ABSTRACT
The question is how we can develop this reflective practice? In this paper, we will show how a method that is well known to many human geographers, namely qualitative interviews, can be used in a manner that is unusual to many geographers, namely by interviewing one’s own students. Qualitative interviews can provide in-depth understanding of the interviewee’s life world (Kvale, 1996); hence by interviewing one’s own students, we may gain valuable knowledge about the “how” and “why” of students’ learning thereby adding to our reflection-on-action as geographer teachers. Unfortunately, interviewing (one’s own) students is not as straightforward as it may seem. At least we were surprised when we began using our extensive interview experience inside academia (Madsen & Adriansen, 2006; Madsen & Winslow, 2009). Based on these surprises, we will address three main themes: the implications of doing insider interviews; ethical issues when interviewing one’s own students and using visual co-constructions as a means of interviewing. A visual co-construction is an artefact, a paper on which the interview is written and drawn by the interviewer and interviewee. The three themes are interrelated in so far as insider interviews raise special ethical concerns, especially when interviewing one’s own students where power relations are at stake, and the creation of visual coconstructions during interviewing can be a means of levelling the analytical power of the interviewer.
