Readings MONDAY July 22

ASSIGNMENT: The reflections should 1) demonstrate that you have critically read the assigned readings; 2) raise questions that you would like us to discuss in class; 3) provide any update on your final paper focus.

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• Lester, J.N. & Paulus, T.M. (2011). Accountability and public displays of knowing in an undergraduate computer-mediated communication context. Discourse Studies, 1-16.
  
  
• Gabriel, R. & Lester, J. (Forthcoming). The romance quest of education reform: A discourse analysis of The LA Times’ reports on value-added measurement teacher effectiveness. Teacher’s College Record.
  

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     Both of these articles provided examples of using DP in the field of education. What I found most helpful was seeing DP in a context with which I am familiar. Last week, I wrote that it seemed DP analysis was just gut reaction and that I was missing some psychology background knowledge in order to get the findings Potter and Edwards reported. Dr. Paulus replied that while the reporting language (in the previous cases) included psychology jargon, analyzing discourse is open to any speaker of discourse (which includes me!)

     I am very familiar with both CMC learning environments (like this blog) and teacher evaluations (particularly using TVAAS scores for teachers of non-tested grade levels and subject areas.) I also recognized in Gabriel and Lester's work the style of reporting research that is taught to us in the education department. For the first time in this course, I understood what DP may look like in my own research.

    The Lester and Paulus article was an example of an empirical study using DP as the epistemology and theoretical framework.  They used DA, CA, ethnomethodology, and rhetorical psychology as methods within DP. Their research question was "How do students work up their beliefs and experiences in this CMC environment?" (p. 5). The authors used 3 DA questions to guide the study...

1. "What are the students doing/accomplishing with their language?"
2. "How are they constructing their language in order to achieve this?"
3. "What resources are being used to perform these tasks?"

These questions are based on Edwards and Potter's work on function, construction, and resource of discourse (1992 p. 133 and 162). The concepts are applied within the analysis and seen clearly in the findings as the authors described the two patterns within the student blogs. Users of the "I don't know" pattern used the phrase to decrease accountability. Users of the "five paragraph" pattern used script formulations and extreme case forumaltions to deny alternate versions.

     Gabriel and Lester's article was a fast read- mostly because of the hot topic, but also the "Warranting Claims and Standards of Quality" section was particularly intriguing to me. This methodology felt like a blend of the qualitative courses that I have taken. It makes sense to me that analysis is not an ambiguous activity done behind the scenes and reported in a final work (dissertation). Instead, the authors wrote "Within a discourse analytic tradition, in lieu of simply telling the reader about the given argument/interpretation and then pointing to an excerpt that illustrates the researcher's point, the discourse analyst shows how she analyses a given excerpt and came to particular interpretations" (p. 16). The authors provided a "Map of Iterations" in the appendix which showed initial interests, then discursive features, and finally overarching patterns. I would love for our guest authors to speak to this process in a little more detail, because this may be how I would use DP in my own study.

    

References

Edwards, D. & Potter, J. (1992). Discursive psychology. Sage Publications.