I’ve been thinking and writing today about research participants as authors of their own experiences — or more accurately as potential co-authors with us of the representations we make of their experiences as learners. The problem in a nutshell is this: we are each the only people who can make meaning out of the flow of impressions, actions, activities, and encounters that make up our lived experiences. But when we attempt to reflect on that lived experience we always do so from an incomplete point of view – we have difficulty stepping out of the lived experience itself in order to reflect on or represent it. Even when we manage, our point of view is limited. We can take the point of view of the “I” who experienced, but in order to create a fuller, more complete account of that experience, we also need to be able to take the point of view of others towards ourselves. We need to see ourselves as both subjects of our experience and objects of our (and others’) reflections.
The problem, of course, for researchers is just the opposite. The researcher has access to their own points of view on our actions, and potentially to multiple points of view on our actions, but unless they also engage us in dialogue about our points of view on those actions, their representations are also incomplete at best and simply caricatures at worst.
In either case, we end up with incomplete representations of human experiences: either the outsider (researcher) view is privileged, or the insider (subjects) view is privileged. As Mikhail Bakhtin pointed out in his work from the 1920’s on the relationship of the author and hero and in his work from the 1970’s on human sciences, both of these perspectives tend toward monologue. They tend to be presented as authoritative statements about our experiences that don’t allow much room for interpretation or negotiation of meaning. The end results it is that I am either represented as a unique subject whose experiences are not generalizable, or represented as an object of research whose experiences are so generalizable as to be personally irrelevant.
Bakhtin’s solution to this problem is to base the “human sciences” on dialogue. Specifically, he calls for dialogue among points of view represented by the voices of active subjects of lived experience and active observers who address and respond to each other. But what would that actually look like in a research setting like the Cyberlab at HMSC? How do we maintain both the generalizable aspects of visitors’ experiences while giving room for visitors’ own personal, unique experiences to shape our research, our findings, and our representations of those findings? That’s a question I’ll be returning to in upcoming weeks and one I hope will spark a dialogue here.