9.25 Discourse Analysis post

Discourse Analysis

9.25.13

 

Rapley – Doing Conversation, Discourse, and Document Analysis (Chapter 6-10)

 

            I enjoyed the readings for today.  I always like when the texts provide the transcripts and then the analysis after the transcripts.  On page 76, as I was reading the analysis, I was thinking about how, in my experience, this is what we do in conversation – we find a way to connect to what other people are saying, to link our perspective or information onto what they find to be salient.  I was thinking about this especially in relation to working with kids.  I am wondering if I will find this sort of linking/connecting when I watch my Reading Recovery lesson.

            I am curious too about what I will find in the lesson in terms of question-answer sequences.  I have seen the video several times, and I am remembering a moment when the student asks me a question “what ‘dat mean?” he asks, as he points to some bold print in the text.  When I watched lessons and observed teachers interacting, I always thought it was meaningful when students felt comfortable enough to challenge a teacher or ask a question.  To me, it meant a level of comfort and trust which had to deal with the power differential between teachers and students.  In these chapters, we read about power and context, and while I think analysis should focus on interaction as it unfolds, I am also very aware of power that exists outside of the interaction.  This is a bit of a struggle for me to make a decision about.  I guess I think both are important!

            On page 81, Rapley talks about the organization of agreement and disagreement and the feature of storytelling.  With both of these organizations of talk, I thought of Reading Recovery teacher training sessions.   There is so much discussion and pondering and wondering.  Often people “put out” their understandings and others either agree or disagree and site evidence from the interaction between teacher and student to back their claim.  Sometimes, people go off on story telling rants – often (in my experience) this is a filibuster of sorts.  It takes people out of what is going on with the teacher and child in front of us (behind the glass), and to a place where the teacher is totally in control of the version of events and cannot be questioned.  If I decide to do the investigation of RR TL for my dissertation, this will most definitely be a place to notice.

            I was blown away by the information by Kitzinger and Firth in the indented paragraph on page 85.   It is such a taken for granted form of education for rape prevention – that the woman says no.  I wouldn’t have thought about this as “counterproductive” because it is just something I have not questioned….and, I consider myself a feminist!  This makes complete sense to me now…clearly I haven’t thought enough about this important issue!

The bottom of 89 reminds me of our conversations in Digital Tools this summer – “you can see how documents and related technologies both constrain and enable our actions and interactions”.     As I read this chapter, I was thinking through all of the possible documents that are related to Reading Recovery – both lessons and sessions.  With lessons – the teacher keeps a lesson record which she writes on during the interaction.  She also keeps track of known words in reading, known words in writing, running records of oral text reading, a tower of progress grid that shows changes in text level reading over time as well as writing samples, and an alphabet book.  With Reading Recovery teacher sessions, there is a session agenda, the texts or articles the teachers read from and use, and charts that are generated by teachers in sessions.  All of these would be appropriate to collect and include in analysis.

The section beginning on page 95 – which talks about the video analysis of the Rodney King beating – was interesting.  This quote stood out “What is important to note is how, through their actions, they collaborate to build a way of how to make sense of the images on the video.”  In Reading Recovery sessions, we do this with both live lessons and with videos that we watch.  We discuss and replay (either in video or in recollection) of interactions and try to make sense of the happening.  Most of the time, we come to a consensus of what we saw…and, there are times when we don’t and people hold to their “truths” and their “claims” of how they are making sense of student behavior or teacher/child interactions.

This quote on 97 also stood out to me, “So what the analysis of conversation allows us to do is to try to document the ways that people and things organize specific institutions and institutional tasks and identities.”  So, Reading Recovery teacher and student create what happens in Reading Recovery together.  And, teachers in Reading Recovery, with their teacher leader, create the “norms” for what takes place – we organize what it means to be in a lesson with a child or what it means to do Reading Recovery training sessions.