Dear Gill-
I'd like to recommend you four books if you did not read them:
Hargreaves, A. (1994). Changing teachers, changing times: Teachers' work and
culture in the postmodern age. London: Cassell.
Gee, J. P. (1996). Social linguistics and literacies: Ideology in discourses
(2nd ed.). London: Taylor & Francis.
Lemke, J. L. (1995). Textual politics: Discourse and social dynamics.
London: Taylor & Francis.
Latour, B., & Woolgar, S. (1979). Laboratory life: The social construction
of scientific facts. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications.
These books can be helpful for different reasons but they can help you with
conceptual framework and methodology.
I don't think you are reinventing the wheel. The questions you are raising
are very important. Bruno Latour made his famous study of a biology lab in
San Diego (?). I'd like to read similar research about teachers. Maybe you
can do it (in whole or in part).
What do you think?
Eugene
-----Original Message-----
From: Gill Boag-Munroe [mailto:gillboag@yahoo.co.uk]
Sent: Monday, August 11, 2003 10:58 AM
To: xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
Subject: Fwd: RE: Activity Theory and tools for analysing language
Dear Eugene,
Thanks for that: you have really made me feel better about my work.
Gill
Eugene Matusov <ematusov@UDel.Edu> wrote:
From: "Eugene Matusov"
To:
Subject: RE: Activity Theory and tools for analysing language
Date: Mon, 11 Aug 2003 10:51:19 -0400
Dear Gill-
This is a great message!!!! I am sure that other xmca folks would like to
participate in discussion of issues you are bringing. May I suggest posting
it on the xmca list, please? However, if you decide not to do that, I can
answer privately to your very interesting issues and concerns that you are
raising here. What do you think?
Take care,
Eugene
-----Original Message-----
From: Gill Boag-Munroe [mailto:gillboag@yahoo.co.uk]
Sent: Monday, August 11, 2003 5:26 AM
To: ematusov@UDel.Edu
Subject: RE: Activity Theory and tools for analysing language
Dear Eugene,
Many thanks for your help: perhaps an editor will pick up on our searches
and decide it's important to translate him for us. (And I hear the Danish
Bacon squadron revving their engines already!)
I'm working on my PhD at present, and feeling very uncertain about my
knowledge and understandings. Please forgive me if I state what seems to you
to be terribly obvious.
I came across Jager's work in Wodak and Meyer (2000) as I was reading about
Critical Discourse Analysis. I am quite fired by the political aspects of
Initial Teacher Training and the way that it is assumed in England that
teachers have limitless time and energy to fit the complex work of inducting
trainees into a workload that is in constant flux and already overcrowded.
Perhaps because my subject is English, and the English subject curriculum
has been in greater turbulence than any other, I am more sensitive to this
pace of change.
So, in attempting to answer the question 'how do teachers make sense of
their work in ITT in the context of all their other work?' through an
activity theoretical frame, I felt that I wanted to answer the question by
investigating two key tools: the personal philosophy of education that
teachers bring to their work, and the language they use in order to
understand and shape their work. As we presently have a government which
plays with words to shape the reality it wishes to bring about - in the
minds of its electorate, at least - and as I had become aware that
government directives on education appeared to be manipulating the language
with which it wanted teachers to work (no new thinking here!) I wanted to
explore the language tool in detail to find out how far teachers create
their own discourse, how far they absorb government discourses, whether the
two are actually diff! erent, etc. The question then comes, which
methodolgy do I use for analysing my textual data? Which is compatible with
an overarching activity theoretical frame?
I like the work of Norman Fairclough, which I'd used a lot in Senior school
teaching - I share much of his rebellious attitude, perhaps -, and there
seems to be much in CDA which is compatible with AT thinking -
contextualisation, language as social, language as constructing reality,
hierarchies of language. So I explored further and came across Jager, who
explicity links AT and CDA, in his chapter in Wodak and Meyer. I'm sure
that others make the link, too, but I haven't found (or realised that I've
found) them yet.
Sometimes I feel as though I'm trying to reinvent the wheel here, and if I
were just bright enough, I'd see that others have done a lot of this work
before. However, I plod on, trying to separate out the strands of Activity
Theory and the strands of linguistic thinking used by the theorists. I
would really welcome some pointers!
Gill
Gill Boag-Munroe
23 Shenstone Avenue
Norton
Stourbridge
DY8 3EJ
01384 863590
gxb822@bham.ac.uk
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Gill Boag-Munroe
23 Shenstone Avenue
Norton
Stourbridge
DY8 3EJ
01384 863590
gxb822@bham.ac.uk
_____
Want to chat instantly with your online friends?
<http://uk.rd.yahoo.com/mail/tagline_messenger/*http:/uk.messenger.yahoo.com
/> Get the FREE Yahoo! Messenger
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