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PRYING INTO SAFE HOUSES
Suresh Canagarajah
Ethical concerns go well beyond issues in the research procedure, such as obtaining informed consent, gaining institutional review board (IRB) approval, and
ensuring the well-being of subjects. They extend to issues more integral to the
study. Researchers are now compelled to ask more fundamental questions about
the purposes, outcomes, and objectives of their research. They have to consider
questions such as the following: Whose knowledge is being represented? Whose
interests does this study serve? What social and educational ends does this study
lead to? The traditional considerations of research ethics will be recast in the
light of these new considerations. Kubaniyova (2013) summarizes as follows:
the three core principles that serve as moral standards for research involving humans: respect for persons, which binds researchers to protect the
well-being of the research participants and avoid harm or potential risks or
both; beneficence, that is, ensuring that the research project yields benefits
while minimizing harm; and justice, or in other words, a fair distribution
of research benefits.
(p. 1)
There are broader ethical implications surrounding respect, beneficence, and
justice, beyond the issues relating to the research procedure. Consider questions
such as the following, as they relate to Kubaniyova’s three criteria:
•
Respect: Do the researchers acknowledge the agency of the subjects to construct knowledge and initiate social change in their own terms? How do
researchers negotiate the power inequalities in the research context, and
construct knowledge without objectifying the subjects?
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•
•
Beneficence: How do researchers respect the knowledge of the subjects, which
might go against the disciplinary interests and constructs in determining
benefits for them? How does the research contribute to structural and attitudinal changes that address the needs and interests of subjects and their
communities?
Justice: How do the research findings lead to reconstructing social and educational institutions in a manner that is empowering and just for the subjects
and other communities?
Such questions have traditionally been the province of critical researchers
from an antifoundationalist and social constructionist perspective (see Cameron,
Frazer, Harvey, Rampton, & Richardson, 1992; Canagarajah, 1996; Smith, 1999).
However, in the emerging orientation to ethics in research, these questions
should concern all of us, regardless of our theoretical leanings.
While what I have outlined above is a significant shift in perspectives on
ethics in research, it raises many challenges and dilemmas that need more discussion. Though obtaining IRB approval or designing a risk-averse study can be
accomplished nonchalantly, this deepened orientation to research ethics poses
ongoing personal dilemmas that need to be resolved with more sensitivity. For
example, the knowledge and interests of the subjects may conflict with what
researchers consider as fair and just for them, based on their own “enlightened”
academic ideologies and professional training. Or, what is a just and fair educational arrangement for the subjects may turn out to be unjust for some other
communities. Or, our attempt to obtain an insider perspective on the knowledge
and concerns of the subjects, in an effort to respect their own perspectives, may
be resisted by the subjects themselves, who might wish to protect their knowledge and develop it in their own way, without intervention by outsiders. How
do researchers resolve such dilemmas?
Kubaniyova (2013) has recently articulated two microlevel ethical constructs
that would help negotiate these dilemmas. Her two considerations for decision
making are the ethics of care and virtue ethics. She defines them as follows:
The ethics of care model’s underlying premise is that research is primarily a
relational activity demanding the researcher’s sensitivity to, and emotional
identification and solidarity with, the people under study. . . . Virtue ethics
theory, on the other hand, originates in Aristotelian ethics and stresses the
researcher’s ability to recognize microethical dilemmas as they arise in the
concrete research practice. It does not place an emphasis on following principles but rather on the development of the moral character of the researcher,
their ability, and willingness to discern situations with potential ethical ramifications as they arise in the research practice, and their ability to make decisions that are informed by both macroethics of principles and microethics of care.
(p. 5; emphasis in original)
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These considerations are valuable as they encourage a situated negotiation of
research ethics. They are defined in personal and relational terms that one has to
develop in engagement with the subjects, in actual interactions, and in specific
research contexts. In this sense, these constructs motivate an ongoing negotiation
of ethical dilemmas, leading to constant reconfiguration of one’s research design
and objectives. Ideally, they will lead to a research process that is coconstructed
by the researcher and the subjects in a manner that addresses the ethical concerns
to mutual satisfaction.
I will apply the microethics of care to a particular research experience to
demonstrate how I negotiated the ethical dilemmas I faced in my study. I will
show how the microethics of care will actually lead to broader changes in the
researcher’s own positioning, leading to relevant attitudinal and values changes.
I will also go on to show how the macroethical objectives I initially defined for
my study had to be renegotiated and reconfigured in the light of the microethics of care I adopted to resolve my dilemmas. In this sense, I will connect the
microethics of care to macroethical principles. In the following section, I articulate the educational significance of my research on safe houses. I will discuss
how safe houses relate to my vision of macroethical objectives for minority and
multilingual students. After that introduction, I will narrate my research experience to demonstrate how I negotiated my ethical dilemmas. I will conclude by
discussing the implications of my research process and ethical decisions for other
researchers in related contexts.
The Significance of Safe Houses
There has been considerable interest in qualitative studies in obtaining insider
knowledge on the life of the subjects. Adopting the emic/etic distinction,
qualitative researchers have discussed the greater validity of emic orientations
in understanding the views and practices of research subjects (Heath & Street,
2008). Interpreting the life and knowledge of the community from broader (etic)
templates may provide a distorted representation of its social and educational life.
Therefore, qualitative researchers go to great lengths to obtain insider knowledge. They adopt methods such as participant observation to minimize observers’ paradox. The always elusive objective is to capture insider life as it would
proceed without outsider gaze. However, since researcher observation is important for academic inquiry and knowledge construction, scholars attempt to minimize their presence and intervention as they adopt emic research approaches.
