back. It can help better the community. And it can help Latinos who are from lower-economic statuses. Just as her education had opened her eyes about her own Latinidad, allowing her to begin to experience herself as a Latina, she felt a calling to open up her students’ eyes as well. She recognized that “sometimes people just want to give up.” She thought this happened because people feel powerless to change society. “I think even now in this political climate, with the Trump administration and children being held in cages at the border, we need more researchers. We need more educators. We need to continue the fight.” She saw the ethnographic research she was conducting and the teaching she was doing as two practices that reinforced each other. Strongly motivated to persist in her doctoral study, she saw herself as an emerging researcher, despite the uncertainties she felt at the start of her journey. These uncertainties included her initial misunderstanding of some research procedures and her confusion over her insider/outsider status at her research site, along with the challenge of making sense of an enormous amount of data.

The Cub Ethnographer In one of the focus group interviews after the case study course had ended, Linda revealed, “You question yourself a lot. That is, am I doing the observation right? Am I doing the interview right? Am I doing the writing right?” The research had taken her more time than she had expected, and that was stressful since she was in her first year as a public school teacher. That meant she only had evenings and weekends for the course. She also said that she had been “overwhelmed by all of the data” that she and her teammates had gathered and analyzed. They had

Learning to Do Research 89 participant observations of the first-year writing class, analyses of course artifacts such as the course policies and student writing assignments, and interviews with first-year writing students and the writing instructor. She called herself a “cub ethnographer,” a phrase she had picked up from the syllabus. She was new to this Community of Practice, an apprentice who was moving toward the knowledge and skills required to be a full participant (Lave & Wenger, 1991). Becoming a qualitative researcher takes practice. Lions learn to become lions from other lions. She knew she was still a cub in terms of research. Like most of the student researchers, Linda’s was a back-and-forth journey as she moved from cub researcher to lion researcher and sometimes back again.

Insider/Outsider Positionality During the second week of class in the case study course, we asked the student researchers to consider their positionalities. We discussed the ways that cultures provide us with group memberships as well as biases. Although all of them were aware of this, the term positionalities was new. We used an exercise in the course text, Methods for the Ethnography of Communication: Language in Use in Schools and Classrooms (Kaplan-Weinger & Ullman, 2015) to get them to reflect on their positions. It said: Talk with a partner. Begin by asking about the social categories they inhabit, including things like race, gender identity, class, ethnicity, sexuality, religious practice, ability, national affiliations, and languages spoken. These are springboards to other identity categories. Then ask your partner about their daily activities. Family? Friends? Work? Hobbies? Social groups or political groups they belong to? Make a list of your partner’s social categories. Then your partner will do the same with you. Compare and contrast your lists. (p. 48) After about 30 minutes working in pairs, we debriefed in a whole-class discussion. Linda began by talking a bit about her family, her evolving views on Catholicism, and her new job as a high school teacher. For her, the most important thing was having a Brown mother from Mexico and a White father from the United States. She shared that it felt uncomfortable to be read as White. She discussed her process of coming to identify as Latina and the need she felt to contribute to the Latinx border community. Her experiences in high school and college, as well as marrying a man from Mexico, had shifted her early notions of herself to her current sense of herself. Her positionality had changed over time, and this process of coming to be was going to inform her research in the first-year writing course.

90  Learning to Do Research In Linda’s self-reflection in her Letter to the Readers 1, written just a week after the course began, she pondered what she had read about researchers having insider/outsider status in Methods for the Ethnography of Communication: Language in Use in Schools and Communities (2015). The text discussed the idea that an outsider to the community being studied was someone who had little or no experience with the community itself and few shared commonalities. In contrast, an insider might be someone who has similar experiences and other commonalities. Often, the insider/outsider binary is actually a continuum. “Sometimes,” write Kaplan-Weinger and Ullman, “an outsider is the one who is curious and connected. It just depends. Both insiders and outsiders can gain important insights about a community and share those insights with the community and scholarly communities” (p. 22). In addition, someone who might seem to be an insider  – who might have come from the same community that’s being studied  – might not be perceived as such by members of that community. As Jacobs-Huey (2002) points out, it is a fallacy for researchers to presume that they have commonalities with research participants based on similar language, class, ethnicity, and so on. Often, researchers have more formal education than the members of the community they’re studying. This was the case for Linda, a doctoral student who was beginning to study first-year college students. Indeed, researchers are sometimes partial outsiders, as we are in this study, as more experienced researchers studying beginning researchers. An entry in her first Letter to the Readers showed how she was grappling with her own insider/outsider status in relation to the study participants, the students in RHET 1500. She wrote, “I find the duality of insider/outsider as challenging in our case study.” Her thoughts shifted from seeing herself as an insider to seeing herself as an outsider as she tried to figure this feeling out. First, she described her commonalities with the students, asserting that “I  have insider knowledge in being a student, Latina, bilingual, and young.” Yet none of these characteristics was necessarily similar to the experiences of these particular first-year students. Yes, Linda is a student, but it is a significant difference to be a doctoral student. She is Latina, but she is a Latina who can pass as White, another important difference. And while she is bilingual, not all the students in RHET 1500 had the kind of fluency she had, especially in English. That is, many had varying levels of proficiency with academic English and some with academic Spanish as well. And while Linda is also young, she was still about 15 years older than the students in the first-year composition course, many of whom were around 18 years old. While she had things in common with the students she was researching, she seemed to overgeneralize those similarities a bit.

Learning to Do Research 91 Then, in the same Letter to the Readers, she shifted to describing her own experience in a first-year writing class, which was important in terms of her reflecting on her own positionality. She wrote: I took the required introductory English writing classes at Borderlands University, and it was traumatic for me. It was with an English instructor who was not helping the students or explaining the material very well. She was never available for office hours. Furthermore, she did not include much feedback on the papers she handed back. I  remember being on the verge of failing the class until I  sought help on my own. I used the Writer Center, and my father helped me. I passed the class, but I wonder what happened to my classmates who did not take my initiative. I was used to getting straight As in high school, so this was a shock. Because of that class, I thought my writing was horrible for the longest time. I lost confidence in myself as a writer. I am more confident now, but not so when I was eighteen. Teachers have such lasting impressions on students. I know not all teachers are like this, but they can really make an impact. I can relate to the challenges some students might have in English composition classes. When she reflected on having taken the first-year writing course, that tilted her toward being an insider. But immediately after writing about that, she shifted gears and described how she might also be an outsider. “I relate to many people in El Paso because I am familiar with the Latinx culture and because I speak Spanish. Yet, I have a lighter complexion, and many people look at me and don’t think I  speak Spanish.” She added, “I am in the doctoral program as well, which can cause further alienation” from the RHET 1500 students. “I need to remember to hold back judgment,” she wrote. “That is difficult with my past experience of taking the same course as the students are taking now.” Linda was grappling with her positionality. She was aware of her tendency to see herself as similar to the students in RHET 1500 and also aware that, in many ways, she was different. Becoming a good qualitative researcher was important to Linda because, as she mentioned several times throughout the course, she wanted to support her community by empowering minoritized students. While she was still figuring out how ethnographic research might do that, it was her goal. In her Letter to the Readers 5, she again talked about her commonality with the students in RHET 1500, writing about an interview she had conducted with young women in the class. She stated: I shared in a previous journal entry that I  can relate with these young, first-year college students. They remind me of myself, and

92  Learning to Do Research this reinforces an integral goal for me. I want to help Latina, Black, and Indigenous young women succeed in college. The four participants I interviewed were all in their first year of college. As I listened to them during the interview, sharing their dreams and hopes for the future, I thought about how important education is. I want to make sure all women succeed in college. Linda saw this research, and the research she would do in the future, as important – potentially transformative – and as changing young women of color’s lives for the better. Perhaps her feelings of connection with some of the RHET 1500 students led her to idealize what research could accomplish. But she was taking the first few steps, and her motivation was high.

You Can’t Make Assumptions Linda, JoAnn, and Facundo met in the hallway before the first participant observation session at their field site: Rosa’s first-year writing classroom. Linda raced to the observation from the high school where she taught, and the group’s first appearance as ethnographic researchers was thoughtful and deliberate. Linda, JoAnn, and Facundo decided to sit in different areas of the classroom so that they could each record their observations from different locations. Their plan was to compile their notes afterward, to gain a more comprehensive view. As we had encouraged them to do, Linda took double-entry field notes, recording her observations on the left-hand column and her questions and reflections on the right-hand column. This is how she began her first set of doubleentry field notes, with Char’s feedback in italics: Table 4.1  Linda’s Field Notes, September 17 What Your See and Hear

Reflections

Date: Sept 17, 2015 Location: RHET 1500 Teacher: Rosa Time started: 3:00 pm My observations began at the front of the room. I had a clear view of the guest speaker, teacher, and the six students around me along with the computer screen, whiteboard, and projector screen.

In the morning, I gave considerable time to choosing what to wear. I wore jeans so students can relate to me. Hmm . . . I appreciate that you’re thinking about this, but I’m not sure that’s how they will relate to you. I think it makes more sense to dress in ways sort of similar to the students, simply so that you don’t stand out. I observed student interactions with each other, the teacher, and technology (the computers in front of them). I’m not sure this sentence is a reflection. It’s just a summary of what you did. We are hoping to see thick description, and in the other column.

Learning to Do Research 93 In the Reflections section, she had thought about what she wore, writing, “I  wore jeans so the students can relate to me.” She purposefully tried to make herself appear similar to the students so they saw her as one of them, someone who has a kind of insider status rather than, as Char pointed out, trying to be inconspicuous. She continued: Table 4.2  Linda’s Field Notes, September 17 What Your See and Hear

Reflections

Teacher continues by telling students that there is a speaker today in classResponse: head nods. The speaker is explaining Wix, an online system for students to use for assignments. What did the speaker say? What did he look like? Did the instructor introduce him?

The students listened and engaged with the teacher. You are interpreting this, but you don’t have any data to base it on. You need to tell us what you actually see and hear.

Linda’s field notes demonstrate some of the challenges that her teammates, JoAnn and Facundo, also experienced in the beginning. The detail was thin, and she was making interpretations based on too little data. Later, she wrote, “The students listened attentively to the teacher.” In response, we wrote, “How do you know the students listened attentively? Can you ask this as a question – were the students attentive?” She also tended to make assumptions, saying things like “The teacher was comfortable with the students.” We encouraged her to describe what she saw that made her think that. Near the end of this first set of field notes, Linda slipped into the type of language that someone evaluating a teacher’s performance might use in summarizing a class. Table 4.3  Linda’s Field Notes, September 17 What Your See and Hear

Reflections

Teacher tells the class they can do a private consultation with her (tells the whole class they can meet with her). She lets the class know that when they email her, she will try to respond within 24 hrs. At 4:19, class dismissed.

Rosa makes herself available to students. Overall, Rosa constantly repeats instructions, assignment clarifications, and prompts. She walks around and asks if any student has questions.

Initially, Linda observed the class through a teacher’s eyes, as did Facundo and JoAnn. Laura’s comments about Rosa making herself available to students, constantly repeating instructions, and clarifying assignments and prompts sounded more like the notes of a classroom evaluator. Without a doubt, it can be hard to stop seeing any classroom

94  Learning to Do Research as a familiar place. It can feel almost effortless to slide into a teacher’s perspective. The reality is that it takes work to learn to see a classroom setting as something strange and for it to become a place of discovery. In her Letter to the Readers 2, Linda wrote, “I battled to not just jump straight into interpretation and to take off my teacher lenses. It’s hard not to think about the lesson plan or to focus on the misbehavior of some students.” Linda, JoAnn, and Facundo were novice researchers, but all of them were experienced teachers, and these two identities – one more established and one more emergent – were in tension throughout the course. Char wanted her comments on these early sets of field notes to help increase the student researchers’ analytical distance from what they were observing. At the same time, there are ethnographers who have negotiated a different kind of researcher identity, and that was something we talked about in class. C.J. Pascoe was a young-looking 30-year-old when she conducted an ethnographic study on masculinity among highschool-aged boys. In gathering her data, she performed what she called “a least adult identity,” in which she was “simultaneously like and not like the teens” (2011, p. 178) she was studying. Char, Kate, and Jair agreed that adopting that kind of identity seemed like an approach that might come later, after gaining more research experience. But we thought it was important that they were aware of how they might be perceived and how it could affect the data they gathered. At the end of Linda’s field notes, Char concluded by writing: So, these are the things I’d like you to work on: 1. 2. 3. 4.

Thick description Describing the Context Describing what you see and hear Using the right-hand side only for musings (you did that sometimes but other times you just put general observations there)

I look forward to seeing thick description from here on in! In her second Letter to the Readers, Linda responded to this feedback without resistance or confusion. She expressed a desire to follow our guidance, affirming: I am trying to write thick description in my field notes, because mine are currently light and more of a summary. I want to practice more observation and look for videos online or even observe at a mall as suggested in our text. I need more experience in observation, and I will continue to work on this.

Learning to Do Research 95 Table 4.4  Linda’s Field Notes, September 24 What Your See and Hear

Reflections

Students continue to print out assignments. Teacher is walking around. Teacher stands in front of the classroom with another student. I hear laughter on the other side of the room. I hear Spanish spoken in the back of the classroom. The teacher plays a video, but it doesn’t load properly, and only the audio plays.

Rosa is always walking around the room to help students. I hear laughter like I did the previous time as well. Spanish is spoken again as in the last observation. The teacher is not so tech savvy, but the students do not seem to mind. She asks for their help, and they give it.

In her second set of field notes, taken just a week after the first set, she was becoming more aware of general patterns in her field notes. While Linda’s observations were still thin, she was beginning to observe patterns, noting that, “Spanish is spoken again, as in the last observation.” Although she didn’t get to the detail of what students were using Spanish to do, she was beginning to notice repeated behaviors. When she wrote, “The teacher stands in front of the classroom with another student,” she neglected to describe why this was happening or explain who the student was. The notes were still quite light. In the remaining three sets of field notes that she completed, Linda decided not to use the double-entry format that separated the observation from the reflections. In a cover sheet for her third set of field notes, she wrote, “The tables were giving me trouble, and information kept moving, along with a lot of space at the end.” She was having trouble coordinating the spacing between the left-hand and right-hand sides of the table. Although Linda did not say that she was thinking about a classroom discussion we had had about ways to update double-entry field notes for the computer age or the discussion of this in our text, what she did was aligned with the textbook, which stated: We promote the double-entry field notes model as a tool for learning to separate your musings from your detailed description of what you see and hear. Once you have learned to separate the two kinds of perception, you can give up the double-entry model. It came from the time when the only option was to hand-write field notes. (Kaplan-Weinger & Ullman, 2015, p. 80) Instead of the double-entry format, Linda simply typed her observations and included her reflections throughout in italics, as was later

96  Learning to Do Research T: T: S: T: T: T: D:

Any questions? How many are more familiar with MLA? Some hands go up. Some with APA? Some hands go up. Is the PowerPoint on Blackboard? No, I’ll put it up. M is still on his phone. He hasn’t really looked up. I don’t want to see quote after quote. SANDwich or sandWICH? English or Spanish pronunciation? I said sandWICH. Like in Spanish, with the accent on the last syllable. SandWIIIIIICH! Emphasis on the last syllable. Students laugh.

Figure 4.1  Linda’s Field Notes, October 27

discussed in the text. In the following example, Linda used T to refer to the teacher (Rosa), M to refer to a student named Michael, S to refer to an unnamed student, and D to refer to a student named Dulce. In this instance, Rosa was explaining to the students how to use APA style for a scholarly paper, knowing that some students might be more familiar with MLA style, which is often taught in high schools in the region. This is an example of growth in Linda’s field notes. She documented the verbal behavior at a more micro-ethnographic level, which was a positive shift from summarizing. There was still work to be done, of course. When she wrote that “Some hands went up” in response to the instructor’s question about who was familiar with APA style, she neglected to note how many, and the same was true with those who knew about MLA style. She was able to describe the whole-class verbal behaviors, but she wasn’t yet connecting them to nonverbal behaviors. The same was true in terms of contextualizing the speech in relation to what was on the PowerPoint, which would have helped to explain how the word “sandwich” came up in a discussion of APA style. But to be sure, this was progress in terms of her learning to take field notes.

Identifying Ideologies In a class discussion in week 7 of the case study course, Linda, JoAnn, and Facundo excitedly told the class about an interview they had conducted with a student in Rosa’s class. They called a student they called Dulce because they thought she seemed sweet. They explained that Linda had asked Dulce, “What language would you prefer to use in class? Spanish? English? Both?” Dulce responded that she was more comfortable

Learning to Do Research 97 speaking Spanish, but she explained that “it would not be elegant” for her to speak Spanish in front of the whole class. The student researchers knew that Dulce frequently spoke Spanish with her classmates, but they had observed her use only English with her bilingual instructor, Rosa. Sometimes Rosa used Spanish when she spoke to individual students, and she frequently threw out a “Todo bien?” (“Is everything OK?”) or “Estás bien?” (“Are you OK?”) as she left their workstations. Students always nodded in the affirmative. This interview data, in combination with the observational data, led the class to discuss the role that language ideologies might be playing in the day-to-day life of this classroom. Hill (2008) defines language ideologies as “sets of interested positions about language that represent themselves as forms of common sense, that rationalize and justify the forms and functions of text and talk” (p. 34). When Jane Hill refers to languages having groups of interested positions, she is referring to the idea that no knowledge is neutral and that “interests are involved in the production of knowledge” (Pennycook, 1989, p. 595). A common language ideology is that of language purity. This is the notion that a language, especially a high-prestige language such as English, should remain “pure” and not include inflections from other, less prestigious language varieties, such as Spanish. That is often highly policed in school settings (Herrera-Rocha & de la Piedra, 2019). In El Paso, where Dulce and most Borderlands students went to high school, many school districts had transitional bilingual education programs that were intended to transition students out of using Spanish at all. Even dual-language programs with the stated goal of bilingualism and biliteracy tend to privilege English and employ the ideology of language purity (Herrera-Rocha, 2019). On a continuum of subtractive schooling (Valenzuela, 2005), these forms of bilingual education are intended to assimilate students into the dominant English language and the mainstream White culture while subtracting the Spanish language and Mexican culture from their repertoires and identities. García (2009) describes subtractive bilingual education as a framework that sees students’ bilingualism as a problem “and supports linguistic and cultural assimilation, having monoculturalism as a goal . . . Children come [to school] speaking one language, the school adds a second language, and children end up speaking the school language and losing their own language” (p.  116). When Dulce said it would not be elegant to speak in front of the class in Spanish, she seemed to be reflecting the belief that English is the only “proper” language of schooling. When Dulce called out “SandWIIIICH” in class after Rosa had pronounced the word with stress on the last syllable, as it is done in Spanish,

98  Learning to Do Research the student researchers understood that Dulce was mocking the instructor’s Spanish pronunciation. The first-year students’ language ideologies were some of the first things that Linda, JoAnn, and Facundo noted when they talked about their data. Their research team ended up focusing on language ideologies in the composition classroom for their conference presentations and their final manuscript for the course.

Overwhelmed by Data In his study of graduate students preparing to do advanced research, Prior (1998) describes what he calls “the multiplicity” of research and writing tasks. He breaks down the task of conducting research into multiple perspectives, using the categories of: How the professor communicated his expectations for form and content, how the students interpreted those expectations, how the assignments were negotiated, how the students undertook the assignments, and how the professor evaluated and responded to students’ final written texts. (p. 36) The real research and writing task, he argues, consists of the “densely textured totality” of these multiple perspectives (p.  37). This “densely textured totality” is an apt description of what Linda and her fellow doctoral students encountered in this foray into qualitative research and scholarly writing. While Prior’s (1998) focus is on graduate students in a seminar course, which involved listening to lectures, reading texts, and writing a seminar paper, what the student researchers were doing was far more complex. They were conducting and recordings interviews, doing participant observation, collecting artifacts, transcribing data, analyzing data, and drafting manuscripts. They did all this while they were learning the genres of oral academic presentations and the different kinds of scholarly writing for publication. These activities involve the simultaneous back-and-forth processes of working with data and developing a theoretical lens, practices that were new to Linda and all the student researchers.

Working as a Team Around week 9 in the first semester of the course, we asked the research teams to start a very initial data analysis, even though data collection was still underway. Linda, JoAnn, and Facundo began to meet outside class to start making sense of their data. They reviewed their interview transcripts and field notes, looking for emergent themes. At the same time,

Learning to Do Research 99 our class discussions began to focus on possible theoretical approaches for their analysis. In mid-October, we began preparing them for what we called their theory presentations. They needed to review the class readings and to read beyond assigned readings so that they could discuss the theoretical approaches they might use to analyze their data, at least initially. They presented their theoretical frameworks to the class, along with some data examples, to explain how the theoretical concepts might help them understand their data. In class, JoAnn and Linda, as well as Victoria, talked about how much they needed to learn about theory and data analysis. JoAnn referenced another professor in the program who had talked about the continual learning that is part of conducting research, saying: Dr. Saenz said that she is still learning. It’s like a to-do list, and it just keeps growing. But you enjoy the process, you enjoy the exploration, the discovery. That is what you do as scholars. . . . We look at the inbetween spaces. You are never done. Jo Ann’s back-and-forth pronoun use (i.e., from you to we back to you) seemed to signal her lack of certainty about her emerging identity as a scholar, and that was something we saw throughout the study. Victoria added positively, “That is all the fun. Everything is changing. Even when you get the answers, you get more questions.” Estévan responded with a concerned look, saying, “It feels overwhelming to me.” Linda reassured him, saying, “We just have to stay calm and not panic.” Indeed, there was a mixture of excitement and anxiety in this classroom conversation. As they began to analyze their data, Linda, JoAnn, and especially Facundo noticed in the field notes that Rosa, the bilingual instructor, used both English and Spanish in private conversations with her firstyear writing students. Facundo, who had a master’s in border history and had been trained to start with theory and then find data to support it, seized on the idea of using the concept of third space to analyze and explain their data. Drawing on Bhabha’s (1994) notion of third space as a metaphor for where cultures meet and where power dynamics and differences are played out in new ways, their team began applying this concept to their data. They looked at the standardized English-only curriculum of the first-year writing class and how it came into contact with the bilingual literacies that the students brought with them to the classroom. They began to think about third space as those side conversations in which Rosa and her students interacted in Spanish and English. In their theory presentation, Linda, JoAnn, and Facundo thought about Rosa and the bilingual students speaking Spanish as a transformative space in the classroom. They were grappling with what they meant by a transformative third space and how it might connect to their data.

100  Learning to Do Research In an early slide during this presentation, they explained the notion of hybridity like this:

Hybridity • • • •

Exists at multiple levels of learning environments (Gutiérrez, 2008) Negotiations of what is known in attempt to make sense of one’s identity in relation to prevailing notions of self and cultural practices (Gutiérrez, 2008) Not problematic, but seen as important cultural resources in children’s development (Cole, 1998) Drawing on various and multiple resources/ funds for meaning making in the world, work, oral and written texts (Moje, 2004)

Figure 4.2  Linda, JoAnn, and Facundo’s Hybridity Slide

Then they presented excerpts of data on slides with the heading “Where Do We See It?” with It referring to the third-space phenomenon. They included this one about their interviews:

Where Do We See It? • Interviews • Negotiating languages (all the three interviewees spoke Spanish as a first language) • Grisela and Dulce speak Spanish with classmates. • Grisela said, “Yes, it’s the affect of another world. You remember words in Spanish. I speak Spanish at home, and it’s the only language I speak there. It’s fun.” She shared that she speaks English at school. • Grisela’s grades were, at this point, 70, 78, and 77.

Figure 4.3  Linda, JoAnn, and Facundo’s “Where Do We See It?” Slide

In their last slide, they attempted to draw connections between theory and data:

Student

Classroom Practical/Theoretical

Teacher

Digital native Same seats Native Spanish-speakers Answers

Multitasking/IT, Librarian Space ownership Initiates/Listens Inverted classroom Politics

Digital Immigrant No seating chart Speaks Spanish Concedes not knowing

Figure 4.4  Linda, JoAnn, and Facundo’s Theory and Data Slide

Learning to Do Research 101 While they were developing their understanding of hybridity and its relation to the third space, when they tried to analyze their data, they got lost in the weeds. That data was indeed overwhelming, as Estévan had said. In our comments about their presentation, we encouraged their initial explorations of theory and data, as tentative as they were. We knew that in the next semester, they would practice identifying themes systematically. We also suggested that they think about which concepts might not be helpful. We reminded them to keep asking themselves how a theoretical idea might not help them interpret their data. In the words of Prior (1998), Linda, JoAnn, and Facundo were grappling with the “densely textured totality of multiple perspectives” (p.  37) involved in making sense of the data they were examining.

Becoming Presenters By the end of October, we suggested that the theory presentations they had just completed could inform the next writing assignment for the class, which was a proposal to present their research at an academic conference. We wanted this assignment to be authentic yet not too threatening, so we selected a conference that we had been to previously and that we knew was welcoming to graduate students. Because they were novice researchers, we understood the importance of their presenting original research in public as part of their disciplinary enculturation into their new Community of Practice (Casanave, 2002; Lave & Wenger, 1991). For Linda and all the students in our course, writing a conference proposal in response to a call for proposals (CFP) was a new experience. While many of them had presented at conferences focused on sharing pedagogical strategies, none had yet presented original research. To prepare them, we discussed in class what the CFP entailed and suggested an organization for the proposal. The CFP for this particular conference, the Ethnographic and Qualitative Research Conference (EQRC) that was going to be held in Las Vegas, Nevada, the following February, was open in terms of the research topic. It required that the research be ethnographic or qualitative in terms of method. The CFP read: We invite scholars to participate in the conference by presenting research projects among a broad spectrum of topics. Employment of traditional ethnographic and qualitative research projects provides the common thread for conference papers. . . . Submit a proposal that includes a title, an abstract of not more than 150 words. We scaffolded their proposal writing by responding to these questions: 1. Tell us about where the study is being conducted. 2. Who are the study participants?

102  Learning to Do Research 3. What are your research questions? 4. What are your data sources? 5. How are you thinking that you will interpret your data? Until this moment, their audience had consisted of their teammates, the whole class, their preceptor, and their professors. Now they had to expand the scope of their thinking to include an audience of conference organizers, who would evaluate their proposal with no knowledge of their research. While adding this new layer was challenging, we knew it was important that they begin to understand that through writing and presenting their research, they could successfully participate in the larger academic community, a crucial step in their becoming qualitative researchers. As Johns et al. (2006) note, a genre “represents a socially recognized way of learning language. . . . [I]t is through this recurrent use of conventionalized forms and communicative practices that individuals develop relationships, establish communities, and get things done” (p.  237). Char and Kate were explicit about how the conference proposals should be written, focusing in particular on specific rhetorical features. Char began the November 4 class, asking: So how do you write a proposal? Your title is really important. You want to pull people in with your title. You should explain what you’re going to address. It’s sort of like an advertisement for your paper, and it is common to have a quote that comes from your data, then there are often three – it’s like a magic number – three themes that may have to do with your topic, and also your theoretical framework. You also have to have keywords. They are important and should be conceptual. El Paso is not a keyword, but Latinx is. Josiah asked how many keywords there should be, and Char explained that three to five terms were common. “You want your proposal to be well written and interesting,” she explained. We showed the students two examples of proposals we had written. Linda and her teammates wrote three drafts of their conference proposal, revising each draft after we gave them feedback. In the first draft, they displayed their knowledge of theory. We thought that perhaps they were performing that knowledge, rather than using it to explain the data. In that first draft, they wrote: Our presentation juxtaposes the experience of both the teacher and students as a means to show the impact of positionality, experience, and funds of knowledge to understand the symbiotic relationship the teacher and students have upon the respective modes and means of identity negotiation with the physical space, the classroom.

Learning to Do Research 103 We responded by saying, “It sounds like you are getting to a question like this: What is the role of classroom language use in the production of an undergraduate composition course?” We were trying to help Linda and her teammates move away from jargon. They were dealing with lots of new terminology, and new terms seemed to be taking over their ideas. We told them to just talk about what they wanted to say. “What are the themes that are emerging from this project?” we asked. “Think about it in regular, everyday language first. Then draw on one theoretical concept.” Talking through their ideas helped. We followed up with this advice in our feedback on their first draft and told them what we wanted them to do in the next draft. “We’d like to see you talk about the questions, the setting, the data sources, and some initial ideas about what you’re seeing.” In other words, we gave them a process to follow and told them what the audience of conference organizers was expecting. We also gave them rhetorical tag lines common to this genre of writing, such as “Preliminary data analysis has revealed . . .” and “In our discussion, we will . . .” Our feedback was intended to be part of a supportive pedagogical network (Maher, Feldon, Timmerman,  & Chao, 2014) that would help Linda and the rest of the class learn this genre of writing. In their second draft of their conference proposal, Linda and her teammates followed the format we suggested. They began to talk about the research site and the research question. They used the question we had drawn out of their first, jargon-laden draft, and we encouraged them to go back to basics and think about topic sentences, which helped their paragraphs stick to one topic. They were still struggling with subjectmatter terminology and also with explaining their data. The following is the second draft of their conference proposal. Our comments and suggestions for word changes are in italics. Connections between language, space, and identities have been explored in K–12 research (e.g., Convertino, 2015); however, little research has explored this topic at the university level. In this project, we will present preliminary results from an ethnographic research project conducted at a midsize university on the US–Mexico border. The participants in this project included eleven students and the instructor of a university-level first-year writing course. The focus of our study is primarily to explore the interactions between the instructor and students in creating spaces for language experimentation and expression within a writing program that focuses on teaching standard written English. Our overarching research question: What is the role of language use in the production of classroom space in an undergraduate composition course? Over the course of a semester, a variety of data was collected. Data sources included interviews with students and the instructor, participant observations, and artifact collection from

104  Learning to Do Research Blackboard (e.g., discussions, messages, and all course assignments via an web-integrated platform), along with instructor feedback provided on student assignments and projects. Preliminary data analysis revealed the following themes in relation to the interactions between the instructor and students as it pertains to the creation of space for language experimentation and expression: 1) the use of classroom space by the instructor as she initiates and responds to classroom interactions, 2) the inclusion of non-academic examples to assist students in bridging knowledge they possess and bring to the classroom with academic/official knowledge and content, and 3) students’ ideologies regarding the use of Spanish while at home and/or in other unofficial spaces as appropriate, in contrast to their belief about the use of only English in academic and official spaces. In this classroom, there can be seen a merging and co-construction of knowledge through the use of outside sources, physical space, and the negotiation of roles Why don’t you mention language ideologies here since the other two (outside sources, physical space) were given as two of your preliminary findings. Or is the negotiation of roles a fourth finding? What roles are you referring to? to create, encourage, and aid in academic learning. In their third and final draft of the conference proposal, which was accepted by the conference organizers, they implemented the recommendations that are in italics, and they proofread the proposal. In these cycles of drafting and revising, they were beginning to master the proposal genre. Being able to produce a compelling conference proposal is the beginning of the social, relational activity of attending and presenting research at an academic conference. We knew that the decisions for inclusion in this particular conference came quickly, so by the time they wrote their last Letter to the Readers, all the students had received news that their papers had been accepted. Linda wrote this in her fifth Letter to the Reader: I am really excited about attending this conference! I  am glad we will all be going. . . . Although I have some experience presenting at conferences, I am nervous about this one. I think when you really care about something, you become more nervous. I  will take it in stride, but I am confident we will do well. Each member of my team contributes something different. We work well together. This class has allowed me to begin and share my research with others. It will be an invaluable experience.

Listening to the Data Through her self-reflections about conducting research in her Letters to the Readers, along with the conference proposal and their

Learning to Do Research 105 research group theory presentation, Linda was inching toward her new identity. But when it came time to draft an article-length manuscript, she wrote in her fifth Letter to the Readers, “I am hesitant to go through all the data. It will be intensive, but the manuscript at the end will be worth it.” She emphasized this point by writing, “I am a little nervous about the enormous amount of data to go through. It’s overwhelming.” Perhaps because of our warnings about not making premature assumptions about the data, she wanted to be sure to, in her words, “let the data speak to me, instead of trying to push into a particular theory.” Perhaps because of these two issues – the amount of data and the need to let the data speak for itself  – the manuscript draft that Linda and her teammates turned in at the end of the first semester was fragmentary and choppy. It included excerpts from of the group’s previous writings and their conference proposal, along with some new material. In particular, too many selections from their field notes and interviews were included. The explanations of their data were not yet developed, and they hadn’t responded to their research question. The different selections of their data that they inserted tended to bring up ideas that were only tangentially related to the research question. Several key concepts were not fully thought out. In particular, the notion of classroom space being produced by language use was fuzzy. The last two sentences in this excerpt, which we have put in italics, show how they were continuing to grapple with third-space theory. They wrote: This study explores the formation of student identities in the US– Mexico border in relation to a third-space analytical framework (Soja, 1996). However, upon entering existing conversation about identity construction in the classroom, this study focuses on the role of language use (language choice and translanguaging) and teacher identity in the co-construction of identities in the classroom. We consider the impact (or what is the final result) when student experience (first space), teacher experience (second space), all comes into contact/interaction in the classroom (the third space) with one another and the result of this intersection of spaces. This study, however, focuses on the process and not (necessarily) the result of experience and space interacting and intersecting. Granted, the result of the certain encounters will most likely produce varying outcomes. However, by considering the process or a part of the process within a thirdspace dynamic, it gives us a chance to see that aspects of third space are not necessarily static components within a theoretical framework. In fact, attention to parts of the whole reveal that said parts can be active agents or converted into catalyst of change that impact the outcome of three spaces interacting or intersecting.

106  Learning to Do Research Later in the draft, Linda, JoAnn, and Facundo drew on their field notes to give a specific example of the third space in the classroom. They wrote: As an example of the three spaces interacting, the instructor was in the middle of a lecture explaining how, when, and why in-text citation works in an essay. As she writes a sample paragraph on the board, in mid-paragraph while writing, she comments aloud that in-text citations work in layers. And, still writing, she continues to explain that as one writes a sentence, said citation should be layered within the paragraph like a sandwich that is layered with various components to the user’s likes. However, it is at this moment, she pauses, and laughs aloud and begins to talk about how her daughters find it funny how she pronounces the word sandwich. Close to the end of their draft, the students expressed a clearer notion of the connection between their data and third-space theory, writing: Students have language ideologies that are contradicted by their behaviors, which merge with the teacher’s identity to co-construct a third space. In this third space, students defy the typical classroom environment that negates their knowledge. The students assert their identities in certain times and places through a combination of language use and teacher identity. We perceive connecting forces of language (saying, doing, and being) in the co-construction of student and teacher identities (Gee, 2014). The teacher discloses her native–Spanish speaker status and encourages the co-construction of identities in this certain time and place. Therefore, our study draws from research focusing on identity, language use, and third space. The emerging nature of this draft was simply a part of the inquiry process. As Kamler and Thomson (2014) point out, “We write to work out what we think. It’s not that we do the research and then know. It’s that we write our way to understanding through analysis” (p. 3). In fact, this manuscript draft demonstrated how far Linda and her teammates had progressed in terms of seeing patterns in their data, especially those relating to language ideologies and classroom power dynamics. They had developed significantly in their ability to use a theoretical concept such as the third space to help them better understand what they had seen.

The Process of Becoming Linda’s contributions to this manuscript demonstrated what she referred to several times in her reflections on her interviews and field notes, which was that she identified with the students, the space of the composition

Learning to Do Research 107 classroom, and their bilingual Spanish and English language practices. In all the student interviews she conducted, she began by asking them to choose the language for the interview. This usually led her to ask more questions about what they thought about speaking Spanish in their firstyear writing classroom. Most of the students said that they thought Spanish was not appropriate for the classroom, yet Linda’s field notes clearly showed that the students did, in fact, use Spanish in the classroom. Spanish was commonly used in one-on-one conversations with their bilingual instructor, Rosa, as well as with their bilingual classmates. Linda was starting to see that interviews and observation together, along with the course documents she analyzed, could help her get a deeper understanding of what was happening in the classroom. In the focus-group interviews, Linda reminded us that as a child she had spoken Spanish at home, but as soon as she started school, it was English only. That meant there was no space for Spanish at school. In the manuscript draft, Linda and her teammates wrote that “the students struggle with contradictory and often hidden ideologies regarding their beliefs about when they should use English and when they should use Spanish.” This was a struggle that Linda had been through herself. While not alluding to her own experience in the manuscript draft, she was very aware of what the students she was observing and interviewing might be going through. At the same time, she and her teammates did not offer an extended explanation of the students’ “contradictory and often hidden ideologies” regarding language use in the classroom. This would be something she and her teammates would work out in future drafts of their manuscript.

Where You Want to Go Throughout the case study course, Linda consistently expressed her enthusiasm about learning to conduct qualitative research, along with some trepidation about the enormity of making sense of the volumes of data they had gathered. Doing participant observation and interviewing students, not to mention presenting at an academic conference and drafting a manuscript, while at the same time holding down a full-time teaching job, was exhausting. That same semester, she was also taking a course in quantitative research methods, another demanding course. Still, despite this demanding schedule, she earned an A in the case study course and a B in the quantitative research course. In classroom discussions, her course writing, and the interviews we conducted with her, she reflected: I think education is about giving back. Research is about questioning. And now sometimes, especially in this day and age, people say, you are dreaming, and it’s not possible to change the world. But you

108  Learning to Do Research can, you can. It’s slow. It happens in small steps. The research that you do can help better the community, better the people. I  try to think of this as I continue my education and as I work. That’s what it’s about. After the case study course, Linda started taking one class a semester while working full time. This seems to be a rhythm that works for her. She’s not in a hurry. Linda’s strong sense of purpose, as well as the congruence between the work she is doing in the doctoral program and her goals, kept her steady on her own educational journey. She was staying calm.

Note 1. We selected the pseudonym Linda because it is a common name in both Spanish and English. And since Linda was often mistaken for being White, it was important to use a pseudonym that allowed for that. In Spanish, Linda means beautiful.

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110  Learning to Do Research Pascoe, C. J. (2011).  Dude, you’re a fag: Masculinity and sexuality in high school. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Pennycook, A. (1989). The concept of method, interested knowledge, and the politics of language teaching. TESOL Quarterly, 23(4), 589–618. Prior, P. (1998/2009). Writing/disciplinarity: A sociohistoric account of literate activity in the academy. New York: Lawrence Erlbaum/Routledge. Relaño Pastor, A. M. (2007). On border identities. ‘Transfronterizo’ students in San Diego. Diskurs Kindheits-und Jugendforschung, 2(3), 263–277. Schwartz-Marin, E.,  & Cruz-Santiago, A. (2016). Pure corpses, dangerous citizens: Transgressing the boundaries between experts and mourners in the search for the disappeared in Mexico.  Social Research: An International Quarterly, 83(2), 483–510. Soja, E. W. (1996). Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and other real-and-imagined places. Oxford: Blackwell. Tessman, D.,  & Koyama, J. (2019). Borderland parentocracy: Mexican parents and their transfronterizo children. Journal of Latinos and Education, 18(4), 328–339. Ullman, C. (2015). Performing the nation: Unauthorized Mexican migration and the politics of language use and the body along the US  – Mexico border. Ethnos, 80(2), 223–247. Valenzuela, A. (2005). Subtractive schooling, caring relations, and social capital in the schooling of US–Mexican youth. Beyond silenced voices: Class, Race, and Gender in United States Schools, 83–94. Wee, L. (2018). Standards in English. In P. Seargeant, A. Hewings, & S. Pihlaja (Eds.),  The Routledge handbook of English language studies (pp.  93–106). New York: Routledge. Yanagisako, S., & Delaney, C. (1995). Naturalizing power. In S. Yanagisako & C. Delaney (Eds.), Naturalizing power: Essays in feminist cultural analysis. New York: Routledge. Zentella, A. C. (2016). “Socials,” “Poch@ s,” “Normals” y los demás. In H. S. Alim, J. R. Rickford, & A. F. Ball (Eds.), Raciolinguistics: How language shapes our ideas about race (pp. 327–346). New York: Oxford University Press.

5 Building Identity as a Scholar and Researcher Identity Work, Impostor Syndrome, and Belonging

When Gloria1 entered the doctoral program in Rhetoric and Composition Studies at Borderlands University, she was 39. Already an accomplished playwright and filmmaker, she was also just starting a tenure-track position as an assistant professor of communication studies at Rio Grande Community College. She identifies as Chicana, a woman of Mexican American heritage from the border, who is deeply connected to her culture and who works to advance social justice for her people. The third youngest of 11 children, Gloria grew up in a small town outside El Paso that is commonly considered a colonia,2 or an unincorporated community with limited infrastructure. Gloria said her parents moved to Chaparral, New Mexico, because they liked having more land and wanted to live in a smaller community. The median family income there in 2018 was $25,559 (U.S. Census, 2019), although there were some more affluent residents, and most of them worked on the nearby air force base. “My family wasn’t poor,” Gloria explained, “but money was tight. A gallon of milk had to last our large family for a week.” She shared: Milk was only for cereal in the morning. It’s not like during the day, if you had a craving for milk you could just go and drink it, because my mom would be like, “Que estás haciendo? Don’t you realize that’s all we have, and it has to last the whole week?” But Gloria didn’t think of the lack of milk – or money in general – as deprivation. Instead, she understood it as a way for her to develop self-control.

Family Beginnings Gloria was greatly influenced by her father, a former marine and Korean War veteran. He liked to tell his children about his experiences in the marines as a way to teach them about history – both the family history and that of the nation. While he was in the service, he and the other

112  Building Identity as a Scholar and Researcher Mexican American marines had to enter through the back door of restaurants, while the White soldiers sauntered in through the front. Those experiences of inequality and humiliation in the marines stuck with him. While he described a segregated military in the 1950s, racism continues to permeate the U.S. military, despite the common saying that the only color in the military is green (i.e., the uniforms). Women and people of color are less likely to be promoted, are more likely die in combat, and are commonly sexually assaulted. Frequently, they receive substandard health care and experience a different justice system than do White men (Burke & Espinoza, 2012). Half of all people of color in the service report they have seen or experienced White nationalism and racism in their ranks (Shane, 2020). Thinking about her father, Gloria explained, “Marines will tell you they never retire. Once a marine, always a marine.” Gloria shared in class that it was normal for her father tie a rope around her waist, attach the other end to the back of his truck, and drive around to make her run faster. He did athletic training with all eleven children this way, sometimes with two or three of them tied to the truck at a time. The class was surprised by this image. But again, Gloria was grateful for the experience “because it taught me discipline and hard work. All of these are the things that we value: integrity, honor, and sticking to your guns.” Her father always said that when they were around other people, they had to be on their best behavior. “We had to be respectful of everybody, acknowledge other people by looking them in the eye, and always shake their hands.” Her father taught them that when they had a job to do, it was essential that they follow policies and procedures. She jokingly said, “Being raised by a marine made me into a marine too.” Her father was the family breadwinner, an independent contractor in the construction industry who, according to Gloria, “only worked for himself his whole life.” She explained that except for the military, “He never had a boss, and everyone mostly just paid him in cash.” He had different clients, including those who were wealthy, as well as those of more humble means. “He could do everything, electrical, plumbing, painting, carpeting, you name it.” He would take the children to his jobs so they could help him out, and that’s how Gloria learned how to put up wallpaper and cut tile, both valuable skills. For the most part, they lived on what he earned each week, and they had just enough. With only one car and thirteen people – and with her father as the only driver – it could be complicated to do things like drive to El Paso for groceries, see a doctor, or attend to other necessities. But they worked it out. Gloria went to elementary school in Chaparral, but she had to be bused to middle and high school, which was an hour-long trip each way. She told us, “We would catch the bus at 7:00 AM in the morning when it was dark, and on the bus, you would see everybody having their breakfast, doing their makeup, doing their homework, or just sleeping

Building Identity as a Scholar and Researcher 113 because the drive took a whole hour.” Like many families in Chaparral, Gloria’s family was closely tied to their relatives in Mexico. While her father had grown up in El Paso on the U.S. side of the border, Gloria’s mother was from a small town in the Mexican state of Chihuahua. After leaving an abusive early marriage, her mother moved to Ciudad Juárez and got a job working for a family in El Paso. It was on that job that she met Gloria’s father, who worked for that family as well. Her mother mainly speaks Spanish, and Gloria and her siblings spoke mostly Spanish at home, although she spoke more English with her father. Gloria and her family would regularly cross the border to spend time with their family in Mexico. Crossing the border was easier when she was growing up than it is now. It was even easier when her father was growing up in El Paso in the 1940s, as he could simply wave to a border patrol agent as he walked from Ciudad Juárez into El Paso, and the agent would wave back. While he was able to walk across the border, since then many people have had to swim. The Rio Grande3 river marks a part of the border between Mexico and the United States, and wetback, a derogatory term for Mexican migrants, was derived from the image of people wading or swimming across the Rio Grande to enter the United States without documents. In the early 1950s, the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) instituted an immigration policy actually called Operation Wetback, which deported more than one million people, including many who were U.S. citizens of Mexican descent (García, 1980). During this time of mass Mexican deportation, the Bracero Program was still active, a deeply fraught binational government program that gave legal permission to Mexican agricultural workers to take in crops while the U.S. was fighting in WWII. At the time, U.S. farmers still favored workers outside the Bracero Program, as their labor was even cheaper. “But back in the 1940s,” Gloria laughingly told us, “Border patrol agents were more like lifeguards.” Now the border between El Paso and Ciudad Juárez is a profoundly militarized site of political contestation, because of the racist anti-immigration policies that dominate the U.S. political landscape. As is common in la frontera, Gloria experienced languages and identities as highly fluid (Bejarano, 2005). When she was a child, she thought of herself as Hispanic (Bishop  & Vargas, 2014). And while 85  percent of the population of Chaparral, New Mexico, is classified as Hispanic by the U.S. government (U.S. Census, 2019), there are many ways that people identify themselves. While she grew up speaking both Spanish and English, her schooling was entirely in English, even though most of her teachers were Latinx. This shifting between English and Spanish is common on the border (García, 2009), as people in bilingual communities use all of the linguistic resources at their disposal, which means they translanguage, or mix languages.

114  Building Identity as a Scholar and Researcher When she visited Mexico, however, she wouldn’t be Hispanic anymore because, to her Mexican relatives, Gloria was American. Although she was born and raised on the U.S. side of the border, Gloria didn’t see herself this way. In high school, she became more aware of her Hispanic identity, noting “I started applying for scholarships, then all of a sudden, my counselor was like, you have to apply for this Hispanic scholarship. I was like, ‘OK, I’m Hispanic.’ ” She would have another and very impactful identity shift when she entered college.

