bishop, wendy "i-witnessing in composition"

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WENDY BISHOPFlorida State U niversity

I-Witnessing in Composition:Turning Ethnographic Data into NarrativesThis essay begins with three borrowed voices:

If there is any way to counter the conception of ethnography as aniniquitous act or an unplayable gam e, it would seem to involve owningup to the fact that, like quantum mechanics or the Italian opera, it is awork of the im agination, less extravagant than the first, less metho di-cal than the second. (Clifford Geertz, Works and Lives 140)For all its promise, then, the future of the embattled Ethnographiccommunity cannot be all that bright. There still seems to be amongusers and consu mers alike, considerable confusion about what sort ofauthority it ha s . . . . However diplomatic its users might wish or needto be in the face of a positivist culture's latent hostility, the methoditself will inevitably be both threatening and radical. It will not mixand match. (Stephen North, The Making of Knowledge in Composition313)I call ethnography a m editative vehicle because w e come to it neitheras to a map of knowledge nor as a guide to action, nor even forenlighte nme nt. We com e to it as the start of a different kind of journey .(Stephen Tyler, "Post-Modern E thnography " 140)

Behind the issues of reliability and validity and ethnographic storytellingraised by these vo ices lurk issues of definition. W hat is ethnography? W hat shouldbe sandwiched be tween Clifford Geertz's poles of quantum mechanics and Italianopera? D oes ethnography have methodological authority in composition studies?Whylike oil and waterdon't ethnographic and positivistic research "mix andmatch"? Is ethnography really such a different kind of journey?In writing research, ethnography is here to stayfor a while anyway. In 1987Stephen North claimed the community of ethnographic research was one withedges but no center; in the same year, I began my own ethnographic research

Rhetoric Review, Vol. 11, No. 1, Fall 1992 147


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project. Since I completed that dissertation in late 1988 and published a revisedversion of my work in 1990,1 have watched the surge, development, and nowperhaps the cresting of a wave of similar projects. Studies labeled ethnographic,naturalistic, case study, and so on , are well represented in Research in the Teachingof English bibliographies of the last several years; the 1991 CCCC programpresented more reports and, in general, much talk about ethnography, includingseveral panels and a posfconvention works hop.1

In 1986 when I started my research, however, I felt I was inventing ethnogra-phy on my own. Aside from Shirley Brice Heath's Ways with Words, GlendaBissex's GNYSATWRK, Sondra Perl and Nancy Wilson's Through T eachers' Eyesand a few teacher-researcher articles, my "b ibles" were w ritten for social scientistsand anthropologists and I had few studies to study. The methods texts I didhaveG oetz and LeCompte and Miles and Hubermanwere valuable. They toldme how to design research and collect datahow to "write it down"and Iscoured them for hints on ways to adapt my borrowed methodology to my ownfield, writing research.I learned to design research, and I designed in, I thought, reliability. I w ould"write it dow n" through field-notes, personal memos , copious participant-observer

data collectionvideo, audio, interview transcripts, and so on. I knew I wouldincrease validity through rigorous data analysischarting, cross-checking (trian-gulation), coding, and so on.Along the way, over a thirty-month period, as you can imag ine, I became lesssure, less able to translate methods book injunctions into research realities. Ques-tions arose. Not just what is ethnography, but why did "doing ethnograp hy" seemto have elements of "doing literature" and "doing creative wr iting" that no one andno methods book was mentioning? Or, how could research that seemed more andmore to rely on my subjectivity, interpretations, and, finally, storytelling skills bea vehicle for reliable and valid results?Ethnography is problematic due to these and the many other challenges thatit presents. Anthropologist Clifford Geertz explains:

. . . [that] the writing of ethnography involves telling stories, makingpictures, concocting symbolisms, and deploying tropes is commonlyresisted, often fiercely, because of a confusion, endemic in the Westsince Plato at least, of the imagined with the imaginary, the fictionalwith the false, making things out with making them u p. (140)First of all, I did not realize that "writing it down" was an interpretive actalthough I knew that "writing it up" would be. I assumed, and my methods textsand rhetoric program 's general grounding in positivistic research led me to believe,that the data I collected w ould be representative, reliable, who le. Then, scrupulouscareful analysis, triangulation, and constant self-questioning would bring m e to a


