CCR 691: Moss, Kirsch, Cushman (Ethnography)

CCR 691 Notes

10/29/09

Moss, Beverly J. “Ethnography and Composition.” Methods and Methodology in Composition Research. Eds. Gesa Kirsch and Patricia A. Sullivan. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.

Seeks to answer two questions:

1. What do comp studies need to know about ethnography?

a. “ethnography in composition studies is generally topic oriented and concerned more narrowly with communicative behavior or the interrelationship between language and culture” (156).

2. What challenges arise when we investigate communities through which we are a part of?

Some principles of ethnography

· Often participant-observer

· Context is crucial

· Usually a hypothesis or focus and a conceptual framework, but new interests should arise and old questions should be revised (157).

· You must negotiate access and interact with community according to that community (158)

· Fieldwork: gather as much info/data as is available, such as interviews, recordings, artifacts, notes, questionnaires (159)

· Data analysis is designed to discover patterns or interesting observations (160)

· Writing the report is usually in a narrative, story-telling fashion (160-161)

· Insiders must work to make the familiar unfamiliar: interrogate assumptions, find interest in the mundane, be cautious about not ignoring or overlooking patterns or significant connections (164-167)

· Insiders must acknowledge the effects of their own roles and participation in the community (165). Work to reflect on ethnocentrism and bias (168).

· Insiders must be cautious about how to present the material so that they are fair, accurate, critical, and loyal, while not going overboard in the opposite direction either (169).

Kirsch, Gesa E. Ethical Dilemmas in Feminist Research: The Politics of Location, Interpretation, and Publication. New York: State University of New York Press.

· Basically, she’s discussing how in feminist research, our goals are to become very close to and collaborate with our participants, but this is problematic since our findings and interpretations may be offensive or disempowering to our subjects. She suggests that we enact in dialogic interactions with participants and allow them say in how data are interpreted and presented.

Cushman, Ellen. The Struggle and the Tools: Oral and Literate Strategies in an Inner City Community.

· It’s ethnographic, but she has a “activist methodology” (x), where she investigates literacy on a class and race level.

· Wants to look at both the politically-infused struggles individuals experience and the coping strategies/tools individuals call on (these individuals being inner-city residents, mostly women and children)

· Looks at “linguistic abilities and political insights” (xi) individuals have for negotiating “institutional language” (xii)

· Data gathered (tapes, artifacts, field notes) (xi)

ETHNOGRAPHY

Possibilities

· Not being held to “false consciousness.” Looking within our social worlds (TJ).

· Co-interpretation: process is fluid (Cushman and Eileen).

· Explore what is present (TJ).

· Empower your people; reciprocity; expose power (Justin)

· Strategic essentialism (Amber, Steve, Eileen, Melissa)

· Activism

Limitations

· Ethics: message you send out is not what you observe, cuz participants are not performing the truth that they claim (Justin).

· Co-interpretation: material limits, time, space, connection/understanding

· Representing negotiations in your text (Eileen)

· What are you giving back? (TJ)

· High stakes! Intervention vs. access (Eileen)

· Insiders: remember to make the unsurprising surprising (Eileen/Moss)

Ethical Dilemmas

· Views and positions of participants and their “claim” to inhabit (false consciousness) (TJ).

· Participants “hurt” by your study (when you interrogate institutions, for example)

· Co-interpretations: disagreement, what do you do?

· Theoretical framework: using a lens doesn’t allow the participant to define themselves (Justin)

· Framing your subject in the deficit: how do you push against it without romancing it? (Amber)

· Intervening: helps right then, but maybe not helping others in the future? (Melissa)

CCR 691: Heath (1999) *Ways with Words*

Heath, Shirley Brice. Ways with Words: Language, life, and work in communities and classrooms. Cambridge: University Press, 1999.

Quick overview of Method:

· What and when: As described in her “Prologue,” Heath conducted ethnographic research during a time post-school-desegregation in the 1960s. Heath collaborated with numerous fellow teachers and graduate students on gathering and comparing recorded (field notes or audio tapes) and interpreted data of communication occurring in two populations during this time.

· Where: The sites she investigated were communities in the Piedmont Carolinas: one town consisting mostly of black farm families new to the working-class (Trackton) and one consisting mostly of long time working-class white folks (Roadville).

· How: Data consists of recorded communication occurring at school, at home, or at the textile mills, where most of the families from both towns work.

