Dear people:
This interaction between Ana and Gordon illuminates Gordon's article for
me.
I first read the article through, skipping the pages of transcript. At
that level of reading, I appreciated the extension of Arne Ratheil's
participation, enjoyed the diagrams, but wondered what all the fuss was
about -- why didn't Gordon simply state that since the two girls were
engaged in joint activity, there were two "subjects" on the left side of
the triangle? I felt mildly irritated that this simple solution had
escaped him.
Then I read the transcript and realized I had missed the point (bad
reading habits, to put it mildly).
Then I read this message, below. I benefited from hearing Ana point to
"that brief moment" when the object gets created, and then refers to the
network or matrix (I'd use the word ecology except that the list has
moved on to Alfred Lang's semiotic ecology, and I'm not sure how these
two uses of the word fit together) of cultural work that enfolds that
moment, and benefited from Gordon's response:
"The various
dimensions of this activity, which go into this brief instance range
from
symbols/tools that are made by a culture over a long period of time and
by
many people, to the very small moment in which a new meaning is created:
language they use; books they use; school as an institution where
children
like them can engage in this type of activity; clothes they wear; their
own
personal realtionship and the brief history of the sicence class..."
Much of my work revolves around conflict: mutually conflicting needs,
demands, positions, goals, etc -- (at this very moment I am interrupted
by a phone call from a union steward representing the Adult Educators in
the Chicago City Colleges system, who may be going on strike soon) and
HOW I WISH I could tape a passage of negotiation in which such a "brief
moment in which an object gets created."
A thought: sometimes the object that gets created -- the consummated
racheting forward of comprehension -- is not friendly. For example,
think of people meeting together, talking, and discovering that what the
other party really means is an indication that the paths of the two
parties will diverge even more sharply. Certainly, they understand each
other; certainly, the "object" that is created through the discourse
changes the choices of action that the parties now can take -- but they
won't be building a land yacht together.
It's pretty unlikely that I would ever be able to video tape a moment
like this in a real labor-management negotiation. There are teaching
videos that reproduce scenes like that, though, that we use in classes
and that people acknowledge are lifelike. But they are performances, not
the real thing. Too bad -- I think it would be tremendously interesting
to study such a moment (either a jointly created moment of successful
negotiation, or some other turning point in negotiation) in the same
depth as is provided by Gordon's article.
Helena Worthen
Chicago Labor Education Program
Gordon Wells wrote:
> Ana wrote:
>
>> Those are the
>
>> lines 36 - 43 in Gordon's transcript. I am transcribing them here
>> without
>> gestures and intonation - I hope you watched the movie and have the
>> transcript near by:
>> 36L: "Look at that sailboat"
>> 37J: "That's neat."
>> 38L: "Yeah and then we could make something like use *air to make it
>> roll"
>> 39J: "*wind power"
>> 40L: "like use *wind power?
>> 41J: "*Yeah"
>> 42L: "I mean <that's>"
>> 43J: "*Yeah - wind power. (Taps rapidly on picture then looks at L
>> on
>> "wind power")
>
>> When you watch the movie you see that this is the moment when an
>> OBJECT gets
>> created. This object is not the same "thing" as the picture in the
>> book -
>> which is there at the beginning. We could say that it was the
>> picture in the
>> book that "made" them construct their own object. In that sense -
>> the
>> picture book is a very complex object made by someone else (many
>> people,
>> whole systems, really: a writer, a painter, a publisher, a
>> book-seller,
>> school teacher who bought the book, and before that: the object
>> which was
>> depicted ...etc - you could probably trace the history there at
>> least
>> cursory). But, a quick glance, little longer than at other pictures
>> plus L's
>> comment about air/wind power and J moves in 43 (underlined) to look
>> away in
>> space, open her mouth (impressed??), then looks back at L. This is a
>>
>> "click" - their object is made now. They continue to discuss this
>> object
>> (how to make wind power...). And there is a pleasure at creating
>> something
>
> together - the bond between the girls strengthens...
>
>> One should note that this really is an object of a different kind -
>> it is an
>> object of their dialogue - it does not exist as a thing
>> ("gegenstand") but
>> as a concept or a plan that they start to elaborate.
>> What is remarkable here is not that there is a difference between on
>> one
>> hand, social relationship between the two girls, and on the other,
>> their
>> individual relationships with the "idea of the boat on wheels", but
>> that
>> there is a connection (relation) between these two different
>> orientations.
>> And each part of this triangle: "L"-"boat"-"J" mediates between the
>> two
>> others. Each one of them becomes something a bit different through
>> this
>> motion.
>>
>> This is what I was trying to talk about - there is a functional
>> asymmetry of
>> the relations within the mediating relationships in meaning making.