It is from this perspective that I consider classroom safe houses as providing a
vantage point for understanding students’ own learning styles, values, needs, and
agendas in order to develop pedagogies that are both fair to them and effective
for instructors and institutions. I define safe houses as social and learning spaces
that are constructed by the subjects themselves and relatively free of outsider and
authority control. I say “relatively free” because all social spaces are embedded
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in other larger social formations and are shaped and mediated by diverse outside concerns and interests. No social space is absolutely free of mediation. Safe
houses are not exclusively constructed in educational domains and are not separated from social life outside schools. I draw from scholarship in diverse social
contexts to outline the value of safe houses for education, highlighting the implications for minority/multilingual students in particular.
Some social scientists have argued that holding back certain areas of our life
from public view is an important process of identity development. As Goffman
(1961) has argued in his insightful work on Asylums, “The practice of reserving
something of oneself from the clutch of an institution . . . this recalcitrance is
not an incidental mechanism of defense but rather an essential constitution of the
self” (p. 319). In removing themselves from the public sites, subjects temporarily
escape or resist imposed identities. Those in subjugated contexts find a space to
enjoy their dignity and autonomy. Furthermore, they find the space to develop
or perform alternate identities. They may even find the creative freedom to
reconstruct new identities that are positioned between institutional expectations
and personal desires. Away from the glare of institutional impositions, subjects
also get the space to reflect on the dominant values and develop resources and
identities for renegotiating them in their own terms.
If Goffman provides a perspective from social psychology, practice-based
models provide other explanations for the value of safe houses. The notion
of legitimate peripheral participation in the communities of practice model
(Wenger, 1998) suggests how safe houses can be learning sites. It is important
for apprentices to have some measure of protection to try out things in their
own terms, as they get socialized into professional practices. Such safe spaces
provide a measure of protection to develop certain competencies and identities
without threat or penalization. It can also be a creative site where apprentices
can merge values and practices from diverse communities (their “multimembership”) with the dominant practices of their profession to reconfigure both
their identity and their work. Thus peripherality matters for creative and effective learning.
The implications of safe houses for resistance in oppressive conditions have
also been well studied by ethnographers. James Scott (1985), in his research
among peasant communities in Malaysia, found that poor peasants would hold
back the harvest or engage in lying, foot dragging (to affect the work or retain
a measure of control over their work schedule), and speaking behind the backs
of their masters (sharing jokes about them, bad mouthing them, insulting them,
or making up names for them) as a form of one-upmanship. Scott refers to these
practices as “weapons of the weak” and considers them as part of their vibrant
underlife. In his later theoretical work, he illustrates from diverse communities to show how the marginalized adopt such hidden sites to seek refuge from
oppression, conscientize themselves, develop networks and communities based
on alternate values, and mobilize themselves for resistance at a more public and
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mass level at a later time. Based on such considerations, Scott calls such spaces as
constituting a form of “infrapolitics”—labeled so for not only being hidden, but
also for being deep. Scott (1990) states:
Infrapolitics is the building block for the more elaborate institutionalized
political action that cannot exist without it. . . . When the rare civilities of
open political life are curtailed or destroyed, as they often are, the elementary form of infrapolitics remain as a defense in depth of the powerless.
(p. 201)
From this perspective, safe houses help develop alternate values and community
that deviate from the oppressive ideologies and identities imposed by dominant
communities and groups. These alternate forms of community and ideology
come to the foreground when the marginalized are ready for direct confrontation of the powerful and the dominant structures.
Mary Louise Pratt (1991) brings out the role of safe houses in establishing ingroup solidarity in contact zones of intercommunity relations. She defines safe
houses as “social and intellectual spaces where groups can constitute themselves
as horizontal, homogeneous, sovereign communities with high degrees of trust,
shared understandings, temporary protection from legacies of oppression” (Pratt,
1991, p. 40). In educational contexts, she sees classrooms as contact zones where
students from diverse communities interact with each other and with texts and
codes from diverse (even if be dominant) communities. The value of safe houses
in contact zones for minority community students is that they are able to retreat
to the safe houses to enjoy in-group solidarity, temporary relief from the stresses
and pressures of engaging with dominant/alien discourses and groups, and
develop their own community discourses and identities. While Pratt’s definition
makes it appear that these sites are of therapeutic value (as in providing protection and relief from the imposition of dominant community’s norms and values),
we must note that safe houses can also be active sites for the construction of
resistant values and knowledge, as in Scott’s theorization. Students may reframe
the classroom texts, discourses, and agendas in their own terms, in contexts
and knowledge of importance to them. They may develop alternate interpretations with the ability to critique dominant forms of knowledge (as I illustrate in
Canagarajah, 1997).
In applied linguistics, researchers have identified the implications of classroom safe houses for practicing languages and discourses censored in educational
institutions and their curricular policies. Though many of them don’t theorize
these sites extensively, they note these sites in passing in their own research. The
following are some metaphors educational researchers have adopted:
•
•
classroom underlife (Brooke, 1987)
institutional interstices (Martin-Jones & Heller, 1996)
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•
•
•
safe spaces (Giroux, 1992)
off-stage discourse (Rampton, 1995)
in-group, off-task student interactions (Lucas & Katz, 1994)
From such research, we gather that safe houses can be located in diverse spatial
and temporal contexts in educational domains. The following are some of them:
In the classroom:
Spatial domains: Asides between students, passing of notes, small group interactions, peer activities, marginalia in textbooks and notebooks.
Temporal domains: Transition from one teacher to another between classes,
before school begins, after classes are officially over.
Outside the class: The lounge, library, dorms, playgrounds, and computer
labs.