· Why: Based on their cross-cultural comparisons of communicative trends in Trackton and Roadville (both of children and teaching practices), the collaborating researchers worked to answer the following research question: “For each of these groups, what were the effects of the preschool home and community environment on the learning of those language structures and uses which were needed in classrooms and job settings” (4).

Some notes on Heath’s “strategies” for an ethnographic approach:

· 9 years! (1969-1978)

· Entered the community naturally, through acquaintances

· Acted as a participant-observer (did the work and knew and respected the town, the people, and the ways)

· Upfront with her focus: the physical boundaries, other communicative limitations, patterns of choice, and values associated within the socialization of language (5-6).

· Considers herself an anthropologist

· Acknowledges that her study is not a model for methods of other ethnographic research, admitting that it shouldn’t and likely won’t be replicated by other researchers (7-8).

· Defends her methodology by arguing that quantitative data approaches don’t account for social and cultural contexts (8).

· Acknowledges that participants “are the products of their history and current situation” and that her focus is on cultural, not racial, influences (10).

· Repeatedly refers to this account as a “narrative” or “story”

· Acknowledges that she affected the “social reality” of how classrooms were conducted at the time: “From ethnographer learning, or coming to ‘know,’ I have become ethnographer doing.”

· Acknowledges that these stories are incomplete (13)

· Conceals names of people and locations (13-14)

· Tries to capture the varying dialects as they naturally occur in speech (15)

Some questions/challenges/interesting topics:

1. I found great interest in Heath’s approach to being “responsible” to the community she researches, whether that be through the ways she entered the community, avoided generalized comparisons of race or socioeconomic status in her findings, used only equipment already accepted by the community (audio recorders), or sought to be respectful and considerate of her influence and presence at all times. Based on our conversations in class, I imagine others may have considered these acts of “responsibility” as answers to earlier calls for researchers to have the best interests for their participants when doing ethnography. Being “responsible” to our participants has been an unsettled issue for me all semester, though, since I suspect some of my research goals may not be perceived as well-intentioned (like when we wish to “infiltrate and assess” an institutional department, for example). I consider my aims to be aimed at positive action for some communities, but the actual community I seek to investigate may not see it that way. If our conclusions lead to arguments that our participants won’t be content with, I’m still unsure about how that complicates our responsibilities to our participants.

2. Heath acknowledges that “educators should not look here [in her book] for experiments, controlled conditions, and systematic score-keeping on the academic gains and losses of specific children. Nor should psycholinguisitics look here for data taped at periodic intervals under similar conditions over a predesignated period of time” (8-9). It’s hard not to respect her approach to using long term ethnographic participant-observation to make claims about how some individuals communicate. Still, having just read Chris Anson’s “The Intelligent Design of Writing Programs: Reliance on Belief or a Future of Evidence,” (where he argues that the discipline of college composition needs to perform research in the field that provides actual evidence, not just our own practical theories and story-telling) and based on our numerous conversations in 691 regarding our discipline’s call for evidence-driven research, I’m interested in thinking about how ethnography can be aligned with other methods to provide such results that Anson calls for. How might have Heath approached the study differently to accomplish this? How might we design a multi-method approach for our future ethnographic studies?

CCR 691: Enos et al (2006) "Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Rhetorical Criticism"

Enos et al. (2006). “Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Rhetorical Criticism” and “A Bibliographic Synthesis of Rhetorical Criticism.” Rhetoric Review, Vol. 5, No.4: 357-407.

Major claims/assumptions about rhetorical criticism:

