Discursive Psychology Blog for 8.5.13

Lester and Paulus – Accountability in public displays of knowing in an undergraduate computer-mediated communication context

            I thought this article was interesting for a number of different reasons.  One, I have the students in my reading 430 class write reading reflections prior to each class.  These reflections have a very similar prompt.  I have asked them to share their reactions, beliefs, or experiences related to the topic.  I have found that they tend to write summary statements in academic prose instead of responding to the prompt.  I write back to each one of them, and I intentionally comment on the aspects of their writing that connect to the prompt.  It seems that over time, with this type of interaction and with me continuing to describe my expectations of the posts in class that the students begin to summarize less and connect more in the way I requested.   It would be very interesting to look at those posts and see if that is truly happening.  Talking about change again…. It would also be very interesting to see if similar script formulations, vague comments, and “I don’t know comments come up”.  Secondly, I found this interesting in thinking about RR training.  One of the things that makes it so challenging is that teachers do have to make their understandings public.  We discuss a great deal – both theory and practice as we watch behind the glass lessons. Teachers make statements about knowledge and are challenged to support them – even when they are novice in the intervention and haven’t much reading of theory or teaching of children under their belts (so to speak).  The concluding comments of the article made me consider this – the vulnerability of making your knowledge public.   

            In the article, you mentioned that you had only analyzed the blog posts and were using the other data in other projects.  What are those other projects?   

            I am also wondering why so few (2) extracts were included and discussed.  Was it due to limitations of/from the journal?  I thought those included were very demonstrative of a number of rhetorical devices, but was shocked when I read the Conclusion heading.  I was anticipating that more extracts would be discussed.

 

Varga & Paulus – Grieving online: Newcomers’ constructions of grief in an online support group

            Reading these articles has made me think about how I might want to investigate written talk … instead of naturally occurring talk.  There is a current debate in RR land right now.  Many trainers want to use more technology in the training and they are getting lots of push back from other trainers who don’t want to change the training model because it has been successful.  I remember doing gobs of reading on reading theory in training and then discussing those readings in small groups and in relation to live lessons.  I wonder how blogging prior to class could have contributed to my understanding…and I wonder if that is an experience that could be explored using discursive psychology.  Prior to reading these two articles, I hadn’t considered anything but naturally occurring talk.  But, now I am wondering if there is a different and equally interesting direction to take.

            I thought the paragraph explaining why you didn’t need approval or permission to have access to the data was important and interesting.  We’ve been talking about that so much in DT, it was nice to see an actual study addressing those issues.

            In the conclusion, when you are talking about future research, you talk about the experiences of lurkers in on-line grief forums and the possibility of doing more research on them.  Because they are lurkers…whose presence is somewhat invisible, how would you get access to them?  How would you go about investigating their experiences?  Seems like an interesting idea, but I was unsure how you would find them!

 

Canfield – Dissertation proposal: The discursive construction of language learning in multiuser virtual environments

 

            This proposal was the most difficult of the three (Price, Johnston, Canfield) for me to understand.   I am not sure if it was the writing style, or the content, or the fact that I am reading it last on a late Friday afternoon…

            I thought his definition of “research” was really interesting – “Research is in essence an exercise in (re)presenting reality (Potter, 1996) by producing constructions from a particular position.  This axiological stance turns away from foundationalist values of ‘validity, reliability, rules of evidence, and decision criteria’.  I believe that as I am actively engaged in the fabrication of the claims of this study, I can only offer one of a plethora of potential stances (Potter & Wetherell, 1987)”.  He goes on to say that “… all researchers, myself included, fundamentally traffic in versions of the world that are grounded in their own epistemic and ontological views (Edwards, 1997a, p.45).    I agree with much of what he said, but it read pretty radical!

            Canfield talks about interpretive repertoires, ideological dilemmas and subject positions (which I read/wrote about in my 1^st article critique) as tools within critical discursive psychology.  Those are not ONLY in CDP, correct? My article was not concerned with “critical” discursive psychology, but addressed those concepts.

            I thought he really spelled out his search process, his process of analysis and was most specific about how many related dissertations, articles, text etc. that he found as a result of his searching. He didn’t mention using a research journal or interacting with others as part of his study.  I am assuming that he didn’t engage in those aspects, or he would have mentioned them.

            I hope when he comes on Monday, that he will talk about how he includes artifacts in the environment as part of his “discourse”.  I wasn’t very clear on that.