Autobiographies of the question

The title of this chapter derives from an essay that Jane Miller wrote a few years ago where she describes a strategy she used with students about to embark on research for a higher degree. Students typically arrive at their first meeting with their supervisor with a topic or question they would like to investigate, but rather than sending them off to begin reading the literature of the field in which they wanted to work, Miller would ask them to start by telling a story about why they had become interested in the topic they wished to explore. She calls this writing ‘the autobiography of the question’ (Miller, 1995, p.23). The strategy was partly directed at a preconception commonly held by her students – mainly teachers or people ‘in the process of becoming teachers’ – that as researchers they should achieve the ‘detachment’, ‘disinterestedness’ and ‘impartiality’ they felt characterised ‘scientific’ inquiry (p.23). She aimed to affirm the potential of the stories they might tell about their classrooms to yield insights that elude ‘abstractions that are deaf to questions of “Who?” “When?” “Where?”’ (p.23). And this was more than an attempt to allow teachers’ voices to be heard within a research community whose fundamental principles of scientific ‘objectivity’ would otherwise go unchallenged. By investigating the autobiographical impulse behind their work, Miller’s students began to recognise the values and beliefs that shaped it. The ‘autobiography of the question’ was not something that, once written, constituted a mere pretext for the research, but a means for cultivating a reflexive awareness that they sustained throughout their inquiries (p.26).