Moss, Beverly J

For Response:  Moss, Beverly J. "Ethnography and Composition: Studying Language at Home." Methods and Methodology in Composition Research. Ed. Gesa Kirsch and Patricia A. Sullivan.

Major assumptions:

• ethnography is the only research method that she/we know of to "tell a story about a community...told jointly by the researcher and the members of the community" 
• ethnography involves a comprehensive view of the social interactions, behaviors, and beliefs of a community and or social group
• ethnography is about recording the everyday, ordinary routine of the community so that an outsider can see it like a native [and can ultimately be compared to other communities]
• in composition we generally undertake a topic centered ethnographic approach, with a focus on communicative behavior or the interrelationship of language and culture
• experience cannot be written or recorded, but must be narrated
  
• good ethnography:
• locates a community or social situation
• identifies a research question and mode of inquiry
  
• crafts a  theoretical framework
• gains access to the community
  
• allows the community to define itself for the researcher
• negotiates the role the researcher takes in the community
• gathers data through field work
• engages in triangulation [researcher checks notes against the community explanations and vice versa, checks that they do as they claim and that notes were recorded accurately]
• analyzes the data
• completes a product that takes into account a host of factors [such as type of ethnography, audience, style etc]

• ethnography about one's own community must address the community expectations that the researcher has
• there is a dangerous tendency to overlook patterns because they are not seen as unique, strange or new
• researchers tend to rely on their own knowledge [the remedy for this is making explicit the implicit]
•  as insiders, researchers must deal with assumptive ethnocentrism and mental baggage through reflection and introspection
• as insiders, researchers face pressures on the product they produce due to continued exposure to the community
• researchers must be responsible to the community they examine
  

Major questions:

• what does a researcher [as a comp scholar] have to know about ethnography to do it?
• what are special concerns about a researcher using a community she is a member of?
• what role does the researcher's degree of membership in a community play in successfully carrying out the study?
• how does the role of the researcher affect the preexisting established relationships in the community?
• will the researcher make assumptions about what certain behaviors signify or how meaning is established in the community based on previous knowledge or on the actual data collected?
• would an outsider attach more significance to observed patterns than the insider, based on the degree of difference?
• what issues might an insider face when writing up the ethnography?

Key peeps:

• Shirley Brice Heath's Ways with Words
• Hymes "What is Ethnography?" & "Models of Interraction"
• Linda Broadkey
• Gloria Naylor
• Zora Neale Hurston

Challenges to/from me:

• that ethnography can only be narrative is bizarre to me; I understand her claim that the community must speak through itself and that experience is best told by narrative, yet that implies a rejection of objectivity in favor of subjectivity. Is the researcher's "product" [her words not mine] not ultimately an objective document for a community whose own practices enfold the purpose of the project? I'm not trying to suggest that the community must overthrow the ideals of the academy or vice versa because those ideas are different for a reason, but to claim that researcher representation escapes false objectivity seems untrue or at the very least problematic
  
• as this section serves as a broader stroke or review of ethnography than merely its use in comp [although that is its focus], how is it positioning itself with Heath and other comp ethnography?
• what new ideas about ethics or concepts regarding ethics has Moss offered that others have neglected?

Gesa Kirsch "'What do You Know About my Life Anyway?' Ethical Dilemmas in Researcher-Participant Relations." Ethical Dilemmas in Feminist Research.

• warning about researcher & participant relationships demonstrate a concern for the risks, which may lead to a participants feeling: disappointment, broken trust and even exploitation despite a close working bond. 
• we need to develop guidelines that will help address ethical problems
• we need to develop realistic expectations for relations among researcher and participant

Examples demonstrate a lack of engagement with the community despite reciprocal and interactive intentions...we should be aware and remind participants about the difference between being friendly and being friends.

Researchers are also sometimes in a position of lesser power and can be vulnerable to the participants...but they still have control over the project, and the participants are often in positions more susceptible to power.

Collaborative methodologies make new demands on participants:

1. expectations for extensive cooperation
2. willingness to be interviewed and observed
3. willingness to share thoughts and experience

For feminist researchers, there are additional concerns:

1. willingness to continue over an extended period of time
2. express interest and appreciation of the project

Thus more realistic expectations about research are rooted in more limited expectations. We must always respect the degree to which they want to interact with us.

In order to deal with this, Newkirk offers the following guidelines:

1. researchers be willing to hear the truth or bad news from participants
2. participants have a right to co-interpret
3. researchers have responsibility of intervention, meaning unethical or problematic behavior

But Kirsch reminds us that there is an element of unpredictability in ethnography that cannot be eliminated.

Institutional Review Board originally set up for social and medical sciences to keep patients from physical harm or abuse in medical research...Kirsch urges that researchers consider the dynamics of power, gender, race class and other factors that contribute to the researcher and participant relationship.

"Whose Words? Whose Reality? The Politics of Representation and Interpretation"
Examines the transition from experience to reporting it, focusing on data that researchers use rather than interactions with participants.

Here the concern is how feminists researchers, who speak for the community, can inadvertently silence the community even though they aim to empower it.

Conflicts can happen around interpretation, or the confidential nature of information. But researchers should aim for a goal of completeness, knowing it is often unattainable, but it at least makes researchers responsible for the range of data they collect.

Being flexible, working with participants and including them in the analytic stage of writing can mitigate some of these concerns. We learn, therefore, how to make political and ethical choices.

Cushman Struggle and the Tools
Analyzes the deep power games in an attempt to look at the process of struggle. Also, for various reasons, women and children are foregrounded in this study.

This is not a look only at language, asking the community to be critical of their language use, but a look into the many practices that surround and enmesh language use and language learners. She focuses primarily on the face-to-face network, looking at how boundaries are constructed, patterns, limitations and significance of language choice. Tracking these children's language learning demonstrates the continual change that the school system went through.

She did not use technology or methods that were not familiar to the community.

Ways children learned language depended on: family structure, roles that community members could assume, how concepts of childhood guided their socialization...culture as learned behavior and language habits as part of that shared learning.

Book for "learning researchers" or academics and non-academics alike.

Education used as means of reform for uncivilized mill people on behalf of the townspeople. Then, many years later, education was a call for black youth to be successful without relying on the mill or farms. This pull between family, jobs and education is seen in two towns with differing conditions (although towns divided racially, other factors important to focus on that create differing cultural histories).

Roadville = white; appreciate recreation; pull between staying on at home or moving on to other things; school changes lead to blaming host of people from teachers to blacks; education should link to home practices and situations
Trackton = black; respectables those who live right; town is not poor, but the city is run-down; mutual struggle and success judged collectively; extended family rarely come back to Trackton; a town and country divide present here as well as in Roadville; tie between mother and son strongest kinship;