Nov 24th 09
Posted by justin in CCR601
Lather, Patti. “Research as Praxis.” Harvard Education Review 56 (1986): 257-77.
- The primary goal of this essay is to involve researchers in the democratized process of research that emphasizes negotiation, reciprocity, and empowerment in the interest of the researched subjects – something of a Frierian emancipatory research as practice.
- The writer draws on feminist, neo-Marxist critical ethnography, and Frierian participatory research to create her research as praxis.
- Postpostitivist research is marked by approaches to inquiry which recognize that knowledge is ‘socially constituted, historically embedded, and valuationally based. Theory serves an agentic function and research illustrates, rather than provides a truth test” (259).
- The author wants to create an empirical research that can be used to change the world to the better. A large portion of the essay (258-61) is used to describe studies where this sort of work was done in the late 70s and early 80s.
- This article champions the feminist research ethical moves of reciprocity and self-reflection (262).
- To make theory tenable and usable, a reciprocal relationship between theory and data must emerge. Theory must be supported by data and data collected in the future must revise theory in light of new turns. This is critical reflection that allows us to move beyond simply assigning theoretical positions to things that are complex and difficult to understand.
- Triangulation is crucial for creating valid data (270). Also, construct validity must be present to ground studies in theoretical constructs (Latour is spinning at his desk on this assumption/claim). The systematized reflexivity of theory and data is crucial in maintaining validity of data.
- According to the author, “This essay has one essential argument: a more collaborative approach to critical inquiry is needed to empower the researched, to build emancipatory theory, and to move toward the establishment of data credibility within praxis oriented, advocacy research” (272).
Nov 24th 09
Posted by justin in CCR601
Welsh, Susan. “Writing: In and With the World.” College Composition and Communication 46 (1995): 103-07.
- The author writes against the idea that Bartholomae and Elbow’s writing as an expression of ‘self’ is an adequate description of what is going on in the writing process. The author wonders,
- What is it that initiates writing, the self or the discursive context?
- The essay is a meditation on the values of Expressivist pedagogy.
- “The open writer in the open classroom brings into view neither a deeper self nor a discoursing subject but a more complex lived world, saturated with virtualities of reading and meaning and intention that an expressivist or discourse community orientation would not equip students to generate or manage” (106).
- The author is interested in “eventfulness” and “conversation” because they evade binary relations and place the student writer in a therapeutics – a therapeutics of writing the self or a therapeutics of textuality (107).
Nov 24th 09
Posted by justin in CCR601
Salazar, C. A Third World Women’s Text: Between the Politics of Criticism and Cultural Politics. In S.B. Gluck and D. Patai, editors, Women’s Word: The Feminist Practice of Oral History. Routledge, NY and London, 1991
- The author contends that women’s autobiography has become a central part of the “intellectual, political, and even armed resistance” waged by oppressed people against dominant or hegemonic groups (93).
- The author hopes to demonstrate how, through close readings of Latin American women’s histories, the different ways that oral history addresses and transgresses socially coded binaries oppositions such as “text/context, personal/political, public/private, knower/known, orality/literacy, and high/low culture” (ibid.).
- The author also hopes to attent to “some of the complexities of production and translation of ‘cultural otherness’ by discussing important criticisms of ethnographic writing practices” and also to reflect on the politics of women’s oral histories.
- Ethnographic accounts are problematic because “once discourse becomes text, it’s openness as dialogue, together with its evocative and performative elements, are lost: the punctuation and silences of speech are gone; the events in the life of the narrator often follow a chronological pattern, partly induced by the questions the ethnographer poses; it is edited, translated, and, finally, given a title” (98).
- A serious problem in gathering oral histories is the power difference between the ethnographer and the Other that structures the interview context in the form of an interplay between demand and desire.
- This article discusses many issues of the “stupid native” wherein colonial hegemony is allowed to move through unimpeded later to be dismantled through guile and tactics. Strategic silences confront the violence of the colonizer.
Nov 24th 09
Posted by justin in CCR601
Kirsch, Gesa E., and Peter Mortensen. “Toward an Ethics of Research.” Ethical Dilemmas in Feminist Research: The Politics of Location, Interpretation, and Publication. Ed. Gesa E. Kirsch. Albany: State U of New York P, 1999. 87-103.
- The authors aim is to “map out significant problems and opportunities that await researchers who want their inquiries to be a resource for individual and group expressions of self-determination” (87).
- The authors claim there are a couple of benefits to feminist research. 1) critical reflection tends to refine the translation of theory into practice, 2) reflection also makes the research process more accountable by exposing it to colleagues, and participants; 3) the conclusion that making knowledge in research is not epistemologically different from its construction in other parts of our lives is also key.
- The authors discuss ethics in terms of 1) collaborative work with others, 2) work within institutions, 3) work within the profession, 4) work that entails multiple roles (researcher, teacher, learner), and 5) work toward sharing what we know with our various publics (89).
- Collaboration – The inclusion of all stakeholders – teachers, parents, admins, community members, etc., – in the case of an education study – must be identified and included in all stages of inquiry.
- Institutions – This is where feminist research ethics intersects with the institution via places/forums like the IRBs and federal legislation on human subject research.
- Paul Anderson – you’ve already read for this assignment – is identified for bringing IRBs into the composition discussion.
- Privacy is considered in the context of consent in this section. The conversation on consent and privacy should answer some fundamental questions: 1) consent should be renegotiated if a research project changes dramatically, 2) consent should be recognized if participants or researchers feel uncomfortable with relations or arrangements as they evolve, 3) the task of securing participants’ informed consent, should be handled by a third party, 4) the status of participants’ consent, should not be disclosed to teacher-researchers as long as students are no longer subject to teacher evaluation, and 5) information collected from consenting participants should be scrutinized for its potential to humiliate, embarrass or otherwise harm participants if published (92).
- Alcoff is a big source here.
- The national organizations (CCCC, NTCE) need to also articulate a ethical research framework.
- The authors hope that folks can respect one another’s ideological and methodological differences within the discipline cordially.
- For the authors, critical reflection is central to the researcher/teacher position. In fact, “critical reflection monitors research and teaching and learning as they evolve, opening new paths of inquiry as needed” 9607). Reciprocity is also key for the researcher/teacher – student relationship. Both have a lot to learn from one another.
- The authors are really adamant that “qualitative research on literacy provide ample reflection on all significant ethical dilemmas encountered in the field and at the desk” (99). These reflections should be a central feature of the text.
Nov 24th 09
Posted by justin in CCR601
Harris, Joseph. “From the Editor: The Work of Others.” CCC 45 (1994): 439–41.
- This piece is a meditation on the new editor of CCCs in 1994 on the ethics involved with citation of student work and other forms of writing. There is an explicit directive in this piece that instructors must “get written permission from any student whose work you wish to include in an article for CCC” (440). In other words, this is the first time that a directive comes directly from the chair of the discipline’s flagship journal requiring informed consent of student work.
- The editor also hopes that researchers will allow responses from the researched about their work before sending to publish.
- There is not a need – according to the editor – to publish students in the works cited of the document researchers create. Perhaps this position is (or should be) different today.
- The editor characterizes the “see XXX 2004” as a “paying of rent, a granting of rights to certain terms or ideas, as well as proof that the author has done some homework” (441).
- Overall, a neat meditation on what the author would like to see in the way of disciplinary conventions in CCC in the mid 1990s.