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reliable and valid understanding of another culture, in this case, retraining teachersof college writing. It was hard to see, at first, the degree to which "writing it d own"is interpretive, that "what is written 'd ow n' is treated as data in the writing 'u p '"and that "both phases of the work involve the creation of textual materials"(Atkinson 61).Although I knew that surely no o ne else could step into the same river of myresearch project for a second time, go back to the same situation I had encountered,I believed they could replicate my research to the extent that I carefully explainedmy m ethodsthat I had collected so many tapes, asked so many subjects so manyquestions in just the same order, and so on.I did not understand then the degree to which all research relies on tropes,researcher personas, and persuasions, that all research methods and researchreports are rhetorical, that is, all use the reliable triad of classical persuasion: logos,the appeal to reason, pathos, the appeal to emotion, and ethos, the appeal ofpersonality or character. As in any persuasion, "these means we use will be partlydetermined by the nature of the thesis we are arguing, partly by current circum-stances, partly (perhaps mainly) by the kind of audience we are addressing"(Corbett 37). I was to learn that all research relies on persuasion, including

ethnography. Carl Herndl points out that a primary reporting strategy, Geertz'stechnique of "thick d escription," is "a highly stylized form of verisimilitude thathas becom e a standard in discussions of ethnographic methods and functions as atextual strategy authorizing attempts at ethnographic realism " (321).It is not surprising that I did not begin to learn to do ethnog raphy by critiquingbasic assumptions and strategies of empirical research. Since I began my ownpractic e from a positivistic epistemology at least as positivistic as I could be withmy words-before-numbers, humanistic backgroundI started with the assump-tions of that epistemology. And positivistic methods do not invite question; in fact,ethnographic m ethods are themselves suspect to the degree to which they questionthe prevailing tradition; this is the dominant culture's latent hostility mentioned byStephen N orth in an o pening quotation. Yet positivism, I would learn, is a p osition,

and a very firmly en trenched on e. William Firestone explains thatScientific writing is a stripped-down, cool style that avoids ornamen-tation, often stating conclusions as propositions or formulae. Forms ofdata presentation are supposed to be interchangeable This absenceof style turns out to actually be a rhetorical device in its own right(Frye, 1957). The use of propo sitions, for instance, is a means to emptylanguage of emotion and convince the reader of the writer's disen-gagement from the analysis. If one of the threats to the validity of aconclusion comes from the writer's own b iases, as is considered to bethe case in science, then any technique that projects a lack of emo tionhas considerable persuasive power. (17)


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Cool style relies on the appeal to reason. The requirement for cool reaso ning,for instance, is laid out for all novices in the Publication Manual of the AmericanPsychological Association which instructs:

The scientific journal is the repository of the accum ulated k nowledgeof a field. . . . Familiarity with the literature allows an individualinvestigator to avoid needlessly repeating work that has been donebefore to build on existing work, and in turn to contribute somethingnew. A literature built of meticulously prepared, carefully reviewedcontributions thus fosters the growth of a field. (17)

As I read this "coo l" description of the field of science, I note the absence ofa first-person author (indeed, the APA manual itself assumes the author-lessauthority of divine creed) and the implied logic of previously proven scientifictruths.Exam ining the passage , I see easily that "Th e style of science is social in itsentirety, a well-policed communal property" (Gros 934). In this example, thepolicing vehicle is the APA manual which tells initiates not what to say that is,

it doesn 't help them choose a nd design their research projectsbu t ho w to say, ina rhetorically appropriate manner.Just as scientific writing gains power from the use of cool style, the w ritingof ethnographic stories has often been viewed as lacking in rigor and validity whe nwriters indulge in what I'll call its "w arm " stylevivid subjective narratives thatare, inevitably, meditative and interpretive. These n arratives, of course, rely greatlyupon the ethos of the author: the work of Clifford Geertz, for instance, is readwidely because we enjoy reading Gee rtz the author as much as we enjoy readinghis study results. And Geertz is well aware of his rhetorical powers: "I'v e alwaysargued that in part I'm represented in my texts by my style, that at least peoplewo n't think my books were written by anybody else, that there's a kind of signaturein them" (qtd. in Olsen 262).Understanding cool and w arm style helps me better understand m y own initialstruggles. Throughout my research project, the problems of "writing it up" wereso omnipresent and so clear they obscured all issues of writing it down. Andwriting it up is indeed difficult. For instan ce, it was impossible to mov e from thehard data of interview transcripts to the "warm" shaped descriptions I was weav-ing, without seeing the subjective nature of m y enterprise. I worried that my storiesand narratives while "convincing" would be suspect. Starting in positivism, I tooconfused the imagined with the imaginary, th e fictional with false, making thingsou tpeople, situations, patterns, understandings with making them up. To an-chor my creations, I weighed down my six-hundred-page dissertation with onehundred pages of charts, analyses, transcripts and raw data, data that did, by the


