Rhetorica in Motion: Feminist Rhetorical Methods and Methodologies

Researching Literacy as a Lived Experience

136 Researching Literacy as a Lived Experience JoanneAddison Much important work in rhetoric and composition is derived from a specifically feminist orientation. While some of this work focuses on empirical methods and methodologies, outside of case study research we still lack both a strong orientation toward empirical research and a significant body of work from which to draw upon that directly addresses what it means to conduct feminist empirical research in our field. Part of this gap lies in the ongoing struggle of rhet/comp to define itself as a discipline. We are both burdened and energized by our relationship to freshman composition; we are engaged in debates over the relative merits of theory, practice, and praxis and striving to understand our place as a decidedly interdisciplinary field within an institution that more often than not insists on specialization. But it is important that we continue to expand and critique the ways in which feminist rhetoric and empirical research inform one another in writing studies in our ongoing efforts to realize what we can know, how we can know, who can know, and who can speak of what we know. In approaching the relationship between feminist rhetoric and empirical research from an epistemological perspective, I am suggesting continued movement toward rhetoric and composition as a contextualized human sciences discipline as envisioned by Louise Wetherbee Phelps in Composition as a Human Science (1988). Noam Chomsky and others have argued that we cannot move forward in our understand- Researching Literacy as a Lived Experience 137 ing of the language faculty1 itself without substantial interdisciplinary efforts (Hauer, Chomsky, and Fitch 2002, 1569). Likewise, we cannot move forward in our understanding of ways the language faculty is operationalized via rhetoric and everyday literacies without drawing on a diversity of scholarly work, providing the friction needed to propel our understandings. I’m drawn to the positioning of composition as a human science as a starting point in articulating feminist methods and methodologies for rhetoric and composition for two reasons. My own work focuses on empirical research and the understanding of literacy as a lived experience; Phelps’s positioning of rhetoric and composition as a human science allows for important links between empirical research in our field and other human sciences. Moreover, and most important for our efforts here, the contextualist framework she outlines in arguing for a view of composition as a human science is the very type of framework that can support the work of scholars in our field seeking to articulate the feminist methods and methodologies that guide research in our own discipline and can inform the research of other disciplines. In Composition as a Human Science, a book that represents an important effort to define composition as a discipline, Phelps argues that the model of the human sciences provides us with both the knowledge needed to further our profession and opportunities for us to participate in a larger dialogue about language studies across disciplines (1988, 106). As part of her effort to put forth a view of composition studies as a contextualized discipline, she addresses the myth of natural literacy, instead preferring contextual accounts that are: . . . powerful not only in themselves, as exciting and generative for teaching practice, but in their affinities and connections with the work of other fields. The effort to relate language, cognition, writing, and rhetoric in terms of a contextualist framework finds its echo in every human science, especially of course those of language, literature, psychology, and social practices, but also in history, critical theory, philosophy, and many others. For the first time, and not altogether self-consciously at present, composition finds itself in the mainstream of intellectual thought, contributing its own perspective to theoretical and empirical inquires of farreaching import. Not only is it exploiting ideas from these fields . . . but it is beginning to draw such figures into dialogue with rhetoric and composition . [This] link[s] composition to the more fundamental task being 138 JoanneAddison pursued across the disciplines, namely, to evaluate and balance interpretive (natural or contextualized) approaches with critical and objectivist understandings of human life and experience. (Phelps 1988, 115) Phelps’s consideration of composition studies as a human science within a contextualized framework—akin to developmental psychology wherein the relationship between the individual and her social, cultural, and economic positions is primary—acknowledges the complexity of human experience and the multiple methods and methodologies required to approximate an understanding of the possibilities...