I know I said we were going to have a workshop on the interview protocols and that I was going to introduce the short analysis project, but when I clicked through the posts before class I noticed that only about have of you were working on questions that you were will ing to post.
This made me think two things: 1) I haven't given you enough information/support to get started on writing the protocols; and 2) you are worried about doing it "right".
The result is the class we had today.
The importance of getting lost. I started out with the story about google.maps and my theory of teaching. If you directions work - you never really know where you are. To really learn something - so that you can figure out your own answers - you need to do some wandering around - spend some time with your mistakes. This class is exactly the place to do that. Blogs are about wandering around. I am not grading "correctness" = I am looking for evidence that you are wandering around. If you are wandering in the right direction I will say "Great" and give you credit. If you are wandering in a direction that wasn't what I was expecting, I will think about wheter is its a good way to get where you need to go, offer some suggestions, and give you credit. So go for it.
Cultural conversations/stories/discourses (if it makes it easier you can think of these stories as kind of like stereotypes for the way things "are"). The next thing we did was spend some time thinking about what James Gee calls big "C" Conversations; stories associated with a particular topic that are "out there" in the culture. Everybody knows them. They will come up (one way or another) in a conversation about that topic. Often they have some truth in them, but what is more important than whether they are true or not is that when we talk about that topic, they will influence the way we talk about the topic. We will either step right into them (as if they are true), defend against them, or move in and out of them in combination with other, related stories.
Cultural stories and the Internet. As a way of developing a more concrete example of a set of cultural stories - a Conversation - we talked about the Internet. When I asked you for cultural stories about the internet you came up with:
the internet is the reason US children/adults are getting fat
the internet is dangerous
parents need to monitor their children's use of the internet
parents need to restict children's access to internet content
video games are a waste of time
violent video games make us violent
individuals who grew up with the internet know more than "adults" (parents/teachers)
and so on
After making this list, we looked at the chat room transcript, and we noticed that S and A talked about the Internet and A's experiences from "inside" cultural stories about the Internet as dangerous, parents needing to monitor/restrict children's behavior/
We also noticed that in the first excerpt, A positioned herself as "vulnerable", and in the second excerpt she positions herself as rebellious & in control. We noted that these subject positionings connected to cultural stories about children and teens, and that one story drew from stories about the internet as dangerous, and the other about millenials being naturally knowing everything about how to behave/interact/take care of themselves on the Internet. In fact, the content of the two stories was remarkably similar: in each case she met up with an older male who confronted/courted her and when she responded there was a surprise about his identity. The fact that she told these two stories - one as "scary" and the other as "weird" (S said it was funny, it's not clear if A thought so); in the first story she was the victim, in the second she was in control.
So - what does this mean? This analysis suggests that cultural stories "position us" with respect to events, interactions, and things so that we experience/tell events in terms of the stories' values (the internet is dangerous, children are vulnerable, teens can do anything on the internet) that are "out there" = and that our experiences, once we "step out" of those stories, might have completely different interpretations?
And the next step is to ask questions about how/why those particular cultural stories are "out there". Who gains an advantage, retains power, evades a responsibility = so long as a particular cultural story remains unexamined? What happens when we "see through" or question a particular cultural story? For example, what if instead of restricting children's explorations of the Internet, we become more serious about policing (and punishing) the traffic of children's sexuality. Another cultural story about the Internet is that it is too big and too diffuse to "control" = but just try to post a Disney patented character on your web site and you will see in about two days whether that is true or not. So whose advantage is it to think that the "dangers" of the internet are "just the way it is" and that it is up to parents to protect their children from them? What does it allow to continue, and whose freedom is limited? Asking and following through on those kinds of questions is the real power of discourse analysis.
What interviews look like: We then looked at a series of interview transcripts, and you noticed the stories in them - and the way an actual interview looks. The questions (focus) is there, but the interview really unfolds as a conversations. There are lots of follow up comments, and the interviewer allows the participant lots of room to talk.
Stories and what they look like. We use a "model" for identifying stories (there is more in the reading) that included a set up (did I tell you about? or in interviews, the "set up" is often the interviewer's question), an orientation (which takes the listener to the time and place of the story= "when I was in first grade. . .") then the complication/or unfolding action = the what problem that drives the story's action, the resolution/outcome, and the reflection. Reflections are about what the story "means" or how it turned out (it was good), and we used L's reflections as a way to find the "ends" of the different versions of the "ESL" story that she told.
You did an awesome job on this. I am sorry it was so rushed, but I hope it gave you enough so you can follow the discussion in the reading.
Work groups for interview protocols: I also announced 5 groupings of students who I thought would work well together, because you have projects that 'relate' well, in one way or another.
Florie, Brenda, Melanie => classroom problem solving/teaching/language
Ariana, Gigi, David => texting
Adrian, Melissa, Jessica => ethnographic studies + an interview of a group/Discourse community
John, Amanda, Nagerrah => (this one is maybe the hardest fit) looking at how a cultural story/practice shapes our experience of church/getting student loans/performance poetery (yeah, well, it was the best I could do)
Holly, Sara, Briana => writing issues for college students (revision, writing summaries, plagiarism)
For Tuesday:
Read: Approaches to story analysis
Blog 10: Write, describe, speculate about some cultural stories/Conversations associated with your focus for your research project. Give it a shot - even if you aren't sure, put it out there and we will see where we are.
Thanks for your attention today. I know it was a lot of me talking = next week should be better.
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