Monday, August 28, 2006
Time to go on!!
It is time to continue rewriting Chapter 3, if not I could continue reading and re-reading without end. I don't think I am completely ready, but would I ever be? So, I should have something by the end of this week and send it out. I know more revisions will have to be made, but if everything goes fine I will be a tiny step closer to my goal. It is so easy to go out to the library and continue searching for articles using different search terms; but again, at least a pause is necessary to see what comes out.
Wish me luck!
Wish me luck!
Sunday, August 27, 2006
About discourses, positivities, and archaeology
It is hard to single out one topic or concept in Foucault’s reading. This book is full with information that can clarify the process of formulating a discourse, far beyond history. The second part of his book is dedicated to discursive regularities: discursive formations as well as formations of concepts, objects, enunciative modalities, and strategies. The third section is about statements – more than sentences, close to what Gee calls discursive models. Both sections seem to present Foucault’s methodology to buildup the archaeology of knowledge of a specific domain.
But this time I will only comment on two of these tools: contradictions and positivities.
ONE: Reading about contradictions was like finding an answer to some of the questions I already have, to some of the fears that paralyzes me when analyzing my data set. Somehow it seems research findings are about formulating a general statement, one that can encompass everything that has been researched. Nevertheless, Foucault stated,
So when analyzing discourse, contradictions are possible, and these together with a "dispersion of elements" that can buildup a discourse model.
TWO: For Foucault “positivities … [are] an attempt to reveal discursive practices in their complexity and density; to show that to speak is to do something – something other than to express what one thinks; to translate what one knows, and something other than to play with the structures of language (langue)” (p. 209) [italics added by the author]. This seems to be a clear and explicit connection to Austin’s (1962), How to do things with words, although he is not quoted or cited in this book.
Foucault’s (1972) discursive formations (Ch.2), or positivities, and Gee’s (2005) discourse models (in 1999, known as cultural models) seem to have similar underpinnings. But Foucault is in search of something bigger, an archaeology, a “discursive practice … [that] give rise to a corpus of knowledge” (p. 190). It is as if Gee’s discourse models were the pieces that together could buildup archaeology.
Foucault, M. (1972). The Archaeology of Knowledge & The Discourse on Language. New York: Pantheon Books.
But this time I will only comment on two of these tools: contradictions and positivities.
ONE: Reading about contradictions was like finding an answer to some of the questions I already have, to some of the fears that paralyzes me when analyzing my data set. Somehow it seems research findings are about formulating a general statement, one that can encompass everything that has been researched. Nevertheless, Foucault stated,
- “Discourse is the path from one contradiction to another: if it gives rise to those that can be seen, it is because it obeys that which it hides. To analyse (sic) discourse is to hide and reveal contradictions; it is to show the play that they set up within it; it is to manifest how it can express them, embody them, or give them a temporary appearance.
- For archaeological analysis, contradictions are neither appearances to be overcome, nor secret principles to be uncovered. They are objects to be described for themselves, without any attempt being made to discover from what point of view they can be dissipated, or at what level they can be radicalized and effects become causes” (p. 151).
So when analyzing discourse, contradictions are possible, and these together with a "dispersion of elements" that can buildup a discourse model.
TWO: For Foucault “positivities … [are] an attempt to reveal discursive practices in their complexity and density; to show that to speak is to do something – something other than to express what one thinks; to translate what one knows, and something other than to play with the structures of language (langue)” (p. 209) [italics added by the author]. This seems to be a clear and explicit connection to Austin’s (1962), How to do things with words, although he is not quoted or cited in this book.
Foucault’s (1972) discursive formations (Ch.2), or positivities, and Gee’s (2005) discourse models (in 1999, known as cultural models) seem to have similar underpinnings. But Foucault is in search of something bigger, an archaeology, a “discursive practice … [that] give rise to a corpus of knowledge” (p. 190). It is as if Gee’s discourse models were the pieces that together could buildup archaeology.
Foucault, M. (1972). The Archaeology of Knowledge & The Discourse on Language. New York: Pantheon Books.
Thursday, August 10, 2006
In working with words
Following the trail presented in Ian Parker’s (2002) article, I came across Austin’s (1962) book, How to do things with words. Parker connects discourse analysis with Austin and then Foucault, a connection I have been looking for, a missing piece of my puzzle, the missing link in my chain that connected to Gee’s discourse analysis.
