Cinnabar and Alabaster: running up that hill Archives

February 10, 2008

data

i got lots. am finished (i think) counting everything for chapter 4 that needs counting. next, it will need adding & grouping & averaging & regrouping & at some point conversion into Useful Bits of Information as a preface to making it into sentences.

but for a good while now i have been counting, and now i have counted. crayons and all.

try not to notice how late in the new semester it is already.

Posted by ttobryan at 09:55 AM | Comments (0)

November 06, 2007

chapter 3

up on google docs w/the others. 183. go-go-gadget me.

Posted by ttobryan at 08:39 PM | Comments (0)

October 30, 2007

sick of myself

175: do you think it's actually possible to bore yourself to death while responsibly reporting on minutia?

meeting w/esteemed advisor scheduled for next week. here's hoping: (1) useful methodological suggestions are forthcoming to illuminate the yet-un-started Chapter 4, & (2) methodological suggestions & other bits of vetted academic brilliance don't result in my being told to scrap many many pages.

not yet.

i'm a firm believer in the value of some good old-fashioned herd-culling. chop that shit to bits. but i'm still at the generation stage. let me make a gazillion pages, say everything i'm trying to say, see the (steamy) heaps of progress-made, and THEN go surgical on what the wide-lens identifies as excess.

Posted by ttobryan at 08:40 PM | Comments (0)

October 28, 2007

171, bitches.

i think i'm going to make like jason & call everybody "bitches." especially everybody i like. or everybody i want to witness even my itty-bitty victories.

Posted by ttobryan at 08:50 PM | Comments (0)

-->164<--

inching, inching.

(for pwm, who doesn't care but who loves mathematical details, that's a 16-page introduction, a 51-page chapter 1, a 64-page chapter 2, and 33 pages so far of a chapter 3 that just keeps getting longer and longer, although parts of it might end up in chapter 5 instead. or for academom, who thinks in these terms instead, that's 57,432 words.)

Posted by ttobryan at 10:42 AM | Comments (0)

October 10, 2007

(don't stop, don't think, don't ask)

total count to date (not counting the TOC where the counting happens): 157.

it's a slow, slow hill some months. well. the months wherein nothing happens at all don't really count as slow-going, as that contains its prerequisite for going at all. but: 12 pages in the past 36 hours, which hours, i might add, were otherwise very full, and haven't been characterized by much sleeping.

but i am still out here.

Posted by ttobryan at 08:08 PM | Comments (0)

September 23, 2007

what i said last time?

pay it no mind.

obviously, i was not starting like i said i was. (although i did get the laptop repaired.) things happened. the world changed. that takes time, sometimes.

anyway, i wrote a page yesterday. my first one in 5 months. knock on wood that it heralds a trend.

babysteps, babysteps.
(let me tell you 'bout the deal i'm makin)
or as paulie says: "just keep swimmin."

Posted by ttobryan at 10:09 AM | Comments (0)

May 28, 2007

a word of warning

stopped at 137, in the interest of a geographically-bordered hiatus. left off all work on the project for a month that turned into 2 that turned into completely reworking my geographically-bordered intentions.

137. that's a mostly-full draft of an introduction, chapter 1, and chapter 2, plus a good 5-page start to chapter 3 and at least a general outline of the purposes-to-be-served-by 4 - 6. so i may have looked slack lately, but rest assured that there is a paper, and (oh, yes) it will be done.

am rebuilding my office so that i can do work in it. am rebuilding my writing-community connections so that i can do work in it. am also worrying about the flickery power-connection on this otherwise fabulous laptop, & need to remind myself to check & see if my roommate's going to leave hers behind when she takes off galivanting this summer like she did last summer so that if i have to turn the dear machine over to the darling fix-it people, i can do work even without it (b/c o gasp i do live without a desktop machine!)

but i will be getting back to work in not too long. and posting updates to my google-docs file that my committee can peer into (doesn't mean they do, or even want to, which is not a bash on them, as i rarely want to either--but it's about the quasi-public accountability, see).

am also telling me right now that i will be writing a dissertation in july, in addition to doing all of my more entrenched and mandatory traveling--i will have neither the time nor the money to go back to pennsic. this year. so in support of the project and the sacrifice required, can i get a "huzzah!" to tide me over?

Posted by ttobryan at 10:42 AM | Comments (0)

February 27, 2007

105.

just sayin'.

Posted by ttobryan at 12:05 PM | Comments (0)

February 05, 2007

Posted by ttobryan at 11:18 PM | Comments (0)

January 26, 2007

woo

(i need me some cute baby shoes)

Posted by ttobryan at 09:58 AM | Comments (0)

January 25, 2007

baby steps (don't call it a comeback)

monday i was a powerhouse & rocked 10 pages of prose (no evaluative adjectives here--i'm starting this at least secure in paulie's advice: lowering my standards and cranking out content). tuesday was a shitty writing day & i only managed 3 before i started throwing tantrums. added another halfa-one in the evening when i was a little calmer & slightly less than a brat about it. today i set 5 as my goal, same as yesterday, hoping that what i'd really do was compensate & make it to the bottom of the next 10; i'm halfway onto 12. 22 in 3 days. no way i'm going to be able to keep that up, but, hey, it's a not-bad-at-ALL kinda beginning.

Posted by ttobryan at 12:03 AM | Comments (0)

November 14, 2006

in mckee's oversimplified universe

McKee, Alan. Textual Analysis: A Beginner's Guide. Thousand Oaks: Sage. 2003.

...some things are still true (even if his articulation of them exhibits poor grammar):

"We can never just describe a text, because every description is an interpretation, there are always many possible description/interpretations of each text" (80).

"We can make educated guesses about likely interpretations of a text by familiarizing ourselves with relevant intertexts" (114). --he suggests immersion in a culture as "the best way to get a sense of the dominant discourses circulating in [that] culture" (106).

"tricks" he suggests for textual analysis ("to help you see how sense-making practices are working") include "exnomination" (from Barthes, meaning "'outside of naming'")--identifying and examining the presence & significance of unmarked categories--and the "commutation test," "a thought experiment where you replace one element of a text with a similar but different part of culture" (s.a., his example, "what happens if you swap the male and female roles in the 1995 Hollywood film Boys on the Side?")(106-7).

Posted by ttobryan at 01:13 PM | Comments (0)

November 02, 2006

this time

below is the now-current draft of my new prospectus. it's in the hands of all 3 of my committee-members for consideration.

i'm still finalizing that list on the bottom of books i mean to investigate, seeing what which reps send me & clarifying a few suggestions.

i have willing & wonderful volunteers among the teachers here who say they'll share materials & student writing with me.

i have no idea where to start w/the literature i've read heaps & heaps & heaps for years of & have to whittle down to a careful & specific little stack, but i need to get the hell on that, because papers are linear and what i do with the rest kinda depends on the stage i set at the beginning.

forgive me for not doing the formatting:

introduction/abstract____________________________________

In this dissertation, I present a multiple-stage analysis of the rich context within which first-year composition students negotiate among—and learn to make for themselves—claims to authority through the incorporation of outside sources in their research-based academic writing. Believing that student writers' struggles with source-incorporation stem from a larger conceptual divide rather than a simple lack of familiarity with correct citation practices, I examine the various points at which students' knowledge of such practices is influenced and evinced within our field's common practice: in our scholarship, in the textbooks and handbooks we assign, in our lesson-plans and teaching materials, and in the papers they write while practicing their acquisition of the skills and theories we teach (however directly or indirectly that tutelage occurs). The purposes of this twofold analysis are to catalogue, in some detail, what we do know about inexperienced academic writers' awareness of the practices and rationales of appropriate source work, and in the process to identify the things we need to know but don't.

theoretical and disciplinary contexts______________________

In authorship studies, scholars have for a few decades now been gradually recognizing that our theoretical and cultural definitions of what an author is are inconsistent, outdated, and at times almost precisely antithetical to one another; theorists like Terry Eagleton observe that writing, like any art, is no miracle born from nothing but is a produced, social commodity, while we cajole our students to produce "original" works and continue to romanticize notions of the author as a solitary genius and writing as a task of isolation. In field studies of collaborative writing (Lunsford & Ede, Gere) and of the inherently social nature of written communication (LeFevre, Bruffee, Reither & Vipond), a number of projects have variously examined how writers work together with other writers in school and workplace settings to solve problems and create text. Few, however, at least outside the specific contexts of seeking cures to plagiarism—commonly conceived of contemporarily as some sort of moral disease—have looked closely at what I consider the pivot-point of writers' authorial self-positioning: the points in their texts where they share authorial voice with other thinkers and writers, where they position themselves in relation to those other voices, as framers and re-staters of others' words, as co-representers to their audiences of ideas they need the work of others to completely convey.

It is for these reasons that the primary theoretical influence on this work comes from authorship studies, particularly its demonstration of the discrepancies between how we as a field conceptualize the author and how writers'—particularly our students'—understandings of themselves as authors (or non-authors) play out in their authoring of texts. Beyond this grounding, however, the motivations for this study are pragmatic and pedagogical in nature, and as such arise from the intersection of my classroom experiences with such broad disciplinary concerns as the nature of academic writing and the degree to which academic writing is teachable vs. an aptitude some possess and others lack, and such culturally-specific influences as the current media hysteria about plagiarism. More specifically, the study aims to engage the specific avenues through which we, as educators and participants in the knowledge-making of our field, bring our expectations about the authorial-establishment involved in academic writing to our students, with varying degrees of theoretical grounding and clarity.

Academic writers are inherently positioned at an intersection-point between being consumers and creators of authored works—of textual artifacts that do the social work they accomplish by the combined virtue of what they say and in whose name they say it. We authenticate ourselves within the academy and vet our authenticity by acting as authors, most productively when those actions are acknowledged as authorial by others, but also in the steps we take toward acknowledgement that no one ever sees, and we depend completely on the creations of other authors—their concepts, their names, their model strategies—to do so. Primarily, we display evidence of this process by means of incorporating other authors' words into our own, using a deliberate and intricate system of introducing, quoting, citing, and contextualizing these words to establish their relation to what we hope to use them for, and in this way we demonstrate both our own knowledge and our connectivity to, respect for, and gratitude toward others' knowledge. In academic contexts, these are not just disciplinary habits, but are fundamentally key practices of fairness, community-membership, and professional validation and it is no wonder, therefore, that we take violations to these expected standards seriously. Our responses to practices we perceive as violations, however, as has been well documented in recent scholarship, reveals a sharp divide between our awareness of the theoretical complexity of the roles and negotiations of authorship and the rigid expectations of rule-observance that we hold our students—and sometimes our colleagues—to, assigning handbook pages detailing the proper punctuation of parenthetical citation and policing written works of all kinds for non-compliance (see Valentine in last month's CCC).

