What is responsible research?

I've always enjoyed reading Heath and Cushman's studies and noting the connections and departures between them, especially the shift that Cushman makes toward participatory action research with reciprocity embedded in it. I also think Kirsch and Moss do a good job of framing the challenges associated with ethics, insider/outsider knowledge.

One of the key issues I'd like to discuss today comes from Missy's blog entry where she takes up the idea of responsible research. What constitutes responsible research in ethnography or activist ethnographic research? Responsible to whom and under what conditions? How do Heath and Cushman take up that challenge (Moss and Kirsch, too)--to whom do they feel responsible? Why? And where do we localize our sense of responsiblity in our research? I'm thinking about this with respect to Steve's comments yesterday in the CCRcolloquium. Steve's point is to funnel academic resources and opportunities to communities outside the university. His trajectory is not the composition classroom or the academic dept, but neighborhoods and communities and a bi-directional flow between the university and the community. Gwen spoke of her research not doing harm and benefiting those represented and contributing to understanding.

And the question of material constraints, which was raised in the readings and blogs this week (see Anna's blog). Cushman's participants seem to feel the relationship is fluid (as Cushman does as well). This is a 3 1/2 year set of relationships and with Heath a 9 year set of relationships. How do we deal with time, trust, and investment on either end of the research/participant spectrum? As members of our class consider doing qualitative research, what are your key questions, concerns, challenges?

What are Welch's methods?

I'm puzzling through the question of Welch's methods in _Living Room_. I was up at 2 a.m. rereading a big chunk of her book. I read it this summer because I was inspired by the idea of public writing and experimenting with it in my courses, but I needed a refresher so I took some time to really pore over the book again. First off, I do find the book inspiring and feel solidarity with Nancy's project of asking our field to really come to terms with what it means to engage in public writing that addresses "living room" in a neoliberal economic order.

I was at the same anti-war march in NYC she was at CCCC and remember seeing here there, so I feel personally involved in her project and connected to many of the political protest moments she names. I also feel personally involved because I share many of her values in wanting writing students to be aware of and practice rhetorical strategies and tactics and understand histories of groups/communities/organizations/movements that have worked against the dominant power structures in U.S. culture.

Also as someone who has worked in the reproductive rights movement, in the anti-war movement, academic labor and feminist movements, I also appreciate her reading of the academy and its labor politics and her careful recounting of student movements. There is far too little attention paid to student-led movements in our field since the 1960s-1970s (when some were writing about student movements), but there is beginning to be some attention paid to that again in the work of Chris Carter's new book on rhetorics of resistance and also Rachel Riedner and Kevin Mahoney's new book _Democracies to Come_. My own work has documented academic labor movements. It's exciting to see this work and to see how solidarity movements launched by students and other groups are coming to the fore once again.

At the same time, for this class, I find myself reading this book very differently on the second round. I'm reading for methodologies and methods and trying to understand how a book like this is put together and what choices she made as a researcher. First of all, it is truly an essayistic book with chapters that could stand alone. Many of the pieces were previously published and developed for other venues. Her writing is balanced between an autobiographical perspective (her first-hand stories of experiences teaching or working as an activist), her students' narratives (which she recreates from observing them and class encounters/their texts), and scholarly researched argument that has an polemical edge coupled with historical accounts (drawn from secondary research mostly?). So this is a mixed methods study: personal narrative/ argument, classroom narrative/observation, theoretical research/argument, secondary historical research.

The methodology--the theory about how research should proceed--seems to be largely ideological and theoretical--driven by a belief in revolutionary socialism, activism/advocacy in general, and free speech rights. Feminist research methodology is a factor there as well, although not a consistent refrain throughout the volume

What laces the study together is first a focus on 1) public writing and the need to teach it: "More than just a topic du jour, the question of how ordinary people reach and persuade influential audiences has taken on intensified exigence as teachers find that the venues in which students' (can own arguments might gain a hearing have become noticeably policed and restricted" (4-5). So there is an urgency behind exploring this topic: neoliberal privatization, global capitalism, and corporate consolidation of the media has made it possible to restrict and control public space and airwaves and, thus, control the messages that ordinary people can express. Secondly, she wants to bring out/link a desire to engage public writing with the work of revisionary historiography (p. 5). She wants us to remember and work with students to embrace rhetorical histories of organized struggle: "By recalling the creative responses of earlier generations to constraints on (or prohibitions against) public visibility and voice, we can learn how individuals and groups, especially those lacking official platforms, have effectively argued for wider participation and greater democratization" (5). Those reading this book get an effective dose of labor history and freedom struggles and a sense of the rhetorical tactics and strategies of a wide array of movements plus stories of students in Welch's classes striving to engage those strategies.