Literacy Sponsors Gloria told us that she was “always into storytelling.” Even before she went to kindergarten, she would write letters to imaginary people, and she and her mother would walk to the mailbox at the end of their driveway to give them to the letter carrier. In first grade, she wrote stories about dogs jumping out windows. Her teacher, concerned about what this might mean, called her parents. They chuckled, explaining that Gloria had simply been watching the TV cartoon Scooby Doo. Her father laughingly said, “That’s my daughter. It’s just what she does.” Both her mother and her first grade teacher acted as literacy sponsors, a phenomenon described by Brandt (2009) as “any agents, local or distant, concrete or abstract, who enable, support, teach, model, as well as recruit, regulate, suppress, or withhold literacy  – and gain advantage by it in some way” (p. 25). Frequently, it’s teachers who act as literacy sponsors, but they also can be people from any part of society who aid in a child’s literacy learning. Literacy sponsors can be friends, family members, religious figures, coworkers, supervisors, or fellow students. In this case, literacy is broadly defined to include formal, informal, and multimodal reading and writing. Literacy sponsorship is ideologically infused, with sponsors often determining who gets access to literacy and how much assistance they receive. Typically, people feel indebted to their literacy sponsors and mention them frequently when they recall their early years (Brandt, 1998, 2009). Such was the case with Gloria, who, when asked about her experiences growing up, told us about the people who had encouraged her to believe in herself as a storyteller and writer. In her words, “There are just very different people in my life who have always embraced my storytelling and nurtured it and in some way pointed me in a certain direction.” One prominent literacy sponsor was her fourth grade teacher, Mrs. Michaels, who typed up her stories into little books and helped Gloria revise them. “She would tell me to think of a different way to say something or be more descriptive,” Gloria recalled. Then there was her sixth grade teacher, who got her to write for the school newspaper. “He had me go to different classrooms and interview people. It was so

Building Identity as a Scholar and Researcher 115 cool,” she enthused. In middle school, the cheerleading coach acted as a literacy sponsor, encouraging her to create choreography and write cheerleading chants. In high school, it was her journalism teacher, who selected Gloria as the editor of both the school newspaper and the school yearbook. Gloria also was part of a small group of students who would produce a news video that was shown to the whole school every morning. “We had our own little set, our own cameras to use. We had to write the scripts.” In high school, Gloria learned that her work as a journalist had the power to effect change. With the encouragement of her principal  – another literacy sponsor – Gloria and another student created a video about the poor conditions in their school cafeteria, which had been constructed out of an old military barracks with a very low ceiling. They went to the state capitol and presented the video to their elected representatives to try to get the cafeteria renovated. It took time, but their video made it happen. “I learned that my video made a difference.” She smiled. Perhaps most pivotal of all her literacy sponsors was her high school guidance counselor. This counselor helped her apply to colleges and guided her through scholarship applications. Before this, no one in her family had ever been to college or talked to Gloria about getting a degree. When the guidance counselor suggested she apply to college during her junior year, Gloria said, “What are you talking about? There’s no way I can go to college. We can’t afford it.” The counselor explained that if she received scholarships, she would be able to attend college regardless of how much it cost. With the guidance counselor walking her through every step of the process, Gloria applied to ten universities across the United States. The counselor encouraged Gloria to ask for donations from local businesspeople to pay for the application fees, and she helped Gloria with the paperwork that she needed to fill out. A neighbor served as another literacy sponsor by showing Gloria how to write the personal essay required for the applications.

From Hispanic to Chicana Months later, Gloria’s decision letters from the ten universities started showing up in the mailbox. Since the only place in her house where there was privacy was the bathroom, she would go there and lock the door before opening each letter. After several rejections, she received a letter from the University of Minnesota saying that not only had she been accepted, but she was also receiving a full scholarship. How could I say no? I remember being so nervous when I gave the letter to my dad. He read it and said, “Como vamos a pagar por esto?”

116  Building Identity as a Scholar and Researcher (“How are we going to pay for this?”) Didn’t you read it? I  got a scholarship! But he just didn’t want me to go. He was struggling with me leaving. But I didn’t know that then. Her mother, in contrast, thought Gloria should go, but she only said this in private, because she didn’t want to openly contradict her husband. At that time, Gloria had no idea where Minnesota was. She couldn’t find it on a map. “I didn’t even know where I was going. And I didn’t know that it was cold there.” Winters in Minnesota are frigid, ranking just after Alaska (and sometimes North Dakota) in terms of U.S. states with the lowest wintertime temperatures. Her father refused to drive her to the airport, so a neighbor drove her instead. It was the first time she had ever flown on an airplane or been away from home – at 17. Gloria recollected that “I had to go to Minnesota to learn about who I was.” Her transition to college was eased a bit by her participation in a summer orientation program for new students of color. It was the first time she had interacted with Black and Asian students, as her hometown of Chaparral was majority Latinx. She was excited to meet new people. But when the fall semester began, she realized that almost all the other students in her classes were White. She lost touch with some of the new friends she had made in the summer, and she wasn’t prepared for how new everything would feel – the classes, the landscape, and being around so many White people. “That first semester was when I  realized the world is not Hispanic.” She was especially unprepared for the weather, having brought only a light jacket to a city where people wear parkas almost seven months of the year. Fortunately, a counselor from the African American Resource Center took her aside and asked if she had winter clothing. When Gloria showed her the light jacket she had, the counselor said, “Sweetheart, I am taking you shopping.” She and Gloria went to the Burlington Coat Faculty, and the counselor taught her about winter clothes. Gloria was able to pay for the new winter clothes with her scholarship money. She explained: She taught me about what material was best, what was water resistant, what was comfortable and lightweight, and also what boots and socks to wear. She taught me to wear layers. When I got back to my room, I put it all in my closet, thinking “When will I ever use this?” Then one day, I woke up in my dorm room, and this bright white light was coming through the curtains. I thought, “What’s going on?” All of a sudden, it went all white. It was thick, deep snow. I went to my closet and got all of my layers out. Separated from her family, her culture, and the world that she had known, struggling to cope with the cold weather, Gloria became sick.

Building Identity as a Scholar and Researcher 117 Her mother wasn’t there to make her soup or give her medicine. Her friends gave her a humidifier, which helped. But she really wanted to go home. She remembered, “I kept saying that I wanted to go home. Why am I here? But my friends and professors kept telling me I had to stay. So I did. And I’m really glad I did.” And then her life changed. In her very first semester the University of Minnesota, she took a Chicano studies class. “I didn’t become Chicana until I went to college and started taking Chicano studies courses. I had to go to Minnesota to learn about who I was.” She began spending time with new friends, and soon she met Tony, who was studying computer animation at the nearby Art Institute of Minneapolis. He would later become her husband. Before taking that first Chicano studies course, Gloria had called herself Hispanic or Mexican American. Hispanic is a term that was adopted by the U.S. Census Bureau during the Nixon administration to refer to people “from any Spanish-speaking country of the Caribbean, Central, South America, or even Spain” (Dávila, 2012, p. 39). And Mexican American refers to nationality, invoking one’s heritage alongside official citizenship status. Dávila (2012) notes that both activists and scholars have long problematized the term Hispanic, noting the contradiction of categories that put Latin American, U.S.-born, and even European in the same category. By embracing a Chicana identity, Gloria was identifying with the collective pride and history of women of Mexican American descent who are politically and personally aligned with their people and the struggle for equality. Historically, Chicana/o has been used derisively by affluent Mexican Americans to refer to working-class Mexican Americans (Delgado Bernal, Elenes, Godinez, & Villenas, 2006). The history of this meaning of Chicana is reflected in a conversation that Gloria had with her father while she was in college. She recounted: When I started using Chicana in my vocabulary, he was freaked out a little bit. He said, “You’re going to get in trouble.” For him it was a dangerous thing to be. He said, “You have to be careful. You’re going to get shot.” During the Chicana/o civil rights movement in the 1960s and 1970s, activists transformed Chicana/o into a term that signified ethnic and cultural pride (Pérez, 1999). Just one of the accomplishments of the Chicana/o civil rights movement was the creation of Chicana/o studies programs that were developed in universities across the country, even in very White states like Minnesota. Chicana/o studies, like other academic programs under the ethnic studies banner in the United States (e.g., African American studies; Asian studies; Native American studies; Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality studies) is usually very interdisciplinary. For Gloria, that meant she took courses in Chicana/o history, art, and

118  Building Identity as a Scholar and Researcher literature, and what she was learning greatly influenced her sense of identity and purpose. In addition to majoring in Chicana/o studies and broadcast journalism, she minored in drama. Along the way, she had an inspiring teacher in her documentary filmmaking class. “So I  started gravitating more toward the fiction side and not so much toward journalism.” While still an undergraduate, she wrote a play that was performed by a college theater group at the University of Minnesota. One of her professors urged her to enter it into the prestigious Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival. When her play, Father’s Shadow/Sombra del Padre won the prize, she received the honor of attending a symposium at the Eugene O’Neill Center in Connecticut as a student fellow. At one luncheon, she ended up sitting at a table with Mel Brooks, the famed comedian and filmmaker, and renowned playwrights August Wilson and Edward Albee. At the time, since theater was only her minor, she didn’t know who they were.

Finding Mentors After earning her bachelor’s degree at Minnesota, she interned for CBS News in Minneapolis, an experience that made her see how tokenism works in media. She pitched a story to her producers about covering a Cinco de Mayo celebration in a Latinx neighborhood on the city’s west side, and she made plans with a photographer to film it. She wanted to focus on the Latinx community as well as the history of Cinco de Mayo in Minneapolis, a commemoration of Mexican armed forces overthrowing French rule on May 5, 1862. Although not a major holiday in Mexico, Cinco de Mayo has become a celebration of Mexican culture in the United States. But instead of using her footage for the story, the producer chose something from the San Diego Zoo that featured children hitting a piñata (i.e., a papier mâché figure filled with candy that is part of birthday celebrations in Mexico). Although piñatas have nothing to do with Cinco de Mayo, that didn’t matter to her producer. She felt like a cultural outsider, and she knew she had to find another path. Disillusioned with broadcast journalism but knowing that she was a storyteller at her core, she applied to the MFA program in film and media studies at Columbia University in New York City. She liked the program’s focus on narrative storytelling, and she was accepted there with a scholarship in 2003. While she was in this renowned program, she worked as a teaching artist and a teaching assistant throughout her course of study. She and her husband Tony, who is an animator, moved to New York City together, and though money was short, they both thrived. One of her professors, Jamal Joseph, a Black Cuban activist, poet, playwright, and filmmaker, took the two of them under his wing. Joseph had

Building Identity as a Scholar and Researcher 119 joined the Black Panthers as a youth and was incarcerated at the federal penitentiary in Leavenworth, Kansas, while awaiting trial on trumpedup charges that were ultimately dropped. While he was in prison, he earned his bachelor’s from the University of Kansas (cum laude) and later became a full professor at Columbia University. Jamal got Gloria a job at the Repertory Theater in New York City, and among other things, he taught her what she called survival skills. She described it this way: One time he told me I needed to get in a cab and meet him at his office  – now. I  was OK with that, but when I  left my apartment, I didn’t see any cabs, so I decided to take the bus. When I arrived, he said, “Did I just see you get off of a bus?” I said yes. He said, “What were your instructions? I told you to take a cab. Why didn’t you do that?” I said I didn’t see a cab, and I saw the bus coming, so I took it. He said, “What if this had been an emergency? What if somebody was dying? What if we were being attacked?” He went into Black Panther mode, saying, “You follow instructions. When someone tells you to do something, you to do it.” He was so right. I learned that you have to trust your leadership and what they tell you. I thought, “Oh my God. He’s so much like my dad.” Gloria’s mentors are important to her, and she values and trusts them. In fact, when she talked to us about her background and experiences, she often organized her thoughts around the series of mentors who had helped her in her educational journey. Her father, Jamal Joseph, her teachers in elementary school and high school – all of them had served as mentors. If it hadn’t been for her high school guidance counselor, she never could have imagined that she could go to college The director of the African American Resource Center at the University of Minnesota was another mentor. Mentoring matters. When you’re the first in your family to go to college, mentoring can make the difference between earning a degree and dropping out. This is especially true when mentors and mentees come from similar racial and ethnic backgrounds (Berg, 2016; Figueroa  & Rodriguez, 2015; González, 2006). Most of Gloria’s mentors have been Latinx, Black, or both. Gloria has loved writing and storytelling all her life. “There have been very different people throughout my life who have pointed me in the right direction,” she reflected. “I am where I am today because of my mentors.”

You Can’t Go Home Again . . . Or Can You? After graduating with a master’s degree in documentary filmmaking from Columbia University, one of the best schools in the country to do

120  Building Identity as a Scholar and Researcher that kind of work, Gloria and Tony moved to El Paso, because she felt deeply connected to the border. Gloria wanted to make films about border life, and Tony wanted to continue his career as a comic book creator, something he could do anywhere. When she returned to the border, Gloria found that her family’s reaction to her education and accomplishments was mixed. Going away to college had separated her from her siblings. Her sisters led more traditional lives that focused on their husbands and children. “Aren’t you tired of living in such a small apartment? When are you going to get a real job?” they would ask. She occasionally went to a Catholic church with her mother, and though she was raised Catholic, what she calls being a “Crib Catholic,” as an adult, she couldn’t believe in the institution of the Catholic Church. However, she found that she still believed in the creed and shared that she is on her own spiritual journey. Fortunately, her relationship with her younger brother has remained strong. He was the only person in the family who encouraged her to pursue her dreams and didn’t see her as stuck up. But spending time with him was a challenge, as he was incarcerated. Gloria wrote a play based on the letters he wrote her while he was in prison. For a long time, she had wanted to teach at the university level. Several of her college professors had told her that that she belonged in the professoriate and needed to get a Ph.D. When she was an undergraduate, the Chicana/o studies faculty at Minnesota had invited her to teach a course during her last semester, an uncommon distinction. Everything was pointing her toward university teaching and earning a Ph.D. In 2008, she was given a class to teach in the communication and film studies department at Rio Grande Community College. Soon, she was invited to teach a class in Chicana/o studies at Borderlands University, also as an adjunct. Before she knew it, she was teaching eight classes a semester and earning poverty wages. Tony was working at the Borderlands University library and barely getting by as well. The two of them knew they had to do something different, so they moved to Tony’s hometown, Chicago. Gloria was selected for an internship at the Gene Siskel Film Center at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she cataloged films, and Tony was hired at Microsoft. While it was something new and exciting for both of them, these demanding jobs left them with no time to work on their art. Then, in 2013, Gloria’s father died suddenly, and the couple went back to El Paso. Gloria was hired again at Rio Grande Community College, but this time as a tenure-track faculty member, which made a big difference in terms of finances and stability. She also taught as an adjunct again in the Chicano studies department at Borderlands, but this time, she found support for her playwriting. Her play, Escaping Juárez, focused on the

Building Identity as a Scholar and Researcher 121 murders of thousands of women (femicides) in Ciudad Juárez and was staged at the university theater. Things were starting to come together for her. Six years after earning her master’s degree, she decided to apply to doctoral program in Rhetoric and Composition Studies at Borderlands. Given her background in filmmaking and Chicana/o studies, you might think that she would be pursuing a Ph.D. in one of those fields. But even though Borderlands University has 22 doctoral programs now, as opposed to the solitary doctoral program it once had in mining engineering, it still doesn’t have a doctoral program in Chicana/o studies or film and media studies. But when she looked at the course offerings, courses in critical race theory (CRT), digital rhetoric, and cultural rhetorics started to look promising to her. She made an appointment with the program director and saw that the inherently interdisciplinary nature of rhetoric as a field would allow her the flexibility to do the kind of work she wanted to do. After being accepted into the doctoral program, Gloria enrolled in the case study course in her first semester. She had been able to come home again. She was different from who she was when her neighbor took her to the airport to start college, and she got on a plane for the first time. And El Paso was different for her too. She now had the security of a tenure-track position at the community college, and she was in a position to mentor her own students, both at the community college and at the university. She was with her supportive husband, Tony, and her brother was nearby. When she walked into the case study class, she was open to learning and willing to be patient about the process of learning to do ethnographic research.

Becoming a Researcher Soon after the two-semester course came to an end, Gloria said this: At some point, I  know I’ll be able to mix film with rhetoric, but I haven’t figured out just how yet. I’m hoping that in two or three years, that the light bulb is just going to go off, and I am going know it’s coming together. I  feel very strongly about it, that I  made the right choice. While reflecting on her scholarly trajectory after finishing her first year in the doctoral program, Gloria also demonstrated self-awareness about her own academic writing, noting that she thought of herself as being in the “mimicking stage” in terms of writing when she took the case study course. In spite of her many successes with plays, scripts, and creative

122  Building Identity as a Scholar and Researcher projects, she shared, “I  don’t feel like I  have found my own voice in rhetoric yet. Hopefully, that will happen in the next three or four years.” In fact, many scholars don’t feel they’ve found that voice until they are well into their careers. One of the notable aspects of these comments is that they occurred after she had been in her doctoral program for a year. Coming from a different field – film studies – Gloria needed to learn about research and develop a new approach to writing. That meant things like how to collect ethnographic data, how to cite sources, and how to develop an argument with data. But when she looked back on her experiences in that first year, she focused more on her developing identity as a researcher and writer than she did on learning particular skills. When she evaluated her own scholarly voice as still in development, she was describing the long, often uneven transition from student to researcher. Kamler and Thomson (2014) write: Making the transition to “scholar/academic” is about . . . taking up a position of expertise and authority. The doctoral researcher often has to adopt this new expert stance before feeling ready to do so. The transition can cause some anxiety. Am I going to get there? Is it ever going to happen? Am I ever not going to feel like a fraud or impostor? (p. 16) We have mentioned the impostor syndrome a number of times throughout this book (Clance & Imes, 1978), and there is a lot of evidence that it can be especially disturbing for students of color, women, working-class people, and first-generation college students (Gardner & Holley, 2011). Gloria fits into all these categories. Becoming a researcher involves identity work  – pivoting from one identity to another, and in Gloria’s case, her identity as a teacher, successful playwright, and documentary filmmaker was shifting to include that of ethnographic researcher and scholarly writer as well. Gloria was becoming a qualitative researcher and scholarly writer while continuing to develop as a teacher, playwright, and filmmaker, in a kind of additive process. This new identity slowly became clearer to her as she progressed through her first year of doctoral study, even though her voice still felt artificial to her. Sadly, the impostor syndrome remains alive and well. But one of the most striking aspects of Gloria’s progress revealed that when she felt insecure, she wasn’t tempted to quit the program. She was guided by many things – her previous academic successes and her awareness of her own learning process, as well as her willingness to ask questions that revealed a lack of knowledge. Her trust in her mentors also guided her through the often-bumpy journey of the first year of doctoral

Building Identity as a Scholar and Researcher 123 study. When you’re tied to your father’s truck while you run, you can’t just stop whenever you get tired. Gloria mapped the persistence she had learned at home onto becoming a qualitative researcher. In the next part of this chapter, we explore the sometimes moment-to-moment shifts she made, along with the craggy terrain she journeyed as she began to conduct ethnographic research.

Excitement and Uncertainty In the five Letters to the Readers that the student researchers wrote, we made clear that the journals could be in English, Spanish, or both and that they were a record of their developing ideas, not their final analysis. Gloria’s Letter to the Readers 1 demonstrated her deep engagement with the class. She wrote: So really, EVERYTHING that I’m reading and learning in this course moves me and affects me personally and emotionally. Journaling and writing notes has helped me to categorize the items that I think will most inform how I do my work moving forward. The generalization that I can make about myself as a writer and as a learner is that I gravitate toward the topics that have the most personal and emotional effect on me. I also noticed that I feel a close connection to these specific items because of my past and current involvement with social justice groups and Communities of Practice in Minnesota, New York City, Chicago, and El Paso. As a student, something I can relate to the most is the idea that “families and groups have gathered knowledge throughout history, or they would not have survived until today.  .  .  . The knowledge and skills that we develop as members of households are called funds of knowledge” (Kaplan-Weinger  & Ullman, 2015, p. 11). As a student starting this Ph.D. journey in the unfamiliar territory that is rhetoric and ethnography, I rely on my funds of knowledge in order to comprehend this new material that I’m reading and studying and to be able to complete my assignments in order to ultimately gain the cultural knowledge of this discipline. And often, we are unaware of our funds of knowledge, or we have come to devalue them. In this Letter to the Readers, and indeed throughout the course, Gloria emphasized her goal of empowering those who are disempowered or marginalized in mainstream society – a goal that resonated with her own journey from the colonia to the university and beyond. In this Letter to the Readers, she focused on Michael-Luna’s 2008, “Todos somos blancos/ We are all White: Constructing racial identities through texts,” which we described in previous chapters.

124  Building Identity as a Scholar and Researcher In response to this article, Gloria wrote about how teachers need to “be aware of the many different voices present in their classroom. They need to listen carefully to what those voices are expressing and create opportunities for the sharing between voices.” She then concluded, “Ultimately, what I’m learning in this set of readings is that those who compile knowledge and interpret it must also be responsible for empowering marginalized identities, creating new ideologies, and embracing the use of language in nontraditional ways.” At this point, early in her first semester in the doctoral program, she was articulating a clear goal  – to empower students who are typically marginalized or ignored as a result of racism, classism, sexism, and/or linguicism (i.e., linguistic discrimination). She read this study through her lens as a Chicana, taking cues to apply to her own teaching practice. And she was deliberately drawing on her past experiences and previous education – and the concept of funds of knowledge, which was new to her – as she faced the intellectual and social challenges of being a doctoral student.

Laboring in a New Discipline Gloria’s Letters to the Readers were impressive to us. What we didn’t know at the time was how much she labored over these assignments, especially the parts that required her to respond to key ideas in the readings. We only found that out when we conducted focus group interviews after the course had ended. Gloria revealed almost immediately that she had struggled considerably with the assigned research articles. The student researchers had to read three or four articles a week that focused on ideologies, identities, and texts, but that was just a fraction of the work required. They were also learning to conduct ethnographic research by reading Methods for the Ethnography of Communication (2015), which concentrated on how to conduct participant observation, interviewing, and artifact collection, along with topics such as the role of social theory, ethics, data analysis, and researcher positionality. At the same time, they were doing participant observation in their research sites twice a week, writing up field notes, conducting interviews with students and the instructors, and writing Letters to the Readers. The research articles they read were models of mature practice that we encouraged them to think of as exemplars, although we also saw them as worthy of critique. For us, their reading the articles from the Journal of Language, Identity, and Education was essential to their developing legitimate participation as qualitative researchers. We wanted their productive interactions with these works to bring them into the community of qualitative researchers, which would help them, as apprentices, see their

Building Identity as a Scholar and Researcher 125 current study as part of their own “continuity-based futures” (Lave  & Wenger, 1991, p. 110). In discussing the research articles for the course, Gloria said: What I learned is when you read an article, you don’t just read it. It takes me like six hours to read an article and really take notes and understand it. Sometimes it takes even more time. It’s different from my master’s program. Now it takes like 30 minutes just to read one page. Like some of the other student researchers, Gloria was working full time and was a full-time doctoral student while she took the case study course. She felt tremendous time pressure to complete her coursework and to do everything required of her as new tenure-track community college faculty as well. In addition to experiencing this stress, she found herself needing to build background in a new discipline, and that takes time. In a discussion of Boellstorff, Nardi, Pearce, and Taylor’s (2012) chapter, “Ten Myths about Ethnography,” Gloria was surprised to learn that ethnography is science, because it is empirical and rigorous. She commented, “I never thought I would be a scientist, but this article and other ones made me realize that I am going to become a scientist. I  never thought that would happen. . . . I wasn’t good in science.” While ethnography consists of, in Boellstorff et al.’s words, “an approach for studying everyday life as lived by groups of people” (p. 1) and is deeply involved with culture, it was the science of ethnography that concerned and even surprised her: “I never thought that becoming a scientist would happen for me.” Gloria’s awareness of her disciplinary outsider-ness became visible in class during the fifth week of the semester, when we discussed Riazantseva’s (2012) study of second-language writing students’ attitudes toward their instructors, entitled “I Ain’t Changing Anything: A Case Study of Successful Generation 1.5 Immigrant College Students’ Writing.” At one point in the article, a student’s writing is called “patchwork,” which Howard (2000) describes as what novice academic writers do when they copy and paste pieces of published texts into an assigned essay. This form of textual borrowing is considered to be part of the developmental process that new writers experience when first introduced to college-level writing. It’s part of the struggle to integrate research studies into their own writing. Gloria declared: I’m doing patch-writing since I’m new to the discipline. Text borrowing. Is it the same as copying and pasting? Or does it get more integrated into my own style? I  don’t know. These are things that legitimize my thoughts.

126  Building Identity as a Scholar and Researcher Here Gloria, in her first semester of doctoral study, is identifying with first-year writing students because, like them, she is learning a new way of writing as well as reading. She was encountering a new writing genre: the qualitative research article. It involved new disciplinary terminology, approaches, and ideas, and like all novices, she struggled with this cognitive load. It’s not lost on us that her learning to conduct qualitative research and master academic writing was happening while she was studying students who were learning the genre of the academic essay themselves. Gloria commented on her newness to the discipline in her first two Letters to the Readers, and she continued on that tack in the third Letter to the Readers, which was turned in in late October. She stated: The generalization that I can make about myself as a writer and as a learner is that I have so much to learn. Just when I think I’ve grasped the key concepts of this course, I read a new article and learn something completely different. I’m soaking up the new terminology. . . . I have found it hard to really disagree with any article, mostly because every article is bringing something new to the table. Gloria was not alone in finding it hard to critique the studies we read, as many of her classmates expressed the same feeling. She was keenly aware that all that was new – the genre of academic writing, the norms of scholarship, and the accepted knowledge in the disciplines. In her Letter to the Readers 3, as in the others, she continued to connect her own background and experiences to the texts, which helped her comprehension and also made the reading more meaningful. For instance, in her response to Davila’s (2012) “Indexicality and ‘Standard’ Edited American English,” a study of writing teachers’ stereotypical responses to the language varieties in their students’ writing, Gloria described her own Spanish-speaking students in a discussion of the resistance to multilingualism in the United States, writing: “Here in America, speaking Spanish is seen as negative . . . unless you’re White and wanting to learn Spanish.” Ek, Sánchez, and Quijada Cerecer (2013) take Gloria’s observation a step further, focusing on the variety of Spanish in the Southwest, writing: The linguistic situation in the United States for many bilingual Latina/os is one that is characterized by double linguistic oppression. First, the Spanish language has lower prestige and status than English. Second, the varieties of Spanish and English spoken by many US Latina/os, from the second generation and beyond, are also devalued when compared to the standard varieties of these codes. These factors can lead to linguistic discrimination, violence, anxiety, and insecurity for bilingual Latina/o speakers. These negative

Building Identity as a Scholar and Researcher 127 attitudes toward language further intersect with anti-immigrant and anti-Latina/o sentiments. (2013, p. 197) While Gloria didn’t talk about varieties of Spanish, she complicated matters by reflecting on her perception of student ideologies within an analysis of power, noting: I teach online courses, and sometimes I  make assumptions about students based on their writing. For example, I  had one male student write in a project description that he was not going to cast his wife in the final project video because she was not photogenic. His comment stood out to me, and I immediately thought to myself that this guy is probably a male chauvinist who doesn’t respect his wife as an equal. That was my honest reaction. But then I thought about it some more and thought perhaps he was reacting to how Hollywood films portray extremely glamorized celebrities who aren’t what people look like in real life. The point is, I  made a quick assumption about the student’s written work based on his language within the essay. It could also be my own feminist ideology that came through in my reading of his text. Gloria is a self-reflective storyteller and instructor. While she was still reading this piece as a teacher and not yet as a teacher/researcher or researcher, she started shifting to her researcher identity as she reflected on Kerschbaum’s 2012 essay “Avoiding the Difference Fixation: Identity Categories, Markers of Difference and the Teaching of Writing.” In it, Kerschbaum argued against putting people into fixed identity categories, advocating for “difference” being fluid and relational. Gloria wrote in response: The way I can relate to this through my observations of the first-year writing class is after speaking with one of the study participants who is Latino. Spanish is his first language, and English is his second language, and I also learned that he is a skateboarder, which puts him in another discourse community that is different from many of his classmates. In other words, Latinos are not all the same. Not only do we come in all colors and sizes, but we also have many different interests and experiences. I learned this when I moved from Chaparral, New Mexico, to Minneapolis, Minnesota. I learned that I was a minority. I had never before experienced a world where Latinos, people who look like me, were a minority. And in Minnesota, you’re minoritized big time. On the border, we are the majority. In Minnesota, I quickly learned that there’s a whole other world out there that does not look like El Paso.

128  Building Identity as a Scholar and Researcher Here, Gloria was examining her own expectations, and she was reflecting on the stereotyping discussed in the essay as something she had experienced, as well as something that she needed to keep in check in her own research.

Increasing Participation We knew that our students came from different disciplines, and we anticipated that they might feel challenged by conducting ethnographic research. For that reason, we assigned several pieces written by successful scholars who described their initial forays into their disciplines at the midpoint of the course. In her third Letter to the Readers, Gloria honed in on one of these articles. In particular, she wrote about Tardy’s (2010) chapter, “Cleaning Up the Mess: Perspectives from a Novice Theory Builder,” in which Tardy described struggling to connect data to theory in her first research project. Gloria responded by writing: This piece was empowering because she very honestly talks about how she felt intimidated by theory and the entire process of research and analyzing data. She mentions many times that she’s a beginner. . . . I was able to visualize myself going through the same process. . . . The description of her research process is helpful to me as a beginning Ph.D. student. Her third Letter to the Readers was 16 pages long, which made it her personal longest as well as the longest produced by any student in the class. In it, she showed her trademark engagement with the readings, even if she wrote that she sometimes felt overwhelmed by the new terminology and ideas. Hers was a strong, writerly voice that combined her personal experiences with thoughtful reactions to the texts, nimbly masking the labor and uncertainty that this writing required. Her self-reflexivity, deep engagement with the texts, and ability to make connections to her own life made her Letters to the Readers interesting and complicated – but she was overwhelmed by the work the letters demanded.

Data Collection: Challenges and Growth After only a month in the doctoral program, Gloria and her fellow student researchers began collecting data in their respective classrooms. Gloria was working on a research team with Josiah, Israel, and Esteván. They were producing double-entry field notes (Emerson, Fretz, & Shaw, 2011), and their initial observations were their “raw” notes, which were likely to have abbreviations, spelling errors, and incomplete sentences. We had them “cook” their field notes within 24 hours before they forgot

Building Identity as a Scholar and Researcher 129 details. Cooking the field notes (Kaplan-Weinger & Ullman, 2015, p. 79) involved fleshing out the observations and thickening their descriptions. We stressed the importance of postponing judgment until they had gathered sufficient data, and we spent class time watching short scripted videos, imagining that the scenes were our research sites, and taking field notes. By the third week of class, Gloria and her fellow student researchers were collecting data in Larry’s late-afternoon writing class to accommodate their own work schedules. Larry is an experienced writing instructor who is a monolingual English speaker. His class was held in a computer classroom, where each student sat in front of a desktop computer. He had 25 students, most of whom were Spanish-English bilinguals, and some of them were older returning students who struggled with the technology. In a typical class session, Larry gave a brief talk about the day’s topic, asked questions in a whole-class discussion, and assigned the students a short piece of writing that they completed in small groups. Later, that assignment would become part of a larger take-home writing task. Gloria’s first set of field notes for this hour-and-20-minute class were long. Most of the left-hand column consisted of verbatim conversations between Larry and the students. She also wrote down conversations between the students in small groups. Because she didn’t know the students’ names yet, she identified them visually, calling one of them “male student, blond, with braces.” Initially, she experienced the challenges that all student researchers encounter. Gloria struggled to record actions and scenes that she observed in sufficient detail, and she made judgments and assumptions throughout. This a brief excerpt from her early field notes: Teacher writes on the white board. Teacher: “I don’t want to spend a lot of time talking today.” He explains he wants the students to talk. Girl asks, “We can sit with whoever we want, right? Teacher: “Sit wherever you want. I don’t have rules.” In the right-hand column, she wrote: The teacher is good at simplifying the topics that the students are learning.

Figure 5.1  Gloria’s Field Notes, October 7

After this last comment, Char wrote, “How can you know that? Please use the right- hand side to ask questions, rather than make interpretations. . . . It’s too early on to know that!” Similarly, in another section of

130  Building Identity as a Scholar and Researcher that set of field notes, Gloria wrote, “The teacher is not afraid to admit when he doesn’t know something. Or maybe he’s pretending to not know something in order to demonstrate that it’s okay to be vulnerable and make guesses when you’re learning new material.” Both Char and Kate responded, saying, “Good! This should be phrased as a question.” In response to these field notes, Char wrote to Gloria:

You’re beginning to get to the richness that is possible here. These entries show great potential. . . . These are things I see: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Postponing judgment. Being unsure. Not deciding what’s “true” with limited information. Providing more context. Describing what you hear and see, not what you have decided is true. I’m confident that you will master the process of taking field notes this semester!

Figure 5.2  Response to Gloria’s Field Notes, October 7

Since all the student researchers were challenged by taking field notes, we conducted more practice sessions with field notes in the next two class periods, encouraging them to be more detailed in their observations and to postpone coming to conclusions until they had enough information. Gloria and several of the other novice researchers commented on Larry’s persona as a teacher. Even though they evaluated him favorably, this wasn’t what they were there to observe. We wondered if this was because they had experience evaluating teachers. It was hard for all the student researchers to background their teacher selves and foreground their emerging researcher identities in the early observations. All of them worked hard not to make assumptions, but instead to ask questions. Rampton (2003) suggests that when ex-teachers (or in our case, current ones) are becoming classroom ethnographers, it can be difficult to distinguish between what they see and what they think they should see.

Language, Identity, and Power Jumping off from the semi-structured question protocol that focused on student experiences in the class as well as identities, ideologies, and texts, as we hoped they would, Gloria asked a Latino student about his views on mixing Spanish and English in his writing. “Do you mix Spanish and English when you write?” she asked. The student responded, “Obviously, no. Do people do that?” She let him know that they did, although not always in a class like this.

Building Identity as a Scholar and Researcher 131 In fact, Spanish/English translanguaging is everywhere at Borderlands University. People translanguage in the student union, in the library, in the hallways, in the parking lots, at the bus stops, and in the plaza where students relax on the grass. But in most cases, translanguaging stops the moment class starts.4 Some call the language variety that many Borderlands students use Chicano Spanish. It is a language with a pulsing heartbeat. It is “un lenguaje que corresponde a un modo de vivir” (a language that corresponds with a way of living) (Anzaldúa, 1987, p. 55). While there is no doubt that this student is surrounded by spoken translanguaging at Borderlands, Gloria learned that he didn’t know that translanguaging can happen in writing. After completing the interview, Gloria met with him again and gave him a copy of “How to Tame a Wild Tongue,” a chapter from Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987). In it, Anzal­ dúa translanguages, using border Spanish and English, creating beauty in a language that has been disparaged by the mainstream on both sides of the border. The New Mestiza is a powerful and poetic masterpiece that has profoundly influenced multiple scholarly fields. In it, Anzaldúa reclaims her border language, which is derisively called pocho, a word that compares it to a rotten or spoiled fruit. She passionately states in this oft-quoted line, “Ethnic identity is twin skin to linguistic identity – I am my language. Until I can take pride in my language, I cannot take pride in myself” (p. 59). Sharing this essay with the student was a teachable moment. Gloria knew that Chicanx from the border grew up believing they spoke bad Spanish as well as bad English. She had felt that herself – until she found Chicano studies in the snowy plains of Minnesota. Chicano Spanish “is illegitimate, a bastard language,” Anzaldúa has recounted painfully. “Repeated attacks on our native tongue diminish our sense of self. The attacks continue throughout our lives” (1987, p. 58). Gloria wanted to make sure this student knew that he was legitimate. She had to make sure he knew he was worthy. Anzaldúa famously said, “So, if you want to really hurt me, talk badly about my language” (1987, p. 59). How could she not share this essay with him? Most ethnographic researchers influenced by postmodern thought (Foucault, 1980) see knowledge as co-constructed and reject the notion of objectivity or epistemic certainty. Striving for objectivity is an impossible pursuit. At the same time, as ethnographers, we do work toward awareness of our own subjectivity, especially biases that may make it difficult to see what is happening in the field. “You need to continually reflect on your positionality, because there are assumptions that all of us have, based on how we understand our own life experiences” KaplanWeinger & Ullman, 2015, p. 48). Gloria reflected on her Chicana feminist positionality throughout the study, which was exactly what we hoped she would do. It made sense for her to share the essay with that student.

132  Building Identity as a Scholar and Researcher She was offering him a lesson in identity, an understanding of language and power. In her second set of field notes, Gloria tried to implement our recommendations by including more detailed observations on the left side and fewer assumptions on the right side. For instance, she noted that while students didn’t use Spanish in the whole-class discussions, Spanish was the main language used when they were working in small groups. Interestingly, she observed that in the small groups, it was usually the same student who would initiate the use of Spanish, and then the other students would follow along. This observation led her to share in a class discussion that “some of these students are learning more than others. They learn in Spanish, their language, and in English, the language of school.” This prescient observation resulted from her own funds of knowledge – her SpanishEnglish bilingualism – and her consistent concern for students who were frequently marginalized, especially in an English class. In this second set of field notes, she fell back into evaluation when she described the teacher. She wrote, “The teacher is making the material relatable again by using Harry Potter as an example.” Char suggested that she make that statement into a question, suggesting that she could ask Larry why he chose the Harry Potter example when she interviewed him, to avoid injecting her own interpretations onto his pedagogical purpose. By the time she turned in her third set of field notes, Gloria was only asking questions about what she was observing. She wrote things like “Do the three young men I’ve been observing meet up before class in order to arrive together?” and “Why does Larry start class early sometimes, and why is he late today?” In our comment on this set of field notes, we wrote, “You’re on the road here! You are getting good at separating what you see and hear from your own questions and interpretations.” It did seem, however, that by only asking questions about what she observed, Gloria was playing it safe and not risking any observations we might criticize. We had emphasized that asking questions about the teacher’s interactions was more effective than evaluating him, but we didn’t intend for Gloria to avoid reflections altogether. In her final three sets of field notes, though, she began to successfully alternate between descriptions and nonjudgmental comments and questions.

Letting Go In the focus group interviews that we conducted after the case study course ended, Gloria commented on the process of learning the practices of ethnographic research. She reflected, “Going into the classroom to do research . . . that was the first time I’d ever had to do that. It was

Building Identity as a Scholar and Researcher 133 something completely new.  .  .  . And now I  understand what we were doing. Do you know what I mean?” But she also expressed mixed feelings about taking field notes. She said that just writing down what she was observing and withholding her views reminded her of journalism, which she had disliked in her brief foray into the field after college. However, the reason she wasn’t happy with broadcast journalism was the cavalier lack of accuracy in reporting on the Latinx community and the tokenism she experienced. But it’s not surprising that doing participant observation brought back those acrimonious feelings. It was hard, she said, “to go into a research environment and [let] go of what you think is really going on.” Indeed it is. Although Gloria became successful at taking field notes throughout the course of data collection, she expressed ambivalence about leaving her assumptions behind and waiting to do the analysis after she had collected all the data. Interestingly, Rampton (2003) has written about this topic, in a sense. He suggests that when teachers are becoming ethnographers, sometimes their deep-rooted optimism can bias them toward learning, making it difficult to see failure and what he argues can be “the systemic product of school social practices” (p.  4). However, Gloria saw pedagogic failure in the teaching of academic writing in English, in that Larry didn’t understand or acknowledge students’ linguistic resources in their native language or work to build on them as they learned to write in English. By sharing the Anzaldúa chapter with the student, Gloria was not making missteps as a novice ethnographer, especially as she did this outside data collection for the study. Rather, she was beginning to understand the implicit ideology that only English was allowed in the whole-class discussions and that no Spanish or Spanglish was permitted in any formal writing, even though, in an interview, Larry told her that he “didn’t have a language policy.” She wanted to use Anzaldúa’s poetic prose to combat the “linguistic terrorism” (1987, p. 58) that has denigrated Chicano Spanish. Anzaldúa writes: Words distorted by English are known as anglicisms or pochismos. The pocho is an Anglicized Mexican or American of Mexican descent who speaks Spanish with an accent characteristic of North Americans and who distorts and reconstructs the language according to the influence of English. . . . I may switch back and forth from English to Spanish in the same sentence or in the same word. (1987, p. 56) Why did this student believe it was improper to include translanguaging in written form in this class? This is an interesting ethnographic question.

134  Building Identity as a Scholar and Researcher Rampton (2003) writes that for those coming to classroom ethnography from a background in teaching, “it’s more a matter of trying to get analytic distance on the familiar, than trying to get familiar with the strange” (p. 3). Gloria demonstrated her ability to make the familiar strange in this instance. She was questioning the formal erasure of writing in students’ native languages in the English writing classroom.

Finding a Topic The proposals for the Ethnographic and Qualitative Research Conference (EQRC) were due in November, and the conference was held the next spring, in Las Vegas, Nevada. We selected this conference because we knew it was a nurturing academic space and also because flights between El Paso, Texas, and Las Vegas, Nevada, are typically inexpensive. Given that none of the students but Victoria had presented original research at an academic conference, we spent some time in class going over proposals and describing what typically happened during conference presentations. That included displaying data on slides and preparing for the question-and-answer time afterward. Whenever we introduced a new writing genre, Gloria asked questions about the length, the style, and how the references worked. She knew more about journalism and the spoken word, as well as creative works, such as screenplays and scripts. Conference proposals and papers were a new world. Gloria and her fellow research team members needed to find a focus for their conference proposal based on the data they were beginning to analyze. After some discussion, they decided to focus their joint conference proposal on Spanish-English translanguaging in the small-group discussions that eventually led to written English assignments. Having documented the use of Spanglish in one small group, Gloria noticed that a young man with strong English skills translated instructions for the other two students. The three of them spoke Spanish as they worked together on the writing assignment, which they ultimately completed in English. Gloria was impressed with this very sophisticated form of translanguaging. She learned that they had been friends since elementary school, and she was interested in how they collaborated. Gloria’s journey as a researcher now shifted from doing the research to drawing conclusions from the research and describing it in a conference proposal. At this point, she ran into the challenge that all the doctoral students struggled with (again, except Victoria), which was identifying a theoretical framework that would help them understand their data. We had introduced them to a broad range of theoretical

Building Identity as a Scholar and Researcher 135 lenses, along with the notion of literacy/biliteracy, which we defined in the syllabus as the “communicative, cultural, and multimodal practices shared by members of particular groups.” We let them know that literacies/biliteracies are complex, fluid, dynamic, and co-constitutive and that literacies/biliteracies were closely connected to identities, ideologies, and texts. This was the focus of their research questions and the research articles they had read. Gloria and her team decided to draw on Bourdieu’s (1991) work on language and symbolic power. For Bourdieu, the prestige variety of a language – in this case, standard academic English – gave an arbitrary distinction to a group of people that helped them secure a more powerful role in their social world. Gloria’s team wanted to show how some of the bilingual students who were not yet fully proficient with the prestige variety of standard academic English were disadvantaged in a class that assumed everyone was a monolingual English speaker who grew up with the prestige variety of English.

Crafting a Proposal Gloria, Josiah, Israel, and Estévan were just beginning to examine their data and identify themes. They knew they needed to read more about their Bourdieuian frame, and in learning this important academic writing genre, they had to consider what Tardy (2009) called the four dimensions of a writing genre: formal, process, rhetorical, and subject-matter knowledge. The formal knowledge was what we had told the students about the format of the proposal; the process knowledge consisted of the steps they would take to produce the proposal, such as drafting and revising; the rhetorical knowledge consisted of what they understood about their audience and purpose; and the subject-matter knowledge was the content of the proposal. Gloria and her teammates’ first draft showed that they were drawing on all four of these dimensions. Their first paragraph said: This study explores the co-construction of identities, language ideologies, and texts in a composition course at a university along the US–Mexico border. The students in our study each come to class with various sorts of economic, social, and cultural capital. They use this capital to create symbolic capital in the various fields in which they inhabit such as school, family, friends, and work. Our study focuses on the RHET 1500 classroom as a field in which the students produce symbolic capital. The symbols that they produce are evident in their interactions, writing, and personal belongings. One symbolic capital that our research led us to look at is linguistic

136  Building Identity as a Scholar and Researcher capital, particularly how, when, and where students use English and Spanish within the classroom. This shows that Gloria and her teammates had narrowed their focus to linguistic capital as it pertained to the students’ use of Spanish and English for small-group work. This rhetorical move wasn’t simple or easy for them to accomplish for it required them to sift through the tangle of data and the theory that had engulfed them for another assignment, the theory presentation. Still, it needed to be refined, and they had already used 122 of their 150-word limit, without mention of the research question or methodology or a hint at the results. Char commented on the draft, noting, Perhaps you might want to ask something like this: How do students in an introductory English composition course along the US–Mexico border view the relationship between academic writing in English and in Spanish? The students’ focus on linguistic capital, established in the first paragraph, didn’t last long. The next paragraph looked like this: Our study also discusses symbolic violence, which includes various modes of social/cultural domination and how that impacts the conscious subject and language used in the classroom. In addition, we will discuss doxa and how the use or misuse of Standard English may lead to perceptions of intelligence. Our study also discusses how grammar is viewed and sometimes feared by a subordinated language community. Char commented, I’m thinking that you are showing the reviewers that you know about theory, but I’m not seeing how it’s connection to your data and your study. Several additional paragraphs were similar in that they talked about a variety of theoretical concepts without referring to their study. Kate offered sage advice: This is a good start! Don’t let the theory take you over. Focus on what you’re doing and why you’re doing it. Identify your research participants, your methodology, your data, and your context. Simple is better. Gloria and her teammates were faced on the one hand with a mountain of data in the form of field notes, interview transcripts, and student writing and on the other hand with the complex theory that they had just started learning in the doctoral program. Moreover, she and two of her teammates – Israel and Estévan – came from the humanities: specifically, film studies, philosophy, and English literature, respectively. Josiah came from special education and higher education administration, both applied fields. Although they had been conducting ethnographic case study research over the course of the semester, spending hours observing classes,

Building Identity as a Scholar and Researcher 137 interviewing students and the instructor, and analyzing course artifacts, when they sat down to write the research proposal, they were attracted as if by magnets to the writing genre of a theoretical essay rather than writing about their research project. In the focus group interviews, Gloria shared that she felt at odds with describing what she saw and heard, becoming what she still called an “objective” observer. This suggests that in this early stage in her doctoral program, she hadn’t yet embraced the norms of this Community of Practice. By the time the conference proposals were due, Gloria and her teammates had revised their draft substantially. They explained their research site, their purpose, their participants, their focus, their theoretical framework, and the overall importance of the study. Their proposal was accepted. This is what they submitted to the conference: This ethnographic study focuses on how college students in an introductory undergraduate composition course along the MexicoUS border view the use of Spanish and English. We examine how, when, and why students use English, Spanish, and Spanglish within the writing classroom with the professor, each other, and in their assignments. The class is composed of students with diverse educational backgrounds and various levels of English competence. Our study examines how students who favor the subordinated language community view English writing. Our data connects with Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of social stratification. Our research suggests that the use of translanguaging was based on students’ level of comfort and perception of social norms. This study is important because it contributes to students’ use of multilingual abilities within the context of an introductory composition course, particularly within a borderland setting. Writing a proposal that was accepted by a scholarly conference took time. They needed lots of feedback. It required considering an unknown audience, starting to think about an appropriate theoretical frame, and thinking generally about data they had not finished analyzing systematically. Throughout the next semester, which was Gloria’s second semester in the doctoral program, she and her teammates worked together to continue to analyze their data. At the same time during this semester, Gloria took two core doctoral courses in her Rhetoric and Composition program, both heavily focused on theory. The manuscript draft that she submitted toward the end of her first year still showed some of the same challenges with research writing that she had earlier in the year – research questions that needed more focus and presentations of theory

138  Building Identity as a Scholar and Researcher that needed to be more integrated into discussions of the data. Nonetheless, it was a complete manuscript, the result of her labor-intensive study of first-year writing students’ productive use of Spanish in their English writing class.