In his article Parker wrote about Austin the follwing, “[I]n this account, language does not simply represent the world, or float on top of it, but does things, brings about or changes sates of affairs” (Section 3.1, second paragraph). The idea of language ‘doing things’ captured my attention and I headed to the library to find Austin’s text. I thought it would help me in my analysis, one that I am about to start, but that I am afraid of, since I am not really a language expert (whatever that could mean – Well, up to a certain point, that I have no formal education in language studies, only general, required courses; and that I have limited knowledge of how language works).
Still, Austin gave me some peace of mind. Throughout his lectures (used instead of chapters), she sustained “to say something is to do something” (p. 12). This kept me looking for more, since in the discussion forum (related to my data set), I will look at the activities people engage in when solving a posed problem or when answering a question. She also looked at the different types of sayings (what purpose do they have) and named them as locutionary (saying something with meaning), illocutionary (saying something with force), and perlocutionary (saying something that produces an effect or consequences). Austing pointed out that
Here it is important to note the inclusion of the context in which the words are said, what makes me think that literal interpretation would not be enough. Still “[r]eference depends on knowledge at the time of utterance” (p. 143) she stated, allowing the space for different interpretations at different times and from different researchers. Even more, a whole sentence is not the object of study, “but the issuing of an utterance in a speech situation” (p. 138), what Gee (2005) calls a line in a stanza that is “devoted to a single topic, event, image, perspective or theme” (p. 127). According to Austin, a utterance is a declaration or articulation, a set of words with meaning, force, and consequences.
Austin ended her lectures by classifying utterances into five groups: verdictives (an exercise of judgment), exercitive (assertion of influence or power), commissive (assumption of obligation and declaration of intention), behabitive (adaptation of an attitude), and expositve (clarification of reasons, arguments, and communications) (p. 162). Some of these will become part of my work very soon.
So now I am headed to Foucault’s (1972), The Archaeology of Knowledge & the Discourse on Language. With this I must have all I need to finish editing the section on discourse analysis and also have a better idea of how to conduct discourse analysis. Even if I don’t I should stop here. The search can be endless and I don’t want to get lost in it.
Austin, J. A. (1962). How to Do Things with Words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Foucault, M. (1972). The Archaeology of Knowledge & the Discourse on Language. NY: Pantheon Books.
Gee, J. P. (2005). An Introduction to Discourse Analysis: Theory and method. [2nd edition]. NY, NY: Routledge.
Parker, I. (2002). Discourse resources in the discourse unit. Discourse Analysis Online, 1 (1). Retrieved on July 17, 2006 from http://www.shu.ac.uk/daol/article3s/v1/n1/a2/parker2002001-paper.html
Other references about How to Do Things with Words include:
Crary, A. The happy truth: J. L. Austin’s How to Do Things with Words. Inquiry 45, pp. 59-80.
Kinzer, G. Excuses and other nonsense: Joan Retallack’s “How to Do Things with Words.” Contemporary Literature, 47 (1), pp. 62-90.
Pålshaugen, Ø. (2004). How to Do Things with Words: Towards a linguistic turn in action research? Concepts and Transformations, 9 (2), pp. 181-203.
In his article Parker wrote about Austin the follwing, “[I]n this account, language does not simply represent the world, or float on top of it, but does things, brings about or changes sates of affairs” (Section 3.1, second paragraph). The idea of language ‘doing things’ captured my attention and I headed to the library to find Austin’s text. I thought it would help me in my analysis, one that I am about to start, but that I am afraid of, since I am not really a language expert (whatever that could mean – Well, up to a certain point, that I have no formal education in language studies, only general, required courses; and that I have limited knowledge of how language works).
Still, Austin gave me some peace of mind. Throughout his lectures (used instead of chapters), she sustained “to say something is to do something” (p. 12). This kept me looking for more, since in the discussion forum (related to my data set), I will look at the activities people engage in when solving a posed problem or when answering a question. She also looked at the different types of sayings (what purpose do they have) and named them as locutionary (saying something with meaning), illocutionary (saying something with force), and perlocutionary (saying something that produces an effect or consequences). Austing pointed out that
“the occasion of an utterance [saying something] matters seriously, and that the words used are to some extent to be ‘explained’ by the ‘context’ in which they are designed to be or have actually been spoken in a linguistic interchange” (p. 100)
Here it is important to note the inclusion of the context in which the words are said, what makes me think that literal interpretation would not be enough. Still “[r]eference depends on knowledge at the time of utterance” (p. 143) she stated, allowing the space for different interpretations at different times and from different researchers. Even more, a whole sentence is not the object of study, “but the issuing of an utterance in a speech situation” (p. 138), what Gee (2005) calls a line in a stanza that is “devoted to a single topic, event, image, perspective or theme” (p. 127). According to Austin, a utterance is a declaration or articulation, a set of words with meaning, force, and consequences.
