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Re: [xmca] Gratier, Greenfield, & Isaac




For the record, I am not unsympathetic to Bernsteinian assumptions, esp. where they overlap with Bourdieu (and Basil was very much influenced by Bourdieu, and to some extent vice versa as well).

However, the simple "restricted vs elaborated" version of BB's model is too simple, I think. I am currently a bit tardy in doing a review of R. Hasan's definitive (IMHO) large-scale study of semantic variation and coding orientations (a later, more sophisticated version of the code hypothesis) both in home and between teachers and children. This work was long scattered among papers in different journals, books, and some quite out-of-the-way venues. It's now been collected in an edited volume:

http://www.amazon.com/Semantic-Variation-Meaning-Sociolinguistics-Collected/dp/1904768350

which is the one I'm reviewing.

The relevance of this to GC&I would be interesting to consider. Maybe later this week, for me.

JAY.


Jay Lemke
Professor (Adjunct, 2009-2010)
Educational Studies
University of Michigan
Ann Arbor, MI 48109
www.umich.edu/~jaylemke

Visiting Scholar
Laboratory for Comparative Human Communication
University of California -- San Diego
La Jolla, CA
USA 92093






On Dec 4, 2009, at 12:48 AM, David Kellogg wrote:

The part that Jay is puzzled by caught my eye as well. It's right on the bottom of p. 297:

"Cultural conflicts between Latino family values and American pedagogical values were also studied empirically by Greenfield, Quiroz and Raeff (2000) through an analysis of patent-teacher conferences. They found widely varying emphases on helping and sharing as well as high levels of misunderstanding and confusion between Latino parents and US trained mainstream teachers. Implicit cultural conflicts were shown to clearly (?) relate to underlying and nonverbalized cultural assumptions. In these conferences, the teacher, having adopted the 'individualistic' assumptions of US school culture, was verbally constructing an 'individualistic' child, whereas the parent was verbally constructing a 'collectivistic' one. As an example, one element in the 'collectivistic worldview is a dispreference for praise, which makes one child stand out. In the 'individualistic' (p. 298) worldview, in contrast, praise is strongly preferred. In one conference, teh teacher's praise for the child made a father extremely uncomfortable. Given that these parents were concerned with socializing their children into tehir culture, we would imagine that high levels of praise in the classroom would cause conflict with the children's (?) more collectivistic worldview, based on their home socialization."

This paragraph is later transformed into a research hypothesis on p. 303:

"H4: We predicted more use of praise in the non-BC classroom and more use of criticism in the BC classroom." (p. 303)

It is also the object of quantitative analysis on p. 304: "the number of instances of praise and criticism directed at the students"

It seems clear, to answer Jay's query, that this means praise/ criticism of the child by the teacher. What is less clear is how these can be "clearly" related to NONVERBALIZED and UNDERLYING cultural assumptions,,

If they are underlying and assumed, why would they be verbalized at all? If they are wholly or partly nonverbalized, how can they be quantified in the number of instances of praise and criticism directed at students?

In addition, it's not at all clear how or if research based on parent-teacher conferences, which are performances of a rather different nature in which the child does not take part, is valid for classroom research.

I think, unlike Jay, I am rather sympathetic to the Bernsteinian assumptions that underly this kind of research. I do believe that there is something called a restricted code and a more elaborated one, and I even believe that up to a certain point a home-school mismatch can be debilitating for children.

But I also believe that after a certain point (say, fourth or fifth grade) kids begin to talk like other kids and not like their parents. So when we find restricted codes reproducing themselves in learner language, it is not blameable on parent cultures, but rather on the child's own emerging volition.

That is the bad news. The good news is that, like foreign language codes (which are certainly elaborated), the fossilization of restricted codes is highly susceptible to teacher intervention.

