Discursive Psychology Blog post for 8.6.13

 

 

Stokoe, Hepburn, Antaki - Beware the Loughborough School of social psychology (2012)

 

The examples in this article – of how Discursive Psychology can be helpful in practical settings, really rung true for me.  I especially connected with the example of working with clients in a residential setting.  The researchers were able to identify specific selections of talk that confused clients.  They were able to isolate the examples and present the information to the staff members in the hopes that their language could change and clearer communication with clients could take place.  

This is precisely the kind of thing we do in RR.  We use a one way mirror and conversation about talk to accomplish a similar goal.  We are looking at interaction and how the interaction impacts the child’s literacy processing.   Teachers often do the very same kinds of things as were described in this example – offering the child a choice between two books, and then after the child makes a choice, not really listening and instead making another comment or asking another question, so the child is then unsure of the choice.  When we do those sorts of things often, we do not contribute to the child being a facilitator of her own literacy development, we put the kid in a passive and receptive place instead of as an “actor’ which is our ultimate aim.

 

I see so many connections with DP and RR.  Writing the Lit Review paper will help me sort it out even more!

 

  

Attenborough and Stokoe (2012) - Student life, student identity, student experience

 

I really liked this article and thinking about how you can use really different data sources all dealing with the same topic, but different groups of people.  Have never considered a study organized that way!  And, who would have thought of using Marginalia to investigate student identity?  Makes perfect sense, but really novel.  It is also interesting to me that analysis of this sort - of bits of talk, the details of talk really do let you get to the bigger picture of something like identity.

 

A similar thing happens in Reading Recovery.  We look intently and describe the best we can, what we are observing with how a child is interacting with text and "performing literacy".   The specific interactions between teacher and student prompt discussion about bigger picture issues -like fluent reading, the development of phonological awareness, comprehension, and efficient searching through visual information.  Teachers take the happenings of a lesson and apply it to their own practice, their own interactions with students.

 

What the authors found in the data is really similar to what we talked about in class last week - that it isn't acceptable to identify your own strength...it isn't socially acceptable to brag or seem like you have a lot of knowledge.  So, we down play it or identify it in someone else.  I see the kind of minimizing and downplaying of the importance of tasks too.  I overhear conversations of the undergrads in my 430 class.  It is almost a "face saving" tactic in class I think.  When you don't really understand something, it is easier to say the task, or the article, or whatever is pointless than to say you don't get it.