χρηστομάθεια or ἀνθολογία?

"It seems to me that the real task in a society such as ours is to criticize the workings of institutions which appear to be both neutral and independent; to criticize and attack them in such a manner that the political violence which has always exercised itself obscurely through them will be unmasked, so that one can fight against them." - Michel Foucault


Now, I'm not going to say that rjmr's reasoning is "faulty", but rather that it is "informed, or should I say misinformed, by the conventionalized positivist paradigms that center on such outmoded empirical notions as…" (OK, now even I'm getting sick of the "Deconstruction Breakfast Food Product." No more…I PROMISE…)


Shall we take a trip into the RTB "retrospective-stream-of-consciousness" rabbit-hole?


rjmr: "Within a discourse community if we are speaking of something of value which we need to define (for example we are both stakeholders), the opinions we have should not be flights of fancy."


RTB: Ummm…we all come into conversations adhering to discourses that inform our perceptions, none of those perceptions being the same (tot sententiae quot homines). Social construction of reality within a discourse community has less to do with defining meaning and more to do with negotiating meaning. And lest we forget, Wegerif (2006) posits that the source of meaning "is to be found not in the figures or in their backgrounds but in the difference between the two because it is the boundary around a figure that makes it exist as a thinkable thing." (p. 145) . Are you remembering this, kiddies? There _will_ be a quiz later….


rjmr: "We would hope that each contributing member of the community has done their part to be thoughtful and can back up their opinion using reason to the fullest extent possible."


RTB: Ahhh…nothing like the smell of fresh logocentrism in the morning! Could you please define reason for us?


rjmr "I heart the scientific method" medley:

• Within the discourse community the definition (i.e. description of reality) that finally becomes accepted should be that which can best be defended by supporting scientific information…
• As a condition of membership into the category science, DA must reach its conclusions in a certain way: it must have its own social-scientific method.
• I would now define science using your phraseology: a field of inquiry whose claims exist in terms of reasonable support.
• any two claims may be judged against one another by comparing their supporting evidence.
• (In response to “Requiring your version of scientific, empirical evidence, without acknowledging other viewpoints, shuts down communication.") "No, it simply limits communication to that which can be supported. As noted by Casie, this happens all the time in academia. If you write a paper filled with unsupported ideas, it is unlikely to get published. Hence, communication is shut down.

RTB: OK, I think we get that you profess an objective epistemology, and that is certainly one way of looking at the world...can I share another with you?:

• "Myths can be produced by the same sorts of methods and held for the same sorts of reasons that now lead to scientific knowledge"
• "Competition between segments of the scientific community is the only historical process that ever actually results in the rejection of one previously accepted theory or in the adoption of another"                          -Thomas Kuhn

Let me elaborate…


On the level of [D]iscourse, the scientific method depends upon a negotiated set of skills within a community of practice and rests on agreement within those communities, so not only is the social determination of scientific knowledge possible in spite of the scientific method…the scientific method itself is a social construct, and the output from the scientific method is constructed knowledge, not discovered truth. The "truth" gets to be told by the "champions"… those who find themselves within the "dominant discourse" of the age. 


Recent example: is Pluto a planet? It was 10 years ago…..


On the level of [d]iscourse, scientific experiments depend upon framing the terms of the argument, the kinds of questions one asks, and the hypotheses that are proposed which depend in large part upon one's relation to the object[s] of study. Seems pretty "squishy" to me (as opposed to Educational Research: The Hardest Science of All…).


So, in the end, the scientific method is just one discourse among many. You of course want to privilege your discourse, which is easy to do…science is a huge cash cow, and where there is money there is power. You have to know that there are other discourses that live to resist the one you want to privilege…that criticize the workings of the scientific community as neither neutral nor independent; that attempt to unmask the political violence which has always exercised itself obscurely through science in order to fight it…(before you think it, five names: Oppenheimer, Nobel, Kevorkian, Mengele, Rascher).


rjmr (in imagined response): "How do you compare two arguments before you? Or are they above comparison?"


RTB: This is a perfectly valid question for someone coming from an epistemology of objectivism to ask…but it is a question that rings false in the ears of someone coming from an epistemology of relativism, which may explain the lack of response.


Let's use your blog title as an object lesson.....


