LOUS HESHUSIUS
York University
Methodological Concerns Around Subjectivity: Will We Free Ourselves From Objectivity?Original Source: QUIG Proceedings
QUIG: The Qualitative Interest Group, University of Georgia
1992 Keynote AddressI would like to share with you some thoughts which have been tugging at my mind now for some time in relation to methodological concerns about what to do with our subjectivity. I have not shared these ponderings in public before. I probably would not quite have dared to do so, had this been an opening address, when everyone is still alert, more eager to find imperfections perhaps than at the end of a conference when an audience is more relaxed and perhaps more philosophically tolerant and welcoming, I hope, a still tentative view on this matter of subjectivity. It is a view that consists more of questions than of answers; it is also a view that differs from those expressed by most educational researchers, including most voices at this conference. My thoughts are based on a large body of literature, largely outside of education. I will not burden you with noting a lot of references but only do so where I use actual quotes. Let me begin by telling a story:
There was this chimpanzee, Harry, who was everyone's favorite and one day he escaped from the zoo. Everyone looked for him, the zoo keepers, the police, volunteers, and finally, they found him on the top floor of the local library. He was sitting on the floor, looking exhausted, with dozens of books around him. "I'm so sorry he said. I knew you would worry about me, but I had to come here and read all of this. I have had this existential question -- I finally needed to find out: WHO AM I? "Well," they asked him, "Did you find out?"
He shook his head, holding the Bible in his right hand and Darwin's "The Origins of Species" in his left: "No", he said, "It is even worse. Now I don't even know anymore if I am my brother's keeper, or my keeper's brother..."
Harry had landed in a paradigm shift all right! This talk about the serious side of our chimp joke, for all humour of course, has a serious undertone. Many see the shift in our methodological concerns from objectivity to subjectivity as reflecting the shift in paradigms from Newtonian thought to New Paradigm thought, analogous to the magnitude of the shift our chimp found himself in, the shift from the Medieval worldview to the scientific revolution. I used to think so as well. I no longer do. To explain my reasons, let me turn to a novel by Gloria Naylor (1989), called "Mama Day".*
Mama Day is a descendent of a slave woman who in 1823 married her Norwegian master, and persuaded him to deed his slaves the island where they lived. In recent years developers have been wanting to buy the island, but the independent-minded islanders decline. For the islanders the year 1823 has become a symbol of their freedom. They use the phrase "18 & 23" even as a verb: the phrase is all tied up with the slave woman and the independence and new meanings she brought to their lives in 1823. Some of the islanders however have bought a bit into the tempting aspects of "life across the bridge." Among them is the son of Reema, who is:
"...hauling himself back from one of those fancy colleges mainside, dragging his notebooks and tape recorder... And then when he went around asking us about 18 & 23, there weren't nothing to do but take pity on him as he rattled on about `ethnography', `unique speech patterns', `cultural preservation', and whatever else he seemed to be getting so much pleasure out of while talking into his little gray machine. He was all over the place -- What 18 & 23 mean? What 18 & 23 mean? And we all told him the God-honest truth: it was just our way of saying something.... ...he sent everybody he'd talked to copies of the book he wrote, bound all nicely with our name and his signed on the first page. We couldn't hold Reema down, she was so proud. It's a good thing she didn't read it. None of use made it much through the introduction, but that said it all: you see, he had come to the conclusion after "extensive fieldwork" (ain't never picked a boll of cotton or head of lettuce in his life -- Reema spoiled him silly), but he done still made it to the conclusion that 18 & 23 wasn't 18 & 23 at all -- was really 81 & 32, which just so happened to be the lines of longitude and latitude marking off where (our island) sits on the map. And we were just so damned dumb that we turned the whole thing around. Not that he called it being dumb, mind you, called it "asserting our cultural identity", "inverting hostile social and political parameters". `Cause, see, being we was brought here as slaves [he explained] we had no choice but to look at everything upside down. And then being that we was isolated off here on this island, everybody else in the country went on learning good English and calling things what they really was --in the dictionary and all that- while we kept on calling things assbackwards. And he thought that was just so wonderful and marvelous, etcetera, etcetera...
