Goffman

[Seth L. Kahn-Egan]

Responses to Randy Eggert below...

Seth Kahn-Egan
Syracuse University
PhD Student in Composition and Cultural Rhetoric
slkahneg at mailbox.syr.edu
103 Trinity Pl. Second Floor
Syracuse, NY 13210
315-423-8042 (home)
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On Thu, 18 Feb 1999, randall henry eggert wrote:

> Dear James Cornish,
>
> Although I've read a fair amount of Goffman's work, I'm not sure I could
> help you much on your project; however, I have a much deeper
> methodological question about what you are doing.  What kind of project is
> this?  What are you trying to show?  I am very skeptical of research in
> which the researcher analyzes their own speech.  I think it is nearly
> impossible to be truly objective about the major question of "what's going
> on here?" when you are one of the participants who helped to create the
> text being evaluated.

A couple of comments here:

 (1) This critique assumes the possibility of  true objectivity, which is
problematic in its own right.  We bring biases to anything we look at, and
this issue becomes more or less of a problem based on the researcher's
personality and agenda.  If Cornish is looking to critique his own work as
a mechanism for improving teaching for himself and others, then he's on
pretty good ground here.  Of course, it's nearly impossible to avoid
self-aggrandizing if the researcher is happy with what he/she has
accomplished, but it's at least partly the reader's job to supply the
grains of salt...There's a fairly extensive body of literature regarding
the ethics of teacher research coming out of Composition and Rhetoric.

(2) To whatever extent we study intentionality as part of a discursive
event, studying one's own discourse solves lots of access problems.  Who
would know his own authorial/speaker intent better than the
writer/speaker?  Or at least think he knows it?  At least this way,
Cornish doesn't have to take time conducting interviews, etc.  And, at
least ideally, he'll have easier access to the students in the course to
follow up on their perceptions.

That's probably enough on that.  When I was writing my thesis, my original
proposal was to do a teacher-research project in my own classroom.  I
wrote a 50-page methods chapter, most of which was taken up by apologies
for all the things I couldn't claim because of my methods.  But I had to
think through the ethical issues pretty intensely.

Seth