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way, help me construct my imagined, fictional, and made out understandings, butdata that could never "prove" them.And "writing it up" proved to be more problematic than "writing it down,"since "writing u p" an ethnographic narrative includes creating that believable andinteresting authorial identity that no one was talking about and no one wasteaching. Research validity reststo a great degreeo n this constructed author.Geertz claims (somewhat humorously) that"Being there" authorially, palpably on the page, is in any case asdifficult a trick to bring off as "bein g the re" personally, which after alldemands at the minimum hardly more than a travel booking andpermission to land; a willingness to endure a certain amount of lone-liness, invasion of privacy, and physical discomfort, a relaxed waywith odd growths and unexplained fevers; a capacity to stand still forartistic insults, and the sort of patience that can support an endlesssearch for invisible needles in infinite haystack s. And the authoria l sortof being there is getting more difficult all the time (23-24)

Being there authorially becomes increasingly difficult in the postmodernworld, and I would argue in the w orld of writing research where the line betweenour own and the studied culture may be a fine onesomeone else 's classroom b uta classroom like those we hav e known. Often little but our methodological claimsseparate us from the teachers w e study. That is, we claim more expertise than they,than their long-term residence in the culture, through our "objectivity" and "meth-ods." Yet those very m ethods are constructed, interpretive:[T]his issue, negotiating the passage from what one has been through"out there" to what one says "back here," is not psychological incharacter. It is literary. It arises for anyone who adopts what one maycall, in a serious pun, the I-witnessing approach to the construction ofcultural desc rip tio ns .... To place the reach of your sensibility . . . at.the center of your ethnog raphy, is to pose for yourself a distinctive sortof textbuilding problem: rendering your account credible throughrendering your person so. . . . To be a convincing "I-witness," onemust, so it seems, first become a con vincing "I ." (Geertz 78-79)

To become a convincing "I " is a primary task of all writing research ethnog-raphers, yet the "I " of the dissertation is rarely convincing. The w riting researchdissertation must be author-evacuated (Geertz's term) since, generally, it mustconvince through an uneasy allianceinterpretive narratives garnishing a pseudo-positivistic banquet. Ma ry Louise Pratt describes the results of the author-evacu-ated voice:


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For the lay person, such as myself, the main evidence of a problem isthe simple fact that ethnographic writing tends to be surprisinglyboring. How, one asks constantly, could such interesting pe ople do ingsuch interesting things produce such dull books? (33)The benefit of jettisoning the cumbersome data exhibits of the pseudo-posi-tivistic proof, of moving from the position of "outside knower" to "I-witnessing"writer includes finding a more powerful way to speak. The mix-and-m atch writingresearch dissertation ethnography has too many bad hab itsit is confusing, c um-bersome, and often downright boring, like most writing that provides merely aninitiation into the academy. Mix and m atch, apparent contradictions, become m oreproblematic if, as Michael Kleine explain s:

On the o ne hand, we tend to buy into social- constructionist epistem ol-ogy; on the other hand , we still operate out of the traditional me thodo-logical assumptions of disciplines like cognitive psychology and struc-tural anthropology as we do ou r own research. (121)Instead, we have to understand that "ethnography is a thoroughly textualpractice " (Herndl 320). Data is collected and transformed into texts, and texts areauthored, that is, constructed. In author-saturated texts, those that acknowledgetheir constructedness and invo ke authority through overtly rhetorical and persua-sive techniques, there is a better chance for engaging a reader in our sometimesconfusing and always modest cultural journey. Ethnographic reports become, toquote Geertz once againplaces where we learn "what it is to open (a bit) theconsciousness of one group of people to (something of) the life-form of another,and in that way to (something of) their ow n" (143).These da ys, it is necessary for al l writing research ethnog raphers, novice andexpert alike, to I-witness and to construct an authorial voice that can adequatelytell needed research stories. To avoid confusion, we can refuse to mix and match

