My current class for the MA in Teaching English that I am working on right now is about intercultural communication and its relevance in the English-language classroom. So, we are learning about interviewing to hear - really hear - culture. This is particularly interesting to me as I assigned a class of students to do interviews a few weeks ago. I wish I had had some of these resources to share with them then.
Below are some comments by the late Greg Sharrow of the Vermont Folklife Center from an article called, "The Art of Interviewing."
...how can you know for sure what it is like to stand in someone else's shoes-until you ask? And when you ask, it is quite likely that your understanding of the world and the people in it will expand.
If, for example, you want to learn about a culture and the lives of people who share this culture, your challenge as a researcher is to understand that experience from an insider's point of view. [...] That means that whether something makes sense to you-or even strikes you as just plain wrong-is irrelevant.
Good questions are an important tool, certainly, but the outcome of an interview will ultimately depend on how well you draw a person out and empower them to show you the shape of their world as they know it.
...your role as an active listener will shape the experience even more than the specific questions that you ask.
(emphases mine)
Some of Sharrow's comments on his approach reminded me of the approach that Malcolm Gladwell says he uses.
