At first glance, Pryer’s article seems to cover the same issues as Brueggemann, Sunstein and in some ways Purcell-Gates.  Like Brueggemann, she describes issues of personal struggle when dealing with academic research and similar to Sunstein, she suggests the use of creative expression to not only engage the reader but open up the area of inquiry. She enters her discussion by asking, like these other scholars, how the researcher should deal with subjectivity. As poison or elixir? Should subjectivity be embraced or rejected? Formal inquiry into educational research, she maintains, works to squeeze out every bit of subjectivity with the ultimate goal of treating it like a science. This idea is reminiscent of some of the techniques Purcell-Gates recommends to decontaminate the data and make educational research more scientific. Using the work of Kathleen Rockhill, Pryer explains how academe demands “…the terrible splitting of self that is an inevitable outcome of working in a culture that despises the subjective, and that prohibits the expression of the passionate” (1). This pursuit of objectivity results in the manifestation of a mythical universal being without passion or emotion split from the physical world and seemingly necessary for upholding ideologies of modernity in the areas of progress and the achievement of boundless knowledge (3). Pryer, of course, appears to reject the idea that the researcher can or should be completely objective or that objectivity is the only precursor to knowledge. Yet, she moves beyond other scholars by not only suggesting that subjectivity be embraced but that it should be used as a way in, a path to knowledge. This path, she posits, can be found through the map of memoir:

Family stories, photographs, personal and family artefacts, letters, conversations, anecdotes, and memories comprise the data for research, and act as a springboard for the study of the self and of others in context, enabling the researcher, to seek patterns in the complexities of everyday experience that illuminate cultural and social structures, identity formation, and lived experiences of power and possibility (6).

Using personal stories, the researcher can discover how the material world affects learning/discourse communities and how lived experiences can uncover both the “ambiguities” and “political nature of language” (14). Through memoir, the political and material can find their way into the classroom.

While all of this interested me, I was unclear as to some of the articles goals. I couldn’t find articulated in the article exactly who should use memoir in research. Does she refer to the researched learning community or the researcher herself? Since I felt that something was missing in the article, I searched Google scholar for other works by Alison Pryer in an effort to see how she uses memoir in educational research. I didn’t find many, but the one I did find, Silences and Silencings: Remembered/Forgotten Pedagogies of School and Family, illustrates the use of memoir in educational research. (I uploaded this article to the library.) Pryer uses her background as a sexually abused child as a springboard for pedagogical research. While describing her own particular experiences and combining them with the broader experiences of others through statistical analysis and scholarly works, she paints a picture of the sexually abused student in the classroom.  Like herself, she posits that these students are “submissive learners” willing to sacrifice their own thoughts and desires for the sake of the teacher’s satisfaction (56). Pryer’s intensely personal experience as a sexually abused child allows her to reveal through more research in other disciplines how educators must come to terms with the affect sexual abuse has on learning just as they have come to terms with how issues of race, gender, etc. affect the classroom.

I never thought of how subjectivity could be used until I read this article. I always thought of it as something that should be at the least acknowledged but for the most part avoided.  While Pryer has provided another alternative, and has dealt with the problems of truth in memoir and the dangers of using the classroom as a therapeutic space, I can’t say that I’ve changed my mind. I do think, however, that she raises an interesting point which warrants more research in this area.