Readings Aug 29

Data I will collect: I have a meeting with my two PD Specialists on Monday, Sept. 9th. Thought I'd record thirty minutes of that. PD Specialists are art teachers that I have hired to help me with developing and facilitating professional development (hence, PD).

Mini-lit review focus: art education. I'd really like to find anything about evaluating or supervising art teachers, but I don't think it exists. So, I may look for evaluating and supervising teachers. (This all connects in my dissertation.)

BTW- I picked up the notebook from the ISC this week. Thanks for helping us with that!

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Jorgensen, M. & Phillips, L. (2002). Discourse analysis as theory and method. London: Sage.  Chs. 1-3 

Rogers, R., Malancharuvil-Berkes, E., Mosley, M., Hui, D., & Joseph, G. (2005). Critical discourse analysis in education: A review of the literature. Review of Educational Research 75(3), 365- 416. 

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This week we read the first 3 chapters of Jorgensen and Phillips (2002). As I read, I found myself using a DP lens to not just search for "ammo" for my eventual dissertation, but also as a way to connect (or not) to the reading. I also discovered a lot of connections to  my experiences in the art world. The authors introduce us to three approaches to social constructionist discourse analysis: Laclau and Mouffe's discourse theory, Fairclough's Critical Discourse Theory, and discursive psychology. The first chapter outline DA. Chapter 2 focused on Laclau and Mouffe. Chapter 3 focuses on Fairclough.

Here are some of the key points from Chapter 2 and 3 in a top hat chart for comparison. (I learned about this type of chart today!) I did not include DP because I currently do not understand some of the references the authors make to DP and would like to consider it after I read Chapter 4.

	Laclau & Mouffe Everything is discursive including the economy. Created their theory in opposition to Saussurian’s work that signs are fixed and related to other fixed signs (like a fishing net). Instead, signs are contingent on other signs and sometimes there is a struggle between what a sign is and what it could be (Antagonism). There is no truth- instead we have objectivity (people forget that these signs can change) and myths (Signs that seem like a totality).  Mostly theory work. Did not develop a methodology for analysis.	Fairclough While discourse is produced and consumed, not everything is discursive. Some things are material- like economy. Discourse is the social world and shapes the social world. Discourse is ideology because power is a part of discourse creation. The critical part of Fairclough’s (and others) DA comes from the goal of the researchers to uncover discursive practices and try to change them. Created a model for DA- 3 parts:  text, discursive practices, and social practice.
Similarities Are post-structuralists- they do not believe that discourses are fixed, but contingent. How we understand and interact with in the world is based on our social processes- like discourse. Researchers could use Fariclaugh’s analysis model with Laclau and Mouffe’s theory.

Rogers, et. al. was a review of literature on CDA in education. There was a lot of repeat here- with Foucault, Fairclough, and the range of (little d) discourses. The authors reviewed 40 articles on  education using CDA, and found five themes: variation of CDA definitions, overcoming (or not) written language bias, how CDA is situated and its relationship to context, the methods used, and reflexivity. I enjoyed that this article was a ROL and that it was connected to education. There are a few references I have noted to look up for my own research (and possibly my mini-lit review).

My two ah-ha's this week are about DP and art. I can not stop using a DP lens when reading this work! As I read through Chapter 2 and 3, I found myself finding pieces of their theories or methods that seem like they work with DP and others that do not. Although other researchers use critical DA, I find myself uncomfortable with the idea of trying to change society. I actually enjoy change in my "real life" and work in the critical realm when I advocate for art teachers. But, for my research, I find myself thinking that the critical aspect does not belong in my dissertation. (I wonder if this goes back to our DP conversations about downplaying our stake and interest?) 

