JAC Volume 14 Issue 1

Co-Editors:
Evelyn Ashton-
Jones &
Gary A. Olson

Back to 14.1 ToC

Rabbit Trails, Ephemera, and Other Stories: Feminist Methodology and Collaborative Research

Rebecca E. Burnett and Helen Rothschild Ewald

Our individual representations (above) of possible ways to structure this journal article contain traces of feminist themes regarding research methodology and also embody a flashpoint that could have derailed our collaboration.¹ Our interest is in exploring intersections between feminist methodology and collaborative research in order to identify a number of these flashpoints. Such an exploration not only has the potential for improving disciplinary approaches to collaborative research, but also for enhancing educators understanding of classroom pedagogy as collaborative action. Our sense is that feminist critiques of research methodology provide indicators that can be used as ways to signal potential areas of conflict in the formation and function of collaborative research groups.²

As a basis for our exploration, we have analyzed our own experiences to date in four ongoing collaborative research groups. In using self-reflective critique as our method of analysis,³ we are keenly aware that the evolving nature of these collaborative groups has influenced the construction of our arguments here. And, conversely, we realize that our critique may in turn influence the evolution of these groups.⁴ Moreover, we recognize as a formative constraint our interest in preserving and continuing to work with colleagues in these groups. Plainly stated, we continually asked ourselves, "Will the colleagues in our collaborative groups ever speak to us again after reading this article?" Because of this concern, we shared drafts with all of these colleagues, asked for their comments, and provided an opportunity for them to offer alternative interpretations.

Our Agenda

Our agenda in writing this article involves both theoretical and political positions. Articulating our theoretical approach is necessary so that readers understand from the outset that we value certain kinds of conflict in collaborative groups. Articulating our political stance is necessary so that readers see potential disciplinary benefits of understanding more about collaborative research relationships.

Theoretical Position Regarding Conflict in Collaboration. Theorists and researchers in disciplines such as small group behavior, cooperative learning, and social psychology (for example, Johnson and Johnson; Putnam; Galegher, Kraut, and Egido) and more recently in rhetoric, composition, and technical communication have argued that substantive conflict enhances collaborative decision-making (for example, Karis; Trimbur; Clark and Ede; Burnett). Substantive conflict during collaboration is not only normal, but also can be productive, in large part because it gives collaborators more time to generate and critically examine alternatives and to voice disagreements on their way to making a decision. In fact, engaging in substantive conflict can increase the effectiveness of a group, improve the quality of their decisions, and increase their commitment to the decisions they do reach (see Gouran; Putnam). Identifying and understanding the sources of their conflict can help collaborators recognize that conflicts may well be epistemological, which would generally be considered substantive rather than affective or procedural.⁵ For example, stalemates among collaborators about ways to formulate research questions, choose methodologies, or shape articles generally stem from theoretical positions; exploring the issues that define these differences is productive and, we believe, necessary.

Collaborators who do not recognize the differences among various kinds of conflict may mistakenly believe that their conflicts are affective or procedural rather than substantive. Generally speaking, if conflict deals with content, context, and concepts, its substantive. If it deals with how things should be done, it's procedural. If it deals with interpersonal and emotional reactions, it's affective. But, in fact, various kinds of conflict may spill over into each other. For example, substantive disagreements about methodological preferences may, as one of our collaborators pointed out, become affective, involving issues of politics and power. Rather than exploring methodological preferences in terms of the most appropriate approach to answer specific questions, collaborators may become emotional because they feel threatened or marginalized.

Similarly, what appear to be substantive conflicts may have been provoked by underlying affective or procedural concerns. For example, if collaborators are operating under emotional stress, they may be reluctant to agree to certain substantive changes if these require a significant amount of extra work. And unfortunately, occasionally substantive conflicts may have their origins in affective or procedural baggage that has nothing to do with the issues at hand. For example, what appears to be a straightforward discussion about how to substantiate certain claims may provoke different reactions among collaborators: for one person it may be a matter of structuring an argument; for another it may be the final straw of always seeming to be on the losing side of decisions, so the issue becomes the turf for expressing an affective response that has little to do with the substantive issue itself.

Political Position Statement Regarding Collaboration and the Discipline. Our political agenda in writing this article is to encourage attention to two critical disciplinary concerns regarding collaboration:

In short, we believe that collaborative authorship and research in composition have been marginalized in ways similar to those that have marginalized women's contributions to knowledge and women's ways of knowing in our culture. Given our position, it should come as no surprise that what drives this discussion is an interest in improving strategies for collaborative interaction in research groups.

Feminist Voices

The link between collaborative inquiry and feminist theory would seem an obvious one. Both call attention to a number of common concerns, which can be grouped under such rubrics as "interrelatedness" and "dialogic openness." Both embody a number of common issues, including the role of authority and agency, respectively, in professional interaction. Yet, as we suggest below, connections between feminist theories and collaborative practices have been more implicitly understood than explicitly developed.

The Feminism-Collaboration Connection. The connection between feminism and collaboration has been a tacit but pervasive element in feminist writing. The link is commonly present in discussions of feminist pedagogies. Joan Hartman points out, for example, that Belenky, Clinchy, Goldberger, and Tarule's constructivist pedagogy, collaborative learning, and feminist pedagogy all represent what Freire would call a pedagogy of the oppressed in that they alter power relations in the classroom and offer agency to marginalized students (23). Similarly, David Bleich (Perspective) links the feminist perspective to collaboration in the classroom, maintaining that such collaboration will take place with or without the teacher's sanction (175); for collaboration to be cooperative rather than subversive, then, it must feature reciprocity or mutuality between teacher and student (67).⁸