Chrestomathia is a fitting title for an objectivist: from the Greek χρηστός (better) and μανθάνω (learn or understand). It is used in philology to describe a book with a sequence of texts used as exempla, to demonstrate the "development" or "perfection" of a language over time. This fits in nicely, IMHO, with a scientific view of the evolution of scientific thought.


If I had created a blog from scratch for this course, I would likely have named it Anthologiai from the Greek ἀνθολογία from ἄνθος (anthos, “flower”) + λέγω (legō, “I gather, pick up, collect”). These were originally collections of small Greek poems and epigrams, because in Greek culture flowers symbolize the finer sentiments that only poetry can express. There need not be an overarching rhyme or reason to the inclusions, arrangement, etc...and if there was intent in any of these, it is of no matter...what matters is how the discursive community of practice receives and perceives them...how the scent of each flower adds to the bouquet, how they interact and resonate with each other and with the researcher.  Bakhtin held that the meaning of discourse is not "reducible to the intentions of the speaker or to the response of the addressee but emerges between these two." (Holquist, 1981, pp. 429–430) Wegerif explains that "the way in which each generation of scholars re-visits and re-interprets textual fragments from ancient Greece is used by Bakhtin to illustrate his claim that there can be no final or fixed interpretation of an utterance."


Having had what I'll call a "near-miss" with a career in the hard sciences, I think I can empathize with the sentiment that this kind of investigation is not for everyone. One must be comfortable with loose ends, with ambiguity, with participation and the “holistic” view of things. Those who come from disciplines that have their roots in the traditional scientific method feel uneasy with research that relies on the personal factor in which the main form is socializing and the main instrument is the researcher. Hopefully, I've done my part to demonstrate that all research instruments are culturally mediated and that what social scientists do (my world view) presents a “picture of reality, of life as it exists in time and space” (Neisser, 1976, p. 2). 


Postscript: On a completely different note (the note that sounds something like "I don't heart discourse that ain't talkin' or writin'), might I recommend Chapter 4 (entitled "Discourse in Activity and Activity as Discourse" by Shawn Rowe) in Rebecca Rogers' An Introduction to Critical Discourse Analysis in Education (2004).......




BTW, the answer to the question in the post title is "yes".

"Is there any way out?"

NMAP: "I like the idea of various factions "resisting" whatever is dominant - but, of course, then the oppressed become the oppressor and before you know it we have myriad "disciplines" all screaming for relevance, making claims of importance, and proceeding to shove their own view of what is "important" and "true" down the next generations' throats. Is there any way out?"

...Not according to this  clip (especially the Foucault part):

How Discourse Made the NMAP a Colonialist

Everything is political, as "Pictures at a Conversation" illustrated quite well. And any discussion of how education "should" be necessarily ends in aporia.


Case in point: the NMAP seems to advocate for teaching education as a monolith (I'm guessing the NMAP would call it "utopian interdisciplinarity") while I advocate for a more granular application of general principles, or even that general principles don't often contextualize as well as the NMAP would like us to believe (which I'm sure the NMAP could call something totally different). Disciplinary relationships are tenuous...take CALL, for example. Even though ESL and FL CALL have been happily "married" for decades, at its foundation it is still a power struggle.


I'm reminded of a book by Adrian Holliday entitled The Struggle to Teach English as an International Language that shows that, if anything, disciplines tend towards becoming even more granular, not less. Holliday uses a discourse of colonialism to challenge "native-speakerism" and advocates for the divestiture in the ESL profession of what has increasingly become an outdated perception of language "ownership" by native speakers, and this as a way to include NNS as not only worthy lecturers of the profession, but a subset worthy of disciplinarity themselves.


It occurs to me that it would be easy (perhaps facile) to take the NMAP's "we are all educators" paragraph, which seems quite interdisciplinary/collaborative, and make it seem quite nefarious and even nativist by hijacking Holliday's discourse and applying it to "education". It could be argued that the NMAP espouses an "essentialist" view of education, a historical force rooted in colonialism, pressuring us into a kind of mindset that colleges of eduation have a monopoly on the proper characteristics of pedagogy, critical thinking, and so on, that reduces 'non-native' education colleagues to suit its own structures...devalues their realities; and ignores the way in which these realities resist the 'dominant' educational dialogue.