• rhetorical criticism is ubiquitously bound by culture, history, and language
• it is important to acknowledge that some approaches of rhetorical criticism are applicable to some cultures/times/sites, while inapplicable to others (since the approaches themselves are tied up with history, culture, and language)
• approaches to rhetorical criticism are (and will continue to be) constantly invented, reinvented, and recycled in response to our historical and social contexts
• rhetorical criticism is not objective and can openly express criticizers' positions and perspectives
• “rhetorical criticism mimics the process of agency….The result [of a critic’s analysis or interpretation] is a world of the agent’s/critic’s own creation” (376)
• rhetorical criticism is not based solely on rational argument (oratory, persuasion, essays)
• rhetorical texts are more than just written documents or speeches; they include: “art, architecture, cityscapes, monuments, handicrafts, and many more human-made objects” (371) and even phenomenons and social movements (Civil Rights; Gay rights, the Chicano Movement, etc.)
• rhetoric is an instrument for investigating influential public contexts and affairs (in media, politics, etc.)
• method for analyzing public affairs: “discovering the best sources, considering the extant theories, interrogating the available evidence, and constructing original arguments that seek to account for the situational matrix that defines public policy debate…going beyond the printed sources to engage directly those involved…through participant observation, interviewing, ethnography, or other field methods” (381)
• goals of rhetorical criticism: “one ends with something beyond the purely rhetorical, something that inevitably speaks to the subject matter under investigation, something that is extrarhetorical in insight or implication” (382)
• it is debatable in what discipline rhetorical criticism originated as well as how rhetoric or rhetorical criticism should be defined
• “it is important to keep in mind that rhetorical criticism should serve a purpose, whether that purpose adds to knowledge in such a way that others can engage with that knowledge creation or theorizes and humanizes rhetoric as performance” (396-397)

Key scholars that are cited: Edwin Black, Jean-Paul Sartre, Herbert Wichelns, Leland M. Griffin, Richard Claverhouse Jebb, Kenneth Burke, Simons, Bowers, Ochs, Enos, Kohrs Campbell, King, Condit, Foss

Some quotes and some questions:

“As exciting and productive as the 1965-1980 era was, it eventually led to an overemphasis on theory and method, often to the exclusion of knowledge grounded in practice and analysis” (380).

In the 21^st century “methodology is clearly less important than before” (368).

“many of the stronger recent studies in rhetorical criticism have regarded criticism not as method but as attitude” (385).

“theorists have presented theories that attempt to break out of the strict structures of methodologically driven criticism” (391).

• I wonder if methodology is used interchangeably with method, or if these scholars reference our definition of methodology: “theory and analysis of how research does or should proceed” (Harding, 3).
• It seems generally accepted that in rhetorical criticism methodology is “less important” than before, yet we’ve been discussing in class how our field has been moving towards aligning greater importance to method and methodology. Does this apply to research methods based on theory and analysis? Should rhetorical criticism be grounded in methods and methodologies? How so? How not?
• Also, might rhetorical criticism’s hesitance to define methods/methodologies reflect many of our instincts (as discussed in class) of keeping methods and methodologies at bay to our already intuitive (and so far effective) practices for analysis?

CCR 691: Bazerman and Prior (2003) *What Writing Does and How It Does It*

Bazerman, Charles and Prior, Paul (Eds.). (2003). What Writing Does and How It Does It: An Introduction to Analyzing Texts and Textual Practices. New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers.

Executive Summary:

For this edited collection, Bazerman and Prior suggest in their introduction that discourse analysis lends itself not only to analyzing verbal discourse in linguistics and sociolinguistics, but also to research in rhetoric, composition, literary studies, and communication studies (among other disciplines). Thus, the authors attempt to combine practices from each of these fields of inquiry to catalog various research methods for scholars interested in textual analysis. They include discussions such as analysis of content, narrative works, intertextuality, code-switching, media texts, textual histories, conversation as well as the analysis of various linguistic and rhetorical features among these practices of analysis. Most chapters provide definitions, methods, methodologies, a review of literature, examples of applied analysis, practice prompts, and suggestions for further reading.

A number of assumptions ground their research methods: (a) that authoring texts is a complex cultural activity not only influenced by the author and his/her social contexts and experiences, but also other authors, other texts, genres, modes of communication, etc. (4); (b) that texts are written, visual, and verbal modes of communication that are produced through various mediums and interfaces including pen, paper, voice, conversation, thoughts, word processing tools, video, digital interfaces, and even sticks, knives, trees, and dirt (6-7); (c) that writing is a “complex literate activity that includes reading and writing, feeling and thinking, speaking and listening, observing and acting” (7); and, lastly, (d) that critical inquiry of texts is most assessable when analysts suspend judgment of what is normal and instead view all texts as being “strange objects worthy of close analytic attention” (7-8).

Quotable Quotes:

· “To understand writing, we need to explore the practices that people engage in to produce texts as well as the ways that writing practices gain their meanings and functions as dynamic elements o specific cultural settings” (2).

· What to consider when analyzing texts: “how texts direct people’s attention to various objects and concerns; how different linguistic, rhetorical, and graphic resources make possible the creation of meaning; how texts depend on and use other texts; how texts influence people’s beliefs and actions; how people learn to recognize, read, and produce genres (texts of certain types); how people actually go about producing texts; and how social systems of activity depend on and promote particular kinds of texts” (3).

