Re: [xmca] Gratier, Greenfield, & Isaac

[Larry Purss <lpurss@shaw.ca>]

David
 
Your analysis of how we proceed from micro to macro VS from macro to micro is brilliant (is that too emotional a term for academic discourse where we should remain reserved).
I have been trying to integrate the various cultural-critical discourses with the micro-genetic "experience-near" acts of cognition and "affect-attunement".
You have suggested a framework which helps me begin to understand how the socio-cultural (historical-cultural) standpoint and the cultural-critical standpoint take different positions on the same landscape.
I hope others have reflections on the way you have elaborated the contrasts
Thank you
 
Larry


----- Original Message -----
From: David Kellogg <vaughndogblack@yahoo.com>
Date: Friday, December 4, 2009 9:30 pm
Subject: Re: [xmca] Gratier, Greenfield, & Isaac
To: Culture ActivityeXtended Mind <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>

> Sometime in the late twentieth century, literary critics made 
> the discovery that all the qualitative methods developed for the 
> exegeses of literary texts could be readily applied to so-called 
> "non-literary" texts. This included biographical, formal, "new 
> criticism" based on the text itself, and a plethora of more or 
> less committed approaches like feminism, multiculturalism, 
> postcolonialism all of which share a cultural-critical stance of 
> one kind or another. Cultural critical discussion of the content 
> of texts, which could be readily confirmed by juicy quotes 
> (sorry, I mean, by the judicious application of cultural 
> analysis) led to a "postructuralist" critical discourse analysis.
>  
> There is a kind of classroom discourse analysis that I would 
> describe as qualitative literary criticism applied to teacher 
> talk, in which words like "enthusiasm", "excitement", and 
> "knowledge building" are used the way we used to talk about the 
> muscularity of Milton's metaphors or the crystalline structure 
> of Pope's verses. 
>  
> But as Halliday points out, a discourse analysis of this type, 
> without some systematic and clear link to grammar on the one 
> hand and semantics on the other, is really no analysis at all; 
> it's just a running commentary on a text, with some selective 
> highlights tendentiously provided to bolster the critic's 
> argument. That's why Gratier, Greenfield and Isaac heroically 
> try to confirm their micro-analyses with a more macro-
> logogenetic comparison.
>  
> How does an analyst manage to connect the kind of microgenetic 
> analysis that we really require to catch actual acts of 
> cognition and communication in the wild with something more 
> macrogenetic, even ontogenetic? I think there are two basic 
> tendancies. 
> The first tendancy is the tendancy we see in ethnomethodology 
> and conversation analysis influenced work, and it's one I would 
> describe as downward reductionist. The analyst takes SINGULARITY 
> as the key feature of communicative/cognitive events, and tries 
> to find the implicit communicative principle in a single 
> particular event (e.g. methods of turn-taking, the latching of 
> adjacency pairs, etc.). If these can be shown to inhere in the 
> actual meaning-making procedures of the participants themselves, 
> then presumably they can be generalized to the macrogenetic 
> plane. 
>  
> The problem with this appears on p. 305 of Gratier, Greenfield 
> and Isaac, where the authors admit that their inter-rater 
> agreement rate was low: 68% for the collaborative completions, 
> 75% for repetition, and only 62% (!!!) for nonverbal imitations. 
> For praise and criticism the inter-rater reliability was 78% and 
> 71% respectively.
>  
> Raters are trained, and when that doesn't work (as it often 
> doesn't in my own work) they train each other until it does. But 
> if even trained and re-trained raters cannot agree on what 
> constitutes praise and what constitutes criticism, it's hard to 
> see how participants consistently do. One cannot help suspecting 
> that they simply don't, and that this may as responsible for 
> the discomfort reported in parent teacher conferences by 
> Greenfield, Quiroz and Raeff as anything else.
>  
> It seems to me that the socio-cultural (or cultural-historical) 
> approach to the methodological problem of linking micro- and 
> macro- levels of analysis is, as the name implies, a much more 
> UPWARDLY moving methodological maneuver. It involves trying to 
> find a point where microgenetic changes pass over into 
> macrogenetic ones, and often that involves working backwards 
> from macrogenetic differences to microgenetic ones.
>  
> That is why I am not so shocked as some participants by the 
> "essentializing" language of cooperation vs. competition, 
