Mentoring PostQual

“A clever, beautiful quote will go here. Some day.”

Unlike some authors of postqualitative genre, I am privileged–I am a doctoral student taking an inaugural course in Post Qualitative Inquiry. I have a proper instructor and a syllabus to nurture my inner post-structuralist, peers to validate Vygotsky and Piaget, a body of literature to roam, and three credit hours to justify reading and experimentation. I know Jenni had no such opportunity, and neither did (…).

Yet, perhaps, my greatest fortune is that I am getting acculturated into postqual before the two fontanelles of quantitative and qualitative thinking in my want-to-be-a-research-methodologist head had fused together to form a hard, thick, boney casing around my thoughts. Presently, I have nothing to lose as I have no idea when, where, or even whether I will hold an academic position, or even publish. Therefore, this piece, written from a student-stepping-into-postqual perspective, is a mixture of risk-free wonder, care-free play, and of defiant confusion. I offer you a glimpse into my train of thought as I pondered my options for the final project. It took place somewhere in the middle of the semester.

It began with a discussion of the final project on our second day of class. The tentative topic is Mentoring in PostQual. Lost in thought, I probably missed something. Why mentoring? We exchanged some ideas; a couple of students offered examples of mentoring relationships in their lives, and it was wonderful because I got a feel for what kind of people these new classmates of mine are, but the topic… the topic is meh. I am not excited about it. No, really, why mentoring? Clearly, Jenni is the mentor in the spotlight here, but why a mentor and not a teacher? This is a rhetorical question–I believe I know what she will answer; she likes to point out that she is not there to deposit knowledge into her students’ heads. …is this what she believes teaching is–depositing? Wait… this is my rendition of what Jenni thinks of teaching. How does Jenni define “teaching”…  Actually, she does not teach, she facilitates. Never mind, teaching is irrelevant because the topic is mentoring. Is she a mentor?  Why not a Sherpa, or a coach, or even a doula? I am resisting the impulse to explore the meaning of the word “mentor,” to operationally define “mentoring.” Much to my excitement, I realize that by refusing to go there, I skip over a pile of imaginary manure even as I preemptively reach for the shovel of Derrida’s linguistic differance and Spivak’s discourse on hierarchies. Oh, the cleverness of me! Is this the evidence of me becoming?

I set out into poststructuralism a year ago, while in my Qualitative II class, and since then, I have clearly grown. I walk around this pile of manure, look at it one last time, wondering what my definitions of “mentor” or “mentoring” might sound like if I give it more thought; but as soon as an answer threatens to form,  I run away with my nose pinched and enlightened: “an inquiry into mentoring in PostQual should not be about “What is mentoring;” otherwise, what am I doing in PostQual?!”

I remember the playful exchange we had during an earlier class–“How is […]? Where is […]?” The intentional disruption and absurdity of these questions made me laugh, and so I play along: if it is not “what is mentoring?” then it must be “where is mentoring?” or “how is mentoring?” because “why is mentoring” in the context of the classroom and instruction reeks of politics and of more manure. In fact, I would not even know what theorist to use to dig myself out of this one. Manning, perhaps?

I should press on just to see if I can turn the topic blahs into an opportunity for a methodological challenge.

A student of Educational Research, Measurement, and Evaluation, I dutifully take the inventory of my newest shiny set of PostQualitative tools: thinking with theory, writing in minor, tuning into minor shifts, thinking with concepts…  Thinking with a concept is my natural mode of existence. I recently became aware that I think in images and that these images create a movie as thoughts die off, develop, interact with memories, recalls, conversations with others, and so forth. Sometimes, the movie is blurry, in the background of my conversations; other times, the movie becomes vivid and sharp, positioned front and center. Concepts are visuals. I visualize concepts. It turns out, I cannot think WITHOUT concepts.

A year ago, in Qual 2, I read Jackson & Mazzei’s “Thinking with Theory” and in the first week, I experimented with the idea of “plugging in” thoughts into concepts. I dusted off my husband’s beautiful set of Prismacolor pencils and sketched to make sense of the process. I loved it. The activity opened my eyes to the world of “plugs” and reminded me of mushroom-picking. First, you do not see anything, you only know where to look for them: different mushrooms like different trees. Then suddenly, you see one, hidden under a leaf; then another, and another, then more, and more. You do not choose your path–the mushrooms lead you–and you can certainly get lost in the woods. The activity is exhilarating and somewhat torturous–it does not end once your basket is full, as one should expect–the mushrooms are still all around you, one is more gorgeous than the other. They taunt you and tempt you to make space in your basket by dumping the unimpressive specimens you settled for in the beginning, back when you did not know whether you will find any mushrooms at all. Conceptual plugs are my mushrooms, and it is a fitting analogy because I suddenly realize that mycelia are a perfect example of a rhizome. Deleuze and Guatarri’s rhizome.

Ideas. Concepts… they buzz, and chatter, and crowd my head. Where was I? Ah yes. I was searching for an acceptable conceptual plug for my “mentoring in PostQual” topic. Since I am still not “feeling it,” I have to force connections with the PostQual scholarship rhizome that grew for me this semester from my thinking and readings. I am a will-be-methodologist, damn it!