As writing teachers, we know our students struggle with using sources appropriately, effectively, even correctly, and in today's climate we and they are acutely aware of the academic, social, legal, and financial possible-consequences of making mistakes. Accordingly, we devote lesson-plans, reading assignments, and draft workshops to citation practices—always with an eye toward, and often with the stated purpose of, teaching "plagiarism prevention," even while we and our students are still, in many cases, unclear even as to the exact nature of the textual practices constituting the offenses whose charges we aim to avoid, let alone possessing and sharing a sufficient understanding of the largely mysterious process by which writers turn ideas—their "own" as well as others'—into prose.

My hypothesis is that students' continual difficulties with the practices of acceptable source-integration and attribution are more than a measure of their lack of familiarity with the citation rules in their handbooks. Source-integration and attribution practices are rhetorical actions that make and support claims about both writers' content and the writers themselves, and only a more nuanced understanding of these practices within the lived contexts of writers' lives—how they perceive, describe, and approach their own textual practice—will enable us to effectively teach our students to move beyond counting sentences in what they believe should be a block quote both toward a grounded understanding of the choices available to them as authors working in connection with other authors and toward an ability to choose wisely among them. To explore this hypothesis, I propose a study that examines the textual influences on writers' practices and the textual evidence of these practices themselves—the elements external to those lived contexts that can be observed and documented without consulting writers directly and engaging with their descriptions of their understandings and intentions. My expectation is that this examination will fall short of answering the questions it poses, and that these gaps will indicate that a closer, more personal investigation of writers' experience is needed.

methodology___________________________________________

This project relies primarily on methods of textual analysis to examine a variety of textual records and exchanges, all of which serve in different ways to illuminate the matrix of information and influence informing students' work with source materials as part of their constructing academic texts. Specifically, the research design of each of the main sections of this project is different, to reflect the particulars of the areas each seeks to examine and the types of data each will collect and analyze.

Section 1 will focus on the textual analysis of published works from two broad categories: scholarship, as found in books and field journal articles, and textbooks and handbooks intended for use by writing students inside and outside of composition classrooms. Section 2 will be concerned, instead, with the analysis of unpublished works, again falling into two broad categories: instructional materials used and provided to students by composition instructors and papers generated by composition students. Within each section, individual chapters and sub-sections will be examined in ways that seem most productive as in-depth inquiries of those particular genres, writing-situations, or types of material.

Specifically, the methodological approach to each chapter will follow the basic framework Thomas Huckin proposes in his chapter in Bazerman and Prior's What Writing Does and How it Does it on content analysis, which he describes as involving "a synergistic blending of quantitative data gathering and qualitative analysis....Some [studies] may start with a proposition and use data-gathering in a deductive manner to confirm or disconfirm the proposition, whereas others may be more exploratory, using qualitative analysis in an inductive, flexible manner" (16), but in general they should all follow his 6-step (recursive, cyclical, non-linear) process: 1. Pose a Research Question, 2. Define the Appropriate Construct(s), 3. Select an Appropriate Text or Body of Texts as the Study Corpus, 4. Determine Appropriate Units of Analysis (Text Features), 5. Gather Data, & 6. Interpret the Findings.

While each of these proposed chapters centers around a similarly structured, open-ended research question—"What does [each area of inquiry] say about how source materials are/should be viewed relative to authorship in the academy?"—and relies on common constructs of authorship, authority, each inquiry focuses on a different study corpus, relies on different units of analysis as data for that corpus, and accordingly requires a unique approach to the different sections of the project's mostly-common constructs.

• Chapter 1 is imagined around a study corpus comprised of a selection of field publications discussing theories and theory-to-practice applications of source-inclusion and intertextual reference. Literature will be selected for inclusion based on its degree of direct relevance to the topic of inquiry and/or based on the degree to which frequent citation indicates that it is influential; for example, Foucault's definitions of authorship, Baktin's description of the dialogic, and LeFevre's treatment of writing as an inherently social act, although not geared directly towards this project's textual inquiries, are frequently cited by more clearly topic-specific works like Howard's Standing on the Shoulders of Giants, Bazerman's work with intertextuality, or Fuller and Lutz's "Constructing Authority."

• Chapter 2 relies on a study corpus of 6-10 popular textbooks (handbooks and writing guides/rhetorics) assigned to students in introductory college writing courses. Texts will be selected by cross-referencing a list generated by field professionals participating in conversations on the WPA listserv with top publishers' lists of best-selling texts in today's composition-textbook publishing industry. Units of analysis might include, among other data, the number of times or the number of different sections of the text wherein source-use is mentioned, the number of times or the number of different sections of the text wherein authorship is mentioned, the types of headings under which this information appears—citation practices, research, ethics, collaboration, etc—and the relation (or lack of relation) between these topics in the book's treatment of them. Additionally, the way that each text treats these topics—with examples, definitions, explanatory exposition about situational expectations, instructions, exercises, justifications, and open-ended questions—can be categorized for comparison.

• The study corpus for Chapter 3 consists of a collection of teaching materials—handouts, lesson-plans, syllabi, etc.—used by Instructors in the Syracuse University Writing Program. Materials will be selected first based on teachers' volunteering their willingness to participate and second based on their relevance to the topic of this inquiry. The analysis of these materials will center around such units of data as the presence or absence of mention of source-integration-related topics on syllabi and the tone (such as pedagogical, strictly informational, or punitive, as possibilities) of the language used in course materials to discuss plagiarism and/or relate plagiarism to the procedures of source use. When course materials do directly deal with issues related to source-integration and notions of authorship, is this material presented as facts to be memorized, skills to be practiced, or theory to be discussed and debated, for example; concretely might appear as lists or comparisons of elements included in different course's materials: as with textbooks and handbooks, examples, definitions, explanatory exposition about situational expectations, instructions, exercises, justifications, and open-ended questions are possible categories for these elements.

• Chapter 4's study corpus is a collection of 6-10 student essays written by Syracuse University WRT 105 students in the Fall of 2006, responding to writing assignments requiring the inclusion and effective academic treatment of outside sources. Essays will be selected for inclusion based on their teachers' volunteering for participation (only student essays from students taught by teachers volunteering their materials will be included) and students' willingness to grant permission for their work to be used. Units of analysis for this chapter will be the noted, counted, and catalogued incidences of textual features such as the introduction of source-texts, claims to authority, and the deliberate integration of source-texts' ideas with students' claims; for example, in each instance of a student making use of a source in a paper, does he or she provide the author's name, context for the source, a clear distinction between his or her language and the language of the source, and complete citation information? If only some of these elements appear, which ones, and does his or her treatment of the source in other areas of the paper provide the missing information? Does the author integrate the source's language with his or her own in ways that present either the source or the student writer—or both—as authoritative? If so, how?

All of these chapters share a methodological reliance on the open question and the flexibility of an evolving approach; for each, data-gathering will by necessity be a recursive process, beginning with examining a few sample texts, read in their entirety and then more exactingly to identify a list of key features that will be catalogued, searched-for in subsequent samples, and re-examined for relevance and completeness as the investigation proceeds. Analysis of the instances and patterns demonstrated by these features will vary as best befits the materials under examination, the scope of their wider representativeness, and the features they demonstrate.

projected chapter breakdown____________________________

Introduction: This section will recognize our current cultural climate of plariarism-parinoia and debates about the ownership of ideas, introduce some of the conflicting conceptions of authorship/authority in the field & in our pedagogy, and provide a rationale for a several-layer investigation into the more direct of the many influences on student writers' awareness of and appropriation of the expectations surrounding their work with others' works in producing academic writing. It will also outline the scope and chapter-breakdown of the project as a whole.

Section 1: On Authoring within the Academy
Chp. 1: What the field says

This chapter will investigate a selection of current scholarship concerning the integration of sources and such related keywords as "plagiarism," "authorship," and "co-authorship" as they inform Composition's understandings of writers' work with the work of other writers. This chapter seeks to answer the following questions: How does Composition characterize the role of the academic writer, at the intersection between (or as a cultural manager of this intersection?) being a consumer and being a creator of works defined in part by their authorship? How does Composition construct that belief through our descriptions of such terms as authorship, co-authorship, authority, academic status, student-status, plagiarism and publication? How does our scholarship theorize our expectations for our students' practices, and for our influences on those practices? i.e. If scholarship were our only way of knowing about students as users-of-source materials, what would we know about them?

Chp. 2: What the textbooks say

This chapter will examine best-selling field textbooks' and handbooks' treatment of and advice to students concerning sources, research, plagiarism, and "cheating." Do they endeavor to tell students why to engage in particular practices, or only model the notation of the practices themselves? If they offer reasons, what sorts of reasons do they offer? Are "correct" practices presented as dependent on situation and context? As universal? As respectful community membership? As punishment-avoidance? In its analysis of these resources, this chapter seeks to determine the message our assignment of these materials send to students about being an author when interacting with the words of other authors.

Section 2: "We'll Make More": Teaching Students to be Academic Authors
Chp. 3: What the teachers say

This chapter seeks to exemplify, through examination of a selection of syllabi, lesson plans, handouts, etc. currently in use in the Writing Program at Syracuse University, the messages about these concepts delivered to students by teachers' personally-distributed instructional materials—particularly as these messages pertain to source work and authority-claims. It is beyond the scope of this project to reasonably represent the rich array of diverse practices undertaken in classrooms throughout the field, but this chapter seeks to examine what a sample of these materials, in local employ, teach our students about being an (student?) author when interacting with the words of other (non-student?) authors.

Chp. 4: What students' papers say

In order to establish what can be determined about students' understanding of field expectations in this area by looking only at their finished works, this chapter asks "What textual evidence is there in students' finished papers of their incorporation of the words/ideas of other authors? What evidence demonstrates conflicting or revealing claims about authority within and without elements of students' papers directly introducing or framing source-inclusion?" Specifically, this chapter will investigate, sample, and categorize the features of student papers that participate in the framing, summarizing, paraphrasing, quoting, citing, and discussion of direct sources or other noted extra-textual influences.

Conclusion/Chp. 5: What nobody's saying

This chapter examines the limitations of the inquiries conducted in the chapters above, claiming that we can only know so much about how to help students learn to practice a set of behaviors without understanding their existing understandings and the reasons guiding their current practice, and we can only know so much about those understandings and reasons without engaging in directed, collaborative, interview-based research of writers and their texts. To this end, this chapter focuses on the implications of the above analysis and on developing rationales for and proposing a different kind of future study to take up this inquiry where examining these influences must inevitably leave off.

bibliography (scholarship)_____________________________

Barthes, Roland. "Authors and Writers." A Barthes Reader. Ed. Susan Sontag. New York: Hill, 1982. 185-93.

