Transformative Learning

This book contains a series of autoethnographies written by participants of a program on qualitative methods, designed by the editors, and offered at the Nord University Business School in Bodo, Norway, between 2010 and 2016. We called the program “Qualitative Camp” to frame the week-long encounter as a retreat, a training, a seminar, a time apart from daily routine—all rolled into one experience. The purpose of camp was to develop the ethnographic writing skills of reporting—and bringing to life—observational and depth-interviewing techniques. In this book, contributors were invited to write autoethnographic accounts of their personal experiences on learning and employing qualitative methods. The autoethnographies are written as stories to place the lived experience of participants at the center of analysis. From the position of the participants’ current professorships and other professional placements, they recall what they learned at Qualitative Camp. These autoethnographies are advantaged by being far enough away from graduate school to have perspective, yet close enough in past time that readers learning qualitative methods can identify with the existential struggle of writing personal stories about their experience. The chapters are both a report on what participants learned at camp, and examples of the writing skills we set out to enhance at the camp. Our claim is that these distillations of Qualitative Camp memories demonstrate how the participants gave meaning to their experiences, and thus are examples of transformative learning. As the chapters develop, they provide evidence for conceptual change as a result of their participation in Qualitative Camp.