Because I am not yet feeling it, the plug does not feel organic, like a mushroom or mole tunnels. I need a more mechanic assemblage with solid, well-defined, and hopefully, breakable edges, like those found in quantitative methodology. I am thinking of measurement. Let’s see if the model fits: I need to identify my latent variable, the construct, then connect it to the carefully boxed in observed variables.  Yes, I am aware that “construct” and “concept” are not the same things, and no, I am not going to apologize for using these terms interchangeably because in PpostQual, I claim my right to experiment, play, stretch, and abstract whatever I wish. So all I need to do is identify my observed variables, complete the model, and test the “plug.”

I am amused to see the quantitative idea of modeling grow soft and lose its hard shape in my PostQualitative play; it reminds me of Dali’s infamous melting clocks. Measurement is still valid, but hardly recognizable. It is still measurement, but in Deleuze and Guattari’s terms: “Stratometers, deleometers, BwO units of density, BwO units of convergence” (Deluze and Guattari, 1987, p. 4).

Here, I can illustrate. See figure 1, or better yet, figure 2.

I wonder if this is what truly mixed method could be–quantitative and qualitative methodologies mixed like a cocktail, not like a bar trail mix. I should stash the idea into my PostQual methodological toolbox, or rather my new anti-Methodological un(-tool)box.

It is time to plant a stick in the mud and think about mentoring. Jenni suggested the “stick in the mud” method to me today after I confessed that I am becoming way too fast to produce anything for a publication. Alas, all I have is fragments–reflections, notes, comments, mental images and video clips–the artifacts that fall into my wagon as I keep accelerating through and toward the unknown plateaus.

So what of the melting model of mentoring in PostQual? At this moment, I see it is a reflective model, the one where the latent variable(s) is/are said to cause the observed variables.

If the latent construct is “mentoring,” then my immediately obvious observed variables caused by mentoring are 1) growth in academic confidence; 2) intellectual growth; 3) academic acculturation. The more I reflect on each, the more I consider how much they are entwined, and so I must indicate that they correlate. I also became interested in mycology, rekindled my love of gardening and thing-making, and developed a kinder opinion of pigeons. Most important, perhaps, I found the experience of playing in PostQual therapeutic as for the first time in my life, I finally felt validated in my life-long propensity to live slowly. I like to walk fast, but I always think and I work–in every iteration of this word–slowly. Where in my model does this batch of observations fit?

The model is starting to look entangled: Jenni infected me with Manning’s “Minor Gesture” months before this semester, so I came to class armed with the vocabulary and a small working arsenal of PostQual concepts. I was also familiar with Thinking With Theory and therefore, felt confident from day one. On the other hand, Jenni challenged me–knowingly or unknowingly–to read beyond our syllabus and humored my consistently delighted reviews of these detours. I used these readings as my intellectual fuel or better yet, food,–and so I grew. As I grew intellectually, I also grew in confidence.

My reading detours virtually introduced me to the PostQual pantheon, the abstracted, mythical bodies whose names keep appearing and reappearing in journal articles, books, and our class discussion. Clearly, they have names, but also (probably, though not necessarily) faces and voices. They probably eat, drink, and sleep, laugh and shout when they get angry. They probably shop. I know that some of them go for walks and talk to animals. They are the assumed material bodies filling the void in the absence of their physical bodies. I imagine these scholars because their written words broadcast connections. These connections send me zig-zagging until I start to feel more familiar with some, but not the others. The growing familiarity helped make PostQualitative ideas less abstract, and when Jenni brought in our guest speakers whom I already knew and admired through the readings, I felt the kinship. The feeling of kinship led me to believe I have finally found my tribe, especially once I realized how familiar I have become with its language and its tradition to avoid traditions. I have been acculturated. Further, the effects of these big three variables that I now recognize to be the result of Jenni’s mentorship (whatever mentorship means–I still refuse to step there) created the entry point into the thinking of the material–the pigeons, the mushrooms, my garden, the numerous versions of cats, clocks, cameras and phones, pizza, snacks, beer, and bagels, things I made or consider making. I am plugged into a multiplicity that no longer fits on the page that holds my model, the multiplicity that exists above the surface only as shadows and fog in quantitative and conventional qualitative epistemological frameworks. It is ever changing; it grows as I grow. It is replete with holes, entry points, and cuts. I can enter it any time and anywhere I please, and I definitely please.

As I step further and further away from my pretentiously orderly, yet pregnant model, I think of mentorship in PostQual in terms of affects, or better yet as a chain of affects (Deluze and Guattari, 1987, p. 30). I also think of how grateful I am, just as Susan

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remember

 

Saldana’s litmus test. Color

 

Why thank you notes? When I came to the States, I was not familiar with the concept of a thank you note. It was not a part of my culture. In Russia, we expressed our gratitude verbally, and I was amused why the Americans felt they had to express the gratitude in writing, and in prefabricated cards as well. I thought it was a strange custom, and I attributed it to economical/ marketing climate. I had a traumatic experience related to that, and it was a part of my culture shock. If epistemologies are vehicles/by-products/results of enculturation, then it is appropriate that I use thank you notes as artifacts of my enculturation.

“Dear Jenni, thank you for everything you have already done for me as a mentor, and what you are still going to do for me and with me. A more pressing thank you, however, is for providing this enabling constraint–thinking about mentoring in qual for my final project (and asking to make it fit on two pages. Huh!)