The connection between feminism and collaboration also emerges in a concern for dialogic interaction. Feminist theory, in its use of the term "dialogic," politicizes a Bakhtinian socio-historical understanding of utterance by understanding women's voices as silenced by monologic (that is, masculine) discourse structures (Peterson 182; Ritchie, "Confronting" 254; Hollis 341; Finke 11). For feminists, dialogic discourse stands in contrast to monolithic discourse in that it is open-ended and multi-voiced, and it takes giving expression and authority to marginalized voices as an explicit goal (Bauer and McKinstry; Ritchie, "Beginning" 153). In Feminist Perspectives, Lorraine Code, Sheila Mullet, and Christine Overall link the feminist appreciation for the dialogic with collaborative strategies (4), and Susan Sherwin in the same volume sees feminist teaching and research as cooperative enterprises characterized by collective learning and action as opposed to the individual isolation and competition often associated with masculine ways of thinking (28; see also Bloom 818-21; Eichhorn, et al. 297-99).⁹

The connection between feminist methodology and collaboration is directly made by Patti Lather, who extols a more collaborative approach to critical inquiry as fundamental (57-61). Although the collaboration Lather has in mind is that between researcher and researched, with reciprocity a featured part of research intent and design, her work is interesting to us because it offers an entry into our discussion of feminist methodology and collaboration between researchers. Before entering that discussion, however, it might be instructive to summarize our understanding of feminist methodology itself.

Feminist Methodology in a Nutshell. In Getting Smart, Lather presents a chart of postpositivist inquiry that expands Habermas' three categories of human interest to feature four categories of research methodology: those methodologies that focus on prediction, understanding, emancipation, or deconstruction (6-7). Lather recognizes feminist methodology as a mode of inquiry focused on emancipation. It shares with qualitative modes in general the impulse to achieve understanding through research that (1) acknowledges the subjective perspective as valid and admits the impact of the researcher on (and within) the research situation, (2) privileges natural as opposed to laboratory settings, (3) operates from a holistic perspective that does not automatically exclude certain detail as irrelevant, (4) retains a sense of the unique contexts of what is being studied, (5) operates inductively, and (6) recognizes the value-laden nature of inquiry with data collected and analysis conducted by a human instrument (see Whitt 407). Feminist methodology, however, overlays these concerns with the desire to put the "social construction of gender at the center" of inquiry (Lather 71).

Centering on the social construction of gender encourages feminist researchers to focus on the ethical and political considerations of producing knowledge. In (En)Gendering Knowledge, Joan E. Hartman and Ellen Messer-Davidow, for instance, call for a feminist "social epistemology" that would question the inadequate presence of women as both agents and subjects of inquiry, expand the definition of who could be "knowers," and question the current organization of the disciplines. Hilary Rose similarly calls for a new epistemology for natural science research that would recognize that scientific knowledge is "structured through its social genesis" (78). This new epistemology would reflect a practice of feeling, thinking and writing that opposes the abstraction of "male and bourgeois scientific thought" (87). Such centering also encourages feminist researchers to challenge the "problematics, hypotheses, and purposes of inquiry" (see Harding 15). In the work of Joan Kelly-Gadol, for example, these challenges call into question foundational constructs concerning periodization, categories of social analysis, and theories of social change informing traditional historical research. Kelly-Gadol's analysis shows how feminist historiography has "unsettled" the accepted evaluations of history by focusing on relational aspects of men and women's separate histories and by seeing the relation between the sexes as a social and not a natural one (4-5).

Furthermore, such centering allows for reconsideration of research methods. Radical feminists in particular are especially strong in their critiques of the research process. Carolyn Wood Sherif, for example, critiques research bias in psychology, where the discipline is heir to a masculine hierarchy of research methods. Sherif finds this inheritance, which glorifies "the experiment," unacceptable because it assumes an objective and often statistical relationship between the subject and object in a research situation, and thereby ignores the role of researcher bias and other sociocultural aspects, including gender, in the research setting (51).¹⁰ In her critique of anthropological research, Micaela di Leonardo points out that even when a field such as anthropology is heir to a research tradition that characteristically links issues involving agency and value judgment in its research methods, being "sensitive to interaction [between researcher and researched] does not necessarily entail sensitivity to power differentials in interaction" (149). Di Leonardo then cites cases that suggest that when women are being observed by male anthropologists, observations often become paternalistic and self-serving, or, as di Leonardo describes it, "the self-reflective scientist" sometimes unconsciously becomes replaced by a "self-justifying john" (149). Similarly, Bleich identifies the "political dominance" enjoyed by the researcher over the subjects as a key issue in ethnographic research ("Sexism" 239).¹¹

Although feminist critiques of dominant research epistemology and methodology have usually been silent concerning issues surrounding collaborative inquiry and authorship, these critiques nevertheless indirectly provide indicators that can be used to signal potential areas of conflict in the formation and function of collaborative research groups. The concerns central to these critiques are reflected in our questions below.

Our Approach

Because we will be using a number of separate narratives from several different collaborative groups in our self-reflective analysis to follow, we think it necessary to posit here a framework for our discussions in order to increase the explanatory power of the individual narratives and to avoid any confusion that might arise from having so many characters and plots forming our story.

Feminist Methodology as a Key to our Self-Reflective Critiques. In generating a framework for exploring our research collaborations, we have tried to be particularly sensitive to those aspects of the narratives that seem to resonate with concerns that are key to feminist methodology. Our framework then, like Harding's, considers issues that can be broadly classified as epistemological and methodological. In addition, we consider issues that we see as primarily relational in nature. The epistemological issues that emerge from the narratives include those entailing disciplinary authority and the struggle to situate collaborative work according to received expectations. In short, the epistemological issues we will discuss center on the question, "Who can be knowers?" The methodological (see Harding, Feminism 15) issues that inform the narratives involve the individual privileging of theoretical approaches or research methods and the impact of this privileging on collaborative decisions, such as how to problematize the data. In other words, we will address issues involved when collaborators try to construct the questions informing their inquiry and the methods for pursuing those questions. Finally, we have found that difference in stances and styles among group members was a key factor in group interaction. We are classifying this difference as relational.

