Commentary #3: Brueggemann

Maria J. Garcia- 3/10/09

Brenda Jo Brueggemann’s article touched a nerve for me; I really felt a sense of her struggle as she candidly wrote up her experience as a participant-observer of deaf (Deaf) writing students at Gallaudet University for her dissertation.  I could feel her frustration at the faculty, and her empathy with her subjects.  However, I believe that she got too close, “she went native,” as she admits.  She lost her sense of objectivity when she became emotionally attached to her subjects.  She writes: “When the researcher becomes friends with the participants then there can be a lapse in what the author calls the “honesty of observing” (26).

Brueggemann, who herself is hearing-impaired, naively set out to do her sociocognitive study of deaf students in a remedial writing program at Gallaudet.  She planned ahead how she would represent herself during the four months that she was there.  When faced with a decision, she chose to not be totally honest in terms of whether she was a novice or expert in certain areas.  She admits, “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.”  

 Additionally, in choosing a position of deceit, she set herself up for the potential dilemma of the ethnographer: “these crises (of representation) are all located in the deceit of trying to represent myself as the so-called participant-observer” (22). Admittedly, when a participant-observer decides to get involved with his/her subject, they face many ethical issues that must be sorted out before doing the write-up.

Brueggemann concludes by sharing her thoughts, post-publishing:  “Like Charlie, I see my life-both personal and professional-caught between…pulled in both directions”(34).  This is telling of her personal and professional transformation after her experience as participating-observer.  She learned that, in order to be a better researcher, she will “respect the spaces between, and the silence within, those spaces while at the same time I try to re-write, re-re-represent, re-vision” (34).

I value Brueggemann’s cautionary experience in light of my own ethnographic observations.  I value that, when speaking of her role as participating-observer, she says, “I still do not know where I stood, or where I stand now” (21).  I understand that much thought needs to be given to the questions she poses at the end of her essay and commit to trying to be an ethical ethnographer. Like Brueggemann, I would question my role as ethnographic observer.