The people who ran the type of schools that could turn our children into raving lunatics--and then put his picture on the back of the book so we couldn't even deny it was him--didn't mean us a speck of good (p. 7-8).
Let's imagine, that the ethnographer had been very concerned about accounting for his "subjectivity" and his "biases". Let's imagine that he had "tamed" his subjectivity (Peshkin, 1988, p. 20), or had been "rigorously subjective" (Jackson, 1991, p. 154). Let's imagine he had provided the reader with a "subjectivity audit" (Peshkin, 1988, p. 18), and that he had "come clean" as some refer to the this trend to account for one's subjectivity. Or let's imagine he had "admitted" his "subjective experience" in order to facilitate "a more self-conscious attempt to control for observer bias (Goetz & LeCompte, 1984, p. 9). Would he and would we have come to understand the phrase "18 & 23" better? Would the ethnographer's account be any more valid? I am afraid that the meaning of "18 and 23" would still have eluded him, and the islanders would still want to deny that the book was about them.
Many scholars have told us that we are "in between stories". We have discovered that objectivity is not possible and has been an illusion constructed by the masculine scientific imagination. We are moving toward subjectivity instead. Now we discuss how to "deal" with our subjectivity: How to account for `it', what to do with `it', how to develop a methodology to restrain `it', how to keep it in straight lines. I have come to be convinced however, that in all our concerns around subjectivity, we have not left the story of objectivity at all.
A long, long list of questions develops in my mind when I read the concerns around subjectivity and bias. When researchers tell us: Here are the subjective parts of me that were involved in the research process, shouldn't they also be able to state, what parts of them were not subjective? Are there parts of us that are not-subjective and not biased? If so, are the not-subjective parts objective? If that is the case, then are we able to be objective after all, after we thought we had done away with it? The idea seems to be that we construct something we call "subjectivity" as separate from ourselves by the sheer force of restraining "it" or accounting for "it". If we don't have objective parts to us, then wouldn't the question become something like: Are there then two kinds of subjectivity: the tamed and the untamed? The accounted for and the not accounted for? If that is the case, what forces in a person separate the two? Aren's these forces themselves subjective? And who decides which one is which and why? How would we know if the accounted for subjectivity is not far more important in determining one's influence on the research process than the unaccounted for? Is there a finite number of subjective parts that makes up all of me? If so, how do I know if I have accounted for all of them? Should I try to account for all of them? Let us assume for a moment that I could account for all of my subjectivity, then why call it "subjectivity": it would be simply all of me. Or, and here I am entering my story for today: should I reach out to what I want to know with all of me? Because I can't do anything else. Is the act of knowing an act of wholeness? We have heard from many scholars: there is no ontological objectivity and no procedural objectivity (I am quoting Elliot Eisner). Along with a number of others largely outside of education, I would like to say, there is no ontological subjectivity either, nor a procedural subjectivity.
One evening, while working on this paper, my attention was drawn to my cat who was chasing her tail, or chasing "ghosts" as we call it in our family. I could not help seeing a similarity: both my cat and the literature on how to manage and be in charge of one's subjectivity were trying to catch the "uncatchable"...neither subjectivity, nor a cat's tail exists as an independent entity. My cat will find out one day, if she actually manages to "catch" her tail, that it is not separate from her, that it is her. She will find out that she cannot restrain it, be in charge of it, tame it, or keep it under her control. The next day, in one of these remarkable, not so incidental moments, I was reading Ralph Waldo Emerson (in Gilman, 1965, p. 154), that great thinker, who says about experience:
Do you see that kitten chasing so prettily her own tail? If you could look with her eyes you might see her surrounded with hundreds of figures performing complex dramas...long conversations, many characters...and meantime it is only puss and her tail. How long before our masquerade will end its noise of tambourines, laughter and shouting, and we shall find it was a solitary performance?
