Nov 2nd 09
Posted by justin in CCR691
Tolar-Burton, Vicki. Spiritual Literacy in John Wesley’s Methodism: Reading, Writing, and Speaking to Believe. Waco: Baylor UP, 2008. Print.
Chapter One: John Wesley and the Rhetorical and Literacy Practices of Early Methodism
Summary:
There’s a lot going on in this section as it introduces the reader to Wesley’s program and also serves as the blueprint
for the remainder of the book. Early in the introduction, VTB lays out a couple of different goals for her work:
- Describe how Welsey’s Methodism encouraged/sponsored “spiritual literacy” that took place in private, communal and institutional contexts (2).
- Illustrate how Wesley – due to his understanding of the transformative power of language in spirituality – wanted to make “ordinary” Methodists readers, writers and public speakers (1).
- First contextualize then “tell the story” of the opportunities that Wesley offered ordinary, “lower-class” folks through a community literacy that “included personal practices [journals/diaries], small group leadership, distance learning, and publication” (4). In this process, Burton hopes to demonstrate how Wesley’s rhetoric was representative of the doctrine of “priesthood of all believers” that emphasized egalitarian spiritual principles and the importance of lived, personal experience.
In the sections that follow, VTB contextualizes the Methodist movement in the contexts of religious rhetoric and the religious and political climate of the early 18th century. After building context, VTB explains the philosophic theories undergirding Wesley’s program (Lockean emphasis on the primacy of experience) before briefly sketching the class tensions that arose because of Wesley’s community literacy efforts. The first chapter closes with a mapping of the book in total.
Method:
- In addition to laying out these broad goals for the study, VTB also discusses her method in bits and pieces throughout the introduction. She is primarily interested in composing an account that treats with equal measure the principles and questions of New Literacy Studies scholars like David Barton, Mary Hamilton, Deborah Brandt, Ellen Cushman, and Beverly Moss as well as historians of literacy like Heidi Brayman Hackel and Jonathan Rose.
- VTB also recognizes that her study takes up intimately the study of women. In this way, VTB’s work is one of feminist historiography as it employs both a “her-story” approach to the literacy practices of women in the early Methodist movement as well as a narrative reconstruction of how women were integrated “into the fabric of Methodist history” (5). In so doing, she hopes to demonstrate women’s agency and power in this particular sociohistorical moment.
Useful Quotes:
- My approach to early Methodist texts is influence by the work of David Barton and Mary Hamilton, who suggest that literacy practices are “the general cultural ways of utilizing written language which people draw upon in their lives” and include people’s “awareness of literacy, constructions of literacy and discourses of literacy, how people talk about and make sense of literacy” (7) (9).
- My study stands with the poor, the ordinary people of early Methodism, by seeking to identify, describe, and understand the literacy and rhetorical practices available to the poor and laboring classes in eighteent-century Methodism and by including their texts and voices as they participated in practices of private, communal, and institutional spirituality. (7)
- John Wesley advocated a number of specific modes of public expression for Methodist women, including spiritual conversation, speaking or praying in bands and classes, public prayer, public testimony or witness, exhortation, and expounding upon a scriptural passage or some other text, which might be accomplished by reading it aloud and asking questions of those gathered as to meaning. (18)
- For Wesley, the rhetoric of experience begins with the perception of the inner and outer experience (which he describes using rhetorical language as a kind of testimony to the self from the senses). (24)
- This book describes the order of discourse in early Methodism, a new order that disrupted the British rhetorical hierarchy at the point of sexuality and politics. The uses wich Methodist women, the lower order, and the poor made of spoken and written discourse both threatened the existing order. . . and worked against revolutionary change. . . (30).
Questions:
- I find the sort of work that VTB is doing to be really, really interesting. I wonder what sorts of studies of “community literacy practices” are made possible through historiography?
- What are some of the ethical dilemmas of representation involved in rhetorical histories of literacy? How do we represent research subjects that are already in the process of being represented (through archival materials, second-hand sources, etc.)?
