mike writes
>I have been in the same boat as Nishizaka and now I am again, reluctantly,
>motivated to go back and look at some tapes and think about how, with
>current technology, I could do a better job of capturing the cognition/
>emotion dynamic. In *Cultural Psychology*, for example (p. 316) I describe
>a child/student pair working through a problem on the number line.
this is, i dare say, the under-discussed area of writing-as-a-skill, yes?
translating 'observations' that possess some semblance of the evocative -
the emotional content of another is interesting, here, because it "evokes"
both an empathy-response, which signals how you might identify the
emotional content,
and as well the descriptive capacity to re-present that in a way that is
as
tangible as the verbal content - the question of accuracy, of course, is
the problem, because identifying an emotion in another
can often be mixed with the ways we empathize, or project - an experience
that might frustrate and anger the researcher, might be experienced
differently by the subject being observed,
but how can we differentiate, how can we know when we are seeing an
emotional reaction in another and projecting our own emotional
expectations in the other's activity?
it's a quality of objectivity and empathy, perhaps.
and then there is the more awkward work of translating it all into a
scientized discourse
and in ways that can portray the emotional content without betraying the
legitimacy of the official discourse -
this is one reason why psychoanalysis is so helpful, not for providing a
language necessarily that can do the translations, but for cultivating a
compassionate perspective - for finding ways to differentiate our empathy
and our objectivity, for articulating the relationship that takes place
when we observe the emotional responses of another,
and so on -
writing about it all, of course, is quite another thing. are adverbs and
adjectives enough to convey the subject's experience? Did he scream
"excitedly" or "gleefully" or ... the need for a vocabulary, too, matters,
as much as the fearlessness that comes with descriptive passages in
academic writing.
this is a huge issue, i think, and thanks mike, for offering a site of
inquiry.
diane
**********************************************************************
:point where everything listens.
and i slow down, learning how to
enter - implicate and unspoken (still) heart-of-the-world.
(Daphne Marlatt, "Coming to you")
***********************************************************************
diane celia hodges
university of british columbia, centre for the study of curriculum and
instruction
==================== ==================== =======================
university of colorado, denver, school of education
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