In digital space: Email, online discussions/chat.
In some sense, these are liminal spaces that don’t fall into the established
instructional routines and regimen (hence, “institutional interstices” in the
words of Martin-Jones and Heller, 1996). Therefore, students take advantage of
their scope for being somewhat free of teacher or authority surveillance to practice discourses and codes that are unofficial.
Based on the picture emerging from the research in diverse contexts and
disciplinary orientations, I highlight the important implications for minority
students for language and literacy learning in order to articulate the macroethical
principles motivating my research of safe houses. The following are some of the
important functions of safe houses for minority students:
a. They are able to preserve and develop their own codes and discourses, even
if they are censored by dominant educational institutions and authority figures.
b. They are able to adopt their own learning strategies to engage with the
texts and discourses in the curriculum to make sense of them and construct
knowledge in their own way.
c. They are able to develop a reflexive awareness of the differences in the
competing discourses of their home and school.
d. They are able to fashion resistant discourses and strategies to deal with the
dominant ideologies of education.
e. They are able to continue their own learning agendas without intervention
from the authority figures, drawing from texts and discourses they prefer.
f. They are able to reconstruct hybrid identities, texts, and discourses that
draw from the competing discourses of home and school to resolve their conflicts for identity, knowledge, and values.
From this perspective, safe houses can help teachers construct more ethical
learning spaces and practices for minority/multilingual students. Research on
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these learning sites then are motivated by such macroethical concerns as the
following:
a. By studying these sites, teachers are able to understand the learning agendas
of the students in educational institutions. In some ways, a peek into the safe
houses constitutes a “needs analysis.” They show what students value in schooling or literacy. Though students might be uncomfortable discussing their actual
interests and agendas in surveys or interviews, the safe house discourses and
practices often reveal what is important for them. An understanding of students’
own learning agendas and needs can help bring into relief the “hidden curriculum” of our own.
b. Teachers are able to understand the languages and discourse practices
students bring with them. We can understand how to build a transition from
their own preferred language practices to the ones privileged by schools and our
courses.
c. Teachers can learn about the values, learning strategies, and knowledge
resources students bring from their communities, families, and neighborhoods
outside the environment of the educational institutions. As scholars in the
“funds of knowledge” model have demonstrated, there are valuable intellectual resources from homes and communities that students from minority backgrounds bring with them (Gonzalez, Moll, & Amanti, 2005). Because many
teachers and scholars consider underprivileged communities as deficient, they
are often misinformed about the value of these funds of knowledge. Safe houses
often serve as a site where these funds of knowledge are practiced, maintained,
and nurtured.
d. Teachers can understand the strategies that enable students to renegotiate
dominant forms of knowledge and discourses in their favor. How students themselves negotiate the conflicts and tensions in their educational experience will
provide perspectives to teachers on what learning strategies can be cultivated in
the classroom to negotiate school and home discourses.
Understanding all these aspects would help us design courses that are relevant and fair to these students. We are able to accommodate their strengths and
expectations in our teaching agendas. More importantly, we are able to make
learning more rewarding and successful for them by drawing from their preferred learning strategies, values, and resources. Furthermore, research in these
sites can also serve as a critique of dominant discourses and practices in education. Scholars and researchers who are influenced by dominant models often
lack alternative vantage points to assess the relevance or effectiveness of their
assumptions. Therefore, safe houses can help scholars and teachers critique their
own practice and devise pedagogies that are more effective. Thus, in my case,
this research was motivated by certain important macroethical principles. Foremost was the need to empower the students and communities who are compelled
to resort to safe houses to enjoy their own discourses and practices. It was also
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motivated by the need for self-critique—that is, the need to understand the limitations of my own assumptions and practices in teaching.
My Study
Though safe houses have important macroethical implications for education,
they present significant challenges for research. Since the safe house is by definition an in-group and protected site, it is difficult for outsiders to gain access to
them. Not only would insiders have a vested interest in keeping others excluded
from their private spaces, the site stops being a safe house if anyone else participates in them. If the membership changes due to the presence of a newcomer
(say a researcher), the dynamic of the community would alter, and the nature
and functions deviate from those of safe houses. In addition to the difficulties in
gaining access to safe houses, there are ethical concerns in observing these sites.
Whether with or without the permission of the participants, researchers have
to reflect on the ethics of analyzing and discussing discourses and practices that
are private to a group. In this sense, such research is analogous to prying into
the personal spaces of others. Many would consider such private spaces as lying
outside the boundaries of observation, analysis, or research. In some ways, this
kind of research is similar to the operations of security or intelligence personnel
conducting surveillance on one’s email and telephone conversations for government’s agendas.
I revisit a classroom ethnography I conducted on the literacy practices of
African American students in a computer-mediated course. I have reported the
implications for literacy in previous publications (see Canagarajah, 1997, 1999).
However, I have not had an opportunity to discuss the ethical challenges in
the research process in those reports. Mention of the IRB approval and human
subjects approval sufficed for previous publishers. Such treatment of ethical considerations was typical of conventions in research reporting at that time. As we
deepen our orientation to ethical objectives now, it is possible to represent more
fully the challenges I faced and the ways I negotiated them.
I initially designed my study as a classroom ethnography. While the writing
course I taught was meant for students in remedial writing, it had a majority of African American students (11 out of 15 students). Since the course was
computer-mediated, it provided opportunities to collect diverse forms of data
saved on the local access network (LAN). These included students’ serial drafts of
essays, outlines, peer review, class discussion and activities, and email correspondence with me and their peers. Typical of ethnographies, this study was hypothesis generating. Therefore, I aimed to gather all types of classroom artifacts and
activities possible, in order to triangulate findings for grounded theorization.