Gloria’s Reflections “Research is addictive,” Gloria beamed as she reflected on the case study course in the focus group interviews. “And,” she added, “it’s really time consuming.” Again, we were reminded of the intense labor it takes to conduct ethnographic research and to learn to do it coming from academic backgrounds that are so varied. Gloria was also coming from a history of having great success with her creative works, and sometimes that can be a barrier to learning something so new. “This was a territory I wasn’t familiar with,” she explained. “I had zero experience with it. But I  guess that’s the whole point of entering a doctoral program. I wanted to challenge myself to try to learn something new. That’s definitely what’s happened.” She expressed confidence that, although she felt that when she wrote, she was continuing to imitate other researchers, rather than using her own voice, she had made the right choice to enter the doctoral program. “At some point, I know it’s going to all come together.” Throughout the rest of her doctoral coursework, she would continue hold down a demanding full-time job. She earned tenure and promotion at Rio Grande Community College, all the while alternating between three courses per semester  – a full load at Borderlands  – and two courses – part time. In reflecting on the case study course, she thought aloud about a lifetime of mentorship that had helped her feel confident, encouraged her to take risks, and smoothed the way for her many successes. At this point in her doctoral program, it didn’t seem that Gloria had found that next mentor. During one class session, she joked, “I always do what my professors tell me to do.” We wondered if this harkened back to her father’s advice about following policies and procedures and Jamal Joseph’s lesson about following directions. We also wondered if that meant she saw us as giving directions that she needed to follow to a T and that as her professors, our relationship was only hierarchical. And while this statement also meant that she was not yet seeing herself as an independent scholar who would conduct her own dissertation study, that is something that probably shouldn’t happen in one’s first year in a doctoral program. Delightfully, she turned the tables on us in this final focus group interview by asking about our own doctoral journeys. “Did you feel you had mentors? Did you feel you were on your own?” And, importantly, she asked how long it took us to be in a comfortable place where we felt that

Building Identity as a Scholar and Researcher 139 we were really researchers. Later, she added, “There is a lot of self-doubt along the way. Am I in the right place? Do I belong? Do I fit in?” At the end of her first year in the doctoral program, Gloria was determined to continue, and she had faith that her journey would become easier at some point. She seemed to waver between feeling hopeful that she would eventually fit in and be successful and feeling uncertain about the strain of entering a new field.

Afterword We began this chapter with Gloria’s plans about combining film and rhetoric for her dissertation study. By her third year in the doctoral program, Gloria had built a bridge that connected all her interests: rhetoric and composition studies, film studies, Chicanx studies, and political advocacy. Rather than letting herself be appropriated by disciplinary norms that didn’t always fit her goals, she created an interdisciplinary identity that has enabled her to forge new ways of working and thinking. Some of her interdisciplinary identity comes from community engagement projects that the Rhetoric and Composition program has encouraged students to do. In one project, Gloria collaborated with her husband, Tony, to create culturally relevant comics for the local Alzheimer’s Association. This branch of the association helps Spanish-speaking caregivers better understand what happens when a loved one is diagnosed with the disease. After earning tenure at Rio Grande Community College and teaching as an adjunct in Chicana/o studies at Borderlands University, at this writing, she is conducting her dissertation research. She has found a mentor in Kate, who is her dissertation chair, and the ingenious study that Gloria has designed looks at Chicanx artists, how they use rhetorical strategies to talk about their work, and the ways in which they reach out to marginalized members of their communities. She is scheduled to defend her dissertation in 2020. After earning tenure at the community college, she moved to a position as a full-time lecturer in Chicano studies at Borderlands University. In that interdisciplinary department, she has designed and taught an innovative undergraduate course on Chicanx film and Chicanx hip-hop music. Her dissertation study combines rhetoric, art, Chicanx studies, and political advocacy. She has figured it out. Gloria has turned the light bulb on.

Notes 1. We have chosen the pseudonym Gloria as an homage to Gloria Anzalduá, who is featured in this chapter and has been deeply influential to this “Gloria.”

140  Building Identity as a Scholar and Researcher 2. Colonias are communities spread along the Mexico-US border region, one of the poorest regions in the United States. They are often created by shady housing developers who sell substandard plots of land to low-income people, making unfulfilled promises that they will provide utilities, sewers, and safe drinking water at a later date. 3. The river is called the Rio Grande in the United States and Rio Bravo in Mexico. 4. It’s important to note that under the previous president’s tenure, it was policy for students to be able to submit their work in their strongest language, with the assumption that that language would be either Spanish or English. Borderlands still offers free Spanish classes to new faculty who do not yet speak Spanish.

References Anzaldúa, G. (1987). Borderlands/La Frontera: The new mestiza. San Francisco: Spinsters/Aunt Lute. Bejarano, C. L. (2005). ¿Qué onda? Urban youth cultures and border identity. Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press. Berg, G. A. (2016). The dissertation process and mentor relationships for African American and Latina/o students in an online program. American Journal of Distance Education, 30(4), 225–236. doi:10.1080/08923647.2016.1227191 Bishop, M., & Vargas, C. (2014). The invention of Hispanics. NPR Latino USA. Retrieved from www.latinousa.org/2014/05/02/invention-hispanics/ Boellstorff, T., Nardi, B., Pearce, C., & Taylor, T. L. (2012). Ten myths about ethnography. In T. Boellstorff et al. (Eds.), Ethnography and virtual worlds: A handbook of method (pp. 29–51). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Bourdieu, P. (1991). Language and symbolic power. J. B. Thompson (Ed.). G. Raymond & M. Adamson (Trans.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Brandt, D. (1998). Sponsors of literacy. College Composition and Communication, 49, 166–197. Brandt, D. (2009). Literacy and learning: Reflections on writing, reading, and society. San Francisco: Wiley. Burke, J., & Espinoza, E. (2012). Race relations within the U.S. military. Annual Review of Sociology, 38, 401–422. doi:10.1146/annurev-soc-0718811-145501 Clance, P. R., & Imes, S. A. (1978). The Impostor phenomenon in high achieving women: Dynamics and therapeutic intervention. Psychotherapy: Theory, Research and Practice, 15(3), 241–247. Dávila, A. (2012). Latinos, Inc.: The marketing and making of a people. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Davila, B. (2012). Indexicality and “Standard” edited American English: Examining the link between conceptions of standardness and perceived authorial identity. Written Communication, 29(2), 180–207. Delgado Bernal, D., Elenes, C. A., Godinez, F. E.,  & Villenas, S. (2006). Chicanas/Latinas building bridges: An introduction. In D. Delgado Bernal, C. A. Elenes, F. E. Godinez, & S. Villenas (Eds.), Chicana/Latina education in everyday life: Feminista perspectives on pedagogy and epistemology (pp. 1–9). Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.

Building Identity as a Scholar and Researcher 141 Ek, L. D., Sánchez, P., & Quijada Cerecer, P. D. (2013). Linguistic violence, insecurity, and work: Language ideologies of Latina/o bilingual teacher candidates in Texas. International Multilingual Research Journal, 7(3), 197–219. Emerson, R. M., Fretz, R. I., & Shaw, L. L. (2011). Writing ethnographic fieldnotes. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Figueroa, J. L.,  & Rodriguez, G. M. (2015). Critical mentoring practices to support diverse students in higher education: Chicana/Latina faculty perspectives. New Directions for Higher Education, 171, 23–32. doi:10.1002/he. 20139 Foucault, M. (1980). Power/knowledge: Selected interviews and other writings, 1972– 1977. C. Gordon (Ed.). New York: Pantheon. García, J. R. (1980). Operation wetback: The mass deportation of Mexican undocumented workers in 1954. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. García, O. (2009). Bilingual education in the 21st century: A global perspective. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Gardner, S. K., & Holley, K. A. (2011). “Those invisible barriers are real”: The progression of first-generation students through doctoral education. Equity & Excellence in Education, 44(1), 77–92. González, J. C. (2006). Academic socialization experiences of Latina doctoral students: A  qualitative understanding of support systems that aid and challenges that hinder the process. Journal of Hispanic Higher Education, 5(4), 347– 365. doi:10.1177/1538192706291141 Howard, R. M. (2000). The ethics of plagiarism. In M. A. Pemberton (Ed.), The ethics of writing instruction: Issues in theory and practice (pp. 79–89). Stamford, CT: Ablex. Kamler, B.,  & Thomson, P. (2014).  Helping doctoral students write: Pedagogies for supervision. New York: Routledge. Kaplan-Weinger, J., & Ullman, C. (2015). Methods for the ethnography of communication: Language in use in schools and communities. New York: Routledge. Kerschbaum, S. (2012). Avoiding the difference fixation: Identity categories, markers of difference and the teaching of writing. College Composition and Communication, 63(4), 616–644. Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Michael-Luna, S. (2008). Todos somos blancos/we are all white: Constructing racial identities through texts. Journal of Language, Identity, and Education, 12, 96–115. Pérez, E. (1999). The Decolonial imaginary: Writing Chicanos into history. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Rampton, B. (2003). Coming to linguistic ethnography from a background in teaching. LEF Colloquium on Linguistic Ethnography at the Interface with Education, 1–11. Riazantseva, A. (2012). I ain’t changing anything: A case-study of successful generation 1.5 immigrant college students’ writing. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 11, 184–193. Shane III, L. (2020, February  6). The number of U.S. troops who say they have seen racism in the ranks jumped to almost one-third in 2019. Military

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6 Recognizing the Role of Self-Belief, Motivation, and Personal Sacrifice in Doctoral Students’ Success

“I cannot afford to be depressed,” Victoria1 told us when we interviewed her after the case study course had ended. She was telling us what it had been like for her to be away from her home country, Colombia, and her family during the mostly five years she was in residence for her PhD in Culture, Teaching, and Teaching Education at Borderlands University. She was on a leave of absence from her university in Colombia, where she was a tenure-track assistant professor, specializing in teaching English as a foreign language (EFL), and the university was holding the position for her in her absence. Victoria was highly interested in research, and she was intensely engaged in her full-time doctoral study, but at the same time, she felt lonely. She was in her fifth year in the program and was renting a room from a fellow doctoral student who worked full time as a detective with the El Paso Police Department. Police work and doctoral study in education is, to put it mildly, uncommon. And being a U.S. police detective is also uncommon for someone who is a Mexican national and who earned his undergraduate degree at the Universidad Autónoma de Ciudad Juarez (UACJ) – in art. Along with this demanding full-time job, he was taking a full load as a doctoral student, and his wife was a hardworking ER nurse. Both of them lived on Red Bull. That said, Victoria almost never saw them. She kept busy with her studies and reminded herself that “I  have to be strong, keep strong, keep going, keep working, because getting a doctorate in the United States is what I’ve always wanted to do.” Ever since she was a child, she felt that she belonged in higher education, first as a student, then as an instructor, and later as a professor; it was her safe haven. Victoria’s belief in the value of her research project and her motivation to return to her professorship in Colombia kept her on track despite the personal sacrifices she had to make and the traumatic events that had marked her past. Victoria was in a different stage in her doctoral studies than the other students described in this book. Not only was she well on her way to completing the required coursework, she had started working on a pilot study for her practicum, an interview-based study of English as a foreign language teachers’ identities and their assessment practices at the

144  The Role of Self-Belief, Motivation, and Personal Sacrifice Universidad de Antioquia, in Medellín, Colombia, one of the best universities in the country. During her practicum course, she had begun to collect data using online questionnaires and in-depth interviews through Skype. Char, who served as one of her committee members, invited her to join the case study course so she could continue to learn about ethnographic research. Because she was gathering data for her pilot study, she didn’t conduct research in the first-year composition classes, but instead applied what we were doing to her own data and her future dissertation. She was an enthusiastic member of the course, participating in the class discussions, reading all the assigned material, and writing about it in the five Letters to the Readers. She also completed the other course assignments, including the theory presentation, the conference proposals and papers, and a research manuscript draft. While she sometimes offered advice to her classmates on qualitative research, Victoria also struggled along with them to make sense of her data and to write about her research. Forty-four years old at the time of the study, Victoria was born in a small town in Antioquia, Colombia. Antioquia is a department, similar to a U.S. state, about 45 minutes by car from Medellín, the capital of Antioquia. As of 2010, there were 6.6 million people living in Antioquia (Antioquia Department, n.d.). Throughout her childhood, Victoria lived in several different small towns around the department of Antioquia, as well as in different neighborhoods of Medellín. An only child growing up, she was raised by her mother and several family members on her mother’s side. Her father, a policeman, had left her mother when Victoria was a young child. Although her father had two more children from two different relationships, he and Victoria’s mother never divorced, even though they hadn’t lived together for a long time. Victoria often joked that her family was “postmodern” because it rejected the grand narrative of what a family is supposed to be. Throughout her life in Colombia, the shadow of urban violence and the drug wars that have plagued Colombia, especially Medellín, hung over her and everyone she knew. Fortunately, her immediate family has managed to stay safe (Moncada, 2016).

The Allure of the University Victoria described her mother as “a very smart, very practical woman,” and we could see why: By not divorcing her husband, Victoria’s mother had access to his state-sponsored health insurance, and she would also likely have his pension at some point in the future. Victoria’s mother had grown up in extreme poverty, and Victoria said her mother and her eight siblings “had to fight for whatever they were going to eat.” Victoria’s mother had had to quit public school after the ninth grade to go to work and help support the family.

The Role of Self-Belief, Motivation, and Personal Sacrifice 145 Public school is expensive in Colombia, as it is in most of Latin America, since families have to pay for uniforms and school supplies in order for their children to attend. If a family can’t pay the fees, their children don’t go to school. And since children whose families are in economic need are allowed to work in Colombia, work can make more sense than school, as children’s wages can contribute to that night’s dinner. Through all the challenges in Victoria’s life, including her father’s absence and growing up poor, her mother always told her not to forget about her studies. She never did. Victoria was the first in her family on her mother’s side to attend college, and because she didn’t know her father’s side, she saw herself as a first-generation college student. She and her mother both saw college as a vehicle for social mobility, but for Victoria, it was more than that. For one thing, she enjoyed studying and learning, though she says she “didn’t grow up in a very literate family.” She explained that her mother, while well informed from watching news programs and listening to the radio, did not read much. But Victoria derived great pleasure from learning, and she also knew that education was her way out of poverty. But just seeing the university from the window of the bus when she was growing up created a feeling of excitement for her. She recalled: The college was located close to downtown in the city, and many bus routes pass by that area. I remember seeing the university when I would ride the bus. But I never entered the campus when I was a child. So I always told myself that one day, I would go to the university. And my mother always told me, “You have to study. You have to study.” In thinking about her pilot study data, Victoria frequently drew on Holland, Lachicotte, Skinner, and Cain’s (1998) concept of figured worlds. Figured worlds are characterized as “socially produced, culturally constituted activities” (pp. 40–41) in which people begin to perform new identities. Urrieta (2007) describes the concept of figured worlds as sociocultural spheres that are socially organized and socially reproduced. They are contextually meaningful to those who enter them. The concept of figured worlds is about “how people come to understand themselves, how they come to ‘figure’ who they are, through the ‘worlds’ that they participate in and how they relate to others within and outside of these worlds” (Urrieta, 2007, p. 107). Victoria’s attraction to figured worlds theory for her pilot study mirrored her own identity work. As she began to get comfortable with conducting her own research, she learned through a trial-and-error process about the writing genres necessary for success in her discipline. Gradually, she began to see herself as someone who could become a qualitative researcher.

146  The Role of Self-Belief, Motivation, and Personal Sacrifice Throughout our interviews with her, Victoria returned to her own, as well as her mother’s, attraction to university life. If she worked at the university, it would offer her family some economic stability. And Victoria enjoyed learning. But it was also because, in Victoria’s words, “The university saved my life.” It provided her a safe haven from traumatic life events and gave her a place where she belonged. The economic stability of an academic position was also alluring. When Victoria was a child, she and her mother never had much money, but she saw her childhood as more secure than her mother’s growing up had been. They were one full step up from the dire privation her mother had experienced, and she was deeply proud of what her mother had done to provide for her. She knew there was no shame in growing up poor. Since her parents were separated informally, and police work took him all over the country, she rarely saw her father as a child. He had two sons from two different relationships – one when she was 11 and the other when she was 32. Although she had met her stepbrothers, she wasn’t close to them. Victoria explained: I wasn’t that poor in the sense that we didn’t have enough to eat or place to live. My mother says that it took her eight years to get my father to buy us a house because my father didn’t care where we lived. That was because he was living in other places around the country. Before living in a house, Victoria and her mother would sometimes live with her aunts, who lovingly spoiled Victoria because she was their first niece. Though her mother was one of eight children, she only had one child herself, and that was Victoria. “My aunts were always providing things for me,” she recalled. “They gave me whatever I needed for school.” But despite her aunts’ generosity and the fact that they always had enough to eat and a place to live, Victoria recalled, “We didn’t have extra money for many things, like going someplace for vacations.” Many people she knew went to the Caribbean coast for vacation, but Victoria didn’t have a vacation like that until she was an adult and could afford to pay for it on her own.

Private School However, Victoria did attend private schools throughout her childhood, and she said decisively, “It changed my life.” Private school was a powerful investment for her, as it prepared her to attend a public university in Colombia where it was very competitive to get accepted. “Every semester, about 50,000 students take the exam to study at the university, and only 5,000 students are accepted. My mom really invested in me,” she

The Role of Self-Belief, Motivation, and Personal Sacrifice 147 explained. “She always paid my school tuition, even though she had to make a lot of sacrifices.” The Universidad de Antioquia, where Victoria earned her undergraduate degree and where she now teaches English as a foreign language, is ranked among the top 50 universities in Latin America in Times Higher Education (Latin American University Rankings, 2019). “I  had good preparation in school on the elementary and secondary levels,” she reflected. “So that then I could go to college. And by going to college, I got access to other things.”

Escaping Marriage When she was just 16, Victoria married a man who was 12 years her senior, and the two of them migrated without documents to work in a factory in the U.S. state of Rhode Island. Her son’s father turned out to be violent and controlling, and he confiscated her paychecks each week. He hid her passport so she couldn’t leave the country. Her mother urged her to enroll in a public high school while she was in Rhode Island so she could at least earn her high school diploma in the United States. Then she found out she was pregnant, and things looked dire. Somehow, she was able to convince her son’s father that they had to return to Colombia for the baby to be born. Fortunately, he agreed. Victoria told us, “My mother was always saying, ‘You have to study, even though you have a baby, you have to study. You have to study.’ ” Victoria took the entrance exam for the university and passed it. That was a huge accomplishment. At the same time, her marriage deteriorated quickly. She explained, “I was tolerating and tolerating things until I just couldn’t stand it anymore.” Her son’s father didn’t support her studies at all. She recounted: My son’s father was a chauvinist. He said he wanted me to continue in school, but he didn’t help me. I had to get up early, get my son ready, cook, clean, look after my son. I could only study after my son had gone to bed at 8:30 PM. But then he would make me turn out the light, so I couldn’t study even though I was in another part of the house. Her son’s father was controlling and didn’t want her to become financially independent. These sexist attitudes are common in Latin American countries (as well as the United States, still), but the legal system in Colombia makes it especially easy for men to have legal authority over their wives. Although recent reforms in Colombia have given women more legal rights, psychological and physical violence against women continues (Zwehl, 2014), as it does around the world. Fortunately, Victoria’s mother helped her escape the marriage. After her mother suggested that she communicate with Church authorities,

148  The Role of Self-Belief, Motivation, and Personal Sacrifice Victoria found out she could get the marriage annulled. This traumainducing marriage made her even more determined to go to college. She and her son moved back to her mother’s house. Her mother offered to support her and help care for her son, telling her that if she could just focus on school, she would be able to graduate sooner and then make money. Her mother saw the long-term investment of education, without a doubt. “But I  felt bad,” she lamented, “because my mom had never had a job.” While her mother urged her to study full time and not work, she felt she had to contribute to the household and not force her mother to work. Consequently, Victoria worked part time throughout her undergraduate years, because she didn’t want to burden her mother any more than she already had. She also wanted to pay for private school for her son, a sacrifice that her own mother had made for her. Her mother had shown her that private schooling could improve her son’s life chances.

Daily Sacrifices As a single mother, Victoria had a grueling schedule. She recalled: When I arrived at home after school and work, I was so tired. Then I would play with my son, and when he went to sleep at 10:30 PM, I  would start to study. I  would study until midnight or later. And then I had to get up at 6:00 AM and take my son to school. It was really hard, but I finally graduated with my bachelor’s in English. But it took me eight years. In her last semester of college, she began to teach English, and simultaneously, she became involved in a study group with a professor, in which they learned how to conduct action research. This study group added to her demanding schedule because the only time she and the other students could meet with the professor was Mondays from 8:00 PM to 10:30 PM. Afterward, she would go home to study for the next day’s classes.

Finding Research She loved the action research study group because the professor, who became her mentor, introduced her to inquiry-based research through journals that Victoria and the other novice language teachers kept. This focus on inquiry is part of action research, in which teachers and other practitioners examine their own practices and connect their selfobservations to the literature (Dustman, Kohan, & Stringer, 2014). In those journals, Victoria and the other teachers reflected on their classrooms in relation to published research that related to their experiences.

The Role of Self-Belief, Motivation, and Personal Sacrifice 149 Her desire to attend college, which started when she was a little girl gazing longingly at the university through the bus window, had now grown into a desire to become a university professor. She pictured herself at the Universidad de Antioquia. Her figured worlds – her sites of possibility (Urrieta, 2007) – were expanding. She knew she had to get a master’s degree to accomplish this goal. Because her university didn’t have a master’s program in language teaching and she couldn’t travel elsewhere because of her son, she applied to and was accepted to an online master’s program in Spain. While she continued to teach English, she didn’t earn enough to pay for school. Fortunately, she got a lowinterest loan that allowed her to pay for 40 percent of her tuition. Her mother, always ready to support her daughter’s education, was able to convince Victoria’s father to give her $100 a month so she could pay the rest of the tuition. “I know it doesn’t sound like much,” she shared, “but it was a lot for me.” The online master’s degree at the Universidad de Jaén in Spain required her to be very disciplined with her time, but she was highly motivated because she knew she had to learn how to do research to become a university professor. Although it was a Spanish university, everything for the master’s program was in English – the online classes, the readings, and the assignments. She both wrote and orally defended her thesis in English. While Victoria was coordinating an English language program for teenagers at the Universidad de Antioquia, a friend of hers who also worked there invited her to participate in a research project about using rubrics in the language classroom. Participating in that study led her to find the topic of her master’s thesis, in which she investigated the feasibility of using rubrics to assess teenagers’ oral English language proficiency. Her research consisted of designing rubrics, interviewing students and teachers, and observing classes, with a focus on the reliability and the practicality of implementing rubrics for this purpose. Victoria enjoyed collecting and analyzing the data, but she felt insecure when it came to the actual writing. She noted: I remember when I got stuck with the writing. I thought that it was all so stupid! I thought nobody would be interested in this. I had all the data, I had done the analysis, but when I started to write, I got stuck, and I couldn’t finish. At that point, she reached out to several students from the Universidad de Antioquia who had been in her action research study group. They told her over and over, “You have to finish!” Because they can offer both emotional support and feedback, writing and research groups can help motivate students – especially people doing academic writing in a

150  The Role of Self-Belief, Motivation, and Personal Sacrifice language they learned as an adult. These groups can support people like Victoria through stressful writing projects (Aitchison, 2009; Aitchison & Guerin, 2014). And as a result of reaching out for help in this way, Victoria grew more confident about her ability to write in academic English. Her successes began to add up. After Victoria had been through three grueling drafts, her advisor finally approved her thesis. Right away, she applied for a very competitive position as a tenure-track assistant professor at Universidad de Antioquia. She got the job. She also published an article in the journal Profile Issues in Teachers’ Professional Development based on her thesis. She was on the faculty at the university where she had dreamed of working as a child. She was starting to believe that she belonged in the figured world of the academy.

Colonial Languages and Their Legacies Before she began to teach English and conduct research on language teaching at the Universidad de Antioquia, Victoria was an experienced language learner herself, having studied English for many years and, to a lesser degree, Portuguese and French. Victoria had a strong interest in languages and cultures, and she began to study English seriously in high school. She continued studying English in college, becoming proficient enough to be hired to teach English during her final semester of college. That was when a state policy had just been implemented to make the entire country of Colombia bilingual in Spanish and English. In college she also studied French for several years. Unlike her experiences learning English, which began in high school, Victoria struggled with French. Her classmates had been studying French for years, and she was clearly a newcomer. She joked about her performance in French class, recalling: I never took French before going to college. So when I was in my first semester, I took the first level of French. I didn’t understand anything. The teacher was asking us very simple questions, like “What’s your name?” and “What’s your age?” and “Where do you live?” I couldn’t answer. When I didn’t know how to say something, I said it in English. Not in Spanish. I had all of these different accents. That was very funny for my classmates. Language teachers’ experiences learning languages play an important role in how they teach (Garza, 2020; Gilham & Fürstenau, 2020). In particular, teachers’ experiences studying foreign languages in a classroom setting influence their own classroom pedagogy (Ruohotie-Lyhty  & Moate, 2015; Yigitoglu & Belcher, 2014) because they better understand what their students go through. Victoria had a better understanding of

The Role of Self-Belief, Motivation, and Personal Sacrifice 151 how students might struggle when learning another language, particularly when they lack sufficient preparation. She didn’t get interested in learning French, she affirmed, until her last semester of college, when she took a course in French history. She didn’t practice French much after her undergraduate studies, so she lost most of her fluency, although she still counts that language and Portuguese, which she also studied, as part of her linguistic repertoire. Victoria was well aware that the languages she spoke were linked to the oppression of Indigenous peoples. Spanish is a colonial language. The Spanish conquistadores seized what is now the country of Colombia in the 15th century. English and French are colonial languages as well. She remarked that “the colonizers from Spain came to Latin America, and they started to mix with African people and Indigenous people,” and because of this history, she saw herself as mixed race. When she heard about a study at the Universidad de Antioquia that used DNA samples to understand more about the ancestry of the department (i.e., the state), she volunteered to participate. She was curious about her own mixedrace ancestry, and she had a feeling that she had a large percentage of Indigenous blood. When the researchers sent her their findings, she shared, “I was told I have a bigger percentage of Spanish blood than I thought, and I had thought I would have more Indigenous ancestry. It was a little disappointing.” She had assumed she had more Indigenous blood because she and her mother’s side of the family have darker skin, what she described as “tan.” Her father’s side of the family had whiter skin, and she assumed that meant more Spanish ancestry. Although she had a feeling that there was African blood in her lineage, the genetic test showed that she had mostly Spanish blood, that she had some Indigenous blood, and that her African inheritance was the smallest percentage. She understood the test as one component of her background, noting that language and culture are most significant. “My ethnic identity is mixed, but it’s  .  .  . mostly Spanish,” she declared. “One’s identity isn’t defined by just one language or culture, but by multiple ones. We’re a mixture of everything at the same time.”

I’m a Colombiana Hispanic, Latina, and Latinx were identity terms that made no sense for describing Victoria’s experience in the world. These terms were far too U.S. centric. Though she was interested in the gruesome racial history of the United States, the racial politics of Colombia were more salient to her. She was determined to learn more about Indigenous peoples and languages in her home country. When she was a college language instructor in Colombia, not long before she left for El Paso and

152  The Role of Self-Belief, Motivation, and Personal Sacrifice Borderlands University, she had hoped to take a course in Eberá, the primary Indigenous language in the part of Colombia where she was from. The course was so popular that it filled up before she was able to enroll. However, just before she traveled to Borderlands for her doctoral journey, she was able to attend an Eberá cultural celebration at the university. She recalled: They taught us a song in their language, and they helped us pronounce the words and sing it. After we sang it once through, they explained the meaning of the song, and it was beautiful. It meant this land is ours, and it belongs to us. You cannot take it away from us. We must protect it and defend it. We are a united people. It made me feel so badly for all of the damage that we have done to these people. Before she had that powerful experience with Eberá students at the Universidad de Antioquia, she had been curious about Indigenous students and how they experienced university study. She also knew the university administration had done research to better understand the experiences of Indigenous students at the university. Administrators had identified what they called a mismatch between their culture and university practices. The Indigenous students made clear that this cultural discordance had contributed to a high percentage of them dropping out. She had observed that many of the Indigenous students in her English and French classes had difficulties finishing their work on time. They would ask for extensions so that they could get tutored, but some instructors at the university wouldn’t allow them any extra help. Victoria asked indignantly, “How can they do that to students?”

Grappling with Teaching English Victoria was conscious that she was teaching the colonizer’s language and that English was a language that continued to colonize her country. But at the same time, she stated that English “is the language of the world. If students want access to good jobs, they need to learn it.” To some extent, she owed her academic position as an English professor to the Colombian government’s controversial language policy that required Spanish-English bilingualism. In 2005, the Ministry of National Education set a goal of making all Colombians SpanishEnglish bilinguals by 2019. Although that objective is still in process today, the policy was intended to strengthen the country’s economy and its national defense. Victoria understood that this policy came at the expense of efforts to revitalize and honor Indigenous languages in Colombia (Usma Wilches, 2009). In effect, this policy helped to create

The Role of Self-Belief, Motivation, and Personal Sacrifice 153 solid footing for the Colombian elites to do business in English and to expand U.S. markets. This came at the expense of threatened Indigenous languages and the ever-deepening impoverishment of Indigenous communities (Guerrero, 2009). Hough and Skutnabb-Kangas (2005), along with other scholars, documented the ways free market ideologies have led to subtractive bilingualism. When people’s native languages are subtracted, this is usually accomplished through formal education (Valenzuela, 1999). In the case of Indigenous languages, the result can be linguistic genocide. Indigenous languages are dying at alarming rates, and Victoria is wide awake to these tragic consequences. At the same time, this promotion of the English language throughout Colombia led to increased resources for English classes and teachers at all levels of education, which benefited Victoria professionally. In fact, it allowed her university to sponsor her doctoral study, which gave her the chance to learn more about the language she was teaching and to make the most of what she described as “an exchange of cultures.” Her position as a tenure-track assistant professor in Colombia benefited her, just as she and her mother had hoped it would. She was filled with pride when she was able to buy her mother a house in a better neighborhood. Her mother’s investment in Victoria’s education, her cheerleading, and her sacrifices had paid off. Victoria was able to send two of her cousins to private school in Colombia as well. Her gratification in these accomplishments helped soften the sadness she felt about her son. He had decided not to go to college and worked as a manual laborer. While she respects the work he does, she worries about how long he will be able to do that kind of job. And although she hears about him through her mother, she has not been in regular contact with him. Throughout her years at Borderlands University, she missed her culture and family, and she felt alone. Loneliness is common among international students. They are separated from their families and their cultures, and they work hard to accommodate new linguistic, cultural, and academic demands (Bek, 2017; Janta, Lugosi, & Brown, 2014; Patron, 2014; Sawir, Marginson, Deumert, Nyland, & Ramia, 2007; Zhou & Cole, 2017). While Victoria enjoyed the intellectual challenge of earning her doctorate, she revealed at the end of the case study course that most people didn’t realize how much she missed her life in Colombia. “People I know don’t realize what it’s been like for me,” she divulged. “Because I  like to travel to different places and I  like getting learning and getting my doctorate, they think I  like life in the United States. But they don’t know how hard it’s been for me.” She struggled to hold back tears. Taking a moment to gather her thoughts, she affirmed, “But I have my strength. I  have my peace of mind. I  have my religion, so I  can keep being strong.”

154  The Role of Self-Belief, Motivation, and Personal Sacrifice Her faith was important to her, and it helped her get through her doctoral work in El Paso. Describing herself as “an intelligent Catholic,” she found a smile and noted that she didn’t believe in some of the Catholic dogma, but nevertheless, she still felt sustained by her faith. She was determined to overcome the hardships she had experienced in her life to become a successful professor and scholar. Her mother and her faith have helped her arrive at this place.

Not a Novice, Not an Expert When people enter a new disciplinary community, the status of novices and experts – in essence, those who belong and those who don’t – can be fuzzy. Memberships aren’t always clear cut or static. Instead, entering a Community of Practice involves complicated and constantly shifting relationships and practices among people (Prior, 1998). Such was the case with Victoria’s position in the case study course. As we mentioned earlier, Victoria was distinct from the other students in the case study course because she was already working on independent scholarship. She was collecting and starting to analyze data on teachers’ identities and teaching assessment practices at the Universidad de Antioquia. In contrast, the other students were earlier in their doctoral studies, and this course was their first venture into doing, rather than studying, research. The person who was closest to Victoria in terms of research experience was Jair, an advanced doctoral student in education and the preceptor for the course. Significantly, he was a co-researcher on this study, and he wrote parts of this book. Victoria occupied an in-between space in relation to the other students who were new to research, as Jair did. While Victoria did not gather data in the first-year composition courses, she did complete all the other assignments for the course.2 Throughout the course, she conducted Skype interviews with university language instructors in Colombia, transcribed her data, analyzed it, and wrote about it. Victoria was also beginning to use theory to explain her findings. As a result, she wasn’t just a student in the class – she was also a more experienced researcher who could help other students with their research, tell them about the norms of doctoral study, and prepare them to enter the professoriate since she was already a tenure-track assistant professor. Thinking about her through a Communities of Practice frame, she had had more access to the culture of practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991) than her peers. This does not necessarily mean she was more advanced than her fellow student researchers though. Becoming a full-fledged member of a Community of Practice is more a cycle of accumulating opportunities for practice than a linear developmental process. Still, Victoria was less of a novice than the other students in the case study course. The majority of them were novices in terms of the norms of qualitative research, as well as the rituals, behaviors, and belief systems typical of the

The Role of Self-Belief, Motivation, and Personal Sacrifice 155 professoriate (Danowitz, 2016; Lee, Chen, Chang, & Yoneda, 2017; Prior, 1998; Starke-Meyerring, 2011). In contrast, Victoria was already familiar with being a professor in her home country, and she was also more advanced in terms of conducting research. At Borderlands University, she had been hired to work in the College of Education’s ethnography lab. That meant she coordinated the weekly research talks  – what we called coloquios – and she was in charge of checking out recording equipment for students and faculty, as well as helping people use transcription and qualitative analysis software. Being in this position meant that students new to the program saw her as someone with more experience. Although she had the insecurities and uncertainties common to all learners entering a Community of Practice (Casanave, 2002), along with the loneliness that came from being so far away from her family and job in Colombia, she had the identity of a more experienced teacher and scholar who was eager and able to help the newer students.

Becoming an Independent Scholar Victoria was also distinct from the other student researchers because she was researching and writing a single-authored pilot study, whereas the other students were collaborating in research teams, and some collaborated on their manuscripts as well. The other students regularly met in their research teams to observe the first-year writing classes, interview participants, and analyze data. They also collaborated on the theory presentation, wrote their conference proposals together, and most of them drafted their manuscripts together, except for Josiah. Sometimes they gathered for meals or coffee to discuss their research, and they took some other classes together too. Meanwhile, Victoria was almost finished with her coursework and was preparing to write her dissertation proposal. Because she was an international student, she was required to take three classes, a full load of coursework, each semester. Also, she could only apply for campus jobs and was limited to working 20 hours a week. JoAnn was studying full time as well, but all the other student researchers were part-time students, taking one or two classes a semester while they worked full-time jobs as teachers or educational administrators. Thus, Victoria had fewer opportunities to develop the socio-academic relationships that can help ease the way into a Community of Practice (Leki, 2007). It’s likely that this also compounded the feelings of loneliness she felt.

The Quasi-Instructor Many times when Victoria interacted with the other students in the course, she positioned herself as closer to an instructor than a student.

156  The Role of Self-Belief, Motivation, and Personal Sacrifice For instance, early in the first semester of the case study course, the students were concerned about getting students to sign their consent forms. They were frustrated that the first-year writing students were ignoring their requests for them to participate in the research. Even though the student researchers had visited the first-year writing class several times, some RHET 1500 students seemed apathetic or suspicious about signing the consent form. Josiah said, “The instructor encouraged them to sign up, so that’s good.” JoAnn countered, “But we passed out the consent forms. The students didn’t return them.” Josiah suggested that maybe the instructor could collect them when the student researchers weren’t there. Victoria listened intently, asking, “How many students have signed up so far?” Josiah explained that his research team only had 14 consent forms out of 23 students. “Actually,” Victoria stated, “that’s not bad at all. You started out with eight participants. So you’re getting there.” She elaborated on the challenges she had faced trying to get the language instructors to participate in her study. She advised her classmates, saying: I had to negotiate with the teachers because they weren’t interested in my study either. I  had to talk with them, persuade them. I  had to express a lot of understanding about their situations. I  wanted them to speak honestly with me. I let them know that they had a lot of knowledge and that we could work together. I wanted to create a space where their ideas could flow organically. I wanted them to know we could understand each other. She recommended they start conversations with potential participants in class so that they could get to know them and feel comfortable with them. Jair shared the same counsel, letting them know that the same thing had happened to him when he took a pilot version of this course. “You have to sell it to them,” he laughed. Their advice worked. By the next week, the student researchers had been able to sign up more than half the first-year writing students in each field site. Victoria also assumed a quasi-instructor stance in her Letter to the Readers 1, with this journal entry written after the first class meeting. She wrote: Today’s class was a good one, the first class of the fall semester. It was well structured, the information given was clear, and we were told what we would be doing for the rest of the semester. I also like the topic of the class and the approach to it – learning to do research by actually doing it. I think this is the type of class we doctoral students need, and I specifically thought of all my fellow students who have little or no experience at all in research. It’s a good way to begin.

The Role of Self-Belief, Motivation, and Personal Sacrifice 157 At the end of this excerpt, when she described how the class would help students who didn’t know how to do research, Victoria seemed more like a professor describing a course to a new student than she did a student enrolled in the course.

Reflections and Intellectual Growth As we described in Chapter  2, the five Letters to the Readers assignments gave students the opportunity to reflect on the readings, class discussions, and their experiences collecting data in the first-year writing classes. The philosophy behind the Letter to the Readers assignment drew on John Dewey’s (1910) notion of reflective thinking as consisting of “active, persistent, and careful consideration of any belief or supposed form of knowledge in light of the grounds that support it, and the further conclusions to which it tends” (p.  6). Our approach was experiential in that we wanted learners to consciously explore what they were experiencing (Silver, 2013). Such experiences are often ambiguous and fill students with uncertainty. But it is through these experiences that they test and modify their ideas as they work to transform their environment, thus leading to new knowledge (Schon, 1987; Yancey, 2016). In Victoria’s five Letters to the Readers, she reflected on the readings, the class discussions, and her own pilot study. She often wrote about the process of reflection itself, explaining how her reflections were helping her think through the significance of her data. She suggested that reflection is connected to identity. As she wrote more Letters to the Readers throughout the semester, she began to connect her own reflective practice to storytelling and identity development, an insight that allowed her to make sense of her own data and to progress in analyzing and writing her pilot study.

Eureka Moments Victoria began the journey of understanding her research data in her first Letter to the Readers by connecting the class discussions and course readings to her pilot study and her life experiences. She was open to ideas that challenged what she had previously learned years ago when she was earning her master’s degree in teaching English as a Foreign Language and applied linguistics. One of the articles that the students read early in the semester was Bucholtz’s (1999) essay “Why Be Normal?: Language and Identity Practices in a Community of Nerd Girls,” an ethnographic study of how a group of high school girls who self-identified as “nerds” resisted hegemonic performances of femininity. One of the key tenets Victoria had learned in her master’s program was the concept

158  The Role of Self-Belief, Motivation, and Personal Sacrifice of speech communities, defined as groups of people who share the same linguistic expectations and norms regarding language competence and use (Gumperz, 1968). The concept of speech community, she had been taught, was important for language teachers because it helped them see that language learning involved more than just grammatical accuracy. Instead, language learners also needed to develop fluency and learn how to use language appropriately in social settings. Buchotlz’s critique of the concept of speech communities intrigued Victoria, who wrote in her Letter to the Readers 1 about the six flaws that Bucholtz identified in the concept of speech communities (Bucholtz, 1999). After quoting these points, Victoria wrote about her own thoughts, saying: The framework of Communities of Practice is better regarding language and gender than the framework of the speech community because the idea of speech communities is flawed. Bucholtz identified these six flaws: “1) the tendency to take language as central, 2) the emphasis on consensus as the organizing principle of community, 3) the preference for studying central members of the community over those at the margins, 4) the focus on the group at the expense of individuals, 5) the view of identity as a set of static categories, and 6) the valorization of researchers’ interpretations over participants’ own understandings of their practices” (Bucholtz, 1999, p. 207). I found it very interesting to see how different Communities of Practice distinguish themselves by the use of language that can be noticed in very subtle forms, such as showing toughness. I liked this article and found it a good argument of how language can be used to manipulate or say things that we cannot express for fear of appearing rude. It is interesting to see how the framework of Community of Practice enables researchers to regard language within the context of social practice. In this passage, Victoria moved easily from a theoretical framework that she had previously seen as the only approach out there to imagining something new. While she used individual interviews as data for her pilot study, her dissertation was an ethnography, and she ended up combining figured worlds and Communities of Practice as her theoretical framework. Victoria’s reflexivity about her teaching and research was clear in this first Letter to the Readers, as well as the others she wrote throughout the semester. Early in the semester, the students read Anthony Liddicoat’s (2009) ethnographic study that looked at heteronormative norms in university language classrooms and instructors’ misunderstanding students’ declarations of sexual identity as linguistic errors. In particular, Victoria talked about an excerpt from the study in which an instructor asked a male

The Role of Self-Belief, Motivation, and Personal Sacrifice 159 student, “What’s your girlfriend’s name?” and he replied, “My girlfriend is a man.” Victoria responded to this study, writing: Liddicoat (2009) addresses the topic of heteronormative language and issues of sexual identity that are seen as linguistic failure in foreign language teaching classrooms. Reading through this essay, I saw that language is something very subtle and profound and that we, as teachers of foreign languages, are many times not very aware of this fact. Maybe it’s because of the rush we are in most of the time, being in charge of too many things simultaneously, besides our own lives. But it could also be because of our own prejudices as human beings. I  am thinking about the many instances in which I  might have done the same thing to my students without even noticing it. I also think about the prejudices implicit in teaching materials that do not include examples that are inclusive of students’ different sexual identities, especially in learning languages where the feminine and masculine forms are very noticeable. Victoria then connected the class discussion of this article to her own pilot study, writing: As I was listening to this discussion, I was trying to connect the idea of Ideologies and identities to my study. I  thought what are those ideologies and identities that English teachers at the university have, and what agency do they have to make changes? Within the first few weeks of the semester, Victoria’s beliefs about her professional and research practices were shifting in response to the class readings and discussions. New ideas challenged what she had previously learned. She also recognized that her teaching practices needed to be more responsive to student identities. She was rethinking her own research because of what the case study course was leading her to think about in terms of ideologies and identities. This suggests that her identities as a teacher and a researcher were shifting as a result of participating in activities and interactions with others in this ongoing learning process (Kamler & Thomson, 2014; Lave & Wenger, 1991; Roozen, 2015). Another eureka moment for Victoria that she wrote about in her Letter to the Readers dealt with language ideologies – the beliefs people have around language, such as the notion that a standard language is superior to another language variety. While she had been aware of the imposition of colonial languages on Indigenous communities in her home country of Colombia, the notion of language ideologies was new to her. What sparked her thoughts about language ideologies was Davila’s (2012) article “Indexicality and ‘Standard’ Edited Academic English: Examining

160  The Role of Self-Belief, Motivation, and Personal Sacrifice the Link Between Conceptions of Standardness and Perceived Authorial Identity.” In this essay, Davila (2012) explored the way White instructors of first-year composition, when asked to assess anonymous student essays, attributed racialized characteristics to student writers’ work. They attributed problems with organization, word choice, sentence structure, and grammar to writers they imagined were from the inner city – their euphemism for Black students. They also made assumptions about the genders of the student writers, ascribing interest in football, for example, exclusively to male students. In her discussion, Davila (2012) focused on the notion of indexicality  – what she thinks of broadly as the ways in which linguistic forms point to social meanings, such as identities. Because Davila’s (2012) study concerned teacher identities and language assessment, Victoria immediately saw the connection to her own work. In the class discussion, she thought aloud, saying: The critical part in this article is how teachers are classifying these students. They are profiling the students. I didn’t know that teachers here in the United States could be that racist. I’m thinking about what we do in Colombia. We need the teachers to focus more on content and not only on grammar. The teachers aren’t aware of the way they’re enforcing their standard language ideology on students. Victoria elaborated on Davila’s (2012) article in her Letter to the Readers 2, writing: “The article shows the power of the standard language ideology and how the status quo in society is maintained by groups that have always been in power. That’s how it is in my study.” Here, Victoria was referring to the Spanish-English bilingual policy in Colombia that led to putting English at the center of university student education, at the expense of the many Indigenous languages used in Colombia. Victoria noted that most of the English teachers in her study didn’t question this language policy. Moreover, even though the government required more English language teaching in universities, the teachers were always poorly paid, and many times, they lacked English proficiency themselves. Victoria was becoming more aware of the sociopolitical contexts and ideologies in which students and teachers alike are immersed. She was carefully starting to apply these ideas to her pilot study, and later, she applied them to her dissertation as well. As Victoria progressed through the case study course and on to her dissertation research, she was learning about Communities of Practice theory in the course readings and connecting them to the theoretical framework for her dissertation. In fact, she ended up drawing extensively on Communities of Practice theory in her dissertation to explain how the teachers in her study responded to new assessment practices.

The Role of Self-Belief, Motivation, and Personal Sacrifice 161 She reflected on her initial attempts to understand Communities of Practice theory and to connect it to her research in her Letter to the Readers 4, writing: CoP is a topic that I have heard about. I have read a little bit about it, but I think I still need to digest it more in order to understand it better. Wikipedia was useful to help me understand some basic ideas and to situate the studies I have read that use CoP. I’m starting to get a better picture of it and to connect it more clearly to the data I initially coded as CoP in my pilot study. I could finally understand that one of the issues with CoP is that it explains the ways in which individuals get immersed into their communities, and this can contribute to explaining lots of dynamics and learning in different professional groups. It’s teachers, in my case. Realizing the importance of exploring the dynamic in a CoP can help me explain, for instance, why the last study group of teachers I observed could not accomplish their objectives. Becoming a member of a CoP is a matter of building relationships and trust because that is what humans do when they initiate new endeavors. This was another eureka moment. She had been puzzled as to why a group of teachers she had worked with to design and implement rubrics for assessment were unable to accomplish the task together. Communities of Practice theory led her to ask questions about who the experts and novices were among this group of teachers and how some of their identities might be tied to previous assessment approaches. While she was starting to use Communities of Practice theory as an explanatory tool in her pilot study, she was taking the case study course in which students, by doing research rather than just studying it, were eased into a Community of Practice of ethnographic case study research and scholarly writing. Just a few paragraphs after she wrote about this eureka moment in her Letter to the Readers 4, she expressed her thoughts about the organization of our course. While she did not explicitly refer to Communities of Practice theory, she was essentially describing how the course offered her and the other students entry into a new Community of Practice. She wrote: I am glad we are having the opportunity to follow the whole research cycle in this class, from recruiting participants through preparing a paper to submit to a conference. . . . Research is learned by doing it, definitely. Not only do we need to read about research, but we also need to start to put into practice the research procedures we are reading about and then experience research in real-life situations. There is no other way to learn. Not to mention the important role that interactions and group work play in this learning to do research experience.