Austin ended her lectures by classifying utterances into five groups: verdictives (an exercise of judgment), exercitive (assertion of influence or power), commissive (assumption of obligation and declaration of intention), behabitive (adaptation of an attitude), and expositve (clarification of reasons, arguments, and communications) (p. 162). Some of these will become part of my work very soon.
So now I am headed to Foucault’s (1972), The Archaeology of Knowledge & the Discourse on Language. With this I must have all I need to finish editing the section on discourse analysis and also have a better idea of how to conduct discourse analysis. Even if I don’t I should stop here. The search can be endless and I don’t want to get lost in it.
Austin, J. A. (1962). How to Do Things with Words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Foucault, M. (1972). The Archaeology of Knowledge & the Discourse on Language. NY: Pantheon Books.
Gee, J. P. (2005). An Introduction to Discourse Analysis: Theory and method. [2nd edition]. NY, NY: Routledge.
Parker, I. (2002). Discourse resources in the discourse unit. Discourse Analysis Online, 1 (1). Retrieved on July 17, 2006 from http://www.shu.ac.uk/daol/article3s/v1/n1/a2/parker2002001-paper.html
Other references about How to Do Things with Words include:
Crary, A. The happy truth: J. L. Austin’s How to Do Things with Words. Inquiry 45, pp. 59-80.
Clary goes on to present a summary of Austin’s book. From a philosophical perspective she wants to clarify misconceptions of Austin’s work. To a certain point, reading this article is reading Austin’s book again. Clary emphasized “Austin is discouraging philosophers from studying the workings of language by looking at isolated sentences” (p. 66). Again the emphasis of context, “the role the circumstances in which a statements is made” (p. 73), is present here; that is, that meaning is not located in literal interpretations of text.
Kinzer, G. Excuses and other nonsense: Joan Retallack’s “How to Do Things with Words.” Contemporary Literature, 47 (1), pp. 62-90.
In this article, Kinzer analyzed Retallack’s poem, a personal interpretation of Austin’s book. An interesting question presented by Kinzer here is “Is language to be thought of as a formal system of meanings, or as a set of acts and practices that connects us to the world?” (p. 64). This alludes to the idea presented by Austin all along his lectures; that is, “saying something is doing something”. This is also an interesting connection that can be traced to Gee’s (2005) activity building task – “What activity or activities in this piece of language [is] being used [here] to enact …” (p. 12).
Pålshaugen, Ø. (2004). How to Do Things with Words: Towards a linguistic turn in action research? Concepts and Transformations, 9 (2), pp. 181-203.
This article presents action research and its application to the managerial world. At first I thought it would not help me, but the title kept me going, something had to be related to Austin’s work. Some of the ideas included in this article follow: including the participants in the research process, general vs. local knowledge, the importance of dialogue and planning together: all of these related to action research; that there are “kinds of discourses oriented towards understanding something … [and] doing something” (p. 194), that “discourses are always somehow located in time and space” – related to Austin’s book and discourse in general. But, what came as a surprise in this article was the section on the researcher’s process of self-reflection, starting at the end of page 197. Pålshaugen wrote
“A researcher who makes no effort to understand the societal/institutional context of his/her personal experience can hardly be called a social researcher. More precisely, a contextualization as part of one’s scientific presentation is necessary also to situate one’s own experience, that is, to acknowledge the historical and social embeddedness of the particular kind of research one is devoted to/involved in” (p. 199).
I would say then, that the experiences of the researcher are embedded in the research he/she conducts, even if he/she wanted to be “completely objective” – whatever that would mean.
Monday, August 07, 2006
Cognition in Practice, J. Lave (1991, Spanish translation)
La cognición en la práctica came as a surprise. The title in Spanish did not include the subtitle it had in English, Mind, Mathematics and Culture in Everyday Life, so when I read the Table of Contents and the Preface it was a positive feature I was not expecting.
