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Re: [xmca] need CHAT training

I think Martin suggests an excellent line of thinking.
Peter and Alcione, on reading your emails, the work of Kris Gutierrez immediately came to my mind. You are working with college students and people about to enter the workforce, while Kris and colleagues have focused more on younger students and student-teacher relations, at least in the articles I am familiar with. But the methodology she uses is strongly based on CHAT and could be very helpful. So I am providing links to a few articles for you to browse. 
As she and a colleague explain in a 2006 paper, "For more than a  
decade, we have been involved in research with students for whom  
English is not the home language, learning what children can do across  
a range of practices and contexts, and trying to understand better the  
various pathways and contextual supports that promote their literacy  
learning."

In fact, this first article I am providing a link to begins with the  
question Martin asks - of how to pose "the problem" in the first  
place.  Something to keep in mind is that by posing "cultural"  
identity and "professional" identity in the way you touch on in your e- 
mail, you are implicitly viewing not just culture but also social  
class in specific ways.  After all, you are training these pre-service  
teachers to be professional members of a workforce.  And being of non- 
dominant cultural backgrounds, they are also dealing with the issue of  
being members - or at least being considered members - of what is  
obviously a very large and varied language, cultural and ethnic  
minority in the US.  I especially appreciate the insights Kris and  
colleagues provide on those issues.  So this first article helps to  
drive out some of the problems involved with how to initially pose  
"the problem," just as Martin suggests.

Orellana, M. & Gutiérrez, K. (2006).  What's the problem? Constructing  
different genres for the study of English Learners. Research in the  
Teaching of English., 41 (1), 118-123.

http://gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/files/gutierrez/gutierrez_RT0411Last.pdf

************

This next article precedes the above one and describes some of the  
more general issues involved.  "In this brief essay, we take the  
opportunity to engage our literacy colleagues in a re-examination of  
approaches in describing English Learners and other non-dominant  
students in literacy research."  In your case, you are training  
teachers who will be very engaged in such issues - as you are  
yourselves by conducting this study - and even just by being their  
teachers and part of their support system.

Gutiérrez, K. & Orellana, M. (2006). The problem of English Learners:  
Constructing genres of difference. .Research in the Teaching of  
English., 40 (4), 502-507.

http://gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/files/gutierrez/gutierrez_RT0404Last.pdf

*************

There are a few more articles available on Kris's site at http://gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/members/gutierrez

**************

On the lchc site is a paper Kris and two colleagues published in 1995  
that I found very interesting and which generated a very good  
discussion on xmca a few years ago, as I recall.  It discusses the  
underlife and counterscripts of students in what seems to me to be a  
typical LA classroom.  I worked in a factory for 28 years and some of  
the methodology Kris uses to analyze these classroom dynamics between  
the students and the teacher could be applied to worker-management  
relations on a factory floor (script and counterscript, underlife,  
cultural repertoires, etc.)  Possibly germane to your project, perhaps  
some the methodological ideas this article describes would also work  
in relation to the dynamics of training teachers, especially those  
with "hybrid" (Mexican, US, etc.) identities.

I liked the way Kris and colleagues in this article framed a number of  
ideas and tools from quite a variety of perspectives - Bakhtin,  
Bourdieu, Goffman, Gee, Geertz, Luke, Foucault, Vygotsky, Leont'ev,  
Cole, Engstrom, Rogoff, Lave, Wenger, Freire, and others - succinctly  
tied these ideas and tools together within a cultural-historical  
activity theory framework - and then showed how to apply these tools  
within this framework in an analysis of a recorded classroom  
situation.  The title of the paper comes from one of the scenes being  
examined where the teacher is trying to teach a lesson about the 1954  
Supreme Court ruling Brown vs Bd of Education while students get  
laughs out of diverting the discussion toward James Brown and other  
jokes.  I think the paper offers some very interesting insights into  
what is actually going on.  My inclination is that this paper could  
serve as a possible model for doing certain kinds of empirical  
research and CHAT analysis - and in any case offers a very interesting  
methodological application of CHAT theory in a dynamic social  
situation where one side controls the script and the other side must  
empower itself with counterscripts and an underlife.