162  The Role of Self-Belief, Motivation, and Personal Sacrifice Victoria was doing Communities of Practice as well as studying Communities of Practice.

Self-Reflection and Storytelling Victoria’s third Letter to the Readers, written midway through the first semester of the case study course, demonstrated an important shift in her thinking about herself as a researcher. Her increased self-confidence was apparent in the first sentence, in which she declared that she was deliberately not using the prescribed structure for the Letter to the Readers assignment: This journal entry breaks a little bit the structure proposed for the research journal but at the same time includes it in a less linear way, just as ethnography sometimes does. This entry is mainly a click in my mind of what I have learned throughout the coursework in the doctoral program and especially in this class, with the readings we have been doing, but also through positioning myself as a beginning ethnographer. This journal entry is a look at how I make connections and how I  was reading ethnographies before I  knew ethnography existed. In doing this, I have also been exploring my own identity, something that I  definitely need to be aware of if I  am researching the topic of teacher identity. Hope the readers enjoy my text as I enjoyed writing it. In this last sentence, she addressed the readers – her professors, Char and Kate  – as equals, confident that we will like her writing. She was beginning to have a sense of belonging to the Community of Practice of the course and of her discipline. The rest of this Letter to the Readers was written in poetic form in Spanish and English, as she reflected on what it was like to do ethnographic research: La etnografía es como la vida (Ethnography is like life) Planeamos un poco (We plan a little bit) Y estamos abiertos a lo que la vida traiga (And we are opening ourselves to what life brings) Sometimes it brings hard moments Sometimes very illuminating ones We try to see things from different perspectives. Next, Victoria reflected on formal education: We are always making life so complicated And life is something simpler

The Role of Self-Belief, Motivation, and Personal Sacrifice 163 We have students learning from books We compare We analyze We try to understand We listen We ask Sometimes we have answers Sometimes not Sometimes silence is the answer. Then she shifted to storytelling and ethnography: I knew about ethnography before I read about it Belva Plain, Frank McCourt3 These were ethnographies Sometimes when I am reading ethnographic books, I feel I am reading a novel, but sometimes the authors mention positionality, data collection, or data analysis And then the magic is broken. In this excerpt, Victoria referred to the similarities between descriptions in the memoirs of Belva Plain and Frank McCourt and description in ethnographic writing. Kaplan-Weinger and Ullman (2015) explain thick description, a term originated by Geertz (2008) in ethnographic writing, like this: The way you bring in the context is by using thick description. Thick description is detailed writing about what you saw and heard in the field. It’s also description that gives your reader context. You might write about the layout of the space you are in, the objects there, and of course the people – what they look like, what they are wearing, and the social relationships among them. (p. 165) In her musings in her third Letter to the Readers, Victoria connected thick description with the storytelling in memoirs that she read. Her interest in storytelling became more insightful and complicated by the time she wrote her fifth and final Letter to the Readers at the end of the first semester of the case study course. In this text, she told stories to talk about storytelling and its connection to the identities of the teachers she was researching. She wrote: Going back to how I began to be interested in the topic of teacher identity, I  remember that it was in a natural way. I  just wanted to

164  The Role of Self-Belief, Motivation, and Personal Sacrifice know about who the teachers were, what characterized them, and how the characteristics they had could help professional program developers better address their needs. Then one thing took me to another. I did the pilot study on teacher identity and as I was listening to the teachers’ answers in the interview, I  soon realized they were telling stories. When I  presented my preliminary interpretations of the findings to the population of teachers to which the participants of my study belonged to, one of them asked if storytelling was inherent to Latin American countries. Later on, I would discover that stories are just inherent to being human. She continued: When I went to Veracruz, Mexico, for an academic conference, the taxi driver told me I could not leave Veracruz without having a lechero. Then he started to tell me the story of what a lechero was, and I loved it. It was about having a cup of coffee with milk in el café de la parroquia. It was almost a ritual. The waiter brought the coffee to the table in a glass – not in a cup – and if one wanted to add milk to it, one had to tinkle the glass with the spoon, and immediately the waiter would come with hot milk to pour into the glass. That was a lechero. The story dates from the times when they – in Veracruz – had a tramway, and every day when the tram driver passed by el café de la parroquia, he rang the bell. The waiter had a cup of coffee for him so that the driver didn’t need to stop the tram. When the tram driver passed away, the waiters began to tinkle their cups with a spoon [to] honor the memory of the tram driver. Now I have found that it is through stories that people connect their inner world to the outer world and establish boundaries of identities. Stories are immersed in the culture. This can be easily be understood looking back to the story of el lechero and also by connecting theories to the stories some of the participant teachers in my pilot study told me. Victoria ended this Letter to the Readers by summarizing how engaging with the teachers’ narratives had given her another eureka moment. She explained that she could now look at identity development within a Community of Practice frame, writing: When I started to read about teacher identity and [I got] involved in ethnographic research, I never thought that I was going to end up being engaged in narratives as both a method and a phenomenon to study. Now the topics of teacher identity and narratives are so connected for me. That makes me think that for my dissertation, I can explore how teachers can work on the construction of an assessment system that is part of their everyday practice and that they can

The Role of Self-Belief, Motivation, and Personal Sacrifice 165 complement it with what they may need from theory. I also think it is possible that as I work with teachers on the development of an assessment system, I can examine their identity development as teachers, making it a part of a Community of Practice. Victoria’s insight here about storytelling as a part of identity development within a Community of Practice served as the focal point for her dissertation research. As Lave  & Wenger (1991) note, learning to tell stories about oneself is part of the gradual construction of identity. The stories we tell let us interpret and reinterpret events and situations in our lives, and they change over time. In all her Letters to the Readers, as well as her formal writing for the course, Victoria told stories about what it was like for her to do research, an activity that allowed her to better understand the research process and to feel herself becoming a researcher.

Claiming an Identity Through Writing In graduate education and in the professoriate, writing plays a key role not just in how novice scholars create and demonstrate knowledge, but also in how they claim legitimacy. Graduate education is not just about a banking-style transmission of knowledge (Freire, 1970), although we acknowledge that sometimes it is. Rather, it’s also about “learning how to talk (and be silent) in the manner of full participants” (Lave & Wenger, 1991, p.  105). Writing is a process that contributes to how people develop new identities in personal and professional contexts. In addition to learning the formalized writing conventions of a discipline, people learn how to be within a group that has certain expectations, social conventions, and norms (Estrem, 2015; Roozen, 2015). Newcomers are expected to master common academic writing genres, such as the conference presentation, the research article, the grant proposal, and the dissertation. Genres such as these are well-established forms of writing, to be sure, but they constitute the means by which newcomers to the field develop and perform their academic identities (Hart-Davidson, 2015; Kamler & Thomson, 2014; Lunsford, 2015). In Miller’s words, genres are social practices in that they are “typified rhetorical actions based in recurrent situations” (1984, p.  159). These rhetorical actions often take place in contexts in which newcomers are evaluated by more established practitioners who act as gatekeepers, determining who can, and cannot, enter the discipline.

Writing a Conference Proposal As a tenure-track assistant professor at the Universidad de Antioquia and a doctoral student preparing for dissertation research, Victoria already

166  The Role of Self-Belief, Motivation, and Personal Sacrifice had quite a bit of experience with one academic genre, and that was the conference presentation. She demonstrated this in the case study course when Char and Kate were preparing students for their first conference presentations at the Ethnographic and Qualitative Research Conference (EQRC). As we described in Chapter 2, this conference was small, friendly, and welcoming to graduate students. The students had just handed in drafts of their conference proposals, and they were busy peppering us with questions, anxious about what it would be like to present original research at a conference. JoAnn asked, “So when you go and give your talk, are people nice? What are your experiences with getting feedback? How does it work?” Victoria responded right away and reflected her experience of presenting at several scholarly conferences Colombia, Mexico, and the United States. She offered this advice: In my personal experience, people who attend conferences, if they’re interested in your topic, they will ask questions about the method or about something you didn’t explain much. They will let you know if they are doing research on a similar topic or they have similar results. They might want to discuss the similarities with you. That allows you to emphasize what you have found. Another interesting thing about attending conferences is that you make contacts. You talk to people who are interested in your topic. At one conference, I  was presenting on teacher identity, and I  met someone who was looking at identity, too, and we ended up having dinner together. We even ended up collaborating on a new project at our different institutions. While some of the student researchers had done pedagogical presentations for other teachers, none of them except Victoria had presented original research at a conference. Their conference proposals went through several drafts as they struggled to explain their research project in the required 500 words. The more experienced Victoria, however, only needed one draft to successfully write the proposal, which was accepted to the conference. While all the student researchers’ proposals were accepted to the conference, the others required extensive revisions before they submitted them. She also wrote this short proposal abstract that appeared in the conference schedule with little difficulty: This work presents preliminary findings of a case study carried out with instructors of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) who work as lecturers at a public university in Colombia where a new language policy and English program will be implemented in 2016. The objective of this study was to explore teachers’ identities. The research

The Role of Self-Belief, Motivation, and Personal Sacrifice 167 questions were: What are the identities of teachers who will work in the new English program at this university? How can knowing about English teachers’ identities contribute to the design of professional development programs? The data collection instruments included an online questionnaire and in-depth interviews. The preliminary findings presented in this paper will be focused on how teachers refer to being part of a community of practice with colleagues and the role the university plays as a figured world where teachers can learn from each other and share ideas. In this abstract, Victoria followed a conventional structure in which she explained the purpose of the study, its context, the research questions, the methodology, and the findings. Unlike her less experienced classmates, she had finished collecting her data, and while she had yet to finish analyzing it, she already had a sense of what the data might reveal. Despite her success with writing conference proposals, though, she was still feeling her way around the more challenging task of writing a manuscript to submit to an academic journal.

Writing a Manuscript Draft As we mentioned in Chapter  2, there are many resources available to students to help them complete high-stakes writing projects, many of which focus on the structure of different writing genres, such as the ethnographic study that Victoria was writing for her dissertation. Creswell (2013), for instance, explains the structure of an ethnography as a thematic narrative that inductively develops from a thesis or main idea. He goes on to more specifically describe four main sections of the ethnography, including an introduction, the setting and methods, the analytic claims, and the conclusion. Guidelines such as this provide helpful scaffolding for novice researchers, as does reading ethnographic articles to use as models, which is what the students did in the case study course. This genre of writing reveals what is valued in ethnographic research, such as creating a complete and complex description of a culture-sharing group and examining patterns of activities that reveal the group’s beliefs and ideologies (Cresswell, 2016). One of the most difficult aspects of this process is what Swales (2004) calls Creating a Research Space (or CaRS) early in a research article, in which writers establish a research territory. The idea is to show the importance of the topic and to review relevant literature to establish a niche for the work. Then they reveal “the main purpose of the study and indicate how it extends previous knowledge about the topic” (Freak  & Swales, 2011, p.  55). The difficulty for many new scholars – including Victoria – is that they have to figure out what counts as important literature on their topic and what constitutes a research

168  The Role of Self-Belief, Motivation, and Personal Sacrifice gap or niche. Then they have to discursively assert that their project is worthwhile. In other words, these people who are fairly new to the field have to present themselves as experts of a sort. Victoria’s final paper for the course, a draft of the manuscript, illustrates some of the challenges she faced with this new genre of writing. Part of this challenge was pivoting from the writing genre she had mastered – a conference proposal – to a lengthier and more complex research article. The first two paragraphs of her manuscript draft mirror the common structure of a conference proposal or abstract, in which the purpose of the study is given, and the data collection process is described. After doing this, Victoria explained the findings of the study, which, as Char’s comments indicated, should appear later in the article. Here are the first several paragraphs of Victoria’s draft with Char’s comments in italics. Introduction The objective of the paper article? is to understand, from a discourse analysis perspective Gee? Van Dijk? and using a sociocultural Who? and poststructuralist Who? theory of teacher identity, how teachers of English as a Foreign Language construct their identities and the role that balanced power relationships play in their professional development and teacher learning. What do you mean by balanced power relationships? Are you going to tell us now or later? The topic of the paper this study? was derived from data collected with 12 English language instructors who worked as adjunct faculty in a public university in Colombia. The data collected for this study included an online questionnaire and in-depth interviews carried out from December 2014 to May 2015. Findings of this study may be relevant for teachers, professional program developers, and school administrators interested in finding alternatives to contribute to teachers’ learning. Tell us about the university, the setting. Teachers of the study found in-services offered to them as an opportunity to learn and share with their colleagues and coordinators. Does this statement come from your data? You need to put that information in the data section. They expressed that in-services were more relevant for them when their voices about what they needed were included and when there was a follow-up to those in-services using a one-to-one coaching approach. Teacher Study Groups (TSG) are another way in which teachers can learn. Show us how you know this. Participant teachers in this study saw TSG as an opportunity to learn, grow, and be part of an academic community. Even thought this was a volunteer endeavor and teachers did not receive any

The Role of Self-Belief, Motivation, and Personal Sacrifice 169 payment for that, the learning teachers gained in these spaces gave them power in the sense that they gained knowledge that represented money for them at other worksites. The rest of the introduction consisted of three additional paragraphs in which Victoria gave several other findings from her study. After this introduction, Char wrote: OK! In the introduction, you really needed to tell us more about the university and your positionality. I’m not clear on why you’re including very generalized findings here. You need to establish why this issue matters and where you did the study. And I think one of the issues you need to explore is ADJUNCT status. Contextualizing it seems very important, given what I know about your study. Later in the draft, Victoria struggled with what Swales (2004) calls creating a research space, in that she summarized a concept that she wrote was key to her analysis without connecting it to her study. Char commented about this section, saying, “What I  want to see and I’m not seeing is your situating the study in the work on professional development of English as a Foreign Language teachers. It’s not clear who the audience is you’re talking to and what this study contributes to the literature. What are the issues they’re discussing, and how does your study speak to them?” Next, Victoria gave extensive excerpts from the interviews she had conducted with the instructors, and for the most part, this section was coherent and linked to her topic. But she then struggled in her discussion section to unite these interview excerpts with her theoretical framework and findings, leading Char to write, “How does this point relate to your interviewee?” and “I think your data and your theory aren’t talking to each other. I want to see you integrate them.” Despite these issues in the draft, Char wrote in her overall evaluation of Victoria’s draft: “All in all, this is a good start, and I’m happy with this paper.” Curry (2016) has noted that graduate students are expected to “careen from one identity position (novice, student) to another (expert, scholar) often within a matter of semesters” (p. 87). This can profoundly challenge their identities and often makes them less confident in themselves as writers. Victoria produced her single-spaced, 14-page draft in only several weeks’ time, despite an intense work schedule coupled with the emotional toll of being away from her family and friends. Although the draft needed much revision, it nonetheless contained substantive ideas and gave her a point from which she could revise. In essence, it gave her the situated literacy practice that newcomers need when they are entering a new community.

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Becoming an Expert After the second semester of the case study course, Victoria spent another year at Borderlands University finishing her coursework, working in the ethnography lab, and drafting her dissertation. One of the highlights of this time was presenting her pilot study at the American Anthropology Association (AAA) in Minneapolis, Minnesota. She returned to Colombia to collect the data for her dissertation and to write it, and the next year, she returned to El Paso to defend it. During this time, Victoria continued to develop as an ethnographic researcher and scholarly writer as she drafted and revised her dissertation chapters. Throughout this process, her authorial identity took on more confidence and certainty as she moved closer to claiming an expert position in her discipline. For example, here is a section from early in her dissertation under the heading Significance of the Study, in which she wrote: This study attempts to contribute to the field of English Language Teaching (ELT) in Colombia, specifically in the area of teacher identity development and teachers’ professional development by drawing on the exploration of their teaching and assessment practices to build on local practices that inform professional development programs, institutional decisions, and language policies. By utilizing sociocultural theories on teacher identity, this study aims to contribute to a more informed and evidence-supported understanding of EFL teachers’ identities in higher education and how these shape and get shaped by teachers’ personal and professional backgrounds, their language teaching and learning ideologies, their participation in communities of practice, their agency, and the influence of the curriculum, programs, and institutions where they have worked. In the first sentence of this passage, Victoria used the hedge “attempts to,” as in “This study attempts to contribute to the field of English Language Teaching,” rather than just saying that “This study contributes to the field of English Language Teaching.” While hedging is a common linguistic practice in academic writing (Hyland, 1995, 1998), using a hedge in such a prominent place early in the dissertation, right after the heading Significance of the Study, might indicate a lack of confidence or perhaps simply a lack of knowledge as to where hedges are most effective. In the rest of this paragraph, Victoria projected a more confident discursive identity as she created a research space (Swales, 2004) for her project. For instance, she writes that “the topic of teachers’ identities has been little explored in Colombia and more research is needed,” claims that are effectively substantiated in her literature review. On the whole, Victoria’s dissertation demonstrates how far she has come from being a novice in her discipline to moving more toward the

The Role of Self-Belief, Motivation, and Personal Sacrifice 171 middle between novice and expert when she took our case study course and, finally, claiming the status of an expert in her dissertation. After earning her doctorate, she was promoted to associate professor. She is obligated to remain at her university for twice the number of years that she was funded for her doctorate. This isn’t a problem as she loves her work, and this is the university where she had wanted to work since childhood. Although she could apply for an administrative position now that she has her Ph.D., she prefers to focus on teaching and research. She is living out her lifelong dream of being a successful professor with a doctorate, a dream that began when, as a little girl, she gazed with yearning at the university while passing it on the bus.

Notes 1. We selected the pseudonym Victoria because it is a common Spanish name; its meaning, victory, signifies the traumatic experiences that Victoria overcame on her doctoral journey. 2. See Chapter 2 for a more detailed description of these assignments. 3. Belva Plain wrote books about women who immigrated to the U.S. Frank McCourt wrote memoirs about growing up in New York City as the child of Irish immigrants.

References Aitchison, C. (2009). Writing groups for doctoral education. Studies in Higher Education, 34(8), 905–916. doi:10.1080/03075070902785580 Aitchison, C., & Guerin, C. (2014). Writing groups for doctoral education and beyond: Innovations in practice and theory. New York: Routledge. Antioquia Department. (n.d.). In Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antioquia_Department Bek, H. (2017). Understanding the effect of loneliness on academic participation and success among international university students. Journal of Education and Practice, 8(14), 46–50. Bucholtz, M. (1999). “Why be normal?”: Language and identity practices in a community of nerd girls. Language in Society, 28, 203–223. Casanave, C. P. (2002). Writing games: Multicultural case studies of academic literacy practices in higher education. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Cresswell, J. W. (2016). Qualitative inquiry and research design: Choosing among five approaches (4th ed.). Los Angeles, CA: Sage Publications. Curry, M. J. (2016). More than language: Graduate student writing as ‘disciplinary becoming’. In S. Simpson, N. A. Caplan, M. Cox,  & T. Phillips (Eds.), Supporting graduate student writers: Research, curriculum, and program design. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Danowitz, M. A. (2016). Power, jobs, and bodies: The experiences of becoming a gender scholar in doctoral education. Studies in Higher Education, 41(5), 847–858. Davila, B. (2012). Indexicality and “Standard” edited American English. Written Communication, 29(2), 180–207.

172  The Role of Self-Belief, Motivation, and Personal Sacrifice Dewey, J. (1910). How we think. Boston, MA: Heath. Dustman, E. L., Kohan, M. B., & Stringer, E. T. (2014). Starting small and building out with Ernie Stringer: Personal insights into action research and educational change. Action Research, 12(4), 426–443. Ek, L. D., Sánchez, P., & Quijada Cerecer, P. D. (2013). Linguistic violence, insecurity, and work: Language ideologies of Latina/o bilingual teacher candidates in Texas. International Multilingual Research Journal, 7(3), 197-219. Estrem, H. (2015). Writing is a knowledge-making activity. In L. Adler-Kassner & E. Wardle (Eds.), Naming what we know: Threshold concepts of writing studies (pp. 19–20). Logan, UT: Utah State University Press. Freak, C. B., & Swales, J. M. (2011). Creating contexts: Writing introductions across genres. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed.  M. B. Ramos (Trans.). New York: Continuum. Garza, M. (2020). A Tejana testimonio: Language experiences and the impact for teaching and learning. Journal of Latinos & Education, 19(1), 93–100. doi:1 0.1080/15348431.2018.1478298 Geertz, C. (2008). Thick description: Toward an interpretive theory of culture. In The cultural geography reader (pp. 41–51). New York: Routledge. Gilham, P., & Fürstenau, S. (2020). The relationship between teachers’ language experience and their inclusion of pupils’ home languages in school life. Language and Education, 34(1), 36–50. Guerrero, C. H. (2009). Language policies in Colombia: The inherited disdain for our native languages. HOW Journal, 16, 11–24. Gumperz, J. J. (1968). The speech community. In International encyclopedia of the social sciences (pp. 381–386). New York: Palgrave MacMillan. Hart-Davidson, B. (2015). Genres are enacted by writers and readers. In L. AdlerKassner & E. Wardle (Eds.), Naming what we know: Threshold concepts of writing studies (pp. 39–40). Logan, UT: Utah State University Press. Holland, D., Lachicotte, W. Jr., Skinner, D., & Cain, C. (1998). Identity and agency in cultural worlds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hough, D. A.,  & Skutnabb-Kangas, T. (2005). Beyond good intentions: Combating linguistic genocide in education. AlterNative: An International Journal of Indigenous Peoples, 1(1), 106–127. Hyland, K. (1995). The author in the text: Hedging scientific writing. Hong Kong Papers in Linguistics and Language Teaching, 18, 33–42. Hyland, K. (1998). Hedging in scientific research articles. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing. Janta, H., Lugosi, P., & Brown, L. (2014). Coping with loneliness: A netnographic study of doctoral students. Journal of Further and Higher Education, 38(4),  553–571. doi:10.1080/0309877X.2012.726972 Kamler, B.,  & Thomson, P. (2014). Helping doctoral students write: Pedagogies for supervision (2nd ed.). New York: Routledge. Kaplan-Weinger, J., & Ullman, C. (2015). Methods for the ethnography of communication: Language in use in schools and communities. New York: Routledge. Latin American University Rankings. (2019). Times higher education. Retrieved from www.timeshighereducation.com/world-university-rankings/2019/latin-amer ica-university-rankings#!/page/1/length/25/sort_by/rank/sort_order/asc/ cols/undefined

The Role of Self-Belief, Motivation, and Personal Sacrifice 173 Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lee, L. A., Chen, S-M., Chang, C-N., & Yoneda, F. (2017). Multicultural teacher education as a community of practice: M.Ed./PDS graduates’ perceptions of their preparation to work with diverse students. Professional Educator, 42(1), 1–18. Leki, I. (2007). Undergraduates in a second language: Challenges and complexities of academic literacy development. New York: Lawrence Erlbaum. Liddicoat, A. J. (2009). Sexual identity as linguistic failure: Trajectories of interaction in the heteronormative language classroom. Journal of Language, Identity, and Education, 8, 191–202. Lunsford, A. (2015). Writing addresses, invokes, and/or creates audiences. In L. Adler-Kassner & E. Wardle (Eds.), Naming what we know: Threshold concepts of writing studies (pp. 20–21). Logan, UT: Utah State University Press. Miller, C. (1984). Genre as social action. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 70, 151–167. Moncada, E. (2016). Urban violence, political economy, and territorial control: Insights from Medellín. Latin American Research Review, 51(4), 225–248. Patron, M-C. (2014). Loss and loneliness among international students. Psychology Journal, 11(1), 24–43. doi:10.1177/2F1028315307299699 Pineda, D. (2014). The feasibility of assessing teenagers’ oral English language performance with a rubric. Profile Issues in Teachers Professional Development, 16(1), 181–198. Prior, P. (1998). Writing/disciplinary: A sociohistoric account of literate activity in the academy. New York: Routledge. Roozen, K. (2015). Writing is linked to identity. In L. Adler-Kassner & E. Wardle (Eds.), Naming what we know: Threshold concepts of writing studies (pp. 50–52). Logan, UT: Utah State University Press. Ruohotie-Lyhty, M.,  & Moate, J. (2015). Proactive and reactive dimensions of life-course agency: Mapping student teachers’ language learning experiences. Language and Education: An International Journal, 29(1), 46–61. doi:10.1080/0 9500782.2014.927884 Sawir, E., Marginson, S., Deumert, A., Nyland, C., & Ramia, G. (2007). Loneliness and international students: An Australian study. Journal of Studies in International Education, 12(2), 148–180. Schon, D. (1987). Educating the reflective practitioner: Toward a new design for teaching and learning in the professions. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Silver, N. (2013). Reflective pedagogies and the metacognitive turn in college teaching. In M. Kaplan, N. Silver, D. LaVaque-Manty,  & D. Meizlish (Eds.), Using reflection and metacognition to improve student learning: Across the disciplines, across the academy (pp. 1–18). Sterling, VA: Stylus Publishing. Starke-Meyerring, D. (2011). The paradox of writing in doctoral education: Student experiences. In L. McAlpine & C. Amundsen (Eds.), Doctoral education: Research-based strategies for doctoral students, supervisors, and administrators (pp. 75–95). New York: Springer. Swales, J. M. (2004). Research genres: Explorations and applications. New York: Cambridge University Press. Urrieta, L. Jr. (2007). Figured worlds and education: An introduction to the special issue. The Urban Review, 39(2), 107–116. doi:10.1007/s11256-007-0051-0

174  The Role of Self-Belief, Motivation, and Personal Sacrifice Usma Wilches, J. A. (2009). Education and language policy in Colombia: Exploring processes of inclusion, exclusion, and stratification in times of global reform. Profile Issues in Teachers’ Professional Development. Profile #11. Retrieved from www.scielo.org.co/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S165707902009000100009 Valenzuela, A. (1999). Subtractive schooling: US–Mexican youth and the politics of caring. SUNY series. The social context of education. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Yancey, K. (2016). Introduction: Contextualizing reflection. In K. B. Yancey (Ed.), A rhetoric of reflection (pp. 3–20). Logan, UT: Utah State University Press. Yigitoglu, N., & Belcher, D. (2014). Exploring L2 writing teacher cognition from an experiential perspective: The role learning to write may play in professional beliefs and practices. System, 47, 116–124. doi:10.1016/j.system.2014.09.021 Zhou, J., & Cole, D. (2017). Comparing international and American students: Involvement in college life and overall satisfaction. High Education, 73, 655– 672. doi:10.1007/s10734-016-9982-2 Zwehl, P. (2014, January  29). Violence against women in Colombia fueled by machismo culture and ‘institutional weakness’. Colombia Reports. Retrieved from https://colombiareports.com/violence-women-colombia-fueled-machismoculture-institutional-weakness/

7 Being and Researching in the Third Space Embracing Cultural, Linguistic, and Professional Hybridity “Being a researcher is a whole new role for me!” Facundo1 cried excitedly in a discussion during the fifth week of class. It was a session that focused on participant observation, and he said, “I want to be a fly on the wall.” Gloria didn’t miss a beat, saying, “You’re bigger than a fly.” All of us laughed. We had just talked about Labov’s (1972) idea of the observer’s paradox – namely, that researchers want to find out what happens when they aren’t there observing  – leading to the fly reference. Along with being bigger than a fly, Facundo is someone who makes a statement with his look. His distinctive plastic eyeglass frames look like white birch and stand in striking contrast to his dark brown skin. He wears stylish vintage shirts, and since his wife works at a local thrift store, she’s in a good place to set aside treasures for him. Just as JoAnn had shared that no one expects her to be earning a doctorate because she’s Black, Facundo shared that he has faced negative stereotypes. He’s been told he “doesn’t look like he speaks,” which is code for people thinking he sounds White on the phone. Because he is heavily tatted – with tattoos on his neck and covering each arm like sleeves – he expressed that sometimes people on the street assume he’s an addict and give him pamphlets about drug rehabilitation programs. But his tattoos are precious to him as they are pieces of his life story. One sleeve is a kind of altar for Día de Muertos.2 It’s an homage to his father, who has passed. There are images of his father’s favorite things – Mexican Faro brand cigarettes arranged like a cross in a copa for tequila and a rose that symbolizes his father’s abiding love for his mother. Nearby, there is a cross with a heart at the center. “The cross represents steel, a strong metal,” he explained. “And the heart is the source of everything else. Hence, this is my dad: strong, tough exterior, but a man of faith. He was all heart – pun intended.” Below the cross is a band that goes around Facundo’s forearm, made up of repeated images of the logo for Ryerson & Son Steel, a division of Inland Steel. That’s where his father worked. “When I was growing up,” he smiled, “being able to say my dad worked at Inland Steel was top street cred.” Facundo took his father’s

176  Being and Researching in the Third Space old work ID to his tattoo artist in Ciudad Juárez as a reference. His tattoo artist is a friend whom he thinks of as a kind of informal therapist as well. When Facundo took the case study course, he did so as a student-atlarge. That means prospective doctoral students can take up to three doctoral courses before formally applying to the program in Teaching, Teacher Education, and Culture. If accepted, the courses count toward the degree, and if not – well, that person has taken some doctoral classes. It had been 12 years since he was in school, and taking two classes before applying to the program made sense to him. In the first semester of the case study course, most of us hung around for 30 minutes or so after class, talking. Facundo walked home after class, and when JoAnn saw him as she drove home, she pulled over to ask if he was OK and if he needed a ride. He explained that walking home helped him decompress. “Being with all these people who know their stuff was intense and exhausting,” he said. “I had a lot of butterflies, and probably my biggest fear was whether I could keep up.” Keep up he did. After he was accepted into the program, he struck up friendships with two people in his cohort who also taught at the community college but were not in the case study course. Having known each other casually beforehand, they quickly became close friends and soon, each other’s peer mentors. “They keep me in line, and we look out for each other,” Facundo said with a smile. The three of them went to his tattoo artist and got tattoos with a gothic-style number nine, illustrating that they were all in the ninth cohort of the doctoral program. Since he chooses tattoos that tell his life story, the decision to get this one is significant. Facundo’s nine sits at the back of his neck. When the student researchers started collecting data, we checked in with them about their research experiences at the beginning of each class. Facundo said, “My mind is racing a mile a minute. I’ve been a teacher. I’ve been a student, but never this role. I’m learning to see things in a way I never have.” He explained, “I sit in the back, in a chair, not at the computer terminals.” In their field site, the instructor had a computer console near the screen at the front of the room, and there were four rows of student computer terminals set up on long tables perpendicular to the screen. Each terminal had a number, and most students put their laptops and phones next to their assigned computer, as the internet connection was often better on their phones than on the university computers. “They’ve got the teacher’s pattern perfectly,” Facundo continued. “When she comes up to talk to someone, everyone nearby puts their phone down. The minute she moves somewhere else in the classroom, the phones go down there, and they go up where she just was. And here I am. I’m in the third space.”

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Inhabiting the Third Space Facundo is a third-space guy, in terms of both theory and his lived experience. He was introduced to third-space theory while working on his undergraduate degree in English, with a minor in Mexican American woman writers, at DePaul University in Chicago. That introduction deepened when was working on his master’s in border history here at Borderlands University, in particular when he read The Decolonial Imaginary: Writing Chicanas Back into History (Pérez, 1999). The third space is an in-between space between cultures, a kind of hybrid location. Homi Bhabha (Rutherford, 1990) theorizes it as a space that “displaces the histories that constitute it, and sets up new structures of authority, new political initiatives, which are inadequately understood through received wisdom” (p. 211). Similarly (and also earlier), Gloria Anzaldúa (1987) wrote of mestiza consciousness as a kind of hybrid space, saying: Soy un amasamiento, I  am an act of kneading, of uniting and joining that not only has produced both a creature of darkness and a creature of light, but also a creature that questions the definitions of light and dark and gives them new meanings. (p. 81) Hybridity and the third space are generative concepts, in that they speak to an interstitial space that produces new ways of being and knowing that move beyond binary ways of thinking. Edward Soja (1996) used third-space theory to put space, history, and the social on equal footing. In an interview, Soja explained “I define third space as an-Other way of understanding and acting to change the spatiality of human life” (Borch, 2002, p. 113). The third space has also been taken up by educational scholars like Kris Gutierrez (2008), who writes about the third space in classrooms as the place where the official knowledge of the teacher and the curriculum come into contact with students’ knowledge. The third space is “the underlife of the classroom” (p. 152), Gutierrez theorizes, and it is constituted by “multiple social spaces with distinctive participation structures3 and power relations” (p. 152). She looks at the interactions and talk that happen in classrooms, often outside the official goings-on that the teacher has orchestrated, noting that she is interested in the “microgenetic processes of everyday learning across a range of contexts, with one eye focused on the collective and the other on individual sense-making activity” (p.  152). Those microgenetic practices seem to be what Facundo was seeing with the negotiation of cell phone use in the class.

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Languages and Hybridity Facundo spent his first five years of life speaking Spanish in Ciudad Juárez, and then the family moved to Chicago, where his schooling was in English. His parents used both Spanish and English fluidly, and he heard his uncles speak Caló, a linguistic variation that deeply interests him. Caló is associated with pachuquismo (the culture of the pachucos) and is thought by some to have originated in El Paso/Ciudad Juárez at the beginning of the 20th century. Pachucos4 were a counterculture of Chicana/o youth who were known for their dazzling use of Caló; their rebellious fashion (especially zoot suits); and their music. In the 1930s, Mexican American families had fled the White supremacy of the South and much of Texas for the U.S.–Mexico border, in hopes of better lives. The pachucos were the children of those parents who had escaped the South, and the pachucos were responding to that racism. Over time, their specifically Chicano form of speaking, Caló, moved along the border to Los Angeles and is linked to the Zoot Suit Riots/Rebellions that happened in the 1940s.5 Caló is kind of argot or cant, a secret language that a group of people use to not be understood by those in authority (Galindo, 1992). While argots and cants often are seen as synonymous, cants feature fancier wordplay, rhyming, and song, all characteristics of Caló. While its origins are murky, scholars suggest Caló is a combination of Mexican Spanish, an archaic variety of Spanish used only in an isolated region in northern New Mexico, English, and Romani. The Romani influence is thought to have been brought to the Americas by Spanish colonizers who were Gitanos (Romani) (Peñalosa, 1980). Chicano scholars have documented that Caló has moved from being used by a small circle of Chicanos – mostly men – along the border to a broader usage among Chicano men and women from a variety of socioeconomic backgrounds (Galindo, 1992; Ortega, 1977). Although Facundo speaks Spanish, English, and some Caló, he declared, “Spanglish is my language. I  have to use Spanglish.  .  .  . It’s Spanglish that makes me who I am.” Dana Cole, in her 2011 linguistic analysis of the work of Chicano performance artist Guillermo GomezPéna, argues that what we call translanguaging is crucial to defining Chicano identity. She suggests that border identity cannot be reduced to two languages and two identities, but “instead it results in a new ethnolinguistic identity, characterized by the ability to blur linguistic and cultural boundaries” (p. 80). It’s not surprising that Facundo identifies most with Spanglish, as it is emblematic of the social life of the border. And he’s a third-space guy. Lucia, Facundo’s wife, was born and raised in Ciudad Juárez; she grew up speaking Spanish and speaks English and Spanglish too. Recently,

Being and Researching in the Third Space 179 the two of them thought about putting their 5-year-old daughter, Maya, in a different school because she is losing her Spanish. Maya has an ear for languages. She has a friend with a speech impediment, and she is the only one who understands him, so she has become his interpreter. “But when it comes to Spanish, she understands it, but she doesn’t speak it.” They visited his wife’s mother recently, and Maya resorted to miming in order to communicate. Their middle son, Próspero, is a 10-year-old bilingual poet and chess champion. He has won chess matches in El Paso and Ciudad Juárez, as well as at state-wide tournaments in Austin, Texas. Their 14-year-old daughter, Destina, is also bilingual and recently came out as queer. Her family is supportive and accepting of her sexuality. Unfortunately, Destina’s girlfriend came out to her family recently, and while her mother was accepting, her father was not. That makes Facundo sad. “And Destina’s getting accused of being in the wrong bathroom at school,” Facundo shared, his eyes getting teary. “She doesn’t talk much about things,” something not uncommon for a teenager. “But she’s a fighter.”

Crossing Borders “Everyone in the family says this is how I  first crossed the border,” Facundo prefaced. “The border patrol agent yelled to my grandfather, ‘Hey, Chuletón [Big T-bone]! Who’s that on your shoulders?’ ” His grandfather, who was gregarious, larger than life, and beloved by many, responded enthusiastically, “It’s my grandson!” Facundo and his grandfather were waved into El Paso, Texas, from Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, Mexico, with a smile. And without passports. “There was a time when it was so different,” Facundo reflected wistfully. Today the U.S.–Mexico border is a highly militarized space. People wait hours to cross into the United States with the proper documents. The 10  percent of Borderlands University students who live in Ciudad Juárez and go to school in El Paso have to leave the house at 4:00 AM to ensure they will get to their classes or campus jobs by 10:00 AM, not because of distance, but because of congestion at the border. Facundo’s young parents met when they were both selling at the Mercado Juárez, a big enclosed market at the center of town. It’s where you can find produce, all kinds of homemade foods, and handmade crafts, and locals go there to shop and socialize. His mother sold jewelry, and his father was an enganchador – the person who hooks the passersby to come in and make a purchase. Both of them spoke English, which made them valued employees, as the Mercado Juárez used to attract U.S. tourists as well as locals before the cartel violence began in 2006, which was when then– Mexican president Calderon declared his war on drugs. By 2010, there were more murders reported in Ciudad Juárez than in Afghanistan, which

180  Being and Researching in the Third Space was a declared war zone at the time (Molloy, 2013). Campbell (2011) argues that the extreme violence of cartels waging war against each other in Ciudad Juárez was mostly because of the city’s border location, given that the United States is the largest consumer of illicit drugs in the world. But when Facundo lived there as a child, things were different. Born in Ciudad Juárez in 1969, Facundo was his parents’ first child. The three of them came to the United States without papers in the days when migration didn’t require crossing the unforgiving desert with a coyote (human smuggler). Later, they were able to arreglarse (get their legal papers in order) when he was five or six, becoming permanent residents through his grandfather, who was born in El Paso and had fought in World War II. Even though his grandfather was a U.S. citizen, he and his wife decided to raise their children in Ciudad Juárez, and his grandfather commuted to work in El Paso. Facundo’s father wanted to earn money to secure a stall at the Mercado Juárez. “My dad being my dad, he had all these friends, and one of them knew about a job that was either in Chicago or Los Angeles,” Facundo recalled. Four guys got in the car, and they thought they were going to Los Angeles, “but they took a wrong turn at Albuquerque,” Facundo laughed. “It was nighttime, and they realized a border patrol car was following them,” he said. “So my dad was driving, and he said to his friend, ‘Arrimate cabrón’ (Get new me, fucker). The guy said, ‘What are you talking about?’ My dad said, ‘Lean on me, like you were my wife,’ ” Facundo recounted. “My dad put his arm around him, and after a few minutes, the border patrol stopped following them.” They ended up in Chicago, the city Carl Sandburg called “hog butcher for the world” (1992, p. 3), where his father quickly found a job at the stockyards. Facundo and his mother followed right away, and they put down roots in a neighborhood called Back of the Yards, an immigrant neighborhood built for stockyards workers by the Union Stock Yard and Transit Company. Between 1865 and 1965, the Yards, as it was called, processed more meat than anywhere else in the country. By the late 1960s, the neighborhood had transformed from a mostly Slavic enclave to a mostly Mexican one. “We had these cool old pictures of my dad,” Facundo reminisced. “He was always standing next to a side of beef. His pictures were a chance for him to show off his arm muscles.” He continued, “For a little boy to see something like that, a man being strong and working hard, that was something really cool. Looking back, I wonder if those pictures speak to me because he was my only point of reference for a positive figure that looked like me.”

Getting Started Their Catholic family grew quickly, and soon Facundo was the oldest of six siblings. He is the darkest of three boys and three girls and commented,

Being and Researching in the Third Space 181 “All of them have a hint of color, except Gabriel, who has very EuroAmerican features and is almost six feet tall.” Their great-grandmother Cristina was an Indigenous woman from northern Mexico, short in stature, with dark skin and long, braided hair, and his great-grandfather was mestizo, tall and fair skinned – a phenotypic range reflected in the family today. His great-grandfather fought in the Mexican Revolution with the Carrancistas, a conservative faction headed by Venustiano Carranza, who later served as president of Mexico during three years of the ten-year revolution. Venustiano Carranza was later assassinated by his general, Alvaro Obregon, who subsequently became president and was also assassinated. While serving in the military, he met Cristina, who was moving with the soldiers, selling food, and taking in clothes to wash. They fell in love and married, despite his family’s racist views about his marrying someone Indigenous. “The joke is that he joined the wrong side,” Facundo said, “because he fought for Venustiano Carranza, and not Emiliano Zapata or Pancho Villa – the real heroes of the revolution.” “My father used to say nobody sits here doing nothing,” Facundo recalled. Indeed, his father did back-breaking physical labor, first in the stockyards and later in the steel industry, but he never saw himself as the only one who was working. His mother was had almost finished her university degree to become a bilingual teacher in Mexico, but they moved to Chicago while she still had a few credits to go, so she never earned the degree. She would have had to have gone to college all over again to teach in the United States, so instead, she ran a household of six children. “My dad used to say, ‘Look at your mom. Your mom is home doing all this work.’ ” Facundo stated, noting that his father had a deep, abiding respect for his wife. It made a powerful impression on him. “Even now,” Facundo noted, “I hear guys make jokes, saying they get paid, and they give their wives the paychecks. But that’s what I saw at home – in a positive way.” When he was growing up, many people didn’t have bank accounts and it was common to cash paychecks at the grocery store. His father would make a bilingual play on words, saying, “Ay, esta el chueco.” In English, check sounds a little like chueco, and in Spanish, chueco means getting ripped off. “I remember visually,” he said, “my dad always gave the check to my mom. He would never cash it.” Even though he admired his father greatly, sometimes the two of them didn’t understand each other. “I think our definitions of work were very much generational,” Facundo reflected. When your work is very physically demanding, reading and writing don’t necessarily look like “real” work. “I would be sitting at the desk with a pile of books,” he explained, “and my dad would go to work. When he got home, I was still at the same desk with the books. I think he must have wondered what the hell I was doing.” Facundo majored in English, and his father worried about his job prospects with a liberal arts degree. “That was his concern,” he recollected.

182  Being and Researching in the Third Space “He was really looking out for my well-being.” But when Facundo applied to the master’s program in history at Borderlands University, he said, “The one that really pushed me was my dad. He really wanted me to mail that application in.” It was only after his father passed away in 2005 that his mother revealed that his father had never gone to high school. “Now I understand why he wanted me to succeed. It was because he had had it so hard.”

Private, Then Public, Then Private Again “I didn’t speak English correctly,” Facundo stated, “until I think I was in the first grade.” He continued: And then I  had a heavy accent for the longest time. I  remember there was a point where I was made fun of for how I spoke. And then, later in first grade, they didn’t make fun of my accent anymore. But I was the still the only short, chubby, dark-skinned Mexican kid. Facundo and his siblings went back and forth between public school and private school, depending on his father’s job. That is, when his father was a meat packer, they went to public school. When his father started delivering packages for United Parcel Service (UPS), they went to Catholic school. When he was a steelworker, it was back to public school. When Facundo was in third grade, his father was working for UPS, so he went to Catholic school, “which was a nightmare for me,” he explained, shaking his head. “That’s when I was made to see and know that I was different. I got called every name in the book. Kids would call me nigger and I didn’t even know what it meant. But I knew it was something bad.” The White kids on the playground were playing a game they called HEADS, which stood for Help Eliminate and Destroy Spics. He was relieved to be back in public school for fourth grade and said, “I had my first Black teacher there, Mrs. Long, and I remember she would say in a soft voice, ‘Hey how are you baby?’ It was really cool.” She got him to love reading, and she was the first person to tell him that his skin tone was beautiful. They were talking about the Incas in class, and she used a comment about “his pretty skin” as a teachable moment to bring in his Aztec ancestry.

Needing a Kick in the Pants Schooling, work, and mentors are rolled together in Facundo’s life. After sixth grade, he got a summer job at a big flea market that set up in the parking lot of a drive-in theater on the south side of Chicago. He sold construction boots, and he was good at it. “I could talk basic numbers in Polish and Korean,” he said proudly, “along with Spanish and English, of course.” Every summer until he graduated from high school, he reported

Being and Researching in the Third Space 183 to a guy named Greg, who was a kind of guardian angel for him. In his first Letter to the Readers, Facundo called him “Greg the Shoe Man,” who “explained how things worked at a flea market. He would rant about customers who were trying to shake us down – code for talking down the price.” Facundo took home $2.25 an hour, minimum wage at the time. But it turned out he was actually making $6.00 an hour, because Greg held money for him until the end of the summer, to pay for his private school tuition. Facundo explained: Tuition was $1,250 a year, and we couldn’t afford it. But in August, Greg would give me a check for $1,400, and tell me to go pay my tuition. He was smart about it. He’d ask me how I  got to school, and he’d put in money for bus tokens. Then he’d ask how much my books would cost and add that to the total. I’d get my hair cut every other week, and he put in money for that, even adding $3.00 a day for lunch money. On the day I  went to pay the bill, he gave me a scrap of a paper that said I was going to pay him back without interest. But there was a little threat there, too, and I needed it. In the note, he said that if I missed work, he was going to tell my father. My dad didn’t like Greg, because he was, in a sense, a provider for me, when it should have been my dad. But when I got mad at Greg and wanted to quit, my dad was the one that told me not to be an idiot and complain about some petty thing. He made me sit down and do the math. Once I figured out what Greg was doing for me, I never missed a day of work. Although Catholic school in his elementary years was soul damaging, going to Quigley South Catholic High School turned out to be “a saving grace.” At Quigley South, he interacted with people who were poorer than he was and others who were really wealthy. The White, Black, Latinx, and mixed-race kids mostly got along because, he said, “It was what the school was about.” At first, he was excited to go there because he would be with his friends, and he could play soccer. But later, he started thinking he might pursue the priesthood, as Quigley South was known for training future priests. It was the high school counselor, Father Ivers, who helped him realize that the priesthood probably wasn’t for him. Facundo is a highly social person: hence, his pseudonym. His teachers guided him toward studying and staying out of trouble, and he knew he needed that push. He earned Bs in high school, although he probably could have gotten As, but he was drawn to hanging out with friends and going to parties. He recalled that some people assumed he was in a gang because he had friends in the Latin Kings street gang. “But I had social networks that helped me,” he explained. They would tell him, “Don’t wear that color. Don’t say that in this part of town.” He said, “I appreciated the street smarts I got through that.”