research positions; our jesea rch needs to begin and end in subjective authority.2This authority, until now, has been earned primarily by time in the fieldthegreater field of com position studiesno t by writing it up in a way that investigatesand experiments with more adequate ways of reporting our work and our "find-ings," using all the rhetorical strategies we can comm and.Or those voices who are allowed to experiment are those who have alreadygained prestige; for example, the experimental authoritative I-witnessing voice isfound in singular humanistic research like Mike Ro se's Lives on the Boundary andmore recently Peter Elbow's What Is English?. Novice ethnographers have notfor many reasonshad the freedom to take the risks and explore the "writing itup" avenues available to composition studies' most well-known writers. Both Roseand Elbow already have the well-developed com position "chara cter" upon which


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they might draw when making emotional argumentsand the work of bothconvinces, often through impassioned textual styles.Rose and Elbow are in the lucky, even if well-earned, position described byCorbett: "Some people, of course, already have a reputation familiar to an audi-ence, and this reputation, if it is a good one, will favorably dispose an audiencetoward them, even before they utter a word" (81). Certainly these authors havedetractors who will criticize their authority, their characters, even their feelings.But such attacks will still honor those authors' rights to move into more complexrhetorical territories. Ethical and emotional appeals have not been sanctioned bythe community of academic researchers, and the effective use of each woulddepend on the long-term exercise of each. The novice is usually told, "prove youbelong," not prove you have "strong beliefs, ideas, feelings, and an admirablecharacter." Yet feelings, beliefs, characterall are hallmarks of the convincingI-witnessing styles of Geertz and Elbow and Ro se.Writing researchers, it seems, have yet to write the necessary researchmetanarrativesthe discussions of how ethnographic research actually gets com-pleted and accepted by our comm unity. These would help guide the new graduateprogram ethnographer. That novice ethnographer studies writers, writing class-rooms, or writing teachers with the aid of dissertation committeesmembers ofwhich may have completed no, and read few, ethnographies themselves. Thenovice studies methods textbooks and d oes ethnography; she tries to be there. Withlittle guidance, she must write to new audiences, assert her authority and method-ology, and produc e thick descriptions and con vincing narratives. She learns she is"telling stories" and "structuring narrative s," and she also learns that these na rra-tives appear radical or unreliable to those in more traditional research strands.She d oes it anyway. The lure of ethnography is powerful and real and appeals, Ibelieve, to our profession for several reasons. Ethnography is subversiveit chal-lenges the dominant positivist view of making knowledge. It demands attention tohuman subjectivity and allows for author-saturated reconstructions and examinationsof a world; in fact, it is groun ded by definition in phen omenologica l u nderstan dingsof knowledge and mean ing-making. Eq ually, it is generative and creative beca usewriting research ethnographies are overtly rhetorical; they are producing informedstories and arguments about the world. In fact, Linda Brodkey suggests that weshould write active, critical ethnographies intended to change institutions. Sheeschews the sm oothly constructed story in which the narrator seems an "instrumentrather than the agent of the narrative" (72) and suggests instead that "a narrativevoice is made most audible by interrupting the flow of the story and callingattention to the fact of narration" (73 ). Narrative can be effectively self-conscious.Additionally, since ethnographic arguments are built by different means thanthose used in quantitative research (arguments there, we need to remember, arealso rhetorical but less transparently so), and such arguments challenge conven-tions of scientific reporting. For instance, "thick description," should we use it as


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our primary text-building m ethod, often canno t be presented in the ten-to-fifteenpage research article, or if it is, readers cann ot expect that report to follow the sameold formatextensive discussion of methodology, data collection, etc.Ethnography is subversive, and it may contribute to the postmodern discus-sions now current in English Departments. While positivistic research used toalienate compositionists, ethnography may be moving composition researcherscloser to their colleagues since, often, our texts and theories are held in com monwith those wh o use critical theory to reenvision the role of reading (literature andother texts) in English S tudies.At the same time, writing research ethnographers, as I have suggested, con-tinue to borrow heavily from the developing discussions in sociology and anthro-pology. By adopting those discussions, we are translating from their longertradition. Writing researchers are mainly at this time getting into the "field" andstarting to ask if and then ho w we should conduct context-based studies even asanthropologists are focusing on questions of discourse, on "writing it up." Forthose individuals a postmod ern d iscussion is in full swin g. For instance, are therenew ways to evaluate the qualities of ethnographic texts? John Van Maanensuggests literary standards, arguing:

