Gee-ze, Louise! or How to Make Unicorn Stew

Ok, alright. I wanted to play nice with Gee's How to Do Discourse Analysis, but the book is trying to turn DA work into a cookbook. But it's not a fancy cookbook that tells me how to make a gourmet meal from a radish, a can of tuna, noddles, and orange juice. Nope, it's one of those crappy cookbooks that tells us how to do the obvious. (Now, don't jump the gun on me because this sounds contradictory to my undying love for Shklovsky's defamiliarization that I discussed last week.) For example, Pippa Middleton wrote an awful party planning book that included tidbits akin to, "breakfast is good in the morning" and "a chicken can be cut into a thigh, drumstick, breast, and wing." And yes, that information is right, and I'm even sure that there are some people who don't know these things. But the Middleton's have gained business savvy for their party planning business--even I know this! They should, in fact, be bringing their A-game, a la Martha Stewart style--not reinventing the basics for us.

This long-drawn out, extended metaphor is exactly my problem I have with Gee: he is known for handling language and communication issues; he has established a recognizable scholarly name in English studies; he has drive more novice English scholars to think critically; but he is talking to readers of this text as if they have never thought to uncover issues of language analysis. And I don't like that this entire book is built upon an assumption of a reader who is completely unaware of close readings. No one is above learning new tools for analysis, but the fact that he can't identify his tools all in unique ways bothers me. The overlapping of his analytical tools seems to imply that we readers aren't going to be bothered by that repetitiveness in writing. I'm all for sign-posting in writing, but don't waste my time recycling partial correlation for other causation. And much like Middleton's cookbook, he really needed a better editor to keep him on the straight on narrow to report the varieties of analysis that can bloom from a certain type of analytical gazing on the data.

So I've been thinking a lot about pedagogical books to support teachers' introducing qual studies to their students. And now more than ever, I realize that my focus has been put on the wrong target audience. Rather than trying to create a book on qual-pedagogy, a book needs to be framed for students that scaffolds from their knowledge. I read B. Johnstone's Qualitative Research for Sociolinguists, and I remember being annoyed with how she doesn't explain what types of questions sociolinguists should ask. If the research question is weak, the project is going to have a difficult development. I've always described the research question for a qual project as the paper's thesis statement. So it's important that they are well articulated. So my new question is "how do I break down the report sections (lit review, methods, analysis, etc) for English majors?".

 *****

How to Make Unicorn Stew
Ingredients:
3 carrots
1 onion
a pot of water
some spices
a box of arzo
1 lbs. unicorn chunks

Wait--unicorn stew?!?

How do you make unicorn stew?
You don't.

Gee-whizz, Sholovsky's swell

The first time I picked up some of James Paul Gee's work was in my MA in a class called "Computers and Writing." (This class was amazing, by the way. Tres chic.) It wasn't a primary source for the class, but his commentary on gaming in the classroom was a totally new paradigm that many people haven't considered for the 21st century. (And the work was published in 2008, and the class ran Winter 2009, so it was timely). He showed how video games have stages of learning that readily gets "noobs" to engage in contexts. And we writing teachers should learn from that structure and implement those similar tools in the the writing classroom. The techniques respond to the Millennial-generation, but show has skills are acquired and then advanced in stages with objectives--think Super Mario Brothers advancing to save the princess. Now I'm not a gamer, but that argument is so savvy and smooth, it's just sexy. (Dare I say, maybe, unicorn-sexy?!)

I wasn't familiar with any of other Gee's work--ASU is a big hub for composition/rhetoric, especially in terms of L2 issues--so I was excited to see what he came up with in How to Do Discourse Analysis: a Toolkit. After reading the first two units, I'm not sure how I feel about the book. It's both helpful and annoying, almost akin to Rapley's text: the presentation is unique, but I've also spent a lot of time in this field, so it's not like I haven't read this argument before (time and time again). Gee's perspective is significantly different because he takes a sociolinguistic approach to decode language, really sticking to a issues we have canonized in English: literary and rhetorical constructions. I don't think he earns unicorn points for this method to explain DA, but he definitely gets some happy prancing points for giving a shout out to Viktor Shklovsky. Shklovsky's one of my favorite literary critics because of his essay, "Art as Technique."

Habitualization devours works, clothes, furniture, one's wife, an the fear of war... And art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stoney. The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects "unfamiliar," to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged. 

(Shklovsky, Victor. "Art as Technique." The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends. ed. David H. Richter. 3rd ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2007: 778.)

I love this quote. It regularly comes up every few semesters in my work because it's so important in remembering that language isn't a tool. It's an art. It's a style. So when Gee included a citation to Shklovsky's work on defamiliarization, a bell went off in my head. Yes! It is exactly the art of defamiliarizing language that qualitative researchers, especially those in DA, need to do. We all know words, grammar, tone, style, etc. But the act of considering the implications of these words from someone else's perspective requires us to think of something quotidienne as unique. I think this is why I gravitate towards styles of phenomenology, but I don't feel like I know enough about it to be totally firm on the stance. But I like the idea of trying to find the art of the daily life.

***

Sorry this is late--my apt. seems to have a busted water pipe and drowning my neighbor's below. I'm worried this may stymie my chances to get to class tomorrow. Here's hoping the problem gets diagnosed ASAP--and it's not my fault!