184  Being and Researching in the Third Space While he was good at navigating the politics among various gangs, he sometimes found himself in dangerous situations. Once he was driving around with his friend Carlos, and a man came up to the driver’s side window. The man looked at Facundo and gestured to ask who he was. “That’s my boy,” Carlos said. “He’s cool. What do you need? The regular?” Carlos pulled out a brick of marijuana and took the man’s money. This was the 1980s, and there are Brown men who are still in prison for less. When he was just 17, Facundo thought he would enlist in the Marine Corps Reserve. His mother didn’t like the idea, but his father thought it was worth exploring. His parents filled out the paperwork, and he was at the Military Entrance Processing Station where they were boarding trains to ship off to boot camp. One of the recruiters pulled him aside and said, “Wait a minute. To be a reservist, you have to be a U.S. citizen. You’re a permanent resident.” Facundo’s plan was to enlist in the Marine Corps Reserve to get money for college. The only option open to him as a legal permanent resident was to enlist full time, and he didn’t want to do that. He hadn’t realized that when his family got their papers taken care of, they hadn’t actually become U.S. citizens. His experience with the Marine Corps Reserve was one reason he applied for U.S. citizenship. National politics at the time was another. In 1992, incumbent George H.W. Bush and challenger Pat Buchanan both ran for the Republican presidential nomination. Before that moment, Buchanan’s virulently anti-immigration and anti-multiculturalism views had been considered to be on the fringe. But when Buchannan amassed almost 25 percent of the Republican vote, Facundo and his parents panicked. They realized that being legal residents was no guarantee of their safety, so they applied for U.S. citizenship. All of them became U.S. citizens in 1995, just in time to see Buchanan lose the nomination to Bush. His mother has always told him, “Todo a su tiempo” (everything in its time), and that is advice Facundo returns to when he needs inspiration. Timing has framed his experiences with education. After not enlisting in the marines, he enrolled in community college. “I registered for five classes and failed four.” He smiled, saying, “I was chasing a girl.” Eight years later, he went back “to kind of right the wrongs” and finish his associate’s degree while he was working full time. Newly back on campus, he remembered sharing an elevator with one of his instructors from his previous stint in community college. “We were both looking straight ahead,” Facundo recounted, “and he said, ‘I remember you. You took my class and failed. You remind me a lot of my son. All brains, but dumb as shit. Especially when it comes to realizing your own potential.’ Just as the elevator door opened,” Facundo said, “he looked me right in the eye and said, ‘Go get your shit together. You are going to do something one day.’ ”

Being and Researching in the Third Space 185 Facundo graduated from DePaul University, a highly ranked, mostly White, Catholic university in Chicago, with an undergraduate degree in English with a minor in Mexican American women writers. He got a little misty when he said, “I would just stand in class sometimes, looking at all this around me, and think, ‘Wow, I can’t believe I’m here. And I can take all of these classes.’ ” He explained that while he wasn’t the best student at DePaul, he loved to talk, and he wanted to be in the middle of everything that was happening. Even though he was an English major, he noted, “Writing was always problematic for me.” He wrote in his first Letter to the Readers, “Placing my thoughts onto paper is more difficult than herding cats. Ask me to write stuff down, forget about it!” This Letter to the Readers was conversational and occasionally funny, and it was clear he had spent some time on it. However, Char and Kate had to nudge him to include more analysis of the readings, which he did in his next Letter to the Readers. Most of the English majors were White women when he was at DePaul, and he was the only Brown person in many of his classes. Sometimes he was the only straight guy as well. He identifies as Brown, Chicano, and American. “But if people put my back against the wall,” he smiled, “I’m Chicano to the core.” When he found Latin American and Latino Studies at DePaul, that led him to a deeply influential mentor: Felix MasudPiloto, a Cuban historian who specialized in the Mariel boat lifts. Felix taught him to network, think about politics, and fight for his space in the academic world. He also saw Facundo’s potential and encouraged him to apply to the master’s in border history at Borderlands University.

Ups and Downs When Facundo arrived at Borderlands University, excited to study history, he stepped onto a roller coaster. He had gotten a phone call in Chicago telling him he was accepted into the master’s program in history at Borderlands. However, when he arrived, he was told that there had been a clerical error, and there was no record of his application. After that error was resolved, the admissions office told him he had a scholarship. He was hired for a work-study position in the linguistics department, and he developed a solid relationship with another professor who mentored him  – this time, a White male professor named Dr. Green. He started having trouble finishing his coursework in the spring semester because of the pressure he was feeling about getting married in June. He didn’t feel totally right about the marriage. The roller coaster was starting to dip. Then his father died unexpectedly. That was a huge drop. He talked with the department chair and explained what had happened. The chair told him he should return to Chicago for his father’s funeral and to get married, and he would arrange for him to get incompletes in his courses. But while he was still in Chicago, he got a call from

186  Being and Researching in the Third Space the new office manager in the linguistics department, asking him to come in to sign his termination papers. It turned out that his department chair had not arranged for him to get incompletes, and instead, he had failed all his courses, which led to his being fired from his position in the linguistics department. His linguistics mentor was out of the country and couldn’t be reached to rectify things. It was a mess. And on top of that, his new marriage was failing quickly. When all these things converged, Facundo was almost ready to defend his extended and revised paper, which is a thesis alternative. He returned from Chicago to find that one of the professors he had been working with had left, taking a position at another university. Another professor he had worked with was denied tenure and left. The faculty who remained wanted him to start the paper over. And on top of it, he still had all those failing grades on his record. Things kept getting worse. He was diagnosed with clinical depression. For a while, he slept on friends’ sofas. Sometimes he slept in the park. He was drinking. There were suicide attempts. The roller coaster was descending into the depths. Fortunately, he got into treatment and began healing, and his life started to even out. He went to his tattoo artist/therapist friend in Ciudad Juárez, and he memorialized those suicide attempts with three big calaveras (skulls), all on one arm. “I was in a real bad place,” he recounted. The last skull is strategically placed on his forearm. “So that I can always see it. A reminder that no matter what bad thing is happening – things could always be worse.” He had a space near the crease in his arm where he wanted to put another tattoo, right between two of the skulls. He talked with his tattoo artist about it, and he thought maybe he would put his father’s signature there. The tattoo artist looked at him. He waited. Facundo thought and said, “Ah . . . it needs to be my signature.” The tattoo artist smiled. The tattoo of his own signature was his last step in making peace with himself, his depression, and his loss. The problems with his master’s degree were resolved, and he graduated, although sadly, his father didn’t get to see him graduate. Over time, he found a job as a photographer at a museum in El Paso, and that’s where he met Lucia. They fell in love and got married, and now they have three beautiful children. Facundo ended up getting his master’s degree, and soon he was teaching Chicano history as an adjunct at the community college. Then one day, he showed up in Char’s office to talk about the doctoral program in Teaching, Teacher Education, and Culture, and he enrolled in the case study course as a non-degree student. By the end of the case study course, he had been accepted into the doctoral program. And after his second year of part-time study in the doctoral program, he was hired as a full-time lecturer in Chicano Studies at

Being and Researching in the Third Space 187 Borderlands. Tara Yosso (2013) reminds us that there are “very serious leaks in the Chicana/o educational pipeline” (p. 4). Racism is implicit, explicit, and systemic, and it starts in elementary school and continues throughout Chicanx students’ lives. She makes clear if we start with 100 Chicanx elementary students, “less than one will receive a doctorate” (Yosso, 2013, p. 4). Facundo is on his way being in that tiny group, and he has overcome significant obstacles in his path.

Negotiating Ideas and Data in the Study After a traumatic experience in his master’s program, Facundo was cautious about the ethnographic case study course. He read the syllabus before he committed to it. Even though it wasn’t history, “It was what I liked,” he explained. “My sense was that the course involved some theory, and that really engages me at a personal level.” He noted that as an instructor at the community college, he can’t bring much theory into his introductory Chicano history courses, so this course would help fill that void for him. That is, before he started the case study course, he was thinking of theory as a literary genre and of himself as a reader. By the time the student researchers started conducting classroom observations, in the fourth week of class, Facundo was already beginning to think about theory from a different position. “When the students talk to each other about the class, they’re negotiating the third space. All of those side conversations – it’s where things come together,” he shared. “And we live on a binary border,” he declared, “but it’s more than just Mexican or American. It’s a third thing.” Facundo started making connections between theory and data early in the semester. In the fifth week of class we discussed Comstock’s 2015 piece, “The Rhetorical Construction of the AD/HD Subject: Managing the Self,” which analyzed the co-construction of identities in an online discussion board for people with AD/HD and the role of neoliberal ideologies. As the discussion wound down and we were moving to another theme, Facundo asked, “They are deviant . . . from what? What’s normal? And by whose standards? Sitting in a cubicle all day – is that normal? Bad spelling is normal. . . . If medication makes them feel normal . . . is it really normativity?” The other students nodded in agreement. Kate asked, “Connected to what Facundo just said about normativity, what norms has the teacher established in each field site? Is there negotiation?” Facundo’s eyes lit up, and he jumped in. “They have a desktop computer, plus laptops and phones. I don’t know what they’re doing when they switch from one to another. That’s another thing I want to find out,” he exclaimed. “And the teacher looks at all of their devices when she works with them one on one.” He compared this to the community college, where personal electronic devices are sometimes forbidden in class. “There’s a different

188  Being and Researching in the Third Space technology norm here,” he noted. He wondered aloud in class about whether Prensky’s (2010) idea of digital natives and digital immigrants might be useful. “But if digital natives have used technology all their lives and digital immigrants are people who learned technology as adults . . . I don’t know. I have problems with the binary,” he said. We agree. This idea also ignores the digital divide (Van Dijk, 2012), the lack of access to technology that is a reality for so many people living in poverty. “Also,” he continued, “there’s a negotiation with this one student, Mr. 18. When the teacher said there’s a good example of something on one page, he corrected her and said there was a better example on another page. She looked at it and said he was right.” Facundo was beginning to try out theoretical ideas to see if they were useful in understanding their data. While they had just started collecting data, his connections between the ideas in the readings and the early observational data were starting to signal a rapid shift in his thinking about theory. In the sixth week of class, we talked about how the observations were going, and Facundo shared with the student researchers, “My interviewee backed out. He sent a standard email, in English. Although it was very respectful, there were a lot of typos, and the grammar was inverted.” JoAnn, who was on the same research team, said, “Yeah, I  remember that when he did his class presentation about the discourse communities he belongs to, and he said his English wasn’t very good.” Facundo was thoughtful about how to respond, and he said that he answered the email in English with some Spanish and then followed it up in English. “I wanted to give that kid an opening, to decide for himself,” he shared. Going on to talk about language and national allegiance, he said, “In the World Cup, people ask me if I’m for Mexico or the United States. It’s always Mexico.” He explained that he had noticed a pattern in the data they were collecting, and it was connected to the idea of marking difference. When students in the first-year composition course raised their hands to speak with the instructor individually, he noted, “The students initiate with ‘Maestra’ (teacher), and then they follow it with English.” He asked, “But who determines when we speak Spanish and when we don’t? That’s the question.” Kate connected Facundo’s observation with Kershbaum’s 2012 essay “Avoiding the Difference Fixation: Identity Categories, Markers of Difference, and the Teaching of Writing,” which we were discussing in that class session. In the essay, Kershbaum talks about what she calls markers of difference – that is, rhetorical signals that acknowledge the differences between interlocutors  – and how awareness of these markers can enhance writing teachers’ practice. “Those identity details, or markers, are really being positioned. It seems like that might be what’s happening,” Kate mused. “It would be good to consult these questions in looking at your data.” Kate made a clear linkage between the readings

Being and Researching in the Third Space 189 and data analysis. “Within every interaction,” Kate continued, “even if you’re talking to the same person, you’re still coming to be and to [find] your identity. You’re always being redefined.” Facundo said, “It’s almost like it’s a constant trap. Do markers of identity have meaning outside their contexts?” He explained that he was thinking of Chicano markers of identity and that sometimes they aren’t viewed favorably. He mentioned things like being from a poor Chicano neighborhood or wearing Dickies clothing, a brand closely associated with Chicano culture. “Clothes and where you live are symbols, too, and they distinguish you. It’s also about saying things like ‘Órale’ or ‘Que onda,’ ” he expounded. The Mexican use of the word Órale can express many emotions (Cano, 2009), from extreme enthusiasm to intense irritation to just simple acknowledgement. Que onda is a decidedly Chicano way of asking, ‘What’s up?’ Both can be markers of Chicanismo. Kate responded by saying, “I think a particular difference is almost always identified in interaction. But that doesn’t mean that it will always be identified the same way in other contexts. Great examples!” It was clear that Facundo was thinking deeply about the readings and applying the concepts to other contexts, in order to work through them. His ability to connect data to theory was developing quickly.

Field Switching and Field Notes Facundo was trained in history in his master’s program at Borderlands University, and he learned to take notes on oral history interviews using Microsoft Excel, putting his notes on the interviewee’s intonation and body language into that format. While there are similarities between oral history and ethnography (Benson & Nagar, 2006), the essential difference is that ethnography involves immersion in a cultural context, and oral history relies on memory. That is, in our ethnographic study, the forms of data collection were triangulated through the three data sources of participant observation, semi-structured interviews, and artifact collection. While the student researchers spent only one semester in the classrooms they were observing and there is debate among anthropologists and educationalists as to how long it takes to become immersed in a cultural context ( Jeffrey & Troman, 2004), the student researchers did spend a chunk of time in their field sites. In conducting oral history, on the other hand, the researcher’s starting point is a specific historical event and often a particular theoretical framework. Oral historians then try to find people whose recollection of lived experience can be interpreted in relation to existing theory and history. Oral historians continually rephrase questions in hopes of getting the interviewee to recount experiences that connect to larger historical processes. In contrast, ethnographers work hard to keep their

190  Being and Researching in the Third Space own biases and judgments in check and strive toward an insider’s point of view as much as possible, understanding there is no single essentialized experience among group members. We want to stress that both oral history and ethnography are important approaches to research. Because IRB approval for university research is based on federal regulations that privilege hypothesis-based research that is generalizable, oral history and ethnography have ended up in different categories. Oral history does not meet the federal definition of research, so IRB approval is not required for oral history projects. At the same time, ethnographic research exists on the edges of that federal definition. Because ethnography is inductive, it typically doesn’t start with a hypothesis, though it does involve systematic data collection. And while it does not attempt to generalize outside a particular context, it can attempt to generalize within that context. IRB review for ethnographic research usually focuses on the prevention of harm to vulnerable research participants. Oral history is outside IRB review, and ethnography occupies an uneasy place at the margins. Facundo stated that in oral history, “You come up with the theory, or you come up with a historical event, and then you look for the information to support it.” He elaborated: My master’s was on implicit racism in the early years of the El Paso public school system. At the time, I had this notion that racism was implicit and not explicit. I see now that it was both. But I was looking for data that fit that idea. That was the route that I took, and looking back, there are things I would do differently. When he was working on his master’s in history, he would think to himself, “I’ve got to find this, I’ve got to find that.” He described it as having tunnel vision compared to doing ethnographic research, which “is more about looking at a certain area and then seeing what you find and, once you get that information, looking for patterns.” Reflecting on the two approaches, he said that oral history research was “a bit more territorial, because you don’t know how people will react, and you want to get certain information.” After taking the entire case study course, he understood ethnographic research to be “about being open to the data, letting it speak to you, being open to what people are saying.” He admitted that at the start of the case study course, he was still “coming from theory.” He recalled: At the onset of our project, I was looking at critical race theory, and I  said to my team, “We should look for this.”  .  .  . I remember my colleagues looked at me like, “We don’t have to do that. We are just here to figure stuff out. Theory comes later.” But letting the data

Being and Researching in the Third Space 191 speak to you . . . that was a big transition. But now I have been able to look back at the work I’ve done, it’s like wow, this is really cool. In our feedback on the manuscript draft that Facundo, JoAnn, and Laura co-wrote, entitled “My Daughter Laughs at Me: Saignwich, Sanwish, Sandwich?”: Co-constructing Identities Through Language Ideologies in a University Writing Classroom,” we noted that they relied almost exclusively on observational and interview data, ignoring artifacts entirely. Facundo agreed that this was the case and suggested that it was probably a result of his oral history training. He also said, “Maybe someone else in the group can do that part.” Indeed, there was a kind of back-and-forth movement in his learning to conduct ethnographic research. Throughout the semester, Facundo fell back onto his internalized model of research, which was oral history. But when he received feedback from his teammates, the preceptor, and his professors, he forged ahead into the unknown of ethnography. He was reflective about his own learning process, acknowledging: Observations are difficult for me because I’m wordy. I talk a lot, and I write a lot, and it’s hard to keep fixed on one thing. And so I need someone to tell me to hold back. I  feel I’ve been getting that in, umm, some of the feedback I’ve gotten from you. It’s telling me OK, yes, no, maybe. I don’t feel a negative vibe in any way; if anything, it’s going to help. Being able to take in written feedback from his professors and oral feedback from his teammates was critical. And perhaps because oral history and ethnography have some things in common, this similarity led to his thinking that he could build on the approach that he knew so well in the case study course. Facundo lobbied to use Microsoft Excel for his field notes, arguing that it could help him record who was saying what because he would give each person the number of their computer terminal, and then he could put what they said on their numbered line. We acquiesced for the first set of field notes, although we were skeptical. As was the case for most of the student researchers, Facundo’s first set of field notes was thin and hard for us to understand. He summarized and abbreviated, writing things like “2 ppl raise hands” and “2 sts. on phone.” He also missed a lot of what was happening because he was looking to match the computer terminal number with the corresponding line on his Excel spreadsheet. Char and Kate convinced him that his approach was not working, both through written feedback and in conversation. His subsequent field notes focused more on recording interaction. While he didn’t like the double-entry approach, he did agree to put

192  Being and Researching in the Third Space his thoughts and questions in italics. His field notes on the instructor reminding students how to find their feedback through the online teaching platform Blackboard were much improved:

Teacher:

So you’re going to your class, then my grades, and then you should be able to see my comments with grades. If you don’t have a grade, it’s because you didn’t turn it in. It took me about 20 minutes for each comment [teacher paused, looked at whole class, row by row]. You should read them. The teacher’s voice is a little louder than usual, and her brow is lowered, which I think means she is concerned. She is not yelling, but her voice inflection is particular on certain words.

Figure 7.1  Facundo’s Field Notes, September 27

This example from his second set of field notes was a great improvement. While we hoped he would tell us which words got the special inflection, it was an example of his rapid growth as a participant observer.

Theory Presentations Although he had initially wanted to use critical race theory to lead the study, Facundo was pulled back by his teammates, JoAnn and Linda. They worked together, discussing the data and really listening to it, and their team decided to move to Facundo’s other theoretical love  – third-space and hybridity theory. The three of them took turns presenting the theory and their initial connections to the data. Facundo began: There is a lot of mixing and mingling, so there is a lot that we have in front of us. I came in kind of backwards because I had an idea of what I wanted to look for, instead of letting the data speak to us. Starting with a predetermined notion of what we would find is totally not good. I left that behind. Then we saw this negotiation between the students and the teacher. They projected a slide with four theorists’ names on it – Mikhail Bakhtin, Homi Bhabha, Kris Gutierrez, and Edward Soja – along with a few key theoretical ideas and their definitions. Facundo continued, “The third space is where these power dynamics meet, in terms of certain students coming in with an idea.” Facundo explained, “This is Rosa’s first time teaching this class. You might not have noticed this, but in moments where students are expecting her to do certain things, she steps back.”

Being and Researching in the Third Space 193 Looking a bit puzzled, Char asked, “But what are they expecting her to do, and how do you know what they’re expecting?” Facundo gave this example: One student didn’t know how to save her document. Rosa, the teacher, was walking over to help the student, and she stopped a few feet away from the student’s table. She asked the class, “Does anybody know how to do it?” The moment those words left her mouth, she added, “Does everybody know how to do it?” Another person got up and helped save the document. But there was this kind of opening up of a window. Rosa looked around, making eye contact with students, to see who else needed help and who could help them. Instead of staying in the teacher space, she let them do it. She just facilitated it. This was an impressive example of connecting theory with observation. And while this example didn’t end up in their manuscript draft, as so many things don’t, it was another example of growth. JoAnn took over, explaining that they looked at the interactions that caught their attention on their own, and then they printed out the data and talked about it together. They found themselves focusing on a classroom interaction in which Rosa talked with the writing students about an upcoming assignment. The students worked in groups and gave a presentation using a PowerPoint or a Prezi, describing a discourse community they belonged to. The idea was for the students to understand the Aristotelian idea of logos, using a logical argument in writing. Rosa expected them to create PowerPoints, but one student asked if they could use screen shots, and Rosa didn’t know what those were. Once the student explained it, Rosa agreed that it made sense to use this technology in their presentations. They thought this might be an example of a third-space moment. Linda explained that along with their observational and interview data, they also looked at the students’ grades and the feedback they received on their assignments, the class artifacts. She focused on one student in particular, a first-generation college student they called America, noting that “sometimes she has an A or a B; other times, her grade goes down to a 65.” Linda suggested that most of the issues with America’s grades had to do with not being familiar with more formal writing in English. They also noticed that America, like the other students, spoke Spanish with individual peers and English with the instructor and when she spoke in front of the whole class. They were wondering if students speaking Spanish in class pointed to a third space as well. “What we are trying to get at is what the role of language is,” Facundo explained, and all of us are educators and new researchers, and we identify as non-dominant members of the

194  Being and Researching in the Third Space culture. That’s our positionality here. And we know that scholars have used third space theory at the K–12 level, but not at the college level. That awareness demonstrated something that it often takes a long time for new researchers to see – how their work might fit into the existing literature. Char and Kate have seen many students only make that connection to gaps in the literature when they get to the dissertation proposal stage. Facundo continued: We are still thinking about Soja’s concept of the third space as a platform. We think it’s a way for us to think about contestation. So you have the student, the teacher, and the third space is where contestation happens – like the student asking if they can use screen shots in their presentations. Soja says that in these spaces, there are preconceived notions about how to act. We are starting to see that students speak up in that space, and it’s where they negotiate their identities. And language is key to that. JoAnn explained that they had some possible examples of the third space in their data, and Linda added, “The instructor would have constant movement. She would put her hands on the student’s shoulder, and she would sit next to them. That’s proximity.” JoAnn continued, “We still don’t know what it means, but we’re working on it.” Facundo said, “So, here we have these language ideologies about Spanish at home, English at school – they’re only bringing in Spanish in the informal spaces, not in the academic ones.” Linda added: It’s contradictory when students say, “Spanish had an impact on me, but it didn’t have an impact on my writing in English.” They speak Spanish in the classroom. We have caught many examples of that. [Excerpts were on the slide.] We see the recurring theme of formal and informal languages and spaces where it’s right or not right to use them. And then America told us that using Spanish in front of the whole class “was not elegant.” This was a very powerful example of a language ideology that seemed to combine their third-space analysis with one of language ideologies. They were grappling with complex data, and they were willing not to be tied to a preconceived way of interpreting it. Char, Kate, and Jair were excited to see this discussion of data happening in the theory presentations. It was what we hoped would happen. JoAnn remarked that in one of the interviews they conducted toward the end of the semester: We hadn’t really heard this student talk informally in class. When we asked him where it’s appropriate to use each language, he told us it

Being and Researching in the Third Space 195 depended on whether his classmates’ first language was English or Spanish. He said he can just tell. Here again, they identified important pieces of data that dealt with language and space, and they were trying to understand the probably unconscious rules that students had for their own language use in the classroom. “Are they so comfortable with both languages that they don’t even realize they are switching languages?” JoAnn asked. “Maybe,” Char replied, musing, “Is there an unspoken rule about only using Spanish when you’ve been invited to do so?” Kate noted that Facundo, JoAnn, and Linda had been talking a lot about Spanish in the home space, and she wondered if saying maestra was a way of inviting the instructor into the students’ home space. Josiah, who is blond and blue eyed, reminded the class that when he walked by a group speaking in Spanish, they automatically switched to English. Gloria and Facundo, said, “Power,” in unison, without planning it. They smiled and nodded knowingly. Estévan added, “I  hear them translanguage all the time, talking about the course content and being social. But I get that with Josiah it’s different.” Gloria chimed in, saying: They do have a third space. But it isn’t necessarily with the teacher. It’s with each other. They wait until it’s time to work in groups, and it’s no accident who they work with. They sit next to each other, and they help each other. We have to listen to both what they say and what they do. This theory presentation turned into a whole-class data analysis session, and it was remarkable. Their questions and their analysis were insightful, and they were engaging with the data in ways that expert researchers do. In fact, their engaging in the practice of data analysis together seemed to be what Lave & Wenger call “the condition for the effectiveness of learning” (1991, p. 93). At the end of their presentation, Facundo said: I’m really interested in what they’re doing here because this is about identity for kids born and raised in El Paso. Sometimes they get through high school without speaking English. And maybe speaking Spanish in small groups is a kind of resistance. While he, JoAnn, and Linda had been reading the data through the lenses of language ideologies in the third space throughout the presentation, at the very end, Facundo brought in the possibility of reading these behaviors as resistance. This was important. He was willing to start looking at the data from another possible perspective. This seemed like the moment when he let go of the idea of starting with theory and finding examples that fit his theoretical framework. Kate said, “Foucault sees

196  Being and Researching in the Third Space power as existing in networks and as functioning like capillaries. Maybe this is about resistance.” This presentation formed the foundation of their manuscript draft, which focused on issues of language ideologies and the third space. They selected data points that included student-to-student interactions, teacher-student interactions, and interview data. While they didn’t analyze this data using a Foucauldian frame, Facundo was aware that they could have. That was big progress. This was an example of learning in practice, of apprentice learners understanding “that there is a field for the mature practice of what they are learning to do” (Lave & Wenger, 1991, p. 110). It wasn’t just Facundo who was taking on these practices. It was all the student researchers. What they did filled us with awe.

Bourdieu and Bordeaux “So, I  want to mention something,” Char said. It was near the end of class the week after students had given their theory presentations. Char’s voice cracked when she said, “This . . . this is difficult for me.” Usually, the class was jovial and filled with lively discussion. Everyone was suddenly silent. “First of all,” Char said carefully, “you did great presentations about theory last week.” People’s eyes were wide. Everyone was still. Everyone could tell that Char was nervous. She went on: This is the hard part. [Her eyes darted from face to face.] I can see that JoAnn is looking at me with an “uh-oh” look on her face. . . . Let’s think about the idea of linguistic capital. It’s a Bordieuan idea. It’s about what languages you decide to speak, what varieties you use, and how that connects with who you are. That’s where you’re from in terms of things like class, race, ethnicity, gender, ability, and sexuality.” Char coughed. Then she looked at Kate, who nodded encouragement. One of the things Kate and I noticed last week . . . was that there were a few moments when people were saying theorists’ names in a way that isn’t standard. I feel like it’s fine when you say things this way in our class, but I worry about what might happen to you on a job interview or at a conference. It’s words like hegemony and names like Bourdieu that get in our way. . . . I was early in my doctoral study, and I said a word out loud in a discussion that I had only read. It was hegemony. I  said hegeMOny, with the stress on the third syllable. [She counted syllables on fingers.] Everyone in the class, it turned out, said heGEmony, with the stress on the second syllable. I felt lousy. It was a word I had only read but hadn’t said out loud

Being and Researching in the Third Space 197 until that day. The point is, if you are on a job interview – and this is super important – it’s hard to talk about this . . . JoAnn jumped in and said, “Geez, now I’m thinking  .  .  . how have I been pronouncing things.” JoAnn looked up and wrinkled her nose, like she was remembering something important. “When we were doing our theory presentations last week,” she said slowly, “and we talked about the writing students’ assignments? You know, remember when I talked about Rosa, and how she explained pathos, ethos, and logos?” We all nodded. “I had been saying legos instead of logos the whole time.” The class burst out in laughter, which helped relieve the tension that Char had built. And given that JoAnn’s specialization was early childhood education, it was an especially delicious Freudian slip. But this was also a moment of moving to full participation in the Community of Practice. JoAnn took the feedback Char had reluctantly offered, applied it to herself, and pointed out something Char had missed. After the laughter died down, Char said, “Again, in our class, it’s fine. But outside of class, it could have consequences.” She continued: It’s hard for me to tell you this because . . . I don’t like that standard language ideology. It’s based on middle-class fantasies of how educated people are supposed to speak . . . and we know that there’s a ton of variation in all spoken language. It’s kind of like linguistic purism. And we’re not saying these names the way they’re said in French either. We’re using an Anglicized pronunciation, but it’s still the mainstream academic version of it, at least in the United States. So Bourdieu is the person. Bordeaux is the wine. The only reason I’m even pointing this out is that I don’t want you to lose an opportunity for a job. Kate nodded in the affirmative again and shared, “If you go online and enter a name and follow it with pronunciation, you can hear how to pronounce it. You can find people’s names at a site. . . . It’s pronunciation.com.” Char’s eyes got wide. “I  had no idea that was a thing,” she exclaimed, adding, “That might just be my new favorite activity.” Gloria commented that she would rather have her pronunciation corrected than not, “because if I am certain you say it that way, I’ll just keep doing it.” JoAnn went to pronunciation.com and entered Bakhtin. She played the pronunciation for the class. It was fast, and she played it for us a couple of times. People practiced saying the name. Then Gloria asked, “How do you say hermeneutics?” She began searching for it on her computer. Kate said, “You’re saying it. You’ve got it. We really don’t want to be prescriptive about it. But it is a norm. I  just want you to know when and where you need to say it a certain way.” Facundo was looking

198  Being and Researching in the Third Space at Gloria’s computer screen and leaning in to hear the pronunciation of hermeneutics, repeating it under his breath. “I’ll take some of that Bourdieu,” he said, “I mean Bordeaux.” Again, we all laughed. For Char and Kate, the laughter was mostly that of relief. In the final focus group interview, Facundo said: I don’t know how to express this exactly, but this course made me think about something. In Spanish, we say una cosquillita. There is this little itch that you have. One of my history professors who has since passed away said – in fact, he said it the last time I talked with him, and it’s something that has always helped with me, to this day – “Please don’t stop asking the why questions.” That’s what Facundo did in this course. He continued to ask those why questions, but now he can ask those why questions ethnographically, as well as through oral history. Lave & Wenger remind us that “knowledge and skill, and their significance to the subject and the community, are never unproblematic” (1991, p.  116). Now Facundo is a full-time lecturer in Chicano Studies at Borderlands University, and he picks up a history class to teach at Rio Grande Community College now and then. He is continuing in the doctoral program, taking one class a semester and then stepping out to save money to pay for the following semester. Paso a paso. Kerschbaum encourages us to acknowledge our own “yet-to-beness” as a way “to maintain an openness to one’s own and others’ identities and refuse to take identity markers as fixed” (2012, p. 626). One semester, he is doctoral student. The next, he isn’t enrolled. Facundo is in the third space.

Notes 1. We chose the pseudonym Facundo because it means talkative or eloquent. That’s him. 2. Día de Muertos is a Mexican holiday that is observed throughout much of Latin America and the Southwestern United States. People celebrate the spirits of their deceased relatives by creating ofrendas (altars) to honor them on November 1 and 2, when the walls between the spirit world and the physical world are thought to be thin. Usually, the deceased person’s favorite food and drink are placed on the altars, along with pan de muerto, marigolds, and items that belonged to the departed. 3. Susan U. Philips (1983/1992) defined participation structures as the socially appropriate ways of communicating that shape face-to-face interactions, particularly within classrooms in different cultural settings. Those structures include things like how turns at talk are allocated and the structuring of attention, and they involve power differentials. 4. One popular theory about the pachucos in El Paso is that the word was derived from the phrase Vamos pa el chuco, which was how people traveling to El Paso from Ciudad Juárez to work in the early 20th century would respond to border patrol agents who asked, “Where are you going?” Their answer was that

Being and Researching in the Third Space 199 they were going to work at the shoe company in El Paso. Hence pa = para and chuco = shoe co. 5. The Zoot Suit Rebellion of 1943 was provoked by White soldiers stationed in Southern California during WWII who viscously attacked Mexican American youth for wearing zoot suits. The soldiers were said to have claimed that zoot suits, which are baggy and use a lot of fabric were un-American, because fabric, along with food, was rationed for the war effort. In fact, it was a racist attack.

References Anzaldúa, G. (1987). Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Spinsters/Aunt Lute. Benson, K., & Nagar, R. (2006). Collaboration as resistance? Reconsidering the processes, products, and possibilities of feminist oral history and ethnography. Gender, Place & Culture, 13(5), 581–592. Borch, C. (2002). Interview with Edward W. Soja: Thirdspace, postmetropolis, and social theory.  Distinktion: Scandinavian Journal of Social Theory,  3(1), 113–120. Campbell, H. (2011). No end in sight: Violence in Ciudad Juárez. NACLA Report on the Americas, 44(3), 19–22. Cano, G. (2009).  Órale! politics: Mobilization of Mexican immigrants in Chicago and Houston (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). Columbia University, New York, NY. Cole, D. (2011). A linguistic journey to the border. Apples-Journal of Applied Language Studies, 5(1), 77–92. Galindo, D. L. (1992). Dispelling the male-only myth: Chicanas and Calo. Bilingual Review/La Revista Bilingüe, 17(1), 3–35. Gutiérrez, K. D. (2008). Developing a sociocritical literacy in the third space. Reading Research Quarterly, 43(2), 148–164. Jeffrey, B.,  & Troman, G. (2004). Time for ethnography.  British Educational Research Journal, 30(4), 535–548. Katz, L. F. (1974). The evolution of the pachuco language and culture. Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press. Kerschbaum, S. (2012). Avoiding the difference fixation: Identity categories, markers of difference and the teaching of writing. College Composition and Communication, 63(4), 616–644. Labov, W. (1972). Sociolinguistic patterns. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Molloy, M. (2013). The Mexican undead: Toward a new history of the “drug war” killing fields. Small Wars Journal. Retrieved from https://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/ art/the-mexican-undead-toward-a-new-history- of-the-“drug-war”-killing-fields Ortega, A. (1977). Caló tapestry. Albuquerque, NM: Editorial Justa Publications. Peñalosa, F. (1980). Chicano sociolinguistics: A brief introduction. Rowley, MA: Newbury House Publishers, Inc. Pérez, E. (1999). The decolonial imaginary: Writing Chicanas into history. Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press.

200  Being and Researching in the Third Space Philips, S. U. (1992).  The invisible culture: Communication in classroom and community on the warm springs Indian reservation. Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press. (Original work published 1983) Prensky, M. R. (2010). Teaching digital natives: Partnering for real learning. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press. Rutherford, J. (1990). The third space: Interview with Homi Bhabha. In J. Rutherford (Ed.), Identity: Community, culture, difference (pp. 207–221). London: Lawrence & Wishart. Sandburg, C. (1992). Chicago poems (Vol. 32). Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press. Soja, E. (1996). Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and other real-and-imagined places. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Van Dijk, J. A. G. M. (2012). The evolution of the digital divide: The digital divide turns to inequality of skills and usage.  Digital Enlightenment Yearbook,  2012, 57–75. Yosso, T. J. (2013). Critical race counterstories along the Chicana/Chicano educational pipeline. New York: Routledge.

8 We Were Never Supposed to Be Here Overcoming Resistance and Joining Communities of Practice In the second semester of the case study course, Char and Kate opted to hold class in a classroom at the community college. Parking on campus at Borderlands was expensive and so overcrowded that you could spend half an hour searching for a spot and then spend another half hour walking to class. We decided as a group that it made more sense for us to hold our second semester of the course at the community college, specifically at one of their campuses where parking was free and plentiful. The majority of the student researchers taught at the community college anyway, so holding class there was an easy decision. Gloria was a tenure-track communication studies instructor, and Linda was an adjunct communications instructor in the same department. Israel taught philosophy as an adjunct, Facundo was an adjunct in the history department, and Estévan taught literature there, also as an adjunct. Although JoAnn and Victoria weren’t community college instructors at the time, both had research assistantships at Borderlands, and they were able to carpool to the community college campus together. Because Israel’s schedule was changed at the last minute, as often happens to part-time faculty, he had arranged for us to meet in his classroom before one of the sections of his Introduction to Philosophy class. This mattered because it was the only way he could attend class. Josiah1 was the outlier in terms of our finding a convenient place to hold class. As the administrator for the Regional Day School Program for the Deaf in far West Texas, his region was enormous, covering 5,587 square miles. That’s Texas. He could be coming to class from somewhere right next door or from somewhere three hours away and in another time zone. During the third week of the second semester of the case study class, all of us were sitting in chairs with attached desks, having arranged ourselves into a circle. Jair’s schedule didn’t permit him to join us, so it was just Char and Kate teaching this time. We reminded the student researchers about the literature on the co-construction of languages, ideologies, and texts that they had read the last semester, noting that they were an important context for the day’s reading, which was Gery

202  We Were Never Supposed to Be Here Ryan and H. Russell Bernard’s essay “Techniques to Identify Themes” (2003). We discussed the connection between codes and the literature and talked about the ways that codes are connected to “professional definitions . . . values, theoretical orientations, and personal experiences” (p. 88) with the subject matter. Gloria’s eyes suddenly lit up. She started searching through her computer for the transcript of an interview she had conducted. “Wait a minute,” she said, excitedly. “They need mentors to lift them up.” We talked about mentors as a possible code. The conversation quickly turned to the student researchers themselves. JoAnn said, “There’s so much resistance to us. I  know that, for me, no one wants to believe I’m a Black doctoral student.” Facundo nodded, saying, “Yeah, I  was told to go to trade school. That was the expectation.” JoAnn reminded him, “You’re the exception to the rule, not the expectation.” He gave a knowing smile. Josiah inhaled audibly. He looked deliberately at each classmate around the circle. Signing while he spoke, which was something he always did, he spoke in a slow, careful voice. “Look at us. We were never supposed to be here. None of us.” It was as if he had pulled away a veil. None of the students in this course had taken the typical route to their doctoral programs. Josiah and Linda were the only ones in the group whom strangers might read as White, and Linda identified as Latina, often having to correct people as to her ethnic and racial identities. When we interviewed Josiah, he explained that he reads as White and identifies that way, although “we had pictures of my great-grandparents on the walls, and I  know they were of Cherokee descent. There is Cherokee on both sides of my family,” he revealed. He described his great-grandmother as a tall, slender woman with very Native American features. In fact, the Appalachian mountain region, where Josiah and his family are from, was sovereign home to the Cherokee people until the late 1700s. It was in the early 1800s that English, French, and Spanish colonizers forced them from “subsistence production to an export economy in which hunting for slaves, and deer skins, and gathering marketable herbs assumed primacy” (Dunaway, 1996, p.  480). Josiah wondered about the trauma his great-grandparents must have experienced, given that they were the first generation after the Trail of Tears.2 “Unfortunately, I  don’t know the stories of how they got there. But most likely, they were always there,” he mused. Josiah had come out to his classmates as gay on the first day of the first semester of the course. He mentioned that he and his husband were trying to adopt a child, and he shared how expensive and stressful that process was.3 His classmates expressed empathy, and everyone knew his sexuality was an important part of who he was. He also identified as someone with a hearing difference. “I  will eventually need a hearing

We Were Never Supposed to Be Here 203 aid,” he affirmed, “but I don’t consider it a disability or an impairment. It’s just a difference in the way I  learn.” However, as the course progressed, he explained, “I knew I had hearing loss, and up until now, it really hadn’t impacted my schooling.” But through conducting fieldwork for this course, he came to evaluate his hearing differently. “I personally have a difficult time hearing what’s being discussed when the students are broken into groups,” he reflected. “Everything sounds muffled, and I have a hard time making out what people say.” Being gay, living with hearing loss, and gradually becoming part of Deaf culture are important parts of who Josiah is. During an interview, he smiled and sat up taller as he declared, “Oh, and I’m definitely hillbilly.”

Multiple Identities “Hillbilly is just the way I see myself,” Josiah explained. “It’s who I am. Whether people take it as having a bad connotation or good connotation, it doesn’t matter. For me, being a hillbilly means being a person who is self-sufficient.” He described it this way: We dug our own wells. We grew our own food; we grew our own feed and raised our own animals. We grew the garden all the summer and canned what we grew in August. I mean, we didn’t ever buy vegetables or meat or eggs at the grocery store. We had freezers, and we dried things or canned them. We even canned beans, you know – we didn’t just dry them. So, to me, the term hillbilly really means selfsufficient. I definitely consider myself a hillbilly. At the turn of the last century, from the 1800s to the 1900s, when immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe was at an all-time high, there was a popular narrative in the United States that hillbillies were a lost race of “pure” White savages who were so isolated in the mountains that they had been untouched by the Civil War or by immigration (Werner, 2015). This discourse portrayed them as the White, “other” (Harkins, 2005) “barbarians” from inside the country (Abumrad, 2019), as well as people who feuded with each other – think of the Hatfields and the McCoys. They were seen as people who made moonshine and were inbred, ignorant, and desperately poor. In the 1930s, hillbilly became a derogatory term for Whites who organized with Blacks in the United Mineworkers Union (Abumrad, 2019). By the 1960s, there was even an unlikely political alliance between hillbillies who had migrated north, called the Young Patriots, and the Black Panthers, who were working together to fight class oppression (Sonnie  & Tracy, 2011). In popular culture, hillbillies have served “as a foil for middle-class social mores, defining modern norms against the perceived abnormality of a liminal

204  We Were Never Supposed to Be Here subject whose sexuality, gender, class, and race are distinctly ‘other’ ” (Mason, 2005, p. 42). Being Appalachian is another aspect of how Josiah identifies himself. Dunaway (Casto et al., 2004) defines Appalachia as “215 mountainous and hilly counties in nine states from western Maryland to northern Alabama” (p. 182). Werner reminds us that “it includes the entire state of West Virginia” (2015, p. 308). Josiah grew up in the Appalachian Mountains in a town with a population of just 300 people called Odd, West Virginia. Really. People from Odd are called Oddities, and the only tourists who pass through are the occasional sojourners who want a postmark proclaiming they have been to “Odd, West Virginia.” Josiah explained that the people in his community wanted a name that would set them apart from other small towns, “so they picked Odd.” Located deep in the mountains, Odd is now home to 900 people and is in the South-Central part of West Virginia, the state that continues to produce more coal than any other in the Appalachians. Not surprisingly, coal mining runs deep on both sides of his family. Josiah’s father was a coal miner, as were his grandfathers on both sides and most of his uncles on his father’s side. His father was motivated to earn his high school diploma because he knew he couldn’t be hired in the mines without one. As a small child, Josiah remembered his father coming home covered in splits. Splits are wedge-shaped rocks that surround the seams in a coal deposit, and they are what coal miners must pick through to get to the coal. A life in the mines was inevitable for most boys (and some girls) in the part of West Virginia where Josiah was raised. But he rejected the idea of becoming a miner at a young age, noting: NO, I . . . I . . . I told myself. I remember my dad coming home, just completely covered in splits, from head to toe. Black. Like we are talking black. Just dirty. Covered in dirt. I  said, “I never want to be covered in dirt like that.” But it was more than just dirt that made Josiah seek out a decidedly different life path for himself. Here, he described the most serious of his father’s mining injuries: Big rocks in the mine had fallen on top of my dad, and he was face down in the water. It was just like a little trickle at first. Eventually, he had to turn his head so that his face was out of the water. He was there for a few hours – I don’t know how many hours – until they got the rocks off of him. He was just lying there. That’s how his back was hurt. He never got compensation for it. And I think that’s why he got laid off from the mines. After that he worked for at a grocery store for about three dollars an hour.

We Were Never Supposed to Be Here 205 Coal mining in West Virginia is, indeed, a difficult life. While men have historically dominated mine work, some women have defied the odds and engaged in that work as well (Tallichet, 2016). But typically, the lines between appropriate male and female behavior are firmly drawn in Appalachia. Josiah explained that his family practiced very set gender roles. His parents married when his mother was 16, and she dropped out of high school in tenth grade because she was married. She gave birth to Josiah just after turning 18. Even though Josiah’s father had lost his job at the mine and was making a paltry hourly wage, he forbade his wife from working outside the home “because women don’t do that.” He did, however, permit her to make and sell dolls and other crafts. Helton and Keller (2010) note that well into the 21st century, Appalachian women are often still “expected to assume gender roles that center on household and home responsibilities and are not always encouraged to seek formal wage-earning labor” (p. 151). They argue that traditional Appalachian crafts, such as making dolls out of corn husks, “is a common Appalachian cultural trait and has often helped them to adjust during hard times” (p. 153). As the oldest child, Josiah saw his parents’ marital strife more than his younger siblings did. Understanding that discord to have been part of his parents’ relationship from the beginning, he attributed it mostly to his father’s having been a very observant Southern Baptist and his mother’s having been decidedly less so. His father is still the youth minister at their Southern Baptist church and is firmly opposed to dancing, drinking, music, and of course, lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people. His father still does not accept him. When Josiah was young, the family lived in a small trailer in a town on the other side of the mountain from Odd called Sophia, which was near his father’s side of the family. Because of his father’s deep faith, “we didn’t have a TV,” Josiah explained. “My dad thought that was how the world and the devil enter your house. They come in through the TV. And by letting other cultures and ideas in.” His father was strict with his wife and children and deeply critical of his wife’s family. Josiah described it like this: Although my maternal grandfather also worked in the mines, that side of the family is more hillbilly than my dad’s is. My mom’s father knew how to make moonshine, and he taught his sons how to do it. In fact, he pulled the boys out of school in 9th grade so they could run moonshine. Sometimes that meant selling it and other times it meant trading it for goods. My mom hated that my uncles were always drunk. But you do have to taste the moonshine in order to see if it’s a good batch. It can actually kill you

206  We Were Never Supposed to Be Here if you’re not careful. My mom always said that my brother and I would never learn to make moonshine. She didn’t want us to be drunk all the time. Josiah’s father saw his wife’s family as “uneducated, poor, and as savages,” a point of view that has much to do with his religious beliefs. Josiah emphasized with a smile and a wink that “Of course, drinking is something we Southern Baptists are not allowed to do.”

Early Schooling Although he is hazy about how his parents were able to afford it, he attended kindergarten and first grade at a private Christian school. His father made sure this happened, reinforcing that his dad was “very, very . . . extremely religious.” He thinks his parents might have bartered labor to pay for his private school tuition. However, when he entered second grade, his parents separated and later divorced. That meant that his father had to give up his dream of becoming a Southern Baptist pastor and settle for being a volunteer youth pastor. It also meant that Josiah was transferred to public school. “I  had to change schools,” he explained, “because I couldn’t go to the Christian school anymore . . . with divorced parents.” At the Christian school, he had worn a uniform that his grandparents paid for with money they earned running a small convenience store out of their trailer. But there were no uniforms in public school, and he was teased mercilessly for having holes in his pants. The children got handme-downs, along with clothes from Goodwill. “I was made aware in my elementary school years,” Josiah recalled ruefully “that I was not part of that community.” From then on, he and his younger brother and sister lived with their mother, spending occasional summers with their father. Later, Josiah lived with his father for a short time while he was attending his first year of college. While his parents were married, Josiah’s father had forbidden his mother to learn to drive. But after the divorce, her learning to drive was crucial to the family’s survival. Given their remote location in the mountains – five miles from the nearest gas station – her driving and subsequent independence were seismic changes for everyone. Over time, his mother earned her general education diploma (GED) and later became a certified nursing assistant (CNA) through working at a nursing home. After that, she attended a two-year nursing program and graduated with an associate’s degree when Josiah was in sixth grade. His mother went to school and had two jobs outside the home most of the time he was growing up. On top of that, she continued to do the farming, preserve the food, take care of the animals, and of course, raise her children. Valuing

We Were Never Supposed to Be Here 207 self-sufficiency and hard work are key to how Josiah was brought up. He worked hard as a child, and his mother modeled that quality for him and his siblings every day.

