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Doing adult education research through autobiography
Nod Miller, University of Manchester
My aim in this paper is to develop some ideas about the relationship between research and autobiography, to sketch some of the changes in my own orientation to and understanding of the research process, and to summarise what I think I have learned through my own autobiographical explorations. I believe that researchers concerned with understanding the processes of adult learning need to be centrally concerned with their own learning, and hence need to acknowledge the autobiographical dimensions of their research.
My life in research: untangling personal and professional strands
My career as a researcher began in the mid-1970s when I registered as a Ph.D. student in the University of Leicester and embarked upon research into the coverage of educational issues in the British mass media. I spent over two years conducting content analysis of newspaper stories and television news broadcasts and interviewing journalists who reported on education. I was at the ‘just writing-up’ stage of my research when I was offered a post as a lecturer in Department of Adult and Higher Education in the University of Manchester. I became so absorbed in the teaching in my new post that my research interests lapsed. My content analysis sheets and interview notes gathered dust and I developed a wide repertoire of excuses not to return to my research and writing up.
It was not until nearly ten years later that I made serious efforts to complete my thesis, and by then I had shifted my focus from media treatment of education to an evaluation of my own practice as an adult educator and a group relations trainer. (The full version of this story appears in Miller, 1992, which was completed as a thesis in 1989.) By the time I propelled myself into the writing up, my research interests and orientation had changed, and I had considerable doubts about the validity of my original project. I felt that to continue or repeat a research process when I was so uncertain about its value would be at best an empty ritual and at worst a fraudulent exercise.
The initial urge to move from my original research focus came out of my unease with the theoretical and methodological bases of the 1970s project, but I came to realise that there were other reasons for my reluctance to return to this work. In the Preamble to my thesis, I recorded how
I stumbled into … [an important] piece of self-insight as I sifted gloomily though my dusty file of content analysis data some time in 1983 … I was conscious at times of an extremely negative emotional reaction to the sight of my coding schedule or the dog-eared notes from interviews conducted around the pubs of Fleet Street or Farringdon Road, and I generally interpreted these reactions as stemming from my self-disgust at having dragged around the baggage of this project for so long.
However, returning to the material after a long interval, I recognised that my frequent desire to jettison the files of newspaper cuttings had been prompted by a mixture of confused and painful feelings. These were associated with the period of my life spent as a research student, during which I left my husband, in the midst of a tangle of emotional and domestic turmoil. When I read through my coding schedule, for example, I could remember the circumstances under which I added a particular category; sometimes I could recollect the day of the addition, and the demoralising argument which had occurred the day I came across a particular cutting. Notes from an interview would evoke the memory of the fact that I had packed my bags to leave the marital home for the third time on the day before I talked to the man from that particular national daily. It was easier, in the relative calm of 1983, to look back and react in an intellectual rather than emotional frame, but the events stamped into the fabric of my interview notes and coding sheets had for several years given me nightmares, quite literally.[1]
I think that it was this sudden realisation of the impossibility of separating personal (marital) and professional (research) concerns and the recognition of the complex interplay between the primarily intellectual activity of doing research and the inner emotional life of the researcher which brought me to my present belief that all social research constitutes an autobiography of the researcher.
Of course, researchers vary considerably in the extent to which they make their personal story explicit; often the only clues are to be found in acknowledgements, prefaces and methodological appendices. My thesis took the form of an explicit sociological autobiography. For example, in the chapter which approximated to a review of relevant literature, I attempted to chart the influences on my thinking in the fields of education and communication studies and to link interpersonal relationships with academic influences. I have observed that even in texts which purport to give the ‘real story’ of a research project[2], there is still a tendency to cite relevant literature in a way that signals detachment and distance. In my experience, most academics read (and, hence, cite) authors and texts not merely on the basis of library searches and explorations in publishers’ catalogues, but through personal and professional relationships with colleagues in their field. When I read the work of people I know, it is clear to me that much of the literature which they cite is written by their friends, colleagues, students, spouses, lovers, ex-partners and so on. To the insider’s eye, many a list of references provides a concise case study in invisible colleges[3]. Rarely do the lists of names and dates arranged in their neutralising brackets give this away to those not already a part of the network in question, although there are writers who have turned the dedication of a text into an artform. Two examples of which I am particularly fond are Laud Humphreys’s dedication of the book which recounts his sociological study of casual sexual encounters in public lavatories to his wife and children ‘whose encouragement and love made this research possible’[4], and Reg Revans’s dedication of his text on action learning to his wife ‘in hope of forgiveness’[5].