Yes/no?

Pictures at a Conversation

Written on an LCD wall...Observed by RTB:

Concerned Student:

I’m torn.
I appreciate the chance to interact with people in other disciplines over things we discuss in class, but I’m concerned about the research in small groups, not only because people like to see how praxis plays out in their _own_ research field, but because there seems to be a lot of polarity about appropriate modes for research. ...I don’t see how that plays out to everyone’s satisfaction if the disciplines are so different that not only is there a gulf of transferability that could likely not be bridged ...but even basic assumptions of what constitutes “discourse” and “research modes” are diametrically opposed.

...I’m not sure whether the history of this proposal is simply the previous impossibility of creating disciplinary teams under the guise of disciplinary diversity or whether there really is a true belief and personal confirmation that this is for our own good. I’m willing to go on some faith, but I’m worried that I’ll end up dreading this research project (or worse, that my group will) especially when I know that there is a chance for some real synergy with some like-minded folks from a “3rd cousin twice removed” discipline...
If it were discussing / dialoguing / debating / anything but researching, you could put me with anyone and I’d be perfectly happy. I’m skittish about the research, because in the “real” world, you get to choose your research colleagues......
 
NMAP:
 
Here are a few clarifications/my take on the group assignment.


1. Calling this a "research study/project" was probably an overstatement on my part. I do want you to get practice analyzing data from a DASP perspective, but it is by no means a full study...I am also going to be somewhat prescriptive with how you approach the assignment (even though I haven't spelled that out yet.)

2. No one has IRB approval to conduct a study in this class, so it isn't like you are working on a "real" study in which the stakes may be higher regarding your concerns.
3. As far as I'm concerned, everyone in the class IS from the same discipline - education. Everyone is concerned with teaching and learning. Counter to how colleges of education tend to be organized, I believe that a lot of teaching and learning is teaching and learning, regardless of the discipline.
4. However, I completely agree that there are likely varying epistemologies in the class - and that's precisely why I wanted to group you with people OTHER than whom you are used to working with or with whom you share beliefs. This is particularly important when doing analysis from a DASP perspective - you want to identify all the possible angles, assumptions, beliefs going on in a particular conversation segment, and working with people you don't share a lot in common with can help with this.
5. You seem to be anticipating or creating problems where none may exist. You are assuming no one else will have an interest in multimodal data. It could be that everyone in your group will be quite interested in this, but of course it's up to you to pitch that to your group by enacting your best collaborative skills - building relationships, honoring each other's perspectives, listening to their ideas, being willing to be influenced by someone who may have an even better idea than yours. I will certainly encourage this kind of exploration.
6. I really wish the statement "in the real world you get to choose your research partners" was true. It's not. At all, actually, especially in this very interdisciplinary, collaborative research world that we live in. Even if you THINK you know what you are getting when you start to work with someone, you don't.

Concerned Student:



As an aside, can I just say that you rock! I know of very few NMAPs willing to engage in the dialogic process to the extent that you do...validating, responding to and challenging our positions when your "id" would most likely rather have a Steven Seagal moment with us.

Now, to some thoughts/reactions to your response:

1. The devil is always in the details...."somewhat prescriptive". And here I thought the DASP/constructionist definition was prescriptive enough. I realize of course that there is method in the perceived madness (just like we all did qual. a certain way to begin with, even if we wanted to "go boutique")...I'm just eager to jump off of the "one-size-fits-all" (was that not a leitmotif of the your response?) bandwagon and research how DA can fit/complement other research orientations I'm likely to have:

Vine, E.W. (2008). "CA and SCT: strange bedfellows or useful partners for understanding classroom interactions?" Discourse Studies, Vol. 10, No. 5, 673-693.

Levine, P. & Scollon, R., Eds. (2004). Discourse and technology: Multimodal discourse analysis. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.

2. I'm not sure that (for me at least) it was a question of stakes. My position was that it would be more helpful (in my current understanding) to see how the praxis of DA plays out in one's_own_ research field. I understand the exercise in Intro. to Qual. of going outside the field to gain an experience free of some of the engrained notions one has about things, but I'm not sure that makes as much sense here, but I could see that rationale being valid.

