9.24 Group work to answer a question + assignments for next class

You spent the remainder of class working in groups to answer a research question.
I'm looking forward to reading your posts!

For next class:
Read: Data Set 3 (posted to the right)
 Texting and Writing  Michaela Cullington

Blog 4: Post an answer to one of the 10 questions we created in class.  Support each part of your answer with evidence from the data.  Evidence should take the form of examples to illustrate particular content or forms and statements about the frequency of particular particular patterns. 

Your post should:
state your question
identify the members of your group by first name
each member of your group should post the same language

Examples of frequency statements.   (6 out of the 10 jottings did. . . ;  in the notes as a whole, professor chandler is mentioned 26 times, 10 in jottings, 5 in head notes, 10 in remembered later, and 1 in observations )(not true - you would need to count this); or far-back statements accounted for less than half of the statements in jottings, but close to 90% of statements in observations (I made this up, it is not true - it is an example of how you should be using numbers to support your claims about what the data does)

9.24 Discussion of ethnographic notes

We started  class with a discussion of notes on the in-class even taken by the other section.  I have pasted in my notes on our discussion of what we saw,
Jottings

Content

What observer did

What others did

Used positin in room + who was talking as jottings

Trigger = note on professor

Names

Form

Single/word phrases

Whole sentences

Sometimes more like headnotes (long sentences, whole thoughts)

Strategies for taking jottings

Strong participation (direct what others will say)

Write down what will trigger recollection of the whole event

Write down what will be forgotten

Write down everything

Organized jottings by experience (see 8)

Head notes
content

Inner reflections

Generalizations

Details

Unpack jottings

Move between close-in and far back

Form

Paragraphs

Chronological

Generalizations

Short phrases

Strategies

Go from the beginning to the end to write down everything that you didn’t have time to write down while you were there

Use your jottings

Associate to what you do remember

Remember later

Fill in details

Conversations!  Names! Realizations about general behavior

Far back observations

We then had a discussion about what kinds of questions we might ask about these data sets and you came up with the questions in the next post.

9.24 Research questions

1. What did the group do? What does this behavior show about the class culture?

2. What do these notes show about the way beginning ethnographers take notes? Jottings, head notes, remembered + observations?  What does the teacher need to give moe support for?

3. What do these notes suggest about how we might create notes for our research? What kinds of notes would be useful/  What kinds not so useful?

4. What forms seemed most effective for each of the 4 different kinds of notes?  What ws the purp0se for each form?  And which kinds of notes best met that purpose?

5. Which organization structures supported strong note taking?  Which strategies worked in the different kinds of notes?

6. When did note takers tend to look close in – and when far back?  How did the note taker’perspective shape his/her notes (the details s/he wrote)?  How did decisions about taking a close in/far back perspective affect the usefulness/effectivness of the notes in term of providing evidence? offering generalizations? 

7. What are the relationships between the content/detailed observations and the generalizations? Is there enough detail to support the generalization?  If not – what would suggest to help a note taker to write stronger notes?

8. Is there bias in these notes?  What looks like bias?  What kinds of moves are dangerous for including bias?

9.17 Part 2 - Introduction to ethnography

We spent the second half of class reading about & practicing (!) ethnography.

We started by talking about what ethnography is and what makes it particularly challenging.  We used the reading on Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes to frame our discussion.  This reading defines ethnography (more or less) as: the inscription of participatory experiences of indigenous culture represented from the perspectives of the observed culture.  This definition emphasizes the participatory nature of ethnography.  As you re-read this material for class next week, pay particular attention to the 4 consequences of this definition for writing fieldnotes.  They are listed at the bottom of the fifth page, under the heading Implications for writing fieldnotes.

In our discussion we noted that:

• ethnographers need to participate in the culture they are studying in order to understand how that culture works;
• that writing (documenting) culture  is central to ethnography;
• that ethnographers' presence/participation will necessarily change what it is possible to observe (just by the fact of their being there);
• and that ethnographers interpretations of what participants' culture "means" - may or may not agree with what participants think their culture means.  

These four features of ethnography are discussed in detail in the first half of the essay.

We spend some time analyzing the 3 examples of fieldnote write ups.  I pointed out that the writing associated with ethnography does not begin with this kind of writing.  In the field, ethnographers make "jottings" - shorthand, meaningful represenations of what happened that allow the ethnographer to remember the details of what took place during the observation.  Jottings are then supplemented - immediately after the observation or as close to that time as is possible - with "headnotes".  This is everything the ethnographer remembers about what happened.  Jottings and headnotes are then used to compose the kinds of fieldnote representations we read. 

The point of reading 3 different versions of fieldnotes documenting more or less the same kind of interactions => was to show that experience can be described from MANY different perspectives.  The three representations we read were identified as having a focus on: objective/spatial relationships; an interpersonal or interactive perspective that includes the experiences of the observer; and a relational documentation of interactions between the individuals on the scene.  No one representation captures the "truth" => each kind of representation provides a different window on "what happened".