Action research: retangling myself as research subject and object
The action research projects which I conducted during the 1980s and which I described and analysed in my thesis involved me as both subject and object of the research process. Most of these projects, involving experimentation with techniques based on the T-group laboratory, were far removed from the focus of my 1970s work, in which I used a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods of content analysis and conducted an occupational study of journalists from the position of an ‘outsider’. The data on which I drew for my analysis of the later work were made up for the most part of volumes of personal diaries, workshop plans and brainstormed lists generated on many sheets of flip-chart paper.
One aspect of my recent research which provides some continuity with my earlier excursions into the analysis of mass communications is that involving practical exercises in media sociology, where, at least for short periods of time, I have become a newspaper editor. A number of participants at this conference will probably have seen Scoop, SCUTREA’s newsletter, of which, with David Jones, I am founding co-editor. Fewer colleagues will have come across an earlier, scruffier and more scurrilous tabloid, to which Scoop perhaps owes its existence and certainly some of its style, namely, the Bongo Times. This paper came about in the course of some work in which I was engaged with Jim Brown during the mid-’80s, in which we experimented with the design of experiential learning events, conceptualising conferences as microcosmic societies. At the same time, we were attempting to understand and to influence the politics and dynamics of the Group Relations Training Association, a professional organisation of educators and trainers which pioneered the use of T-group laboratory methods in Britain, and in which Jim and I were heavily involved. During the 1985 GRTA Conference, we set ourselves up as capitalist entrepreneurs of the leisure industries within the micro-economy of the conference. We hired a marquee in order to operate a nightclub for insomniac conference participants, and, as it now seems, in order to ensure that we spent the entire conference in a sleepless state, we established ourselves as proprietors and editors of the conference newspaper, the Bongo Times. For the first day of the conference, we went so far as to produce the Bongo Times’s ‘rival’ paper, The Daily Rupert, as well.
Immediately after this experience I remarked that I had learned more about journalists’ ideologies and practices in the three days of the conference than in nearly a decade of reading sociological studies of journalism. However, while I would not wish to diminish the importance of the experiential learning acquired through my entering the roles of editor and news-gatherer, I recognise that I would have performed these roles rather differently had I not had a detailed knowledge of journalism as a researcher and consumer of journalistic products. Indeed, if I had not been socialised into media research, or had not been a sociologist, I should probably not have conceived of the Bongo Times at all.
The contrast to which I wish to draw attention here is that between research about an occupational group conducted from the outside, with the group in question clearly conceived of as ‘other’ to the researcher, and research which involves the researcher as an insider, or a member of the community being researched (and, indeed, where the research is formulated with the intention of promoting change, and where the politics of the researcher are made explicit). My research orientation remains broadly in accord with the position exemplified in the Bongo Times project, although these days I find I have slightly less stamina than I did in 1985 when it comes to action research which involves staying up all night.
Reading my autobiography: reviewing relations with other selves
In working through my life history, I have tried to understand the influences on my own learning as an adult, and, in particular, the way in which my personal and professional development has been shaped as a result of my membership of a variety of reference groups and invisible colleges.
I see reference groups as being those which provide for me ‘a frame of reference for self-evaluation and attitude formation’[6]. It is important to stress that a reference group is not necessarily one of which I am a member; sometimes groups which help me to define what I am not or what I do not want to be are as significant as those to which I belong, or to membership of which I aspire. Reference groups to which I belong include those made up of adult educators, sociologists, feminists, working-class kids made good, T-group trainers, – and, in more recent times, gatekeepers and managers. Groups to which I do not belong, but which have had a significant impact on me in terms of helping me to establish my identity through an understanding of what I am not – what constitutes ‘other’ – include those made up of psychologists, quantitative researchers and Rogerian counsellors.
The term ‘invisible college’ is used to define a phenomenon in academic communities described by Derek de Solla Price in the following way:
For each group there exists a sort of commuting circuit of institutions, research centers and summer schools giving them an opportunity to meet piecemeal, so that over an interval of a few years everybody who is anybody has worked with everyone else in the same category. Such groups constitute an invisible college.[7]
The colleagues I have met and worked with in SCUTREA constitute a significant part of one such group. The boundaries of SCUTREA do not equate precisely with the boundaries of the invisible college to which I belong in the field of adult education, since significant others in the group include non-members of SCUTREA – for example, there are a number of North Americans in my group.