- Where do we start to look for materials like VTB is using in this text to examine the “lower ranks” of folks in the past? How is this process one of representation vs. re-creation? Does this diminish the ethos of the study at all?
- In keeping with the previous question, how do reclaimed rhetorical histories – I’m thinking of Glynn’s Rhetoric Retold or Unspoken: the Rhetoric of Silence – complicate our idea of historiography? How do the politics of research methods play into these reconstructions/re-evaluations? Are any historical methods apolitical? ( I doubt it, but it’s worth asking)
Oct 28th 09
Posted by justin in CCR691
From Methods and Methodology in Composition Research
Gesa Kirsch and Patricia A. Sullivan
Chapter 7 : Ethnography and Composition: Studying Language at Home
This chapter provides a great how-to for ethnography. Highlights:
- Ethnography works in situations where the researcher has epistemic privilege
- Ethnographers tend to focus on the daily routines in the everyday lives of the communities being studied.
- 3 modes of ethnography:
- Comprehensive-oriented: this is almost impossible because it asks you to look at EVERY aspect of the researched.
- Topic oriented – focus on one or more aspects of life known to exist in a community.
- Hypothesis-oriented – when you already know a great deal about a community – usually the result of an amalgam of the other two.
- All ethnographies need a theoretical dimension (Marxist, materialist, cognitive, ecological, etc.) The theoretical lens informs the method.
- Ethnography requires open-mindedness and immersion.
- The question of how to gain access or enter the community must be addressed
- Triangulation as a protective measure is necessary. Triangulation is a comparison between what you think you recorded and what the informants explanations of what were recorded (and vice-versa) are. Ensures reliability in data.
- Data analysis and coding schemes are part of sifting and shaping data collected.
- Last step is to write the ethnography.
- Some cautions/questions to be considered:
- Don’t assume your epistemic privilege will always be useful. Your “knowledge” about a community may really skew your observations
- What role does an ethnographer’s degree of membership in a community play in successfully carrying out the study?
- How does the role of the researcher affect the preexisting established relationships in the community
- Will the ethnographer make assumptions about what certain behaviors signify or how meaning is established in this community based on previous knowledge or on the actual data collected?
- Would an outsider attach more significance to observed patterns than the insider, based on the degrees of distance?
- What issues might an insider face when writing up the ethnography?
From Ethical Dilemmas in Feminist Research: The Politics of Location, Interpretation, and Publication
By Gesa E. Kirsch
Chapter Two: What Do You Know About My Life Anyway? Ethical Dilemmas in Researcher-Participant Relations
Chapter Three: Whose Words, Whose Reality? : The Politics of Representation and Interpretation
Again, for the sake of time, a bulleted format: Chapter Two:
- Make it easy to establish a rapport with subjects to validate their concerns.
- Allow subjects interviewing other subjects to form close bonds on their common cultural experiences.
- Dismantle the traditional hierarchy between researcher and researched. . . possibly forming a friendship/relationship.
- There are pitfalls to having a relationship with participants. By using interview methodology as a lens, Kirsch demonstrates how some researchers who strive for close relationships with participants risk that such relationships might end with the participant being disappointed because of broken trust and possibly exploitation
- Be aware that there is a difference between friendship and friendliness
- Interviews are constructed occasions – hence, there is a power dynamic and the folks being interviewed tend to put on their “best face” for the rhetorical situation.
- There are difficulties in remaining objective in the face of blatant ism’s (sex, race, etc.).
- Newkirk (UNH) has some provisions for how to conduct ethnography responsibly:
- Participants should be willing to receive critical feedback and hear bad news from researchers and vice-versa.
- Participants have a right to co interpretations. In other words, the interpretations of those being researched should be included in research narratives, even if the two parties (researcher/researched) don’t agree on the interpretations
- Researchers should bear the ‘responsibility of intervention’ – in other words, researchers should be willing to intervene if unethical things happen in the course of the study.
