CCCC 2005: ReviewReview: D.22: Research and Identity The presentations for this panel were descriptions of qualitative research and the researchers’ findings, but each presentation offered a different component to think about in terms of the data we collect, our imagined and anticipated outcomes, and the complicated connections between researcher, research, participants, and unpredictable human behaviors. Sheila Otto’s presentation, titled “Writing and Identity: Examining the Social Construction of Identity in a Basic Writing Classroom, offered implications and conclusions from her research focusing on the different kinds of identities students might and can assume in a writing course. Otto’s research questions, which included queries about how students construct identity, how students position themselves as identities in the classroom, and how student position themselves as identities in their own texts, emphasized the notion of “positionality” as an important function of identity moves apart from any emphasis on psychological identity. Otto’s data consisted of students’ texts (three) and transcripts of classroom discussions, allowing her to conduct a micro-analytic discourse analysis. Her findings for this presentation included a mini-case study of one student, Graham, whose discourse “positionings” in the classroom discussions allowed him to represent himself in an authoritative professional (and social) location. But his identity locations in his papers revealed that he was not able to conduct himself with the same kind of authority in writing. In his classroom excerpts, Graham was a strong advocate for his profession (nursing) and for service professions, in general, calling on his own experience as valid support for his arguments. Yet, his papers were distant, third-person objectified accounts of what nurses do, as if he didn’t really know. Otto’s major finding—that students who might assume authority in class discussions do not necessarily translate that authority to their writing—led her to the question implications about closing the gap between student performance of self in talk and student performance of self in writing. Otto questioned not just genre choices in writing courses that may inhibit students’ assumptions of authority, but the inability of writing instructors to talk about these different “positionalities” openly and comfortably with their students. Following Otto, Catherine Pavia’s eloquent reflection on her ethnographic research conducted for her master’s degree in the late 90s asked her audience to move back in time with her as she reviewed certain choices and options she had as the participant-observer in her study. Pavia noted that much of the research she did at that time was about “doing” research, as opposed to “being” a researcher, and that her representations of the students she was observing and collecting data on were not always the most carefully and helpfully created. In hindsight, she would emphasize more fully the reciprocal nature of the research relationships and the “positionality” of the researcher in relation to those being observed and noted. Pavia reflected on how she was part of group work in the classroom that served as her research site, but that she didn’t actually participate; now she wonders how her representation of that group and its work was affected by her position in it. She noted that in future research she will be much more careful to work with participants as they strive for more reciprocity in the research process. In terms of “positionality,” Pavia felt that she had not represented her own complicated locations in the research and the research site, as a friend of the instructor’s, as a graduate student, and as an instructor herself. Looking back, she feels as though the disregarding of her multiple “positionalities” affected the research—or the representation of the research—in less than ideal ways, for example, through specific word choices in the text as well as by not surfacing her own sense of herself as outsider. Pavia ended by admitting that her research choices meant she had silenced some of her participants, through constructing them as “other,” and that in the end, her research was more fully a self-presentation through positive representations of those in the class that were most like her. When considering the ethical implications of such a move, Pavia suggested that researchers take the time, during their research, to reflect closely on their own behaviors and the consequences of their behaviors in order to address ethical issues immediately. She ended by encouraging researchers to return to their completed studies, reflect on them, and rethink their processes for the next study. The last presentation was Barbara Zimmerman’s very intriguing “Living the ‘Lived Experience’: Ethnography as Reflexive Storytelling.” Zimmerman began by narrating the story of one of her graduate students who had been diagnosed with cancer, and whom everyone expected to lose to the disease before the student was able to collect all of her data for her research project for her degree. Zimmerman collected the data, but miraculously, the student got better, finished, and attended graduation. In reflecting on this situation, Zimmerman noted that that personal story was left out of the research and yet had an impact on the research and its own narrative, as the student’s life and her experiences with cancer had colored every aspect of the student’s ethnographic research. This dissonance led Zimmerman to ask the question: “What is entailed in experiencing the research experience?” And she set out to attempt to answer this question by observing and collecting data on her graduate students as they researched (and experienced) their own ethnographic studies for their degrees. Zimmerman looked at twelve ethnographic theses written by her graduate students and found some very common personal experience themes emerging, such as the researchers changing the nature of their representations and relationships of and to their students, their teaching and their research. Zimmerman also found that the researchers viewed their field of study through their own personal lenses of experience, often revealing components of their own sense of identity along the way. Zimmerman articulated how this data is leading her to argue that ethnographic research is always autobiographical research and that the final product is always a self-narrative. She offered a theoretical frame work that compared personal and scientific methodologies, noting that both personal and more scientific methodologies both emerge from the understanding that research is a construction, a highly selective act, and thus interpretation of data will always depend on the story the researcher wants to tell. She suggested that by locating the researcher at the center of narrative inquiry, the experiences involved can be studied and represented, and can be used as a valid methodological framework for research. Her final data offered a table in which Zimmerman had noted the coalescing of the graduate student/researcher’s teaching content with personal experiences at the time, both of which led to the researcher’s decision to frame the ethnography in terms that included the researcher’s personal understandings of her own life issues. She advocates that ethnographers surface these tensions, acknowledge their own role in the research, and be reflexive concerning the outcomes of these “surfacings” and acknowledgments, “where the subject and object fuse.” |
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