Insight #1: People, not texts
This comes from Heidi McKee’s Skype call where she recounted her journey from Literature to RhetComp and how she came to be interested in, among other things, qualitative research methodologies. I felt a moment of recognition hearing McKee describe the moment she discovered that she was more interested in researching people rather than texts. (It also made me feel a little sad, as her realization was productive, whereas mine signaled more of a slow decline into confusion.)
McKee’s realization captures something I’ve been working on/through for a while. After my PhD coursework I became more and more lukewarm to literary scholarship, throwing my energy into the classroom and writing center. The energy I put into avoiding my exams could have produced two dissertations. But when I did work on them, I felt like a Roomba, moving noisily and jerkily over the same small patches over and over, often to end up bumping into a corner or table leg until finally getting stuck under a cabinet.
So in this case, my “insight” is entirely personal, which is fitting because I took this class for personal reasons (is academia still for me? if so, what part of the work can I do?): people, not texts (or pehaps, more accurately, people and their texts). I wish I could say I knew more about what I figured out, but at this point even having my suspicions confirmed feels like a win.
Insight #2 But people make everything harder (AKA ethics and representation)
I’ve blah-gged (my word for blogging without concision) here, here, here, and here about ethics and issues of representation. I appreciate how sensitive (and even overly sensitive, some might say) and careful many of our readings were to issues of representation, especially all the authors in Ethics and Representation in Qualitative Studies of Literacy as well as Boyd, McKee, and Porter. While comp scholars may not be be ethnographers (shout out to Rhodes and his underused psychography here!) and thus aren’t grounded/trained in the ethics that govern research on human subjects (unless everyone comes to composition research with a solid social science background), that doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t be governed by the same strict standards as ethnographers (or anthropologists, sociologists, etc.) are. And perhaps the rules governing comp research should be even stricter since, despite it sometimes seeming like social science, it remains part of the humanities tribe. (So I’m on Team McKee when it comes to deciding what’s public on the internet, at least for composition researchers.) I found the chapters in Ethics and Representation quite powerful (this is no coincidence, as writing center theory is also influenced by postcolonialism and feminism), especially their emphasis on sharing knowledge with their subjects to support best practices (I don’t care for the term intervention), sharing power, and polyvocality. I know that there is a lot of anxiety and effort devoted to plotting the future of RhetComp (as there is, of course, elsewhere, especially in the Humanities), and while I am pretty far outside of that conversation, it seems to me that continued attention to ethics and representation should guide wherever the field goes.
Insight #3 Not generalizable? Not necessarily the problem one might think.
We started the semester with Taber’s thesis, who introduced me to North and his concerns about ethnography in composition research: “Among [North’s] multilayered warnings of ethnographic research, one of the most poignant and specific concerns is about the ‘limits as knowledge’ of ethnography due to the ‘insularity of investigation: the difficulty of somehow extending the findings of an investigation in any one community to any other’ (Taber 4). While I agree that (mis)appropriating research methods from other disciplines can be problematic, I was much less concerned about the problem of “insularity,” which is a concern in not just ethnographies but also other qualitative studies. Maybe it’s because I spent the last decade reading literature, looking for connections between a handful of texts (rather than a library full) that I don’t feel the pressure to generalize.
In fact, many of our readings have made excellent cases for case studies. For example, in Persons in Process, Herrington and Curtis acknowledge the limits of their approach while at the same time valorizing it :
We have not aimed to generalize that these students are representative types, but we do believe the backgrounds and experiences they bring represent something of the diversity amongst the students sitting in our classrooms and appropriately admitted to higher education in the United States: students of a range of national origins, ethnicities, classes, and religious convictions; females and males of various sexual orientations; students whose home languages are not all English and who possess varying ranges of facility with standard American English; and students with varied personal and family histories. As we have endeavored to show, these aspects of social and personal identity intermix in complex ways in particular students and are implicated in their learning” (355)
Other studies, especially Lee Ann Carroll’s Rehearsing New Roles and David Foster’s Writing with Authority, also defend how useful it can be to study a small group of students despite the fact that they may not represent all students. Carroll also justifies her methods for understanding a complex system like a gen ed program by looking at specific student experiences. She quotes Crowson, who privileges gaining an “understanding of the phenomena … rather than some generalizable knowledge, explanation, prediction, and control” (qtd. in Carroll 43)
Many have raised the issue of what we then do with these individual “stories.” McKee offered a practical suggestions: researchers need to examine what’s already there, creating meta-studies that determine what researchers have found, what is missing, and where we should go from here.
Periodically, Dr. Moxley would try to gauge our attitudes toward ethnography, and I felt like at the heart of his questions was, “Does ethnography make sense as a research method in composition studies? Is it useful?” Yes and yes, I have learned.
I feel for your academic journey for your niche. I had the opposite reaction; composition research is a new and different way to approach my studies, but I wouldn’t want to live here. Good luck in your search!