ABSTRACT
This chapter is written to enmesh four different individuals’ perspectives on and experiences in qualitative research. As three of us pursue PhDs in qualitative research and one seeks tenure as an assistant professor of qualitative research, we find ourselves a bit baffled as to how we ended up here. Three of us are first-generation college students, and all four of us began our academic journeys in departments and colleges outside education and research methodologies. No one would have convinced any one of us, only a few years ago, that methodology would be our trajectory, and perhaps even more impossibly, that being here would be right for us. As we considered how we arrived at where we are, we agreed on a single-word explanation: relationships. Using a Pedagogy of Tenderness as a conceptual framework, this chapter’s dialogic narrative structure examines the ways that we four have worked and learned together, and how those connections have informed our identities as qualitative methodologists and our understandings and enactments of mentorship. This connected journey through/with/in qualitative inquiry is one that has emphasized to us the degrees to which mentorship is inextricably bound into/with relationships. These communities that we have built together are sacred and powerful spaces where we support one another in agentive and meaningful ways.