Script, Counterscript, and Underlife in the Classroom: James Brown  
versus Brown v. Board of Education.

by Kris Gutierrez, Betsy Rymes, University of California, Los Angeles
Joanne Larson, University of Rochester

http://lchc.ucsd.edu/MCA/Paper/kris.pdf


Sorry to throw so many articles at you.  My suggestion is to just  
browse and see what resonates.  I hope you find something helpful.

- Steve




On Sep 7, 2010, at 1:56 PM, Martin Packer wrote:


Hi Alcione and Peter,


First thing I say to anyone who comes to me for research advice is,  
what question do you want to answer? The clearer the question, the  
easier the decisions about conceptual framework and methodological  
tools and techniques.

Here the question seems to be: How does the development of these  
student teachers' cultural identities interact with their  
professional identities?  Can you articulate that a bit more for us?  
For one thing, it seems to presuppose something that would need to  
be confirmed, namely that there *is* an interaction between two  
identities. That may well be the case, but it may be better to frame  
the question in a more open ended way. Or perhaps that's not the  
central question?

Martin

On Sep 7, 2010, at 4:37 PM, Peter Farruggio wrote:


This is a recent exchange between Mike and my colleague, Alcione  
Ostorga, about our interest in learning more about how to use CHAT  
for a longitudinal case study we'd like to do with a group of our  
bilingual preservice students.

I'm going to follow Mike's suggestion and tap into the collective  
brain power on xmca to see if anybody can guide us in learning how  
to use CHAT

Pete Farruggio
________________________________________
From: Alcione Ostorga
Sent: Monday, August 16, 2010 4:03 PM
To: lchcmike@gmail.com; Peter Farruggio
Subject: RE: need CHAT training

Hello Mike,
Nice to meet you too.
I am on vacation this week so I may be a bit slow to reply.


I am really interested in using CHAT for our studies.  From the  
little I have read about CHAT, I see that it offers a lot of  
potential for our multiple studies in bilingual preparation because  
in my opinion, it offers the most appropriate theoretical  
foundation to examine our bilingual teacher development.  I like  
the way it examines learning from a context based perspective,  
taking into consideration the sociocultural and historical  
aspects.   I really think that to understand the development of our  
pre service teachers we need to consider their history, their  
experiences both in our program and in their lives.  Since we are  
situated in the US/ Mexico border, the development of these  
preservice teachers is heavily impacted by their hybrid identities  
as both American and Mexican.  Multilingualism is also an important  
component and we cannot forget the history of the area and how it  
impacts the overall development of everyone here.

Our research project has multiple layers. Some of us are focusing  
on very specific aspects of our bilingual teacher preparation  
program.  I am particularly interested in examining the development  
of professional identities in our teachers and how the development  
of their cultural identities interacts with their professional  
identities. We have a lot of data. from cultural identity surveys  
and online discussions, educational philosophy assignments, focus  
group discussions that asked for their perspectives on the program  
and some incredible assignments. Some are very reflective, like the  
development of a classroom management plan and video analisis of  
thematic units used in teaching children in a sumer library  
program. In the fall, I will be doing observations of student  
teaching. As a long term plan, I will observe some of these  
participants when they become teachers.  I am interested in  
examining their growth as teachers longitudinally from the time  
they entered the program last fall semester to the completion of  
their first year as teachers which will be December of 2011.

Although, I think CHAT is the way to go in my study, I must also  
state that I am a novice and have only recently become familiar  
with CHAT.  I realize that is a complex theory, because it is based  
on examining the world from multiple perspectives. I think this is  
one of the positive aspects of CHAT. After all, the world is  
complex and there are many simplistic approaches that are overly  
superficial and cannot possibly help us to fully understand human  
development.  I am not interested in those approaches. But because  
CHAT is complex, I feel I need to really learn it before I can use  
it.