An overview of chapters 1-7:

· In “Content Analysis: What texts Talk About” (13-32), Thomas Huckin defines content analysis as “the identifying, quantifying, and analyzing of specific words, phrases, concepts, or other observable semantic data in a text or body of texts with the aim of uncovering some underlying thematic or rhetorical pattern running through these texts” (14). Huckin also outlines the methodological procedures of content analysis (16-19), provides real examples of research using this approach (19-26), and assesses the approach for its criticisms and virtues (26-28).

· In “Poetics and Narrativity: How Texts Tell Stories” (33-56), Phillip Eubanks argues that the structure and function of language using narrative, metaphor, and metonymy have significant social power since these forms subconsciously shape cultural thinking and practices. Eubanks also suggests that poetic and narrative forms not only shape the writing of fiction, but also argumentative and scientific research practices. To exemplify the narrative approach, for instance, Eubanks describes his method of analyzing story-telling features in texts written by Bill gates, noting how he (Eubanks) selected texts, analyzed them, categorized his analyses, and applied narrative and rhetorical theory to make an argument about the functions of social thinking and argumentative processes (36-42). After exemplifying metaphor (42-50) and other figures like metonymy (50-52), Eubanks concludes that “studies of narrative, metaphor, and other figures are not just concurrent or collocated but inherently connected” (53).

· In “Linguistic Discourse Analysis: How the Language in Texts Works” (57-82), Ellen Barton views discourse analysis as “a method for analyzing the ways that specific features of language contribute to the interpretation of texts in their various contexts” (57). Barton explains how linguists—following various methods including ethnography of communication, interactive sociolinguistics, genre analysis, systemic linguistics, and critical discourse analysis—work to explore the ways language is structured in given contexts, analyzing the function (purpose and effects) of these structures. The chapter is divided into sections discussing and exemplifying discourse analysis used in (a) the analysis of oral-written language in linguistics and composition studies (62-65); and, (b) rich feature analysis (e.g. analyzing awkward sentences) (65-74).

· In “Intertextuality: How Texts Rely on Other Texts” (83-96), Charles Bazerman outlines terms and practices for research methods analyzing how texts rely on other texts in making meaning and posits that “intertextaulity is not just a matter of which other texts you refer to, but how you use them, what you use them for, and ultimately how you position yourself as a writer to them to make your own statement” (94). Methodologically speaking, he suggests that you (as researcher of intertextuality) should identify “why you are engaged,” “what questions you hope to answer,” “the specific texts you want to examine,” and “the traces of other texts that you wish to consider,” and then work to “[make] observations and interpretations,” “look for more subtle clues,” “make a list” and “look for a pattern” (91-92).

· In “Code-Switching and Second Language Writing: How Multiple Codes Are Combined in a Text” (97-122), Marcia Z. Buell illustrates how “Code-switching offers particularly rich insights for examination of second- (multi-) language or dialect speakers and writers who must not only negotiate across recognizably distinct languages or language variants, but also must worked through the complexity attached to learning and suing an unfamiliar set of codes” (98). Buell offers an extensive example where she analyzes a student’s essay for code-switching using not only contrastive analysis and interlanguage theory, but also using contrastive rhetoric (106-117).

· In “The Multiple Media of Texts: How Onscreen and Paper Texts Incorporate Words, Images, and Other Media” (123-166), Anne Frances Wysocki unpacks definitions of basic concepts used for analyzing various media texts, including the underlying assumptions for analyzing media texts (123-126), the “categories and terminology to use in analysis” of media texts (126-137), and a suggested “approach for analyzing the visual aspects of a text” (137-140).

· In “Tracing Process: How Texts Come Into Being” (167-200), Paul Prior discusses how and why researchers study writing processes. He defines how major concepts (like inscription, composing, text, and authorship) influence writing as practice. Methods for analysis are catalogued and include practices for “collecting and keeping track of texts,” “intertextual analysis,” “eliciting writers’ accounts,” “observation of writing,” and “integrating data from multiple sources” (172-196). Prior suggests that using multiple methods tracing textual histories (such as “intertextual analysis, participant accounts, and observation of activity” 197) will help researchers carefully consider and analyze how authorship and social contexts influence the composition of texts.

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