Bazerman, Charles. "Intertextuality: How Texts Rely on Other Texts." What Writing Does and How It Does It: An Introduction to Analyzing Texts and Textual Practices. Ed. Charles Bazerman and Paul A. Prior. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2003. 83-96.

Berkenkotter, Carol, Thomas N. Hucken, & John Ackerman. "Social Context and Socially Constructed Texts." in Textual Dynamics of the Professions: Historical and Contemporary Studies of Writing in Professional Communities. Ed. Charles Bazerman and James Paradis. Madison, WN: U Wisconsin P. 1991. 191-215.

Brannon, Lil and C. B. Knoblauch. "On Students' Rights to Their Own Texts: A Model of Teacher Response." College Composition and Communication. 33.2 (May 1982) 157-66. (to me this is actually about/influential of methodology rather than content)

Brodkey, Linda. Academic writing as social practice. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. 1987.

Buranen, Lise and Alice M. Roy, eds. Perspectives on Plagiarism and Intellectual Property in a Postmodern World. Albany: SU of New York P, 1999.

Corbett, Edward P.J. "The Theory and Practice of Imitation in Classical Rhetoric." College Composition and Communication 22 (1971): 243-50.

Day, Kami, and Michele Eodice. (First Person)2: A Study of Co-Authoring in the Academy. Logan: Utah State UP, 2001.

Ermarth, Elizabeth Deeds. "Beyond 'The Subject': Individuality in the Discursive Condition." New Literary History 31.3 (Summer 2000).

Eliot, T.S. "Tradition and the Individual Talent." 1917. Selected Essays, 1917-1932. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1932. 3-11. Rpt. Authorship: From Plato to the Postmodern. Ed. Seán Burke. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1995. 73-80.

Foucault, Michel. "What Is an Author?" Language, Counter-Memory Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews. Donald Bouchard, Ed. Donald Bouchard and Sherry Simon, Trans. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1977.

Fuller, Mary J., and Jean Ann Lutz. "Constructing Authority: Student Responses and Classroom Discourse." Discourse Studies in Composition. Eds. Ellen L. Barton and Gail Stygall. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton P, 2002.

Greene, Stuart. "Making Sense of My Own Ideas: The Problems of Authorship in a Beginning Writing Classroom." Written Communication 12.2 (April 1995): 186-218.

Harris, Joseph. "From the Editor: The Work of Others." College Composition and Communication. 45.4 (Dec. 1994) 439-41.

Herrington, Anne J. "Teaching, Writing, and Learning: a Naturalistic Study of Writing in an Undergraduate Literature Course." Advances in Writing Research Volume Two: Writing in Academic Disciplines. Ed. David A. Jolliffe. Ablex: Norwood, NJ. 1988. 133-66.

Horner, Bruce. "Students, Authorship, and the Work of Composition." College English 59.5 (1997): 505-29.

Howard, Rebecca Moore. Standing in the Shadow of Giants: Plagiarists, Authors, Collaborators. Perspectives on Writing: Theory, Research, Practice. Ser. 2. Stamford, CT: 1999.

Huckin, Thomas. "Content Analysis: What Texts Talk About." What Writing Does and How It Does It: An Introduction to Analyzing Texts and Textual Practices. Ed. Charles Bazerman and Paul A. Prior. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2003. 13-32.

LeFevre, Karen Burke. Invention as a Social Act. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1987.

Miller, Susan. Textual Carnivals: The Politics of Composition. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1991.

Mortensen, Peter, and Gesa E. Kirsch. "On Authority in the Study of Writing." College Composition and Communication. 44.4 (1993): 556-572.

Newkirk, Thomas. The Performance of Self in Student Writing. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook. 1997.

Odell, Lee and Dixie Goswami "Writing in a Nonacademic Setting" Ed. Richard Beach and Lillian S. Bridwell. New Directions in Composition Research. Guilford P. New York: 1984. 225-258.

Pecorari, Diane. "Good and Original: Plagiarism and Patchwriting in Academic Second-Language Writing." Journal of Second Language Writing 12 (2003) 317-345.

Peters, John Durham. "John Locke, the individual, and the origin of communication." Quarterly Journal of Speech. 75.4 (1989) 387-399.

Pickering, Wilbur. A Framework for Discourse Analysis. Summer Institute of Linguistics Publications in Linguistics. Ser. 64. U of Texas at Arlington: Summer Institute of Linguistics Inc., 1978.

Prior, Paul. "Tracing Process: How Texts Come Into Being." What Writing Does and How It Does It: An Introduction to Analyzing Texts and Textual Practices. Ed. Charles Bazerman and Paul A. Prior. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2003. 167-200.

Porter, James E. "Intertextuality and the Discourse Community." Rhetoric Review 5 (1986): 34-47.

Reither, James and Douglas Vipond. "Writing as Collaboration." College English. 51.8 (Dec 1989) 855-67.

Robillard, Amy E. Reimagining Students' Writerly Authority: Co-Investigation and Representations of Student Writers in Composition Studies. Diss. Syracuse University, 2004.

Rymer, Jone. "Scientific Composing Processes: How Eminent Scientists Write Journal Articles." Advances in Writing Research Volume Two: Writing in Academic Disciplines. Ed. David A. Jolliffe. Ablex: Norwood, NJ. 1988. 211-50.

Scollon, Ron. "Plagiarism and Ideology: Identity in Intercultural Discourse." Language in Society 24.1 (March 1995): 1-28.

Spellmeyer, Kurt. "Inventing the University Student." Composition in the Twenty-First Century: Crisis and Change. Ed. Lynn Z. Bloom, Donald A. Daiker, and Edward M. White. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1996. 39-44.

Stillar, Glenn F. Analyzing Everyday Texts: Discourse, Rhetoric, and Social Perspectives. Rhetoric & Society. Ser. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1998.

[Thompson, Celia Helen. Plagiarism or intertextuality? A study of the politics of knowledge, identity and textual ownership in undergraduate student writing. Thesis. U of Technology, Sydney. 2006.] c'mon, CHT, publish this already! 

Valentine, Kathryn. "Plagiarism as a Literary Practice: Recognizing and Rethinking Ethical Boundaries." CCC 58:1 (Sept. 2006) 89-109.

Williamson, Micheal M. "A Model for Investigating the Functions of Written Language in Different Disciplines." Advances in Writing Research Volume Two: Writing in Academic Disciplines. Ed. David A. Jolliffe. Ablex: Norwood, NJ. 1988. 89-132.

Woodmansee, Martha. "The Genius and the Copyright: Economic and Legal Conditions of the Emergence of the 'Author.'" Eighteenth-Century Studies 17 (1984): 425-48.

Woodmansee, Martha. "On the Author Effect: Recovering Collectivity." The Construction of Authorship: Textual Appropriation in Law and Literature. Ed. Martha Woodmansee and Peter Jaszi. Durham: Duke UP, 1994. 15-28.

bibliography (textbooks and handbooks) _________________
handbooks (acc. to becky)
Little, Brown
Simon & Schuster
Bedford (hacker 7th ed? 2 diff lunsfords)
St. Martin's
handbooks list-recommended
Hacker's A Writer's Reference (2)
Everyday Writer (Lunsford) (maybe)
--new Thompson (not high-selling b/c it just came out, but if i want to look at the most contemporary stuff, Blakesley (author) says he does much source stuff & recommends i check it out)
rhetorics (acc. to becky)
Axelrod & Cooper (St. Martin's)
Kennedy & Kennedy (Bedford)
Reid (Prentice Hall)
Ramage & Bean (Allyn & Bacon)
rhetorics list-recommended
Axelrod & Cooper—St. Martin's
at SU:
Longman [handbook]
Writing Analytically [rhetoric]

Posted by ttobryan at 09:59 AM | Comments (0)

October 19, 2006

how T.H. finds out what writing does and how it does it

what is it good for?
bazerman, from Introduction (distracting/irritating overuse of boldfacing removed): "For researchers, discourse analysis provides a means of examining communicative practice so as to uncover signs of social identities, institutions, and norms as well as the means by which these social formations are established, negotiated, enacted, and changed through communicative practice. For teachers of writing in colleges and schools, discourse analysis provides ways of going beyond the simple and perhaps confusing terminology of our everyday language for texts and writing" (3).

following directions
T.H. says "content analysis...involves a synergistic blending of quantitative data gathering and qualitative analysis....Some [studies] may start with a proposition and use data-gathering in a deductive manner to confirm or disconfirm the proposition, whereas others may be more exploratory, using qualitative analysis in an inductive, flexible manner" (16), but in general they should all follow his 6-step (recursive, cyclical, rarely-this-linear) process:
1. Pose a Research Question
2. Define the Appropriate Construct(s)
3. Select an Appropriate Text or Body of Texts as the Study Corpus
4. Determine Appropriate Units of Analysis (Text Features), Using Multiple Raters if Possible
5. Gather Data
6. Interpret the Findings

elaborations

on "construct(s)": "...a researcher who hypothesizes that more mature students tend to be more rhetorically sensitive than less mature students is implicitly working with two constructs, 'student maturity' and 'rhetorical sensitivity.' these constructs will have to be defined, however, in a way that can be converted into measurable units. for example, 'student maturity' might be defined in terms of age, years living on one's own, or some other variable; 'rhetorical sensitivity' might be defined in terms of attention to purpose, attention to audience, and/or other parameters" (17). (so i guess i shouldn't ask how, exactly, "attention to purpose" is "measurable"?)

on coding: make it up as you (start to) go along, using your first few samples of material to find/make categories that can be applied to later samples.

limitation #1 as reason #1 for arguing that the project shouldn't stop here: "coding in quantitative analysis is too surface-based and thereby lacks validity...[as it] is said to valorize the textual artifact in unreflective fashion, ignoring the reader's or writer's engagement with the text (anderson 1973). as van dikj (1997b) put it, content analysis is 'a method which in fact has less to do with meaning than with the more observable aspects--mostly words--of discourse' (p. 9)" (26). <--why we have to also ask the writers.