Interactive ethnographic exercise: participant observation in a class event.  We spent the last part of class doing an interactive ethnographic exercise.  Everyone was asked to get up out of their seats and come to the middle aisle, and talk to people - particularly people they did not know.  And you were asked to take "jottings" = quick, shorthand notes to help you remember - in as much detail as possible - what happened. 

The "event" lasted about 8 minutes.  I then asked you to go to your seats and add your headnotes to your jottings.  While you were witing - we made a list on the board of some of the kinds of "details" you might include in your notes:

• where people were standing, who was in which group, how people moved among groups, the overall configuration of the groups in the room
• who talked to whom, short quotes of what people said, the sequence of talk, the overall focus of conversation, silences, laughing, questions, talk inside and outside your group, people leaving and joining groups
• Chandler's role in the "event", what she said, where she stood, what she did, tone of voice, how comments were received, silences, interruptions,
• the "feeling" of the room, the noise level, the way talk sounded overall
• what people were wearing, facial expressions, body language, distances between speakers

When we summed up, you pointed out that the talk was "awkward" at the beginning and got more comfortable. That is probably true - but the point of ethnographic observation is to IDENTIFY THE FEATURES of what happened that SHOW (PROVE) that that is what happened. 

For next class:
Read: Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes
Blog 3: Post your ethnographic notes.  ALL of them - your jottings, your head notes - everything you wrote down and all that you can remember about the in-class exercise.  Label your notes.  There should be 4 categories:  jottings, headnotes, things I remembered later, and observations about what happened.

In class next Tuesday we will analyze our notes on the in-class ethnographic "event."  You will first define a question, or a problem, you want to use this data to explore.  Then you will name and classify the different elements in the notes, notice patterns, and pose and test theories relevant to your question/problem.  We will talk more about how to do this in class. 

What a fun class tonight!   Thanks for your good participation and see you on Sept 24 (or before for your conference => see the last post for the schedule of conferences).

 

9.17 Part 1 -Schedule for conferences and more talk about discourse & discourse communities

If you have not yet turned in your NIH training certificate - send it to me at the course email asap.

Research projects:  You signed up for conferences to talk about ideas for your research project.  The schedule is for the week beginning Monday, Sept. 23, and all meetings will be in my office, CAS 324.

Monday, Sept 23: 10:00 Julissa; 10:15 Sam; 10:30 Sarina; 2:00 Jaleel; 2:45 Danielle B; 3:30 Bri
Tuesday, Sept 24: 10:30 Carolina; 3:30 Trisha; 3:45 Jennifer; 4:00 Tanaera
Wednesday, Sept 25: 2:00 Silvia, 2:15 Eli; 3:15 Tania, 3:30 Rachel
Thursday, Sept 26: 3:45 Danielle J

Do some writing/thinking over the weekend what kind of research project you might like to do.  I will help you find writing studies research relevant to your study, and talk about what kind of methods you might use to work on your study.

Presentations on shaggy dog stories.  Great presentations!   Each group demonstrated the kind of naming, categorizing, and theorizing (about what elements are 'essential') characteristic of language analysis for writing studies!  Good start on this.  I will give you some written feedback on your blog posts by next class.  To receive credit - each group member needs to have the analysis posted on his or her blog.

I apologize for rushing you through these presentations - especially the groups at the end (sorry, Eli).  It did not reflect the quality of your work - but rather the fact that (as usual) I'd scheduled just a few too many activities for class and I was worried about covering them all. 

Mini-lecture on discourse & Discourse
We talked about discourse some more, only this time - after restating that discourse is "language in use" - we began with your definitions of language.  Your list is as follwows.

a form of communication - a way to know others
expresses self and feelings
conveys ideas
creates knowledge
adapts/changes => depending on who you are talking to and what you are talking about (by context)
has many different forms

Your definitions covered all the main concepts linguists include when they write about language.  James Gee defines language as not just the grammar & vocabulary, but as allowing us to do, say, and be things.  These are exactly the concepts for language that your definitions cover! 

Discourse:  We then spent some time focused on the concept of Discourse - which includes not just all the language we use to "be" ourselves, but also all the other ways we create meaningful communication about our identities (who we are).  Discourse includes not just how you talk (and all the ways you talk including word choice, tone of voice, accent and so on) but also how you dress, behave, your facial expressions, your values and beliefs and how you enact them => essentially everything about you that expresses who you are within a particular situation.  We each take part in many Discourses (which Gee defines as "identity toolkits") - the ways of talking, being, and thinking associated with our different identities.  I take part in teacher Discourse, as well as Discourses for being a white-middleclass female parent, for being a rural Pennsylvanian (my childhood Discourse), for being a researcher (as I work with my colleagues on different projects); for being folk dancer and so on. 