The IRB approval covered all classroom artifacts and interactions. Similarly, in
my signed human consent, I obtained permission to use all forms of classroom
data for my study. The blanket approval and broad research purview turned out
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to be beneficial. As my study proceeded, I fell into unexpected sources of data in
newly discovered safe houses that turned out to be critical for my interpretation.
My research objective at the beginning of the study was to analyze the students’ attitudes and responses to a pedagogy that accommodated their codes
and discourses as a means of transitioning them to academic discourses (which I
labeled the code switching model). In this model, I encouraged students to maintain their codes and discourses in informal sites—such as their communities,
peer groups, casual interactions, and low-stakes classroom exercises (i.e., class
discussion or journals). However, students were expected to switch to “standard
English” and academic conventions for formal and high-stakes assignments. I
considered this a just and fair approach to validate the codes of minority students while transitioning them to the privileged codes of the school and social
mainstream.
Initially, the surface spaces of classroom interactions turned out to be uneventful. The students displayed a positive attitude to academic readings and literacy
activities, adopted academic conventions in their own writing, and demonstrated
high motivation for obtaining good grades. As the semester proceeded, I discovered certain “hidden” interactions and conversations in relatively protected class
discussions and communication that suggested different attitudes and communicative practices. They suggested a possible resistance to my code switching pedagogy. I gradually started focusing on these safe houses as the study progressed.
Some of the less controversial forms in which I gained access to in-group
communication were through self-reported data. I gave students assignments to
transcribe in-group speech events (particularly arguments, as the course focused
on argumentative discourse) and literacy practices for classroom analysis and
discussion. Students brought to me reports of their collaborative reading/writing
practices and insult routines they engaged in at their dorms. Though it was evident in some cases that the “transcripts” had been embellished slightly to provide
dramatic and expressive effect, it was useful to consider what the students wanted
outsiders to know about their discourse.
Another mode of access was computer-mediated discussions that were initiated by the students themselves. In the program that we used, Daedalus, students
can start an alternate discussion forum for their own interactions, abandoning
(or in parallel with) the forum/topic that I had initiated (in my capacity as the
instructor). There were many instances where the African American students
left the general discussion forum that I had initiated and constructed their own
forum. These forums had a safe house effect, as it was mostly students in the
African American group who were the participants. They engaged in topics that
mattered to them, and adopted in-group discourse conventions. In conversations
that seemed to move away from the prompts of the instructor, the students still
addressed the pedagogical implications in a way that was reframed to suit their
own values and interests. We have to acknowledge that students were aware
that others in the course (including the instructor) could either join or at least
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eavesdrop on their conversation. In some cases, their safe house discourse was
framed in relation to this unintended audience. Such awareness actually provided
even more significance to their discourse, not less. Thus students could resist the
pedagogical agendas or critique institutional norms without fear of penalization, as they assumed that this was communication within the in-group and not
meant for outsiders.
Consider the following example of an in-group discussion forum. The class
was asked to discuss a reading on recent revisions in history textbooks (see Clegg,
1998, pp. 406–412). Though the author presents many details on the manner in
which specific information and modes of presentation have been changed to correct the biases in previous texts, she doesn’t favor these changes. After providing
some text-based information on the author’s position in the general discussion
forum, the African American students constructed an in-group forum where
they discussed the topic differently:
47 (3) David Smith:
I have noticed that in watchin tv that the indians are always considered the
bad guys while the cowboys were considered the good guys.
48 (5) Sonny Tippens:
Weren’t most of the people who started civilization from Africa? Are not
most Africans black? This is the biggest misconception of them all in my
view. When I was young I thought that Cleopatra and all of the Pharoahs
were white.
49 (10) Ray Wright:
That reminds me of the movie Moses, Sonny, that Pharoah was a Ramseses
(the character that was played by Yul Brenner) He definitely wasn’t black.
50 (11) Amos Manor Jr.:
i see too that they show all the egyptians as whites they do this because they
won’t get very vood reviews picturing them as they actually were “africans”
51 (12) David Smith:
Yea you know it is weird how the people who write most of the histroy
books we read in school are white. Why is that? And why does it seem
that the white man in those history books are portrayed as being the better of the races?
52 (17) Sonny Tippens:
Exactly, Ray. Have you heard the song by BDP (I think) that talks about the
black people of the Bible?
53 (19) Dexter Bomar:
i feel the reason for the distortion is because whites want to portray
themselves as doing the right thing to their children since they are the
majority.1
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What we see is that the students are drawing from their oral history and
popular culture to adopt a different position on the reading. Thus the forum
features alternate sources of history compared to the academic sources in the
public discussion site. The students are also reframing the discussion in their own
terms, as relevant to their interests; that is, students shared how their communities celebrated events that were important to their history although outsiders
were not aware of them; they ruminated on the reasons why their history was
not represented fairly; they considered the ulterior motivations of the dominant
communities in representing their history differently; and they pooled together
oral history, rap, and music to inform each other of alternate sources of history.
Though some of these topics might have been considered irrelevant to the agendas of the course (which focused on the conventions of writing in the field of
history, in the tradition of “Writing across the Curriculum”), they mattered to
the students. However, the instructor cannot challenge students on the relevance
of this discussion because the students might argue that this is an off-task and
in-group discussion that is different from that assigned by the teacher for the
public site. At the same time, since the site is not totally blocked from the view
of others, the participants are also making a statement about their thoughts and
feelings on racism in society and history to the others in the class.