Trying to account for one's subjectivity, it seems to me, is not so much wrong as it is impossible: trying to split the whole of oneself into something called subjective and something called...I don't know exactly what. For I have not read a qualitative researcher who has explained, or even tried to explain, what the other parts are that are left, after he or she has accounted for, or rather thinks she or he has accounted for, her or his subjectivity.
In borrowing methodology from the natural sciences in an attempt to become a "science", we borrowed much more than methods: we borrowed the idea (not the fact, but the idea) that the knower is separate from the known. Knowing as distancing became the epistemological stance in the study of human behavior as well, a distance that could be crossed, first by objective methodology and now, presumably, by subjective methodology.
Prior to the scientific revolution, the idea of knowing as an act of distancing, or as an act of "disenchantment" as historians of science also refer to it, was new to humankind. Knowing had always been understood as a form of participation. Says Morris Berman (1984, p. 1) "For more than 99% of human history, the world was enchanted and man saw himself as an integral part of it". The very act of participation was knowing. For most of human history humans did not know objectively, and therefore did not know subjectively. The idea of subjectivity and bias makes sense only against the backdrop of the possibility of objectivity, which is to say, of knowing as an act of distancing. The concepts of subjectivity and bias have no life outside of it. Historians of science have referred to the belief that one could actually distance oneself in order to come to know as "alienated consciousness".
As many have documented, the birth of alienated consciousness by creating the idea of a split, a distance between the knower and the known, can be located in the historical matrix of overlapping ideologies of patriarchy, capitalism,, marxism, and colonialism. The idea of an alienated consciousness emerged for social, political and theological reasons as much as scientific/technological ones. It legitimized domination and a hierarchical concept of order, rather than an order of participation that implies relatedness, equality, care and a full somatic presence.
Knowing as an act of participatory consciousness points to the knower as an integral part of that which he or she wants to understand, not as separate from it. It points to knowing as enchantment... not the sentimental "enchantment" as in the song, "One enchanted evening...", but enchantment as awareness of the unity of self and other, which involves a morality of relatedness and care. Knowing as enchantment, as participation, involves merging, or identification with the other, or with one's surroundings, an identification which as Berman (1984, p. 2) states, "bespeaks a psychic wholeness". Cultures that do not objectify nature, such as American Native Indian cultures, or several of the ancient eastern spiritual traditions, do not subjectify nature either. They see themselves, not as objectively, nor as subjectively related to nature, but as inextricably interwoven with it. One only has the need to subjectify reality if one first has objectified it.
When I first encountered the literature on participatory consciousness, I read a phrase in a book about ecology by that suddenly made lights flash in my mind and clarified the concept of knowing as participatory (rather than as either objective or subjective). "Throwing away" something is not possible, the author said. There is no away; the ecological crisis is not about throwing away, the author said, it is about the nature of our consciousness which has falsely believed in a separation between internal and external reality. The ecological crisis is the externalization of our alienated consciousness. The crisis is us, it is our alienated, distancing mode of knowing something.
I was shocked into a different awareness of the ecological crisis. A crisis, not about the ecology, but about us. We do not have an objective relationship to the planet (as the scientific and industrial revolution would have it), nor do we have a subjective relationship to the planet (as the many surface or even sentimental discussions about the ecology would have it). To account for how our subjectivity sees the ecological crisis would accomplish nothing and would shield us from having to face the crisis as being identical to how we think about the nature reality, which is the nature of our own consciousness.
I do not know whether the analogy works for you. It does for me. I see the concerns around both objectivity and subjectivity in educational research as mirroring a similar misunderstanding of the real issue. Concerns about objectivity and subjectivity are not methodological issues, they point to how we understand the nature of our consciousness.
