Engaging the Student Role

Abstract

Working within the symbolic interactionist tradition, this article presents an ethnographic research agenda for studying the ways that “people engage roles as students.” Using an ethnographic study of two Protestant Christian seminaries as an illustrative case, I consider the ways the student role may be conceptualized and studied as ethnographic instances of “education in the making.” This includes the matters of people (a) entering into the student role, (b) attending to instruction, (c) being assessed, (d) sustaining efforts, (e) attending to one’s peers, (f) encountering difficulties, (g) experiencing failure and termination, and (h) pursuing subsequent studies. I concentrate on establishing the fundamental elements of theory and methods that can focus research and comparative analyses on the activities that constitute the student role.