The most ethically challenging site was the private email messages students sent
each other. Students could block access to unintended recipients by marking the
message protected. There were some special conditions governing this feature. In
Daedalus (at that time, in the 1990s), the email system was used during class time
and was restricted to participants of that class. Therefore, the email system was
defined as restricted to pedagogical sites and purposes. Furthermore, the protection
for the messages is taken off when the whole course is archived at the end of the
semester. The students were made aware of this. What this means is that the protection of the email is not removed for research purposes only. It is a routine feature
of the Daedalus instructional system as it was originally designed. Moreover, the
fact that it is at the end of the semester that one has access to all the email messages
prevents a conflict of interest for the instructor. The awareness of the content in
the email messages would have no implications for the grades of the students. The
information also doesn’t affect the instructor’s relationship with the students, as
they would have already completed the course when the protection is removed.
Despite being informed of the removal of protection at the end of the course
and granting me signed consent to use these messages as data, students gradually
dropped their caution and engaged in private conversations in the email forum.
This site then turned out to provide relatively deeper insider perspective on safe
houses. For example, it provided a good sample of the preferred discourses of the
students. There were insult routines, arguments, rhyme, and capping interactions
in the email. There was also criticism of the curriculum and pedagogy. Often,
these interactions seemed to have taken place when the class was supposed to be
discussing important academic topics or doing serious pedagogical activities. The
safe house discourse suggested the level of involvement or investment the students
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had in the agendas of the course. For example, when I gave a final test to be written in the class as a timed essay, two students had the following exchange:
From: ANDREW HUBBARD
To: ANYBODY
Subject: THIS
8/19
aaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh,
sssssssssssssshhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhiiiiiiiiiiittttt!
From: SONNY TIPPENS
To: ANDREW HUBBARD
Subject: R) THIS
8/19
ANDREW
it’s AAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
shit!
Thus students are able to share their anger or frustrations with this assignment.
It is clear that the topic didn’t interest them. In some ways, this medium turns out
to be a space for catharsis. Despite the expression of frustration (or because of the
benefit of being able to do so in this site), both these students ended up writing a
decent essay and completing the course with a good grade (above B+). In addition to the expression of anger or frustration, we must also note the play with
graphics. I found such multimodal creativity a lot in the safe houses. Is this activity
providing them a measure of playfulness that they might lack in other activities in
the class? Is this a way of distracting themselves, impressing each other, or finding
opportunities for bonding?
There were also email messages meant to encourage each other through the
course and the college career. As students cheered each other up, there was an
undercurrent of resistance to racism in their messages. Consider an exchange at
the end of the semester when the students bid farewell to each other:
From: SONNY TIPPENS
To: ALL
Subject: IS BERN GERT 8/19
. . . stay close to each other.
we are all gonna need help to get through, and i’d like to
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say all of us minorities make it. do it for your family,
community, and culture, but most of all do it for yourself.
. . . good luck everyone
and remember, you on scholarshirp!!!!!
Sonny Tippens (S.T!)
From: RHONDA NICHOLAS
To: ALL
Subject: FIGHT THE POWER
8/19
Hello everyone, this is a reminder to everyone:
“STAY BLACK”
I LOVE YA’LL,
RHONDA (MOOKY)
As we can see, students are conscious of perceived threats to their identities and values. The safe house emerges as a site that helps them enjoy their
community solidarity, protected somewhat from the gaze or impositions of the
dominant institutions and discourses. It also serves to preserve in-group solidarity. The subject line (“fight the power”) actually suggests an ongoing conversation (or an email trail) of messages on this topic. It also suggests possibilities of
affirmation, agency, and resistance as students’ positioning towards dominant
institutions. The spelling of “Is bern gert” and “scholarshirp” are parodies of
non-Black ways of talking. Though students rarely had opportunities for this
kind of discourse in public sites of the classroom or college, these messages show
that these feelings were hidden but ever present for them.
In fact, throughout the course, students exchanged some messages of the following nature to affirm or celebrate their identity:
To: DEXTER BOMAR
From: S.T
Subject: THE BLACK MAN
8/10
TO STRONG . . . TO BLACK . . . TO STRONG . . . TO BLACK . . .
FFFFF
F
FF
F
F IGHT THE POWER
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To: SONNY TIPPENS
From: DEXTER BOMAR
Subject: FIGHT THE POWER
8/10
stay black, fight the power, support your people.
PEACE HO!
Here, again, we see the role of playful font and spacing to perhaps distract
themselves from the tedium of academic topics of reading and writing.
A more controversial set of messages related to playful rhyming and insult
routines. Consider an exchange such as this:
From: DONNIE JONES
To: RAY WRIGHT
Subject: HIMSELF
8/09
Pussy ass NIGGA’!!!
From: RAY WRIGHT
To: DONNIE JONES
Subject: A PUNK NAMED DONNIE
8/09
HOMEBOY YA’ SLIPPIN.
YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT TIME IT IS POPPIN’
THAT WACK BULLSH-T. IT’S TIME I PUT SOME HEAD OUT.
DON’T PLAY ME SMALL MONIE!!!
Though I used such exchanges as data in my study, I didn’t use certain other
exchanges that were too personal or showed the students in an undignified manner. For example, some students shared private information about parties, drinking, relationships, and sexual activity. In data such as this, I assumed that despite
the anonymity and consent, certain amount of restraint had to be observed by
the researcher. We have to ask ourselves what benefit such data might serve for
pedagogical outcomes. They are certainly data that will be sensational. However, the researcher stands to lose his or her credibility among the community
concerned when the data presents students in an undignified manner. Furthermore, if the purpose of the researcher is the affirmation of the community’s
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interests and advancement of their values and education, data of this nature will
go against those objectives. Therefore, I kept such data out of the study.
