The discourse-based interview (DBI) allows researchers to explore writers’ tacit knowledge. This article describes how we taught and learned to adapt a DBI-based interviewing process through the reflections of both the professor and two graduate students in a graduate-level course, Field Methods in Technical Communication. By participating in a large-scale research project focusing on how online PhD students viewed their education post-graduation, current graduate students learned about planning, conducting, and analyzing interviews. The authors reflect on how they not only learned qualitative methods, but how the experience made them feel like part of a research community (as well as an academic community). Taking a dialogic approach, the professor and both graduate students weave narratives, reflections, and the voices of their participants to share their experiences in uncovering tacit knowledge using a DBI-inspired process.

This essay argues for the value of an ecological metaphor in conceptualizing, designing, and enacting research in writing studies. Such a metaphor conceives of activities, actors, situations, and phenomena as interdependent, diverse, and fused through feedback.