“What difference, I ask, does it make who researches, who writes about, who represents ‘subjects’ in composition research? And what difference does it make how these subjects are represented?”

As Brueggemann began her dissertation research, she believed herself a distant observer in an elevated position. She quotes David Bleich, who says, “even politically sympathetic ethnographers seem to require for themselves some elevated position relative to the studied culture” (Brueggemann 22). I think there is a fear being played out (perhaps unconsciously) when we enter these ‘alien’ cultures, and it is much easier to deal with them if we are under the (perhaps false) impression that they are ‘less’ than us; that we are ‘more civilized’ than those we study, or in the case of grad students in a high school or first-year program, more educated. I know as a grad student coming into a high school classroom, I am less nervous walking in having been to high school before and knowing what I expected to see as a student there. I would be much less inclined to perform an ethnographic study of a graduate classroom or a conference. This comes from my fear of inferiority and my understanding that the people around me know infinitely more about the goings-on than I do. At least from a presumed ‘higher ground’ I can look out on the horizon of a high school classroom with a sense that this space is not wholly outside my grasp.

Later, Breuggemann realizes that in the course of her participant-observation that she has “gone native,” and in doing so found it difficult to write anything coherent about her subjects without feeling that by representing them at all she would have to choose between representations, between audiences, and therefore, I think, to skew reality. “For the two students I wrote up in the dissertation, Anna and Charlie, were not necessarily representative of all deaf students, nor even all deaf students at Gallaudet, nor even of other deaf students in their basic writing classes” (27). As such, Even if she represented these two faithfully, she could not, without trepidation, cast them as being representative of anything but themselves, even as she was asked to do so by her dissertation panel. The classroom is a highly contextual space, and Brueggemann found it very difficult to write about her experiences as if they held some global meaning for the sake of her dissertation, or later, that her experience could therefore be applied directly to any deaf student she encountered in her own writing center.

While I have learned a great deal teaching basic writing, and am learning even more as I observe high school seniors at different writing levels (college prep vs. AP), I am constantly reminded that all of my observations are contextual, that these students are reacting to this specific teacher under these particular conditions, and that anything I gain from this experience will have to be tailored and tweaked, that some of it may even have to be thrown out as unusable in my own classroom with my own set of students, even to the point that some things will work in an afternoon class that will not work in an early-morning one. While this realization may seem daunting as it is written here, I much prefer it to the decontexualized, standardized-testing model otherwise at my disposal.