Data from the safe houses in my course provided a nuanced perspective on the
literacy challenge for minority students in the academy. It appeared that students
were caught in a dilemma: They had to affirm the norms and conventions of the
academic discourse in on-task and public sites of classroom interactions in order
to get good grades; however, they also sensed some conflicts to their identities,
preferred discourses, and community solidarity in adopting academic conventions.
How they resolved this was to keep their preferred discourses and identities in
safe houses. In fact, safe houses provided them a space to nurture these discourses
right in the heart of educational institutions. The shuttling between normative
discourses in the public sites and alternate discourses in safe houses developed skills
of code switching that these students were already familiar with. However, I found
some of these alternate discourses gradually creeping into the texts and discourses
in the public sites as well. They suggested to me that the students were seeking
ways to merge their preferred discourses into the dominant academic norms, rather
than keeping them separate as demanded by my code switching pedagogy.
My Approach
I will now highlight the ethical dilemmas I experienced and the ways I renegotiated them in a situated manner. The main concern for me was becoming privy
to the discourses and interactions of students’ safe house life. We must remember
that not all safe houses are protected and private to the same degree. The qualified access provided to outsiders is an important consideration in deciding the
degree to which we can be invasive in gathering data. To begin with, in seeking
students’ help to collect data from their safe houses, I was getting their collaboration in revealing insider discourses. In this case, the degree and scope of the
discourse they want to make available to me are completely under their control.
However, I had to compromise on the level of objectivity and accuracy required
in the quality of the data. The data provided is shaped by the interests of the students. As I mentioned earlier, they could have embellished the data or suppressed
details as they intend them for outsiders. Such mediation and “distortion” should
not be treated as unusual, but typical of all data. It is simply the degree to which
such mediation shapes the data that is different. More importantly, we should
factor in the features of such mediation and shaping when we interpret the data.
I therefore considered why students would present such arguments and such
conventions to my attention. What did it show about their preferred arguments
or the ways they wanted outsiders to think about their arguments?
The other forms of safe house interactions were also not completely free of
mediation. The discussion forum is not fully blocked from outsiders. While
students discuss certain topics and discussions by themselves, establishing the
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discussion forum collectively, they cannot be blocked from outsiders. As I mentioned above, students factored in their awareness of outsiders peeking into their
interactions to make some statements to them as well. Therefore, this partial
access to outsiders is integral to the nature of this discourse. While there is nothing to prevent me from lurking in this site, I sometimes made my presence felt
gently. The challenge was not to interfere too much with their own topic and
discussion, while also not deceiving them as to my presence.
It is the third form of safe house interaction that provided the most ethically
challenging dilemma. Since the email exchanges are protected, students clearly
didn’t intend others to read them (until perhaps at the end of the semester
when they are archived). It is possible that some students didn’t care if I or the
IT professionals who archive the course read them when they were archived.
They might have been open to such possibility as they were aware that the
protection comes off at the end of the course. I repeated this eventuality many
times during the course. Students themselves often asked me about the archival
conventions for their confirmation. In this sense, this data was also relatively
mediated by the awareness that it was going to be read at some point by others.
It was also shaped by the awareness that this is an email system dedicated to this
course—that is, for the members in this class (and not others)—and restricted
in access. Though students may have forgotten that others may gain access to
the data later, I reminded them of this periodically in order to prevent them
from writing things they might regret later. As I mentioned above, my ethical
responsibility didn’t end when I gained access to email data at the end of the
course. I still chose judiciously which data to present in academic publications.
The larger ends of the research and respect for the subjects had a bearing on
these decisions.
Responding to Ethical Dilemmas
What is unique to my research, unlike many of the examples provided by
Kuboniyova (2013) in her research practice (and presumably those of others in
more interactive situations), is that I had limited possibilities of negotiating my
ongoing relationship with the subjects. Since a safe house is by definition out
of bounds to outsiders, I had to keep a respectable distance from the interactions of the subjects while observing them. This research context necessitated
much of my microethics of care to be negotiated differently. To some extent, my
negotiation was one-sided, involving changes in my own attitudes and practices,
without involving the subjects too directly. Though I didn’t attempt to shape the
safe house interactions and discourses of the students directly, significant changes
involved my own attitudes, pedagogical approaches, and research practices. In
this sense, the microethics of care had tremendous implications for my own practices, attitudes, and values. I articulate below the type of changes I negotiated in
response to the ethical dilemmas.
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Among the most important changes for me were attitudinal. In the face of safe
house discourses and interactions, I had to rethink the following distinctions:
Safe house discourses as not disruptive but functional: In the beginning of the
course, I had considered the off-task discussion of students as disruptive of my
own pedagogical agendas. As students explored some of the topics of classroom
discussion in relation to their own community experiences—that is, through oral
history, narrative, and popular culture—I considered these discussions as useless
distractions. I even attempted to suppress these interactions, shift students’ attention from such safe house discussions, and reorient them to the issues as defined
in my prompts. My bias may have been shaped by the ideology that communitybased and popular discourses (i.e., narratives, conversation, and insult routines)
were irrelevant or inferior to academic discourses. However, as I considered the
value of these discourses in safe houses, I started appreciating their pedagogical
functionality. I began to see that the students were reframing the pedagogical agendas in their own terms, with greater relevance to their own interests and
concerns, in order to explore the issues with greater engagement.