All of these issues shed light on the situatedness of the researcher, particularly ways in which a researcher's beliefs infiltrate work. Furthermore, these questions are implicit in general theoretical and empirical work about collaboration (see Blakeslee; Kaufer et al.; Forman) and collaborative conflict. Before addressing these epistemological, methodological, and relational categories in light of our collaborative experiences, we introduce the groups central to this discussion.

The Collaborative Research Groups in Question. We have selected anecdotal examples that feature interactions within four groups. We've chosen to focus on these particular groups largely because they are successful ongoing efforts and because the collaborators are committed on both personal and professional levels. Each of the groups has a different character and agenda:

The marked differences within and among these groups initiated our inquiry. Although some might argue that it is our very presence in these groups that creates the phenomena we will be discussing (that, like Rappaccini's daughter, our presence has the power to influence what we have experienced) we believe that the phenomena are not due to our specific presence in any group.¹³ Instead, what we discuss represents for us potential risks shared in any given situation by collaborators as they attempt to form and preserve relationships. The extent to which our stories ring true in other collaborators' experiences is the extent to which they are generalizable.

Epistemological Issues

Privileging and acknowledging authority are central concerns of feminist theorists, but these issues also are important to theorists who investigate collaboration (such as Clark and Ede). Within a collaborative group, all those who are recognized by their peers as having authority are "knowers." In a reciprocal collaborative relationship, all the partners are so recognized. Unfortunately as our narratives will show, such recognition and acceptance isn't always enough; the same discipline that constructs authority also monitors that authority and designates sites and sources of power in ways that influence the interactions and decisions of collaborators.

Privileging Authority. Beth Hartung and her collaborators maintain that the "issue of power is integral to research and is a key to confronting the various oppressions inherent in that agenda" (7). They identify research, especially at large institutions, as a patriarchal enterprise. In our collaborations, we have observed that this patriarchal nature exists as an external pressure influencing each groups most basic decisions. We recognize that theoretically there is no "outside" to any collaborative situation because the individual group members themselves embody what we have labeled an "external pressure." Embedded in a patriarchy is the irony that while each individual member of a group may be tacitly empowered to authorize the work of any other members, that authority vanishes (at least as far as certifying the work for presentation or publication in a peer review process) when these members become part of a collaborative unit.

As a way of introducing our first narrative, we thus ask, "How do hierarchical and authoritarian influences impede the workings of a collaborative group?" We're starting with the four collaborators in the "power group" (Helen and Rebecca among them); we have been working through an elaborate, year-long process of situating ourselves in order to begin a collaborative project in which we will explore various manifestations of conflict:

This problem raises not only the issue of whether or not collaborators with expertise can authorize their own work, but also points to the impediments imposed by authoritarian structures in the discipline. In this case, the talents of four individuals, considered expert by "industry standards," are suppressed by those very standards. And ironically, two of the individuals in the group opposed common practice and two saw its value.

Problems with authority are not limited to validating credentials; they also affect the very subject and outcome of collaborative inquiry. Our second narrative illustrates the critical value of asking, "How can hierarchical and authoritarian outside influences subvert the intentions of a collaborative group?" It shows how external factors--expectations, pressures, restrictions--can impinge on the decisions of a group:

In this case, patriarchal expectations forced the group to consider and settle for what it saw as the weaker alternative.¹⁴ Significantly, because this alternative was engendered not out of enthusiasm but expediency, progress on the project was agonizingly slow, with one member finally declaring that she felt "caged" by the accommodation. The group eventually opted out of doing the special issue and redefined the project so that each member would have a publication that was both of interest to them and of the type recognized by the profession. The members' willingness to grapple openly with such potentially explosive, substantive issues testifies to the cohesiveness of this particular group.¹⁵

Acknowledging Knowledge Makers. In a collaborative relationship, "who can be a knower" depends, in part, on each collaborator's perceptions of the other's position, perceptions influenced by the complex context in which each researcher works. As Elizabeth Kamarck Minnich remarks, the liberal arts and culture in general are still influenced by a phallocentric bias concerning who can be knowers (111-13). Our next narrative focuses on an example in which the appearance of gender bias caused us to ask, "How can perceptions about who can be knowers affect collaborative interaction? What happens when these perceptions reflect (or seem to reflect) gender bias?" Because the following example, which contains an instance of potentially serious affective conflict, is disturbing if taken out of context, we must add at the outset that Rebecca, Robert, and Hal are unequivocal in saying that their working relationship is excellent; they work together productively and comfortably in an equitable and forthright manner and have committed themselves to a three-year project:

The perception of gender bias here cuts two ways. If such bias were truly present, Rebecca was excluded from full participation in the group on the basis of her sex. If such bias proved a misperception (as, in fact, was the case) Robert and Rebecca ran the risk of rejecting Hal as a potential collaborator because of what they presumed was Hal's bias. In either case, perceptions (and misperceptions) could have derailed collaborative efforts. Luckily, Robert and Rebecca's initial perceptions were wrong. Both of them see it as their good fortune that they were willing to mistrust these perceptions. Since then, they have learned from Hal that he was falling back on academic conventions in giving attention to the senior colleague, although, in retrospect, he feels somewhat embarrassed by his actions.¹⁶ In fact, in the College of Agriculture in which ninety-six percent of the full professors are male, Hal has a reputation for encouraging and supporting women students. Over the past ten years, forty percent of his graduate students have been women (in a college where the average is thirty percent). In any case, the situation is a good lesson to defer initial judgments, which may be colored by misperceptions and unintentional biases, when establishing collaborative partnerships.