3. I realize that you are coming at this from the instructional designer / subject matter expert POV, but I would argue that this is only working (and increasingly so) in the business world. You espouse a centralized view of instruction and pedagogy that is not only diametrically opposed to my point of view, but to the overwhelming view of higher education. Pedagogical and research environments in most institutions of higher education are decentralized to some degree, with greater decentralization in large research universities. Larger institutions with a significant research mission (such as ours) tend to emphasize disciplinary academic efforts in both instruction and research and place a great deal of authority at the department level. If we extend your argument, then we should have a universal methods course to teach pedagogy as a monolith, and cast off entire subdisciplines that have been devoted to the idiosyncracies of teaching and researching certain subjects. While I believe that there is room for interdisciplinarity to some degree (you have programs like film studies or Latin American studies, etc. that administratively codify this idea), even your own college is structured to reflect the reality that there are content areas, and that content areas have their own discourses and vocabularies and idiosyncracies that no centrality is going to fully comprehend or effectively provide for praxiologically. An excellent math teacher...even if they were fluent in French, would likely make an awful French teacher were they not trained how to teach in a second-language acquisition context, and I would argue that a "one-size-fits-all" class would not do that.
4. This actually makes sense to me!
5. It would appear that I’m fine…my group seems at least open to the idea of multimodal, and we can likely find enough in common to come upon a topic. Others, on the other hand, are being flat-out rejected. I didn’t want to end up in that situation…it would have made this course miserable...
OK…maybe the “you get to choose your research partners” is over-reaching…but you get to choose your research focus…I’m not going to ever be compelled to study the intersections of CALL and Engineering., even if I might in five years get roped into research with some moon-bat I’m not thrilled with because the research takes a wicked curve into psycholinguistics…or…heaven forbid…Ed. Psych. ;-)


NMAP:
 
This is AWESOME (snippet below) and I would love to have a whole class on the nature of academia and why things are structured as they are. How did we create these "realities" about what academic departments are and how they are organized and what is "real" about a discipline? These decisions are made not because there is a "truth" about the existence of a field, but because we CREATE it. Excellent, excellent example that maybe I'll use in class. (It's fine by me if you want to blog this stuff.)
(And I've seen lots of excellent language teachers who never had classes in pedagogy or SLA. Also seen lots of awful ones who have..go figure. IT's the class "is teaching an art or a science? argument. )
I realize that you are coming at this from the instructional designer / subject matter expert POV, but I would argue that this is only working (and increasingly so) in the business world. You espouse a centralized view of instruction and pedagogy that is not only diametrically opposed to my point of view, but to the overwhelming view of higher education. Pedagogical and research environments in most institutions of higher education are decentralized to some degree, with greater decentralization in large research universities. Larger institutions with a significant research mission (such as ours) tend to emphasize disciplinary academic efforts in both instruction and research and place a great deal of authority at the department level. If we extend your argument, then we should have a universal methods course to teach pedagogy as a monolith, and cast off entire subdisciplines that have been devoted to the idiosyncracies of teaching and researching certain subjects. While I believe that there is room for interdisciplinarity to some degree (you have programs like film studies or Latin American studies, etc. that administratively codify this idea), even your own college is structured to reflect the reality that there are content areas, and that content areas have their own discourses and vocabularies and idiosyncracies that no centrality is going to fully comprehend or effectively provide for praxiologically. An excellent math teacher...even if they were fluent in French, would likely make an awful French teacher were they not trained how to teach in a second-language acquisition context, and I would argue that a "one-size-fits-all" class would not do that.



Concerned Student:


And I've always been of the opinion that methods courses largely give you the vocabulary you need to articulate what you do in praxis. I taught for a while before I hit a methods course. It simply gave me the "jargon" to explain in a "meta" way what I was already doing.


Still, I think I would be a terrible math teacher....

And I agree that we have created the reality in which we live. You just strike me as the Don Quixote here...tilting at windmills....

[etc. etc. etc.]

RTB pleure

"I free myself for today and forever from human immobility"

RTB Wants You to Show & Tell Your DA/CA Tools!

I'm looking forward to going hunting for good discourse analysis tools during the semester. I have a list of things to start looking at, and I'd like to hear what experiences any of you have had with these or other tools I fail to mention:

CLAN (supports Jeffersonian notation)...the most general tool available for transcription, coding, and analysis.