Also, there were some great connections to the visual arts in the text. Some were explicit- critical DA uses visual images as text that should be analyzed. But also, in the preface and in Chapter 3, the authors describe how text comes from other text and is sometimes cited within text (manifest intertextuality). The same is "true" (whatever true means!) for art. My current work, for example, comes from and directly references the work of Jasper Johns and (maybe) Georges Seurat. They were each influenced (directly or indirectly) by other artists. And, when you finish a piece and hang it in a gallery, you let go of your work and interpretation is now open to the viewers. Earlier this year, one of my pieces was interpreted by a dance troupe. They choreographed a dance for my piece. The choreographer envisioned a lot of circular movement. My piece is very static so it was a surprising interpretation.

Intro and Readings Aug 22

Quick Intro: 

My name is Heather Casteel. I am the supervisor of Knox County's Art Department. I am in the Ed Leadership and Policy Studies program at UT and this is my final semester for course work. (Comps in October!!!)

 

I took DP in the summer as one of my cognate classes and realized (this took a few weeks) that I agree with DP epistemology and that it makes sense to me to use DP/DA in my dissertation research. I am interested in what art teachers say about the evaluation and supervision of art teachers using the TEAM system (one of TN's models for evaluation.)

 

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Mercer, N. (2000). Words and Minds: How We Use Language to Think Together. New York: Routledge.

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I decided to use a graph to display the major concepts from Mercer's book. I also thought it would be interesting to compare what I found with DP. As I read over the last week, I've realized that I've caught the DP bug. It just makes sense to put cognition to the back burner, because we can't know what is under the skull. (I would classify myself as cognitive agnostic, though. I do believe there is something under my skull- just not sure about anyone else's!)