Today's theoretical physicists point to participatory consciousness. John Wheeler states that we have to cross out the old word "observer" and put in its place the new word "participator". He did not say: put in its place "subjectivity knower", but "participator".
Michael Polanyi talks about the need to "extend our body to include the object so that we come to dwell in it..." In his book, "The Tacit Dimension", Polanyi gives some beautiful examples from science of knowing as a participatory act. Barbara McClintock, Nobel Laureate for her work on the manner in which genetic forces interact with other genes and with the whole organism, has been perhaps the most lucid of all scientists on the participatory nature of being a scientist: her vocabulary is one of empathy, affection, love, and kinship (Keller, 1985, p. 164). "I know them intimately", she said of the corn plants she studied, "and I find it a great pleasure to know them" (in Keller, 1983, p. 198).
McClintock describes her state of mind which enabled her to see what others could not see:
"I found that the more I worked with them, the bigger and bigger [the chromosomes] got, and when I was really working with them I wasn't outside, I was down there...I was right down there with them....I actually felt as if I was right down there and these were my friends...As you look at these things, they become part of you. And you forget yourself. The main thing about it is you forget yourself (in Keller, 1983, p. 117).
It is not surprising that in an era that follows the dictates of alienated consciousness, McClintock's work was ignored until near the end of her life. Scientist June Goodfield says the best analogy for the practice of science is "always love, touching something central to that which you want to come to understand, and "one feels silent and grateful...the nearest an ordinary person gets to the essence of the scientific process is when they fall in love", in Goodfield's words (in Keller, 1983, p. 125).
Several families scholars who address the influence of gender on modes of knowing, see the act of knowing as an act of relating, of participating, of knowing as caring: You want to come to know something out of such caring that it enables you to relinquish perceived boundaries and to come to dwell in it, attending so fully that you forget yourself (rather than focus on your subjectivity).
Perhaps that is what the narrator of the novel "Mama Day" meant: had the ethnographer only cared so deeply about them that he would have forgotten about himself and merged with them instead, he might have come to know what 18 & 23 meant. The narrator suggests what the ethnographer could have done instead of "sticking that machine into everyone's face": He could have stayed at a distance waiting for Mama Day to come out of her house and "beckon him near"; he could have followed her quietly into her garden, where she might just have told him about about the past; she might have wanted to show him pictures of her grandchildren and told him about them; he might have sat in the grass and seen the graveyard where meaning is buried.
And if he was patient and stayed off a little ways, he'd realized she was there to meet up with her [another female's] first husband so they could talk about that summer fourteen years ago when she left, but he stayed. And as her and George are there together for a good two hours or so - neither one saying a word - Reema's boy coulda heard from them everything there was to tell about 18 & 23 (p. ).
If one merges, one can learn even from silence.
I just learned from a colleague in New Zealand, that certain segments within Maori society have now refused to be researched and insist to have control over all aspects of research that affect them. They too, must be tired of being written about and knowing it is not about them. I am convinced it would have made little difference to the Maori people had their researchers provided subjectivity audits. Knowing as participatory consciousness was never refuted, as Berman (1984, p. 10) reminds us, but rather was set aside for a few hundred years for ideological reasons. But in doing so he states:the continuity of the human experience and the integrity of the human psyche (was destroyed). It has nearly wrecked the planet as well. The only hope, or so it seems to me lies in the reenchantment of the world.
In Griffin's (1988) book entitled: "The Reenchantment of Science", a collection of essays by a number of scientists (including from biology, physics, psychology and ecology) point to the need for scientists and for science to become enchanted again (not subjective, but enchanted) if we are to survive the fragmentation that has resulted from the Newtonian alienating worldview.
Enchantment and participation are implicit aspects of wholeness. It is not autobiographical, as accounting for one's subjectivity can easily become. Autobiographical is about one's own life. About one's past. Enchantment and participation is about the actual act of merging with the new, and thus coming to know it.
