Race (inter)views: From the classroom to public discourse

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Abstract
This essay explores what happened to a group of 19 graduate students as they learned how to collect data from others using the interview method during an introductory seminar on qualitative research. Through inductively exploring a research question (How do people in education talk about race ?), students encountered dimensions of research that challenged their fixed, habitual categories of understanding about race. The issues that emerged from these collected narratives concern the polysemic nature of social phenomena, the inescapable and often painful reality of positioning or locating ourselves in relation to others in the practice of research, and the obligation to respond to those who help us construct meanings. The focus is on students' struggles with issues of personal intimacy and analytic distance, in addition to our coming to terms with the obligation to make a coherent statement about what was learned. Developing a perspective and shaping a story in response to the experience of collecting data from others involved moving from the classroom to the larger public arena of debate and discussion on issues of race.

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