David Kellogg
Seoul National University of Education



--- On Thu, 12/3/09, mike cole <lchcmike@gmail.com> wrote:


From: mike cole <lchcmike@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [xmca] Gratier, Greenfield, & Isaac
To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Cc: "Patricia Greenfield" <greenfield@psych.ucla.edu>, mgratier@u-paris10.fr
Date: Thursday, December 3, 2009, 4:51 PM


I am cc'ing authors in case they have not signed up for the discussion. A
mixture of questions have been raised that perhaps
they can help to help us sort out.
mike

On Thu, Dec 3, 2009 at 3:00 PM, yuan lai <laiyuantaiwan@gmail.com> wrote:

Michael, I believe there are ways that mirror the “natural way” to teach cultural capital overtly. I’ve seen 3- and 4-year-olds from families of refugee status quickly appropriated the value placed on print, showing interest in print, wanting to write their names, feeling proud of their own attempts, not long after establishing a relationship with the preschool teacher in various activities in a family literacy program, which embeds print in almost all its classroom activities. For example, the teacher read to the children while they were eating, pointed out print and signs in the environment for them as they went out for recess, and wrote notes in front of them to request materials needed for the classroom. The transformation
of
the children’s attention, interest, and desire is amazing given that the children hardly understood English when they entered the program and their parents seldom read to them or pointed out print around due to low reading and writing ability in English and in their first language. I've since been convinced of the importance of setting up a learning environment that has
an
emphasis on relationship building.

Jay, until you revealed it, I didn't see it. I reread the section leading
to
the hypotheses section and found that there is some reference to praise,
but
not at all to criticism.

It appears that the same two classrooms (BC and non-BC) have been studied from different angles and the findings seem to be consistent with Gratier
et
al.'s framework. This article certainly extends their work. Terms such as
style and collectivism do connote essentialization; the authors’ data
provide substantiation of the essentialzed norms and communication styles (although what one sets out to do confines what one looks for) but I think they could have gone a step further. The example of a father’s feeling uncomfortable when the teacher praised his child does not tell how he may act or say to people in his in-group. There is also the assumption that
home
socialization remains the same after immigration. Given the contrastive
framework in Gratier et al., I see little reasons not to include the
videotaping of the same groups of children (some of them, more likely) interacting with their parents at home. Or is another paper forthcoming?

  Yuan


On Thu, Dec 3, 2009 at 4:46 AM, Michael Glassman <MGlassman@ehe.osu.edu
wrote:

Jay
,
It seems to me a playing out - at least to some extent of Bourdieu's
larger
theory. That increasing the cultural capital of the teacher in relation
to
the class would increase the level of social capital, which would lead to some of the findings they present. A lack of cultural capital (usually
assumed on the part of the students) would certainly lead to more
difficulties in communication and the students feeling more uncomfortable
in
class.

But this leads to a fairly radical assumption on the part of the authors concerning habitus, even in terms of Bourdieu's theory. That is that cultural capital can be taught overtly, as cultural capital - Bourdieu
seems
to emphasize that we learn cultural capital more or less unconsciously, through everyday experience in the right situations (whether it is with parents or in a school system where the type of cultural capital that
leads
to easy social capital is pervasive). I'm not so sure this is possible.

I have another difficult which is that I read habitus as defining class distinctions rather than cultural distinctions, and that I'm not sure his ideas translate between the two, or make that much sense if they do. The types of cultures like Latino/Latina cultures are going to have class
distinctions defined by different habitas, defined most easily by
different
levels of economic capital, and different recogntions of symbolic capital (and symbolic violence), To say a population so large has a single type
of
habitus I think is problematic - especially when using a terms such as collectivist, which is both categorical and far too broad I think to be really salient in describing classes, let alone entire cultures (I think level and type of social capital might be more appropriate if you are
going
to use Bourdeiu's theory as a starting point).

Michael

________________________________

From: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu on behalf of Jay Lemke
Sent: Thu 12/3/2009 12:16 AM
To: XMCA Forum
Subject: [xmca] Gratier, Greenfield, & Isaac




I don't know how many people have yet had a chance to look at the MCA
article-of-the-month (Gratier, Greenfield, & Isaac on communicative
habitus and attunement in classrooms).

I must have missed something, so could someone explain to me how they derive the hypothesis that the more culturally attuned classroom will have more criticism (by the teacher? or by everyone?) and less praise,
than the mismatched classroom?

And what do you think generally about the methodology in this work?

JAY.



Jay Lemke
Professor (Adjunct, 2009-2010)
Educational Studies
University of Michigan
Ann Arbor, MI 48109
www.umich.edu/~jaylemke <http://www.umich.edu/%7Ejaylemke> <
http://www.umich.edu/%7Ejaylemke>

Visiting Scholar
Laboratory for Comparative Human Communication
University of California -- San Diego
La Jolla, CA
USA 92093






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