While there were many interesting sessions because Elinor Ochs,
the program chair, shaped the meeting's focus around the theme of
"Discourse Communities", some points may be of special interest
to xmca.
I was particularly fascinated by a session organized by David
Bogen (Emerson College, associated with U Mass), which I only
heard part of. Title: Discourse communities in the material
world: shared objects/ shared meanings. His own presentation and
that of a collaborator (Leslie Jarmon, U Texas - Austin) dealt
with the uses and limits of Heideggerian phenomenology in the
conceptualization of situated learning and instruction: "Making
sense with materials: Object-situations as an emergent order of
instruction".
Punning on the English meanings of "object-lesson" (a special
experience that teaches an important lesson vs. a lesson learned
through use of objects/artifacts), Bogen and Jarmon considered
the relevance of Heidegger's notions of tools as being ready-to-
hand for tasks and becoming tools-as-such in their use in
material-experiential situations where the user, tool, and
environment form emergent systems with their own rhythms,
practices, affordances, etc. (not too different from Bateson's
man-axe-tree circuit discussed on xlchc a while back).
The empirical data was from a videography by Jarmon of novice
women construction workers acquiring hammer-using skills on-site
as they helped more experienced women build a tool-shed as the
first effort toward building a complete house (all-female
construction project). Close analysis quite clearly shows the
progressive integration of woman-hammer-nail-boards into a single
functional system with emergent properties (some transportable,
some not). It also showed a number of elements of novice-expert
and more-experienced/less-experienced peer interactions
(dimensions of authority vs experience are separable in this
context).
There was also some theoretical discussion, for which I was
lacking the intertexts, relative to controversy surrounding the
proposals of Winograd and Flores for a design model, concerning,
as best I could understand, the issue of abstract-topdown vs more
situationally-immersed design strategies. Notions of embodiment,
habitus were used, and brief reference made to Polanyi and to
scaffolding and the ZPD.
If anyone happened to hear more of the session, or has a better
sense of its contexts and agendas, I'd like to hear about it (on
the list).
I'll also mention Emanuel Schegloff's plenary, basically a
defense of Conversation Analysis, which looked at a few seconds
of video of a diagnostic interview with a neurologically
traumatized (surgical commissurotomy, severing the corpus
callosum right-left hemisphere links) man. Contrary to
conventional diagnosis of 'pragmatic deficits', he showed,
integrating verbal and non-verbal interactions with an
interlocutor, that many aspects of pragmatic functioning seemed
intact (and implying that the models underlying the diagnostic
tasks of the formal interview were inappropriate). There were a
number of interesting methodological discussions (some carried
over from a prior symposium in which I participated on the value
and limits of formalist analysis of discourse and interaction,
and some held outside the session) around the issue of context:
what and when is contextual information outside the event
appropriate for interpreting the event itself? One of the most
important points of Schegloff's presentation was, I think, that
interaction as such, not verbal discourse, provides the primary
basis for units of analysis.
Finally, I'll mention a session in which I participated on the
last day that showed the growing interest in linguistically-
grounded analysis of the social construction of evaluations,
attitudes, judgments, appraisals, affects, subjective reactions,
etc., from the ability or tenacity of persons to the truth or
irony of propositions and proposals. While this session relied
mainly on verbal data, it was quite clear that here too some
larger unit of analysis (e.g. including non-verbal communication,
visual print materials and graphics, etc.) was implicit and
perhaps necessary to define the meanings whose textual cues were
being analyzed. There was also a clear sense that cultural and
social contexts were needed to define both the meanings and the
means by which they were constructed and construed by real or
hypothetical participants.
There was a lot more, of course, and I hope others will also
report what they found interesting. JAY.
JAY LEMKE.
City University of New York.
BITNET: JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM
INTERNET: JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU