Maria Shreve

Dr. DeVries

English 5870

March 10, 2009

            After reading “Stiff-Life Representations and Silences in the Participant-Observer Role” by Brenda Joe Brueggeman, I was surprised at how the essay pulled at my heartstrings, so to speak, particularly in that once she sent a copy of the chapter to Anna, she never heard back. 

            This article did a superb job of explaining the participant-observer role and the mindset of the person doing the research.  Brueggemann, who herself is hearing-impaired, set out to do her sociocongnitive study of deaf students in a remedial writing program at  Gallaudent.  She thought ahead of time about how she was going to represent herself during the four months that she was there – and she wasn’t always honest in terms of whether she was a novice or expert in certain areas.  She states, “Admittedly, I was not presenting my true self on these occasions.  I was trying to present myself as a noninterfering and nonjudgmental, somewhat objective and distanced observer, but also as an eager, interested, and intelligent potential participant.”  This brings up the question of under what circumstances is it acceptable to be dishonest.  I would say very few.  I realize that the goal is to obtain research, but I don’t think that I could misrepresent myself. And, of course, we all know how easy it is to be caught in a lie. Interestingly, she notes that most people responded to her more in her deceitful role as novice, although she discovered she was not accepted by either the hearing or deaf faculty and that individuals were defined as “deaf” or “hearing.” She likened herself to being caught in a crossfire.            Brugggeman notes that eventually she did form friendships with three faculty members and two students, who, incidentally, provided her with a great deal of the information for her research. She describes the feelings of betrayal as she used their quotes and sentiments as part of her research and states, “Yet to write about them and with them as such would be to betray an enormous trust, to possibly demolish friendships I had come to value.  Again, I danced in deceit in that space between participant and observer.”  She notes that at this point she was no longer nonjudgmental and had, in fact, “gone native.”  This makes me wonder how often this happens.  Does an observer need to get close to participants to obtain the research? I would think it unlikely that if she had not formed friendships with Anna and Charlie,  she have gained the amount of insight about Gallaudet that she did.

            Later in the article, she discusses the difficulty in writing about her subjects’ representativeness – they simply did not represent deaf other students at the school, let alone deaf students in remedial writing classes.  She concludes it was not possible.  Another difficulty pertaining to writing was the interpretation of Anna and Charlie’s interviews.  Anna used a combination of “something like Pidgin Signed English (PSE)” and because Charlie used an interpreter, this confused Bruggeman because she was also interpreting on her own. To make things even more difficult, she was writing for two audiences – her dissertation committee and the Gallaudent community.  In terms of publishing, she submitted her work although reviewers did not agree with her representation of Anna.

            During the exit interviews, Anna and Charlie emotionally expressed their “life-long frustrations and failures with acquiring English literacy.  At this point in the article, it is even more apparent that a closeness has been established between the researcher-observer and subjects.  However, this brings me back Anna not responding to the paper that Brueggemann sent her.  In addition, although many faculty members at Gallaudet were interested in seeing her dissertation, only one person responded to it.  She ponders over what do if her subjects choose silence and asks, “Can I – or even should I – speak out of these silences?  How might I represent these silences myself?”

            This article put into perspective for me the concept of participant-observers in research, and it is much more clear to me how the participant observer is part of the research.