It's one of of those sticky lines I picked up from a seminar course on Gender, Culture and Ideology while doing my Masters in Community Development at my home university.
I've always thought that my writings were personal hidden in the language of 'scholarly' research to be acceptable enough. My papers stemmed basically from that--interest in subject matter which mattered most to me: the small school I'm currently in, the previous schools I've worked with, and my classroom experiments anchored on my interests in education.
While undertaking my doctoral studies, I wrote a paper in the first person for a class under my research adviser. She cautioned against the use of 'I'. I find that troubling as most of the articles I connected with were written in first person. I wondered: howcome they can and I can't?
Towards the tailend of my doctoral coursework, I took a Quali-R methodology course with Ma'am Jean Gray, a colleague at my university of employment. I chanced upon this article which captured what I really meant. It came from a group of women doing a collaborative auto-ethnography.....yes, there is such a thing!
Ngunjiri, F. W., Hernandez, K. C., & Chang, H. (2010). Living autoethnography: Connecting life and research [Editorial]. Journal of Research Practice, 6(1), Article E1. Retrieved [date of access], from http://jrp.icaap.org/index.php/jrp/article/view/241/186
"Research is an extension of researchers’ lives. Although most social scientists have been trained to guard against subjectivity (self-driven perspectives) and to separate self from research activities, it is an impossible task. Scholarship is inextricably connected to self--personal interest, experience, and familiarity. Working together on this special issue provided an opportunity for us to candidly reflect on and dialogue about the motivations behind our scholarship. Not surprisingly, at the very onset our dissertation studies were anchored in our personal interests. Ngunjiri (2007, 2010), a Kenyan woman, studied African women leaders; Hernandez (2005, 2006 ), a Trinidadian who lived and taught in the British Virgin Islands (BVI) prior to coming to the US, studied high school students in the BVI and the US; Chang (1992), a secondary educator, explored the culture of adolescents in a US high school. In spite of this intimate connection with our work, we followed traditional scientific paradigms in conducting and reporting our work." (p.2)
I've always thought that my writings were personal hidden in the language of 'scholarly' research to be acceptable enough. My papers stemmed basically from that--interest in subject matter which mattered most to me: the small school I'm currently in, the previous schools I've worked with, and my classroom experiments anchored on my interests in education.
While undertaking my doctoral studies, I wrote a paper in the first person for a class under my research adviser. She cautioned against the use of 'I'. I find that troubling as most of the articles I connected with were written in first person. I wondered: howcome they can and I can't?
Towards the tailend of my doctoral coursework, I took a Quali-R methodology course with Ma'am Jean Gray, a colleague at my university of employment. I chanced upon this article which captured what I really meant. It came from a group of women doing a collaborative auto-ethnography.....yes, there is such a thing!
Ngunjiri, F. W., Hernandez, K. C., & Chang, H. (2010). Living autoethnography: Connecting life and research [Editorial]. Journal of Research Practice, 6(1), Article E1. Retrieved [date of access], from http://jrp.icaap.org/index.php/jrp/article/view/241/186
"Research is an extension of researchers’ lives. Although most social scientists have been trained to guard against subjectivity (self-driven perspectives) and to separate self from research activities, it is an impossible task. Scholarship is inextricably connected to self--personal interest, experience, and familiarity. Working together on this special issue provided an opportunity for us to candidly reflect on and dialogue about the motivations behind our scholarship. Not surprisingly, at the very onset our dissertation studies were anchored in our personal interests. Ngunjiri (2007, 2010), a Kenyan woman, studied African women leaders; Hernandez (2005, 2006 ), a Trinidadian who lived and taught in the British Virgin Islands (BVI) prior to coming to the US, studied high school students in the BVI and the US; Chang (1992), a secondary educator, explored the culture of adolescents in a US high school. In spite of this intimate connection with our work, we followed traditional scientific paradigms in conducting and reporting our work." (p.2)
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