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.