Learning and social change: using interviews as tools to prompt reflection on practice

Abstract

This article argues that interviewing is a process in which interviewees can reflect on critical decisions about their academic careers. Reflective practice is a course of action where a person ponders significant incidents in her or his life. In so doing, she or he can make critical decisions about her or his own well-being. Drawing on our experiences collecting qualitative data for ADVANCE Purdue, an NSF-funded project to increase the number and success of women faculty in STEM academic disciplines, we illustrate how interviews triggered our interviewees to think differently about accessing or interpreting promotion and tenure policies of the university. Hence, we argue that interviews can be considered as a form of reflective practice where interviewees decide to take alternative actions to enhance their well-being. In this paper, we ask: (a) How do interviews trigger new realizations among interviewees?; and (b) How do interviews act as agents of potential social change? Data are derived from semi-structured interviews with faculty members from science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and agriculture disciplines at Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana. We interpret the data qualitatively in the context of reflective practice.

Keywords:

• interviews
• learning
• social change
• methods
• reflective practice
• qualitative analyses

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to our participants for sharing experiences with us. We appreciate the discussions and comments provided on and around this work by the other members of the Research in Feminist Engineering (RIFE) Group. We also thank Dr Nathan J. McNeill, as well as the anonymous reviewers of this paper, for their constructive comments.

This research is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. HRD-0811194. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.