Discursive Psychology Blog 7.23.13

Discourse and Social Psychology p. 1-93

 Great readings for today!  I do like this book SO much better than Discursive Psychology…

 
On page 6, I underlined the following, “… social text do not merely reflect or mirror objects, events and categories pre-existing in the social and natural world.  Rather, they actively construct a version of those things.  They do not just describe things; they do things.  And being active, they have social and political implications”.   This summarizes much of what we have talked about through the last 3 weeks – that language ‘does’ and can be seen as active and constructive instead of simply descriptive.

The reading about the rules in prison was very interesting.  How they used the “rules” to account and justify was very similar to what we read in Lester about the parents’ variable and contradictory ways of referring to the label of autism and to the scientists’ claims about scientific theory.  In each case, explanations or use of rules, labels, or scientific knowledge was conditional.

 

On page 25, when the authors are talking about the “arbitrariness of the sign”, I thought of symbol/sound relationships when kids are learning to read.  The signifier is the sound for “b”, the signified is the concept of ‘bness” and the combination of the two – letter and sound presented together would be the linguistic sign.   Our language and symbols and conventions of print are so arbitrary.  Kids have to learn that we go left to right, top to bottom and that symbols have permanence (can’t flip the b around and still retain “bness” like you can other objects – a chair, for example).  Only in print does the orientation of the object matter.   It is quite a lot of learning for kids, and so much of it is incredibly abstract.

 In class, Brian talked with Jessica about the ideas of perspective and face saving being flip sides of the cognitive/discursive psychology coin.  I wondered about that same thing as I read about cognitive dissonance (p. 37).  Is it related to ideological dilemmas?  I read about those in my article and even wrote “cognitive dissonance”? in the margin.   To me, they are similar in the same way that perspective taking and face saving are.

 

I have written about this before, but was reminded of it again this morning as I read.  On page 53 it says, “It is commonly found in attitude research that people will say one thing, or express one kind of attitude, but then will behave in a way which is inconsistent with this attitude (Wicker, 1969).”  I see this a lot with teachers professing one set of beliefs (I believe kids learn to read by reading well and widely) and doing something else (worksheets to teach reading).  This phenomenon is similar to what you described in class last night – about the summer school teachers in “third space” – saying it was up to the kid and their choice, but then being very limiting in choices.   This is also related to comments on the bottom of 79 where the author is talking about the difference in what people say they do and in what they actually do.  Our recollections are so strong and unless we have something like video or audio or verbatim text to scrutinize, we will hold tight to them.  I think for teachers, this is a particularly critical issue, especially if we are working with low achieving kids.  We have to be very clear in what actions they are making and in what responses we are making to their actions in order to help them achieve. 

 

The following two questions on page 55 stood out to me…. “How is participants’ language constructed, and what are the consequences of different types of construction?”, because these are two of the questions we ask in RR all the time. Rephrased… “What did the teacher say?” and, “How did the kid respond?” (and how else might she have said it?)  The appropriateness/inappropriateness of the teaching directive or prompt is always determined based on the child’s response.

 On page 91 and 92 is the following quote “One way of looking at constraint in psychology is to look at the actual constraints and limits on people, while a second very common procedure is to look at people’s attributions of constraint.  That is, to look at the beliefs people express about causal processes when they give explanations”…this reminded me of an interaction I had with a kindergarten teacher and one of her students.  The teacher was concerned about the little guy’s reading because he was constantly coming out of the text to talk about what he was noticing about the letter combinations – things like, “Look, there is the ‘th’ that is in thumb, and that, and this.”  The teacher went into this long explanation about how his obsessive attention to letter combinations was related to his autism and it was impacting his fluency and comprehension of text.   I listened to him read a bit, and he was coming out of the text to make the kinds of comments that the teacher described.  I asked her if she had told him to save what he noticed about letters until the end of the book and to read straight through.  She said she hadn’t, so she told him and then he began to read and read straight through until the end with no stopping to talk about letters.  This is exactly the kind of thing that bothers me about labeling kids…the label becomes the thing we respond to instead of the person wrapped in the label.  This kid might have real constraints, but his teacher was constraining him with her beliefs about his constraints.  She was attributing his difficulty to some condition instead of just responding and interacting with what the child was actually doing. I think labeling often does more harm than good.