Quaran-Teens 2020 Blog Series: Collaborative Digital Auto-Ethnography During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Introduction

On March 11, the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global pandemic (WHO Director-General’s opening remarks, 2020). As the coronavirus pandemic has spread across the globe, most educational institutions have turned to virtual schooling and were forced to close their doors and follow the global “stay at home” policy (Barnes et al., 2020). Though most teachers had some experience with technology-integrated instruction, the context required a new reliance on digital media in times of crises. With school closure and exam cancellation widespread, institutions sought alternative teaching techniques that would function during the quarantine lockdown. These decisions significantly changed teaching practices around virtual educational technology. Designed and implemented in virtual classes, this chapter highlights one collaborative digital auto-ethnography project called Quaran-Teens 2020 undertaken by high school seniors in Memphis, Tennessee and published by Anthrodendum.org. The aim of this chapter is to examine the blogs posted by Quaran-Teens 2020 to demonstrate the effectiveness of auto-ethnography as a rhetorical writing style, digital media project, and social science methodology.

Using auto-ethnography in the virtual classroom is an effective pedagogical strategy because it situates the individual as both a culturally produced person and culture-producing person. Auto-ethnography, defined as the study of one’s own experience of culture, is a genre of research and writing that connects the personal to the cultural, placing the self within a social context (Reed-Danahay 1997; Holt, 2003; Dunn & Myers, 2020; Olmos-López & Tusting, 2020). Auto-ethnography is a very personal method for student understanding and reflection on their own personal experiences both subjective like a memoir but also resonating with universal human concepts. During virtual education, auto-ethnography is a particularly meaningful way to communicate an individual and cultural experience simultaneously. The personal approach and continual self-reflexivity are good storytelling, building personal connection and emotional resonance with the reader. What could be called a “fusion between social science and screenplay yields a compelling story where effects of reality and human experience come together” (Forber-Pratt, 2015b, p. 821).

In addition, the project enabled time-sensitive data collection and research in an unprecedented time of global pandemic and quarantine, providing rare and valuable insight that connects the local to the global through collaborative digital media as called for by Roy and Uekusa (2020). The project was collaborative, producing blogs written by small groups of students, and digital, relying on collaborative digital educational technology for virtual schooling and blogging. The collaborative, digital nature of the project suggests ways to overcome the traditional limitations of ethnography and may be an effective strategy beyond the specific context. To establish a meaningful foundation for this argument, this chapter must position auto-ethnography within the literature on rhetorical narrative, digital media and social scientific pedagogy.

This chapter, therefore, argues that auto-ethnography is a valuable pedagogical practice and a rhetorical writing approach during COVID-19 crisis, clearly important in terms of the integration of project-based educational technology, communication through blogging and virtual schooling as well as allowance for critical inquiry of the self through storytelling. Thus, the contents of the blog posts are analyzed in terms of critical self-inquiry, the social construction of society, storytelling, and ethical considerations. The findings show the effectiveness of auto-ethnography as persuasive rhetorical narrative approach and a timely method of sociolinguistics data collection, especially in times of digital media and cultural crisis and raise broad implications for education, writing, sociolinguistics, and digital media.