Family Life While cash was short in their home, there was always food on the table. Josiah went to the dentist as a child; he noted, “That’s one thing my mom made sure we did. She was very, very adamant that we should brush our teeth and go to the dentist.” His aunts and uncles didn’t have many teeth, and his cousins started losing their teeth by the age of 16. Josiah’s extended family were not outliers in regards to tooth loss in Appalachia. In fact, Appalachian residents in both West Virginia and Kentucky are more likely to lose teeth than adults in any other state in the country. Researchers have found that after controlling for fluoridation rates, access to dental care, and low socioeconomic status, the reasons for this incongruity include “environmental pollution exposures in Appalachian mining areas” as well as “an array of elements, solutes, and sediments released by . . . coal mining activity and . . . not monitored in rural drinking water” (Hendryx, Ducatman, Zullig, Ahern, & Crout, 2012, p. 494). Josiah remembers that he, along with some of the other kids at school, were bused to the other side of the mountain to get fluoride treatments. His mother’s teeth were very brown, and she was aware that “your teeth communicate more about you than you realize.” As is the case throughout Appalachia, water was the issue. It wasn’t fluoridated, and “in our area, there was so much iron in the water that it was actually red.” He remembered that when he had a physical in high school, the doctor “was concerned about my iron levels. But when I told him where I came from,” he said, “it made sense to him. Still, he was worried.” Josiah’s great-grandmother, grandmother, father, and all his uncles on his father’s side have a condition that leads to degenerative hearing loss as they age. Josiah has it too. Most of his relatives use hearing aids, except for his father, who refuses to get them. “This is just part of my family,” he explained. “It’s a genetic disorder.” His grandmother, who never learned to sign, does really well “if it’s a one-on-one conversation. Because she reads lips, she can find out what’s going on.” But if more than one person is talking, “she doesn’t understand anything.” He remembered that when he went to her house as a child and wanted to use the phone, he had to pick it up and dial really quickly, because it was a special phone that was incredibly loud. “I know that I suffer from hearing loss as well,” he stated. “It’s progressive, so we don’t start out that way. But that’s why I know I’ll be using hearing aids at some point in my life. It’s just the way it is.”

208  We Were Never Supposed to Be Here During the data collection for the ethnographic case study course, Josiah found that it was difficult for him to hear the first-year composition students “when they started talking as a whole group.” When he was close to the people speaking, he could hear them talking, but not enough to be able to decipher their meanings. “And if they were in the distance, I couldn’t hear them at all.” He decided to try recording each class he observed, but he had an even harder time with the recording than he did in person because he couldn’t filter out each voice. This is one of the reasons he produced very thin field notes. Fortunately, the other members of his research team were able to transcribe the recordings.

Farm Living After the divorce, Josiah, his mother, and his younger siblings lived in a modest two-bedroom farmhouse on eight acres of land near his mother’s side of the family in Odd. His maternal great-grandparents lived even farther into the mountains, on a 15-acre farm with a creek, which was about an hour’s drive on a winding dirt road from their house. Josiah is the oldest, with a brother who is two years younger and a sister who is four years younger. Later, a half sister who is ten years his junior joined the family. He recounted: We only had one bathroom and we didn’t have a shower. We only had a tub, so we tried to conserve water. My sister would bathe first, because she was the girl. My brother and I  had to rotate who was going to bathe second. Later, my sister switched to the mornings and bathed after my mom. West Virginia winters were especially hard for the family. Josiah remembered: When it snowed, the trees would cover the road so the sun would never hit it. That meant the road was just a sheet of ice. You literally couldn’t get out. We didn’t go to school for a month at a time, usually in January. We had a wood burning stove and a coal burning stove and we used both. Actually, we would take blankets that my mom had made and put them over the doorway. Then we would pull all the mattresses into the dining room, which was where the coal stove was, and we would all just sleep in the same bed to keep warm. In the morning we would get a bucket of snow, put it inside to melt, and then pour it down the toilet to make it flush, because the plumbing would be frozen. Back on the farm, the tradition of not having a TV or a radio continued, but more out of economic need than fear of the outside world. “I think

We Were Never Supposed to Be Here 209 it was good for me,” he reflected, “because we just read all the time. We would go to the public library in Sophia.” While the farm was selfsustaining, it didn’t produce enough extra food to sell for cash. They had pigs, cows, rabbits, and lots of chickens, all of which they raised for food. Josiah was in charge of caring for the animals and tending the garden. His brother killed and butchered the animals, and his sister did all the cooking and cleaning inside the house. Even after his parents’ divorce, the gender rules still applied. “You know, men do certain things,” he said, “and women do other things.” That means boys can help do the dishes, “but they don’t actually do the dishes.” And it wasn’t a girl’s place to cut the grass, do the weeding, or take in the garden. “The girls could help the boys with the garden, as long as they didn’t do the gardening themselves,” just like doing the dishes.

Schooling as the Way to Move Up “We were definitely lower middle class, if not poor,” he explained. “I  qualified for government programs when I  entered college.” A  few years after his parents divorced, his mother started dating a Black man. Her father was furious about it. He excommunicated Josiah’s mother, and the family had to leave the farm during that time. They moved to a Black neighborhood in Beckley, just a few minutes from Sophia. They were the only White family living there at the time. His mother was working and going to school, and the children were alone a lot. That was the case until Josiah made friends with two Black neighbor children, Aisha and Montel. Eventually, the school bus started dropping Josiah and his siblings off at Aisha and Montel’s grandmother’s house. “She would watch us while my mom was working,” he recounted. “My mom started doing schoolwork the minute she got home, so I it was my job as the oldest to make sure that my brother and sister were occupied.” Over time, his mother’s relationship ended, and the family moved back to the farm in Odd.

A World Outside Odd The time Josiah spent beyond the farm made a powerful impression on him. One of Vance’s (2016) insights in his Appalachian memoir was that poverty and limited time spent with parents or other guiding adults can “narrow the realm of possibilities” (p. 242) for a child. As a result of leaving the farm, even though the reasons were traumatic for his mother, Josiah realized that there were other people, other schools, and most importantly, other, and perhaps better, possibilities for him out in the world. Although he had made some friends in the middle school in Sophia, he was also picked on there. While his siblings were content to go to the district high school assigned to them, Josiah was not. “I didn’t

210  We Were Never Supposed to Be Here want to go to that high school,” he stated. “I wanted to go to the high school with the AP biology, the chemistry, the zoology, and the calculus.” His mother wanted him to keep his head down and do what was expected, “but I am really head-strong.” He smiled. “I told her I had to go to that high school, and I would move in with my dad if she wouldn’t let me go there.” Finally, she acquiesced. “Because I put in a request to go to an out-of-district school, I didn’t go to high school with the other farm kids,” he said. The residents of Odd were mostly farmers and people of meager means. But during the brief time the family had lived in Sophia, Josiah had learned that there were resort communities just seven miles away called Glad Springs and Flattop Lake. In that world, the children’s parents were doctors and lawyers. Some of their parents worked in Washington, DC, and commuted back and forth to West Virginia in private helicopters. “And these were the kids that I went to high school with,” he explained. He earned good grades in high school in spite of being bullied for being gay. “I got called names left and right in high school,” he recalled. “It was a dark time for me,” he shared quietly. Fortunately, he had a biology teacher who saw who he was and accepted him, and that helped him a lot in terms of surviving the bullying. A study conducted by the Trevor Project (2019) reports that LGBTQ youth who have even one accepting adult in their lives are 40 percent less likely to attempt suicide. That teacher was crucial for him. After getting his mother’s permission to go to school out of district, Josiah still had to petition the district to allow him to attend the other school. He was elated when his request was granted. In order to make this opportunity work, he had to be extremely disciplined, walking three miles to the bus stop and taking a 45-minute bus ride to the town of Shady Spring so that he arrived by 7:00 AM. His aunt worked close to the high school, and she would drive him from the bus stop to school. “But she would leave exactly at 7:00 AM,” he laughed, “with or without me.” On her days off, he had to figure something else out. His motivation to find opportunities beyond his hometown was powerful. “Some of my uncles moved out of Odd through the military,” he noted, “but I knew I would never make it there.” He laughed, saying that he was too hefty then to be considered for the military. But as he thought about it more, he said that some of his high school bullies were joining the service too. It was also the time of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,4 and he knew the military wouldn’t be an option for him. “But I saw both my mom and my grandfather move up through education.” Vance (2016), in his popular and controversial book Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, wrote about his growing-up years in Appalachia, a world not too different from Josiah’s. He talked about his grandfather knowing when he was a young man that “the best way up for the hillbilly was out” (Vance, 2016, p. 29). Josiah wanted that too.

We Were Never Supposed to Be Here 211

Going to College Although he received a full scholarship to West Virginia University, his family didn’t allow him to accept it because the campus was three hours away from home. So he applied to Bluefield State University, which was about an hour from his family home, and was awarded a full scholarship there. “I  actually got paid to go to school there,” he exclaimed, “and I  knew I  couldn’t pass that up.” Bluefield State began as the Bluefield Colored Institute in the late 1800s, intended to educate the children of Black miners. By the early 1900s, it became a normal school (i.e., an institution for teacher education), with all Black students, faculty, and administrators. It became a fully accredited Black college in the late 1940s and was nominally integrated in the 1950s. By the 1960s, Brown v. Board of Education had opened a few more options for Black students in higher education, and the great migration of Black people moving from the South to the North (Wilkerson, 2011) meant there were fewer Black people in the region. That led to Bluefield State enrolling more and more White students. Perhaps the most significant shift at Bluefield State happened when the state government closed the dormitories in response to Black student protests in the 1960s and appointed White administrators to run the school. Now, Bluefield State is a commuter school that is 80 percent White and 20 percent Black, a mirror image of the racial shift that occurred at Borderlands University. Strangely, Bluefield State University still maintains its designation as a historically Black college (HBC) and has been regarded by some as “the Whitest Historically Black College in America” (Meraji & Demby, 2013, October 18). During his time at Bluefield State, Josiah worked at a fast food restaurant, where he met his first boyfriend. While it was exciting at first, their relationship soon became tumultuous. As his boyfriend spiraled deeper into drug and alcohol addition, he became violent. Josiah knew it was time for him to escape. He called his cousin who was going to New Mexico State University in Las Cruces, New Mexico, to cry on her shoulder. He found out about her university and transferred there, a rather amazing feat for a first-generation college student on a full scholarship. He recalled saying to himself, “I am going to make a different life for myself in Las Cruces. I’ll be whoever I want to be there.” He sold his car to pay for a plane ticket, and soon he was sleeping on his cousin’s couch in southern New Mexico, going to class, and looking for a place to live. He settled in, and soon he was a rebel who wore his long hair in braided dreadlocks. He had the freedom to take art classes. Although there were some stumbles along his academic road, he eventually found his way to anthropology, a discipline in which he excelled. While he “had always wanted to become Indiana Jones,” he found that cultural anthropology was much more to his liking than archeology. “I learned so many things about the struggles of the Navajo, Cheyenne, and the Cherokee people

212  We Were Never Supposed to Be Here that I wasn’t aware of,” he recounted. “I even did a person-centered ethnography (Hollan & Throop, 2011) with my neighbor about what was it like to grow up in a Mexican family in Mesilla, New Mexico in the 1920s. Her relatives had lived through the Gadsden Purchase.”5

Entering New Worlds of Work After graduating with an undergraduate degree in anthropology from New Mexico State University, Josiah landed a job as the personal assistant for a man who owned a number of assisted living and memory care communities in Las Cruces and nearby Alamogordo, New Mexico. Initially, his job was to interview the residents “about the food, the activities, what they did and didn’t like.” He was young, and the elders wanted to talk to him. “I was there to ask certain questions, but I loved hearing their stories. That was invaluable. It wasn’t part of the job,” he explained, “but it was part of being human.” Not long after he started, one of the administrators quit, and Josiah was made administrator for one of the nursing facilities. He was 22. Along with ordering food, making staff schedules, and dealing with complex medical and legal issues, he had to call family members and say, “I’m sorry your mother has passed away. What funeral home would you like me to call to come pick up the body?” Emotionally, it was more than he could handle. He had to quit, and he went from being the administrator of a nursing home to bartending at an LGBT nightclub in El Paso. “It was night and day from the nursing home,” he laughed. “Part of this job was to flirt,” and his work uniform was underwear and a T-shirt. A few months of bartending and earning tips allowed him to save money and move to Phoenix, Arizona. There he administered customer usage surveys for a chain of convenience stores. He quickly learned that the pay was not a living wage in a big city like Phoenix, so he found a job as a permanent substitute in an alternative middle school where he worked with students who had severe behavioral problems. He knew he needed to save money, so he worked at a retail store on weekends. Josiah has always worked hard. One of his many frustrations at the school included being forbidden to use Spanish with the mostly Spanish-speaking student population. Josiah had won an award in high school for being the top Spanish student in West Virginia, and he had studied abroad in Mexico while at New Mexico State. Unfortunately, he started teaching in Arizona just as Proposition 203 became law. Arizona’s English for the Children Act of 2000: Requires that all public-school instruction be conducted in English. Children not fluent in English shall normally be placed in an intensive one-year English immersion program to teach them the language as quickly as possible while also learning academic subjects.

We Were Never Supposed to Be Here 213 That Arizona law is on the 2020 legislative docket for full repeal, with support from both houses. But when Josiah was there, schools were scrambling to comply with it. He saved money and applied for a permanent substitute position again in a small city outside El Paso, Texas, where the district put him to work right away. He said: They actually told me, “It’s not that legal but . . .” They put me in a room in the library to work with a fifth grader they couldn’t handle in the resource room. He was a pretty angry and violent kid and he would just run out of the room to find his brother and beat him up. After the boy assaulted a pregnant paraprofessional and subsequently spent time in a psychiatric hospital, the district had Josiah go to the boy’s home to teach him privately for the next semester. When the school year ended, Josiah was hired as a paraprofessional in the Las Cruces public school system to work in a special education classroom with seven children, most of whom were wards of the state.6 He and the teacher of record co-taught, which is a common strategy in inclusion classrooms, and Josiah was responsible for the science portions. Through the people he met as a paraprofessional, he learned about a program at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque that would allow him to earn a master’s degree while working for the Albuquerque public schools. He jumped on it. While he was earning his master’s in special education, with an emphasis in low-incidence disabilities (e.g., blindness, deafness, deaf-blindness, and autism, among others), he taught middle school children with vision and hearing issues, some of whom were Spanish speakers. He worked one on one with a little girl who was classified as verbally disabled and entered middle school with a productive vocabulary of six words. Six words. By the end of year, she had learned forty-four words, and Josiah started asking himself, “Why does this happen? Why had she only learned only six words by the time she went to middle school?” He was starting to ask the why questions that ethnographers ask. Before he knew it, Josiah was in charge of a new middle school program for special education students in Albuquerque, New Mexico. After getting that initiative established, he returned to El Paso, earned his Texas teaching certificate, and started teaching deaf youth in the public schools. Initially, he was put in an oral-only program, an instructional approach with which he disagrees. But he quickly learned to sign on the job, passing the Deaf Education Teacher Exam, and soon he was teaching deaf education using ASL. While he can use ASL, he’s more fluent in Signed Exact English (SEE), and his students have exposed him to Lengua de Señas Mexicana (LSM).7 SEE is the system most commonly used in that part of Texas. He found himself using SEE most frequently, along with what is sometimes called

214  We Were Never Supposed to Be Here Pidgin Signed English (PSE). PSE uses signs from ASL but employs them with English grammar, rather than ASL grammar, which is more similar to French grammar. A Pidgin language is one that uses simplified vocabulary and grammar drawn from several languages. Josiah explained that ASL is used most commonly on the East Coast and in the Midwest and that SEE is more common in the Western United States. Texas is split between ASL in the eastern part of the state and SEE in western part. Some people use PSE as a bridge between ASL and English, as PSE uses something similar to English grammar. The theory is that PSE makes it easier for deaf people who use ASL to learn to read and write in English, as there is no written form of ASL. Josiah moved up quickly in the school district. His supervisor encouraged him to get another master’s in educational administration at Borderlands University, and as soon as he finished that program, he was made administrator of the Regional Day School Program for the Deaf, the position he held while he was taking the ethnographic case study course.

Finding Love Before he started the doctoral program at Borderlands, Josiah was at an LGBT Pride event in El Paso, and he met the man who would eventually become his husband. The two of them fell deeply in love. His husband, José, grew up in El Paso, and his parents had migrated to the United States from Mexico. José, a native Spanish speaker, completed his undergraduate degree at Borderlands, and not long after the two of them fell in love, he was accepted into the doctoral program in pharmacy at the University of Texas-Austin, so they had a long-distance relationship for a number of years. While Josiah’s mother and siblings attended their wedding, his father did not. “The weekend before the wedding,” he recounted, “my father called and said it was a sin for me to marry a man and that I was going to go to hell. He told me to read the Bible.” It turned out that he and his husband had already had their legal ceremony at the courthouse, so he replied, “Well, that’s too bad. It’s already done.” Although it was painful for him, Josiah said that studying anthropology had helped him understand the Bible from a more historical point of view. He knew that he and his husband would be fine. And they are.

From Teacher to Administrator When Josiah became an administrator, he remarked that it felt dramatically different from being a teacher. As an administrator, he was told he had to take out his earrings, even though earrings were fine when he was a teacher. He also noticed that the other administrators treated him with

We Were Never Supposed to Be Here 215 more respect once they saw him wearing a wedding ring. He made sure they didn’t know he was married to a man as Texas is a state in which employment discrimination against LGBT people is legal, and labor rights for queer people in K–12 education are especially tenuous. It is also one of five remaining states that have what are called “No Promo Homo” laws since four states have either repealed or overturned these laws. What that means in Texas is that K–12 teachers must: Emphasize sexual abstinence before marriage and fidelity in marriage as the expected standard . . . and state that homosexual conduct is not an acceptable lifestyle and is a criminal offense under Section 21.06, Penal Code. (Human Immunodeficiency Virus Services Act, 2015) That is, it’s fine for K–12 teachers in Texas to say negative things about LGBT people, but they are forbidden from saying anything positive. But Josiah knows how to survive. He explained that in the mountains of West Virginia, where strip mining is the norm, often there is just one paved road, and all the smaller dirt roads fan out from it. Gigantic coal trucks that are too big for even the paved road rumble through at an urgent pace. He has learned that you have to make sure you hug the mountain, regardless of whether you’re going up or down. If a coal truck comes barreling down the road and you’re not on the mountain side, you will fall into the abyss. Josiah has learned to hug the mountain in his life.

Identity Work Before the student researchers started participant observation, we wanted them to ponder the social and political identities they inhabited and how their positionalities might impact their ways of understanding the world in general, and of conducting ethnographic research in particular. We had them work in pairs to talk about their daily activities, including work, social and political activities, friends, family, and hobbies. Given how busy all of them were with school, jobs, and families, a number of them joked that their hobby was sleep. From there, they discussed their positionality in terms of race, ethnicity, gender identity, class, language background, sexuality, religious practice, ability, and national affiliation. We moved to the discussing Chiang and Schmida’s 2002 essay “Language Identity and Language Ownership: Linguistic Conflicts of First-Year University Writing Students.” It’s a chapter that focuses on Asian American learners in the same context we were studying, a university composition course. “Although they feel connected to their home culture,” Chiang

216  We Were Never Supposed to Be Here and Schmida (2002) explain, “they are not able to connect with it linguistically, often needing to resort to ‘konglish,’ ‘vietnamish,’ ‘chinglish’ ” (p. 400). And while they are English dominant, they don’t identify with mainstream American culture, which puts them in an in-between identity space. “The kids in this article are like the kids who leave their hearing aids in their backpacks,” Josiah said. “They just want to pass.” Speaking as a deaf educator, Josiah may also have been thinking about this as someone who has hearing loss himself. Making a complex connection between deaf learners and composition students from diverse language backgrounds, he continued, “It’s like deaf kids. They don’t have family members who can talk with them.” He brought up that many deaf youth have hearing parents who refuse to learn ASL or who struggle with it. He noted that an important distinction between deaf youth and immigrant youth is that many deaf people forge an identity as Deaf (with a capital D)8 only when they have the opportunity to be around other Deaf people. “It’s a lot like gay identity,” he reflected. “That is, most gay kids have heterosexual parents, and they develop their gay identities as young adults, through spending time in their community.” Gloria, who grew up in a Mexican family living on the U.S. side of the border, related to the Chiang and Schmida chapter, saying that it’s important to “claim a language, even if you’re not fluent in it.” Facundo mentioned that people use language to negotiate their space and critiqued the fact that “the authors denigrated translanguaging.” He added that this article was talking about the air he breathes on the border, and he wouldn’t have paid attention to it if it weren’t from a language context in which he is an outsider. Musing on the connection between language and culture, Victoria, who taught English as a foreign language (EFL) in Colombia, noted, “They could speak their native language, but they couldn’t write it. The way to maintain a language is through reading and writing.” She came to the doctoral program with a negative view of all language mixing (i.e., translanguaging), and she graduated from the program with a different mind-set, having produced a dissertation that employed translanguaging. Indeed, everyone was reading this paper through their own experiences and beliefs. That same night we discussed Anthony Liddicoat’s 2009 article “Sexual Identity as Linguistic Failure: Trajectories of Interaction in the Heteronormative Language Classroom,” and Josiah pushed his understanding of it through his own gay identity. Liddicoat argues that practices of language instructors who read queer students’ honesty about their lives as linguistic errors place “the burden of establishing a nonheterosexual identity on the student” (2009, p. 200). While many people were incredulous that this happens, Josiah was not. He said firmly and rather formally, “I believe the student’s disclosure

We Were Never Supposed to Be Here 217 must be seen as an attempt to self-identify and not as a mistake.” Other students agreed, and the conversation veered to how they might avoid misunderstanding queer students in our study. Josiah foregrounded his gay male identity in his first Letter to the Readers, not just in relation to Liddicoat’s article, but also in his reflection on the first chapter of our text, “Making the Familiar Strange, Making the Strange Familiar,” which dealt with culture. There, he noted: I think that our cultural consciousness varies based on the marginality of our identities. I’m very conscious that I’m a homosexual in a heterosexually dominant culture. This leads to how I interpret the world around me, but I  also know that not every homosexual will interpret the world as I do. This epistemological stance, sometimes called standpoint theory (Collins, 1990; Harding, 2016), posits that our social positions and experiences influence our understanding of the world and, as a consequence, what is knowable. We wanted students think about their multiple positionalities and how they might impact the knowledge they were producing in this study. Josiah seemed to have been thinking about that a lot. The fact that marginalized people often see certain power structures more clearly than do those who are part of the mainstream is an important point, as is his awareness that there is internal diversity within the LGBT community. However, Josiah is also white and male, two components of his identity that he examined less frequently. Josiah often read things through his gay and emerging Deaf identities, as was evidenced through class discussions and his Letters to the Readers. Sometimes, that meant using those identity resources to understand things that mapped directly onto an aspect of his identity, such as being gay. This happened with the Liddicoat (2009) article. Other times, it meant using what he understood about Deaf identities and language through noting the similarities to other students’ experiences, such as those in the Chiang and Schmida (2002) piece. We understand all the students’ participation and our own to have been continually evolving throughout the course. Lave and Wenger theorize that participation “implies not only a relation to specific activities, but a relation to social communities – it implies becoming a full participant, a member, a kind of person” (1991, p. 53). Josiah participated in the discussions and written assignments for the course, as well as some of the activities that we hoped would facilitate students’ becoming researchers, through these two important aspects of his identity. Other times, he read the coursework through his identity as a special educator and administrator. That happened with Comstock’s 2015 article “The Rhetorical Construction of the AD/HD Subject: Managing the

218  We Were Never Supposed to Be Here Self,” which analyzed online posts from people with AD/HD diagnoses. Comstock used a Foucauldian frame to think about how people used both official discourses and their “deviant” social behaviors to construct their identities, and we began the conversation talking about how the Foucauldian framework shaped the analysis. Estévan discussed wanting a more detailed use of Foucault in the piece. All of us knew that he felt more comfortable with theory than data – no doubt a result of his academic background in literature. “Teachers sometimes tell me,” Josiah broke in, “just don’t send this young man to my class. I’ve had it with him.” He explained that when teachers can really see a child with AD/ HD, it makes all the difference. “Kids are waiting for someone to understand them,” he said. Jair reported that a special educator at the high school where he worked had failed a student because of spelling errors, something he knew was egregious. Josiah agreed that that was terrible. “Although drugs are used to subdue them, to make them conform,” he mused, “sometimes without medication, certain students can’t stay focused enough to do anything.” JoAnn commented that her son had been dealing with AD/HD issues and that she was against medication. Kate added gently, “The article really isn’t pro- or anti-medication. It has to do with the sense of identity,” in an attempt to nudge the discussion back to the article. Linda took up Kate’s charge, noting that the analysis of existing discussion boards was an interesting methodology. “Understanding how other people are experiencing similar behavior is important,” Gloria urged. “The discussion board allowed them to come to an understanding that this is just who they are, instead of feeling powerless.” Josiah brought us back to AD/HD students in the classroom again, reminding us that “some kids cannot sit still, and they hug everyone. I  tell teachers, it’s OK. Just give them a high five and have them sit down.” He was invoking his positionality as an administrator and perhaps trying to push his own experiences through the article. While all of us read the world through our own identity lenses, sometimes there was tension in class discussions in terms of sharing experiences versus seeing the course readings as the work of expert qualitative researchers – old-timers – whose studies could inform our own. There were a number of instances in which Josiah focused on more practically based topics that had to do with his own identities  – being deaf/Deaf, being a special educator, or being gay, both in class discussions and his Letters to the Readers. However, in his second Letter to the Readers, we saw a subtle shift. He asked rhetorically, “Why are there more AD/HD diagnoses on the East Coast of the country than in the West? And why is it mostly boys who get this diagnosis?” These are ethnographic questions. While he was not identifying explicitly as a researcher yet, either in class discussions or in his Letters to the Readers, Josiah was starting to ask questions that could be addressed through qualitative

We Were Never Supposed to Be Here 219 research. Perhaps his Letters to the Readers felt like a safer place to do that than in class at this point.

Becoming a Classroom Researcher In his fifth Letter to the Readers, Josiah acknowledged, “I am a White male and know that I have some privilege due to those facts.” He wondered if students switched from Spanish to English in their pair and small-group conversations because he was walking by. He asked if that could be because he’s White, as well as blond and blue eyed. Were students assuming that he was not a Spanish speaker based on his appearance? Were they thinking he might be offended by the perception that they would be shutting him out linguistically? Was it about perceived politeness? He wondered if perhaps their behavior had to do with his being closer in age to the instructor than the students. He reflected on whether his work as an administrator had become so embodied that he exuded a certain authority that students read as demanding English. His fellow research team members were Latinx, and they didn’t experience this shift in language during their observations. He wondered. He, along with the other student researchers, noticed that students spoke Spanish with each other in their discussion groups, but when they were engaged with the whole class, they switched to English. Other times, their small-group conversations involved translanguaging, effortlessly combining Spanish and English into a single utterance. He wondered if there was a pattern of students deferring to him and perhaps another one of their working on their spoken academic English in certain circumstances. He also wondered if students would answer him honestly if he asked about this directly. Being curious about why a particular language behavior is happening is a move toward becoming a researcher. The questions he was asking were not about his identity as a teacher or an administrator; rather, they arose from his observations. They were also a shift away from his thinking through his deaf/Deaf and gay identities, at least in this moment. By asking questions about language ideologies and language use, he was engaging himself as a researcher and connecting with the goals of the study. He scoured the composition course syllabus and textbook in search of a language policy but couldn’t find anything written about the use of Spanish and English. Giving meaning to his activities in this way is what qualitative researchers do. His sense of who he is was changing. Josiah decided to ask Levi about whether there was a language policy in the class during his second interview. This is what he wrote in his final Letter to the Readers: Levi indicated that he does not have a language policy in his class and students are free to use whatever language they would like. But

220  We Were Never Supposed to Be Here at the end of October, he did say that the assignments must be written in English since this was an English class. Now I somewhat question his language policy. He says that there is not a language policy in his class, but he does say that this assignment must be written in English. So, is it then that some assignments must be in English and some can be in another language? How explicit can I be in that interview to get an answer for this question? Again, these are questions that a researcher reflects upon. From his observations of language use in the classroom to his questions for the instructor about an official language policy, Josiah’s topic for his final paper in the course was starting to emerge. He had interviewed a student who told him, “In Spanish, I WAS a great writer” but who lamented his struggles to write in English. Josiah wondered why he had lost his ability to write in Spanish and what that meant for him as someone learning to write in English. His idea was to use interview data from this student about his schooling history, which had occurred both in Mexico and the United States, and to put those experiences in conversation with the student’s current language ideologies. He was thinking about the erasure of this student’s ability to write in Spanish and how his writing in the English composition course “might contain traces of what was taken from him.” The question that was forming for Josiah was: “How do bilingual students’ experiences of subtractive schooling (Valenzuela, 1999) align with the language ideologies they express in a mainstream English writing course for first-year university students?” He was definitely thinking like a researcher by the end of the first semester of the case study course. He had started to make connections to theory as well, writing: “I’m thinking about how Bourdieu talks about linguistic capital. Some students have more comprehension/experience with the English language than others, and we know English has more value in the US social structure.” Josiah employed Bourdieu’s ideas to frame his final paper for the course, focusing on the experiences of one student in the first-year composition course. The young man he concentrated on had won prizes for his writing in primary school in Mexico but was put into English-only, sink-or-swim classes in El Paso starting in fourth grade. In this college writing course  – in English  – his confidence was low. Josiah called his study “In Spanish I WAS a Great Writer: Language Ideologies, Identities, and Practices of Erasure” and argued that the student’s accomplishments as a writer were erased through U.S. public schooling, and he made links between the ideologies and identities that the student expressed in the first-year composition course, his schooling history, and his current writing assignments. Josiah seemed to be drawing on the writing he had done in his two master’s degrees prior, as well as perhaps from his undergraduate work in anthropology. His final paper was well organized and

We Were Never Supposed to Be Here 221 focused on analyzing data from three sources – interviews, artifacts, and classroom observation. One can be thinking like a qualitative researcher and still have doubts, though. Josiah still saw parts of his administrator identity seeping into his developing researcher identity. He wrote: I have a hard time not sticking to the questions presented. I think this is because in my job I set forth about five to six questions and I then ask all the questions to the interviewees. I know that I need to get over this, but it is something that I struggle with when I am conducting research interviews. His self-awareness is interesting. As an administrator, it was important for him to follow a question protocol to make sure there was equity in hiring. But as a qualitative researcher, the questions he was asking were part of a semi-structured interview process intended to leave room for spontaneous questions. He can hold both interviewing approaches in his mind and gradually learn when to use each. At that point, he had a lot more experience interviewing applicants in the school district than he did interviewing study participants.

The Gradual Transition from Teacher to Researcher It was fortuitous that there were three of us able to take field notes at different times during the meta-study of the course. Usually, that meant that when one of us  – Char, Kate, or Jair  – was facilitating the discussion, the other two could take field notes. It also meant that we had field notes from different stances, both physical and social. While Kate and Char were answering individual questions after the third class, Jair overheard some of the student researchers talk about feeling scared to begin conducting observations. “What should we wear?” Josiah asked his research team. “I’ll be coming from work. Should I  change clothes in the car? Should I be more casual?” Estévan always wore a tie to teach, and he thought maybe he should take his tie off in the car. Gloria suggested they should dress as much like the students as seemed appropriate – jeans seemed fine to her. Israel said he would wear what he always wore, which was casual attire, but that he was worried that he “might already be assuming things.” “This is a new role,” Josiah shared. “I’m not sure what to do.” To varying degrees, the student researchers felt comfortable in their roles as classroom teachers or administrators, each in different settings and disciplines. But learning to see what was going on in the classroom as a researcher and not a teacher was something that took practice. In his first set of field notes, Josiah recorded the first day of class for the composition course. He gave each student a number based on where

222  We Were Never Supposed to Be Here they were sitting, a practice we would ask him to replace with thick description. He wrote:

2:

I have a bad habit of calling my professor sir or ma’am. I need to call them Dr. or Professor. I am so used to high school. You’re a professor, right? Levi: No, I just showed up. [student laughter] 7: So do you have a master’s? Do we call you master? [student laughter] Levi: Call me Levi. 1: See, I told you. 7: So how do we know what to call you? Levi: Some people are uptight about calling them Dr. or Professor. I am a lecturer here at the university and I’m working on my doctoral degree. I finish in December.

Figure 8.1  Josiah’s Field Notes, September 15

We encouraged him to be curious about the participants’ transitioning from a high school identity to a college identity. Josiah took descriptive field notes when there was an all-class discussion, but as the class progressed to mostly pair and small-group work, it became harder for him to interpret conversations. His second set of field notes included many things he couldn’t hear, such as:

7: What does inconsistency mean? Levi: (couldn’t hear answer)

Figure 8.2  Josiah’s Field Notes, September 24

At this point, he switched from recording oral interactions to a generalized focus on behavior, writing field notes like this:

Students who are constantly answering out loud are 17, 12, 21, 8, and 4. 21 and 22 are having a side conversation about birthdays and makeup at 6:25 PM. 21 uses the word ‘like’ multiple times in the same thought (more than 5).

Figure 8.3  Josiah’s Field Notes, October 13

We let him know that these field notes lacked context and were summative, rather than being descriptive. In his third set of field notes, he

We Were Never Supposed to Be Here 223 was able to go back to making notes on the all-class conversations, but there were still many situations in which his field notes said, “I could not hear.” He often reflected that he was grateful he was doing audio recording as well. And, as has to happen at least once, he noted in his fourth set of field notes that the batteries in his recorder died in the middle of class. By the time he got to his fifth set of field notes, when the students broke up into discussion groups, Josiah noted who was in each group and logged when someone moved from one group to another, but he didn’t write anything about what they said. By his sixth and last set of field notes, Josiah had still not made adaptations based on our feedback. His notes were still characterized by general summaries, such as “Levi gets the entire class attention,” but without any description of how Levi got the class’s attention or any context about what came after that. In that final set of field notes, Josiah wrote that he noticed a student near him who was trying to download an article from the library and was not having success. He reflected, “Not sure if I should have done this, but he was struggling, and I knew how to help, so I did.” We reminded him that this was participant observation, and it was fine for him to be part of the activities in this way. But we also wondered if this was an example of his feeling more comfortable in the role of a teacher than that of a researcher. Throughout the data collection, Josiah struggled to produce thick description. He expressed appreciation that his teammates were taking notes on the same classes he was. We suggested their research team read all of four sets of field notes together for each class session and listen to the recordings to get a more robust picture of what was going on. He also noted that he was glad that he was on a research team with the Gloria and Israel, both of whom were from the Rhetoric and Composition Studies program. He assumed they would be more comfortable with academic writing than he was and that their skills would help with their final paper. And while he looked to getting help with writing from his team, he also saw himself as the leader of that team. This is what he wrote in his final Letter to the Readers: I know that Estevan wants to use more activity theory but I am concerned that this framework is not what the data is saying. I hope that I am leading my team down the correct path, because I know they look to me to lead them. I don’t want to lead them down the wrong theoretical path. I want to be honest with my opinion but I also want to be flexible and give everyone the opportunity to express their opinion and evidence for choice in the framework that we use. Lave and Wenger (1991) argue that by putting participation at the center of learning, peripheral participation becomes about being situated in

224  We Were Never Supposed to Be Here the social world, and changing positions and beliefs are a crucial part of that learning path. That is, Josiah can be both the team leader and someone who needs help with academic writing. His ways of belonging are multiple, and his participation is changing because communities of practice are always producing and reproducing themselves.

Becoming deaf/Deaf and Becoming a Qualitative Researcher Josiah was born hearing, as were all his family members. While taking the case study course, he became conscious that his own hearing loss had progressed more than he had previously thought. He found it difficult to hear small group conversations, especially when there was background noise. He knew that he had an inherited condition that would lead to more hearing loss over time, so both aspects of his identity – becoming deaf/Deaf and becoming a researcher – were in process simultaneously. Char and Kate both had lots of experience working with secondlanguage learners, and we noticed something different about Josiah’s writing. Although Josiah hadn’t grown up with hearing loss, we wondered if years of using SEE, LSM, and ASL had impacted his writing in academic English. In their 2011 essay “ ‘I Was Born Full Deaf’: Written Language Outcomes After 1  Year of Strategic and Interactive Writing Instruction,” Wolbers et al. identified a number of characteristics of Deaf writing and analyzed the impact of a writing intervention on deaf middle school students. They argue that Deaf writing can be distinguished from non-Deaf writing in terms of there being:

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

Fewer words; More incomplete sentences; More incomplete syntactic structures; Fewer subordinate clauses; Fewer noun phrase modifiers; and Omitted function words.

Figure 8.4  Wolbers, Dostal, and Bowers (2012) on Deaf and Non-Deaf Writing

While we noticed all these as minor aspects of Josiah’s writing, none of them interfered with his expression of meaning. Indeed, it seemed that Josiah was comfortable with the genre of academic writing, even if small details slipped by. Marschark, Mouradian, and Halas (1994), who have studied written discourse among hearing and deaf children, have suggested that the characteristics listed here “give deaf students’ writing the appearance of being choppy, simplistic, and rigid” (p. 19). However,

We Were Never Supposed to Be Here 225 Josiah didn’t have hearing loss as a child, so while these omissions were aspects of his written English, they were not significant. What we did notice was his light use of punctuation, which you have seen in quotes from his work throughout this chapter, and, most interestingly, his selecting the right word stem but using a nonstandard form of it. For example, in his first Letter to the Readers, Josiah wrote: Bucholtz (1999) uses communities of practice to help analysis a specific piece of communication between a group of nerd girls. In his second Letter to the Readers, he wrote: They were at ease with their ethnic cultural. In the first example, he needed analyze (v.) but he used analysis (n.). In the second, he used cultural (adj.), and he needed culture (n.). Again, this did not impede his ability to communicate in any way and is something that could be easily caught with spell-check. But we are curious as to whether these aspects of his writing had more to do with his current use of various forms of sign language, rather than his having grown up “Full Deaf” (Wolbers, Dostal, & Bowers, 2012). Josiah always spoke compellingly in class discussions, and there was never a single moment when his spoken meaning was unclear. However, he expressed in class that he felt like his writing wasn’t as good as that of his team members in the Rhetoric and Composition Studies program, and he hoped to lean on them in terms of writing the final paper for the course. Indeed, learning to use language in ways that are consonant with one’s Community of Practice is part of the gradual construction of identity. In fact, all doctoral students are in the process of learning to write in the style of their disciplines. This is a process in which all of us are continually engaged. Professors included. Josiah concluded his last Letter to the Readers with a comment about the role of identity development, language, and writing, and it seemed like an apt way to conclude his chapter. He wrote: Writing is the tool with which we display our language “competency” but as professionals we must remember that writing has its own set of rules that are separate from oral or conversational speech. Students with a hearing loss for instance tend to not do well on writing exams because their language, ASL, doesn’t follow the same set of grammatical rules in written English. The process of developing the academic writing of one’s discipline is partially about “learning how to ‘do’ school appropriately” (Lave  & Wenger, 1991, p.  107), and while it is a component of becoming a

226  We Were Never Supposed to Be Here qualitative researcher, it is just one skill among many. Both conducting qualitative research and producing academic writing involve continuous development. Perhaps Josiah put so much emphasis on his own writing in part because he was becoming deaf/Deaf while he was in the process of becoming a qualitative researcher. Josiah finished his coursework for the doctorate in 2018 and promptly took a leave of absence from the program. He and José moved to Tucson, Arizona, which is a five-hour drive from El Paso, so that José could do his residency in pharmacy there. They had spent more than $40,000 trying to adopt a child, and after three failed attempts, Josiah was emotionally exhausted. Their finances were depleted by the adoption attempts as well, combined with the fact that Josiah had taken a deaf education position in Tucson that paid far less than he had earned in El Paso. But now, they have adopted a beautiful son named Joaquín, who came into their lives as a newborn. Joaquín is eight months old at the time of this writing, and in an amazing turn of events, Josiah’s father has become involved in their son’s life, having traveled across the country from West Virginia to Arizona to spend time with the new family. Josiah returned to the doctoral program in 2020, and he is now working virtually to complete his proposal for the dissertation study he will conduct in Tucson. He plans to do a qualitative study, using the methods he learned in this course, to explore questions of Deaf identity in schools and what it means to be deaf enough. He was supposed to be here.

Notes 1. We selected the pseudonym Josiah because it is a popular Biblically derived name in Appalachia, and it means Jehovah has healed. Josiah feels he has done a lot of healing in his life. 2. President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act in 1830, and government agents forced members of the Cherokee, Choctaw, Muscogee (Creek), and Chickasaw nations to walk across the country to be “relocated” to the American Southwest, which was then considered worthless territory. More than 4,000 Native peoples died of starvation, disease, and exposure to the elements during the Trail of Tears. 3. Josiah and his husband have since adopted a beautiful baby boy named Joaquín. 4. Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell was a US military policy that prohibited openly LGBT people from serving in the military. It was in place from 1993 to 2011. 5. The Gadsden Purchase of 1853 involved the sale of Mexican territory that is now southern New Mexico and southern Arizona to the United States. It was part of the negotiations after the signing of the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo that ended the Mexican American War. Mexican people living in the region went from being Mexican to being US citizens overnight. The Tejano band Los Tigres del Norte, in their song “Somos Mas Americanos,” have aptly said,“Yo no cruce la frontera, la frontera me cruzo” (I didn’t cross the border, the border crossed me).

We Were Never Supposed to Be Here 227 6. Wards of the state are usually children who have experienced abuse and/or neglect, and the state has stepped in to appoint a guardian for them. 7. ASL is a language with its own syntax and vocabulary that has much in common with French grammatical structure. SEE is a manual version of English that uses English word order and overlaps somewhat with ASL in terms of vocabulary. It was developed to help Deaf people learn English. Like ASL, LSM is a language with a grammar and vocabulary of its own and is syntactically distinct from Spanish. There is a variety of LSM that is uses Spanish word order and is similar in form to SEE. 8. Josiah uses deaf (lowercased d) to refer to people with a particular audiological condition and Deaf (capital D) to refer to people who share a language (ASL, SEE, LSM) and a culture.

References Abumrad, J. (Host). (2019, December 3). Dolly Parton’s America. WNYC Studios and NPR, 3. Retrieved from www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/dolly-partonsamerica/episodes/dolly-partons-america-episode Bucholtz, M. (1999). “Why be normal?”: Language and identity practices in a community of nerd girls. Language in Society, 28(2), 203–223. Casto, E., Harris, S. E., Huffman, E., Keyes, M., Price, S., Robertson, P., & Beaver, P. (2004). Revisionist with a cause: Interview with Wilma Dunaway. Appalachian Journal, 31(2), 166–191. Chiang, Y., & Schmida, M. (2002). Language, identity and language ownership: Linguistic conflicts of first-year university writing students. In V. Zamel & R. Spack (Eds.), Enriching ESOL pedagogy: Readings and activities for engagement, reflection, and inquiry (pp. 393–410). London: Psychology Press. Collins, P. H. (1990). Black feminist thought in the matrix of domination. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment, 138, 221–238. Comstock, E. (2015). The rhetorical construction of the AD/HD subject: Managing the self. Journal of Language, Identity & Education, 14(1), 1–18. Dunaway, W. A. (1996). Incorporation as an interactive process: Cherokee resistance to expansion of the capitalist world-system, 1560–1763. Sociological Inquiry, 66(4), 455–470. Harding, S. (2016).  Whose science? Whose knowledge? Thinking from women’s lives. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Harkins, A. (2005). The hillbilly in the American imagination. Historically Speaking, 6(3), 4–7. Helton, L. R., & Keller, S. M. (2010). Appalachian women: A study of resiliency, assets, and cultural values. Journal of Social Service Research, 36(2), 151–161. Hendryx, M., Ducatman, A. M., Zullig, K. J., Ahern, M. M., & Crout, R. (2012). Adult tooth loss for residents of US coal mining and Appalachian counties. Community Dentistry and Oral Epidemiology, 40(6), 488–497. Hollan, D. W., & Throop, C. J. (Eds.). (2011). The anthropology of empathy: Experiencing the lives of others in Pacific societies. Oxford, NY: Berghahn Books. Human Immunodeficiency Virus Services Act. (2015). Section  21.06, Penal Code. Texas Health & Safety Code § 85.007 2015.

228  We Were Never Supposed to Be Here Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Liddicoat, A. J. (2009). Sexual identity as linguistic failure: Trajectories of interaction in the heteronormative language classroom. Journal of Language, Identity, and Education, 8(2–3), 191–202. Marschark, M., Mouradian, V., & Halas, M. (1994). Discourse rules in the language productions of deaf and hearing children. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 57(1), 89–107. Mason, C. (2005). The hillbilly defense: Culturally mediating US terror at home and abroad. National Women’s Studies Association Journal, 17(3), 39–63. Meraji, S. M.,  & Demby, G. (2013, October  18). Codeswitch: Race and identity. Remixed, The Whitest Historically Black College in America. Ryan, G. W., & Bernard, H. R. (2003). Techniques to identify themes. Field Methods, 15(1), 85–109. Sonnie, A.,  & Tracy, J. (2011).  Hillbilly nationalists, urban race rebels, and Black power: Community organizing in radical times. Newport, RI: Melville House. Tallichet, S. E. (2016). Digging deeper: Rural Appalachian women miners’ reconstruction of gender in a class-based community. In Reshaping gender and class in rural spaces (pp. 145–160). New York: Routledge. Los Tigres del Norte. (2001). Somos mas americanos. In Uniendo Fronteras. Hollywood, CA: Fonovisa Records. The Trevor Project. (2019). National survey on LGBTQ mental health. New York: The Trevor Project. Valenzuela, A. (1999). Subtractive schooling: US–Mexican youth and the politics of caring. SUNY series. The social context of education. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Vance, J. D. (2016). Hillbilly elegy: A memoir of a family and culture in crisis. New York, NY: HarperCollins. Werner, T. L. (2015). The war on poverty and the racialization of “hillbilly” poverty: Implications for poverty research. Journal of Poverty, 19(3), 305–323. Wilkerson, I. (2011). The warmth of other suns: The epic story of America’s great migration. New York: Vintage Books. Wolbers, K. A., Dostal, H. M., & Bowers, L. M. (2012). “I was born full deaf.” Written language outcomes after 1 year of strategic and interactive writing instruction. Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education, 17(1), 19–38.

9 Learning and Not Learning to Become Qualitative Researchers

Thus far, we think we have illuminated the processes of how a group of doctoral students from diverse backgrounds engaged in the process of becoming qualitative researchers and scholarly writers. Lave & Wenger (1991) suggest that “everyone can be considered a ‘newcomer’ to the future of a changing community” (p.  117), and we think that’s true. Uncertainty, back-and-forth movement, understanding, and misunderstanding, as well as triumph, were all part of their processes of becoming. At first tentatively and then with a growing sense of confidence, they took the first steps of learning to do participant observation, conduct interviews, and analyze artifacts, all the while reflecting on their own positionalities and relationships with their research participants. After some hesitation and anxiety, they began to use theory to analyze their data and make their research public through presentations at professional conferences. Crucially, their process of becoming was interactional and dynamic, changing almost from moment to moment as they talked with each other in class and worked together on collaborative research projects. They were emotionally invested in this process, and they leaned on each other for help, encouragement, and humor. That was true – for the most part. You might recall that in Chapter  1, we showed you a chart of eight study participants. And as you read the book, you might have noticed that there were two people, Estévan and Israel,1 who didn’t have chapters devoted to them. In that first chapter, we described some of the devastating experiences that had befallen Estévan, and we reported that we were unable to conduct an interview with him. For that reason, while he is mentioned in the text, we did not study his particular process of becoming. And while we think Estévan really wanted to become a qualitative researcher and scholarly writer, for some reasons we think we know and others we don’t, he did not. But what about Israel? While we have limited data about his development because he stopped turning in individual assignments early in the first semester, Jair was able to conduct an interview of sorts with him after the course had ended.

