SELECTING THE VEHICLE FOR THE JOURNEY
4.5 Theories
The life history as a methodological tool, probed deeply into the adult learners' lives to understand how other factors shaped and were influential during the process of acquiring the English language. In the life history study, I conducted extensive interviews with the adult learners for the purpose of collecting a first person narrative (Biklen, 1992). Over time, the content of the life history interviews became more revealing as I probed deeper and deeper into their lives.
The data collection process was ongoing over the six-year period (1998-2003), I was able to understand and get to know the learners in far greater depth. The theoretical frameworks play a significant role in life history research, as will be explained in the next section.
consensus on features that would characterize feminist research. The features of its methodology are clarified in the discussion that follows:
Firstly, Walford (1994) explains that the subjects of enquiry are usually the forgotten and the less privileged, which are often women. The distinctive power of feminist research is that it generates its critical issues from the perspective of women's experience. The purpose of feminist research has an empancipatory goal, where research and analysis should provide useful information that will empower people so that they can challenge and fight their manipulation and exploitation. Feminist inquiry goes beyond the innovations in subject matter in a crucial manner, in that:
...it insists that the inquirer her/himself be placed in the same critical plane as the overt subject matter, thereby recovering the entire research process for scrutiny in the results of the research (Harding, 1987: 9).
In feminist research, there are no universal women. Thus feminist analyses always have categories within every class, race and culture. It is difficult to find one set of feminist principles or understandings with which every class, race and culture will agree. It needs to be stressed therefore that not only gender experiences vary across cultural categories but vary within an individual's experience. I illustrate this point by citing my own example of the changing role experiences as a South African Indian researcher, member of an extended family and educational leader.
I am able to articulate my identity as an emancipated, empowered female in academic and educational circles while my role in the Indian family circle is influenced by my South African Indian cultural values. My identity, i.e., my class, race, culture, gender, beliefs and behaviour as researcher and educator has to be placed within the context of this research. I need to position myself as researcher and educator in terms of the power relations in this study. I am a South African Indian female from a middle class, mainly Indian suburb, Reservoir Hills. This is one of the legacies of the Group Areas Act, inherited from the previous apartheid government to place residents in areas according to their race. Reservoir Hills presently (2004) has a fair percentage of Black informal residents. My first language is English and I am literate in my vernacular language, Tamil. As much
as I have imbibed Western influences I am closely rooted in my Indian culture. As stated the females in this study are all Black adult learners who are domestic workers. They either live with their employers or in the informal settlements. This declaration exposes some of the power, educational, economic and cultural differences that exist between the researcher and the Black female adult learners.
The women's life stories encompass the multiplicity of ways they reveal and reflect important features of their conscious experience and social landscape, from both their essential realities. Prell (1989) cites Myerhoff s life histories where she talks about the reflexive nature of culture. She was interested in finding out about cultural settings where people created their identities. For Myerhoff (Prell, 1989) the human/cultural process of finding stories within stories was an example of reflexivity, which is the capacity to arouse consciousness of ourselves as we see the actions of others and ourselves. Reflexivity allowed me to understand persons as active and self-conscious narrators of their own lives. According to Myerhoff s reflexive moments were the richest because they framed the process of meaning and made narrator's aware that they were makers of meaning. In life history, people talk about their lives. They lie, sometimes, forget, exaggerate, become confused and get things wrong yet they are revealing truths. They do not reveal the past as it actually was to a standard of objectivity using the logic of mathematical deductions of the scientific ideal. But they give, instead, the truths of lived experiences. The stories reveal truths but they do not necessarily provide access to other times, places or cultures.
Feminist researchers choose multiple methods for various technical reasons (Reinharz, 1992). In this research I make use of the life history methodology and the primary instruments are interviews, autobiographies, classroom observation, document analysis. The letters and in loco visits are serendipitous tools. In order to explore the complex realities and to discover the 'figure under the carpet' I had to make use of multiple methods in this research. It was not always easy to obtain lengthy interviews or at times make any physical contact with some of the adult learners. This necessitated that I use more creative methods to obtain information
from those who could not be contacted physically. As domestic workers the adult learners had long hours of work and were only available to be interviewed late in the evenings or at night. This meant that I had to make numerous visits to the informal settlements. Interviewing the learners in their own familiar environment brought further enlightement about the lives of the women in different contexts.
Lincoln & Guba (1995) argue for the legitimating of this tacit knowledge in addition to knowledge expressed in language form because multiple realities can be gleaned in this way. Tacit knowledge also reflects more accurately the value patterns of the researcher and researched. In order to obtain thorough data and a desire to be open-ended, feminist researchers must take risks to link the past and given present information of the subjects (Reinharz, 1992).
There is a need for feminist researchers/educators to consciously reflect on practice, in particular, to the way it relates to inequalities in power relations and to encourage critical consciousness amongst students so that they can learn to live their values (Weiner, 1994). Code et al (1988) emphasize that if a researcher/educator recreates class division within their teaching, their analysis will be devoid of form. Thus it becomes critical as feminist researchers/educators to not only examine their teaching methodology but to be critical of what they teach. As a researcher/ educator I must attempt to create a consciousness-raising environment, which is emancipatory, transformative and empowering in order to create counter-hegemony.
How can the educator and researcher reach these above objectives? (Weiner, 1994) argues that a feminist research pedagogy emphasizes the changing views of classroom methods to reflect three main areas of concern: the roles and authority of the teacher, the source of the claims of knowledge and truth in personal experience and feeling, the goals of providing the learners with skills to continue feminist principles after they have left the educational institution. There are major problems in how we create critical consciousness without implying ideological correctness or a clash with the complex desires and subjectivities of the learners.
There are no easy answers to these complex situations, but Lewis (cited in
Weiner, 1994) suggests that there are critical incidents or illuminating instances, which can be used in the transformative feminist research pedagogy to enable greater understanding of the inequalities in power relations. Feminist research theory emerges from and responds to the lives of women. Feminist theory is grounded in women's lives and aims to analyze the role and meaning of gender in those lives and in society.
4.6 The Site of the Study: Asoka Adult Basic Education Co-operative