Comprehensive Support for Institutional Ethnography Dissertations

In this session, I will present my approach to mentoring doctoral students toward their dissertation projects that use Institutional Ethnography as a their primary method for data collection, analysis, and reporting. I will start by describing my own experience as a doctoral student using IE as a method for my dissertation. In choosing IE, a method that my advisor and committee were not familiar with, I faced a dual challenge of learning IE and defending it as a valid method for my dissertation study. Now, to ensure my students do not face similar obstacles, I create learning communities for all of my doctoral advisees that include the following components:

1. An IE as a research method course, where students conduct their own IE study

2. Regular writing groups, where students can bring their writing for feedback and have an opportunity to ask questions about their IE work

3. IE Journal Clubs, where we pair reading a scholarly article that used IE as a method with a chapter of one of Dorothy Smith's foundational works

4. Peer mentoring, where more experienced graduate students provide feedback and support to each other and to those newer to IE as a method

5. Collaborative IE research projects

My goal is to create an IE community where students have multiple opportunities to learn about IE as a method and to participate in the IE research process before they begin their independent IEs. The final part of this process is the advocacy work I do as their chair to advocate for IE as a valid method and to ensure that the committee and our ethics board is educated about what IE is, so students do not face institutional obstacles in pursuing IE as their dissertation research method.