	Major Concepts	Of Note	Connection (or not) to Discursive Psychology (DP)
Chapter 1: Language as a tool for thinking.	interthinking	Using language to think together and problem solve collectively	If we can only access thinking through talk and text AND if talking is doing, then a better term might be interacting.
	Interthinking may be an evolutionary puzzle piece.	Not just opposable thumbs, but the flexible nature of language may have helped our ancestors survive and thrive together.
	Communication with others and individual thinking are dependent on each other.	We talk to others to make joint sense of things by expressing our ideas in words.	DP would say “Maybe there is ‘individual thinking’, but you can’t prove it, so quit talking about it!” :)
	Vygotsky says there are 2 functions to language. We use language as a cultural tool and a psychological tool.	As children, we fuse thinking and language, which aids in our mental development.	Children’s thinking happens “under the skull,” and we don’t have access to that.
	Talking is doing.	It’s hard to separate the content of the talk from the talk itself.	That’s right!
	Language is a tool.	Wells calls language a whole tool-kit. It’s also hard to separate the learning about language from the doing of language. (Like hammers and hammering.)	Right again!
Chapter 2: Laying the foundations.	Knowing Thought	We can’t know thought, but trying to infer what other people are ‘thinking’ is what each of us does in our everyday talk.	I don’t believe we can tell whether people are always trying to figure out what other people are thinking UNLESS it is apparent in the discourse.
	Context	A concept used to analyze “collective thinking” (or discourse); the shared knowledge used by discourse participants. (This could be physical space or past conversations); information used to make sense of talk or text. Context changes depending on the situation	Context is really important to what the text is doing and how it is constructed.
	Conversational Ground Rules	The unspoken rules for discourse. This can be different for different situations or communities of people. We often assume that the other person knows the ground rules.	“The Rules” Chapter 3- Potter & Wetherell (1987) “Discourse and Social Psychology”.
	Cumulative Talk and Working Together	People work together to construct language by building information and do not have to have explicit rules or references. Phase model- problem, proposal, completion, and extension.
	Frames of Reference	Sharing frames of reference helps discourse participants employ the same ground rules. Without shared frames of reference, miscommunication “mistakes” is more likely to happen. These mistakes have to be repaired for the conversation to become “successful.”
Chapter 3: The given and the new.	Given knowledge	Background knowledge, shared frames of reference, ground rules.	Given or new information is only important if it is made important in the talk/text.
	New knowledge	Information we don’t have that we need to figure out.
	Long Conversation	People who talk to each other frequently can be considered to be having one long conversation.	It would be more challenging for a researcher to understand the context of people who share an intimate connection (husbands and wives for example).
	Techniques used in talk.	Tag questions, explicit requests, overt agreements, recaps, elicitations, repetitions, reformulations, and exhortations. Verbal and nonverbal cues- prosody, pausing, breath intake (I do this one!)	These could be used to interpret excerpts of data to look for pattern and variation.
Chapter 4: Persuasion, control, and argument.	Rhetoric	Is used to persuade, convince, or pursue individual or group interests Lists, contrasts, call and response, metaphor, “At first, but then”,	Edwards & Potter (1992): DP is a discourse and rhetoric approach.
	Power and control.	Power is hard to see or hear. Instead, Mercer suggests using the word control: “how people exert influence in the process of jointly creating knowledge” (p.95).	I think DP would like control vs. power. I would like to see if this term is used in critical-DP work.
	3 types of arguments (how control is used in talk)	Exploratory- constructive, engaging, critically building the new. Cumulative- people join to support a shared view (not making anything new) Disputational- people strive to keep their independent ideas, ideas tend to compete.
Chapter 5: Communities.	Communities are groups of people with a history, a collective identity, reciprocal obligations, and a discourse.	A community’s discourse is the jargon that the community uses to access its history and collective identity. Sometimes this keeps outsiders out and can be challenging for novice members.
	Virtual communities	Both asynchronous and synchronous communication. Virtual community members “roleplay”. Some researchers say this is a flexible self.	Flexible self goes along with “doing-being”. Last semester Journey, Brenda, and I had a great conversation about if an actor was an actor, doing-being-an-actor, or just a flexible self (although, we didn’t know this term at the time).
Chapter 6: Development through dialogue.	“Growing up is an apprenticeship in thinking” (p. 133), but thinking is through communication.	Children learn from each other and from adults. Children are part of their own learning.	Well, I didn’t see a lot of DP on children.
	Scaffolding	Adults can scaffold learning for children, providing them with the support so they won’t fail to help them surpass their potential.
	Intermental Development Zone	A play on Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development. It is shared communication space between teacher and student with the common goals and knowledge.	Once again, a nod to cognition. Potter and Edwards would not be happy.
	Talk Lesson	Mercer conducted an experiment. The intervention was a set of lessons about how children should talk and listen to one another.	I can’t imagine DP doing experiments. (BTW-we talked about something similar this summer-called “Accountable Talk” by the U of Pittsburgh.)

Mercer’s book, Words & Minds, provides practical examples of how people construct talk and some of the functions that talk can have. However, Mercer’s continual references to thinking and understanding (including interthinking, intermental development zone, and the Talk Lesson experiment) helped me understand that DA and DP are not the same thing. In several of the readings in the summer, authors would say that they used DA with a DP approach. Now, I understand (and agree) that the epistemology and theory of DP works well with DA, but they are not the same thing. On a functional note, I learned a lot about the types of talk and how language is constructed collectively.

Readings WEDNESDAY Aug 7

• 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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  Stokoe, E., Hepburn, A. & Antaki, C. (2012). Beware the ‘Loughborough School’ of social psychology? Interaction and the politics of intervention. British Journal of Social Psychology 51, 486-496. 

  
  

  Attenborough, F. & Stokoe, E. (2012). Student life, student identity, student experience: Ethnomethodological methods for pedagogical matters. Psychology Learning & Teaching 11 (1), 6-21. 
  
  
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       These articles provided a great wrap up for the semester. Each article contained a description of DP/CA research and its potential application to help people. Stokoe, et. al. included summaries of work on neighbor mediation and using CARM (Conversation Analytic Role-play Method) to train mediation hotline workers,  Child Protection hotline and discursive crying, and whether staff members were actually providing choices to adults with disabilities in a residency setting.
  
