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:Brandt (2001) *Literacy in American Lives*

Brandt, Deborah. Literacy in American Lives. Cambridge, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

Some claims/assumptions:

· Literacy is part of the machine: it is part of material systems and is assigned a societal value

· Literacy is a tool for denial of opportunity; it is exploited for profit;

· Social privilege is associated with literacy

· Literacy is a resource like wealth, education, or trade-skill (5)

· Three themes

o “Literacy learning principally will refer to occasions when people take on new understandings or capacities; as we will see, literacy learning is not confined to school settings or formal study” (6-7).

o “Literacy development refers to the accumulating project of literacy learning across a lifetime, the interrelated effects and potentials of learning over time. It is closely connected to the life span and to the historical events that affect literacy as a collective good” (7).

o “Literacy opportunity refers to people’s relationships to social and economic structures that condition chances for learning and development. Realistically, these three dimensions are not easy to separate and, as literacy is lived, seem to be three sides of one coin” (7).

· “Together, these studies strongly imply that literacy among the U.S. citizenry has been underestimated by standardized tests and other narrow, usually school-based measurements that miss the meanings and forms of literacy in everyday life” (7).

Method

· Interviewed 80 folks born 1895-1985 about their literacy practices, all from Wisconsin

· Volunteers recruited through social networking and public locations (nursing homes, etc.)

· Looked at how literacy evolved for generations (especially throughout their lives as children, students, workers, parents, citizens)

· Research question: “How has literacy learning changed over the last century and how have rising expectations for literacy been experienced as part of felt life?” (4).

· Considers economical and historical influences of family, region, nation (politics, war, etc.)

· “collection of open-ended autobiographical monologues, structured and less structured interviews, and biographical surveys” (10).

· Cohort analysis over their life span

· Used interview script (appendix A)

· Addresses reading and writing, but more focus is on writing

· Transcriptions were edited for slip-ups, false starts, pauses, umms (13-14)

· Analytical framework: sponsors of literacy: “older relatives, teachers, religious leaders, supervisors, military officers, librarians, friends, editors, influential authors” (19). Seems to be missing other textual aritifacts.

· There is a LACK of theory and disciplinary framing

Some assumptions about methodology:

· Literacy should be viewed in context (looking at an individual’s unique experience)

· People refashion their memories (12)

· Editing for standard English aims at equality

Chapter 1: “Literacy, Opportunity, and Economic Change”

· Case studies of two women, showing how the rise, fall, and change of literacy is closely related to the rise, fall, and change of economics in their region. Surprisingly, it is the woman from the older generation who received more opportunity since economical advancements were available in her region at the time. Similarly, both had to negotiate “conservative effects of gender” (41).

Chapter 2: “Literacy and Illiteracy in Documentary”

· Case studies of two men, looking at how literacy standards change over time and depending on sites of literacy. For instance, one man’s skills for speech and debate are “eclipsed” when written language becomes the more privileged medium.

Chapter 3: “Accumulating Literacy: How Four Generations of One American Family Learned to Write”

· Case studies of four generations writing in one family (the Mays), showing that some literacy practices are passed from one generation to the next, while other practices are influenced by historical and technological change (The Depression, WWII, associations of literacy as elitism, industrialization, move from village to city to suburbia). See additional notes saved on this chapter.

Chapter 4: “The Power of It: Sponsors of Literacy in African American Lives”

· Case studies of African Americans who experienced literacy while being excluded from education and economic opportunity, thus literacy advanced without economic sponsorship. It appears that one major sponsor was AA churches.

Chapter 5: “The Sacred and the Profane: Reading versus Writing in Popular Memory”

· Considers how cultural context plays in when individuals learn to read vs. when individuals learn to write. Focuses on how “writing is a more ambivalently encouraged enterprise and is fraught, more than reading, with secrecy, punishment, and surveillance” (24).

Chapter 6: “The Means of Production: Literacy and Stratification at the Twenty-First Century”

· Considers how literacy and social inequity are at play by comparing literacy experiences of two individuals with different socio-economic backgrounds: one white male of privileged class and one Latina female.