writing as a method of inquiry

Well last night I went to a lecture at Melb Uni and listened to Dr Laurel Richardson, who wrote books on the methodology of writing. This sounds dull, but in fact she was very erudite in the simplest way you can imagine. She was also funny and witty, all the while drawing you into new ways of connecting to knowing. Such a hard thing to make difficult things simple. Wish I could do it.
Here is a picture of Lauren

Here is some of what she has to say about writing


"People who write are always writing about their lives, even when they disguise this through
the omniscient voice of science or scholarship. No writing is untainted by human hands,
pure, objective, ‘‘ innocent.’’
The old idea of a strict bifurcation between ‘‘objective ’’
and ‘‘ subjective ’’ – between the ‘‘head ’’ and the ‘‘ heart ’’ – does not map onto the
actual practices through production of knowledge, or knowledge about how knowledge
is produced.

In the social sciences, try as writers do to suppress their humanity, thankfully it keeps
erupting in their choice of metaphors, topics, and discourses. (I have colleagues who
only do quantitative research, and who claim their work is unrelated to their lives.
These include : (1) an immigrant from Formosa, who studies Formosan immigration
patterns ; (2) an East Indian demographer, tragically displaced from his homeland, who
believes that sociology is the study of ‘‘relations in vector space,’’ i.e., sociology should
not be about actual people in actual places ; and (3) a colleague who suffers from
crippling autoimmune diseases, who studies occupational rehabilitation protocols.)"

Lauren suggests further..

I write because I want to find something out. I write in order to learn something that
I did not know before I wrote it. I was taught, though, as perhaps you were, too, not to
write until I knew what I wanted to say, until my points were organized and outlined.
No surprise, this static writing model coheres with mechanistic scientism, quantitative
research, and entombed scholarship.

Much of that writing is simply not interesting to read because adherence to the
to the model requires writers to silence their own voices, to view themselves as contaminants.


Such rich thinking!
Lauren demonstrated various ways that she was able to make connection to deeper thinking and breaking the paradigms that were limiting her own work and writing.
I wonder to myself how we perhaps inhibit our students by upholding models of writing ( ie style guides) when in fact we may be espaliering their thinking, and inhibiting them from forming the very connections that they could be making.
When I think about TOK and what it makes possible for students and for learning , and I and the styles students can adopt in the extended essay, writing in the first person, ......
I also thought about Ithaca project and that we could be reviewing what writing would be in the "ithaka" classroom....

What do you think or feel about this, let me know.

Here is the link to Laurens Article in International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education
"Getting Personal;writing stories

http://taylorandfrancis.metapress.com/(rnwjm5e0zkb21wyqerwd1545)/app/home/contribution.asp?referrer=parent&backto=issue,3,8;journal,31,51;linkingpublicationresults,1:100667,1