> "collective" vs. "individualistic" or even Latino vs. Anglo. 
> Actually, I think this kind of language is, as Larry says, a 
> heuristic; a form of "hypothesis and then research", and it's 
> excusable in a socio-cultural (cultural historical) attempt to 
> link the micro with the macro.
>  
> Where I think I really differ with the authors is in the way 
> that IRE is selectively employed to describe the latter and not 
> the former, and "criticism" is selectively employed to describe 
> the former and not the latter. It seems to me that BOTH of the 
> following interactions can be described in terms of IRE:
>  
> BC:
> T:El mar es la colecion de much agua, pero agua fresca o agua salada?
> S: Agua salada.
> T: OK.
>  
> Non-BC: 
> T: Tell us what an artist does. What does an artist do?
> S: Draw.
> T: Draws. OK? How about a photographer?
> S: Takes pictures.
> T: OK. 
>  
> The usual way we think about IRE involves emphasizing the role 
> of the E, either as reward (in neo-behaviorist teaching) or as a 
> bridge to linking exchanges into sequences (in the work of Hugh 
> Mehan, and latterly in that of Nassaji and Wells, and Gordon 
> Wells generally). But here both teachers are moving from the 
> general to the particular, from definition to 
> exemplification, using "OK" as their E move. 
>  
> It's pretty clear to me that the INITIATE is the key difference. 
> In BC the initiate is a STATEMENT, followed by a question with 
> only one degree of freedom. The result is a consensus, albeit 
> one based on very little choice (and one which confirms what one 
> child said earlier in the exchange, "ya me lo se todo").
>  
> In the Non-BC we have a much more open opening: a command which 
> actually REQUIRES participation, followed by a wh-question. The 
> child's response is the object of critical uptake (focussed on 
> verb-subject agreement). But the second question indicates an 
> implicit CRITICISM of this response, because a photographer can 
> also be said to be an artist, but a photographer does not draw.
>  
> So it appears to me that the teacher in the Non-BC classroom is 
> being a lot more critical, at least implicitly. The difference 
> between the two classrooms might actually be in the 
> demandingness ("prospectivity" is the proper technical term, I 
> guess) of the initiate. 
>  
> The problem is that there is nothing inherent or universally 
> generalizeable in demandingness; it really does depend on the 
> needs and on the volition of the participants. In a classroom, 
> however, those needs and that volition are, either explicitly or 
> implicitly, explainable by that faith in a link between learning 
> and development which we all do confess.
>  
> David Kellogg
> Seoul National University of Education 
>  
> 
> --- On Fri, 12/4/09, Larry Purss <lpurss@shaw.ca> wrote:
> 
> 
> From: Larry Purss <lpurss@shaw.ca>
> Subject: Re: [xmca] Gratier, Greenfield, & Isaac
> To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
> Date: Friday, December 4, 2009, 5:21 AM
> 
> 
> I wanted to amplify an aspect of the article that is implicit 
> and make it more explicit.
> On page 312 various frames are offered to explain the reason for 
> the alternative communicative styles.
> A) in the BC class the interactions are peer-group led rather 
> than teacher led
> B)It might reflect a sense of partaking in a group voice and 
> sharing a coherent group identity.
> C)It may denote a general OPENNESS TO NOVELTY and creative 
> responding and an orientation to verbal PLAY,NARRATIVE, AND HUMOR.
> 
> There is another discourse which focuses on creating "COMMON 
> GROUND" (p313) and "student attentional engagement and emotional 
> expression" (313) which "results in a rhythmic pattern that 
> creates ensemble" (313).
> This is the dramaturlogical discourse of "enactments" and "PLAY" 
> and language "games"  This discourse emphasizes metaphors that 
> point to creating or opening spaces where common ground emerges 
> from novelty.
> I share sympathy with the perspective of this article that 
> emphasizes collaborative emergence.  Yes the terms 
> collectivistic and individualistic are essentializing terms but 
> if we view them as heuristic language games to map the territory 
> of the relational patterns emerging and creating common ground 
> their are various discourses which can point us in that direction.
> 
> Larry
> 
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: David Kellogg <vaughndogblack@yahoo.com>
> Date: Friday, December 4, 2009 12:50 am
> Subject: Re: [xmca] Gratier, Greenfield, & Isaac
> To: lchcmike@gmail.com, Culture ActivityeXtended Mind 
> <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
> > 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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