- Renegotiation of consent may need to occur as a project goes on in case of ethical dilemmas on the part of the researcher or the researched.
- IRBs aren’t adequate for this sort of research because the protect the researched in medical/physical ways and cannot address the qualitative concerns of close research.
Chapter Three:
- This chapter is about creating the written ethnography or the ways that we work and write the data we’ve collected.
- To answer the question of taking responsibility for our representations in ethnographic studies, we must consider:
- i. Examine who benefits from the study
- ii. Examine whose interests are at stake
- iii. Examine the potential consequences for the participants researched in our studies.
- This is difficult for feminist researchers because they want, through their research, to empower folks to act; however, in the process of empowerment, you don’t want to silence potentialities.
- Dilemmas Involving Individuals
- i. Dealing with interpretive conflict: What happens when your interpretations and the researched interpretations are at odds? Do you include them both in the hope of striking a balance of representation?
- ii. Dealing with confidential information: What happens when the information you find threatens someone’s welfare, safety, etc., if it gets out? Do you publish it? What if it’s really useful for your ethnographic study? How about:
- If you omit, explain the omission – or at least why you omitted it.
- Negotiations with the researched is also an answer to this question.
- Dilemmas Involving Institutions
- i. The institution sponsoring the researcher often wants to influence the negotiations between the researcher and the participants. What to do?
- ii. The reputation of the institution is at stake when you conduct research, so you must consider this. . . you can always go rogue!
- Responding to Dilemmas of Representation and Interpretation
- i. Studying Up instead of Down – i.e., studying folks in power – can make ontological/epistemological inscription an easy thing to avoid. This will avoid us spending all the time “studying down”; however, those folks in power don’t often want to be studied!
- To avoid “paralysis” or fear of everything we could do wrong in an ethnography, we should be prepared to engage in “dialogue” with those we study. In other words, a ‘co’ approach to ethnography might be the best solution in a feminist research paradigm.
From The Struggle and the Tools: Oral and Literate Strategies in an Inner City Community
Ellen Cushman
Preface:
- Cushman uses what she refers to as an “activist methodology” that allows both herself and her participants to make knowledge together and engage in mutually rewarding reciprocal relations.
- Struggles: their perceptions of the common ways institutional representatives hindered community members’ efforts to act for themselves
- Tools: the numerous ways individuals linguistically strategized in their everyday strivings for resources and respect.
- The book is about how folks use language to form oppositional ideologies in lower income or “oppressed” areas.
- The focus is really on the area residents enacted specific rhetorical practices to challenge the hegemony of the public servants they dealt with on a day-to-day basis.
- Cushman’s study advocates a more holistic interpretation of literacy and orality. Instead of separating the two, we should think of them as mutually informing – quit enforcing the binary that presupposes that the literacy aspect is more cognitive while the oral is relational/context bound.
- The takeaway from the study is that language doesn’t wholly subvert or reproduce the dominant ideology; rather, language cyclically develops in “nuanced everyday politics” (xviii). So, instead of simply ascribing an ideological domination to a population (wherein we lose the ability to look critically at the oppositional ideologies at work counterhegemonically) we need to attend to the nuance of daily expression to see how resistance is actually at work and how crucial consciousness of the ‘oppressed’ may not be sleeping, but just working itself out in other ways. To do this, we need to move away from a definition of critical consciousness as not a pathway to collective action, but individual action – then we can see how resistance really happens on the micro level (which may eventually lead to a macro analysis).
- Instead of “false consciousness” Cushman wants to employ the term “strategic consciousness”
- Centrally, Cushman wants to dispute the idea that “under the banner of false consciousness, theorists sell out their dialogic notions of power to the notion of socially determined actions by uncritical actors. But I’ve found agency is more than mere blind obedience to the inevitable (ideological domination)” (8). In this sense, Cushman’s project is something like Latour’s in that she is letting the actors define themselves a bit more than Bourdieu and other social theorists.