As an example, we made a list of student identities - including the "good"student, the disinterested student, the one there for the grade, the student with many demands on his/her life, the rebellious student, the class clown, the always talking student, the quiet student . . . .  These categories are complicated, and students move in and out of them for many different reasons.  To begin to understand some more detail about how students enact these identities in class, we made a list of "moves" students make to establish their student Discourse.  Here are the "moves" you came up with

talking in class
raising hand
calling out
being quiet in class
making on topic comments
talking off-topic, particularly about personal material
asking questions
answering teacher questions

where students sit
showing up on time
staying in the room
eating during class

taking notes
coming to class prepared

Analysis of language moves that define different Discourses. As we discussed this list, I pointed out some of the linguistic terms associated with talking = holding the floor, or floor time, and turn taking.  These are two categories (names for moves that speakers use in different ways) that linguists use to analyze talk.

They might look at: who takes the most floor time?  What are the agreed upon practices for holding the floor?  Are their different expectations for holding the floor for different members of the community?  What do Discourse members do when someone violates agreed upon for holding the floor? 
or
What are the patterns for turn taking?  What are acceptable moves for interrupting turns?  Do turns overlap or is there only one person talking?  What are the practices/signals for ending or interrupting turns? 

Sample ethnographic essay.
We concluded the first half of class with an examination of the sample ethnography essay. Your suggestions about how to strengthen this essay were to:

•  state the focus more clearly at the beginning of the essay
•  use the focus to organize + develop the essay (delete material not relevant to focus)
• the overall organization was mostly good in that each section made the right moves - but the internal organization of the sections needed work.  Also, the author needed to delete some material + develop other material.
• write a stronger conclusion that is more specifically connected to the findings and the focus

We agreed that more work on revising this essay would make it much stronger. You made good observations in this discussion!  Check out the marginal comments and see if the authors of the text where this essay was published agree with our analysis. 
Discussion of what we did during the second part of class and the assignment for 9.24 is on the next blog.

9.10 Part 2: Defining Discourse Communities & what to do for next class

Important notes: 
1.  To read notes on analyzing shaggy dog stories, scroll down to the next post.
2.  The reading for next class, "Coaches can read, too" was sent to your Kean email as a pdf. 


Reading Swales essay.
We started out by acknowledging that this was not a "easy read".  At the same time, it has lots of important information about discourse communities.  So I asked you to notice the different moves the essay makes (as a way of identifying where the information you are going to need is located).  You already know how to do this - so very quickly you identified:

1.  an introductory section (about 20% of the essay's total length) where he states what other researchers have done and points out what he will add to this "conversation" (distinguish between speech + discourse community & define discourse community),
2. a long middle section (about 60%) where he gives is data/presents his "findings"/makes his point,
3. a (surprisingly long) conclusion (about 20%) - which was in my text but was not part of your assigned reading.
This is one pattern for a writing studies data.  Important consideration for you: does this essay include primary data?  Where would you put your primary data if you used this form?  How much "space" should your data take?

We then noted that this introduction was really written to people already IN the conversation (in that it really didn't give background on all those "famous" researchers who have written about discourse, relativist or social construcionist views of language etc) and that most of his "background" was presented in terms of ONE of the major researchers.  He then stated what he would add.

The presentation of his points - was pretty clear.  He used headings and numbers to identify the main points.  And the six points in part 2.3 were what we focused on in our discussion (and what you needed to pay attention to in your reading.

Defining a discourse community.
In our discussion of Swales features of a discourse community, we used his features as a way to "check" whether our ENG 3029 class was a discourse community (according to his criteria).
I've pasted in our observations.

A discourse community:

1. has a  set of common public goals -In the syllabus=public + we all know them

 

2. has mechanisms for intercommunication among members

Blogs, class meetings, emails, conferences, through drafting + commenting

3. Uses participatory mechanisms primarily for information + feedback

Commenting = TALK in class
+ common goal

4. uses and possesses one or more genres in the communicative furtherance of its aims (we translated this to mean that a discourse community uses genres for its own purposes, and in ways that change or "re-purpose" the genre so that it belongs to the group).

Genres we use:

Brainstorming + drafts + revising, research essays, interactive analysis, blogging (we do this a little differently than most social blogging),

Genre we read/analyzed :

Shaggy dog stories, academic essays, our own writing, or blogs, emails,

5. has a special lexis (one that belongs to the group)

You pointed out that we used the words: blog, analysis, community, methodology, critical, discourse (and other words) in ways in this classroom that are slightly different from the ways they are used other places. 

6.  has a threshold level of members with a suitable level of relevant content & expertise
We kind of skipped this one.  The point here is that the group is big enough so that the "practices" (the special ways we use genres, language, and communications) are "passed on" and used.  In some ways, the fact that this is a class with a teacher (a presumed expert) and students (participants) kind of ensures the membership feature – or does it?  Will we still be a discourse community after you leave this class? 