Even when expertise is presumed among group members and, thus, everyone is acknowledged as a knower, we have discovered that epistemological differences still can threaten to stall group progress. In our next narrative, we focus on another collaborative research group (nine men and women with backgrounds in linguistics, TESOL, rhetoric, composition, and professional communication) just beginning their work together about international aspects of professional communication. Members of this group were asked by Rebecca to reflect in individual interviews on the impact that various approaches to research had on the group's progress. Even though the members of the group acknowledged each other's disciplinary expertise, several thought it important that this expertise be somehow made explicit; they wanted to know what other people in the group knew . . . and what they didn't know. This need to articulate expertise leads to the question, "How does not knowing what other knowers know reduce a person's ability to situate an individual's own knowledge in the group?"

This narrative suggests that even though no one's knowledge had been marginalized, the mere acknowledgment of another's expertise was not enough to assure that individual voices within this group would be heard with any degree of understanding. This is not to say that taking the time to listen to individual voices is unimportant. In fact, research on collaboration has shown that groups that take the time and effort to hear every voice, to encourage the articulation of alternatives, and to build on each other's strengths tend to develop a feeling of cohesiveness and a sense of purpose that often result in decisions for which there is a strong commitment from everyone in the group (see Putnam). Our experience in this group simply points to the importance of being acquainted with the nature of each team member's expertise to guarantee productive substantive conflict.

Methodological Issues

In this section, we are assuming with Harding that methodology includes theoretical and rhetorical constructs involving research. Feminist theorists often address the methodological by pointing out that privileging certain constructs may unduly influence the interpretation of events and may actually silence alternative understandings.¹⁷ The following four narratives suggest ways that individual privileging of certain positions can engender disagreements about the purpose of a collaborative project and about the problematization of data for such a project. The first three narratives deal with articulating theories and choosing methodologies. The last narrative, which features a series of drafts, shows Helen and David struggling with parallel rhetorical choices.

Articulating Theories and Choosing Methodologies. Our first narrative in this series, which draws on the transcripts of tape recorded meetings of the power group, shows the relevance of asking, "How does occupying different stances towards research contribute to conflict within groups?"

This excerpt embodies a recurring source of debate for the power group and represents, in part, our efforts to create a model for collaboration that permits alternative approaches. Our experiences in this group have taught us the importance of articulating theoretical and methodological biases up front, as is done in this excerpt, in order to avoid procedural conflicts down the road.

The next narrative shows how individual methodological preferences within a group can contribute to group gridlock. The following excerpt illustrates the way members of the international group danced around their discomfort in discussing each other's methodologies. This experience led us to ask the question, "How does privileging certain research methodologies inhibit group functioning?"

Kevin, one of the theorists in professional communication, confirmed this problem: "I don't know exactly how all my colleagues go about doing research." Theresa, a communication theorist (also in the power group), noted that the very diversity of the group created difficulties as it translated into "diversity of . . . methodological bias." She touched what may be the center of people's unease about the multiplicity of methodologies by observing: "Most of us send mixed messages to one another. We voice 'tolerance' and 'equal but different' but . . . within there is a cross-message that's saying, 'No, this thing that I do is really better, sounder' or something. So we are, I think, probably sending contradictory messages to one another. Now what's that all about? That's where, I think, you get into how much is this driven by real beliefs and how much is it driven by your need to defend and mark out the status for what you're doing and the territory."

Even members of the group who saw methodological diversity as primarily an advantage voiced some concern that "mingling of research methodologies" might not be a pragmatic way to operate. Christine summed the dilemma up fairly well, commenting, "We have a large group of individuals who go about things differently, think about their research differently, think about the world differently. And trying to put those people together in one room, I think, has produced a lot of going around in circles rather than moving directly to a point."

While there was general agreement that members of the group used a variety of methodologies, there was less agreement about what this diversity meant. Some members of the group foregrounded the difficulties involved in such diversity, while others saw the multiplicity of methodologies (and consequently perspectives and areas of expertise) as one of the primary reasons for collaborating. In any case, we think it's important that those interviewed recognized the complexity that such diversity brings to a collaborative research situation.

Our third narrative shows Helen and her colleague David as they drafted their first article together. David and Helen see their ongoing collaboration as strengthened by their different epistemological perspectives and methodological approaches and their familiarity with different bodies of research. They agree that their discussions lead to compatible objectives and approaches. In fact, they agree that their meetings are often spirited, enjoyable, and productive--each recognizing and appreciating the other's areas of expertise. However, drafting the article about their first year of classroom research revealed some unanticipated tensions. Since their work so far had gone smoothly, they were surprised that drafting raised issues that they hadn't even seen as potential problems. They were equally surprised that the consensus that each believed had emerged during discussion wasn't reflected in the subsequent drafts.

Their sequence of responses gives us some insight into the question, "How do differing theoretical positions affect the problematization of the data during collaborative inquiry?" The following comments (selected from interviews that Rebecca conducted separately with Helen and David) were initiated when David was asked to identify what he saw as the source of the tension that he and Helen had noticed when drafting their article. He commented about the difficulty the they had deciding on terminology:

When Helen heard David's comment, her reaction was immediate: "Given David's knee-jerk reaction to the term 'poststructural,' I should have used the term 'postmodern.' That might have broadened the definition enough for him. Right now I can't remember if we settled on his term 'constructivist' or used 'postmodern' in the article. In any case, poststructuralism is important given the fact that we're dealing with interpretations--interpretations of authority in the classroom and of discourses embodying that authority."

David did not have any difficulty in responding: "You've got to be kidding! 'Postmodern' doesn't work at all to convey what we're doing. 'Postmodern' wouldn't have helped at all; if anything it's worse than 'poststructural.'" Helen turned her comment away from their differences about diction in order to suggest another possible reason for their struggle: "Upon reflection, I don't think the term was what was giving us problems. I think we were seeing different things in the data. I saw and wanted to emphasize the differences in interpretation. I think he saw patterns in the discourse itself and wanted to focus on commonalities."

Given the final response, David commented: "I agree with Helen that whether or not to use this term was not a major issue. It did matter in terms of how we chose to present what we did, but the analysis was already done. We had both agreed with the substance of that. But I also wanted to make a methodological argument--that we had something different to say--because instead of just talking about the importance of student perspectives for pedagogy, we actually did something about it; that is, we interviewed students and used what we learned in the analysis."

