Knowing Her Place: Research Literacies and Feminist Occasions

By Lorri Neilsen

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• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1880192276
• ISBN13: 9781880192276
• Release Date: July 1998
• Publisher: Caddo Gap Pr
• Length: 288 Pages
• Weight: 0.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.8" x 0.5" x 5.8"

Customer Reviews

Knowing Her Place Teaches Me To Look For Mine

Lorri Neilsen's journey through academia raises profound questions about education and the production of knowledge: who's knowledge is considered valid? After exercising great discipline and excellence in her studies, she comes to recognize "the language of theory" as a form of "conceptual imperialism," which allows little space for lived experience.In her book, Neilsen draws surprising insights from a variety of processes and states of being, be it adaptation, writing, teaching, reflecting, or authenticity. Her poetic writing resonate long beyond the moment. More important perhaps, she provides writers, students, and teachers with encouragement to explore the unbeaten path, to dare to be curious and bold. Meaningful learning and research embraces integrity, passion, and compassion. Neilsen suggests not sterile objectivity, but engagement that demands and offers respect. An enriching and very pleasant read.

An artistic piece of inquiry !

KNOWING HER PLACE is a charismatic work by Lorri Nielsen in which she takes a big canvas, paints a three dimensional picture and captivates our interest and admiration by the ingenuity with which she highlights important issues affecting the educational scene in general and research in particular. The book is almost like a musical composition which starts softly with an autobiographical note, reaches a crescendo and then ends with another autobiographical strain.Various themes are touched upon,like musical notes in a composition to give an orchestral effect. In the kaleidoscopic structure of the book one genre fuses into another so that we get a mixed flavor of beautiful poetry, eloquent prose, nostalgic reminiscences, lively dialog and fiery criticism. She traces her development as a woman, a writer, a teacher and a researcher. In her first chapter she voices her discomfort with conformity to; a)being a woman in a patriarchal world which entailed conformity to the social norms, flowing with the current of life and an interrupted career, b)statistical method of inquiry, i.e the quantitative research methodology and c) the exploitative nature of research and teaching. She thus addresses vital ontological questions like(1)what it means to be a woman in a men's world(2) what are the ethical dilemmas of a researcher(3)how to get around the exploitative power relationship between the researcher and the researched, and finally (4)how best to teach literacy, specially reading and writing. Her gradual departure from the quantative paradigm epitomizes the soul-searching struggle that any researcher would go through, faced with the dichotomy of conforming to verifiable standards of research versus portraying the reality of life. In pedagogical terms,"it was a move from skill-oriented, top down perspectives on learning to write towards holistic process-driven understanding of writing" Writing is thus shown to be a means of breaking the shackles of social and pedagogical conformity and becoming your own master.She traces the evolution of the writing process from it being a latent cognitive store of syntactic, lexical and pragmatic knowledge of language to its translation as a social "web of meaning". Writing is thus a metamorphosis from the psychological to the sociological.The stark artificiality of a quantitatively collected data comes home to her when she realizes that human speech is meaningless if it is taken out of its context which is replete with perplexities, insecurities and frustrations that characterize human existence.This also awakens in her the precariousness of a woman's marked existence in a male-dominated society.We admire her for her eloquent support of women's cause. She aptly points out that even though literacy has largely been the domain of women, they have always been denied their rightful niche in the social and economic hierarchy.Subscribing to a holistic view of the world, she perceives of it as a colorful quilt"stitched with memor

Brilliant,rich,and illuminating!

Lorri Neilsen weaves a rich, multi-layered text of poetry,prose,stories,and inquiry as an artist, literary writer,teacher,researcher and mother.She brilliantly portrays the complexities of a woman's life as seen through the lens of multiple perspectives and succeeds in meeting her own criteria for good writing. Her book incites, enchants, illuminates, inspires and provokes thought. Her work "turns pages and turns lives", as KNOWING HER PLACE moves the reader to a deeper exploration and understanding of one's own landscape.