Posted by ttobryan at 12:28 PM | Comments (0)

bibliographic & ironical

books i checked out about this branch of methodological possibility that are not useful at all:

Dijk, T. A. van. Text and Context: Explorations in the Semantics and Pragmatics of Discourse. New York: Longman, 1977.

de Beaugrande, Robert-Alain and Wolfgang Ulrich Dressler. Introduction to Text Linguistics. Longman Linguistics Library. Ser. New York: Longman, 1981.

books i checked out that had at least a few notes & glimmerings of language i might someday have use for to offer:

Pickering, Wilbur. A Framework for Discourse Analysis. Summer Institute of Linguistics Publications in Linguistics. Ser. 64. U of Texas at Arlington: Summer Institute of Linguistics Inc., 1978.

Stillar, Glenn F. Analyzing Everyday Texts: Discourse, Rhetoric, and Social Perspectives. Rhetoric & Society. Ser. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1998.

essay from book already on bibliography that RMH suggests i use for heavy methodological guidance (& i, being one w/the smart, was able to show her when she made that suggestion that my copy of the essay was already thoroughly dog-eared):

Huckin, Thomas. "Content Analysis: What Texts Talk About." What Writing Does and How It Does It: An Introduction to Analyzing Texts and Textual Practices. Ed. Charles Bazerman and Paul A. Prior. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2003. 13-32.

not-quite-like-alanis juxtaposition of carrying that book around, dog-eared & marked as Highly Relevant while listening to 2 colleagues over lunch & coffee describing the above author as a loudmouth & bit-of-a-nut-job re: some recent activity on the RFP listseve?

priceless.

Posted by ttobryan at 12:00 PM | Comments (0)

notes about textual analysis

from Stillar's Analyzing Everyday Texts

p. 14: the overarching framework of "discoursal practice" has 3 key elements; it is "systemic," "functional," & "social." he defines systems as "organized sets of linguistic structures: the arrays of 'what can be done' in terms or selections and combinations of linguistic units" & textual function as "the organization of the language system & the interpretation of its possible structures," and explains that both are "social phenomena...in terms of their origins, contexts, and effects."
p. 15 from Halliday:

Text represents choice. A text is 'what is meant,' selected from the total set of options that constitute what can be meant. In other words, text can be defined as actualized meaning potential. (109)

basically, what text = is choice (15); what texts do is "represent" (18)--"institutional context, social experiences, temporal selection & perspectival conditions"; studying text involves studying the roles & reasons/circumstances its authors' words convey--representations of authors as authorities (28)--alongside the representations of their motivations (29).

& the stuff itself, in overview/definition: "discourse analysis interprets instances of text in relation to systems of meaning-making resources" (179)

from Pickering's A Framework for Discourse Analysis

p. 3 he establishes a "framework" rather than a "method" because methods are too rigid & depend too much on replicable situations for their application.
p. 57: style as an expression of the social; p. 59: register as an expression of the context of the situation (how are those separable?)

-->food for thought: we never treat citation practices & text-mingling/intertextuality as matters of style and/or register, but they are; they're about community membership in very specific contexts.

& the WOrld WIde WUb (or at least Daniel Chandler) says the term "intertextuality" (at least as he's using it?) is from kristeva's 1980 Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art (Semiotics for Beginners)

keyword "explicitness"; do i need to hang somebody's name on that?

Posted by ttobryan at 11:13 AM | Comments (0)

October 17, 2006

the drawing board

i (like most people, i think) have always visualized this metaphor relating to art; the "drawing board" was a chalkboard, whiteboard, schoolhouse slate, flip-pad of trace-through-ably thin architectural paper, & going "back to" it meant erasing the old drawing, flipping to a new page, washing the board down, & starting over from scratch.

i met a girl named katie this summer who was making metal jewelry by braiding strands of thin, somewhat-malleable silver wire, & pulling the finished braids through holes in a board sized appropriately for how crushed into shape she wanted the loose braids to become. according to katie, most of us visualize the metaphor entirely incorrectly; the board full of different-sized holes is the "drawing board," "drawing" the braids through the board explains the verb in question, & going "back to the drawing board" means noticing an inconsistency in the finalized weave of a piece of braid & re-bending, then re-drawing it through to compress it more fittingly. there's no eraser in this version; the work done on the art remains, & the return to the drawing board is a way of correcting minor flaws, not scrapping entire concepts to begin anew.

wikipedia has no idea what i'm talking about, and i can't find any online support for this board as an object (she had one in her hands, but it was the type of craft-item that, in its context, was more likely to have been made by/for her than purchased anyway), but i still like katie's version better. and after sufficient googling, i did find this sentence, from an assessment of the relative value of new car designs, which stood alone in a sea of "back to the..." metaphorical uses, & which leads me to believe she's not wholly alone in this conception: "Instead, Chevy produced a work-in-progress in need of another pass through the drawing board."

Posted by ttobryan at 07:35 PM | Comments (0)

September 13, 2006

methodology | wide-angle

Denzin, Norman K. and Yvonna S. Lincoln, Eds. Collecting and Interpreting Qualitative Materials. 2nd ed. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. 2003.

zoom lens: "In North America, qualitative research operates in a complex historical field that crosscuts seven historical moments…[that] overlap and simultaneously operate in the present. We define them as the traditional (1900-1950); the modernist or golden age (1950-1970); blurred genres (1970-1986); the crisis of representation (1986-1990); the postmodern, a period of experimental and new ethnographies (1990-1995); postexperimental inquiry (1995-2000); and the future, which is now (2000-). The future, the seventh moment, is concerned with moral discourse, with the development of sacred textualities" (3). <--each category gets shorter-lived than the ones before, & how much of a trend can 4 or 5 years really involve—it takes that long to get something published for others to even *see*.

qualitative research as bricolage: "The interpretive bricoleur produces a bricolage--that is, a pieced-together set of representations that are fitted to the specifics of a complex situation" to create an "'[emergent] construction'…that changes and takes new forms as different tools, methods, and techniques of representation and interpretation are added to the puzzle" (5-6). "The qualitative researcher as bricoleur or maker of quilts uses the aesthetic and material tools of his or her craft, deploying whatever strategies, methods, or empirical materials are at hand" (6).

in critique: "Positivists…allege that the so-called new experimental qualitative researchers write fiction, not science, and that these researchers have no way of verifying their truth statements. Ethnographic poetry and fiction signal the death of empirical science, and there is little to be gained by attempting to engage in moral criticism. These critics presume a stable, unchanging reality that can be studied using the empirical methods of objective social science….The province of qualitative research, accordingly, is the world of lived experience, for this is where individual belief and action intersect with culture" (12).

in theoretically-grounding explanation: "Poststructuralists and postmodernists have contributed to the understanding that there is no clear window into the inner life of an individual. Any gaze is always filtered through the lenses of language, gender, social class, race, and ethnicity. There are no objective observations, only observations socially situated in the worlds of—and between—the observer and the observed. Subjects, or individuals, are seldom able to give full explanations of their actions or intentions; all they can offer are accounts, or stories, about what they did and why. No single method can grasp all of the subtle variations in ongoing human experience. Consequently, qualitative researchers deploy a wide range of interconnected interpretive methods, always seeking better ways to make more understandable the worlds of experience they have studied" (31).

"Qualitative research is endlessly creative and interpretive" and "The interpretive practice of making sense of one's findings is both artistic and political" (37)

"The interview is negotiated text….is a conversation, the art of asking questions and listening. It is not a neutral tool, for at least two people create the reality of the interview situation. In this situation answers are given. Thus the interview produces situated understandings grounded in specific interactional episodes" (48).

on text: "Mute evidence—that is, written texts and cultural artifacts—endures physically and leaves its traces on the material past. It is impossible to talk to and with these materials. Researchers must interpret them, for in them are found important meanings about the human shape of lived culture" (50).

reality check: "We cannot study lived experience directly, because language, speech, and systems of discourse mediate and define the very experience we attempt to describe. We study the representations of experience, not experience itself. We examine the stories people tell one another about the experiences they have had. These stories may be personal experience narratives of self-stories, interpretations made up as the person goes along" (51).

the U.S. as "'the interview society' (Atkinson & Silverman, 1997; Silverman 1993). Both qualitative and quantitative researchers tend to rely on the interview as the basic method of data gathering, whether the purpose is to obtain a rich, in-depth experiential account of an event or episode in the life of the respondent or to garner a simple point on a scale of 2 to 10 dimensions. There is inherent faith that the results are trustworthy and accurate….One cannot escape being interviewed; interviews are everywhere, in the forms of political polls, questionnaires about doctor's visits, housing applications, forms regarding social service eligibility, college applications, talk shows, news programs—the list goes on and on….It seems that almost any question—personal, sensitive, probing, upsetting, accusatory—is fair game and permissible in the interview setting….the interview has become a means of contemporary storytelling, where persons divulge life accounts in response to interview inquiries" (63).

nonverbal techniques: "Proxemic communication is the use of interpersonal space to communicate attitudes, chronemics communication is the use of pacing of speech and length of silence in conversation, kinesic communication includes any body movements or postures, and paralinguistic communication includes all the variations in volume, pitch and quality of voice. (Gorden, 1980, p. 335)" (87).

feminist research: "The feminist, communitarian researcher does not invade the privacy of others, use informed consent forms, select subjects randomly, or measure research designs in terms of their validity. This framework presumes a researchers who builds collaborative, reciprocal, trusting, and friendly relations with those studied….It is also understood that those studied have claims of ownership over any material that are produced in the research process, icnluding field notes" (96). (denzin 1989a)

Chp 4 (Ian Hodder, "The Interpretation of Documents and Material Culture"; pp. 155-75): "This chapter is concerned with the interpretation of mute evidence—that is, with written texts and artifacts. Such evidence, unlike the spoken word, endures physically and thus can be separated across space and time from its author, producer, or user. Material traces thus often have to be interpreted without the benefit of indigenous commentary. There is often no possibility of interaction with spoken emic 'insider' as opposed to 'outsider' perspectives. Even when such interaction is possible, actors often seem curiously inarticulate about the reasons they dress in particular ways, choose particular pottery designs, or discard dung in particular locations. Material traces and residues thus post sepcial problems for qualitative research" (155).

"Writing is not an innocent practice" (459). (Denzin, "The Practices and Politics of Interpretation"; 458-98)

Posted by ttobryan at 01:39 PM | Comments (0)

September 02, 2006

so far, part 2

below is the draft as it's been sent off, in accordance w/promises, to my esteemed advisor so that she may begin the process of telling me why it's all wrong so that i may begin the subsequent process of righting it.