Questions for Other Researchers

I'm feeling a little out of place asking questions about education dissertations. Invariably, I'm waiting for the "well, it's done this way for ed. majors" answer." And that's fine. I understand there is a disciplinary style for format, focus, and organization for a major writing project, like a dissertation. After reading through Joshua's (awesomely massive!) prospectus, I've decided to stick to questions on the methods. Afterall, learning more about methods is what we are here about.

In reference to Joshua's prospectus:

• In the transcription section, you mention that you, first, refrain from conventional punctuation, and then, add Jeffersonian transcripts for passages used in the dissertation (34). Since Jeffersonian transcription includes a refined sense of punctuation, where will you explain the implication of that notation? 
• Can you explain the Discursive Action Model (DAM) more (36)? It isolates "Action, Fact and Interest, and Accountability," but can you define and distinguish these categories more for me? Can we create our own analytical model to explain how we identify conceptual ideas from the transcribed text?
• I'm not sure I understand how DP differs from DA, in this context of research. Is it because the topic of investigation is self-reflective by the participant?
• Edwards and Potter get shout-outs all over, does that mean we can find a researcher and keep their methodology paradigm in sight? 

Hmm, can you tell that I'm in the process of writing up my own prospectus and outlining the implications of each chapter. <Sigh>

I have the same types of questions for Elizabeth about her construction of a theory-methodology-methods complex.

Additionally, an update about the progress of the projects would be awesome. 

What we really need is a little bit of Aristotle...and some 20th century rhetoric

Let me preface by saying that this entry will definitely play with rhetoric more than this class is built for. I'm having a hard time engaging with Sacks because, let's face it, I hate the idea of a decontextualized conversation. This scenario just doesn't exist! So while I like some of the characteristics of conversational analysis (CA), it needs a bit of rhetorical love. Unfortunately for Sacks, introducing rhetorical theory essentially means the theoretical death of CA, while also problematizing the role of language in society more. I would argue that rhetoric swirls space, time, and actors. But it's not really just a mix of these ingredients, but the integration of space and actors within time. Grammar allows a sense of time that impacts our space and actors. So CA dies if we revoke the role of one of these qualities. We, researchers, care about rhetorical qualities because they make language and its analysis not a scientific study, but a qualitative one. Linguists (I'm pretty sure) would defend the stance that language is dynamic. So while we can create scientific models for repeated actions, communication is variety. This variety is constructed through layers of rhetorical tools.

Sacks, or rather Hutchby and Wooffitt evoke a rhetorical inquiry into CA in chapter 6 about "Talk in Institutional Settings." The style of talking for set organizations is not dissimilar to private conversation:

"By focusing on the relatively specialized ways in which turn-taking and turn-design are accomplished in institutional settings, conversation analysts show how participants similarly constitute 'non-conversation' interactions b the same process of displaying an orientation to the relevance of specific types of activity" (138). 

There is a systemization to all scopes of communication. This commentary reminded me of Aristotle's definition of topoi. Topoi are conventions for argumentation. Pick an industry (eg baking, politics, flute playing), and we know there are styles that have been practiced and repeated to signify the niche. Language tools like vocabulary, passive v. active sentence structures(science v. humanities), citation styles (MLA v. APA v. Chicago...), etc. are all hallmarks of disciplinized styles for institutional exchanges. English people would call this part of genre studies.

But before topoi, Aristotle explains that we must understanding the contemporariness of the argument. He defines three rhetorical styles that predicates the topoi conventions. The three styles are deliberative, judicial, and epideictic. Each style is associated with a time frame of action relative to the speaker. For example, deliberative speech is used to define future action (eg. should we go to war; how many people to invite to the wedding). Judicial, as the name implies, is for assessments of the past (eg. was it murder or manslaughter, can you steal your own property in the midst of a divorce?). Epideictic is used to assign praise or blame in the present tense (eg. an obituary or national anthem). So we have to understand the timing of the argument to understand its genre tendencies, says Aristotle.

"But wait," you ask, "why should Sacks care about all of this old Greek stuff?" To use a more contemporary metaphor borrowed from Twitter, CA is all about "trending" conversational turns. Chapters 4 and 5 related (semi-cookbook-style) considerations to analyze conversation. (See something happen--add a hashtag to it. See it again? Add another hashtag to it. Etc.) But unlike tweets, conversations have a more implicit exchange of dialogic characteristic. An epideictic speech moves towards an emotional assessment for the now. We see this, for example, in obituaries when people detail the lives of relatives to invoke grief. CA would all this movement the turn-taking. And Aristotle tells us that these patterns are important:

"Thus, one should take coincidences and chance happenings as due to deliberate purpose; for if many similar examples are cited, they will seem to be a sign of virtue and purpose." (On Rhetoric, I. 9. 32, my emphasis).

These turns are important because it relates some information about the speaker's role. And here again, is where CA gets KO'd by rhetoric. CA doesn't seem to stop and question who people are, it only cares that they said something to someone else who responded. But a purposeful conversation gets directed by someone who knows what's going on and knows how to discuss the issue to the people. It's not about a speaker's intention, but about their skills. I think one must consider the skill set of a conversationalist to understand how the discussion unfolds. Many teachers have "classic" tales of woe when students came to class unprepared and the lesson goes wry because the skills are not balanced in the context. Sure, CA will show how a stasis gets uncovered, but knowing the backstory helps the analysis.

I'm sorry if this commentary seems disjointed, but it felt satisfying.