230  Learning and Not Learning to Become Qualitative Researchers Israel has not become a qualitative researcher and scholarly writer. We know that when professors study their own students, the findings often seem too good to be true. That is, all the rough patches are smoothed out and all the goals are easily achieved. We showed you throughout this book what the student researchers’ processes of becoming qualitative researchers and scholarly writers looked like, and while there was variation in their processes, all of them succeeded. In this final chapter, we will present what we know about Israel’s process of not becoming a qualitative researcher and scholarly writer. But first, we look at the student researchers as a group and how the Community of Practice framework helped us understand their processes of becoming. After that, we delve into the data we have from Israel and explore what it can look like to decide not to become a qualitative researcher and scholarly writer. And finally, we situate our findings in the literature.

Entering a New Community of Practice Becoming qualitative researchers and scholarly writers is a process involving learning new rituals, norms, behaviors, and belief systems that are situated in a larger community of qualitative researchers. When you are a newcomer to a Community of Practice, you begin by taking on activities that are usually thought to be on the margins of the group. Over time, you start to make more important contributions, and you gain more expertise and legitimacy (Lave & Wenger, 1991; Wenger, 1998). As you gain more and more access to the community of researchers, you negotiate and modify your identity through interactions with fellow novices and more experienced practitioners who can serve as guides. You draw on past experiences to compare to and modify what you have previously learned. This process of becoming isn’t linear, even though the ethnographic case study course we designed followed a logical progression of research activities, from reading about ethnographic research procedures to conducting the research to making sense of the research to making the research public. Like all Communities of Practice, our course was a living entity with its own patterns and rhythms (Wenger, McDermott,  & Snyder, 2002). We made modifications throughout the semester, as the student researchers told us they needed more time or assistance and as they questioned the research practices they were learning. Even though they were newcomers, their participation altered the course dynamics and made us rethink what we were doing as teachers and researchers.

Different Kinds of Novices Novices entering a Community of Practice draw on their previous experiences and knowledge to help them make sense of the new norms and

Learning and Not Learning to Become Qualitative Researchers 231 rituals they encounter. They define who they are by where they are going and where they have been (Wenger, 1998). We found in this study that what students had previously learned about research deeply impacted how they oriented themselves toward conducting an ethnographic case study. Because entering a Community of Practice is a dynamic and interactional process, we will not attempt to definitively “place” students on particular points in a learning trajectory. Instead, we found that with each student, there was an assemblage of past research experiences that impacted their practices in relation to their fellow students. Everyone entered the class from a different academic field with its own research and writing practices. Victoria’s research experience began in her last year of college, when she was involved in a research group that practiced action research. In that group, they learned to carefully reflect on their own experiences in the classroom and conduct research about them, in order to contribute to progressive educational change (Dustman, Kohan, & Stringer, 2014). For her master’s degree in English and Applied Linguistics, she had conducted a qualitative study that involved interviewing teachers, observing classes, and analyzing artifacts. During the case study course, she was analyzing data for her pilot study, which was based on teacher interviews. That pilot study informed her dissertation, which was an ethnographic study. She was in between a novice and an expert, in the terminology of Lave & Wenger (1991), and that allowed her to advise her fellow students with their data collection. It isolated her from them as well. Victoria came to the study with more qualitative research experience than any of her classmates. Of all the students, JoAnn seemed the most focused on the process of becoming a qualitative researcher, perhaps because she was close to the dissertation proposal stage. She asked focused questions in class about research procedures and scholarly writing, and she reflected about how it felt to see herself becoming a legitimate qualitative researcher in her Letters to the Readers. And she had already had some general exposure to research in her master’s program in curriculum and instruction, where she took a course about action research, as well as an overview course on research methods in education. But when she began the class, she had only read research studies and read about how to do them. We have a feeling that her drive and enthusiasm about doing ethnographic research was at least partly because she wanted to get her degree as quickly as possible so that she could return home to be with her children and husband. Already in her third year in the doctoral program, she developed quickly as a qualitative researcher. Linda and Josiah also came to the case study course with some research experience. For her master’s in communication studies, Linda had conducted a survey of Latinx viewers’ ethnic identifications and trust in both Latinx and White newscasters, and she thought her quantitative methodology had limited her ability to understand why people thought the

232  Learning and Not Learning to Become Qualitative Researchers way they did. She was already interested in the kind of questions ethnographic research can address. She was especially eager to understand people’s perceptions by conducting interviews, something she wished she had been able to include in her master’s thesis. And while Josiah’s two master’s degrees  – one in special education with a focus on low-incidence disabilities and one in educational administration – were applied and did not require him to write a thesis, he had an undergraduate degree in anthropology. For his capstone project, he conducted ethnographic interview with one of his neighbors whose parents had lived through the Gadsden Purchase, and he had also done interviews with elders in a long-term care facility. Both experiences made a deep impression on him. While both Linda and Josiah were new to conducting an ethnographic research study, each of them had been thinking and reading about identity construction and ideologies, both in their coursework and at that point and in their lives. They were novices to qualitative research, but not necessarily to the research questions we were asking. Each of them had already taken a number of doctoral courses before they found themselves in the case study course. More than any other student you have read about thus far, Gloria was the most brand new to qualitative research and to her doctoral program. With an undergraduate background in Chicanx studies, broadcast journalism, and theater, as well as a master’s in film and media studies, Gloria came to the case study course as an artist. A successful documentary filmmaker and playwright before she entered the doctoral program in rhetoric, she took the ethnographic case study course in her first semester. In her Letters to the Readers, she wrote that she was startled that she would be doing this kind of research, but she pushed ahead and was able to build on her knowledge of Latinx cultural theory to help her research group make sense of their data. As an absolute beginner, she knew she needed to learn about the rituals of academic research, and she dove right in. In the focus group interviews at the end of the course, she was unsure about how to connect her interest in Chicanx studies and documentary filmmaking with rhetoric, but she was open to what the future would bring. Since he hadn’t yet applied to his doctoral program, Facundo, technically speaking, was still outside the Community of Practice. But this wasn’t true in reality, as he played a prominent role in the class because of his extroverted nature and his strong interest in learning how to do ethnographic research. Throughout the course, he both drew on and reevaluated his training in oral history. His dreadful experience with his master’s degree, a result of administrative inattentiveness and a lack of faculty concern, made him nervous about succeeding in the case study course.

Learning and Not Learning to Become Qualitative Researchers 233

A Continuum of Practice Victoria worked separately from the research teams, but she offered advice about doing interviews, recruiting research participants, and conducting observations. As a more experienced student, JoAnn took the lead on drafting her team’s manuscript when her classmates were blocked about how to proceed. Gloria’s knowledge of Chicanx theory, especially Anzaldúa’s work, enriched her research team’s analysis of bilingual language practices. As an absolute beginner, Gloria mostly followed the lead of the other members of her research team, but she was also the most confident speaker when they presented their research at the EQRC conference. Linda’s experience conducting research for her master’s thesis helped her team organize their data and stay on track, while Facundo’s interest in third-space theory from his history master’s degree offered his group a powerful theoretical framework. But there were hitches as well. Victoria felt isolated from her classmates because she wasn’t working on the same project. JoAnn, a well-organized and more experienced student who was eager to start her dissertation research, sometimes had to wait for her teammates to complete their part of their work. Facundo’s enthusiasm for third-space theory led him to premature conclusions about the data, although he had no problem letting go of his ideas when his classmates pulled him back. And don’t worry, we will get to Israel. We think these ethnographic portraits of our students’ journeys to becoming qualitative researchers and scholarly writers are rich, complex, and compelling. And while we know that they are more and more representative of the people who earn doctorates today than the “traditional” students highlighted in the scholarly literature, they are still seen by scholars and university administrators as “nontraditional.” Their timelines and processes are different from those of full-time graduate students who are White, in their early twenties, childless, upper-to-middle class, able-bodied, and funded by families and/or grants and scholarships. It’s common for those students to complete their doctorates in four or five years. In contrast, it can take much longer for our students to finish their degrees as they juggle work, family, and financing their doctoral study. In addition to experiencing the stress and uncertainty of learning a new discipline, each of them had personal pressures and responsibilities that could easily pull them away from completing their degrees. Their classes were in the evenings, after long workdays, and they were tired. They also had less time to spend with family and friends, and money was tight. But what most of them had was a wealth of community capital that helped them in their processes of becoming.

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From Capital to Wealth Those “traditional” graduate students typically have what Bourdieu (1991) calls cultural capital. While cultural capital isn’t actual money, it includes assets that can lead to earning money. Cultural capital refers to the assets that people carry with them that are recognized as valuable. That can mean having had certain experiences, like going to museums and leisure travel, along with speaking a prestigious version of English and dressing and behaving in ways that align with the norms of White middle-class society. Whiteness is, indeed, a form of cultural capital. Yosso (2005, 2013) saw that Bourdieu’s framework had been used to promote a deficit perspective about people whose communities are seen as lacking these kinds of capital. Brilliantly, Yosso reconceptualized Bourdieu’s ideas about capital into a framework that identifies community cultural wealth and the cultural knowledge and assets in Latinx communities (Yosso, 2006, 2013; Yosso  & Burciaga, 2016). We see this critical historical framework as a useful tool for understanding our students’ processes of becoming qualitative researchers and scholarly writers. Though Yosso’s (2006) framework was conceptualized for Latinx students, we think it resonates with JoAnn’s experience as well. However, we don’t think it helps to understand Josiah’s experience, so we discuss him separately at the end of this section. The Community Cultural Wealth framework (CCW) refers to all the community-based resources and assets that people have amassed over time. Yosso (2013) categorizes those assets into six kinds of knowledge, understanding that these different types of knowledge/capital combine to create Community Cultural Wealth. The first is aspirational capital, which refers to people’s ability to hold on to their dreams and hopes for the future, despite very real obstacles. Linguistic capital speaks to the social and intellectual skills that come from being able to use more than one language or style and being able to use that linguistic capital in different modalities, such as storytelling, poetry, or other forms. Familial capital refers to the knowledges and support people have from their families (both blood and chosen), kinship circles, and communities. Social capital might come through community networks that could include include schools, sports, and religious institutions. Yosso (2006) says that social capital can help people “maneuver through the system,” noting that most Chicanx “turn around and give the information and resources they gained through the navigation process back to their social networks” (p. 45). These social connections and resources might look like telling someone they’re worthy of a scholarship, and they lead to navigational capital. Navigational capital means being able to maneuver through unfamiliar institutions that were created to serve the White middle-class population, such as educational and health care systems.

Learning and Not Learning to Become Qualitative Researchers 235 And finally, resistant capital is the knowledge and skills that come from fighting racism and inequality. These different kinds of capital are dynamic and overlapping (Yosso  & Burciaga, 2016), and we use this framework not as a straitjacket, but as a way to better understand what we saw in Gloria, Linda, Victoria, Facundo, and JoAnn. Aspirational Capital JoAnn kept studying for her doctorate, even though it meant being away from her family and hearing her daughter cry on the phone, begging her to come home. Victoria left her son’s father when he became abusive, dealt with isolation, and found a way to write a dissertation that was her own, in spite of pressure from her university in Colombia to control the topic. Gloria also found college scholarships, refused to do soulkilling work, protected her artistic integrity, and found a way to combine Chicanx studies, film, and rhetoric in her dissertation. Linda gave up the business world to teach and pursue scholarship that would make her community better. Facundo overcame bullying and institutional barriers in his master’s program; survived loss, depression, and suicide attempts; and is continuing his doctoral study. All of them kept their hope for their own education alive, in spite of serious barriers. Linguistic Capital These emerging researchers have lots of linguistic capital. Linda, Gloria, and Facundo all speak Spanish, English, and Spanglish. Facundo has some Caló in there as well. Victoria speaks Spanish and English, along with some Portuguese. JoAnn speaks English and African American Vernacular English (AAVE). Their linguistic capital allows them to inhabit many different social spaces and to conduct research in a variety of language contexts. Familial Capital JoAnn’s mother made sure that it was possible for her to earn her undergraduate, master’s, and doctoral degrees by inspiring her and helping her and her husband raise their children. Similarly, Victoria’s mother urged her to study and supported her, even though she didn’t work outside the home. Both of them have extended family and mentors who have helped them on their educational journeys. Facundo’s parents encouraged his education, though they couldn’t help him financially, and his mentors have played a crucial role for him. His wife, Lucia, is his rock. Linda’s family supported her graduate study, and her husband is steadily by her side as she works on her doctorate.

236  Learning and Not Learning to Become Qualitative Researchers While Gloria’s family was less enthusiastic about her educational aspirations, her husband offers her solid support on a daily basis, and she has an uncanny ability to find the ideal mentor. This familial support is crucial. Social Capital An important aspect of Community Cultural Wealth is students’ ability to navigate social institutions like school. Four of these six students attended Catholic school, often doing so with great financial sacrifice. JoAnn’s parents sent all their children to Catholic school when it was available in their region, even though they are Baptist, and her mother was a public school teacher. Linda and her six siblings attended Catholic schools in El Paso, and that was important to her parents for religious as well as educational reasons, even though it was a sacrifice. Facundo attended Catholic school when the family could afford it and public school when they couldn’t. Sadly, sometimes Catholic school exposed him to racist bullying, but going to the right Catholic high school was a positive experience that was facilitated by a boss/mentor who made sure his expensive tuition was paid. Victoria’s mother suffered financially in order to send her to Catholic school, but she made the investment knowing it would give Victoria a better chance of getting into a good university. And although Gloria attended poorly funded public schools, she always found helpful and inspiring mentors who encouraged her creativity, told her she had to attend college, helped her raise money to pay for her application fees, and encouraged her to apply for “Hispanic” scholarships. Navigational Capital All these emerging scholars have navigated difficult social systems. JoAnn is immensely strategic, having sought out a college where she was surrounded by other Black people she knew were going to succeed and found a mentor who helped her register for classes at a new university after she had her baby. She and her husband used the resources they earned through his military service to support her dissertation study in multiple ways. Victoria managed to survive migrating to the United States without documents when she was 16, and later, she figured out how to pay for college and earn scholarships to support her graduate study. Linda has always navigated between cultures as a Latina who looks White, and she has learned how to balance working full time with taking one doctoral class a semester. Although Gloria gives credit to several mentors who have helped her, the credit also belongs to her as she has purposefully sought out mentors and has nurtured her relationships

Learning and Not Learning to Become Qualitative Researchers 237 with them throughout her life. Facundo began by learning to maintain good relationships with members of rival gangs in Chicago, which is no small feat. With little assistance, he learned how to go from a community college to DePaul, a White, selective university in Chicago. Later, he found a position teaching history at the community college and then a full-time job in Chicano Studies at Borderlands University, also with little help. Facundo listened to professors who saw his potential and encouraged him to get his act together. And he has come up with a creative way to remain in the program, stepping out temporarily to save money one semester and returning to study the next. Finally, all of them have resistant capital as well. Resistant Capital All these students want to change the face of academia. They are explicit about higher education as a way to improve people’s lives, especially those from minoritized backgrounds. Their own experiences have shown them that educational institutions privilege White, able-bodied men and put up barriers for people from minoritized groups, in a veiled effort to prevent them from gaining power. All of them are ready to take up the fight. The Case of Josiah Most people who come out as gay or as part of the LGBTQA community don’t grow up with parents who are part of that community. And often, like Josiah, they have family who do not accept them, which can last anywhere from a limited time to a lifetime. Josiah, along with others, has observed that the same is often true for Deaf people. Sometimes hearing parents of deaf children refuse to learn ASL, SEE, or another form of communication, which not only delays their children’s language development, but also creates schisms between parents and children. Identifying as LGBTQA and Deaf with a capital D, along with becoming part of the communities in which both these identities are situated, often happens in adulthood. At the same time, Josiah has many kinds of wealth that align with that of his classmates, but when he was growing up, he developed much of that capital outside his family and community cultural context. Aspirational Capital Josiah learned through watching his mother and his uncles that school was a way to gain financial stability. He was able to survive homophobic bullying with the support of his high school biology teacher.

238  Learning and Not Learning to Become Qualitative Researchers Language Capital A native speaker of English, Josiah started learning Spanish in high school and continued on in college, doing a study abroad in Mexico, and he is married to a man who is a native Spanish speaker. He uses Signed Exact English (SEE) and Pidgin Signed English (PSE) daily, along with English and Spanish, having acquired this language capital on his own. Familial Capital While his family didn’t allow him to accept the scholarship he was awarded at the University of West Virginia, they did permit him accept a scholarship at Bluefield State University because it was closer to home. Like Gloria, Josiah was discouraged from pursuing higher education by his family. Fortunately, both of them are tenacious and did it anyway. Social Capital Josiah went to a private Baptist school for first grade and part of second – until his parents divorced, and he was forbidden to attend because he had divorced parents. Later, when his grandfather kicked his family out of the house to punish his mother for dating a Black man, Josiah saw that there was a world outside Odd, West Virginia. That was when he learned that there were public schools with different resources. Josiah lobbied hard to transfer to a better public high school, but his mother was resistant, and he needed her approval for it to happen. He took the risk of saying that he would move in with his very religious father if she didn’t let him attend the school he wanted to attend. He knew that his father didn’t accept him, but it was a risk he knew he had to take. Fortunately, his mother acquiesced. Navigational Capital Josiah was able to leave a drug-addicted boyfriend, in part by figuring out how to transfer from Bluefield State to New Mexico State University, all while being on scholarship. Through work connections, he found a master’s program that allowed him to be paid while he was completing his internship, and he earned his first master’s degree. While working full time as an administrator in El Paso and studying in the doctoral program, he took out student loans, paid his tuition in cash, and saved all the loan money to help pay for an adoption. Like JoAnn, Josiah understood how to use the resources available to him in unexpected ways. He is scheduled to teach Deaf education as an adjunct at the University of Arizona in Tucson in the fall of 2020, and he hopes to apply for a tenuretrack position there when he graduates.

Learning and Not Learning to Become Qualitative Researchers 239 Resistant Capital Josiah found a way to marry his love, adopt their son, and get financially stable enough to reenroll at Borderlands University to complete his dissertation. Like all his classmates, Josiah wants to transform education, and he is passionate about Deaf education in particular.

Who’s Missing Again? We focus this next part of the conclusion on Israel, whom we mentioned in the participant chart in Chapter 1. We don’t have a complete chapter on his development as a qualitative researcher and scholarly writer for a number of reasons. First, while he took both semesters of the yearlong course, he didn’t turn in much of the individual work. And while Israel did attend class, he seldom spoke, so we don’t have much observational data on him. He participated in the focus group interviews, and Jair attempted to interview him after the course ended, although Israel chose not to respond directly to many of the questions Jair asked. In mid-October of the first semester, Israel missed a class session without letting us know, and his teammates told us he hadn’t shown up to conduct a scheduled observation, so we contacted him by email and phone. That was when we learned that he had just been separated from his partner and young daughters and that he was experiencing homelessness. It was a confluence of terrible things. We connected him with resources and gave him an incomplete for the first semester, in hopes that he would have the stability to finish his work from the first semester during the second semester. That didn’t happen. After a year, his incomplete in that first semester turned into an F. However, he earned a B in the second semester of the course. Israel continued in his doctoral program for another year. But since then, he hasn’t communicated with his advisor or taken any coursework. He continues to struggle with academia and understands it as a colonized space of deep-seated racism. In this part of the conclusion, we will explore what we know about Israel’s conflicts and critiques, both within his discipline(s) and in academia in general.

Internal Discord “I am elitist, because I fucking value my own life more than all the people I went to high school with,” 32-year-old Israel said. Born into a workingclass Mexican American family, Israel grew up in central El Paso in a neighborhood where historic landmarks date back to the 1870s. He was more willing to sit down for an interview with Jair than with Char and Kate as he had failed the first part of the course. Again, that did not come from poor quality work, but rather, from not turning in his work.

240  Learning and Not Learning to Become Qualitative Researchers Jair and Israel went to the same high school, although they didn’t run in the same circles. “High school was a joke,” Israel recalled. Their high school had an 80 percent graduation rate, and he said deridingly, “I barely passed my classes.” After graduating from high school, Israel signed up for the coast guard, which, along with the air force, is one of the most competitive branches of the U.S. military. It requires a high school diploma and top scores on the Armed Forces Vocational Aptitude Battery test, which measures verbal expression and reading, along with general math and science. It also tests mechanical and automotive knowledge. That makes it likely that Israel scored well on the aptitude test, even though, as he said, he didn’t get good grades in high school. When people enlist in the U.S. military, they commit to a minimum of eight years of duty. Israel served just three and a half years and did not explain why he was discharged. Israel then found his way to the University of Texas at Austin, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in philosophy. He returned to El Paso to enroll at Borderlands University, where he received his master’s degree in philosophy. In an interview with Jair, Israel compared himself to his high school peers, calling himself an elitist because he had not only gone to college; he had earned a master’s degree. He said: A college degree is not the measure of success. One of the ones I went to high school with that didn’t get a college degree is a multimillionaire. He started his own construction company out of high school, and he does work for the regional military post. School isn’t the measure of success, but that one guy is the fucking outlier. The rest of them, man, you’ll see them here at the local bar. You’ll see them right there every night, doing their drugs, doing their alcohol. You know, that’s just something I am not interested in. He also called himself an elitist because, unlike many people he went to high school with, he said he didn’t abuse alcohol or drugs. Israel called the people he knew in high school, except for the one who owned a construction company, a lost generation.

Bused to the Base Israel attended a variety of elementary schools when he was young because financial struggles forced his mother and him to move a lot. The experiences he shared about growing up centered on his feeling affinity for his fellow students who had military parents. He was bused, along with other students from working-class backgrounds who did not come from military families, to an elementary school on a military base. While he was growing up in El Paso, the school district had implemented a policy to send students who were connected with the military but who

Learning and Not Learning to Become Qualitative Researchers 241 lived off base to school on base. This was all part of an effort to solidify the ties between the military base and the larger El Paso community. In Israel’s fragmented memory, he emphasized the similarities he felt to those military kids. It was so long ago; I  remember only bits and pieces.  .  .  . I never looked at this fucking poor White kid whose father was a private in the army as better than me because he was White. I sympathize with the struggles of military families because, even though he had more of a privilege because of his skin color, this motherfucker was still poor. They were fucking struggling. The base pay in the army is below the poverty line if you have kids. The same thing with the Black kids in military families. You know, you went to school with them.  .  .  . We all came together and formed this identity that was completely bereft of any sort of academic . . . identity. Israel believed that he and the kids from military families of all ranks and backgrounds shared a common identity because of poverty. Hall (2011) and Henderson (2011) both note that the hierarchical structure of U.S. military culture means that families have little social mobility and no voice in their pay or where they are assigned to serve. This clearly impacts the fabric of military households and can lead them to be isolated and impoverished. Active duty members spend years in their tours, both in the United States and its territories and in other countries (Hall, 2008, 2011; Hillman, 2009). At the same time, military life is seen by some as one of society’s “great equalizers,” in which members are perceived as being treated equally across the military spectrum, the only differences based on rank. Schouten (2004) argues that there are safe spaces for minoritized ethnic groups in the military culture, and Israel shared this belief. He said that his three years in the coast guard were one of the few times in his life when he didn’t experience racism. However, this view is not supported by data. Claims of racism against members of all branches of the military, along with discrimination, harassment, assault, and sexism, are frequent (Dick, 2013; Weiss, 2011). Women are ten times more likely than men to experience some form of sexual discrimination or violence (Cahn, 2019) in the military, and at least one third of active duty troops from all branches of the military have experienced racism or racial discrimination or have witnessed White nationalist discourse within military ranks (Habib, 2018; Shane, 2019). However, Isaac seems to have bought into the ideology that the military is the “great equalizer.” In his naiveté, he felt that he and the poor kids he knew who were from military families were “all in this together.” It’s not surprising that he enlisted in the military after high school.

242  Learning and Not Learning to Become Qualitative Researchers Israel described his experiences in the military like this: Everything people lament about the mistreatment of minorities was exactly what we did in the coast guard. We celebrated it. We used to make fun of people’s differences all the time. No one was fucking triggered. There was no running to a safe space. If someone made fun of me for being a Mexican, I made fun of him for being a fucking Black person. It was just how we got along. Yet Israel’s examples of what he thought of as military equality had less to do with acceptance of difference and diversity and more to do with the simple acceptance of normative racist discourse. Wadham (2017) argues that a culture of violence exists both on and off the battlefield. Hazing, humiliation, bullying, and extreme forms of violence, including sexual violence, are endemic to the military, and sadly, this is not exclusive to the United States (Enloe, 2007; Nuwer, 2004; Wadham, 2017). The idea behind these practices is to deconstruct a person’s identity through humiliation and subsequently to rebuild it so that a person is faithful to the needs of military institution over their own (Pateman, 2006; Remy, 1990). This practice is associated with toxic masculinity, in which the concept of masculinity or being male conforms to heteronormative, socially accepted norms in society, such as physical strength and “man up” myths about how males should act in the face of hardship or pain (Elliot, 2018; Posadas, 2017). In his description of a circumstance in which soldiers humiliated each other through racialized discourse, Israel presented the interaction as an example of equality – a tit for tat, so to speak. He compared it to the idea of safe space, which is an inappropriate parallel. In fact, safe spaces allow people to be open about their experiences of racism, sexism, and all forms of systemic discrimination, harassment, and violence (Fox  & Ore, 2010). In other words, Israel confounded safe spaces with the continuance of unquestioned racist norms. Instead, he argued that these practices of humiliation in the coast guard reaffirmed his identity, even though he did not explain how.

Why Philosophy? Ninety percent of faculty hired in philosophy departments across the United States are White men (Alcoff, 2013), a fact that figured into Isaac’s decision to get his master’s degree in the field: I chose to major in philosophy as an undergrad, when I started to realize at the University of Texas that there weren’t many of my kind – Mexican people – in the philosophy program. It was all White guys in the philosophy program there, aside from one kid who was from Palestine. Everyone else was a bunch of White kids. Looking

Learning and Not Learning to Become Qualitative Researchers 243 back on when I got my masters here at UTEP, it was all European philosophy. I guess I made a conscientious decision to try to insert a Brown voice into a clearly White dominant view. The philosophy department at Borderlands is small, with only five tenured faculty and one tenure-track assistant professor. Four of these professors are White males, and the remaining two female professors are minorities, one of the them being a yet-to-be tenured female minoritized scholar. Thus, 33 percent of faculty in this department are from minoritized groups. It’s unusual for a there to be only 77 percent White faculty in this department, when 90  percent is the norm. Gómez (forthcoming) writes, “In 2013, The New York Times identified philosophy as the most underrepresented academic field for women and other minorities in the United States.” Compared to other humanities, it falls behind in diversity (Alcoff, 2013; Haslanger, 2013). Early in the semester, when we did the exercise on positionality, Israel shared a meme with all of us on his phone. It was Fox News personality Tucker Carlson in a red bow tie, and it read, “I  have the privilege of being totally unaware of my own privilege.” Carlson is known for being openly racist, sexist, and homophobic, and his views on immigrants are especially vile. Toward the end of the first semester, Israel spoke again, saying to Gloria, “That’s what I tell my students. Some of us are born on third base, and the rest of us are born on first base.” That is, White people are born on third base, and people of color are born on first base – a baseball metaphor of inequality (Artz & Murphy, 2000; Lensmire et al., 2013; McIntosh, 2018).

Conflicting Ideologies and Identities “I’m cisgender,” Israel said in our early discussion about positionality. He was the first to bring this term up in a class discussion. Cisgender refers to having one’s gender identity align with the one they were assigned at birth. It is often discussed in contrast to transgender, which refers to someone whose gender identity does not match the one they were given at birth. He described himself pejoratively in terms of his gender identity, while he affirmed his identity as Chicano. But then he summed himself up by saying, “I’m just an asshole straight guy.”

I Always Wanted a Ph.D. In 2013, Israel started teaching philosophy at the local community college as an adjunct, and he applied to the doctoral program in 2015. He explained: I’ve always just wanted a Ph.D. I looked into it the rhetoric program briefly, and it seemed to be a lot in line with philosophy. And I wasn’t

244  Learning and Not Learning to Become Qualitative Researchers going to leave El Paso again just for a Ph.D. I  had already started working at the community college, and my daughter was about to start school. . . . The rhetoric program seemed to be the closest in line with philosophy. When he was accepted into the Rhetoric and Composition Studies program, he met with Kate, who directed the program at the time. She invited him to take the ethnographic case study course as one of his electives for the Ph.D. program. That first semester in the program, Israel also took Introduction to Rhetoric and Composition Studies, a course for students coming to the doctorate program from other disciplines, which focuses on foundational concepts in the field. Like Israel, most students in the program are working professionals and take only one or two courses at a time.

Entering a New Field Philosophy and rhetoric do have things in common, as Israel noted. Rhetoric often draws on philosophy in studying language and its relation to reality, but it is actually a much broader field, encompassing the teaching of writing, workplace communication, community literacies, digital communication, and intercultural interactions. Research methodologies also differ, and while theoretical argumentation is one approach to rhetoric, qualitative, historical, and archival methods are common as well. Israel used theoretical argument in his master’s thesis. Ethnographic case study research was totally new to him. That first semester in the doctoral program was bumpy. In his Introduction to Rhetoric class, he earned a B, a decent grade but nothing like the As he had earned in his master’s program. In the first semester of the case study course, Israel completed the collaborative assignments with his research team, such as the theory presentation, the conference proposal, and the manuscript draft, but he didn’t do all the individual assignments. Out of a required five Letters to the Readers, he only submitted the first one, and out of the five required sets of field notes, he submitted just the first two. Char and Kate gave him an I grade in the class, which at Borderlands University signifies incomplete. According to university policy, students have a year to make up the missing work; if they don’t, the grade of I automatically turns into an F, failing. Char met with Israel after the first semester class was over, and together they drew up a contract that spelled out the work that Israel needed to complete. Char and Kate received only about half the work he was missing, even though Kate unsuccessfully tried to contact Israel through email to see if had completed it. In his interview with Jair, Israel said he had submitted all the work. He told Jair he hadn’t tried to contact Char and Kate about this. Israel did do better in the second semester of the class, and he earned a B.

Learning and Not Learning to Become Qualitative Researchers 245 Early in the first-semester course, Israel had confided in Char that he was going through a difficult breakup and was temporarily homeless. He mentioned this as well in his interview with Jair after the course was over. Except for these occasions, he kept silent about what he was enduring in his personal life.

Finding a New Way to Move Forward In the first Letter to the Readers, Israel reflected on entering a new field. This is his first paragraph, with Char’s comments in italics:

Dear Dr. Ullman and Dr. Mangelsdorf, I am hoping I get better with this as the semester progresses. For now, I am sure you will find my letter will have many of the same themes as the majority of my journal entries, and that is of someone who is attempting to figure out what is going on. Unsurprisingly, the reason I chose these journal entries was because being confused was a large part of my past three weeks in this course. This is by no means an indictment on your teaching, as the classes have been amazing and insightful; it is me and my mind that are leading me astray. Oh no! I say this because I genuinely feel as though I have an understanding of the material: in class. Once I get out of class, however, I feel as though I am navigating an entirely unknown field. I think that’s normal when beginning to grasp new material. While I grasp the concepts, my biggest problem I feel is my reluctance to engage my own personal views and experience. This is a good awareness, though. Why do you think this is? Having come into this class with no rhetorical background, I did not want to come in here and rely solely on my philosophy to get me by, as this is not a philosophy course, after all. I double majored in philosophy and print journalism as an undergrad. I really value the training you’ve had. Little did I know, however, how much this course actually contains philosophy! What doesn’t . . . I never thought, for example, that we would have a chance to read Foucault, and yet, three weeks in, there he was. Yes! We use social theory to understand social practices. Which is why I saw that I am starting to gain some direction, thankfully. Perhaps my journal entries reflect the thoughts of a perfectionist who simply expected too much from myself at the beginning. You have more background than you know. I do not know yet. All that I do know is I chose these ideas from my journal to remind myself of where I was and where I am now after a few short weeks, just in case I slip back into that negative thought pattern that consumed me the first couple of weeks in this course. Great reflective thoughts.

Figure 9.1  Israel’s Letter to the Readers 1

Israel’s thoughts in this first paragraph are an apt expression of what it can feel like to enter a new Community of Practice. As Char noted, he had an impressive awareness of what was happening to him as he began to learn how to do ethnographic research. According to Lopate (2005), reflective writing is both recording thoughts and speculating on their meaning. Israel did both as he wrote about the confusion he was

246  Learning and Not Learning to Become Qualitative Researchers experiencing and what it meant to come from a different discipline. In this first assignment, he portrayed himself as humble, with his mind leading him astray, and aware that he is a perfectionist and that he didn’t want to share his personal views. He also showed us that he was selfmonitoring his emotions when he mentioned the need to remind himself of his progress “just in case I  slip back into that negative thought pattern that consumed me the first couple of weeks in this course.” This last point is telling. We wonder if he was feeling overwhelmed by this new course of study. We asked the student researchers to use their Letters to the Readers to summarize and reflect on specific course readings and then to apply those insights to their research. All of them did that, except for Israel. He reflected on of the assigned readings as a whole. He wrote:

I am discovering that all of the articles we have read focus on the minutiae of everyday life and draws it to the forefront in an attempt to decipher this massive mystery called life. I swear I am not dressing this up, that is really how I feel. In reading these articles, I have been getting a firmer understanding of the intricacies of communication and how they relate to the individual, which I am understanding more and more to be the point of this class. In one respect, it is clearly about the construction of identity, but in the back of my mind I cannot help but think this is all bad news for agency. Ideally, I, as others, like to think of myself as an individual with free will, and one underlying theme to all of these articles has been how much I relate to them, meaning I am not as much of an individual as I like to believe. This for me is the most important topic communicated throughout these readings. None of the authors explicitly mention this, and I honestly did not expect them to, but the fact that individuals from all walks of life relate to these examples demonstrates, to me, how alike we really are.

Figure 9.2  Israel’s Letter to the Readers 1

Israel then pointed to Chiang and Schmida’s chapter “Language, Identity, and Language Ownership: Linguistic Conflicts of First-Year University Writing Students” (2002), which we mention in earlier chapters. He wrote:

All any person has to do to relate to this article, for example, is speak any other language aside from English. Whether it is Korean, Spanish, et cetera, is irrelevant; the sentiment behind the people struggling to come to terms with both worlds seems to be the same.

Figure 9.3  Israel’s Letter to the Readers 1

Learning and Not Learning to Become Qualitative Researchers 247 Interestingly, Israel connected this piece to philosophical debates about structure and agency, reading it as evidence of the powerful role of structure in everyday life, unlike his classmates, who read them through both their teacher and border identities. He didn’t yet understand that the evidence in the readings was used to build an argument. Instead, he dismissed these examples as minutia. Also, he wrote about the readings as a whole, which kept him from engaging in a more in-depth analysis. At the same time, he did what we had asked, which was to reflect on the readings. Indeed, reflection is an “epistemological process that people use to make meaning and knowledge” (Yancey, 2016, pp. 303–304). He did just that. In that same Letter to the Readers 1, he reflected on the positionality activity we had done in class, writing:

When we were conducting the positionalities experiment, I really did realize how many “privileges” I have. I cannot oversell this point. I do not feel the need to belabor the point, simply because of how obvious it is. I will say that I am not only proud, but thankful to be Mexican, for a variety of reasons. One of which is that had I been born with lighter skin and a more Anglicized last name, at this particular point in American history, I basically would not be allowed to say anything about the state of the world, which would not be good because I like making observations about the state of the world. I like to refer to my heritage as my get-out-of-jail-free card when making comments about the conditions of “the others.” Even then, however, I am still very well aware that it can only get me so far.

Figure 9.4  Israel’s Letter to the Readers 1

Here, Israel turned White privilege on its head, saying that his positionality as a Mexican man – or Chicano, as he used both interchangeably – permits him to talk about the Other in a way that White people cannot, without invoking the history of colonialism and racial violence. His last point seems to be that identifying as the Other is limited, perhaps because no group is homogenous and perhaps because there are other groups with different histories and experiences. Also, it’s interesting that Israel said the course focused on identity construction, while in reality, it was about ethnographic case study research, and it was the research questions that looked at the co-construction of identities, ideologies, and texts. The idea of doing empirical research seemed not yet to be on his radar. In that same Letter to the Readers, he reflected on the Collaborative Institutional Training Initiative (CITI) online course that everyone has to complete before conducting research with human subjects. We had the students do it before the first night of class, and that led him to note that he thought of himself as a scientist, but he prided himself on “being more of a theoretical scientist that was tasked with thinking through

248  Learning and Not Learning to Become Qualitative Researchers complex problems in hopes for laying the foundation for quantifiable experimentation.” He continued: Before, I used to get a sense of entitlement out of claiming to be a scientist. I understand now how unfounded this presumptuousness was. In taking these CITI tests, I realized how much of a responsibility and commitment is truly necessary in order to conduct research. It is so easy to sit back and make claims about the world (as we philosopher types are apt to do). In all honesty, I have questioned myself whether I am even qualified to be doing this type of research. Again, I have no formal education in rhetoric, or education, for that matter. In taking these CITI tests, I realize there are actual scientists out there who have dedicated their lives to a field of study/goal that they are genuinely passionate about. At best, I am just some dude who signed up for a class with nary a clue of what to expect.

Figure 9.5  Israel’s Letter to the Readers 1

Here again, he demonstrated some humility and self-awareness, situating himself as a novice in this Community of Practice.

Beginning the Research All the student researchers save Victoria, who had collected and were working with different data, had difficulties when they began participant observation. Josiah’s notes were thin because it was hard for him to hear simultaneous speech. Linda, Gloria, and JoAnn evaluated instructors’ teaching at first. Initially, Facundo experimented with other methods of taking field notes that pulled his attention from the task at hand. And Israel, too, had difficulties with field notes. His observations were thin and included judgements throughout. Char had asked him to “tell us what you SEE” on his first set of field notes. He was interpreting what he saw, rather than telling us what he saw. In his second set of field notes, he wrote, “The students in this class are all very young.” Char commented, “What does that mean? Can you guess their age range and ask people later?” Israel continued (Char’s responses are in italics): There is, however, a veteran in this course. I say this based solely off of his appearance and mannerisms. Furthermore, based off both his accent and mannerisms, he does not appear to be native to this area. What are you noticing in terms of accent and mannerism? The instructor’s presence is felt by all, given that he not only walks around the classroom, but reads over students’ shoulders as well. How do you know it’s felt? You can’t be in their heads. Tell us what you SEE! This would include myself. I can’t help but think what someone who was observing me would discuss about all of my habits as a teacher.

Figure 9.6  Israel’s Field Notes, September 15

Learning and Not Learning to Become Qualitative Researchers 249 This time, Israel brought his teacherly self to the observation, but rather than positioning himself as an evaluator, as his classmates did, he identified with the instructor being observed. In this next excerpt, Israel focused more on interpretation than description, writing:

There is a group of students, three males, one female, who went to high school together and are all sitting together now. . . . I want to know if they were friends in high school or simply drifted towards one another out of communality. If this is the case, I’m curious to know if the students who are having their private conversations in Spanish have a shared background, or if they flocked together out of the commonality they share in that English doesn’t appear to be their primary language. If that is the case, I’m wondering if this is a form of empowerment, as in, they’ll stick together and get through the course together, or disempowerment, as in, they have developed this mutual understanding that the best way to survive a course in which you are not a native speaker is to come together and try to collectively make sense of the course as a whole, rather than as one. If it is in fact the latter, this itself can be viewed further in terms of empowerment or disempowerment; the former being they prevail despite the circumstances, the latter being they have no other choice because they’ve been systematically failed by the education system.

Figure 9.7  Israel’s Field Notes, September 15

First, he assumed they had gone to high school together, and later, he wondered if they sat together simply because they were using Spanish more than English. He was making assumptions about the reasons for their behavior. From there, he guessed about more structural meanings, wondering if they sat together for solidarity because they had been Othered as Spanish speakers or if it was, as he said, because the educational system had failed them. His assumption seemed to be that if they used Spanish in their student-to-student interactions, then they had not been educated well. These field notes were all interpretation, without thick description. He continued to respond to what he noticed about students’ language use, writing:

Based entirely off of my teaching experience, I  have had students who go out of their way to either apologize in advance, or simply remain silent due to their accent/lack of comprehension of the English language. And of course, an accent has nothing to do with a possible lack of comprehension, right? I’m not convinced at all these should be separated. I’ve honestly either never noticed it or never paid attention to it, but the more I think about it, I’m curious to know how much of a role this plays in their academic development.

Figure 9.8  Israel’s Field Notes, September 15

250  Learning and Not Learning to Become Qualitative Researchers This was an example of Israel’s starting to look at the classroom more carefully, even though he wasn’t yet producing thick description. By questioning the connection between speaking Spanish-accented English and the comprehension of oral English, he was hinting at the dynamics of raciolinguistics (Flores  & Rosa, 2015). In his 2016 work, Flores describes the stigmatization of students from minoritized communities, detailing the ways stigma undermines their linguistic and cultural contributions and, ultimately, leads to their exclusion. The nativist notion of there being a single correct way to listen and speak English has been an object of study for a long time (Cummins, 2000; Flores & Rosa, 2015; Labov, 1969). We were excited to see Israel starting to think about what he saw, even if he still struggled to describe it. Israel showed that while he understood that the purpose of participant observation was to describe what he saw, he continued to interpret in his Letter to the Readers 1, writing:

I am certainly still floundering at this point. I say that because, while my philosophical background has helped me acclimate to an extent, I still do not really know what is expected of me. Again, I only have experience in theoretical philosophy, so the only thing that was expected from me was an ability to ground my claims and observations with astute references. One of the bonuses of this was that I could have an idea of where I would like the semester to go and the steps I would need to take to get there. Thus far, however, it would appear as though I will not be granted that opportunity in this course. And that terrifies me. I want nothing more than to start laying the foundations for the manuscript we have to turn in, but I cannot do that, seeing as how I have to get into the class we will be observing in the first place.

Figure 9.9  Israel’s Letter to the Readers 1

He understood that he had to gather data before he had anything to analyze, even though he was more comfortable writing a theoretical paper. It’s difficult to enter a new field with new methods and new ways of producing knowledge. We were asking him to background the way he had succeeded in his classes in the past, and that’s a big identity shift. It is understandable that the ambiguity of this context unsettled him. Perhaps if he had continued to participate wholeheartedly in the firstsemester course, he would have become more confident as a qualitative researcher. After the first month, though, Israel stopped handing in his individual assignments, which were five sets of field notes and five Letters to the Readers. He did participate in the theory presentation and the manuscript draft with Gloria, Josiah, and Estévan. He attended most of the classes, but without a doubt, he spoke less than anyone else did. However, we do think he was listening attentively to what was happening. In

Learning and Not Learning to Become Qualitative Researchers 251 the next section, Jair writes about having gone to high school with Israel and draws out more from the interview he conducted with him.

Char, Kate, Identity Politics, and the Ghettoization of Academia It was Houston High School in the spring of 2003. Mr. Brody’s creative writing class was the only elective that incentivized high school writers to polish their style and work on both fiction and nonfiction. Mr. Brody, a well-known writer in El Paso, was a 60-something, six-foot Anglo man with glasses and white hair, who usually wore button-down shirts, brown slacks, and white sneakers. He would carry a mini–spiral notebook in his pocket with a black pen, ready to take notes on anything that sparked his curiosity or to record a new idea. Israel and Jair took that class together, and this was the day they were giving presentations on books that had spoken to them. Jair was a fivefoot-seven skinny Latinx guy who wore a sweater and jeans that were too big for him. He rarely spoke with anyone and was usually reading a book – that week, he had just finished reading Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Israel was six feet tall and Latinx. He wore worn-out jeans and button-down long-sleeved shirts. Israel gave a presentation on Tolkien’s The Hobbit. The presentation was short; he told the class that he liked The Hobbit more than The Lord of the Rings. When Jair saw Israel was taking the case study course, it brought him back to Mr. Brody’s class. Creative writing had been one of his favorite high school classes, and Mr. Brody had inspired him to study the subject as an undergraduate at Borderlands. It was a small class, so naturally, he recognized Israel, who had been a year behind him in high school. “I remember you liked The Hobbit,” Jair said after the first day of class. Israel said he didn’t remember him. During that interaction after class, Israel was making short videos on his phone of people who came from the hood and were in graduate school. Israel walked up to Jair and Facundo, who were in conversation, and asked them to do a short video. Jair said he would do it the following week because he had to get home, and that was when Israel acknowledged Jair and apologized because he didn’t remember him from high school. That short video was never recorded. After the course ended, Jair contacted Israel to arrange for an interview. Israel would make plans to meet and then not show up or cancel at the last minute, a process that continued for nearly five months. He said he didn’t want to relive the pain of talking about the class, and Jair suggested that talking would be a way to vent his grievances. Finally, Israel agreed. In the interview, Israel grappled with his positionality, his race, his gender, and his views on academia. He was filled with animosity toward Char and Kate.

252  Learning and Not Learning to Become Qualitative Researchers Israel brought up a class when Char mentioned that the term Latinx was gradually being adopted in academia. I didn’t appreciate this idea of a White woman going and telling other people about their culture. I didn’t appreciate it. There was one point in class, too, where she tried to impose the Latinx identity on us. And even Gloria was like, “Well, what’s Latinx?” And Char was like, “Oh, Latinx was this movement in the Latin community, or it’s more inclusive to queer people.” I was like, “I don’t give a fuck about the Latin community. I  am not Latin, I  am fucking Mexican, bro. I am Chicano; if you want to say Chicanx, maybe . . . but don’t try to force this identity on me.” Not everyone likes the term Latinx. In class, Char mentioned that she had seen the first job posting for a position in Latinx Studies. Israel rejected the pan-ethnic label intended to describe people in the United States with Latin American heritage, and the x, a linguistic move to gender neutralize the word, especially including transgender people, along with the LGBTQA community (Haddock-Lazala, 2016). Some argue that Latinx is a rejection of Eurocentric epistemologies that stem from romance languages, with gender systems for nouns and adjectives (Salinas & Lozano, 2019). At the time of the case study course, Latinx was gaining purchase on social media and in academia as a label that included minoritized, intersectional, Indigenous, mestizo, and gender nonconforming identities (Vidal-Ortiz  & Martinez, 2018). Still, the Latinx community is not monolithic, and in mainstream contexts outside U.S. universities and progressive English-speaking media, heteronormative discourses tend to prevail. It’s likely that more conservative factions of the Latin American–origin population are reluctant to use Latinx for two main reasons. First is homophobic and transphobic bias. Some people feel U.S. Spanish is being hijacked by leftists (Salinas  & Lozano, 2019). The second reason has more to do with linguistic imperialism. As Scheurich and Young (1997) point out, there is a long history of White U.S. scholars producing biased and illegitimate scholarship on people of color (de Onis, 2017; Scheurich & Young, 1997; Solorzano & Delgado Bernal, 2001). Here is Israel’s response to Char’s mentioning Latinx: It’s just another extension of European colonization [of] the Latin identity in general. So just by biffing it up with x to include a queer neutral doesn’t take away from the fact that it still has colonial roots. You know what I mean? On top of that, the fucking cherry on the cake is when White woman is trying to tell me, a Brown person, what I should identify as. Right? Like, no, dude, no.