So - it looks like we are a discourse community.

What to do for next class.

Read: Branick: "Coaches can read and write, too" (sent to your kean email).
Write: Blog 2: group post discussing your findings about the essential features of shaggy dog stories.  Post your analysis (the names of the features in the four jokes), the essential features, and the variants.

Come to class prepared to give a presentation on your analysis of the shaggy dog stories where you identify their essential features + the variants - and give some examples (show your data in your blog post) to support these findings.

We will start class with your presentations.

Then you will do some more brainstorming to think about your research topic. 

We will spend the second part of class discussing Branick - and talking about ethnographic method.
 

9.10 part 1: Discourse analysis of shaggy dog stories

At the beginning of class I read over the list of who has turned in their NIH certificate - just so you knew I got them.  Training certificates are due by the beginning of next class.  If you have problems with the site - send me an email and we can work it out.

I will be writing feedback for Blog 1sometime between now and next class.  Meanwhile, you will be working on Blog 2 (group analysis of the shaggy dog stories) for your next post, due at the beginning of class 9.17.

Discourse.  After talking about blogs & the NIH certificates, we had a discussion about discourse.  The simple definition is language and use - which seems simple enough, but once we start thinking about the elements or components which shape how we use language -it gets pretty interesting.  In quick succession you identified 4 key features relevant to language in use:

the forms language takes

the identities, beliefs, values, everyday experiences of people who write/speak/enact it

the identities etc of people who make meanings (interpret/hear/read) it

the contexts (places) which surround and influence how language is used

 

Discourse analysis looks at these features: forms/users/audience/context - looks for relationships among them, uses those relationships to identify patterns => and then poses theories about how language "works" in terms of those theories, patterns and correlations. 

 

I pointed out that all of you are experts at discourse analysis - you make personal (local) theories about what it means when language is used in certain ways all the time.  You identify who will make a likely friend (and who to avoid), which teachers will teach their courses in ways that work for you, what people are interested in or "good" at = all by analyzing the ways they talk. It is not only what they say - but how they say it that you take in and analyze to come to your conclusions.

 

So you already know how to do discourse analysis - in an automatic, half conscious kind of way.  What we will do in this class is learn to identify the steps.  We will apply the language of analysis - naming, categorizing, looking for patterns & testing relationships & theories - to discourse.

General impressions of shaggy dog stories.
Before we did a formal analysis of a particular shaggy dog story (the florist friars story) we made a list of some general observations.  These were our "impressions" (the discourse analysis we did automatically - without naming, categorizing and formally writing out patterns).  Our list looked like this:
Features/impressions of what these joke/stories do

1. Joke (punchline) based on word play

• Used homonyms or rhymes
• Slight rearrangement to make nonsense meanings (words that sound the same)

2.   Readers need cultural knowledge to get the punchline

3. First part of the joke is an elaborate set up = to provide rationale for the punchline

 

Next, we did a detailed analysis of one joke, and this is the list of features we came up with.  An important thing to notice here is that we got the "big" features with our general impressions BUT that we got much more detail, and more ideas through a close, careful analysis where we named and counted things, and wrote them down. 

 

 

 

Features of Florist Friar joke

1.formal language

2. history – gives background for story => sets the scene

3. Words from the punchline appear early in the text

4. elements of the punch line are both put forward & held back

5. lots of storytelling details that are off the point

6. characterization for all characters (hugh = tough, why friars need money etc)

7. audience needs cultural knowledge to get the joke

8. Named character is Scottish – which sets up a meaning about?

9. language starts out with one meaning – takes a twist

10. goes in a direction you don’t expect

11. beginning, middle, end – flow => like story = well developed

12. rule of 3 plot development – similar to fary tales

13. Punchline has nothing to do with the story itself= the joke makes you construct a meaning that is ridiculous

14. characters talk to each other

 

This is a GREAT list - and it gave you a good place to start for the group work assignment.

 

I asked you to:

 

Group work:  Write a list of features of what makes a shaggy dog story a shaggy dog story.

To do this, you will need to:

1. Analyze all the jokes
2. Identify (name & list) their features
3. State which features all 4 jokes have in common.

 

This work set you up for your group blog post (Blog 3).

For this assignment you will do the following.

 

Blog 2:  (group post discussing your findings about the essential features of shaggy dog stories).  Post your analysis (the names of the features in the four jokes), the essential features, and the variants. 

With your group, be prepared to present your findings regarding the essential features and variants of shaggy dog stories at the beginning of next class.

 

The discussion of discourse communities will be posted at 9.10 Part 2 (I'm still working on it), along with your assignments for next class.

 

The assigned reading, the ethnography about football coaches, will be sent to your kean email this afternoon.