Week 7
2/25/2014
I was struck by Annie Dillard’s
(2005) comment: “Never, ever, get yourself into a situation where you have
nothing to do but write and read. You’ll go into a depression. You have to be
doing something good for the world, something undeniably useful; you need
exercise, too, and people” (p. xiv; as quoted in Broad, 2012, p. 2006). When I
planned a project for this course, I was concerned with how to answer the call
of Powell & Takayoshi (2012) that our work should “extend our ‘use value’
beyond academe” (p. vii). Similarly, Sullivan & Porter (1997)’s critical
approach to research as praxis outlines a road map of transformation from the personal
to the public (p. 62). Should I launch an activist project that aims at changing
the way second language students learn writing in this institute? I am excited
at the very thought of delivering any actual change to practices within a
community. Kemmis, McTaggart, & Nixson’s (2014) The Action Research Planner, Grabill’s (2012) community-based
research, and Blythe’s (2012) activist research all suggest that the ultimate
goal of research is to “change social practices” (Kemmis, McTaggart, &
Nixon, p. 2). If the real value of research is in social practices, dramatic changes
are expected to take place in the current academic values and organization. The
“publish or perish” dictum should be geared more towards practical uses of
research in our field, much as industrial application and patents are in
scientific fields. As we often lament on publications that have only a handful
of readers, we must change the value-orientation of research to give more
credit to practical implications.
This ideological change
necessitates an epistemological change in our field from a exclusively constructivist
perspective to a more inclusive one. Haswell’s (2012) call for appreciation of
quantitative methods, Broad’s (2012) proposal of empirical-qualitative
research, and Calfee & Sperling’s (2010) mixed methods all ask us to go a
bit beyond the social constructivist castle. What matters in this school of
thinking is an epistemological awareness that knowledge is not located only in
the social and the subjective. It is true that the subjectivity of the
researchers may serve as “an interpretive lens” (Powell & Takayoshi, 2012,
p. 112), but we might close up alternative perspectives from the contextual
(Broad, p. 205) and the public and social (Sullivan & Porter, 1997, pp. 62,
68). That a researchable problem is located in the personal and the subjective
(e.g., Powell & Takayoshi, p. 113; Lakeslee & Fleischer, 2007, p. 18) should
not be taken as an attempt to separate the subjective from the objective,
contextual, and social practices. In fact, Powell & Takayoshi (2012) and
Sullivan and Porter (1997) contend that research should often be “collaborative
and participatory” to have “empowering potential” (Addison, 1997, p. 111, as
quoted in Powell & Takayoshi, p. 9). The warning that Sullivan and Porter
(1997) issue in their critical approach is that we should not cut off our
connection with the communities of participants, researchers, and policy-makers
(p. 68). It seems likely that a researchable problem is located in the gap
between the personal and subjective and the contextual and objective. We are
creating a researchable problem by constantly comparing our perceived problem
that the actual, “real” problem “out there.”
Along with what is researchable is
the issue of what to research. Echoing Sullivan and Porter’s (1997) critical approach
that identifies ideological, practice and method components in methodology
(Grabill, 2012, p. 211), Grabill (2012) suggests that we look at such stance issues
as the identity, purpose, power and ethics, and position (p. 215). In her response
to Blythe, Takayoshi articulates the value of such meta-research as improving
communities of participants and researchers (Powell & Takayoshi, 2012, p.
285). I do not repute the value of meta-analysis, or research about research, especially
in regard to reflexivity, subjectivity, and ethics, but we still have to answer
a core question: what can our work do to benefit the social? If, for
confidentiality issues, Teston’s study (in Powell & Takayoshi, 2012) only
lends to our understanding of the research process, we are left with the
question about the real value of our research.
Can we eventually produce any good
for the community in the way science does to industry? To me, the question involves
our value orientation and ethics. For the former, we will need to change what
we view as valuable in the academic circle. Specifically, we will need to break
the binary of public or perish and give due credit to social practices. For the
latter, we must extend ethical considerations to the participants. Rather than promising
some intangible and remotely relative benefits, we will need to bring real
changes to the participants’ community. We are not to “leav[e] people to decide
for themselves” (Barton & Marback, 2012, p. 76) in case of ethical issues,
but to acknowledge our power as the researcher and take action to deliver some
real changes.
Arthur,
ReplyDeleteYour extension of the research’s value in this conversation to remind the researcher of her power is interesting. It seems each of our readings, and not just the ones from last night, contend that the researcher has to remind herself that she has no power, from the data collection stage to the documentation stage she must be reminded that someone else is larger than her, puppeting the success of her research.
This “puppeting” is where things get a little messy in your conversation of researcher value, ethics, and power. Last semester, during Literacy, Pam noted that once she was told by a publisher that her research (I don’t recall what research it was) needed to include how it would effect the composition classroom, though she has zero desires to include that in the publication. But she had to, and she did. What happens to value, ethics, and power then? I know this is tangential from owning those properties in the communities which we desire to work in, but I argue that it is tough to establish our value and ethics when our disciplines doesn’t quite know why we choose to do research that does not fit into the realm of pedagogy.
And puppeting aside, it is refreshing that you remind us that we do have power. So often we have read that we need to “be reflexive” or remember the community members first, and this can often leave us forgetting about the power we have as researchers – the power that we have to document our findings and assert the results. That said, referring your question, “can we eventually produce any good for the community in the way science does to industry?” I think both Grabill and Blythe would argue as long as you look at community research as they do, and follow their examples, then, yes. We can. But I think the problem is deeper than that, which make just bring us back to power, and how, not only does the researcher lack power, but so does the rhetorician: Yes, we can enact a community change, but it is on the rest of the world to take notice, which is often different in the science fields.
Halle,
ReplyDeleteI appreciate your comment. You made me think about power in a larger context. Oftentimes, the moment researchers think they have power, it is taken away. It seems to me that for researchers, power is really an argument. As you asked, how do we make the world notice? So, it seems that research itself does not generate power; instead, researcher need to fit into larger power relations to have power. Your comment really makes sense to me. Thanks.