Literary standards are different, b ut they are not shabby or second -rate.When taken seriously they may require even more from an ethnogra-pher than those formulated by the profession. Fidelity, coherence,generosity, wisdom, imagination, honesty, respect, and verisimilitudeare standards of a high order. Moreover, they are not exclusionaryones, since those who read ethnography for pleasure and generalknow ledge are as able to judg e wh ether they are achieved as those whoread for professional development. Ethnographies that reach suchstandards in the minds of many readers are certainly far fewer thanthose that obtain collegial stand ards. They are not less worthy. (33)The issue of evaluating our "factional texts" (Geertz's term) with borrowedliterary criteria has come about becau se anthropologists have received m emorableproofs of the constructednessthe factionalityof the core texts in their field.Anthropological narratives have been around long enough to allow their authorsto contradict and challenge themselves.For instance, James Clifford discusses Bronislaw Malino wski's A Diary in theStrict Sense of the Term. Published forty-five years after Malinowski's original,field-defining research among the Trobrianders (published as Argonauts of theWestern Pacific), this work alone sets the problems of I-witnessing in bold relief.In the Diary, Malinowski shows himself to be less than the noble ethnographer,rather he is ambivalent, lonely, obsessed, and his metacommentary proves that"ethnographic comprehension (a coherent position of sympathy and hermeneutic


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engagement) is better seen as a creation of ethnographic writing than a consistentquality of ethnographic experience" (Clifford, "On Ethnographic Self-Fashioning"110). Malinowsky clearly "evoke s" and "interpre ts" in exceedingly different waysin the two docum ents, neither of which we would like to do without today. In thesame way, we could wish to have a write r's diary from Mike Rose or ethnograp hicmetanarratives from Shirley Brice Heath. Mine is not the first or only voice tosuggest these directions. Michael Kleine suggests that there should be as much orperhaps more room these days for metadiscourse, encouraging us to "write evenmore in the first-person singular, to write personal diarieseven confessionsabout our experiences as ethnog raphers" (124), and Carl Herndl suggests we needto develop a historical study of ethnographic discourse as a way to reflect on ourinstitutions and practices (331).

Tales about tales are available in anthropological ethnography and we need toencourage them in writing research.3 John Van Maanen calls the traditional eth-nography a realist tale and distinguishes two other forms: confessional talescomm entary on realist works and impressionistic talescom ments on the doingof ethnography, that is, metacommentary. M y dissertation was realist just as thisessay aims for a mixture of confessional and impressionistic. Tales about tales andnarratives about narratives allow us to "treat all textual accounts based on field-work as partial constructions " (Clifford, "O n Ethnographic Self-Fashioning" 97 ).That is, treat them as they truly are .

As we tell tales about tales and narratives about narratives in writing research,we find that metacomm entary helps us avoid positivistic and subjective m is-mix-ing and matching. We learn the reasons for transforming "data" into stories thatmatter, journeys to be taken. Yes, reliable and valid stories are possible and need ed,as well as stories of w riting it down, writing it up, telling w here we w ent and w hatwe thought about all along the way.Notes

1 To define ethnographic research, a new researcher must sort through definitions offered by otherI-witnesses; all are shaded by the originating discipline (like sociology, anthropology, education,psychology) and the needs of the witness, his or her current project and situation within the hum anitiesand/or social science professions. Anthropology based"An ethnography is written representation ofa culture (or selected aspects of a culture)" (Van Maanan 1); Education based "Ethnographers attemptto record, in an orderly manner, how natives behave and how they explain their behavior. Andethnography, strictly speaking, is an orderly report of this recording. Natives are people in situationsanywhereincluding children and youth in schoolsnot just people who live in remote jungles orcozy peasant villages" (Spindler and Spindler 17); Psychology based"The self as we experience it,understand it, and act it out is a function of the dynamic interaction between individual and socialgroups, so to describe the self usefully we must investigate these interactions" (Brooke 16-17).