When we wanted to be "objective", we admired the distance between the knower and the known. We now want to cross the distance in a more personal way...but not dissolve it. We still insist that we are in charge of it. When I read the literature about having to manage one's subjectivity, I feel the anxiety about crossing distance, an anxiety which clearly shows in phrases such as: restraining one's subjectivity, rigorously accounting for it, and so on. I feel the fear to merge, to identify, to be whole in one's knowing. As a consequence we try to create the idea of two "I"s within one person: the "I" that is the restrainer, and the "I" that needs restraining. The question for me is: are they separable in the first place?
Participatory consciousness and educational research
In trying to relate the foregoing to educational research, I wasn't sure anymore where to look for "educational research". When genres are "blurring" (Geertz, 1980), when the turn is to "interpretation" and to the humanities (Winkler, 1985), when social science research is seen on a continuum with other literary forms (Rorty, 1982) and consequently, when novels are seen as qualifying as a form of educational research (Barone, 1990), and when topics for research can be highly personal (see e.g. Wolcott, 1990), the question: What constitutes educational research seems a strange, almost outdated question, certainly one to which no clear, non-ambiguous answer is available. So, I stopped worrying about finding examples from "educational research" and simply looked for examples of "knowing" in education that illustrate, I think, forms of participatory consciousness. I took two examples from the study of special education, an area of study which has been a major focus in my own work, although there are certainly some other, and perhaps even better studies in education I could have chosen. One example is a study by Fujita (1990), a dissertation recently completed at the University of Alberta, that offers the reader reflective narratives about the author's interactions with children the system has labeled autistic and her attempt to understand these children better. Reading Fujita, I am engaged in the story of participatory knowing. Fujita accounts not for her subjectivity, but for her act of merging and what she learns in doing so. Let me quote:
I sit down very close to him with my legs crossed as he does. He shows few signs of recognizing me. "Hi, Matt. How are you doing?" I say to him, pushing his shoulder with mine. Matthew looks at me.. right into my eyes. Then, without giving me any chance to talk to him, he turns his gaze to his fingers which are held up slightly above his head. Rejected, or rather ignored by him, I lose my words. I lie down with my head on my arm and look up at Matthew... He is looking up skywards with his eyes half open...Fingers move in the air, close to his face, twirling and twisting each other, overlapping and being overlapped by one another. Sometimes, very slowly, Matthew's head moves sideways, yet his regard is fixed on a certain point. But where is that fixed point? What is he looking at? I sit up half way to see what he looking at...
(and a little further):
"This is interesting, I think. "Is this how you do it, Matt?" I ask Matthew, who has a glimpse of me and goes back to his finger play again, without showing any interest in what I am doing. I continue to flick my fingers for a while. "Don't you think I am doing well?" I ask him again, which receives the same lack of reaction from him. I feel uneasy about his ignoring me this time. What am I going to do if he won't stop his finger play? (p. 59/60)
I can hear, feel, touch almost, her merging, her coming to know. I am not reading about a distance to be crossed by objective or subjective methodological strategies. It is not about crossing a distance, but about active identification with the phenomena one wants to understand. When I read Fujita, I cannot hide in considerations of objectivity or subjectivity. She pulls me into her act of knowing in a way that is immediately present, in other words.
When a researcher tells me about her/his subjectivity, I, as a reader, feel somewhat put down. I feel a slight irritation. It is as if I am not capable enough to do my own knowing. It restricts the possibilities of my participation and interpretation. It restricts me as a knower. Had Fujita told me all about her subjectivity, I would have been distracted from fully listening, from fully attending to these autistic children. Reading her work, I was fully present, fully attending, because she was. I want a study to be so clear, so well described, so rich in data, so engaging, so impacting on my consciousness, that I don't want, nor need, anyone's subjectivity as a guide. I want to be my own knower. When researchers force me to listen to "their subjective parts" it paralyzes my own sensitivity somewhat, my own initial non-cognitive knowing of reality. For as thinkers like David Bohm and Michael Polanyi show, our initial comprehension of reality is an inner commitment, a non-cognitive orientation that is uniquely one's own.