Learning and Not Learning to Become Qualitative Researchers 253 His rejection of Latinx appeared to come from his resentment toward Char and Kate, whom he seemed to think of as symbolically White. Following Scheurich and Young (1997), the history of hegemonic privilege made the term intolerable for Israel. However, this analysis is limited. Language is always evolving and changing, depending on how, where, and when it’s used and who is using it. The term Latinx is more political and intended to mobilize more voices than just those who identify as male or female. Vidal-Ortiz and Martinez (2018) label Latinx as “a way to challenge the gender binary in both language and society and to point out the marginalization and violence it creates” (p. 6). In terms of current conventions, Latinx is now being used in mainstream media in the United States, and the debate about the term within the diverse Latin American communities in the United States continues to rage. It first gained popularity among young people who are of Latin American descent in the United States, academics, and members of the LGBTQA community, also in the United States. The term doesn’t have purchase outside the U.S. contexts for a number of reasons. First, there are multiple pronunciations of the letter x in Spanish, and while one of those pronunciations is like the English pronunciation of x, which of the pronunciations to use is not immediately apparent to a Spanish speaker. And because the standard pronunciation of Latinx is aligned with English pronunciation, the term can be understood as an imposition of English norms onto Spanish, a kind of linguistic imperialism. Being able to interpret and pronounce Latinx seems to depend on one’s being fluent in Spanish and English and living in the United States. Secondly, the need for a term that unites people from different Latin American countries against imperialism seems to have been coined in South America in the 1850s (Mix, 1986), and it referred to a region, not necessarily an individual: América Latina. While it is still a question as to whether Latina/o includes a Portuguese-speaking country like Brazil, it has really only been used refer to individuals and groups in the United States. The word Latina/o came to prominence in the 1980s as a term of political mobilization, to unite people of Latin American heritages in the United States. By the 1990s, U.S. activists were using Latin@, with the idea that both the a and o endings were encompassed in that symbol, and Latinx was just beginning to be used at the time Israel took the case study course, around 2014. Since then, there has been a linguistic move to replace the male (-o and -os) and female (-a and -as) endings of Spanish words with the gender neutral -e and -es endings. One example of this trend is in the bilingual children’s book written by transgender author Lourdes Rivas (2018) and illustrated by Breena Nuñez, They Call Me Mix/Me Llaman Maestre. These language shifts and the controversy around them point to what Ahearn,

254  Learning and Not Learning to Become Qualitative Researchers drawing from Bakhtin, aptly calls “the socially charged life of language” (2012, p. 3). Israel also critiqued Char’s and Kate’s positionalities and intentions for doing research: I don’t think Char or Kate cared about the students. They were just using them. I  mean, Char is somewhat of a minority, she is a gay woman, but aside from that, she is still a White woman in power. Come on, dude, you are a college professor, a tenured college professor; you are fine. You know what I mean? You are not suffering in any way, shape, or form; you live in a very liberal city. So you are good. You are just using people like me. While acknowledging that Char identifies as queer, Israel completely ignored that gender discrimination in academia is well established (Centra  & Gaubatz, 2000; Huston, 2005; Macnell, Driscoll,  & Hunt, 2015). Women, people of color, and especially women of color receive lower course evaluations than do White men, regardless of what happens in their classrooms (Huston, 2005; Boring, Ottoboni,  & Stark, 2016). He also ignored the fact that Texas anti-discrimination law does not protect people based on sexual orientation or gender identity. But Israel saw them as privileged White professors. There is no question about it. Academia’s colonizing past and present continue to be violent and destructive. Fields such as anthropology, sociology, education, biology, law, and medicine – really all disciplines – have been used to justify slavery, segregation, Native American genocide, apartheid, and so much more. Eugenics dominated the U.S. academy for nearly 100 years (Barkan, 1992; Dubow, 1995; Jackson, Weidman, & Rubin, 2005; Ordover, 2003; Washington, 2006). Israel told Jair he didn’t believe academia had really been changed at all. He said: So, leaving that world of the hood and coming to the academic world is very ghettoized, very divided in its sinister way under the umbrella of inclusion. It’s inclusive in that more people are allowed to come in, but once you are in, you are being indoctrinated into this very rigid identity politics. I just don’t see the benefit. . . . I think the PhD program is something of a joke. . . . It’s cause of what they teach. . . . From the introduction class, at the undergraduate level, to the very last class you take at the doctoral level and anywhere in between that . . . it’s a colonial project. Israel described academia as dividing people under the guise of inclusion. He was not wrong. Israel sees people of color in academia being isolated and made powerless. While more diverse groups of people are getting into the academy,

Learning and Not Learning to Become Qualitative Researchers 255 they end up in the less prestigious parts of it, the ghetto (Sandoval, 1999; Youdell, 2010). Universities continue be White, middle-class, heterosexual, male institutions that allow limited entrance to the Other (Heyes, 2002; Sandoval, 1999; Wilson, 1995). Israel told Jair he wanted to finish the doctoral program to disrupt the dominant cultural narrative. At the same time, he talked about his own elitism, and he saw earning a doctorate as a means to an end  – career advancement. Regrettably, he paints Char and Kate with the same brush  – as instrumentalists. He interpreted Char’s explanation of the term Latinx as imposing an identity on himself and other students. Char saw herself as sharing the term because it was becoming popular in academia, and she wanted the student researchers to know about it. Both perceptions can be true.

Not Becoming a Qualitative Researcher Early in the case study course, in his Letter to the Readers, Israel wrote about being more interested in the more philosophical aspects of the readings and being new to qualitative research. At the same time, he shared his initial impression of qualitative researchers – that they needed to be responsible and committed and that they didn’t “just make claims about the world as we philosopher types are apt to do.” He was wary about ethnographic research, but he also seemed impressed by those who did it. By the time he spoke with Jair over a year after the course was over, his attitude had changed: My goal was just to have the Ph.D. and, you know, use it if I could to advance in my career. I never intended to be an academic in the rhetoric realm or let alone do ethnographic work. Israel suggested that interpretative research such as ethnography wasn’t as important as the hard sciences, and he told Jair that most schooling – except math and science – doesn’t matter. His spoke of this in connection with his daughter’s schooling, saying: If it’s not science and it’s not math, I tell her straight up, and I don’t sugarcoat it. I really do, I tell her all the time, if it’s not science and it’s not math, you should not really listen to what your teachers are telling you; focus on what matters. With two degrees in philosophy himself and being on his way to a doctorate in Rhetoric and Composition Studies, he seemed to be warning his daughter not to take the path he had. He was conflicted about ethnographic research. At the same time, he acknowledged that it was difficult, and then he denigrated it. Ultimately, he refused to learn it.

256  Learning and Not Learning to Become Qualitative Researchers It is understandable that a Brown emerging scholar like Israel distrusted the academy. And to make matters worse, he ended up with a failing grade for the first semester of the course. When Jair asked if he had talked to Char and Kate about his grade, Israel said: Nah, fuck, no. No, I’ll take it like a man; I’ll just keep going. Like I said, if I get a job at a university, that’s cool, but I’m not going to kiss anyone’s ass. When Jair asked him why he was getting the Ph.D. Israel said he wanted to go back to the hood, the high school where both he and Jair gone, and teach philosophy. He said: My dream is to go there and teach philosophy so I can tell the students straight up, “Listen, motherfuckers. You guys are not gonna amount to anything in life, and not because you are incapable of it, but because these people that are outside of this class, the other teachers here, they are not going to help you. They’re expecting you to fail. More importantly, the system as a whole is expecting you to fail. You are not the student that is going to go to Yale; you are the student that is going to go to jail. It’s that simple. That’s your role. You are going to be that body that fills that prison system. Now you have two fucking choices. Are you gonna let the system win, or are you gonna do something about it?” This seems like a statement that balances structure and agency, something Israel talked about early in the course. Israel chose not to become a qualitative researcher. And although he was virtually silent in class, he was outspoken with Jair. As of this writing, Israel hasn’t taken a course or responded to messages from his advisor in the Rhetoric and Composition Studies program for over a year. The faculty are unsure if he will continue. While his message is sometimes contradictory, Israel does want to educate people in his community. He also wants the academy to be a place where people of color can thrive. All of us may just want the same things.

The Role of Mentoring Mentors been crucial in the lives of JoAnn, Victoria, Josiah, Facundo, Linda, and Gloria in different ways, and they talked about those people in both interviews and focus groups. Josiah’s high school biology teacher helped him survive homophobic bullying. Linda was influenced by her communication professors, who opened her eyes to racism and sexism in mass media, which became the topic of her master’s thesis. JoAnn’s

Learning and Not Learning to Become Qualitative Researchers 257 mother had been a mentor throughout her life. As an undergraduate, Victoria had a professor who introduced her to action research, which sparked her interest in becoming a researcher. Working in the ethnography lab in the College of Education helped her get to know several faculty in her program with whom she worked. Gloria, especially, was someone who centered her mentors in her narration: her father; the literacy sponsors in school; the high school guidance counselor; the counselor from the African American Resource Center at the University of Minnesota; her Chicanx professors who made her realize she was a Chicana; the Black Cuban activist Jamal Joseph, who, when she attended Columbia University helped get her a job at the Repertory Theater in New York; and the director of the Chicanx studies program at Borderlands. Facundo also expressed deep appreciation to several influential mentors throughout his life. His father taught him to respect women and work hard. His boss at the flea market where he worked as a teenager paid his Catholic school tuition. At DePaul University, he was mentored by the Cuban historian Felix Masud-Piloto, who urged him to study history at Borderlands. A  linguistics professor at Borderlands arranged for him to get an on-campus job. His tattoo artist can be considered a mentor since he helped Facundo understand that his signature, not his father’s, should be written on his arm. Facundo has peer mentors as well, and the three of them have a tattoo signifying the ninth cohort of their doctoral program to prove it. Facundo, JoAnn, and Linda worked together closely on the case study course, and he and JoAnn in particular bonded both as parents of young children and as emerging qualitative researchers. The number of mentors our students talked about is impressive. Sometimes these mentoring relationships were brief but still life-altering while others were more long term and sustaining. A body of research has demonstrated that mentoring is critical to the success of doctoral students from diverse backgrounds, especially when the mentor and mentee share a similar background or discipline (Berg, 2016; Blockett, Felder, Parrish,  & Collier, 2016; Figueroa  & Rodriguez, 2015). JoAnn, Gloria, Josiah, Linda, Victoria, and Facundo at some point all had mentors from the same cultural background and/or discipline. However, they all also had mentors from different backgrounds and fields. Facundo was assisted by a linguistics professor who was White, and Josiah’s high school biology teacher – who, as far as he knows, wasn’t gay – helped him withstand bullying. Victoria even had someone she called an “angel,” a woman who came out of nowhere at the airport in Providence, Rhode Island, when Victoria had just arrived in the United States without papers and was wandering around a massive airport in the middle of the night, having missed her connecting flight. Suddenly, a woman she had never seen

258  Learning and Not Learning to Become Qualitative Researchers before came up to her, began talking with her in Spanish, and helped her get on the right flight. Even an angel can be a mentor.

Lessons for Doctoral Advisors and Programs This study of doctoral students from diverse backgrounds becoming qualitative researchers and scholarly writers has implications for doctoral advisors as well as programs. Most doctoral programs aren’t created with nontraditional students in mind  – students who are from minoritized backgrounds, who are working full-time, who are middleaged, who are parents, or who have different abilities. Many programs set time limits for degree completion that are unreasonable for these students. If the programs offer funding like graduate teaching assistantships or research fellowships, they aren’t ample enough to support a family, even living frugally. Often, advisors are busy with their own teaching and research and don’t have time to spend with students, especially those who need to meet outside established office hours. A number of unspoken rules can guide how doctoral students should interact with their mentors/advisors, like how to approach a dissertation advisor who hasn’t returned their work in over a month, how to say no when a professor asks students to pick up their laundry, and what to do when a faculty member makes a racist or sexist comment in their presence. What have JoAnn, Gloria, Josiah, Linda, Victoria, and Facundo told us that doctoral advisors and programs should listen to? Nontraditional students make tremendous sacrifices to become researchers and finish their degrees. So that JoAnn could concentrate on her coursework, she allowed herself to be separated from her children and husband for a year, a situation that made her feel guilty and like a bad mother. Victoria was away from her family, friends, and job in Columbia for five years, and she felt isolated and lonely. Gloria’s academic accomplishments and ambitions caused some separation from family members who didn’t understand why she had chosen that kind of life. Both Linda and Facundo will be working on their degrees for many years because of job and financial demands. While he was taking the case study course, Facundo taught many classes as an adjunct in order to provide for his family, and time was tight. Josiah had many sleepless nights and working weekends as he juggled coursework, a demanding job, and a long-distance relationship. Many nontraditional students will take a long time to finish their degrees. Facundo’s pattern is to take coursework one semester and then stop out for a semester to focus on making money to pay tuition. Josiah’s husband got a pharmacy internship in Tucson, and soon Josiah was teaching Deaf education and quickly became a program administrator

Learning and Not Learning to Become Qualitative Researchers 259 at the school district there, all while they were trying to adopt a child. He stopped out for over a year. Linda’s progress is steady but slow, as she takes one class a semester. Advisors must work to maintain bonds with these students. Even short emails or texts asking how they’re doing or forwarding relevant articles to them can be crucial to keeping students on track. In fact, nontraditional students need a network of mentors – both official and unofficial  – as well as peer mentors. One long-term mentor, such as a dissertation advisor, can be very sustaining. But students often need multiple mentors to help them complete their studies. This happened to Victoria when she was working in the ethnography lab and got to know faculty who were there to attend a talk or sign out recording equipment. Peer mentoring is also important. This occurred in the ethnographic case study course as students bounced ideas off each other during class discussions, teasing each other in friendly ways, and spending time together outside class to complete work. While valuable to all the students, this might have been especially important to Facundo, who applied to the doctoral program during the second semester of our course. However, peer mentoring was less effective for Josiah, whose demanding work schedule made it almost impossible for him to meet with his research team face to face. He and his fellow researchers did much of their work online. Finally, nontraditional students like JoAnn, Gloria, Linda, Victoria, Facundo, and Josiah possess an enormous amount of Community Cultural Wealth, which can contribute to their success as qualitative researchers and scholarly writers. Often, it’s hard for faculty and advisors, most of whom are White, to see students’ backgrounds as advantageous to their success as the cultural deficit paradigm (Yosso & Burciaga, 2016) is so engrained in their minds. Because these students had already had years of experience navigating institutional structures that were designed for those “traditional” students, they had to figure out how to get into universities and earn degrees, even if it took them longer and even if there were a few stumbles along the way. They had learned to deal with demeaning assumptions about their abilities that came from racist, sexist, and heteronormative beliefs. They knew how to lean on their families, both blood and chosen; mentors; and fellow students for support. Even as novice researchers, their research in the first-year writing classes revealed significant insights. They showed how one monolingual White instructor unintentionally imposed a standard language ideology that hindered students whose first language wasn’t English and how another teacher who was Latina and Spanish-English bilingual opened up a third space for her students to use their bilingual proficiencies to succeed. Their experiences and backgrounds helped them ask questions

260  Learning and Not Learning to Become Qualitative Researchers and interpret their data in ways that traditional doctoral students might not have. We look forward to their claiming their place in the next generation of scholars.

Where Are They Now? JoAnn, Linda, Gloria, Victoria, Facundo, and Josiah are all doing well. We don’t know how Estévan and Israel are doing. Victoria graduated in 2019, returned to the Universidad de Antoiqua in Colombia, and is now a tenured associate professor. JoAnn also graduated in 2019 and has been working for the Department of Education for the State of Louisiana as a data analyst and early childhood specialist. She will begin as an assistant professor of practice at Southern Mississippi State University in her hometown in the fall of 2020. Linda continues to teach full-time at the early-college high school where she mentors Latinx students. She is moving steadily through her coursework, one class at a time. Gloria is progressing on her dissertation research and is a full-time lecturer in the Chicano Studies program at Borderlands. She recently applied for a tenure-track position at a university in California and was selected as a finalist, even though she was still finishing her dissertation. Facundo is also a full-time lecturer in the Chicano Studies program at Borderlands, and he supplements his income by concurrently teaching part time at the community college. He is progressing in the doctoral program slowly and steadily. Josiah and his husband, José, live in Tucson, Arizona, with their infant son, Joaquín, and Josiah is completing the remaining milestones in his doctoral program virtually, with a plan to conduct his dissertation research in Tucson. JoAnn, Linda, Gloria, Victoria, Facundo, and Josiah are changing the face of the professoriate, and rather than standing on the shoulders of John Dewey and Kenneth Burke, perhaps they are jumping off their shoulders to create something new.

Note 1. We selected the pseudonym Israel, because it is a fairly common name on the border, and it means “to contend or fight.” It is often interpreted to mean one who struggles against rules. In the Bible, Israel wrestled with an angel.

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Index

14th Amendment 5 Abasi, A. R. 29 ability 3, 5, 89, 215 Abumrad, J. 203, 227, 307, 342 accents 85, 150, 129 access to higher education 4 action research 148, 149, 231, 257 AD/HD 187, 217, 218, 227 Afghanistan 179 African 151 African American 140 African American Resource Center 116 African American Studies 117 African American Vernacular English (AAVE), 51, 235 Ahern, M. M. 207, 227 Air Force 111, 240 Aitchison, C. 29, 31, 32, 150, 171 Akbari, N. 29 Albee, Edward 118 Albuquerque, New Mexico 272, 322 Alcoff, L.M. 243, 260 Alcorn State University 50, 52 Algonquin Round Table 2 American Anthropological Association (AAA) viii, 12, 40, 42, 170 American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) 1 American Community Survey 52, 53, 79 American Federation of Teachers (AFT) 1 American Philosophical Association (APA) 364 American Sign Language (ASL) 213, 214 Amundsen, C. 29

anti-immigration 113, 184 anxiety 30, 99, 122, 126, 229 Anzaldúa, G. 31, 84, 108, 131, 133, 139, 140, 177, 199, 233 APA style 96 Appalachia (Appalachian), 202, 204, 205, 207, 209, 227, 228 Araujo, B. 83 – 84, 108 Aristotelian 2, 193 Armed Forces Vocational Aptitude Battery Test 240 artifact collection 11, 14, 103, 124, 189 Artz, L. 243, 260 Asian 3, 60, 116, 117, 215 aspirational capital 234, 235, 237 assimilation 87, 97 Australia 27 avant-garde 2 Back of the Yards (Chicago neighborhood), 180 Bakhtin, M. M. 8, 192, 197, 254 Bañuelos, L.E. 85, 108 Baptist 50, 54, 59, 77, 206, 236, 238 Barkan, E. 254 Barnett, B. 29 Basturmen, H. 29 becoming ix, 8, 9, 19, 24, 26, 31, 32, 48, 59, 60, 65, 69, 72, 73, 77, 78, 79, 84, 86, 87, 88, 89, 91, 101, 106, 121, 130, 133, 137, 154, 155, 161, 165, 170, 171, 203, 217, 219, 224, 225, 226, 229, 230, 231, 233, 234, 237, 255, 257, 258 Bejarano, C. 113, 140 Bek, H. 153, 171 Belcher, D. 150 Belcher, W. 29

266 Index Benesch, S. 16 Bennington College 2 Benson K. 189, 199 Berg, G. 30, 119, 140, 257 Bernard, H. R. 202, 228 Bhabha, H. 38, 99, 108, 177, 192, 200 Bialystok, E. 86 bilingual (bilingualism) 51, 56, 63, 66, 68, 72, 83, 84, 85, 86, 90, 97, 99, 107, 113, 126, 129, 132, 135, 150, 152, 153, 160, 179, 181, 220, 233, 253, 259 bilingual education 83, 97 Bitchener, J. 29 Black (Americans) i, viii, x, xi, 1, 3, 5, 11, 16, 18, 30, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 55, 56, 58, 63, 72, 79, 92, 116, 118, 119, 160, 175, 182, 183, 202, 203, 209, 211, 236, 238, 241, 242, 257 Black/White dichotomy 63 Blockett, R. A. 27, 30, 257 Bloomburg, L.D. 27 Bluefield State University 211, 238 Boellsdorf, T. 77, 79, 125, 140 Borch C. 177, 199 Border Patrol 113, 179, 180, 198 Bourdieu, P. 8, 135, 137, 140, 196, 197, 198, 220, 234 Bowers, L. M. vii, 224, 225, 228 Bracero Program 113 Brandt, D. 114, 140 Bresler, L. 24 Brooklyn, Mississippi 49 Brooks, J. 29 Brooks, Mel 118 Brown (Americans) xi, 4, 25, 89, 175, 184, 185, 243, 252, 256 Brown v. Board of Education 211 Brown, L. 153 Brown, S. 16 Buchanan, Pat 184 Bucholtz, M. 60, 72, 79, 158, 171, 225, 227 Burciaga, R. 234, 235, 259 Burke, J. 112, 140, 169, 211, 387 Burke, Kenneth 3, 20, 24, 48, 140, 260 Burlington, Vermont 1 Bush, George H. W. 184 Caffarella, R. 29 Cain, C. 145 Calavera 186 Call for Proposals (CFP) 101

Caló 178, 199, 235 Campbell, H. 84, 180, 199 Canada 27 Canagarajah, S. 28, 69, 70 Cano, G. 189, 199 Carrancistas (Carranza) 181 cartel violence 84, 179, 180 Casanave, C. P. 27, 29, 32, 101, 108, 155, 171 Catholicism (Catholic) 50, 83, 89, 120, 154, 180, 182, 183, 185, 236 Centra 254 Chao, J. 29, 103 Chaparral, New Mexico 111, 112, 113, 116, 127 Cherokee 202, 211, 226, 227 Chiang, Y-S. 60, 215, 216, 217, 227, 246 Chicago, Illinois 25, 82, 83, 123, 177, 178, 180, 181, 182, 185, 186, 237 Chicana/o Civil Rights Movement 117 Chicanismo 189 Chicano identity 178 Chicano Studies 117, 120, 131, 139, 177, 185, 186 Cholo 26 Choy, S. 15 Christian 1, 19, 206 cisgender 20, 25, 26, 27, 243 Ciudad Juárez (Chihuahua, Mexico) 24, 26, 84, 86, 87, 113, 121, 143, 176, 178, 179, 180, 186, 198 Clance, P. 15 class 308, 325 Coast Guard 240, 241, 242 co-constructing (co-construction) 9, 10, 11, 12, 19, 63, 66, 67, 74, 104, 105, 106, 135, 187, 201, 247 codemeshing 69, 70 Cole, D. 153 Collaborative Institutional Training Initiative (CITI) 247 College of Education’s Ethnography Lab 155, 170, 257, 259 Collier, J. 27, 30, 257 Collins, P. H. 217, 227 Colombia 18, 72, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155, 159, 160, 166, 168, 170, 216, 235 colonial languages 51, 150, 151, 159 colonias 111, 123, 140 colonizers 151, 178, 202 colorism 48

Index  267 Columbia University 1, 2, 118, 119, 257 communicative competence 60 Communities of Practice (CoP) ix, 8, 60, 64, 123, 154, 158, 160, 161, 162, 170, 201, 224, 225, 230 Community Cultural Wealth ix, 234, 236, 259 Comstock, E. 187, 217, 218, 227 conference proposal(s) 14, 19, 33, 39, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 134, 137, 144, 155, 165, 166, 167, 168, 244 Conley, V. 3 Convertino, C. 103, 108 cooked field notes 37, 52, 65 Corchado, A. 6 Council of Graduate Schools 27 Coyote (human smuggler) 180 Creating a Research Space (CaRS) 167, 169 Cresswell, J. 167, 171 Critical Race Theory (CRT) 30, 121, 190, 192 Croom, N. 30, 31 Crossman, J. 32 Crout, R. 207, 227 Cruz-Santiago, A. 84 cub ethnographer 35, 88, 89 cultural capital 135, 234 Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) 11 Cummins, J. 250 Curry, M. J. 28, 169 Cuthbert, D. 13 Daniels, H. 11 Danowitz, M.A. 155, 171 data analysis 14, 33, 40, 75, 98, 99, 103, 104, 124, 163, 189, 195 Davies, A. 85, 108 Dávila, A. 117, 140 Davila, B. 71, 72, 117, 126, 140, 159, 160, 171 Day, A. 28 De la Piedra, M. T. 97 deaf culture (identity) 203, 217 Deaf Education Teacher Exam 213 Death in Venice 2 Delaney, C. 85 Delgado Bernal, D. 117, 140, 252 Delgado, R. 85 DeLyser, D. 29 democratic pedagogy 1

Denby, G. 211, 228 densely textured totality 98, 101 DePaul University 177, 185, 257 Deumert, A. 153 Dewey, John 1, 2, 3, 48, 157, 260 Día de Muertos 175, 198 Dick, K. 241 Dickies 189 digital divide 188, 20 digital native, digital immigrant 188, 200 discourse community 66, 67, 127, 193 dissertation ix, 14, 26, 27, 29, 32, 42, 59, 78, 79, 138, 139, 144, 155, 158, 160, 164, 165, 167, 170, 171, 194, 226, 231, 233, 235, 236, 239, 258, 259, 260 doctoral education viii, 4, 7, 27 Doerr, N. 85 Dostal, H. M. vii, 224, 225, 228 Driscoll, A. 254 DuBois, W.E.B. 1 Dubow, S. 254 Ducatman, A. M. 207, 227 Dulin, C. 67 Dunaway, W. 202, 204, 227 Dustman, E. L. 148, 231 Early-College High School 19, 82, 87, 88, 260 East, M. 29 Ebbs, C. A. 24 Eberá 152 Educational Testing Service (ETS) 56 Edwards, C. W. 15, 16 Ek, L. 126 El Paso, Texas 24, 26, 55, 56, 58, 60, 70, 82, 83, 84, 87, 91, 97, 102, 111, 112, 113, 120, 121, 123, 127, 134, 143, 151, 154, 170, 178, 179, 180, 186, 190, 195, 198 – 199, 212, 213, 214, 220, 226, 236, 238, 239, 240, 244, 251 Elbers, E. 11 Elenes, C. A. 117, 140 Elitist 239, 240 Elliot, K. 242 Emerson, R. M. 11, 65, 75, 128 English as a Foreign Language (EFL) 25, 143, 147, 157, 166, 168, 196, 216 English Composition 10, 17, 72, 136, 220

268 Index English Language Teaching (ELT) 160, 170 Enloe, C. 242 Espinoza 112, 140 Espinoza, E. 169, 211, 387 Esquinca, A. 83 – 84, 108 Estévan 17, 18, 19, 99, 101, 128, 135, 136, 195, 201, 218, 221, 223, 229, 250, 260 Estrem, H. 165 ethnic identity 82, 83, 131, 151 Ethnographic and Qualitative Research Conference (EQRC) viii, 12, 39, 42, 78, 101, 134, 166, 233 ethnography i, 9, 10, 14, 15, 20, 33, 77, 123, 125, 134, 155, 158, 162, 163, 167, 170, 189, 190, 191, 212, 255, 257 Falchi, L. 17 familial capital 234, 235, 238 Father’s Shadow/Sombra del Padre 118 Feak, C. B. 28 feedback 7, 10, 11, 12, 29, 31, 32, 33, 36, 42, 60, 72, 75, 91, 92, 94, 102, 103, 104, 137, 149, 166, 191, 192, 193, 197, 223 Felder, P. P. 27, 30, 257 Feldman, D. 29, 103 Femicidios (femicides) 84, 121 field notes 37, 38, 189 Figueroa, J. 30, 119, 257 Figured Worlds 145 Finkelstein, M. 3 Fitzgerald, T. 32 Flack, T. 5 Flaherty, C. 4 Flores 83, 250 Foner, N. 16 Fordham, S. 50, 51, 60 Foss, S. 27 Foucault, M. 8, 19, 131, 195, 218, 245 Fox, C. O. 242, 243 Fredericksen, E. 29 Fretz, R. I. 11, 65, 75, 128 funds of knowledge 102, 123, 124, 132 Fürstenau, S. 150 Gadsden Purchase 212, 226, 232 Galindo, D. 178, 199 Gándara, P. 17 García, J. 113 García, O. 17, 51, 97, 113

Gardner, S. 15, 27, 30, 122 Garza, M. 150 Gaubatz, N. B. 254 gay (identity) 19, 61, 202, 203, 205, 210, 216, 217, 218, 219, 237, 254, 257 Gee, J. P. 11, 106, 168 Geertz, C. 11, 65, 163 gender identity 8, 18, 89, 215, 243, 254 General Education Diploma (GED) 206 Gildersleeve, R. 30, 31 Gilham, P. 150 Gitanos 178 Godinez, F. E. 117, 140 Golde, C. 29 González, J. 30, 119 Graves, B. 29 great migration 211, 228 Greenwich Village 2 Gu, Q. 29 Guerin, C. 29, 150, 171 Guerra, J. 86 Guerrero, C. 153 Gutiérrez K. 100, 177, 192, 199 Guzman-Barron, I. 16 Haddock-Lazala, C. 252 Halas, M. 224, 228 Hall, K. 72, 79 Hall, L.K. 241 Hall, S. 24 Hallett, R. 29 Harding, S. 217, 227 Harkins, A. 203, 227 Harlem Renaissance 2 Harris, A. 3 Hart-Davidson, B. 165 Harvard University 2 Haslanger, S. 243 Hattiesburg, Mississippi 52, 53, 54, 56, 79 Heath, S. B. 58 Helton, L. 205, 227 Henderson, K. 24 Hendryx, M. 207, 227 Hernandez v. Texas 5 Herrera-Rocha, L. 97 Hess, M. 16 heterosexual 20, 26, 27, 216, 217, 255 Heyes, C. 255 higher education 4, 5, 6

Index  269 Hill, J. 97 hillbilly 18, 203, 205, 210, 227, 228 Hillman, E. 241 Hispanic(s) 5, 25, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 151, 236 Hispanic-Serving Institution (HSI) 25 Historically Black College (HBC) 50, 52, 211 Hoa Hiep, P. 30 Hoffer, T. B. 16 Hollan, D. W. 212, 227 Holland, D. 145 Holley, K. 15, 27, 30, 122 homosexual 215, 217 Hopwood, N. 31 Hough, D. A. 153 Howard, R. 125 Hunt, A. 254 Huston, T. 254 hybridity 39, 100, 101, 175, 177, 178, 192 Hyland, K. 170 Hymes, D. 9 identity (as learning trajectory) 75 identity negotiation 102 identity work ix, 17, 31, 51, 59, 111, 145, 215 ideologies 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 14, 17, 19, 33, 40, 48, 67, 68, 72, 76, 96, 97, 104, 107, 124, 127, 130, 135, 154, 159, 160, 167, 170, 201, 220, 243, 247 Imes, S. 15 immigration 113, 203 impostor syndrome i, 15, 30, 111, 122 Incas 182 indigenous 52, 92, 151, 152, 152, 159, 160, 181 Ingerslev, K. 32 Inouye, K. 32 insider/outsider 88, 89, 90 Institutional Review Board (IRB) 9, 10, 35, 190 interdisciplinary 7, 8, 117, 121, 139 international students 7, 18, 28, 29, 69, 153, 155 intersectional 3, 15, 16, 25, 252 interviews 9, 10, 11, 17, 19, 20, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 40, 42, 74, 76, 88, 89, 98, 100, 103, 105, 106, 107, 124, 132, 137, 144, 147, 154, 158, 167, 169,

189, 194, 221, 229, 231, 232, 233, 239, 256 Israel 17, 18, 19, 135, 136, 201, 209, 221, 223, 229, 230, 233, 239, 240, 241, 242, 243, 244, 245, 246, 247, 248, 249, 250, 251, 252, 253, 254, 255, 256, 260 Jackson, J. 254 Jackson, L. 27, 28 Jackson State 52, 79 Jacobs-Huey, L. 90 Janta, H. 153 Jeffrey, B. 189, 199 Jerolmack, C. 24 Johns Hopkins University 1 Johns, A. M. 102 Johnson, M. 30 Joseph, Jamal 118, 119, 138, 257 Journal of Language, Identity, and Education ( JLIE) 8, 33, 48, 61, 62, 124 Kamler, B. 28, 30, 31, 32, 106, 122, 159, 165 Kaplan-Weinger, J. 33, 37, 41, 59, 60, 65, 89, 90, 95, 123, 129, 131, 163 Kasinitz 16 Keller, S. 205, 227 Kerschbaum, S. 127, 198, 199 Kim, K. 29 Kite, S. 32 Kleifgen, J. A. 17 Kohan, M. B. 148, 231 Koyama, J. 84 Kroskrity, P. V. 67 Kumar, S. 30 Labov, W. 175, 199, 250 Lachicotte, W. Jr. 145 language capital (linguistic capital) 39, 136, 196, 220, 234, 238 language ideologies 9, 10, 17, 41, 67, 69, 97, 98, 104, 106, 135, 159, 191, 194, 195, 196, 219, 220 language purity 97 Larry 129, 130, 132 Las Cruces, New Mexico 24, 211, 212, 213 Las Vegas, Nevada 39, 42, 101, 134 Latin American 5, 117, 147, 164, 252, 253 Latin Kings (gang) 183

270 Index Latinidad 88 Latinx i, 4, 6, 11, 18, 48, 56, 82, 86, 88, 89, 91, 102, 113, 116, 118, 119, 151, 219, 231, 232, 234, 251, 252, 253, 255, 260 Lave, J. ix, 8, 62, 64, 73, 89, 101, 125, 154, 159, 165, 180, 186, 195, 196, 198, 199, 202, 223, 225, 228, 230, 231, 254 League of Latin American Citizens (LULAC) 5 LeCompte, M. 10, 11 Lee, A. 31, 32 Lee, S. 29, 59, 64, 65 Legal Permanent Resident 184 Legitimate Peripheral Participation (LPP) ix, 9, 62, 199, 228 Leki, I. 155 Lengua de Señas Mexicana (LSM) 213, 224, 227 Lensmire, T. 243 Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender (LGBTQ) 205, 210, 214, 215, 217, 226, 228, 237, 252, 25 Letter to the Readers 34, 35, 58, 59, 60, 62, 63, 66, 70, 71, 72, 73, 77, 78, 90, 91, 94, 104, 105, 123, 126, 128, 156, 157, 158, 159, 160, 161, 162, 163, 164, 183, 185, 217, 218, 219, 223, 225, 245, 247, 250, 255 Leyva, V. L. 27 Lichtman, M. 14 Liddicoat, A.J. 62, 158, 159, 216, 217, 228 Lillis, T. 28 linguicism 214 linguistic terrorism 133 Lippi-Green, R. 85 literacy sponsors 114, 115, 257 Lopate, P. 245 Louisiana, S. 29 Lozano, A. 252 Lugosi, P. 153 Luk, G. 86 LULAC v. Richards 5 Lunsford, A. 165 Macnell, L. 254 Maher, D. 32 Maher, M. 29, 103 Mangelsdorf, K. 29 Mann, Thomas 2 Mantai, L. 29

Maquiladora (assembly factory) 83, 84 Marginson, S. 153 Marine(s), 111, 112, 184 Marjanovic-Shane, A. 11 Marschark, M. 224, 228 Martinez, J. 252, 253 Mason, C. 204, 228 McAlpine, L. 29, 32 McIntosh, P. 243 McLemee, S. 2 McMullen, C. 32 Medellín (Colombia) 144 Meier, N. 32 Melia, T. 2 mentoring 7, 30, 119, 256, 257, 259 Meraji, S.M. 211, 228 Mestiza consciousness 177 meta-study 12, 13, 18, 19, 221 Michael-Luna, S. 62, 63, 64, 66, 123 microgenetic processes 177 military 6, 55, 56, 59, 66, 79, 112, 115, 181, 184, 210, 226, 236, 240, 241, 242 Ministry of National Education (Colombia) 152 Minnesota 116, 117, 118, 120, 123, 127, 131, 170 Mississippi 50, 53, 56, 57, 77 Mississippi State University in Starkville 54, 66, 79, 260 MLA style 96 Moate, J. 150 Molloy, M. 180, 199 Monárrez Rodriguez, A. 14 monoculturalism 97 Moore, Marianne 2 Mouradian, V. 224, 228 Mullen, C. A. 28 Muñoz, Jair i, ix, 13, 239, 240, 251 Murphy, A. 24 Murphy, B.O. 243, 260 Nagar, R. 189, 199 Naidoo, D. 27, 3 Nardi, B. 125, 140 Nasir, N. I. S. 50 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) 1, 52 National Center for Education Statistics 27 National Reserve 18

Index  271 National Science Foundation 4 navigational capital 234, 236, 238 new criticism movement 2 New Mexico State University (NMSU) 211, 212, 238 New Mexico x, 24, 111, 113, 127, 178, 211, 212, 213, 226, 238 New School for Social Research 2 New York City 2, 118, 119, 123, 171 Newton, Mississippi 55 Ni de aquí ni de allá 61, 84 novice researchers 94, 101, 130, 187, 259 Nuwer, H. 242 Nyland, C. 153 Odd, West Virginia 204, 205, 208, 209, 210, 236 Office of the Institutional Review Board (IRB) 9, 10, 35, 190 Ogbu, J. 50 Okahana, H. 27 O’Neill, E. 118 Operation Wetback 113 oppositional identities 60 Órale 189, 199 Ordover, N. 254 Ore, T. E. 242, 243 O’Reilly, K. 24 Ortega A. 178, 199 Ortegón, R. R. 5 Otsuji, E. 32 Pachuco 26, 178, 198, 199 Pachuquismo 178 Paltridge, B. 28, 29 Paris, D. 48 Parrish III, W. 27, 30, 257 participant observation ix, 7, 11, 14, 20, 33, 34, 37, 41, 51, 67, 73, 76, 89, 92, 98, 103, 107, 124, 133, 175, 189, 215, 223, 229, 248 Pascoe, C.J. 94 Pateman, C. 242 Pearce, C. 125, 140 Peets, K. F. 86 Pels, P. 14 Peñalosa F. 178, 199 Pennycook, A. 97 people of color 15, 16, 27, 30, 112, 243, 252, 254, 256 Pérez, E. 117, 177, 199 Phillips, T. 29, 48

philosophy 1, 2, 3, 136, 157, 201, 240, 242, 243, 244, 245, 250, 255, 256, 260 Phoenix, Arizona 212 Pidgin Signed English (PSE) 214, 235, 238 plagiarism 28 Pocho 131, 133 Ponce, P. A. 17 Posadas, J. 242 positionality v, 24, 41, 62, 72, 82, 89, 91, 102, 124, 131, 163, 169, 194, 215, 218, 243, 247, 251 power 9, 58, 63, 64, 71, 82, 85, 87, 88, 99, 106, 115, 127, 130, 132, 135, 140, 149, 160, 168, 169, 171, 177, 192, 195, 196, 198, 217, 228, 237, 254, 268 Predominantly White Universities (PWIs) 71 Prensky, M. R. 188, 200 Princeton University 2 Prior, P. 98, 101, 154, 155 professoriate viii, 3, 7, 20, 120, 154, 155, 165, 260 proposition 203, 212 qualitative research viii, lx, x, 7, 9, 10, 12, 13, 14, 19, 20, 27, 29, 32, 39, 40, 42, 57, 58, 59, 87, 98, 101, 107, 126, 144, 154, 226, 231, 232, 255 quantitative research 42, 107 queer x, xi, 1, 25, 27, 84, 179, 215, 216, 217, 252, 254 Quijada Cerecer, P. 126 race 1, 3, 6, 11, 18, 30, 41, 63, 71, 82, 85, 86, 89, 121, 151, 183, 190, 192, 196, 203, 204, 215, 220, 251 racial identities 63, 123, 202 raciolinguistics 250 racism viii, 86, 112, 124, 178, 187, 190, 235, 239, 241, 242, 256 Rallis, S. F. 24 Ramia, G. 153 Ramirez, R. 30 Rampton, B. 59, 130, 133, 134 receptive bilingualism 86 Relaño Pastor, A. M. 84 Remy, J. 242 resistant capital 235, 237, 239 RHET 1500 9, 10, 11, 12, 37, 65, 67, 90, 91, 92, 135, 156 Rhetoric and Writing Studies 68

272 Index Riazantseva, A. 125 Rio Grande Community College 87, 88, 111, 120, 138, 139, 198 Rio Grande River 113, 140 Rodriguez, G. 30, 119, 257 Romani 178 Roozen, K. 159, 165 Rosa, J. 83, 250 Rosales, R. 30 Rossman, G. B. 24 Roth, W. 59, 64, 65 Rubin, G. 254 Rumbaut, R. G. 16 Ruohotie-Lyhty, M. 150 Ryan, G. W. 202, 228 Salemink, O. 14 Salinas, C. Jr. 252 Sallee, M. 29 Salome, M. R. 67 Salvatierra v. Independent School District 5 Sánchez, P. 126 Sandburg, Carl 180, 200 Sandoval, A. 255 Sawir, E. 153 Saxe, G. B. 50 Schensul, J. 10, 11 Scheurich, J. J. 252 Schieffelin, B. B. 67 Schmida, M. 60, 215, 216, 217, 227, 246 Schon, D. 157 Schouten, F. 241 Schuster, J. 3 Schwartz-Marin, E. 84 Seaton, L. 32 second-generation immigrants 16, 26, 60, 61, 126 Sederstrom, S. 16 Seidman, I. 11, 36 Selfa, L. 16 sexism 86, 124, 241, 242, 256 sexual identities 61, 158, 159, 216, 228 Shane, L. III. 241 Shaw, L. 11, 65, 75, 128 Signed Exact English (SEE) 213, 235, 238 Silver, N. 157 Simons, H. W. 2 Simpson, S. B 29, 171 Sismondo 25 Skinner, D. 145 Skutnabb-Kangas, T. 153

social capital 234, 236, 238 socialization 28, 31 social justice 88, 111, 123 social mobility 145, 241 sociocultural 1, 8, 9, 29, 145, 168, 170 socioeconomic 6, 29, 71, 178, 207 Soja, E. 105, 177, 192, 194, 199, 200 Solorzano, D. 252 Sonnie, A. 203, 228 Soong, Thi Tran 30 South Texas Border Initiative (STBI) 5, 6 Spanglish 133, 134, 137, 178 Spanish conquistadores 151 Spark, C. 13 Stake, R. E. 7, 35 Standard Edited American English (SEAS) 70, 71, 126 Standard English 50, 51, 85, 136 Standard Language Ideology (SLI) 71, 72, 160, 197, 259 standpoint theory 25, 217 Starfield, S. 28, 29 Starke-Meyerring, D. 155 Stefancic, J. 85 Steiner, A. 11 stereotype vulnerability i, 15, 16, 31 Stringer, E. T. 148, 231 Stringer, H. 27 student identities 105, 108, 159 students of color viii, 15, 20, 73, 116, 122 subtractive bilingualism 153 subtractive schooling 97 Swales, J. 28 Swales, J. M., 167 symbolic capital 135 symbolic violence 136 Tallichet, S. E. 205, 228 Tardy, C. 128, 135 Taylor, T. 125, 140 teacher identity 70, 105, 106, 162, 163, 164, 166, 170 tenure-track 3, 4, 20, 28, 88, 111, 120, 121, 123, 125, 143, 150, 153, 154, 165, 201, 260 Tessman, D. 84 Texas 4, 5, 6, 56, 77, 178, 201, 213, 214, 215, 254 theoretical frameworks 9, 39, 40, 102, 105, 134, 137, 158, 160, 169, 189, 195, 233 theory presentations 38, 99, 101, 192, 194, 196, 197

Index  273 third space (theory) 99, 100, 101, 105, 106, 175, 176, 177, 178, 187, 192, 193, 194, 195, 196, 198, 233, 259 Thomson, P. 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 106, 122, 159, 165 Throop, C. J. 212, 227 Tierney, W. 29 Timmerman, B. 29, 103 toxic masculinity 242 Tracy, J. 203, 228 Trail of Tears 202, 226 transcription 14, 33, 74, 75, 15 Transfronterizx 83, 84 transgender 11, 27, 205, 243, 252, 253 translanguaging 51, 67, 69, 70, 105, 131, 133, 134, 137, 178, 216, 219 Trevor Project 210 Troman, G. 189, 199 Trump Administration 88 Tucson, Arizona 25, 26, 226, 260 Ullman, C. i, 33, 37, 41, 59, 60, 65, 89, 90, 95, 123, 129, 131, 163 Universidad Autónoma de Ciudad Juarez (UACJ). 143 Universidad de Antioquia 144, 147, 149, 150, 151, 152, 154, 165 Universidad de Jaén 149 University of Arizona 26, 238 University of Minnesota 1, 115, 117, 118, 119, 257 University of Southern Mississippi 54, 79 Urrieta, L. Jr. 145, 149 U.S. citizens 83, 113, 180, 184 U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) 113 Usma Wilches, J. A. 152 U.S.-Mexico border V, 24, 25, 178, 179 Valenzuela, A. 97, 153, 220, 228 Vance, J. D. 209, 210, 228 Van Der Veer, R. 11 Van Dijk, J. A. G. M. 168, 188, 200 Van Oers, B. W. 11 Vasquez, P. 30, 31 Vidal-Ortiz, S. 252, 253 Villenas, S. 117, 140 Volpe, M.F. 27

Wadham, B. 242 Walker, L. 10 Walker, M. 29 war on drugs 179 Wardekker, E. 11 Waters, W. 27 Wee, L. 85 Wegener, C. 32 Weidman, N. 254 Weiss, E. 241 Welch, V. 16 Wenger, E. ix, 8, 62, 64, 73, 75, 76, 77, 89, 101, 125, 154, 159, 165, 180, 186, 195, 196, 198, 199, 202, 223, 225, 228, 230, 231, 254 Werner, T. L. 203, 204, 228 West Virginia 53, 204, 205, 207, 208, 210 – 212, 215, 226, 238 West Virginia University 211 White Anglo Saxon Protestant (WASP) 21 White vii, 1, 3, 4, 6, 11, 14, 18, 25, 26, 50, 51, 52, 63, 71, 72, 82, 175, 202, 203, 217, 219, 231, 233, 234, 236, 237, 241, 243, 247, 252 – 254, 257, 259 Whiteness 51, 72, 82, 83, 85, 234 White supremacy 178 Wilkerson, I. 211, 228 Wilson, J. K. 255 Wolbers, K. A. vii, 224, 225, 228 women of color 16, 254 Woolard, K. A. 67 Wylie 25 Yanagisako, S. 85 Yancey, K. 157, 247 Yang, S. 86 Yigitoglu, N. 150 Yosso, T. J. 187, 200, 234, 235, 259 Youdell, D. 255 Young, M. D. 252 Yuval-Davis, N. 69 Zentella, A. C. 84 Zhou, E. 27 Zhou, J. 153 Zoot Suit Riots 178, 199 Zullig, K. J. 207, 227 Zwehl, P. 147