Methods tex ts may define ethnography by constituent parts and in opposition to other methodolog ies;for instance, ethnography m ay be described as one point in the continuum of empirical research w hichmoves from descriptive (at that far endcase study and ethnography) to the experimental (at that far


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endexperiment and meta-analysis) (Lauer and Asher 16). Others view ethnography in opposition toexperimental empirical research:"Experimental inquiry is generally based on apositivist view of social behavior (Comte1973; Durkheim 1956) that seeks to identity facts and causes. Ethnographic inquiryemanates from a phenom enological base (Husserl 1931; Schutz 1970); Weber 1947) thatseeks to understand social behavior from the participants' frames of reference" (Kamil,Langer, Shanahan 71).

Most definitions identify particular m ethodological aspects of ethnographic projects: ethnographiesgenerate hypotheses, focus on context, are written up using thick-description, require participant-ob-servation, and use multiple m easures fordata collection, that is, triangulation (K antor, Kirby, andGoetz298; North 277; Lauer and Asher 39). More recently, definitions include case study reporting andethnographers in composition are often teacher researchers (Bissex Small and Bissex Why, Myers).

2 North's worries about the limits of ethnographythat it is a field with edges but no centerseemto stem from his use of an experimental rather than a phenomenological measure. Ethnography willnever be well defined using the standards of empirical experimental research. Thomas Newkirk claimsthat:

the price of [such] respectability comes hi gh .. . If the case study and ethnog raphic reportare to be treated as research, they are still to be judged by the traditional stand ards ofeducational researchreplicability, validity, objectivity, generalizability. . . . To beaccepted, the researcher must also accept positivistic assumptions about the existence"out there" of generalizable truths that transcend particular contexts "( 12 8) .

Instead, many researchers, myself included, find I-witnessing is "a way of learning, not a method forproving" (Bissex, "Small" 71). North's analysis did help ethnographers say,"No , that is not what wemeant at all," and they have gone on to redefine anddiscuss their work in ways I have started to outlinehere.

3 Geertz's Works and Lives discusses the writings of four influential anth ropologists; he looks around,through, andbehind the construction of their major texts. He is also at work on abook, After the Fact,that looks at his own ethnographic practices. Van Maanen discusses his own field work and thebibliography to his book offers further readings, including critical tales and literary tales. Clifford'sbook and coauthored collection (with Marcus) offer many sidelong and behind the scenes descriptionsof fashioning field reports.

Works CitedAtkinson, Paul. The Ethnographic Imagination: Textual Constructions of Reality. London: R outledge,

1990.Bishop, W endy. Something Old, Something New: College Writing Teachers and Classroom Change.Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1990.

. A Microethnography with Case Studies of Teacher.Development Through a Graduate TrainingCourse in Teaching Writing. Dissertation Abstracts International, 49, UA: 1989. (UniversityMicrofilms N o. 89-05, 333).

Bissex, Glenda. GNYS AT WRK: A Child Learns to Write and Read. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1980.. "Small is Beautiful: Case Study as Appropriate Methodology for Teacher Research." The Writing

Teacher as Researcher: Essays in the Theory and Practice of Class-Based Research. Ed. DonaldA. Daiker and MaxMorenberg. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 1990. 70-75.

. "Why Case Studies?" Seeing for Ourselves: Case-Study Research by Teachers of Writing. Ed.Glenda Bissex and Richard H. Bullock. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 19 87.7-20.

Brodkey, Linda. "Writing Critical Ethnographic Narratives." Anthropology & Educational Quarterly18 (1987): 67-76.


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Brooke, Robert. Writing and Sense of Self: Identity Negotiation in Writing Workshops. Urbana: NCTE,1991.

Clifford, Jam es. "On Ethnog raphic Authority." The Predicament of Culture. New H aven, CT: HarvardUP. 21-54.

. "On Ethnographic Self-Fashioning." The Predicament of Culture. New Haven, CT: Harvard UP.92-113.

Clifford, James, and George E. Marcus. Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography.Berkeley: U of California P, 1986.Corbett, Edward PJ . Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student. 3rd ed. New York: Oxford UP , 1990.Elbow, Peter. What Is English? New York: MLA, 1990.Firestone, William A. "Meaning in Method: The Rhetoric of Quantitative and Qualitative Research."

Educational Researcher 16.7 (October 1987): 16-21.Geertz, Clifford. Works and Lives: The A nthropologist as Author. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1988.Goetz, Judith P., and Margaret LeCompte. Ethnography and Qualitative Design in Educational

Research. Orlando: Academic, 1984.Gros, Alan G. "Does Rhetoric of Science Matter? The Case of the Floppy-Eared Rabbits." College

English 53 (1991): 933-43.Heath, Shirley Brice. Ways with Words: Language, Life, and W ork in Communities and Classrooms.