In this excerpt, Helen and David's theoretical difference played itself out as a disagreement about word choice. But their disagreement was less about whether they should use "poststructural" or "postmodern" or "constructivist" and more about their interest in different facets of the data. While Helen wanted to emphasize the hermeneutic nature of classroom discourse, David wanted also to emphasize poststructural and empirical methods.

Playing on Parallel Paths. Our final narrative in this section on methodological issues epitomizes the tension that emerges from individuals' privileging of their own positions in collaborative situations. It finds Helen and David "playing on parallel paths." Their collaboration about authority and agency in the classroom had progressed to the point where they had data, had negotiated interpretations of that data, and recognized that it was time to get the first article written. They were in agreement about the general thrust of the article, but their agreement didn't initially find its way into the introduction.

In this section we present representative excerpts from the initial drafts of Helen and David's coauthored article. These drafts of five different introductions reinforce the complexity of answering this question, "How do differing theoretical positions affect the way collaborators situate their work?" The drafts show that David and Helen acted from different theoretical starting points and, as a consequence, played a kind of academic Russian roulette, essentially "writing away" each other's perspectives. We base the following discussion on these drafts and on Helen and David's retrospective accounts, which were shared separately with Rebecca when the article was nearly completed. The drafts and retrospective accounts provide a partial picture of how their face-to-face meetings and independent writing sessions both built and destroyed consensus.¹⁸ Although David and Helen characteristically reached oral agreement concerning the goals of their discourse, differences nevertheless emerged in how these goals were instantiated as text at least in part because each writer had difficulty including the others perspective. Thus, after having reached an agreement on the goals of the introduction, Helen drafted the first opening to their article, using her poststructuralist bias to situate their argument:

Note to David: Do we have an excerpt from English 506 that we can open with where students are doing most/all of the talking? Can you hunt one up if this intro looks promising to you? Then we can lead into questions such as "Who creates meaning in this excerpt? Who is the teacher here? Is there a teacher in this class?"

. . . With our last question, we consciously echo Stanley Fish's well-known query, "Is there a text in this class?" Such a question is fundamental to poststructuralist inquiry into the site of meaning in the production and reception of texts. Like questions underpin our exploration of instructional discourse in this article.

Our structuralist heritage looks upon texts as artifacts containing meaning in and of themselves, encouraging the notion that writers transmit rather than create meaning. It's also fair to say that the idea of the writer as an autonomous self is basically consistent with the Western humanist tradition. . . .

After writing this version, Helen met with David. At this meeting, the two of them seemed to reach a new consensus, this time about downplaying the poststructuralist argument Helen had used. David then revised the introduction, but despite their face-to-face discussion, his text below (like Helen's previous draft) provided little indication that they shared the same vision for the article. Even the most superficial rhetorical analysis of the two introductions shows differences in the literature cited, the stance each takes, and an inductive approach versus an explicit statement of purpose. Helen and David situated the article in quite different ways, drawing on different literatures and focusing readers' attention on different aspects of their work. Here's David's revision:

In her retrospective analysis of the Hayes/Flower cognitive process model of writing, Linda Flower criticizes her own model for failing "to account for how the situation in which the writer operates might shape composing" and for having "little to say about the specific conventions, schemata, or commonplaces" possibly informing a chief element of that model, the writer's long-term memory. Flower argues that what is needed is a theory of writing grounded, in the ethnographic sense, in "specific knowledge about real people writing in significant personal, social or political situations" (283).

We argue in this article that a similar claim can be made for a theory of instructional discourse. Currently, how we conduct our classrooms has become a matter of public debate. Responses to Jane Tompkins' article "Pedagogy of the Distressed," for example, have been heavy and sometimes hot. There have been defenses of the performance model which Tompkins attacks (Seabury 716). There have been doubts that "real" students [as opposed to Tompkins' "privileged" students] can be anything more than passive and that student-centered pedagogies can inspire anything more than giggles from "real" faculty (Martin 358). There have been "reality checks" reminding Tompkins that scholarship rather than teaching is valued by administrators and rewarded by institutions (Carroll 601; Wolff 353; Caesar 475). But there have also been congratulations for Tompkins for realizing that teaching and learning are "as intellectually exciting as criticism" (Mayher and Lester), and supportive testimonies from teachers who keep silent in the classroom so students can speak out (McGann 360) and who work to empower students through various student-centered means (Ewald 354; Boggs 476).

Following the same jointly-agreed upon procedure as before, David gave the draft to Helen for review. Helen saw this version as no more acceptable than David saw Helen's previous version. After they talked about this version, Helen returned to her original version. However, this draft (with a new title) showed clear signs of their conversation by suggesting that reading theory, linguistics, and cognitive psychology also address the issues. Helen added two paragraphs (one of which follows) that established parallels between poststructuralist theories and work in other disciplines:

After discussing together the problem that Helen had letting go of the poststructuralist emphasis, David generated another revision. He added a new situating paragraph at the beginning of his original version of the introduction, explaining that "Scholars such as Shaughnessy, Berthoff, and Rose have challenged the notion that knowledge is something conveyed by teachers and that students are passive recipients of knowledge." Then he introduced the idea of teachers and students as theory-builders. The emphasis on teacher authority and student agency reflected in his title was an emphasis David and Helen had agreed on from the beginning of the project and was one that they had jointly explored as important to the article. Heres David's revision:

Introductory paragraph with this addition: We propose that examining the interplay between teacher authority and student agency in learning is a useful way to understand some of the consequences of understanding the new roles that teachers and students are taking in classrooms.