* * *

introduction/abstract? (in some examples this is the same section; in others it's not)

In this dissertation, I allow more- and less-experienced academic writers to give voice to their differing ideas about and attitudes toward the inclusion of both direct and indirect references to and/or evidence of influence by outside writers and thinkers in the research-based academic writing they do. As much as possible, while I situate them theoretically among scholarly conversations about authorship, collaboration, and intertextuality, writers' ideas, explanations, and observations are recounted descriptively and presented in writers' terms so that this study can offer a grounding look at the rationales guiding the ongoing practices of writers in the real academic work they are already doing—a vital but often neglected component of any larger disciplinary conversation.

theoretical & disciplinary contexts

Although the motivations for this study are primarily pragmatic and pedagogical in nature, and as such arise from the intersection of my classroom experiences with such broad disciplinary concerns as the nature of academic writing and the degree to which academic writing is teachable vs. an aptitude some possess and others lack, and such culturally-specific influences as the current media hysteria about plagiarism, the primary theoretical influence on this work comes from authorship studies, particularly its demonstration of the discrepancies between how we as a field conceptualize the author and how writers'—particularly our students'—understandings of themselves as authors (or non-authors) play out in their authoring of texts.

In authorship studies, scholars have for a few decades now been gradually recognizing that our theoretical and cultural definitions of what an author is are inconsistent, outdated, and at times almost precisely antithetical to one another; theorists like Terry Eagleton observe that writing, like any art, is no miracle born from nothing but is a produced, social commodity, while we cajole our students to produce "original" works and continue to romanticize notions of the author as a solitary genius and writing as a task of isolation. In field studies of collaborative writing and the inherently social nature of written communication, a number of projects have variously examined how writers work together with other writers in school and workplace settings to solve problems and create text. Few, however, at least outside the specific contexts of seeking cures to plagiarism—commonly conceived of contemporarily as some sort of moral disease—have looked closely at what I consider the pivot-point of writers' authorial coming-out: the points in their texts where they share authorial voice with other thinkers and writers, where they position themselves in relation to those other voices, as framers and re-staters of others' words, as co-representers to their audiences of ideas they need the work of others to completely convey.

methodology

In this dissertation, I will investigate these notions of authorship, textual ownership, and authorial intent by examining the current practices of varyingly experienced writers authoring texts in collaboration with the spoken ideas and existing texts of other authors. Believing that these are common cultural challenges among academic writers, challenges that these writers confront regularly in their own work and attempt to overcome using a variety of strategies, some more successful than others, some the result of deliberate instruction but many the product of writers' interpretation of cultural expectations, I will call upon writers within the academy, both more and less experienced at integrating the ideas and words of others into their own prose, to consider and describe their own actions and rationale. To that end, I will conduct and analyze the results of conversational, semi-structured interviews with writers and collaborative examination of writers' sample texts. This project will draw on both interview methodology, such as is explicated by Steiner Kvale and by James Spradley, and one-on-one text-based conference strategies such as those practiced in the writing center pedagogy of such authors as Murphy and Sherwood or Gillespie and Lerner.

projected chapter breakdown

1. (Guiding metaphors—autonomy vs. participatory authority) [introduce/rationale for project (major claims/argument)]

This chapter will propose that the ways inexperienced and experienced academic writers percieve their authorial roles are different, and that those different perceptions directly influence the way these writers approach textual tasks involving the collaborative interaction of their words and ideas with those of others (as in the production of researched texts and research-based arguments). To this end, this chapter will review studies of student authorship and student interaction in authorial roles, including Amy Robillard's 2004 dissertation, Mary J. Fuller and Jean Anne Lutz's 2002 discourse study, Susan Miller's Textual Carnivals, Bruce Horner's 1997 study in College English, and contemporary impressions made by participants in current plagiarism debates; the examination of these and other sources will demonstrate that the moves student authors make to establish and demonstrate their authority in academic writing—particularly as regards writers' use of sources as claims to wider authority and support for their own—are doomed to insufficiency by the inconsistent expectations and theoretically confusing pedagogy that initiates them.

2. what current work does & falls short of (lit review: authorship theories etc.)

Chapter 2 will examine contemporary theoretical depictions of authorship and their foundational predecessors, with an eye toward the imapact of these theories on the policies and practices of law and pedagogy in common practice today. The chapter will also look closely at the way these theories influence the field's treatment, both theoretically and pedagogically, of collaborative writing, a variously-defined array of practices and skills increasingly deemed relevant in workplace studies. Of particular interest is the common move among collaborative writing scholars of framing their projects in such terms as "In a sense, all writing is collaborative," then going on to interogate some specific practice of coauthoring without engaging with the cultural relevance of their initial pronouncement; it is within this neglected area of study that I position my examination of the beliefs and understandings guiding writers' incorporation of others' ideas and texts into their own commonly-conceived-of-as-solitary creation of what are always, due to the inclusion of these influences, collaboratively generated texts.

3. design/explication of the study (methodologies)

This chapter will introduce the elements of interview methodology and best-practices writing center processes this study will make use of, theorizing and detailing in particular the deviations from more traditional interviewing procedures required to allow writers' descriptions of their process to be recorded and analyzed alongside writers'-and-researchers' collaborative coexamination of writers' previously constructed texts. Additionally, this chapter will discuss technology used to allow the researcher and each studied writer to review the writer's text collaboratively, making and recording both more traditional question-and-answer exchanges and conversational descriptions and analyses of writers' described processes and demonstrated products.

4. data/descriptions/results (interview transc. & analysis)

Chapter 4 will include: samples of writers' texts and their descriptions of the processes and rationales prompting the creation of those texts; writers' and researcher's collaborative analyses of those textual practices; transcriptions of conversational elements from writers' and researcher's examination and discussion of both included samples and larger-scale textual works; a comparison-based examination of the differences apparent in the processes described & products created by different writers working from different levels of experience in the particular situation of creating researched academic texts.

5. from theory into the classroom (changes in attitudes (yes i have jimmy buffet on the brain & wish i were somewhere tropical)

This chapter will consider the implications for both scholars and educators of the practices described and trends suggested by writers'-and-researcher's conversational interviews and collaborative textual analyses. It will include recommendations for reconsidering some current approaches to introducing inexperienced academic writers to the academy's expectations for intertextual work in research-based writing, and will contextualize these recommendations in light of contemporary concerns conflating questions about students' citation practices with the cultural stigmas of cheating and plagiarism.

bibliography
Barnett, Robert W. and Jacob S. Blumner. The Allyn and Bacon Guide to Writing Center Theory and Practice. Boston: Allyn and Bacon. 2001.
Barthes, Roland. "Authors and Writers." A Barthes Reader. Ed. Susan Sontag. New York: Hill, 1982. 185-93.

Brandt, Deborah Text and context: How writers come to mean1986In Couture, Barbara (Ed.), Functional approaches to writing research perspectives; Norwood, NJ: Ablex 93-107.

Brodkey, Linda. Academic writing as social practice. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. 1987.

Brown, J. and D. Canter. "The Uses of Explanation in the Research Interview." The Research Interview: Uses and Approaches. Ed. M. Brenner, J. Brown, and D. Canter. New York: Academic P, 1985. 217-245.

Buranen, Lise and Alice M. Roy, eds. Perspectives on Plagiarism and Intellectual Property in a Postmodern World. Albany: SU of New York P, 1999.

Corbett, Edward P.J. "The Theory and Practice of Imitation in Classical Rhetoric." College Composition and Communication 22 (1971): 243-50.

Day, Kami, and Michele Eodice. (First Person)2: A Study of Co-Authoring in the Academy. Logan: Utah State UP, 2001.

Ermarth, Elizabeth Deeds. "Beyond 'The Subject': Individuality in the Discursive Condition." New Literary History 31.3 (Summer 2000).

Freedman, Sarah Warshauer, and A.M. Katz. "Pedagogical Interaction During the Composing Process: The Writing Conference." Writing in Real Time: Modeling Production Processes. Ed. Ann Matsuhashi. Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1987. 58-80.

Foddy, William. Constructing Questions for Interviews and Questionnaires: Theory and Practice in Social Research. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. 1993.

Fontana, Andrea, and James Frey. "Interviewing: The Art of Science." Collecting and Interpreting Qualitative Materials. Ed. Norman K. Denzin and Yvonna S. Lincoln. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1998. 47-78.

Foucault, Michel. "What Is an Author?" Language, Counter-Memory Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews. Donald Bouchard, Ed. Donald Bouchard and Sherry Simon, Trans. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1977.

Gray-Rosendale, Laura. Rethinking Basic Writing: Exploring Identity, Politics, and Community in Interaction. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates: Mahwah, NJ. 2000.
Gillespie, Paula and Neal Lerner. The Allyn and Bacon Guide to Peer Tutoring. 2nd ed. New York: Pearson Longman. 2004.
Greene, Stuart. "Making Sense of My Own Ideas: The Problems of Authorship in a Beginning Writing Classroom." Written Communication 12.2 (April 1995): 186-218.

Harris, Joseph. "From the Editor: The Work of Others." College Composition and Communication. 45.4 (Dec. 1994) 439-41.

Horner, Bruce. "Students, Authorship, and the Work of Composition." College English 59.5 (1997): 505-29.

Howard, Rebecca Moore. Standing in the Shadow of Giants: Plagiarists, Authors, Collaborators. Perspectives on Writing: Theory, Research, Practice. Ser. 2. Stamford, CT: 1999.

Kvale, Steinar. Interviews: An Introduction to Qualitative Research Interviewing. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1996.

LeFevre, Karen Burke. Invention as a Social Act. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1987.

Lunsford, Andrea A., and Lisa Ede. "Collaborative Authorship and the Teaching of Writing." The Construction of Authorship: Textual Appropriation in Law and Literature. Ed. Martha Woodmansee and Peter Jaszi. Durham: Duke UP, 1994. 417-38.
McAndrew, Donald A. and Thomas J. Reigstad. Tutoring Writing: A Practical Guide for Conferences. Portsmouth NH: Boynton/Cook. 2001.
Miller, Susan. Textual Carnivals: The Politics of Composition. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1991.

Mortensen, Peter, and Gesa E. Kirsch. "On Authority in the Study of Writing." College Composition and Communication. 44.4 (1993): 556-572.
Murphy, Christina and Steve Sherwood. The St. Martin's Sourcebook for Writing Tutors 2nd ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's. 2003.
Newkirk, Thomas. The Performance of Self in Student Writing. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook. 1997.

Odell, Lee and Dixie Goswami "Writing in a Nonacademic Setting" Ed. Richard Beach and Lillian S. Bridwell. New Directions in Composition Research. Guilford P. New York: 1984. 225-258.

Odell, Lee, Dixie Goswami, and Anne Herrington. "The Discourse-Based Interview: A Procedure for Exploring the Tacit Knowledge of Writers in Nonacademic Settings." Research on Writing: Principles and Methods. Ed. P. Mosenthal, L. Tamor, and S. Walmsley. New York: Longman, 1983. 221-235.