Phon ...phonological and phonetic data analysis ...transcribed in CHAT. Fully compatible and interoperable with CLAN.

ELAN ...analysis of gesture (from video) and conversational overlap. Complete interoperability between ELAN and CLAN.

EXMARaLDA ... "Extensible Markup Language for Discourse Annotation"....XML for DA? Think of this linked up with A/V. Very powerful concept...but how's the praxis?

TalkBank and the SIDGRid Project seem like good places to learn how to do/approach all of this.

Also looking at retail options as well...any advice / personal experiences welcome:

• Transana
• N*VIVO 8
• atlas.ti
• Others?

RTB Likes Validity — Hates the Hegemony of Print Culture

I finally have some time to respond to the second issue that in my mind arose from Week 1, the idea of multi-modal data and its "published" representation.

To understand my position(s), it might be helpful to look at a post I made last year about an article by Marc Prensky concerning a shift in media culture and the rise of a new concept of literacy. Just as the affordances of an emerging print culture (permitting people to generate, store and retrieve ideas as needed across time efficiently and accurately, affording the development of complex ideas) displaced the dominant oral culture of the ancients (Remember, Socrates was a vehement opponent of the emerging print culture, calling it "inhuman"), so new media, with their ability to fuse orality, performance and text to convey meaning in ways a print culture simply cannot, are poised to supplant that print culture, naysayers notwithstanding. Which brings me to two thoughts:

• Given where we stand, it puzzles me that discourse analysis (at least what we've seen and discussed so far) concentrates on such a small sliver of the meaning we convey as to render it hollow. Communication ("speech" or "illocutionary" acts in the broadest sense), has always been multi-modal, as communication is not exclusively linguistic...in fact, go out and find an article that discusses the various components of communication, and most will spring from or reflect Mehrabian's (1971) "7%-38%-55% Rule"...only 7% of the meaning we convey is linguistic...38% comes from paralanguage, and 55% comes from non-verbal communication. Yet, DA/CA privileges linguistic speech acts as data, with some token aspects of paralanguage. Does it occur to anyone that this might cause one to unwittingly produce an analysis akin to Horace Miner's Nacirema? My mind goes back to one of the earliest cases of "deconstruction experts" in the courtroom (of course, I can't remember the name of the case now, does it ring a bell to anyone?). Someone was accused of an intentional criminal act, and the prosecution hung their case on the dialog transcript from a video, and had the defense let that go, it likely would have been an open-and-shut case. The defense, however, hung their case on a frame-by-frame deconstruction of the paralanguage and non-verbal communication, which was in their representation diametrically opposed to the sense the prosecution was trying to establish via the dialogue. The defendant was acquitted. I can think of a million "faux pas" that could occur in intercultural analyses if non-verbal communication was not taken into account. I don't know whether to blame the hubris of a logocentric Western society, the slow-grinding wheels of "les vieux dinosaurs" of academia, or my own impatience for not letting Trena "get to that" later on in the semester. I guess I'll know before long, won't I?

• But (perhaps) more to the point: for a discipline that places high value on the analysis of 'naturally occurring' language use, you would think that there would be an equally high value placed on conveying that information in a 'natural' or 'contextualized' way, especially given the affordances of new media. That having been said...have you looked at the Jeffersonian notation system? Could anything be more de-contextualized than rendering the intricacies of speech acts via text and an arbitrary set of signifiers for which one must acquire a taste? Now, in her defense, if I were operating in an academy that was the paragon of print culture, and the technologies of another/emergent literacy were not available to me, I would have done the same thing...what else could I do? I cannot blame Gail Jefferson. But we know better. We have known for some time that this kind of reduction strips communication of the system of references and repetitions between the three modes, as well as intermodal discourse indicators that we rely on when "reading" a conversation. We have the means to fix it...we can display video, play audio, and mount text simultaneously, with any one of the modes serving as gloss for the other (although it makes the most sense for the marginalia to be textual). We have infinite storage and a society (and, mirabile dictu, administrators) willing to embrace a switch to digital scholarship. We as scholars are the ones standing in our own way, and I find that lamentable.

Mehrabian, A. (1971). Silent messages. Wadsworth, Belmont, California.