Teachers and Students as Theory-Builders
In the keynote essay in a forthcoming collection of classroom observations, Linda Flower argues that teachers are theory-builders. She challenges the notion of theory as the province of a select group of literary theorists who explicated the work of continental writers or of those educational researchers who have "the luxury of sustained inquiry, of piloting, replicating, and carefully analyzing a question in a cumulative sequence of studies . . . [often by those who] are white, male, and tenured at a university." Instead, she argues, that serious theory-building goes on in other parts of education . . . .

In short, Flower argues that good teaching involves observation and theory-building. We'd like to make a friendly amendment to Flower's argument--that students are also theory builders. Like Flower, we recognize the importance of the work of literary and rhetorical theorists and of educational researchers; however, we argue that what happens when teachers and students negotiate the meaning of traditional theory in classroom or other settings is also a matter for serious study. Further, we contend that students must be treated as important participants in this theory-building.

Helen, not particularly receptive to how this fourth version of the introduction instantiated their most recent collaborative discussion, returned again to her poststructuralist emphasis, beginning the fifth version with an ALL-CAPS note to her collaborator: "DAVID, I AM ENTRENCHED, AND AM FEELING PLENTY STUBBORN BESIDES. LET'S MOVE ON." Although she offered another introduction, it wasn't much different from her previous efforts, but she did add a forecasting section to address David's concern that the piece not be entirely inductive: "In this article, we will explore instructional discourse as a hermeneutic act before suggesting pedagogical implications, especially as these involve teacher authority and student agency in the classroom." At this point, Helen recalls, "We decided to start writing the body of the article and to leave the introduction to later. Our next attempt at an introduction [after generating a great deal of other parts of the article] saw us finally working on the 'same page.'"

This new (and sixth) version (with another new title) showed clear indications of Helen and David's negotiation. This version retained David's references to Tompkins and his decided preference to foreground their thesis, but it also reflected Helen's preference for beginning with quotations that help the readers situate the writers and themselves in relation to the issues. In fact, the ideas in the first paragraph were posed by David and (based on David's earlier versions) written by Helen, while the ideas in the second paragraph were posed by Helen and written by David:

These responses to Jane Tompkins; recent article "Pedagogy of the Distressed" illustrate fundamental tension in the profession regarding the roles that teachers and students should play in instructional settings--a tension between teacher authority and student agency. Like Martin, quoted above, some respondents to Tompkins have argued for the importance of teacher authority, defending the performance model that Tompkins attacks (Seabury 716), expressing doubts that "real" students as opposed to Tompkins' "privileged" students can be anything more than passive (Carrol 599-600), and observing that student-centered pedagogies can inspire anything more than giggles from "real" faculty (Martin 358). These responses often called attention to what the teacher has to offer students and to the advantages to both student and teacher of student passivity. Other respondents, like McGann, provide testimonies that support teachers who keep silent in the classroom so students can speak out. These respondents value student agency as a means by which pedagogy can empower students through various student-centered patterns of discourse and eschew the assumption that teachers should impart to students everything they need to know (Ewald 354; Boggs 476).

These exchanges in the "Comment and Response" section of College English have pitted models favoring teacher authority against those advocating student agency, sometimes in "winner take all" fashion. We do not intend to declare a winner; instead, we will reexamine teacher and student roles by focusing on the concepts of authority and agency as they play themselves out in classroom discourse. Stated baldly, our thesis is that student agency and teacher authority must be negotiated in classroom discourse: teachers do have knowledge and expertise that students need, but learning also depends on student engagement and contributions. The question then becomes how teacher authority and student agency can be usefully mediated in classroom discourse.

It's important to note here that Helen and David's disagreement was limited to how the ideas they jointly discussed become instantiated in text. They agree that their differences, not only in their research interests but also in their methodological approaches, help make their work more interesting and reduce the chances of offering a narrow interpretation of any situation.

Relational Issues

As we've established, feminists are particularly concerned with subject-object relations and other issues dealing with research methods. Within the context of collaborative research groups, feminists emphasize the importance of "alleviating repressive and exploitive aspects of the research process itself," especially when vulnerable groups such as students are being studied (Malhorta 84). Malhorta describes various ways of breaking down the alienation between researcher and researched and effecting participatory and reciprocal research design (85 ff.) characterized by dialogue. Harding concludes that the best feminist analysis "insists that the inquirer her/himself be placed in the same critical plane as the overt subject matter" (Feminism 9). As we reflected on our collaborative experiences, we discovered that researcher-researcher relationships are equally implicated as sites of difference during the research process, although that difference is not necessarily hierarchical in nature. The narratives that follow articulate differences in researcher styles and stances which emerged from our experiences and which can signal significant areas of potential conflict in collaborative relationships.

Identifying Differences in Approaches. Our first narrative in this section raises the question, "How does the nature of people's working style influence collaborative work?" The international group is currently stymied, in part because of remarkable differences in working styles. Most members of the group agree that there is a difference in the amount of up-front time that various people need.

When Dillon, a linguist in the group, was asked about the group's efforts, he said, "I'm mystified . . . about why we're not making progress. . . . Some people seem to have more concerns than I do. I'm perfectly happy dealing with fuzzy categories . . . whereas other people seem to be much more concerned with wanting more precision." Later in the conversation, he came back to this point: "It seems to me that the real difference is that I'm willing to go ahead and push forward and try to make some progress and say we're going to do this and we're going to do that and if we change our minds later on, that's fine; whereas it seems that some other personalities in the group would prefer to know exactly what we're going to do before we set out and stick to that. . . . I think maybe it's just a difference in working style."

Kevin reinforced this perspective when, separately, he pointed out that members of the group have to deal with differences in approaching long-term projects: "I think there also are personalities or styles . . . of how to do projects that have almost nothing to do with anything else than one's sort of entrepreneurial risk-taking sort of mind set as opposed to a much more cautious, long-range, sober . . . view of how you're going to commit your time."