Pecorari, Diane. "Good and Original: Plagiarism and Patchwriting in Academic Second-Language Writing." Journal of Second Language Writing 12 (2003) 317-345.

Peters, John Durham. "John Locke, the individual, and the origin of communication." Quarterly Journal of Speech. 75.4 (1989) 387-399.

Porter, James E. "Intertextuality and the Discourse Community." Rhetoric Review 5 (1986): 34-47.
Rafoth, Ben. Ed. A Tutor's Guide: Helping Writers One to One. 2nd ed. Portsmouth NH: Boynton/Cook. 2005.
Reither, James and Douglas Vipond. "Writing as Collaboration." College English. 51.8 (Dec 1989) 855-67.

Robillard, Amy E. Reimagining Students' Writerly Authority: Co-Investigation and Representations of Student Writers in Composition Studies. Diss. Syracuse University, 2004.

Scollon, Ron. "Plagiarism and Ideology: Identity in Intercultural Discourse." Language in Society 24.1 (March 1995): 1-28.

Spradley, James P. The Ethnographic Interview. New York: Holt, 1979.

Woodmansee, Martha. "The Genius and the Copyright: Economic and Legal Conditions of the Emergence of the 'Author.'" Eighteenth-Century Studies 17 (1984): 425-48.

Posted by ttobryan at 05:48 PM | Comments (0)

writing center processes & practices

Barnett, Robert W. and Jacob S. Blumner. The Allyn and Bacon Guide to Writing Center Theory and Practice. Boston: Allyn and Bacon. 2001.

Gillespie, Paula and Neal Lerner. The Allyn and Bacon Guide to Peer Tutoring. 2nd ed. New York: Pearson Longman. 2004.

McAndrew, Donald A. and Thomas J. Reigstad. Tutoring Writing: A Practical Guide for Conferences. Portsmouth NH: Boynton/Cook. 2001.

Murphy, Christina and Steve Sherwood. The St. Martin's Sourcebook for Writing Tutors 2nd ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's. 2003.

Rafoth, Ben. Ed. A Tutor's Guide: Helping Writers One to One. 2nd ed. Portsmouth NH: Boynton/Cook. 2005.

(Murphy/Sherwood)

"generally, tutor and student must first establish a working relationship or mutual understanding, as a basis for collaboration on improving the student's text"--stages of this process are "pretextual, textual, and posttextual" (8)

on developing that (pretextual) relationship, from meyer & smith: "tutors 'must listen carefully to distinguish underlying meanings in a writer's comments' (9)"; "the ways in which individuals process information must always be taken into account, too, since people tend to interpret, understand, and evaluate ideas in diverse ways. consequently, tutors need to engage in what harris calls 'perception checking' or 'guessing the student's basic message and asking for affirmation of that guess' (57)"; doing all of this empathetically & nonjudgmentally "will go a long way toward forming a special trust" <--an unexamined but apparently key component to a successful session (9)

"a good question for tutors to ask ourselves is, 'who has the power in the collaboration and how is that power used' as we, for example, truly interested in what the student has to say, or are we too quick to announce our opinions? are we acting as collaborators or authority figures? do our comments invite responses and show respect for the student's ideas, or do they foreclose further interaction and leave the student feeling intimidated?" (10)

on the textual part of sessions: "to find solutions that remain true to a student's writing style and intent, a tutor must learn to address the student's needs while also creating a collaborative space within which confidence and skills can flourish" (17)

on the posttextual: (like in interviewing) you want to wrap up by sending them forth w/a sense of what's been accomplished

on tutoring online: (according to joanna castner) "synchronous online tutoring offers opportunities for dialogue between tutors and writers, allowing them to build a relationship, clarify misunderstandings, and collaboratively create knowledge (124-7)"; also working online "allows a tutor and writer to keep a record of their conversations"; notes eric crump, in "at home in the MUD: writing centers learn to wallow" (on p. 242) "what is often lost, in the time between the conversation and the inscription, is the rich immersion in detail and nuance" taking place interactionally, which is recorded in online transcriptions (23-4)

(McAndrew & Reigstad)
according to reigstad (1980) conferences follow 3 models: student-centered, collaborative, & teacher-centered (25); being totally student-centered is often idealized but each has its benefits for different kinds of tutoring problem/situation.

tutoring in the real world is characterized by "chaos, complexity, & fuzziness," & while that makes it hard to offer definitive blanket-advice on how to do it, these are good things we shouldn't try to overcome (27)

body language and the tutoring environment: "polished tutors are aware of the messages given by their posture, gestures, and tone of voice, and they learn to manipulate those three areas to ensure the messages are positive. posture, because it is often seen and assessed from a distance, is the first message the tutor sends to the writer. the tutor should adopt a posture that is alert but relaxed. if the tutor is overly attentive, the writer may perceive it as nervousness, insecurity, or even anger; if the tutor is too relaxed, the writer may take it as indifference or fatigue....the rule for posture is: look available. once the tutoring session is underway, the tutor can lean in a bit to show interest and connection."

"the tutor's gestures are constantly assessed by the writer. at the first moment of interaction, the tutor should establish eye contact and smile....once tutoring is underway, the tutor can nod and use back-channel vocalizations like 'yeah' and 'uh-huh' to reinforce the nod, showing attention and interest."

"the writer reads the tutor's tone of voice, so the tutor should strive for a tone that is both friendly and professional, approachable and efficient. if the tutor sounds harsh, the writer may be intimidated or put off. if the tutor is too warm, the writer may assume that nothing directly useful will happen" (28-9)

(Gillespie & Lerner) (chp. 3 "The Tutoring Process")
26. "as a tutor, you don't have to be an expert on the subject matter of the paper the writer is working on" [and i'm not the expert on what they wrote or how/why they did it--they're the expert. i'm the one coming to them for demonstrations of the workings of their expertise]

29. "start with questions": "what was the assignment? what is your central point or main argument?" [& from there, "what kinds of influences/resources did you decide you needed in order to make that argument" or "...did you draw upon when designing your argument?"]

30. the writer-reads-aloud part--[this is why i want to pre-read work sent to me electronically, b/c it's done to fill time/space while the tutor becomes familiar w/the work, & to reduce awkwardness, & i don't want to have to use their time that way, plus i want to be more familiar with their texts than such an introduction would allow]

35. "higher-order concerns come first" & lower-order concerns later if the session's long enough for both [they mean structure, assignment-appropriateness, etc. as opposed to grammar details, but it's applicable too to questions like "what do you neeed other sources/influences in this paper for?" as opposed to questions like "how did you go about it--what does this inclusion look like in the text?" <--citations, allusions, etc.]

37. ideals for the session: "would look like two peers having a conversation about writing, where each is equally likely to ask a question, move forward or point out his or her confusion"; "right and wrong ways of asking questions"--"you may ask, 'why did you choose to put this section here?' the writer is still going to hear this question as 'this doesn't belong here'" (37).

contrastingly w/spradley, at least in the 1st example [(but this is for tutoring, not interviewing, although his concerns would likely apply here as well)] "content-clarifying questions can be important. 'what does this term mean?' 'what is this paragraph's function?' overall, avoid questions that put the writer in the position of trying to guess the answer that's in your head" (38). [how about "can you describe the reasoning you used when you put this together this way?"; can i ask "what do you mean" if i package it as "i want to make sure i'm hearing this the way you mean it" & then try a rephrase?]

100. ways to get more writer-talk inc. "descriptive meta-analysis questions" s.a. "what have you done when you've encountered this problem in the past?"

101. the classic wait time: "when you ask questions, wait for the answer. be patient. when you think you've waited long enough, wait that amount of time again."

(in Radforth: "Tutoring in Unfamiliar Subjects" by Alexis Greiner p. 115-20)

suggested approaches to not being sure you get what they're doing on the page, w/o losing their confidence in your knowledgeability, when you need to get it in order to see if it's working.

117. "it sounds like 'affected' is a key term. would you agree? [ann agrees] what exactly do you mean by 'affected?' i ask because its meaning might be the focus of your paper" <--"notice how the tutor depends on ann to confirm what the tutor thinks ann is getting at"

118. "this is hard for me to understand. it seems like you are putting forth a formula and then you explain why it works in those reactions. is that right?" ann: "close, but not really. i was trying to illustrate a flaw in a fairly well-known theorum as it applies to intercellular interactions"

119. "your client probably has a better sense of the writing in her discipline than you do"

(in Barnett & Blumner: Kenneth Bruffee and "Peer Tutoring and the 'Conversation of Mankind'" p. 206-18)

[he's not talking about exactly what i'm talking about, but his observations nevertheless defend it:] "if we accept the premise that knowledge is an artifact created by a community of knowledgeable peers and that learning is a social process not an individual one, then learning is not assimilating information...learning is an activity in which people work collaboratively to create knowledge among themselves by socially justifying belief. we create knowledge or justify belief collaboratively by cancelling each other's biases and presuppositions; by negotiating collectively toward new paradigms of perception, thought, feeling, and expression; and by joining larger, more experienced communities of knowledgeable peers through assenting to those communities' interests, values, language, and paradigm of perception and thought" (214); "peer tutoring is not, after all, something new under the sun. however we may explore its conceptual ramifications, the fact is that people have always learned from their peers and doggedly persist in doing so" (216).

Posted by ttobryan at 11:54 AM | Comments (0)

August 31, 2006

encouragement from the mighty b:

(see, somebody's at least paying a *little* attention to my efforts at making headway here!)

remember that you don't need to know everything about qualitative methodologies; all you need to do is say "I'm going to do X and A,B, and C did it this way too" or "I'm going to do X and it diverges from what A & B did in the following ways, and here's why I'm diverging" and you don't have to have final answers to what/how you're doing after the prospectus hearing you'll do a pilot and see how that goes and then adjust as necessary the prospectus just convinces your committee that you know what you're doing and won't dig yourself into a hole that you can't write your way out of

(we'll leave the part where i couldn't write my way out of a wet paper bag right now to pointless speculation. or at least to the excuse department busily cranking out explanations for the lack of progress on the prospectus...)