Still, I was troubled by the way Lave treats the concept of transfer in mathematics and that kept me paying special attention to the reasons she would present to support her argument. This book is not about learning mathematics; it is about how adults use arithmetic (the lowest level content area in mathematics, taught in grade school) in everyday activities: such as home finances, supermarket shopping, diet meal preparation, and others.
Two theories of transfer are presented by Lave: first, many specific tools are used to solve specific problems; second, a few general tools can be used to solve many different problems.
An example that is presented in the book is related to the preparation of a recipe, where 3/4 of 2/3 of a cup needs to be used. The person did not use paper and pencil to solve the problem (multiplying fractions will give 1/2 cup), instead measured 2/3 of a cup and then used a circle to take three fourths of the total. But isn’t this something learned in school when working with fractions? The mathematical algorithm is not used, but concretely it is solve as with manipulatives. In this case, I believe transfer has occurred.
How much mathematics do we remember after we leave school? How much mathematics we need to use in our work? How much mathematics/arithmetic we need to use in everyday activities? In school, students are expected to find solutions to specific problems, to find exact solutions. But Lave’s research shows in real life, approximations are usually enough. For example, in the supermarket, when trying to choose between two articles, an exact solution is not necessary.
One might think that it is not important to have students go over so much trouble, trying to learn so many algorithms. But mathematics is not only used in real live activities, it is also used in different ways in our jobs. Being precise is being accurate, correct. And because we never know what are we doing in the future I truly believe it is better to be safe and learn as much as we can.
Anyway, at this moment this book doesn’t seem to help me much with my research, as it is related to how people use mathematics more than to how people learn mathematics outside the school building. One thing I can say, the discussion forum I will be analyzing is more an extension of the classroom/school, a place where students go to get help, to be tutored by more knowledgeable others. Up to a certain point, it works as a zone of proximal development where novice and expert interchange ideas, and working together try to find a solution to a problem posed by the student. Students that participate in the discussion forum are internally motivated, they are going beyond their own means to understand the math they study at school. Now the question remains, up to what point is this informal learning?
Lave, J. (1991). La cognición en la práctica. Buenos Aires, Argentina: Paidós. [Translation by Luis Botella; original title: Cognition in Practice, 1988].
Still, I was troubled by the way Lave treats the concept of transfer in mathematics and that kept me paying special attention to the reasons she would present to support her argument. This book is not about learning mathematics; it is about how adults use arithmetic (the lowest level content area in mathematics, taught in grade school) in everyday activities: such as home finances, supermarket shopping, diet meal preparation, and others.
Two theories of transfer are presented by Lave: first, many specific tools are used to solve specific problems; second, a few general tools can be used to solve many different problems.
An example that is presented in the book is related to the preparation of a recipe, where 3/4 of 2/3 of a cup needs to be used. The person did not use paper and pencil to solve the problem (multiplying fractions will give 1/2 cup), instead measured 2/3 of a cup and then used a circle to take three fourths of the total. But isn’t this something learned in school when working with fractions? The mathematical algorithm is not used, but concretely it is solve as with manipulatives. In this case, I believe transfer has occurred.
How much mathematics do we remember after we leave school? How much mathematics we need to use in our work? How much mathematics/arithmetic we need to use in everyday activities? In school, students are expected to find solutions to specific problems, to find exact solutions. But Lave’s research shows in real life, approximations are usually enough. For example, in the supermarket, when trying to choose between two articles, an exact solution is not necessary.
One might think that it is not important to have students go over so much trouble, trying to learn so many algorithms. But mathematics is not only used in real live activities, it is also used in different ways in our jobs. Being precise is being accurate, correct. And because we never know what are we doing in the future I truly believe it is better to be safe and learn as much as we can.
Anyway, at this moment this book doesn’t seem to help me much with my research, as it is related to how people use mathematics more than to how people learn mathematics outside the school building. One thing I can say, the discussion forum I will be analyzing is more an extension of the classroom/school, a place where students go to get help, to be tutored by more knowledgeable others. Up to a certain point, it works as a zone of proximal development where novice and expert interchange ideas, and working together try to find a solution to a problem posed by the student. Students that participate in the discussion forum are internally motivated, they are going beyond their own means to understand the math they study at school. Now the question remains, up to what point is this informal learning?
Lave, J. (1991). La cognición en la práctica. Buenos Aires, Argentina: Paidós. [Translation by Luis Botella; original title: Cognition in Practice, 1988].