In addition to the immediate practical, procedural problem (some group members were ready to define a project and others wanted to wait so that they had more background), there was tension among the members of the group that indicated individuals were frustrated by the differences in working styles. Some members of the international group were willing to frame a preliminary research question so they could begin a research project and then make changes as they went along. Others wanted a lead time of six months or a year to explore the literature and identify all the issues before even framing a research question. Perhaps even more basic, members of this group have had different perceptions about what it means to collaborate. Does it mean, for example, to work together on a single, overarching research question from the same perspective? Does it mean to work together on a single question from different perspectives? Does it entail investigating the same situation? Different situations? Without some consensus concerning such issues, this group is having difficulty proceeding.

Our next narrative explores the question of difference more specifically in terms of research styles and addresses the question, "How do different styles of doing research create potential problems for collaborators understanding each other's work?" In this discussion of a substantive conflict (from the power group), Rebecca and Theresa were trying hard to understand how the other pursues research. In this exchange, Theresa explained how she planned to locate examples of conflict in an organization the group would be studying.

Rebecca: . . . You're just following a trail . . . a rabbit trail.

Theresa: But I couldn't walk in in advance and say I would like to have a collaborative team working on written documents. . . . The conflict is in the culture, you see. The conflict doesn't necessarily have to show up in a conversation between two people. The conflict can be what's suppressed in a document. In other words, it can be what's absent. By looking at what's absent, by looking at what's present, that can be a way of looking at conflict.

Rebecca: So you'd have this notion and you'd sort of follow a little rabbit trail, with informants, and they would eventually lead [you] to at least one instance of that.

Theresa: Of something that I thought was true.

A subsequent exchange revealed differences in how power group members would get their information. To explore conflict within an organizational culture, for example, Theresa would explore that culture--reviewing the organization's values, norms, and history; completing rhetorical analyses of available documents (video and textual); making observations and conducting open-ended interviews with employees--to identify what she believes to be critical manifestations of conflict. Then she would use informants to help locate specific instances of conflict. Brigid would follow a similar procedure in exploring organizational narratives. In contrast, Rebecca would approach her exploration of the impact of conflict within collaborative work groups quite differently. She would begin with specific groups--identifying patterns in group protocols, completing discourse analysis of their talk and texts, tracing the changes as process evolves to product, making observations, and conducting process-based and discourse-based interviews--to identify kinds of conflict that occur and the ways that conflict affects the processes and products of these specific groups. Helen would be willing to follow either procedure, depending on the situation and topic. A key factor here is that Brigid and Theresa have strikingly different research methods than those used by Rebecca. Helen, whose research methods in the past resemble those preferred here by Brigid and Theresa, finds herself more in agreement with Rebecca's approach on this particular project. Quite familiar with the debate from similar issues raised in her collaboration with David, Helen here has been satisfied to entertain both possibilities as she watches the argument unfold in this group.

Negotiating Stances. One element of Lather's feminist "research as praxis" involves reciprocity between researcher and researched participating in a fully interactive research design (56ff.). While the research design of Helen and David was not fully interactive, the question of reciprocity still (or perhaps as a result) emerged as tension Helen felt in terms of the interviewing, which was part of their case-study data collection. Our next narrative explores the question, "How does concern with reciprocity generate problems in collaborative work?" David and Helen had constructed a series of interview questions: Helen was to ask them of his first-year undergraduates; David was to ask the same questions of her first-year Ph.D. students. At the time, Helen didn't realize how difficult it would be for her to follow the game plan:

David clearly was more comfortable with the task as he and Helen had originally designed it. At the outset of the interview process, he explained to each interviewee (one male and one female) that he would be following a script: "I should tell you that some of the things I ask you today--I have a standard list of questions--some of the questions might seem stranger today than they might farther down the line, but I have to get comparative data." During each interview, David continued to be faithful to the script, although noting on occasion that "I know [from your past comments in this interview] the answer to this question, but I'll ask it anyway." He analyzed the situation this way: "I could stick to the game plan more easily because first-year students are more insecure and need such identification [as represented by Helen's self-revelatory comments] more than the graduate students I was interviewing."

David viewed their differences in styles as just the kind of thing they needed to learn about during a pilot study, at least if internal consistency were to be a value in their ongoing research. David thought Helen shouldn't have worried; she had a more difficult task than he did since she was interviewing undergraduates. Helen, however, was concerned that the differences in the sequence of their questions and in their styles of interviewing would reduce the usefulness of the interview data. David suggested that Helen's concern about the usefulness of the interview data probably also stemmed from her belief that she was violating "some monolithic standard" for doing such research, a standard that David said "simply doesn't exist."

The difference in Helen and David's approach to the interviews reinforces the importance of exploring the question, "How does responding subject-object relations generate issues in collaborative work?" The subject-object relationship, identified in our earlier review of literature as a fundamental issue in feminist critiques of research, includes a concern for reciprocity in research design and attention to dominant-subordinate relationships. While subject-object relationships are a concern of individual researchers, the issue becomes more complex in collaborative research. This complexity is reflected in Helen and David's experience. Although operating from the same research design, Helen and David encountered different problems in collecting the data. After their pilot study was underway, Helen realized that the first-year students she was interviewing weren't relaxed or confident enough to analyze their teacher, nor did they have the vocabulary to answer the questions David and Helen had agreed upon (for example, "What was the purpose of the class?"). Helen thought that she could build their confidence in analyzing their class and teacher by using self-revelatory comments of her own to give them the idea that such critique was okay. In retrospect, Helen believes that these first-year students seemed less like participants and more like objects of study because they lacked awareness of terminology and fluency of expression needed to answer the questions. Neither fluency nor awareness were problems with the graduate students David interviewed. David and Helen later agreed that a problem they'd need to address in their methodology was the age of the students that Helen interviewed and recognized that adding the self-revelatory comments was in fact a sensible decision to make. Although Helen and David anticipate consensus in the way they expect to modify their methodology, such consensus among collaborative researchers might not be easily won.