Posted by ttobryan at 01:09 PM | Comments (0)

closing out the category, alex

Foddy, William. Constructing Questions for Interviews and Questionnaires: Theory and Practice in Social Research. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. 1993.

reality-check-type stuff to remember about interviewing:

"the relationship between what respondents say they do and what they actually do is not always very strong" (usually more of a problem related to (a) things ppl are embarrassed about or otherwise afraid to reveal or think the researcher would judge them poorly if he/she knew or (b) recall of events or (c) the correlation between attitudes & actions, i.e. the chinese tourists example) (3)

many (incredibly obvious but also some less so) things (like wording, context, situation, question-length & complexity) influence respondants' answers to questions, s.a. their ordering; respondants will answer a question differently based on the influence of the questions that preceded it (7)

when writing questions: be sure you're crystal clear on your goal b4 you write any specific questions, keep the general-goal question handy when writing specific questions, & keep asking yourself 'why do i want to know this'--demand substantive relevance answers; curiosity isn't enough (32)

language is a barrier (40)--respondants may/will hear things differently from how researchers hear/intend them. you need to know what the question means to your respondant b4 you'll know what to do w/the response

"funnel sequence" (kahn and cannell 1957) of general-to-specific questioning works b/c "general questions are the most easily justified in terms of their relevance to the avowed purpose of the study" so "they serve as natural leads for more specific questions" (62)

it's been historically common for researchers to try to tell respondants as little as possible about the study's aims, in order to keep from inappropriately influencing responses, but the fundamental flaw in that approach is human nature: "when respondants are given only the vaguest of information about the purposes of the studies in which they are asked to participate, they are put in the position of having to make guesses about the researchers' requirements" (71)--& they're going to be just as influenced by those guesses about purpose as by knowing the real thing, only as a researcher you can't account for those influences b/c if they come from guesses inside respondants' heads, you don't know what they are.

"respondants do their best to answer all questions that are put to them--even those they have trouble interpreting. it seems that when respondents have difficulty interpreting a question they use all available clues to help them....clues afforded by the way...the question is worded; clues generated by the accompanying sets of response options; clues contained both in previous related questions and in the answers the respondents have already given...and clues afforded by the overall definition of the situation" (or what they imagine it to be). "the problems that arise when different respondents are influenced by different clues...can be lessened...by clearly defining the topic in specific, concrete terms and clearly spelling out the reason for asking the question so that there is no reason for respondents to fall back onto contextual clues in order to clarify the question for themselves" (75).

among the "topics that are seen to be 'socially undesirable' and are therefore under-reported": "illegal and contra-normative behavior" including "committing a crime" (118) <--be aware that this could get in the way when students' perceptions of questions lean in the direction of their perceptions of plagiarism-hysteria

the tricksy thing about open questions: although they have lots of benefits in terms of being open to respondents' presentations of their attitudes & reference-frames, their own readings of questions & situations, & their responses based on their values & concerns rather than as limited by pre-determined response options, when respondents fail to give complete or adequate answers, "probing" for those answers easily becomes overly directive, which might skew answers and, potentially, "turns [open questions] into closed questions" (135)

plus, coding is always murky (138).

piloting questions: is a good idea. "demario (1983:101) has proposed that interviewers work in pairs when piloting questions, so that one of them is free to concentrate fully on conducting the interview while the other is free to listen to and observe both the interviewer's and the respondent's behavior" and "converse and presser (1986) suggest that interviewers who carry out pilot surveys should be encouraged to make copious notes in the margins of the questionnaires while they are doing the interviews and that they should take part in group discussions once they have completed them, to help identify problem questions" (185)

one method of question-testing: "asking respondents to rephrase questions in their own words" to see what they're hearing (186)

Posted by ttobryan at 10:18 AM | Comments (0)

August 30, 2006

a little more on interviews. emphasis on the "little"

Brenner, Michael, Jennifer Brown, and David Canter, Eds. The Research Interview: Uses and Approaches. London: Academic P. 1985.

interviewing is valuable because of its "willingness to treat individuals as the heros of their own drama, as valuable sources of particular information" (3); "the interviewer should follow rules in his/her relationship with the informant....his/her questioning must always be nondirective; that is, must never suggest a 'right' answer or direction of answering; he/she must take care that the accounts obtained are adequate (as complete as possible, linguistically comprehensible, free of internal inconsistencies, for example); he/she must enact a facilitator role by being nonjudgmental and supportive" (159).

farraday and plummer: "sociologists using life history methods become more like a journalist, a novelist or a biographer" (p. 774). bertaux (1981) argues that the latter three roles are more effective agents for change than sociologists have ever been! (Benner et al 167)

& 169 a little digging into who's in control when in the research interview; technically the interviewer, by design, but the whole point of the open-ended form is that interviewees can take control & lead conversations in ways that account for their concerns, interests, anxieties relative to the topic.

tangential approaches: "asking a mother 'when did your child have flu?' is liable to produce error; some of this may be overcome if...other neutral marker events, such as birthdays and holidays, are used to build up a more accurate picture" (175).

----------------

Spradley, James P. The Ethnographic Interview. New York: Holt, 1979.

characteristics of the good informant: he/she is
thoroughly enculturated, currently involved in the place/time being studied, a member of a cultural scene not already too familiar to the beginning researcher, able to make enough time available to be worked with, & nonanalytic: i.e. won't try to overexplain & do the researcher's job for him/her (46).

seemingly innocent questions like "what do you mean" or "why did you do that" can threaten responders b/c they "contain a hidden judgmental component. louder than words, they seem to shout, 'you haven't been clear; you haven't explained adequately; you are hiding the true reasons for what you told me'"--so ethnographic interviewing tries to avoid these questions, going instead for versions of "can you describe a situation wherein you might do x" as a way of finding out more indirectly & as less of a challenge what x means to the responder (82).

you don't always know what's relevant contextual information or whether your questions will be meaningful to your "informants" (ugh) unless/until you test them on representatives of your population (116-117).

Posted by ttobryan at 02:32 PM | Comments (0)

August 29, 2006

tracks in the rain (cuz it's too early for snow)

my Right This Minute & Subject to Plenty of Potential Change hypothesis (b/c kvale says i have to have one):

experienced & inexperienced academic writers use sources differently (with differing levels of canonical acceptability/appropriateness) b/c they have fundamentally different sense of the purpose & value of including the works/words/ideas of others in their writing

plus other methodologically-proximal thinking: 10-15 is avg # of interviewees (kvale 102); 9-12? 3-4 of each frosh, srs or MA 1st years, & published/ing faculty? B says 1 or 2 categories only: frosh & grads 2-3 years in? fac. seems too specialized to pair reasonably w/freshman (most of whom aren't going career-academic--will we be able to learn things that'll reasonably serve the population by that comparison?)

can i collect only frosh who think they want to stay in academia? (yes, but will that defeat the purpose--it'll only be informative then about teaching academic writing to lifetime academics, when our job is to teach it to everybody just passing through)

transcription/recording: can i do this side-by-side w/writers at a shared computer screen, adding comment-bubbles as transcription of conversations? test this!

p. 125 in kvale: from spradley ("an open phenomenological approach to learning from the interviewee is well expressed by")

i want to understand the world from your point of view. i want to know what you know in the way you know it. i want to understand the meaning of your experience, to walk in your shoes, to feel things as you feel them, to explain things as you explain them. will you become my teacher and help me understand? (34)

Posted by ttobryan at 09:34 PM | Comments (0)

InterViews

Kvale, Steinar. InterViews: An Introduction to Qualitative Research Interviewing. London: Sage P. 1996.

...in which our intrepid hero fights hard against the tangent-urge to kvetch at length about the graduate education system (why am i doing self-guided study for my dissertation in my sixth straight year of grad school before i encounter a text that actually & usefully defines "hermeneutics" and "phenomenology"?) & quarrels at length with the internal (il)logic of definitions & co[ntrasting]/[laborative] theoretical systems...

basic definition (from preface): "interviews are conversations where the outcome is a coproduction of the interviewer and the subject" (xvii)

traveler metaphor: in addition to wandering around talking to whomever he/she encounters, "the traveler may also deliberately seek specific sites or topics by following a method, with the original Greek meaning of 'a route that leads to the goal.' the interviewer wanders along with the local inhabitants, asks questions that lead the subjects to tell their own stories of their lived world, and converses with them in the original Latin meaning of conversation as 'wandering together with'" + "the journey may not only lead to new knowledge; the traveler might change as well" (4).

the book's particular domain: the "semistructured life world interview" defined as "an interview whose purpose is to obtain descriptions of the life world of the interviewee with respect to interpreting the meaning of the described phenomena"--& i want my interviewees to do as much of the interpreting as they can so that i'm not imposing upon them any more than is absolutely necessary.

Conversation is an ancient form of obtaining knowledge. Thucydides interviewed participants from the Peloponnesian Wars to write the history of the wars, and Socrates used dialogue to obtain philosophical knowledge.

necessary disclaimer: "the interview...is neither a progressive nor an oppressive method....the knowledge produced can be used either to enhance the inbestigated subjects' condition or to manipulate their behavior more efficiently" (11)

more definitions: "technically, the qualitative research interview is semistructured: it is neither an open conversation nor a highly structured questionnaire. it is conducted according to an interview guide that focuses on certain themes and that may include suggested questions. the interview is usually transcribed, and the written text together with the tape recording are the material for the subsequent interpretation of meaning" (27); in the model provided "the interviewer's questions aimed at a cognitive clarification of the subject's story....the mode of interviewing was inspired by a phenomenological philosophy, which is based on a descriptive study of consciousness" (29)

where it gets tricksy: "the interviewer registers and interprets what is said as well as how it is said; he or she must be observant of--and able to interpret--vocalization, facial expressions, and other bodily gestures. an everyday conversation often takes place on a factual level. a pupil may state: 'i am not as stupid as my grades at the examinations showed, but i have bad study habits.' common reactions could then be on a factual level: 'what grades did you get?' or 'what are your study habits?'--questions that also may yield important information. a meaning-oriented reply would, in contrast, be something like, 'you feel that the grades are not an adqueate measure of your competence?'....it is necessary to listen to the explicit descriptions and meanings as well as to what is 'said between the lines.' the interviewer may seek to formulate the 'implicit message,' 'send it back' to the subject, and obtain an immediate confirmation or disconfirmation of the interviewer's interpretation of what the interviewee is saying" (32) <--& if you're doing that, then interpretation--b/c it's collaborative--seems less iffy, although i still imagine ugrads, anyway, saying yes to restatements they don't really follow. but this makes me twitchy: "the question of why the subjects experience and act as they do is primarily a task for the researcher to evaluate. an analogy to a doctor's diagnosis may be clarifying" (32)... or thoroughly obfuscating, since doctors mostly diagnose based on lists of symptoms observed in past patients, not on interpretive guesses about causality...