By describing and analysing my own patterns of operation within such groups, and by employing a model of experiential learning (in which reflection on experience leads to the development of theory and the formulation of future action, which in turn becomes the object of further reflection and theory-building), I have begun to advance my understanding of these groups in a broader sense, and my insights have become the basis for further explorations and other research projects. There is, therefore, interplay between the way in which I research myself and that in which I research other selves.
One piece of research in which I am currently engaged is concerned with the facilitation of learning. I am investigating what some of those generally agreed to be expert facilitators see as important elements of their practice. This work has grown out of my reflections on my own experience of facilitation and my attempts to identify key features of my own practice. Another current project focuses on the nature and extent of invisible colleges within the international community of adult educators: the interconnections between scholars and researchers, the common points in their biographies, the networks and groups to which they belong, how they decide what to read and to whom they talk, the conferences they attend and how they see the professional world they inhabit. It is clear that the way I have constructed the research on invisible colleges has come out of reflection on my membership of (and construction of) reference groups. And my discoveries about how others construct their social and professional worlds in turn shape the way in which I conceptualise my own.
Writing my autobiography: actively constructing myself
Re-reading the autobiographical account of my research from 1989, I am struck by something of which I was much less aware at the time, namely the artful nature of the construction in which I was engaged. It seems to me that, at the same time as I was giving a critical perspective on others’ texts and interpretations, I tended to privilege my own accounts such as those contained in my diaries. I think that embedded into my 1989 text was an assumption about the possibility of discovering truths about the past (and about myself) through the analysis of contemporary documents and through a revisiting of past experience.
I am now more inclined to see the process of autobiographical writing as an active construction of myself for a particular audience and purpose. I construct myself through writing [about] myself, as, indeed, I do through my everyday conversations. Much of my social life involves meeting with friends and exchanging accounts and analyses of recent history. I tell stories of what has recently happened to me; often the narratives are tried out with one friend and then honed or edited with another. I am sometimes conscious of working on the characterisation, pace and punchline of a particular narrative. Over time the issue becomes not so much whether the story is ‘true’ or ‘exaggerated’, but rather whether its timing is appropriate and whether its elements are arranged in such a way to maximise drama or ironic effect or to provide a climax or whatever it is I am trying to achieve with or from my audience. In writing the process is more clearly open to scrutiny. I type one version of the story of an event and then read and re-read and tinker with the words, consult the thesaurus, insert synonyms, change the order of phrases to enhance the rhythm and flow of sentences, cut, paste, and chop out unnecessary sections. What ends up in the final version, I realise, is more to do with what fits my criteria of what works on the page than with what might be more or less ‘true’.
Liz Stanley is a feminist sociologist who has written extensively on life-writing[8], using the term auto/biography to indicate the close relationship she sees between writing accounts of one’s own life and writing accounts of the lives of others. She suggests that recent sociological concern with biography and autobiography may be seen as arising from two diverse sources: firstly, from Robert Merton’s sociology of knowledge[9], and secondly, from concerns with reflexivity in feminist research and feminist praxis. Feminist research, to be consistent with feminist politics and principles, demands that researchers write themselves into their accounts of the research process.
My own autobiographical explorations have been influenced by my reading of Merton’s account of sociological autobiography as ‘a personal exercise ... in the sociology of scientific knowledge’[10], by my reading of feminist research and epistemology, by my experience as a feminist and by my contact with other feminist sociologists such as Liz Stanley herself. (I should also acknowledge, in the spirit of making personal influence explicit, my knowledge of Liz’s work comes as much from conversation as from reading her academic texts, since she is a close friend.)
I suspect that the process of constructing and reading sociological and feminist autobiography is an ongoing process of conducting a dialogue with different ‘selves’ over time. One version of a text becomes the data for the next version: intertextuality indeed. The ‘voice’ of one version of an autobiography becomes the initiator of a conversation with one’s self from another point in history.
In writing about the past, I actively construct the past for myself as well as for others. Earlier in this paper, I quoted an extract from an account I wrote in (I think) 1987, and edited in 1989, of events which took place in 1983. I chose here to quote that account because my recollection of the events to which I refer has been shaped by that account of the 1983 experience written in 1987, completed and edited in 1989 and published in 1992. I have a vivid mental picture of the desk at which I wrote the account quoted above, and the room in which I completed the editing of that account a couple of years later, but a much hazier recollection of the events themselves.