Methodological Concerns Around Subjectivity: Will We Free
Ourselves From Objectivity?
Lous Heshusius
York University
Keynote Address
I 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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