I am now getting familiar with the vocabulary and main concepts  
through a lit research of the latest writings and studies that have  
used CHAT.   A big question I have at this point is what kings of  
analytical methods are used in CHAT studies? Are qualitative  
methods generally applied in other kinds of studies also applied in  
studies that use CHAT as an analytical lens? Or have CHAT theorists  
developed their own methods for analyzing data that best fit  
activity theory? This is only the beginning, to fully use CHAT as a  
foundation for our research, we need to get some good professional  
development in the use of CHAT as a theoretical basis for our  
analysis and interpretations of the development of bilingual  
teachers.

In the meantime, I will check the XMCA. Do we have to subscribe to  
the listserv to post questions?

Thanks Pete for making this dialogue possible. Let's see if we can  
plan a video conference for us to learn more about how to use  
activity theory.

Alcione


My

Alcione N. Ostorga, Ph. D
Associate Professor
Department of Curriculum & Instruction
College of Education
The University of texas Pan-American
Edinburg, TX


________________________________
From: mike cole [lchcmike@gmail.com]
Sent: Friday, August 13, 2010 6:13 PM
To: Peter Farruggio
Cc: Alcione Ostorga
Subject: Re: need CHAT training

Peter--


Skype works pretty well, even for small group- small group. I will  
think of other refs (some of Engestrom's papers come to mine  
because he follows cases and he is always thoughtful) but I cannot  
help recommending the chapter in Luria's chapter on romantic  
science from his autobio.



Hi Alcione, nice to meet you! Either you or Peter should get on  
XMCA and post the question about case studies and CHAT. I'll bet  
people have not thought much about that issue in that way, but  
rather, they have unconsciously been using case study methods under  
the banner of
"qualitative research". There are several such articles in Mind,  
Culture, and Activity over the years.

mike


On Fri, Aug 13, 2010 at 4:03 PM, Peter Farruggio  
<pfarruggio@utpa.edu<mailto:pfarruggio@utpa.edu>> wrote:

Mike,


Thanks for the rapid, thoughtful reply. I'm copying to my  
colleague, Alcione Ostorga, because she's the one with the interest  
in using CHAT for the study. Several of us are interested, but  
she's the one who brought it up. She can jump in with a precis, as  
you suggest.

I like the idea of doing a videoconference with you as an initial  
brainstorming session. We have the technical capacity to set  
something up to have an open conversation.

Could you recommend some readings for us to do prior to such a  
conversation?  Maybe some concrete stuff that shows how others have  
used CHAT integrating the big picture (institutions, communities,  
local & state politics and policy making, etc) with the finer focus  
(our students moving through the system and into their careers)

I'll wait for Alcione to explain to you before we think about some  
teleconferencing.

Thanks again,

Pete
________________________________________
From: mike cole [lchcmike@gmail.com<mailto:lchcmike@gmail.com>]
Sent: Friday, August 13, 2010 5:44 PM
To: Peter Farruggio
Subject: Re: need CHAT training

Pete-


If you could perhaps send a precis of your proposal to XMCA, it  
would allow you to tap into a lot more brain power. The general  
issue of case studies from a CHAT perspective is a challenging one.  
Maybe Luria will make a comeback?

Also, I can interact from skype or Polycom but basically do not  
travel any more. Maybe a preliminary chat about CHAT via that zero  
cost route would be helpful?

mike


On Fri, Aug 13, 2010 at 10:47 AM, Peter Farruggio <pfarruggio@utpa.edu 
<mailto:pfarruggio@utpa.edu><mailto:pfarruggio@utpa.edu<mailto:pfarruggio@utpa.edu 
>>> wrote:

Mike,


We have a faculty team in bilingual teacher ed that has been  
working together for two years on research about our teacher  
preparation program. We'd like to do a longitudinal case study of  
some of our students as they finish with us and go into the  
teaching profession. We've already been teaching an experimental  
cohort of students as a pretty cohesive faculty team for the past  
three semesters.

We'd like to do our study from a CHAT orientation, as best we  
understand it. To help us, we'd like to find a good CHAT "trainer"  
who could come down here to South Texas to meet with us and lead a  
professional development session about how to use CHAT with our  
circumstances. We have a federal grant, so we can pay a reasonable  
fee plus travel, lodging, etc.

Would you recommend somebody, or put the word out to help us find  
such a person?

Thanks,

Pete Farruggio
University of Texas Pan American
Edinburg, TX


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