Cambridge, MA: Cambridge UP, 1983.Herndl, Carl G. "W riting Ethnography: Representation, Rhetoric, and Institutional Practices." College

English 53 (1991): 320-32.Kamil, Michael, Judith A. Langer, and Timothy Shanahan "Chapter 5: Ethnographic M ethodologies."

Understanding Reading and Writing Research. Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 1985 . 71-90.Kantor, Kenneth, Dan R. Kirby, and Judith Goetz. "Research in Context: Ethnographic Studies in

English Education." Research in the Teaching of English 15 (1981): 293-310.Kleine, Michael. "Beyond Triangulation: Ethnography, Writing, and Rhetoric." Journal of Advanced

Composition 10 (1990): 117-25.Lauer, Janice M., and J. William Asher. Composition Research: Empirical Designs. New Y ork: Oxford

UP , 1988.Miles, Miles B., and A. M. H uberman. Qualitative Data Analysis. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1984.Myers, Miles. The Teach er-Researcher: How to Study Writing in the Classroom. Urbana: NCTE, 1985.Newkirk, Thoma s. "The Politics of Composition Research: The Conspiracy Against Experien ce." Th e

Politics of Writing Instruction: Postsecondary. Ed. Richard Bullock, John Trimbur, and CharlesSchuster. Portsmouth, NH : Boynton/Cook, 1991. 119-35.

North, Stephen M . The Making of Knowledge in Com position: Portrait of an Emerging Field. UpperMontclair, NJ: Boynton/Cook, 1987.Olsen, Gary. "The Social Scientist as Author: Clifford Geertz on Ethnography and Social C onstruction."Journal of Advanced Composition, 11 (1991): 245-68 .

Perl, Sondra, and Nancy Wilson. Through Teachers' Eyes. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1986.Pratt, Mary Louise. "Fieldwork in Common Places." Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of

Ethnography. Ed. James Clifford and George E. Marcus. Berkeley: U of California P, 1986. 27-50.Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association. 3rd ed. Washington, DC : APA, 1983.Rose, Mike. Lives on the Boundary. New York: Penguin, 1989.Spindler, George, and Louise Spindler. 'Teaching and Learning How to Do the Ethnography of

Education." Interpretive Ethnography of Education: At Home and Abroad.Ed. George Spindler andLouise Spindler. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1987. 17-33.

Tyler, Stephan A. "Post-Modern Ethnography: From Document of the Occult to Occult Document."Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Ed. James Clifford and George E.Marcus. Berkeley: U of California P, 1986. 122-40.

Van Maanen, John. Tales of the Field: On Writing Ethnography. Chicag o: U of Chicago P, 1988.


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158 Rhetoric Review

Wendy B ishop teaches writing and rhetoric atFlorida State Univers ity. Currently, she is editing Th eSubject Is Writing: Essays by Teachers and Students on Writing (forthcoming, Boynton/Cook), atextbook for first-year writers; with Hans Ostrom, she is coediting Colors of a Different Horse:Rethinking Creative Writing (forthcoming, NCTE), acollection of essays by creative writing teachers.Her currentresearchprojects include anaturalistic study of new teachers of college writing during theirfirst year in the classroom and a study, with GayLynn Crossley, of one year in the life of a collegewriting program administrator.

Work has begun on The Encyclopedia of Rhetoric, to be published by GarlandPublishing, Inc., of New York City. The book will comprise alphabetically arrangedentries on all aspects of the subject and is intended to provide an overview of currentscholarship in this metadiscipline. Inquiries should be addressed to Theresa Enos,Department of English, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85721.

General Editor, Theresa EnosEditorial Board

Carroll C. Arnold Henry W. Johnstone, Jr.Patricia Bizzell James L. KinneavyErnest Bormann Janice M. LauerStuart C.Brown Andrea A. LunsfordEdward PJ. Corbett James J.MurphyFrank J.D'A ngelo Muriel Saville-TroikeRichard Leo Enos Robert L. ScottBruce E.Gronbeck Kathleen E. WelchBruce Herzberg W. Ross WinterowdWinifred Bryan Homer Richard YoungRichard L.Johannesen

bishop, wendy "i-witnessing in composition"

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