Of course, when I read a research study, I do come to know, how a researcher influenced her/his research: It is in and in between the lines. It breathes through a work. But I want to know it tacitly, intuitively, holistically, and only have it made explicit if I need to have it made explicit. The integrity of me as the reader, as the knower, is at stake.
Another example of knowing as participatory consciousness I choose for today are the "Portraits" by the Dutch award winning author Lize Stilma. Stilma wrote about her coming to know marginalized people. Every one of her portraits is about a real person and her or his marginalized location in life. I'll read one of her portraits translated into English (Stilma, 1986, p. 15):
Nice Do I know the latest top ten? No, I don't. He's disappointed. What else is there to talk about? He clearly wants to entertain me this afternoon. Shall we play a game of checkers? I have to confess I don't know how. He's amazed. More deep thought. Shall we go swimming together? He'll go and borrow a bathing suit from the house parent. I tell him I can't swim. Pity now, instead of amazement. But all is not lost. Then we'll go walking for a couple of hours, he decides. I explain to him that an hour is all I can manage, for I have a weak back. Disappointment, amazement and pity now turn into deep compassion. Not to know the top ten... Not able to play checkers... No swimming... No more than a short walk... He takes my hand and says, "It doesn't matter, really. Here we are always kind to people like you!" The exclamation mark is a warm kiss. And then I go walking with him, this Down's syndrome child. Together, one hour, through the woods. Hand in hand.To the comment that her work is poetry, Stilma says: "It is not poetry, I just write down what I see". Her knowing as seeing is participatory. It gets to you directly with no distance left to cross. Had she accounted for her subjectivity, would I have grasped Stilma's different way of looking at mental retardation better? Would it have made the knowing expressed in these portraits more valid? More trustworthy? I think the answer to these questions is a simple, No.
What is a different matter altogether, or so it seems to me, is if I become interested in the researcher, in the writer, after I have engaged my own knowing of her/his writing first. That happens when a work has had a real impact on me: then I may want to know: Who is this person who manages to touch me in this way, to make me think, make me see. Then I might be interested in her/his life, because it is always one's whole life that informs one's work. The significance for me of a piece of work, through my own knowing, comes prior to wanting to know about its writer.
Another very important aspect of knowing as participatory, is that it renders the act of knowing instantly an ethical act that dissolve whatever power relations might have existed. When one becomes embedded in what one want to understand, to the point of forgetting oneself, there is a sense of equality that no longer allows for privileged status of any kind (including methodological). The other you are studying is no longer someone you can bombard with questions, but someone, as the narrator in Mama Day says, who may just "beckon you near". Mutuality and ethicality are at once embedded in the relational nature of knowing.