We also get, to some degree, an evolving sense of Welch's activist literacies as she negotiates her own position as a secretary going back to school and becoming an academic, as the partner of someone battling the managed health care system for alternative cancer treatments, as someone engaged in solidarity struggles with workers and students and anti-war/peace protests. She tells stories with a point, she is polemical, and she argues with/challenges some of the scholarship in the field, pushing us to do more to engage public writing and the rhetorical histories of struggles, which we can draw strength and insight from (as she does). She puts her own story on the line. She is a part of movements, not simply a documenter/historian of them. She is trying to practice and teach what she preaches.

What is less clear to me is what research practices pertain to her addressing the words and lives of others in her account. What responsibilities and constraints does she have to the student narratives/voices and the activist narratives/voices? Some narratives/voices are in the historical record and can be drawn out from the texts of others representing them (secondary sources or primary collections), but what about those who are living/breathing folks? There is nothing in the book (that I could see?) about the research ethics she followed in working with the narratives of others. Maybe b/c this is not a qualitative or a purely historical study, she is not bound, in the same ways, since she is narrativizing and arguing, not "researching" a community. But isn't her classroom a community and the protest movements she represents a form of community? I think many pedagogical studies do just what Welch is doing: a mixed methods study, but I also think that as a mixed methods study, it serves many masters--rhetorical history, feminist theory, socialist theory, progressive comp, classroom teaching/teacher research.

What responsibilities do we have in terms of methods when we write about our classrooms and work with students? We all tell stories about what happened and what students did in our classes. How do we think through the ethical challenges of that kind of research (an abiding concern in our class this semester).

This may be beside the point for many readers who want to read this book and get a sense of how one might engage public writing and offer up assignments that do so. It might be beside the point for those looking for an inspiring story of how to take up public writing. But its not beside the point for us as we puzzle through the question of how to engage methods and methodologies.

American Lives in Brandt

I've blogged about Brandt's book before--a couple of entries in 2006 when I read it with my 601 class (I blogged Chapter 5 in Oct 2006, see my blog archives, and also posted a response about Brandt's read on the agricultural economy).  I didn't come at the book from a methodological perspective, though, so I'd like to think through a few questions here.   

Since this book is entitled _Literacy in American Lives_, what pressures and burdens does a project like this carry when the nation-state is mentioned in the title?  What is particularly "American" about this book and this kind of study (beyond the obvious geopolitical location)?  

How does the focus on "American-ness" bear up under the pressure of the focus on a specific region (Madison, Wisconsin) and surrounding environs.  Madison, as she notes, undergoes a transformation common to other mid-sized communities in the 20th century, moving from an agricultural economy to more of an information economy.  Is there a uniqueness to a community like Madison, which is so heavily imbricated in the university as an economic agitator, incubator?  What would a study look like that is not focused around a university town that has mushroomed so greatly and become more urbanized and suburbanized?  Think of a another place where a study like this might be done--what might be different?

How do larger historical events and transformations play out against the backdrop of individual lives?  What do individuals notice versus the researcher about such patterns?  The military service piece is a big piece of what I noticed on this time around--the sponsorship of the U.S. military to boost literacy during war-time    

Brand's  interview questions provide us with an inventory-like, life course-style interview approach. How does that favor specific kinds of individuals?  What might be other ways to research "literacy" in a life?

What role do artifacts of literacy play here?  What are the relative merits of examining literacy artifacts versus literacy narratives?  What are the possibilities and limitations of an interview approach focused on a life narrative?  

How did she decide when she had enough interviewees?  Why 80?  Why select the different pairs/groups to feature?  

What are the possibilities in the idea of literacy as an economic resource and literacy sponsorship as aiding and abetting in that (or suppressing that)?  There is a consistent focus here on literacy as something to be "traded" for economic gain and power (a materialist notion of literacy).  What are the limitations of that kind of framework?   And what are the distinctions to be made across literacies?