Student discourses as not insulting but resistant: There is a thin line separating insult from resistance in classroom discourse, as critical educationists have
pointed out (see Giroux, 1992). The moral implications behind this distinction
are tremendous. What conservative authority figures may perceive as insulting
to them can be interpreted as resistance, with ideological and social implications, by critical scholars and practitioners. I wavered between both positions
in the face of safe house discourses. When students complained about some of
my assignments in their safe houses or indirectly hinted that they found them
unengaging, I felt insulted by them. Even their creativity and playfulness I considered as disrespectful, as I interpreted them as a comment on the irrelevance
of my pedagogical activities for them. It took some time, effort, and attitudinal
change to reinterpret them as acts of resistance that are a demonstration of the
agency of the students and their critical engagement with the course to reframe
the pedagogy in their own terms.
Safe house activities as not lacking motivation but seeking motivation : Safe house
interactions and discourses also made me think of my students initially as unmotivated for learning. I was thinking of ways to suppress the safe house interactions and attract students to the public sites through revised activities. I was also
considering using participation points in the grading system to punish those who
engaged in off-task activities. However, over time, I adjusted my perspectives
by considering the type of motivation displayed when students engaged in safe
house discourses. Students displayed a motivation to engage with the pedagogical materials and activities indirectly through their preferred discourses. It is also
possible that students were seeking ways to engage with my course through their
own strategies and interaction styles.
These changes in my attitude had implications for my teaching practice. Rather
than imposing my intended pedagogical agendas and activities, I had to reconfigure
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my pedagogy mid-course. This is not unusual in recent forms of teacher inquiry
(see Lankshear & Knobel, 2004). Teacher researchers treat their classroom agendas
as collaboratively negotiated with their students in an ongoing manner as their
own knowledge about the students and their agendas increases. However, at the
time I conducted my research it took considerable effort to consider the pedagogy
as open to negotiation and revision. Here are the major changes involved:
Not my pedagogical agendas, but coconstructed agendas: I had to consider how I
can accommodate the needs, interests, and values of the students in the learning experience. This went against my starting position that I had adopted an
enlightened pedagogy that was good for the students; that even though they
might not appreciate the pedagogy, it is important for me to persuade them of its
relevance; that my training and experience gave me the authority and insight to
design an appropriate pedagogy for my students. Gradually, I had to develop the
humility and self-criticism to appreciate the limitations of my pedagogy. I had
to also acknowledge that it was difficult for me to bridge the divide between the
students’ home discourses and academic discourses without an understanding of
the linguistic backgrounds they were coming from. I had to also acknowledge
the right of the students to appropriate academic discourses in their own way, in
relevance to their own values and interests. This realization made me reposition
myself in the classroom—from exercising my authority and imposing my classroom agendas to coconstructing agendas with students.
Engage students’ discourses and texts in pedagogy: In order to validate the agendas
and interests of the students, I began to introduce more of the texts that interested them. I introduced readings by African American scholars and articles that
used or discussed vernacular black dialects and discourses. I gave them transcripts
of the arguments they had collected in their safe houses for closer analysis in the
classroom. However, I also had to reconcile myself to not seeing very engaged
and enthusiastic participation on these texts in the public sites of the classroom.
In fact, many students resisted the suggestion that they speak vernacular dialects
or that such dialects were appropriate for classroom purposes. I realized that
expecting all students to enthusiastically support or use vernacular dialects is to
essentialize the black community. I had to leave these texts with a gentle touch
for students to take them up in their own way.
Create more safe houses for student interaction : Respecting the desire for students
to negotiate pedagogical agendas in their own way, I had to learn to construct
more spaces for students to enjoy in-group interactions. This meant that my
teacher-fronted pedagogy turned out to be not the main or sole form of learning
in my course. While I designed a full schedule of activities earlier in the semester
to fill all the available class time, I had to now leave enough spaces for students to
engage as small groups in relatively more protected safe houses. I had to accommodate more activities that were low stakes and nongraded so that students could
bring their own agendas and interests in those contexts. More importantly, I
had to learn how to accommodate the extra curriculum as a learning resource.
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That is, I designed activities and interactions students could undertake outside
the classroom (i.e., in their own dorms, library, or student center). I had to also
design activities of reading and writing that they could undertake in relation to
their own topics of interest.
Finally, such ethical negotiations also implied revisions in my orientation to
the research process. As safe houses meant that I should respect the privacy of
student interactions, keep a respectable distance, and find access only in ways
that are comfortable to the students, I had to make the following changes in my
research practice:
Allow for contingencies to shape my research: While I started initially with the
expectation of having a measure of control over my research, I had to relax this
notion a bit. Procedures involved in IRB application, grants solicitation, and dissertation approval still require a research protocol that has a coherent plan, with
all the stages, questions, and outcomes neatly resolved. However, research on safe
houses prepared me for the serendipity of “falling into data.” That is, I couldn’t
fully anticipate which sites and interactions would become available for me as
data, and which of them students would make available for me, at least partially.
I had to learn to take what I received. I developed the confidence to embrace this
messy “mangle of practice” (Pickering, 1995) in research activity and accommodate such contingencies and practicalities into my analysis and theorization.
Be content with partial access to data : I had to also resolve not to expect complete
access to safe houses. As mentioned earlier, students might provide access only
to bits and pieces of their inner life. Rather than treating this as insufficient, or
being so invasive as to demand greater control over these sites, I had to learn to
be satisfied with partial glimpses. I had to also realize that such partial access
is sometimes provided for good reasons and that I have to theorize their social
implications for their own sake rather than discard them as incomplete, distorted,
or irrelevant for research. In fact, tips of the iceberg can still be insightful as to
what lies beneath them.