I supervise a fair number of graduate theses. Increasingly students share drafts with the co-researchers (formally: subjects) for their insights, and also for their final decisions on whether their words (in the form of quotes) may be included. When the topic of the study focusses on what their views in life are, the draft is shared for their approval. Never should they feel that they want to deny the study is about them. A major problem with the idea of objectivity has been that it has masked ideologies of power which have been clearly revealed by feminist analysis, critical pedagogy, and other post-modern voices. I am convinced, however, that our shift to methodological concerns about subjectivity and bias do not solve the problem of hidden power inequalities. I like to suggest that becoming aware of and resolving unequal power relations in research methodology must happen, in first instance through knowing as merging, knowing as identification. This is not to say that critical and feminist thought and other critical analysis would no longer be necessary. They are crucially important. They address different facets I think: participatory consciousness addresses the actual act of knowing, the doing of the knowing so to speak. Critical thought constitutes an analysis of what is known, and of established methodological practices. I like to share a incident in this regard, that happened when I was doing my dissertation research in the late seventies, and which I have only recently identified as a act of participatory knowing. (At that time I was too busy writing an 80 page method chapter on objectivity and subjectivity, defending the use of qualitative methodology!) I spent almost a year in a group home for persons we label retarded, "doing" participant observation (Heshusius, 1981). My question was: How do these persons view meaning in their lives. I remember distinctly being confronted very early on with power and statues differences that stood in the way of carefully listening to them. I had to resolve these by posing myself the question: Could I live such a life? Could I see such lives as having meaning for myself? I knew I had to resolve the question or it would forever restrict my ability to fully listen to them and be with them. It took me a week or so to deal with it. Only when I could start seeing their lives as worthy for myself, or for my children, could I forget myself and start fully attending to them. I now think that, while I was clearly dealing with my emotions and values, I was not restraining or taming my "subjectivity". Something distinctly different was going on: what I have here referred to as participatory knowing. It was not something I could restrain, could provide an audit of, or could account for. It was something that, after I had become aware of my emotions, I had to in order to come to know: I had to dissolve (rather than restrain) the boundaries that stood between me (the knower) and them (the known). What was needed was an act of identification that dissolved distance. It was something I (all of me, not part of me) had to do as a knower. Only then could I forget about myself (and the idea of managing distance between us) in order to fully attend and learn directly from them.
I personally believe that the difference between subjective knowing and participatory knowing is no small matter. Sometimes I think the difference is so crucial and consequential that we keep escaping into the objectivity/subjectivity debate. For as long as we are involved in the methodological issues created by this illusionary objectivity/subjectivity split, we can escape from the important questions in real life. Once knowing is recognized however as participatory, it requires one's full, somatic, and immediate presence in the realization that what seems to exist "out there" is only a reflection of the extent to which we are able (or not able) to merge. We then have to directly engage in the questions that really count, questions which always reflect back on ourselves.
In education, rather than quibble over the methodology of either objectivity or subjectivity, we would in our research have to more directly face the questions of schools characterized by immense boredom, violence, sexism and racism, handicapism and poverty, all contributing to low incidence of school learning. Children, I am quite sure, could care less about our methodological quibbles; they would like us to forget about ourselves in order to fully listen to them, truly communicate with them, and learn from them how to turn schools into more relevant places to be.
In the meantime I, too, go on teaching courses in qualitative research methodology. I, too, tell my students to outline their theoretical framework up front, to gather data from multiple sources, to triangulate, to generate categories. And, if it seems important, they may even tell about their own reactions to the research process. But whereas I used to tell my students they "had" to do all these things, I now tell them that all these activities may bring a certain clarity to the research process (I use the word "certain" because it is only one of many different ways of bringing clarity to the research process). But more than anything I tell them, they need to attend fully, not forcing a separation between their cognitive, affective and somatic knowing, to see with empathy, to ask with true concern and care, in other words to merge more and identify more. I also tell them that they can write a novel to give form to what they have learned--if they can find enough committee members who agree to be on their committee! Still hesitantly and I fear not very articulately, I have tried to share a few thoughts on the concept of participatory knowing. No one knows what it would mean for educational research if it were fully explicated and then internalized. I don't know if it ever can be fully explicated, for it is more a mode of being than a position on methodology, a mode of being however, that in fact changes the epistemological status of the concept of "methodology" itself.
The 400 years of disenchanted knowing has left us alienated from each other, from nature, and from ourselves. The move from objectivity to subjectivity has been very important indeed in that it has started to upset the false stability inherent in the idea of objectivity, and has focused on values and emotions as related to the act of knowing. I fear however, it has not eliminated the forced distance between ourselves and other, created by the idea of objectivity. The real shift it seems to me, is not from objectivity to subjectivity, however important that shift has been, but from the objectivity/subjectivity dualism to participatory knowing.
Thank you for listening to my ponderings.
* I would like to thank Mary Poplin, Claremont Graduate School, who showed me this wonderful novel and its reference to ethnography (see also Poplin, 1991, where Poplin also uses Naylor's novel to make a similar point).
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