When I grow up, I want to write like write like Allison Pryer.  When I read a piece of writing that is of such high quality, I find it hard not comment on it.  In Imagining Educational Research? On the Uses of Fiction in Autobiographic Inquiry, Pryer discusses, as the title states, using the autobiographical writing, or the writing of memoirs, as another method of conducting research.  Interestingly, the writers whom she chooses to quote also write both artfully and eloquently.  She recalls a paper by Kathleen Rockhill, which had a profound effect on her.  Pryer states:

 

In her paper, Rockhill expresses great sadness about her experiences within academic culture, and voices serious doubts about how she might continue to participate in academe meaningfully, never mind finding a way to change it. (1)

 

She explains further that Rockhill describes the “terrible splitting of self than is an evitable outcome of working in a culture that despises the subjective, and that prohibits the expression of the passionate” (1).  I can relate to that comment because as I tell my seventh grade students, “I am a sucker when it comes to writing voice,” because that is what makes a piece of writing come alive.  For example, even though I realize that I voluntarily launched myself right in the middle of graduate level academia, I still find it a struggle, at times, and have an unenthusiastic, sluggish approach to many of the readings required in the RTW program.  In contrast, within the first page of reading the articles by Brunnegann and Sunstein, I found myself ready to get up and do a soft-shoe with article in hand. 

 

            Pryer asks me question of why language has to be a place of struggle.  She quotes bell hooks: “Our words are not without meaning, they are an action, a resistance.  Language is a place of struggle” (3).  Pryer relates that she has had her own “struggles against the constraints and limitations of ‘the ordered halls of academe’” in that she has incorporated autobiographical writing into her research.  Her preference is the genre of memoir for the following reasons:

 

This specific form of life writing offers opportunities to question and play with some of the common dualistic polarizations that prevail in the North American educational research culture – the personal versus the professional, the remembered versus the scientifically measured, and the imagined versus the real (4).

 

            Interestingly, she doesn’t mention any specific flack that she might have for conducting this innovative type of research, as Brunnegann and Sunstein referred to in their articles in which when they did their teacher-research.  However, she does ask the questions: “So does this impurity preclude the use of memoir as research methodology?”  She does not believe that they do and states the following explanation:

 

The impure qualities of memoir are, of course, extremely problematic within the traditional bounds of mainstream educational research.  Yet, through the use of memoir, the personal, the remembered and the imagined may infuse everyday educational research with a certain colour and quality of meaning that are not, and indeed often cannot, be expressed solely through technical-rational approaches to research (5)

 

She notes that in the educational community, we should use a variety of diverse methodologies  “to express the depth and breadth of that most human and most mysterious of experiences, which we call pedagogy” (5).  She states that we need to use artistic methodologies and to transform scientific methodologies. 

 

Obviously, when we think about writing memoirs, the image comes to mind about writing of life experiences.  Specifically, it seems to me that celebrities prefer to use the term “memoirs.” Pryer clarifies the definition of memoir and states:

 

At first glance, the focus of memoir may seem to be set firmly on the self.  However, for the purposes of research in the field of education, the focus lies not on the self, but on the space between educational practice and the self (6).

 

And just what does the research consist of?  Family stories, photographs, personal and family artifacts, letters, conversations, anecdotes, and memories. 

            Pryer notes that when social scientists assess the quality of autobiographical narrative methodologies related to inquiry questions related to accuracy, reliability, reproducibility, generalizability, ambiguity, and unintended and inappropriate interpretations of the text arise, but she states this criteria is no longer applicable.

            She categorizes the research memoirs as dialogical texts, which she states acknowledge the reader in anticipation that the will have a response. The reader will subsequently be coaxed into a conversation with makes the reader an active participant and will evoke a powerful emotional experience.  There is also another reader-writer connection, as the writer will “become ‘vulnerable observers’ of their own lived and living fictions, inviting the reader to become vulnerable observers with them.  Memoir as a research methodology sounds appealing to me and I would like to examine for articles of this nature.