- Cushman, in chapter two, enacts some of the feminist research methods that Kirsch mentions. Specifically she notes that she is working to demonstrate a “piece that community residents authorized through our dialogue and reciprocity. If the subaltern cannot speak, it is only because the scholar cannot listen or hear” (21-2).
- Cushman notes that researchers and participants empower each other when they enable each other to achieve goals and facilitate each other’s actions. Also, when they lend to each other their respective social statuses (Does this become a skewer for the research project?)
- Cushman notes that she used critical discourse analysis. She also investigates the social context in which the language use unfolds and looks at the larger political and ideological assumptions informing language use.
- Reciprocity and dialogue are essential to Cushman’s study because through it the “research relationship” became mutually beneficial. This leads to something called “researcher-as-participant” and “participant-as-researcher” wherein – through triangulation – the making of knowledge occurs TOGETHER.
- Critical Discourse Analysis in this Work:
- Looked for salient features of language used in the exchange or text in order to describe the social functions that a particular linguistic choice represented.
- i. What are the rhetorical features of the text?
- ii. What social function do these features perform?
- Explain the “situational context” that depicts the “reciprocal relations of actors in an exchange”
- Consider the text or exchange in terms of ideological assumptions underpinning the participants language use (Latour says “NO!) Does this to locate the text in larger institutional and social struggles.
Sep 4th 09
Posted by justin in CCR691, rhetorical criticism
Composition Research Agendas in the 1960s and 1970s
Richard Lloyd-Jones
History, Reflection, and Narrative: The Professionalization of Composition, 1963-1983
This relatively short piece discusses one veteran rhet/comp professor’s experience with administering writing research for national organizations like NCTE, NAEP, and other groups during the 1960s. In his introduction, Lloyd-Jones notes a key theme that is spun throughout his essay: namely, that all rhetoric is political; hence, all writing is also political because it is about delivery.
L.J.’s research team started by working through dissertations to provide legitimacy for composition as a field that needed research. As a result of this work, L.J. and his team were told by Braddock that “composition, in comparison with research in the physical sciences, was just emerging from the age of alchemy” (75). L.J. also mentions that the field was so young that the researchers often shared their knowledge of the field with one another, creating a “essentially oral quality” in composition studies until the early 1970s.
L.J. notes that there were many problems with the tests initially used by ETS to rate students writing. First, the writing prompts had no rhetorical purpose. He also noted that the prompts, while attempting neutrality, often had class or gender bias. This created specific responses from different groups of writers. These biases, combined with the inadequate training of the graders, created pretty poor research results.
In retrospect, L.J. notes that he learned a lot in his participation in this study because of a recognition that gender, class, and S.E. played determining factors on the kinds of work the team received in their research. He also rails against the administrators, politicians, deans, and others that expect hard data at the expense of more accurate yet ambiguous answers.
Introduction and Chapter
Gesa Kirsch and Patricia A. Sullivan
Methods and Methodology in Composition Research
I found this piece to be really useful. In the first couple of pages, K&S offer some useful definitions:
1. Method – a technique or way of proceeding in gathering evidence
2. Methodology – the underlying theory and analysis of how research does or should proceed
In addition to these definitions, they pose a series of questions that researchers should heed:
1. What problems emerge in the process of inquiry, and what issues are raised by a particular methodology?
2. What constitutes data?
3. How are data used in producing knowledge, generating theories, and building models?
4. What kinds of questions can and cannot be answered with a given method of research?
5. How does the researcher resolve these problems and issues?
After noting that qualitative research poses serious problems for the researcher-to-subject relation, and encouraging researchers in rhet/comp to use multiple research methods, K&S get to the really useful part of their introduction: how to do effective, productive research.
While rejecting the claim that adopting a single methodology would be the best thing for the field (10, 248 – North & Irmscher), K&S argue that the “plurality of perspectives . . . may be taken as a sign that we are growing more confident in our identity as a research community and that we are beginning to understand the complexity involved in adapting research methodologies that have their origin in vastly different disciplinary traditions” (10). In arguing against the single method system, K&S offer these reasons:
1. single methodology research “determines what is included in and excluded from the study of composition”
2. “to declare one methodology most suitable for composition studies is to declare other methodologies less suitable, less valuable, and less intellectually worthwhile” (253).