>> I do see this kind of meaning making as different from other kinds
>> of
>> communication between people, or between things, or between
>> people/animal/things. I do not think that it is isolated, though
>> from other
>> types of communication, instead it is very integrated into all
>> others. But I
>> do see a need to study this particular type of communication in more
>> detail
>> because it is an activity that transforms (or forms) its makers. The
>> various
>> dimensions of this activity, which go into this brief instance range
>> from
>> symbols/tools that are made by a culture over a long period of time
>> and by
>> many people, to the very small moment in which a new meaning is
>> created:
>> language they use; books they use; school as an institution where
>> children
>> like them can engage in this type of activity; clothes they wear;
>> their own
>> personal realtionship and the brief history of the sicence class...;
>> their
>
>> relationships with the other children;...).
>
> Thank you, Ana, for capturing the significance of this brief moment
> so well. It was exactly this part that originally drew me to work on
> the video-clip. It seemed to epitomize the sort of "dialogic inquiry"
> that I have been exploring and trying to promote in classrooms for the
> last twenty years. Your commentary also helps me answer Nate's
> question: "Was the video an after effect or was it an essential
> element in the coding or anaysis? If one was just focusing on the
> typical audio transcription, certain actions, gestures, movements etc
> would be missed." Much of the work I have done on classroom
> interaction has been based on audio transcripts only. However all the
> extracts I have written about in detail have been based on the video
> recording. I learned my lesson quite a few years ago when I used a
> video clip with a doctoral seminar in which I interacted with two
> students about an experiment they had been doing. My familiarity with
> the episode was based on discussion of the transcript - with Jay among
> others - (based on the audio track only) but when we viewed the video
> in class it became apparent that I had missed the nonverbal
> participation of one of the children - not only in my analysis of the
> episode, but also in the moment when I was with the children. I was
> mortified by my insensitivity, which my doctoral class brought to my
> attention with some satisfaction! Since then I have reanalyzed the
> material (http://www.oise.utoronto.ca/%7Egwells/Shoebox.html) and, as
> a result, started to pay attention to much more of what's going on
> whenever people interact. Writing about the land yacht episode was one
> outcome of this change of heart and practice. In some ways it is an
> "ideal" example, in that - as Ana points out - so much of importance
> can be clearly seen as well as heard in this five minute episode. As
> several people have pointed out, participation in a joint activity
> involves a very complex dance, in which - very often - different
> individuals are relating to each other and the material setting in
> different ways, to different "music", and on different time-scales.
> So, from an analytic point of view, it is difficult to gain a focused
> understanding of what is going on and (re)present one's understanding
> in a publishable article. (Alfred's messages provide a particularly
> relevant alternative view on the value of such analytic attempts.) A
> lot of a teacher's skill is in coordinating and, frequently, leading
> the dance in such a way that all the students are co-participating,
> contributing in their different ways and appropriating new ways of
> acting, thinking, feeling and talking in the process. In many
> classrooms this does not seem to happen very effectively. One of my
> goals as an educational researcher is to discover the different ways
> in which teachers can be successful in creating a collaborating
> community in which all learn with and from each other. But the episode
> is not "ideal" in the sense that it is "superior" to what was going on
> in the rest of the classroom. I spent quite a number of hours in the
> classroom and saw other groups equally fully engaged in planning and
> making their working models. Nate observes: " the group in front
> while maybe not goofing off, interacted differently with the object.
> They seemed less focused, more action in the now, and less interested
> in dialogue." This particular pair were twins, fairly recently
> arrived in Canada from SE Asia and not yet entirely adjusted to the
> norms that had become established over the course of the year. But
> later in the episode, one of the focal girls turns to help them decide
> what they might make. I think the main reason why one might see the
> land yacht episode as "ideal" has to do with the nature of the
> activity. While specifying certain requirements (use of junk
> materials, write concurrently in log books), the teacher encouraged
> both initiativre and collaboration and, most importantly, gave the
> children choice and ownership of their project while addressing the
> broad theme of mechanical technology. It is also significant that this
> episode took place fairly late in the school year, by which time the
> class had established productive ways of working and interacting. The
> teacher, Zoe Donoahue, was one of the founding members of the
> Developing Inquiring Communities in Education Project (DICEP) and,
> together with several other teachers and myself and a colleague, was
> committed to trying to adopt an inquiry approach to the curriculum.
> She and her colleagues have written about their work in Action, Talk
> and Text, a collection that I edited (Teachers College Press, 2001).
> Zoe's chapter in that book is about the ways in which her class uses
> class meetings to discuss how they live and work together as a
> community. You can also read another article by her in Networks, an
> Online Journal for Teacher Research, Vol. 1 (1998)
> http://www.oise.utoronto.ca/~ctd/networks/ in which she describes how
> she changed her way of organizing literature discussions as a result
> of studying videotapes of her early attempts one year. I hope these
> remarks provide a little more context for the episode under
> discussion. Gordon --
> Gordon Wells
> UC Santa Cruz.
> gwells@cats.ucsc.eduhttp://people.ucsc.edu/~gwells/
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