The concern about subject-object relations that Helen and David addressed in their pilot-study interviews touches on the dominant-subordinate relations between the researchers and participants. However, collaborative researchers may also run the risk of establishing dominant-subordinate relations among themselves. Thus, what are essentially subject-subject relations between these researchers promise to embody many of the concerns associated with subject-object relations in other research. Our final narrative suggests some difficulties that emerge when researchers use a non-hierarchical style of interacting. Our discussion below is ironic in light of feminist theory that decries the problems associated with patriarchal structures, organizations with hierarchies that often marginalize some voices and values. The members of the international group came together as colleagues all sharing some interest in international aspects of technical communication. Although no one explicitly raised the issue, a nonhierarchical group made sense. No one had a set agenda; we simply wanted to explore the potential for pursuing jointly what many of us were interested in individually. But the absence of an articulated research agenda for the group as a whole has encouraged us to ask the question, "Are nonhierarchical structures efficient or effective for research groups of more than three or four people?"

Christine commented, "At this point everybody's kind of wondering are we really ever going to do anything." She believed that unless one or more people would step forward and influence the direction and the process of the group, little would get done, and eventually people would lose interest and move on to other projects that had a defined agenda and clear goals.

The members of this group, probably because of its size, have been conscious of the management and leadership problems that become critical when a number of people try to establish a working relationship. Initially having any one person assume responsibility for the direction of the group (which any one of the nine members was qualified to do) may have been counterproductiv; however, continuing with this nonhierarchical structure may prove equally counterproductive and may ultimately result in the dissolution or reconstitution of the group.

Implications of Viewing Collaboration from a Feminist Perspective

By calling attention to a range of epistemological, methodological, and relational issues, we hope to have suggested fruitful arenas for reflection about collaboration--reflection to strengthen existing relationships and to improve the chances that new relationships will have an increased chance of success. We see both implications for researchers and for teachers arising out of our reflections.

It is remarkably unpopular in some circles to compare research in the humanities to research in social sciences and sciences; however, social sciences and sciences have for centuries recognized that certain complex issues are best investigated collaboratively.²⁰ Our discipline restricts itself by presuming that the most important questions are those answered individually or those answered by a certain kind of collaboration. We believe that collaborative groups, by their very nature, have the potential advantage of offering multiple perspectives, which can contribute to shaping a more complete view of any situation. Collaborative groups also bring together a critical mass of expertise that is unlikely to be found in a single individual; a project benefits from new information and insights, from differing theoretical stances. Productive collaborators who are receptive to multiple perspectives essentially validate feminist observations that all voices can contribute to knowledge-making.

If we accept the argument that our discipline benefits from encouraging collaborative research relationships, then we necessarily need to revise our notions of authority and authorship and to encourage the development of multiple models of collaboration. And if we discuss increasing the amount of collaboration members of our profession engage in, we will all need additional ways to identify and evaluate the success of our interactions. Feminist theory offers one way to address potential problems by providing terms and concepts to begin our discussions. Revising our attitudes toward and treatment of collaborative research relationships in our discipline would go a long way in moving toward the changes we suggested at the beginning of this article.

In her interview about the international group, Theresa commented, "Like everybody else, I do more team collaborative work in the classroom [than I used to]." But as a result of self-reflection, based in part on her involvement in the power group as well as the international group, she wondered if we as a discipline are not sometimes asking too much of our students: "I am really beginning to re-think what it means from the students point of view when I ask them to produce texts together. Even if you find ways to deal with the evaluation, split the grade with the team and individual effort and so forth, I think that we really as a profession need to be looking at that very carefully because we're asking people to do something that we have a very difficult time doing." Theresa recognized that, too frequently, students are expected to collaborate without learning the strategic skills they need in order to be effective collaborators.

Even though our reflections have not dealt specifically with pedagogical situations and issues, we believe that our narratives nevertheless hold implications for pedagogical practice in advanced composition classrooms:

Second, any collaborative work associated with advanced composition classes, including peer review and team projects, would be beneficially supported by models of various kinds of collaborations and concrete suggestions about how to become effective collaborators, many of these drawing on feminist methodologies.

Third, in advanced writing classes, there probably should be some introduction to the nature of and to the issues surrounding "formal" methods of inquiry. In other words, a study of methods should entail critique and reflection.

Fourth, students should understand that their "rhetorical stance" as writers not only includes such elements as persona and voice, but also entails assumptions concerning how knowledge is constructed and regarding what knowledge and "styles of learning" have value (see Bleich, "Sexism").

We started out with an interest in exploring the intersection between feminist methodology and collaborative research. We believe we have established that feminist critiques of research methodology can provide indicators that collaborators can use to identify potential areas of conflict in the formation and function of collaborative research groups. We have been successful if readers borrow our epistemological, methodological, and relational categories for examining their own collaborative research groups. Every time researchers struggle with issues of disciplinary authority and received expectations, individual privileging of theoretical approaches and research methods, and differences in stances and styles among group members, they can be reminded that similar conflicts can pose problems for students. Students working collaboratively seldom have the analytical skills (or the time) to examine and reflect on their process. As collaborative research groups becomes more prevalent in our discipline, we may come to realize that encouraging reflection about the processes we (and our students) engage in may increase both the pleasure and the productivity of collaboration.

Our discussion raises a number of questions regarding research on collaboration. Two such questions that specifically informed our research for this article are, "How does a researcher position him or herself in the interpellation of his or her own collaborative groups?" and "How does a researcher gather data about collaboration?" That is, at what stage are and should those studied be involved in interpretation? In the end, our discussion also raises questions concerning what constitutes a productive collaboration. Is it a collaboration where a product or goal, such as an external grant, is agreed upon in advance? Is it a collaboration where a product emerges slowly with a great deal of substantive conflict? Is it a collaboration where nothing more (or less) emerges from the discussion than a better understanding of each others individual research interests and goals? Finally, is self-reflection itself a key to productive collaboration?²¹

Iowa State University
Ames, Iowa

NOTES

Works Cited