Goffman

[randall henry eggert]

Seth Kahn-Egan's remarks are well-taken. I asked Cornish about his reasons
for doing the research because I could imagine that there are sound
reasons for analyzing your own speech.  Kahn-Egan articulated some of
those reasons in his first comment far better than I could have.

If there are pedagogical or other reasons for doing the research, that's
great.  However, what I was concerned about is doing this kind of analysis
on your own speech in order to learn more about discourse or framing.
Yes, by analyzing your own speech you may have access to the speaker's
inentions; however, the audience did not.  Personally, I think it would
be a grave oversight to overlook the role the audience has in discourse,
and I think that we do so when we concentrate on speaker intentions (as
was the tradition until fairly recently).  By analyzing our own speech, I
think we run a great risk of perpetuating this oversight.

We all know that we can never be completely objective when we analyze -
well - anything.  However, why compound that problem?

Happiness,
Randy Eggert

On Thu, 18 Feb 1999, Seth L. Kahn-Egan wrote:
> 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
>