Maria J. Garcia

4/7/09

Mid-Term Question #2

2. We have talked a lot about subjectivity during the last few weeks. Focusing on the problems of subjectivity, use the readings to develop an approach to dealing with subjectivity in your classroom observations.

I chose to answer this question after listening to my classmates in another class discussing socioeconomic issues among their students.  One of my classmates was commenting that a student in his class was out sick and that, upon returning to class, the student commented that his mother could not afford to buy him his medicine.  Apparently, the student owns a cell phone and a flat-screen television, both of which should be taken as indicators of the affordability of medicine and, apparently, irresponsible parents who willingly leave their children uninsured.  I believe the reality is quite far from this preconceived notion.  I know many of the working poor, struggling to support their families and trying to get by.  They are proud people who will not seek social services such as welfare.  Instead, they might go without much needed medication of medical care.  Are they right or are they wrong?  And, who are we to judge them?  Our subjectivity imposes our own values and beliefs on others.  We see them as they “ought to be” rather than accepting them as they are because we are/have become  part of the oppressive apparatus, the dominant ideology.

This conversation among my classmates really struck a nerve with me because the class is about Politics in Basic Writing which explores oppression of one class of people by another class of people in the academy.  When I heard the discussion among my classmates, I could not help wondering what type of ethnographic observations they might conduct.  How would they deal with their subjectivity upon observing the economically-challenged students in their classrooms?  Would they go into the observation with a pre-conceived notion that these students are “basic writers” because they come from a “basic background” and live “basic lives?”    What would these Graduate students’ research paper look like?   Will they buy into the clichés and stereotypes of the disenfranchised?

Brenda Jo Brueggemann’s article poses that our preconceived notions affect our research.  She writes about the hyphenated world between participant and researcher.  Bonnie Sunstein quoted Barbara Meyeroff as such: ‘”what was being written was from my eyes, with my personality, biases, history, and sensibility, and it seemed dishonest to exclude that” (182).  All the research point to the inevitability of bringing our biases into our ethnographic research.  It points to the “guilt” a researcher might experience when acknowledging these biases. 

Brueggemann and Sunstein offer solid examples of how a teacher researcher might deal with the inevitability of bringing our subjectivity into our research.  By exploring their experiences, I might become a better ethnographer, always attempting to be aware of my own biases and striving to be as objective and ethical as possible when reporting my findings.