  
       The point of the article was to show critics of DP/CA that the authors selected research topics and settings that were "relevant to emancipatory projects"  and the agencies they worked with were "socially responsible" (Stokoe, et. al., 2012, p. 495). Because DP/CA focuses on the interaction between participants, these research studies were not one-sided, but included both clients and providers of service. 
  
  
       Attenborough and Stokoe's work was on "doing-being-a-student-amonst-other-students" (Attenborough & Stokoe, 2012, p. 6) in the hopes that higher education teachers and administrators would understand when students resisted tasks or did not display their knowledge in front of other students. The authors used a wide range of data sources to look for the construction of "doing-being-a-student-amonst-other-students"and showing the big picture of how this talk is constructed and functions. They argued that ethnomethodology/DP/CA is the best way to find out how this actually happens instead of more traditional qualitative interviews which ask students about the student experience.
  
  
       What I enjoyed about both pieces was that the argument for DP/CA was not aggressive or over-the-top. The authors of both articles explain the strengths of DP/CA and argue against critics. I also really enjoy the doing-being-x statements. This makes sense to me as I often find myself in contradictory roles- at different times I am doing-being-student, doing-being-supervisor, doing-being-wife, or doing-being-festie (someone who goes to music festivals). I also like the phrase from Attenborough and Stokoe's (2012) article, "The question... is...answered at one remove from the...thing itself" (p. 16). This makes me think of the 6 degrees of Kevin Bacon game, but with the interpretive gap. 
      (Side note: I have a Bacon number of 4. I appeared in a home movie with my cousin, Ben Pace, Bacon number of 3).
  

Readings MONDAY Aug 5

ASSIGNMENT: The reflections should raise questions that you would like us to discuss in class.

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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. 
  
  
• Varga, M.A. & Paulus, T.M. (Forthcoming). Grieving online: Newcomers’ constructions of grief in an online support group. Death Studies. 
  
  
• Canfield, D. Dissertation proposal: The discursive construction of language learning in multiuser virtual environments.
  

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(From Readings 7/22) 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 formulations to deny alternate versions. 

 

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The Varga and Paulus article was an empirical study also using DP and DA to examine the construction and function within the initial postings from newcomers to an online grief support group. The analytic 6 step approach found on page 7 has been seen in several of our readings. I'm assuming this is part of the DA course in the Fall. Is that true?

I'm still a little confused about variability and its role in DP. On page 12, a "variable pattern" is noted. I understand finding a variation in the data, but I haven't quite made the connection with how it is worked out with the rest of the pattern. 

I really liked the idea of "doing normal" and how people seek membership with groups to redefine normal in an attempt to do "being ordinary" (even when they may need to express the extremes of their experience to join.)

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Questions for Canfield

Can you explain what an argumentative texture is? 
"I suggest that this in-depth examination can be accomplished through a critical discursive psychology approach that emphasizes the local, everyday discursive practices of the study’s participants and the “argumentative texture” that makes the interaction possible (Laclau, 1993, p. 341)" (p.7)

The following seems pretty gutsy to me! Can you explain why you wanted to include this? Did it meet with any resistance from your committee? "I wish to offer an alternative view of the notion of “significance”. Qualitative researchers often feel compelled to attend to the tension between the view that their research is useful in answering the “how/why” questions of the discipline and the view that such research offers so little generalizability as to be useless in providing broader pedagogical significance. (Munby, 1983)" (p. 8).


So, critical DP is a combo of DP with Wetherell's attention to the " 'broader cloth' of social fabric" (p. 10). How did you come to this belief/ decision? Can you explain it in a little more detail? On page 42, you use the phrase extra-discursive. Do you mean the same thing with both phrases?


Have you started the analysis of the video recordings? What is this experience like? We discussed last week that video is very hard due to the amount of data.