James D. Dyer

Dr. Kim DeVries

ENG 5870

Spring 2009

Working “at the edge of incompetence” is what Elliot Eisner (in Saks (Ed.), 1996,p. 412) calls the risky practice of courting the unknown in one’s research practice. If we can acknowledge the disorderly, ambiguous nature of pedagogy, and let ourselves be drawn outward into the pedagogical world with a heightened sense of unknowing, we begin to nurture the qualities of astonishment and wonder in our living practice.(14)

I must confess, Pryer is not saying anything new really, and I read Fay’s response before I wrote this so I will talk a little about what she had to say. She thought that Pryer was sort of non specific about methodology, and that while she agreed that Pryer’s experiences made her think about the problematic relations between abused children and teachers was interesting, she still basically thinks that we should try to remove subjective perspectives from our research whenever we can. Now, I would suggest, that as teachers, as truly participant observers in our classrooms in our day to day lives, that this is impossible and should therefore not be attempted. The very attempt to distance oneself from the memory, from the experience that you have just been through, corrupts it. It is precisely that emotional involvement, and the acknowledgement of one’s thoughts and feelings that separates ethnology from other forms of research, and memoir is an excellent vehicle for the passing on of thoughts and feelings.

I am not a Christian, my only faith, really, is in humanity’s potentials, both good and ill. This is a philosophical orientation that many people are not comfortable with, but it is all I have. However, I am fond of Norse and Celtic mythology. In the Norse Pantheon, Odin is the father of the gods, he traded an eye for wisdom, and got crucified on an ash tree for nine days, but more important and relevant to this discussion is the fact that he had two pet ravens (or familiars if you want a more technical term), Their names were Huginn and Muninn, which translates out of the old Norse as “Thought” and “Memory” and they sat on his shoulders and whispered news of the world into his ears. Those are the things that subjective research is made of.

The true participant observer cannot write down all they see and hear, or even record it with a spy camera in their sunglasses. Life is too chaotic, and particularly when you are dealing with children, trust me, I have some here. We are true participants in a culture, writing about that culture, we use our memories, and our notes, hopefully made unobtrusively, to create a picture of a particular culture or subculture at a particular time, and from a particular point of view. The Muninn is our remembered experience, filtered as it is through our position in the world, desires, mood, and intent, Huginn is what we think about it, and both of these things whisper through our beings and onto the page as memoir. That is ethnology in its purest form. A woman named Patricia Hample once described it this way,

The authority of memory is a personal confirmation of selfhood. To write one’s life is to live it twice, and the second living is both spiritual and historical, for a memoir reaches deep within the personality as it seeks its narrative form and also grasps the life-of-the-times as no political treatise can.

Our most ancient metaphor for life is a journey. Memoir is travel writing, then, notes taken along the way, telling how things looked and what thoughts occurred. But I cannot think of the memoirist as a tourist. This is the traveler who goes on foot, living the journey, taking on mountains, enduring deserts, marveling at the lush green places. Moving through it all faithfully, not so much a survivor with a harrowing tale to tell as a pilgrim, seeking, wondering. (Mind Readings, 190)

Everything we write is fiction, but there are degrees, a scientific research paper, or a research paper in philosophy is concerned with reporting the facts of a certain process or idea, then the degree of “fiction” is relatively small and concerned primarily with the validity of the idea or physical process, so the researchers “selfhood” is not necessarily all that important. In most social research however, even when using purely mathematical data such as statistics, the researchers persona becomes much more important because their orientation towards the world determines the way they set up their questions if nothing else, and let me tell you, I can make statistics dance in the head of a pin like so many angels—most sorts of math might not be strictly rhetorical, but statistics is. And when you get into the realms of participant observation, ethnology, and other purely relative disciplinary trends, the observer is as important as what is observed. This is true because they are telling you a story about a people. If you listen to stories about people it is important to know who is telling it, and why, what is their background? Are they Prejudiced? Do they have an agenda? Why are they telling this story? What is their purpose? Think about it classmates, really, in Germany, in the 1930’s Hitler started telling stories about a people, and six-million of them wound up dead….Fictions that purport to tell the truth should do so.

This kind of research is important, and informative, and it can help other teachers, but with it comes an obligation of self-disclosure, and a responsibility to tell the truth through your fiction. All of our lives are stories, and stories have the power to shape generations…look at the Bible, or Romeo and Juliet, or the Declaration of Independence…Stories have power because people believe in them, and act based on them, In This World that we share.