Accept mediation, without seeking unfiltered inside knowledge: My gradually evolving position that all sites are mediated and that there is no unmediated access
to insider knowledge or social spaces required some shifts in the epistemological assumptions motivating my research. In fact, such relative mediation of safe
houses by outsiders and the performativity of the students themselves (on the
types of safe house discourses they wanted to display to outsiders) provided a way
out of the ethical dilemmas in gaining access to private spaces. The fact that most
sites, spaces, and interactions are mediated socially gave me more confidence
to seek information on sites that were relatively more accessible to outsiders.
However, by the same token, I couldn’t claim the same types of validity social
scientists make for emic and insider knowledge. I had to acknowledge the levels
of mediation involved when I analyzed my findings.
Make my presence visible, and do not strive to be unobtrusive : Acknowledging
mediation allowed me to make my presence visible when I gained access to safe
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houses. I resisted the temptation to be a lurker or voyeur in these interactions to
gain knowledge without the observer’s paradox. Though the email exchanges
were more private, I reminded the students frequently that the protection would
be removed at the end of the course. I also answered their questions about access
after archival honestly and elaborated how I would use the email as data in my
research at the end of the course. In discussion forums that the students set up as
safe houses, I threw in a comment or two to make them aware of my presence.
While these reorientations demonstrate what I could do at the level of microethical consideration with reflexivity and sensitivity to modify my teaching and
research process, I still had to return to the macroethical level to validate my
research. A key consideration was catalytic validity (Lankshear & Knobel, 2004). I
valued the research not on the basis of the objective and pure access to truth about
student motivations and values. I valued it for the ways it changed my own orientation to pedagogy and helped fashion new pedagogical orientations that would help
other teachers and empower these students. The microethics of care helped reshape
the macroethical principles I had initially envisioned for this study. I started this
study with the understanding that the pedagogical model of code switching would
be the most ethical and fair for minority students. That is, students would use
their vernacular to transition to “standard English,” but keep it reserved for home
and informal contexts only. My study was intended to explore what practices and
attitudes would make this pedagogical model more efficient. The discovery and
interpretation of safe house practices helped me understand the limitations of the
code switching model and move to what I later labeled the code meshing model
(Canagarajah, 1997, 2006). In the code meshing pedagogy, teachers would encourage minority students to merge their preferred discourses with the dominant codes
and conventions of academic discourse, rather than keeping them separated for
separate contexts. I considered this hybrid option as the one my students and their
safe houses discourses were hinting at. Merging their codes would facilitate their
voice and identity in academic communication, while also developing African
American Vernacular English (AAVE) as a suitable medium for serious contexts. I
understood the code meshing approach as addressing the issue of justice for minority communities, ensuring that there were more benefits than costs to their social
and educational life, and respecting their cultural and intellectual traditions in the
academy. This research experience has led to advocacy for code meshing as a more
ethical and just pedagogical approach for language minority students, which has
gained considerable uptake from other scholars in literacy and language teaching
(see Horner, Lu, Royster, & Trimbur, 2011; Young & Martinez, 2011).
Implications
My research and the ethical negotiations have broader relevance. To begin with,
the experience has implications for those using Internet-based pedagogies and
interactional contexts for their research purposes. Though many sites on the
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Internet can be intrusive, and there is a temptation for subjects to be lulled into
a false sense of protection and privacy on the Internet, we must realize that there
are different types of online spaces with different levels of protection and privacy.
We have to identify the types of protection presumed by participants in deciding
what level of access and permission is required for research. McKee and Porter
(2012) offer a heuristic for making such decisions based on the following factors:
whether the site is public or private; whether the data is identified or not; the
degree of interaction with the researcher; topic sensitivity; and subject vulnerability. For instance, very public chat sites, with participants using pseudonyms
in many cases, lend themselves to research without permission. In fact, trying to
unveil the identities of participants for the sake of obtaining permission would
be needlessly invasive. The data is not identified, the researcher is not manipulating the discussion, and the topics may not be sensitive. In contrast, a researcher’s
participant observation in an Alcoholics Anonymous discussion forum would
require permission, as the subjects are vulnerable, the topic is sensitive, the forum
is relatively more private, and the researcher may interact with the participants
(having to declare his or her identity). Teachers can adopt the heuristic McKee
and Porter offer to figure out which spaces are open to what types of research
with what levels of consent.
Classroom ethnographies and teacher research can also benefit from the
microethics of care. The classroom is not a single public site. It has many layers
and levels of social interaction, moving from the very direct teacher–student
interaction to various levels of collaborative, peripheral, off-task, and hidden
interactions. Teachers have to identify the level of protection assumed by the
students in deciding what types of access they can gain to those sites and what
kind of permission is required. In other studies, I have analyzed the anonymous marginalia students write on textbooks without permission (Canagarajah,
1993a, 1993b). Other teachers have studied pedagogical safe houses they coconstructed with their students for mentoring purposes (as in the case of the study
by Samimy, Kim, Lee, & Kasai, 2011), where they enjoyed in-group status. However, audio recording small group discussions in classrooms may require consent,
as these interactions can be meant to be private by some students (or they might
be lulled by their camaraderie to sharing sensitive information).
Eventually, the ethical dilemmas and the ways of negotiating them should
be decided in situ. Internet sites and classroom spaces are very diverse, with different conventions and interactions. The research subjects themselves might be
behaving differently in these sites, based on their level of community feeling and
familiarity with each other and the teacher. Therefore, the decisions relating to
ethics and research need to be negotiated in a context-specific manner. Such
negotiations have to be marked by researcher sensitivity and reflexivity, leading
to transformation of the broader macroethical principles motivating the study
and the social and educational structures that may impede justice and fairness
for the subjects.
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Note
1. Transcripts from the discussion forum and email are not edited.
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