In arguing for methodological pluralism, K&S offer the following grouping in favor:
a. the diversity of research questions raised by scholars
b. the broad territory encompassed by rhetoric and composition
c. the multidisciplinary backgrounds of researchers (255)
In carrying out methodological pluralism, K&S encourage an open discussion of :
a. the researchers relation to the subject (the researcher’s presence and authority are never neutral)
b. the purpose of the researcher’s questions (they must be grounded in the subject’s experience and be relevant to the subject)
c. the researcher’s agenda (it is never disinterested) (256)
Later in the article, K&S make mention of the POMO conception of methodology. The note:
new approaches to research also reflect the current discussion of the socially constructed nature of knowledge that has been central to poststructuralist debates of the last two decades. Poststructuralist scholars in a variety of disciplines have argued that all research is limited and partial, shaped by the cultural and historical context of the researcher as well as by the participants, and that the meaning of research is constructed, not discovered (Kuhn, Geertz, Rorty) (260)
More Methodological Matters: Against Negative Argumentation
Ellen Barton
CCC, Vol. 51, No. 3 (Feb. 2000). pp. 399-416
In this article, Barton laments her perception of how the field of Composition is increasingly pushing away empirical, quantitative research. She frames this shift in the rhetorical tactic of “negative argumentation” or the arguing against unnamed, but implied subjects. Barton’s contention is that qualitative researchers are falsely accusing empiricists of using “traditional, imperialistic hegemony” in their research practices (401). Furthermore, because quantitative researchers don’t incorporate collaborative and reflexive design and analysis their work is ethically suspect (401).
Barton ties this shift in research to a the field’s emphasis shifting from product to process. This likely explains why Tom Newkirk is the focus of much of her invective (not that it’s not deserved). In this shift, Barton claims that the field looses a couple of things:
1. the devaluation risks losing sight of the ethics of empirical frameworks, thereby exacerbating the continually simmering conflict with regard to nature, place, and value of empirical studies
2. in devaluing empirical studies, the field may lose it’s ability to ask certain kinds of questions about oral and written language and the complexities of its production in various contexts.
3. as a result of devaluing empirical research, the field may lose its ability to make appropriate methodological choices for investigating problems of value, thereby impoverishing the methodological education we offer to new practitioners in the field (403).
The Making of Knowledge in Composition – Introduction
Stephen North
In the introduction to his book, North recounts a personal experience that led him to a disciplinary question. After working with a student for some time in preparation for exams, North probed his student about wide-ranging disciplinary questions of synthesis and analysis. Unfortunately, because of the somewhat unorganized and messy nature of the field, the student couldn’t answer the questions . . . and neither could the examiner. This is what ultimately led North to trace the development of Composition as a field through an analysis of specific individuals and professional organizations.
Some useful definitions:
a. modes of inquiry – the whole series of steps an inquirer follows in making a contribution to a field of knowledge.
b. methodological communities – groups of inquirers more or less united by their allegiance to one such mode, to an agreed-upon set of rules for gathering, testing, validating, accumulating, and distributing what they regard as knowledge (1)
In the first chapter, North traces the evolution of composition as a discipline. He grounds the founding of Composition (with a capital C) in the education reform movements of the post-war period. Instead of working with Progressive educational principles, the reform movement sought to use English (the tripod – language, literature, and writing) to meet the responsibilities of being a world power – especially in light of how Sputnik demonstrated Soviet intellect and capability.
In addition to demonstrating the history of the discipline, North also notes how Composition, since it’s very inception, has had something of an identity crisis. This crisis is manifested in the results of the Braddock essays (alchemy metaphor), the kinds of knowledge that the field was going to privilege and the kinds it would exclude (for example, the Practitioners), and the unclear aim of the Composition course (service course, expression? what to do?)
