Heather Loepp

Professor Lucchesi

Reflective Annotated Bib #3

11/25/18

 

1. Citation

Writing Studies Research in Practice : Methods and Methodologies, Southern Illinois University Press, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral-proquest-com.ezproxy.library.wwu.edu/lib/wwu/detail.action?docID=1354656.

 

1. Summary

 

The selection I chose to read from the edited collection, Writing Studies Research in Practice: Methods and Methodologies was “Exceeding the Bounds of the Interview: Feminism, Mediation, Narrative, and Conversations about Digital Literacy” by Cynthia L. Selfe and Gail E. Hawisher, who interrogate the concept of ‘objective knowledge’ and suggest a feminist approach to the method of the interview as a means to connect and to share knowledge rather than to ‘extract’ information. Selfe & Hawisher demonstrate that the archetypal role of researcher as distant, impersonal, clinical in their approach to data-gathering through the medium of interview, stripping away the possibilities that human connection and oral tradition have to offer. For Selfe & Hawisher, the traditional model of interviewing is an outmoded, unethical vestige from an imperialist, anthropological history that positions the subject as specimen— foregoing the possible relationship forged within a conversation. This chapter, inspired by a talk given by Deborah Brandt- narrows in on how and why people develop vastly different digital literacies and what that means in the Information Age when digital communication is the standard. If human-to-human communication relies almost primary on digital mediums, what could it mean for a person who has little to no access? Starting out with typical interview protocol of prescribed questions, Selfe & Hawisher moved further and further beyond this sterile format and began paying attention to the little “little stories” (28), which they would eventually respond to, instigating a conversation, a relationship, and the unfolding of a dialectic in which both researcher and subject were engaged in meaning-making.

 

• Quote Bank

 

• “Most researchers recognize that large-scale statistics provide one picture of salient educational trends, but such a picture, as Donna Haraway notes, can prove problematic if it seduces us into the “God Trick” (584), the arrogant and mistaken belief that we can know objectively, completely, transcendently. If we, as researchers, depend solely on such information, we tend to miss the human and very personal face of social, cultural, economic phenomena that so fundamentally shapes the project of education and the nature of institutions, departments, and classrooms. We miss the powerful, vernacular sense of what social change looks like from the perspective of individuals in their own experiences and lives, in their relations with other humans” (36).

 

• “The relationships forged within these conversations, we believe, construct a participatory model of research that challenges more conventional understandings of investigations and the power relations between the researcher and researched subjects” (37).

 

• “…they proceed best when participants forge relationships over time, across conventional spatial and geopolitical boundaries, and around conditions of mutual interest” (37).

 

• “…the importance of paying close attention not only to participants’ direct responses to our targeted protocol questions but also to the small stories, engaging in a kind of “self-fashioning” (Brockmeier and Carbaugh 10) and self-performance (Goffman), composing themselves into the fabric of an increasingly technological world through their utterances and actions” (38).

 

• “Thus, by the time we began our book Literate Lives in the Information Age: Narratives of Literacy from the United States, we had added coauthorship as a major component to our research approach. We were influenced in this decision not only by our increasing awareness of the dialogic structure of unstructured and semi-structured interviews but also by Caroline Brettell’s collection When They Read What We Write, which presents a series of perspectives on studies like ours—interview based ethnographies and life histories—and talks about the ways in which modernist approaches to reporting on such research have often suffered from the limited perspectives of academics and professional scholars who, as Donald Schoen notes, still cling to an understanding of “the superior academic value of ‘pure knowledge’ inherited from the ‘model of technical rationality’ that has been influential in all American social sciences” (27).

 

• “As Haraway might characterize our efforts, we have become less interested in the God stories that yield coherent narratives of complex phenomena and more interested in the coyote knowledge of individuals, which provides small but potent glimpses of the meaning people attach to the everyday practices of their literate lives” (42).

 

1. Reflection

 

Although I am not a researcher in the context of my work at Western and am not conducting any formal interviews with my students, this chapter was incredibly relevant within the context of teaching, in that my role as “teacher” presupposes a superior knowledge that my students do not have free access to. Much like the ethnographer, a teacher is extracting answers from a classroom of subjects, summoning responses of a certain nature and typically refraining from an open dialogue with students that almost seems to challenge the laws of a classroom. To open dialogue with each student, publicly, and engage in any sort of dialectic (outside source reference, sorry, can’t get Hegel out of my head) certainly undermines the traditional power structure we are familiar with. I am interested in exploring how to illustrate that as a teacher, I hope to facilitate a dynamic learning environment that values what the article refers to as, “small stories” within the classroom— for example: what is the subtext in a Webtext?” Is something I wanted to talk about today; I am always looking for the narrative in everything we do. How can something like a Webtext, which seems to be a disassociation from the writer(s), be telling a story? How can I forge a relationship of mutual interest with my students in the future? It is my theory that if we really ground ENG 101 in the context of “Multimodal Storytelling” (what I wish was the name & concept!) we will engender a notion– at least— that we are mutual participants in a meaning-making experience, where their stories are in conversation with other stories, mingling at all times in a soft flurry of possible connections.