Writing Our Way Into Shared Understanding: Collaborative Autobiographical Writing in the Qualitative Methods Class

From her experience as an instructor, the author finds that it is valuable to engage graduate students in conducting a study within their qualitative methods course. In this article, the author discusses how she used a collaborative autobiographical research approach. Class members generate autobiographical writing to be shared with the group, and then the group collaboratively analyzes and interprets the set of autobiographical materials. The author goes on to describe two examples of collaborative autobiographical projects grounded, respectively, in memory-work and narrative inquiry frameworks. The complexity of autobiographical writing and the value of collaboration are discussed, along with ethical issues relating to role blurring, coresearcher relationships, anonymity, Research Ethics Board timelines, and cycles of consent.