> My colleague Doug Vipond taught me to put all the textbooks side by
> side on the reserve shelf and tell the students, "Go see what two or
> three of them say about early language development." That seems to
> me to inscribe the text into a much less pushy role -- to treat it,
> in fact, as a reference text.
>
> It's the same text in each case, but it's a different utterance, as
> Bakhtin might say.
I am very sorry I could not reply any earlier as this is the
spring-conference time in Australia.
I quite like the methodology-perspective that has come through your mail
rather than just focusing on a text as a category within itself. This is
exactly where I was pushing...:-)
And then there are also other points about which I spent time thinking:
i.e. the basis for saying 'go and find out this or that'. As if this or
that existed per se, which is often an inbuilt assertion of all courses
and especially in academia. Fields are treated and are introduced to
students as parts of their courses as if they were autonomous categories
floating in the space of reality. In the field of second language pedagogy
(my field) when "taught" at uni as a degree or so, you have *subjects* :
autonomous entities waiting to be applied in real contexts by mediating
pedagogues unable to create the real thing themselves but able to extract
the essentials and give them to learners.
ania:-)