done properly, the qual. reserch interview "is focused on certain themes in the interviewee's life world. it is neither strictly structured with standardized questions, nor entirely 'nondirective,' but....the interviewer leads the subject toward certain themes, but not to certain opinions about these themes" (34).

rorty ("a neopragmatist philosopher") on knowledge: "the notion of mind as re-presenting an objective world can be discarded, 'if we see knowledge as a matter of conversation and social practice, rather than as an attempt to mirror nature' (rorty, 1979, p. 171). the certainty of our knowledge is a matter of conversation between persons, rather than as a matter of interaction with a nonhuman reality. if we regard knowing not as having an essence but as a right to believe, we may see 'conversation as the ultimate context within which knowledge is understood' (p. 389)" (37).

gadamer & shotter: conversation is how human creatures construct reality: conversation in interviewing "is not only a specific empirical method: it also involves a basic mode of constituting knowledge; and the human world is a conversational reality" (37).

gooey border-drawing interviewing (like this) has theoretical bases in: postmodern thought, hermeneutics, phenomenology, & dialectics; "a phenomenological perspective includes a focus on the life world, an openness to the experiences of the subjects, a primacy of precise descriptions, attempts to bracket foreknowledge, and a search for invariant essential meanings in the descriptions" (38-9). [begin creep factor here: "invariant essential meanings"? on this planet?]

from PoMo we get "Knowedge as Conversation" (rorty, gadamer, shotter), "Knowledge as Narrative" (lyotard), "Knowledge as Language" (presumably derrida et. al.--he doesn't specify), "Knowledge as Context" (again) & "Knowledge as Interrelational" (more lyotard + merleau-ponty, both of whose work he calls phenomenological) (40-4)

[what separates the "hermeneutic meaning interpretation" (which is so interpretation-oriented & determinedly textual that i'm shoving it aside) from seeking (& creating by interpretive moves) "invariant essential meaning"?]

phenomenological description: "is based on phenomenology in the sense of understanding social phenomena from the actors' own perspectives, describing the world as experienced by the subjects, and with the assumption that the important reality is what people perceive it to be" (52) [which to me flies like a red flag of contrast against that invariant-essential business...] "[it] is interested in elucidating both that which appears and the manner in which it appears. it studies the subjects' perspectives on their world; attempts to describe in detail the content and structure of the subjects' consciousness, to grasp the qualitative diversity of their experiences" [good so far, BUT-->] "and to explicate their essential meanings." [doesn't essentializing meaning drown complexity/reality in really ungood ways? danger danger-->] "phenomenology attempts to get beyond immediately experienced meanings in order to articulate the prereflective level of lived meanings, to make the invisible visible" (53)(by inventive interpretation? this sounds like exactly what i don't want to be doing--yet isn't it also an accurate presentation of what i propose? i want to know what writers' (invisible) reasons are for their (visible) actions... but i don't want to impose a reading on their experiences; i want to know what they think they're doing.)

description of open description: (spiegelberg) "'keeping the eyes open,' 'not think, but see.' according to merleau-ponty (1962), what matters is to describe the given as precisely and completely as possible; to describe rather than explain or analyze." [right! does this only seem to fold back on itself to me?] "phenomenology is the attempt at a direct description of experience, without any considerations about the origin or cause of an experience. in phenomenological philosophy, objectivity is reached through intentional acts of consciousness and is an expression of fidelity to the phenomena investigated" ...until "in the investigation of essences one shifts from describing separate phenomena to searching for their common essence....this means varying a given phenomenon freely in its possible forms, and that which remains constant through the different variations is the essence..." (53).

bracketing: "a phenomenological reduction calls for a suspension of judgment as to the existence or nonexistence of the content of an experience" & "can be pictured as a 'bracketing,' an attempt to place the common sense and scientific knowledge about the phenomena within parentheses in order to arrive at an unprejudiced description of the essence.... [it] does not involve an absolute absence of presuppositions, but rather a critical analysis of one's own presuppositions" (54).

All my knowledge of the world, even my scientific knowledge, is gained from my own particular point of view, or from some experience of the world without which the symbols of science would be meaningless, the whole universe of science is built upon the world as directly experienced, and if we want to subject science itself to rigorous scrutiny and arrive at a precise assessment of its meaning and scope, we must begin by reawakening the basic experiences of the world of which science is the second order expression. (p.viii) --merleau-ponty (1962)

acknowledgement of contradictions: "both phenomenology and dialectics seek the essences beneath the manifest appearances, while in postmodern thought the appearance has become the essence" (58) <--but i don't think this either; writers cite poorly not b/c they don't know how (appearance) but because they don't know why (how-purpose vs. how-implementation)

objectivity: as freedom from bias (is untenable), as reliability (don't we already have a term for that?), & as "reflecting the nature of the object researched" (we have a term for that too: suitability) (65).

methods: 7 stages of an interview investigation
thematizing--hypotheses & general questions
designing--specific questions aimed at testing the hypothesis
interviewing
transcribing
analyzing
verifying
reporting (81)

in academic journals, the what-i-did component of the write-up has to always look like "a distorted technical picture of scientific research as a logical, linear process" that of course it isn't/never was (83).

thematizing: most studies have methodological problems b/c they try to assign "how"s to their plans before thoroughly developing their "what"s and "why"s. don't. (95).

designing: develop your overview before you start (carefully), remember how many factors are interdependent (most of them), "keep the endpoint in sight" ("stay on target"), don't procrastinate, & expect to learn/evolve work along the way (99-100).

ethics: have some.

proceedures: "the interview is a stage upon which knowledge is constructed through the interaction of interviewer and interviewee roles"; "the interviewees should be provided with context....the context is introduced with a briefing in which the interviewer defines the situation for the subject; briefly tells about the purpose of the interview, the use of a tape recorder, and so on; and asks if the subject has any questions before starting the interview....the first minutes of an interview are decisive. the subjects will want to have a grasp of the interviewer before they allow themselves to talk freely....a good contact is established by attentive listening, with the interviewer showing interest, understanding, and respect for what the subject says; at the same time, the interviewer is at ease and clear about what he or she wants to know. the initial briefing should be followed up by a debriefing after the interview....there may be some tension or anxiety, because the subject has been open about often personal and emotional experiences...the interaction can be rounded off by the interviewer mentioning some of the main points learned from the interview. the subject may then want to comment on this feedback. the interaction can thereafter be concluded by the interviewer saying, for example, 'i have no further questions. do you have anything more you want to bring up, or ask about, before we finish the interiew?'" (128).

types of interview question:
introducing questions: "can you tell me about...?"
follow-up questions
probing questions: "could you say something more about that?"
specifying questions
direct questions: "have you ever done x"
indirect questions "how do you believe most people feel about x"
structuring questions: "now i want to ask instead about"
silence (ah, wait time)
interpreting questions: "you then mean that...?" (133-5)

transcription is inherently interpretive (160). duh.

more don'ts: don't collect 1000 pages of shit what needs transcription (181)! (a) plan better, (b) focus your questioning/recording, & (c) "the interviewee's statements are not collected--they are coauthored by the interviewer" (183)

strategies: categorization, condensation, narrative structuring, & "ad hoc tactics"--do what makes sense in the scenario: from miles & huberman--> "noting patterns, themes (1), seeing plausibility (2), and clustering (3)....making metaphors (4)....counting (5).... making contrasts/comparisons (6).... partitioning variables (7) .... subsuming particulars under the general (8); factoring (9)....noting relations between variables (10); and finding intervening variables (11)...building a logical chain of evidence(12) and making conceptual/theoretical coherence (13)" (204).

beware the "pervasiveness of interpretation"; doesn't happen @ the analysis stage only but is always happening (205).

plurality of interpretation (210): me & the writers themselves? hope that's plural enough...

Posted by ttobryan at 04:45 PM | Comments (0)

August 28, 2006

on writing centers & conference-conversations

i need better resources. i brought these home from the library:

Briggs, Lynn & Meg Woolbright, Eds. Stories from the Center: Connecting Narrative and Theory in the Writing Center. Urbana, IL: NCTE. 2000.

Grimm, Nancy Maloney. Good Intentions: Writing Center Work for Postmodern Times. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton Cook P. 1999.

Sperling, Melanie. "I Want to Talk to Each of You: Collaboration and the Teacher-Student Writing Conference." Research in the Teaching of English. 24: 3 (Oct. 1990). 279-321.

i was hoping for something pedagogical, methodological, about talking to students about their words-on-pages in ways that don't pre-determine everything for them so that you're really only hearing yourself echoed back. i didn't find it.

a few minutely-useful gems:

sperling
terms from her abstract: this is a "descriptive quantitative discourse analysis of conference talk across students and descriptive qualitative case study analysis within students" (279); in more words "analysis is thus in two parts: (a) a descriptive quantitative analysis, across cases, of teacher-student writing conferences for the six focal students, based on their conference transcripts, and (b) descriptive case studies within the six individual students across time, informed by all data sources" (290)--picking the 2 for the latter was based on maximum contrast.

interviewing w/o influencing is impossible: much of the purpose of this study is to show "how, participating in the explicit dialogue of teacher-student conversation, students collaborate in the often implicit act of acquiring and developing written language" (282).

how not to write this disclaimer? "while, as case study students from a descriptive study, they do not 'represent' a larger population of students, they make up a fair microcosm of the variety of students in this ninth-grade english course" (285).

coding/classifying: "i studied the conferences for content as well as for structure as both...had functional relevance. in identifying discourse categories...i was guided by the work of campbell (1986), green & wallat (1981), gumperz (1982), mehan (1979) and wells (1981)" (290)--> but as a loose basis, not a determining guide. "i designated each conversational turn as either (a) request, (b) compliance, (c) offer, (d) acceptance, (e) question, (f) answer" (293)

teacher she observed met w/students having already commented in writing on their first drafts & was bringing those comments to them at the meeting(?); then "using his comments as a springboard" he'd initiate conversations by asking questions (307).

grimm

reminder: the culture of the academy is a culture. indoctrinating others into it--or studying the failures of their indoctrination--is still indoctrination.

to one of her students, "because he was born into the dominant culture, he has been rewarded for understanding and following the dominant expectations. and because his white middle-class background is congruent with the cultural milieu of school, he is able to discern what is expected in terms of topic development and structure. to him, school has been fair, and it seems intuitively obvious that one would follow directions and do what the teacher requires. to him, truth lies in the details of the assignment sheet" (101) <--& if we assume this is blanket-true, we lose touch completely w/reality.

Posted by ttobryan at 02:14 PM | Comments (0)

August 26, 2006

drafty biblies (wow has my command of the language left me)

here's, um, part 1. or 0.1. or something. of a list.

prospectus bibliography so far: