Transcript Place-based Reading and Writing

Studying Places/Spaces
CI5410, Fall, 2007
Identity, Agency, and Power
Identity can be considered an enactment of self made within
particular activities and relationships that occur within particular
spaces (geographic, social, electronic, mental, cultural) at
particular points in time. These enactments are always
situated in and constitutive of histories and of power relations.
(Moje, 2004)
Agency might be thought of as the strategic making and
remaking of selves; identities; activities; relationships; cultural
tools and resources; histories; and possibly, but not
necessarily, relations of power. Agency is always socially and
culturally produced, and enacted within structures of power.
(Moje & Lewis, in press; Lewis & Moje, 2004)
Power is produced and enacted in and through discourses,
relationships, activities, spaces, and times as people compete
for access to and control of resources, tools, identities. Power
can constrain, but does not necessarily prohibit agency. (Moje
& Lewis, in press, Lewis and Moje, 2004)
An Activity Perspective
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What is the activity?
What are the tools used in the activity?
Who are the participants?
What are the goals of the activity?
What is the activity system?
Who are the participants?
What are the goals of the system?
In this activity, who acts/talks? When? How?
 What is the content of their utterances, and how is
that content shaped by the activity? The
relationships? The tools? The activity system?
How do the actions (talk and other actions) vary across
participants?
What do people learn in this activity?
Critical Discourse Analysis
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What are some of the features of this social activity?
What discourses (or ideologies) surface in this
discussion?
 What social identities are enacted in this exchange
(through language use, discourses, generic features,
actions)?
What relations of power are enacted and/or produced in
this exchange?
How are these power relations locally produced?
 How are these power relations tied to and
reproductive of larger systems of power?
 What aspects of the talk, silence, or action could
be considered agentic? How? Why?
How Do Identity, Agency, and Power Shape
Learning? (Moje & Lewis, in press)
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What is learning? (Another tentative definition)~~
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Learning is the acquisition or appropriation of, the resistance to,
and/or the reconceptualization of skills and knowledge that have
the potential to make and remake selves, identities, and
relationships, and
Learning is ways situated in participation within discourse
communities.
If discourse communities produce and struggle over
cultural tools, resources, and identities (both within and
across communities), then learning is shaped by power
relations.
Therefore, agency, which is about the power to control how
one’s self, identity, relationships, etc. are made and
remade, is critical to understanding learning and to
mediating learning environments.
Performance Theory
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What positions, spatial or discursive, do participants
take up in relation to each other?
What positions, spatial or discursive, do participants
take up in relation to the text?
What social codes are available to participants in this
context?
What ways of talking, not talking, acting are
performed in this exchange? What do these ways of
talking, not talking, or acting suggest about
individual or group identities?
How are these performances tied to larger systems of
power?
Agency: drama: adopt
perspectives of expert
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Allows students to
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experience what it means to be
perceived as expert or authority
Step out of familiar “student” role to
adopt a “professional” role
Learn to cope with dialogic tensions and
challenges through verbal arguments
NCLB: use of genres associated with
engaging in formal debate
The value of place-based
learning: Knowledge
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Robert Brooke (ed. Rural Voices, NCTE),
“If we understand our local place well
enough to grasp how it came to be this way,
the forces that shape it, and how it compares
to other places, we will have developed a
robust and extensive knowledge base” (p.
63).
Place--> Meaning of Space
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Place: the actual physical site, event, or
activity in lived or text worlds
Space: the meanings we associate with place
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Subjective
Autobiographical
Social/cultural
Power
Frames: Phenomenological:
Subjective
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Attachment to place: Uniqueness
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Uniqueness vs. homogeneity and
standardization: “McDonaldlization” (#1 in
sales in France)
What if everything looked the same?
Celebrating the local: challenge top-down
imposition of corporate sameness and
standards as standardization
Michael Perry: Population
456: subjective New Auburn
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I am happy here, but my gravitation to place has
always been balanced by my need to move. I crave
a contrapuntal mix of shiftlessness and stability. In
bed at night, I can hear the trucks out on the highway.
Sometimes a driver drifts across the white line, and
when the tires hit the rumble strip, the rubbery howl
makes me want to drive away in the night, fills me
with the urge to go west, makes me think the finest
sort of freedom is found at sunrise in a South Dakota
rest stop. Contentment, it turns out, can be a matter
of global positioning.
Subjective: affiliation: insider
versus outsider
“The Laundromat,” Larry Watson
They hate us here and why not.
We’re the summer people,
The cottage owners, lake dwellers,
The city folks, the flatlanders,
here to use every washer
and dryer and on no special
Schedule….
You can tell , they’d like to say,
bag your clothes and wash them at home,
wear them dirty, beat them
on a rock for all we care.
But they can’t they don’t dare
because we buy our groceries
from Howard at the IGA
And our malts from Tutt’s Tastee Freeze
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Poems about place: Steve
Athanases, UC,Davis
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Milwaukee suburb
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Home: safe/pastoral
Focus: beyond the
local
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Urban CA.
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Travel, cars
Focus: seasons
Critique of sameness
and consumerism
Home: danger
Focus: the local
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Parks, street
corners,community
Little about nature
Critique of poverty
and challenges of
urban life
Frame: narrative or
autobiographical
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Stories about a place
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Autobiographical recollections
Family histories
Fictional versions
Tall tales
Creation myths
Documented historical accounts
Perry: time: rural development
Today, when I see the cornfields sprouting
duplexes and hear my neighbors mourning
the loss of the family farm--a decimation that
began in the 1980s and is now virtually
complete--my gut sympathies lie foursquare
with the displaced farmers, but I can’t help but
think that this land has been lost before.
Pedagogies of Place: Design
(Ellsworth, 2005)
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“The experience of the learning self in the
times and places of knowledge in the making,
which are also the times and places of the
learning self in the making”
Places “speak to and about pedagogy
indirectly through design…[they are] things in
the making [that] provide us with a ‘zone of
historical indetermination’ that allows room for
experimentation.”
Maya Lin: Vietnam Veterans’
Memorial
Linking internal imagination
and external reality
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Lin: “I create places in which to think, without
trying to dictate what to think.”
Pedagogy: “must create places in which to
think without already knowing what we should
think.”
Place “confronts us from outside the concepts
we already have, outside the subjectivities we
already are.”
Public versus private spaces
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Rec Center: “face-time”
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“having one’s ‘face’ recognizing by another
person or being able to see the face (or
body) of a person whom one might be
interested in meeting.”
Positioning: “opening-lines”
Strutting: attention to oneself
Timing: being there at the “right time”
Transgressions: stalkers, roamers, lurkers
Frame: Categories:
regions/groups
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Geographic categories/regions
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“Suburbia”/”urban”/”rural”/”small town”
“Midwestern,” “Southern,” “West”
“Small town”
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“Dying” main street businesses: WalMarts
Value of sense of community
Moje: Latino youth: hybrid
identities in different spaces
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Different neighborhoods
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Malls: sense of being “different”
“Space for othering and being othered”
Virtual spaces: lowrider.com
“The ethnic community space of their lives remained
dominant in their textual choices and literacy
practices.”
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Space for building ethnic identities
Texts/dress for identification
Frame: affiliation markers:
Perry: lawn art
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In New Auburn, as in any place, lawn art is a form of
public display as simultaneously trite and revealing
as bumper stickers and nose rings. Between the
porch and the road, iconography sprouts: the bathtub
Madonna, the milk-cow windmill, giant mushrooms
carved from stumps, yellow Norwegian Crossing
traffic signs--these images speak to who we are.
Small-town Minnesota
Summer Festivals
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Ron Lavenda: Cornfests and Water Carnivals
Celebration of town unity/coherence
Display of expertise/resources
 “Corn Days”
Socialization of new members
Queen’s Pageant
 Demonstration of commitment to town values
 Gender identity associated with traditional values
 Assuming the role of representing the town’s
idealized expectations for young people
 Pleasure at witnessing commitment to conforming
to these expectations
Regional spaces: Mediated by
popular culture: “Wild West”
“Wild West” portrayed in cowboys,
Indians, 10-gallon hats, saloons, guns,
horses, frontier, ghost towns,
tumbleweeds, ranches, sheriff, dirt,
wind, dreams coming true, glitter and
gold, Hollywood, movie stars, the pull of
California etc.
Regional identities: values
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Living well/valuing ecology/biology
Civic involvements
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Sense of economic worth
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Know about/actively address local issues
Know local opportunities
Spiritual connection to place
Belonging to a community
Regional identities
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Being someone from a certain place/ region
Cheryl: “Therefore, I realized my racial identity
was so inextricably connected to the space in
where I grew up. Indeed, Los Angeles, itself,
helped me identify who I was, and when I
venture beyond its border, I realized my racial
identity lost its meaning.”
Melissa Cook: Texas to LA
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Gendered/culural spaces
Gendered space: Japanese
department store
Reynolds: women and space:
safety/control
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Domestic spaces: oppressive
Public spaces: unsafe
Neighborhoods in music videos:
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Male spaces
Feminist geography/ecocriticism
Classed space: Bettie: cultural
capital and class
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“Hard-living” vs. “settled-living” habitus
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Lack of continuity/support
“White-trash” smokers: marginalized
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Behavior: it’s there choice to behave
Awards ceremony: celebration of preps
Excluded from social school networking
Hard-living: poverty/instability
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Problematic: Ruby Payne: culture of poverty
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Shift from structural factors to blame on the
“pathological” values of “poor families”
Sense of unfairness but not framed in
structural, systemic terms
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Blame victims vs. economic/political system
Lack of stable attachment to schools
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Housing/changes: no consistency
Raced spaces
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Suburbia/Exurbia: Whiteness: “white
flight”
Homogeneity: fear of diversity
Segregated/gated communities
Political power shift: state legislatures
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Cuts in funding for urban areas
Whiteness: positioning
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White privilege/safety
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Assumed as the invisible norm
Order, rationality,self-control, power
Colorblind racism: “we’re all the same”
Local pedagogy:
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Understand race/power relationships
How one learned about race
Resistance to interrogating privilege
Costs of segregation
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Sheryll Cashin,The Failures of Integration: How
Race and Class Are Undermining the American
Dream
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Racist real estate policies: “desirable
neighborhoods”: higher housing prices
Gary Orfield (Harvard Civil Rights Project: will
be at UCLA in 2007): housing segregation
and schooling
McDermott: Meaning of white
identity: context dependent
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Observations: white/black interactions in
convenience stores in similar working-class
neighborhoods: different histories
Atlanta: no sense of working-class/ethnic
solidarity
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Whites perceived as “failures”
Boston: privileged as working-class whites
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Strong positive identification with neighborhood
Interracial interactions in the
stores
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Misperceptions/stereotypes
“Jane (white) interacts with Sue (Black) as
Sue--until Sue mentions her white boyfriend,
or mistakedly insults Jane, or mentions the
trouble her child has with the law; then Sue
becomes a black person, and a whole set of
group-based stereotypes can be activated.
Conversely, Sue interacts with Jane as Jane,
until Jane remarks about “those people”
moving into the neighborhood…”
Frame: ecological
perspectives on space
“There is a real world, that is really dying, and
we had better think about that”
-Marilynne Robinson, Mother Country
Jut Jhally, Advertising and the End of the World-most resources depleted by 2060
http://www.mediaed.org/videos/Commercialism
PoliticsAndMedia/Advertising_EndOfWorld
Analyzing music/media fan
spaces as “scenes” or “zones”
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Scenes: Spaces to play
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Bedroom culture as a “zone”
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Buffy nights: fan responses in a bar
Fans sharing of knowledge/expertise
Monty Python's Spamalot
Soundscapes, memorabilia, multi-tasking, work
Music club as spectacle: “zoning out”
Three types of spaces (Soja)
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Firstspace: Actual physical place
Secondspace: Intellectual/Imagined
spaces
 Idealized versions of what spaces
should/could be
Thirdspace: tensions between actual
and imagined
Space and positioning
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How one is positioned by the spatial
aspects/artifacts/social practices
Higher education: position workingclass student as marginal
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Fails to consider Thirdspace, borderland
tensions between ideal and reality of
working-class students’ lives
Frame: Power in space:
Positioning/stance
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How am I being positioned to respond to
this experience, event, or the text?
Do I accept or reject how I am being
positioned to respond?
What are the different “modes of address”
Ellsworth?
Border Theory:
physical/cultural borders
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US/Mexico borderlands
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hybridity, hierarchies, colonialism
Bejarano, C., (2005) Que onda?: Urban
Youth Culture and Border Identity
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4 year ethnography: high school
Chicana/o vs. Mexicano youth
Distinct social spaces in the school
De Fina: social categories and
narratives
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Narratives reflect schema
“Membership Categorization Analysis”
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Local practices in using categories
Being “Hispanic”: Mexican workers
Defining properties of categories
Relations with others
Storytellers: being Hispanic:
discrimination
Erdreich and Rapoport, Reading
the Power of Spaces:
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Palestinian Israeli women at the Hebrew
University
Employed spatial literacies to transform
oppressive spaces for own agency
Coping with borders between
official/legal practices and resisting
practices
Time: Canyon alternative high
school program
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Different uses of time from “official
school chronotope”
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Late passes, Saturday school, catch-up
work
“factory/efficiency time” vs. “science time”
Value of alternative time schedules
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Official school time controlled, segmented,
decontextualized, contained
Janette: narrative chronotope
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Carnival space: challenge to traditional
norms
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Soja’s “thirdspace”: alternatives to official
second space chronotopes
Identity of “tattooed freak”
“Girls Room” poem: rejection of traditional
focus on appearance
Mauk: Gordan Community
College
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“Students, themselves, in an academic
third space are the intersection of
academic and nonacademic spatialities-defined by their own bodies”
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Interview people outside of school on
issues of education
Nature of work in different places
How to correspond with politicians
Mauk: focus on nonacademic
vs. academic spaces
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Online spaces vs. campus spaces
Online writing feedback: U Writing
Center
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http://writing.umn.edu/sws/appointments.ht
m
Writing about nonacademic spaces
Campano, Immigrant Students
and Literacy
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First mandated classroom space
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Official instruction
Second classroom spaces
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Students’ interests, leads, desires, stories
Before/after school, lunch, homes, etc.
“Funds of knowledge” outside official
school spaces
Lakoff: menu mediated “minor
identities”
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Knowledge of food types: markers of cultural
capital and ethnic differences
Chez Panisse vs. Oriental Restaurant
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Relationship between space and identity
“Expectations of character, interaction, and role to
be played; the menu merely validates and
underscores those assumptions and sets the
stage for the main act, the food and eating of it,
again according to personal expectations.”
Chez Panisse: tonight:
$100.00
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A Dinner with Christine Campadieu of the
Domaine de la Tour Vieille
Grilled leeks and chicories with Catalan
sauce
Baked Atlantic cod with black olives and garlic
Cattail Creek Farm lamb shoulder braised in
Grenache wine with almonds; with potato and
celery root purée and winter greens
Warm chocolate fondant with toasted
hazelnut ice cream
Ethnography methods
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Adopting an “outsider” “Martian” cultural perspective
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Adopting an insider “emic” perspective
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Problem: being a fish in water
“Making the familiar strange and the strange familiar”
(Erickson)
Finding insider informants
Extensive observations: fly on the wall
Interviewing
Understanding practices as reflecting
discourses/cultural models
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High school study: Cultural models of physical and
intellectual control in the school
Field notes: Fieldworking
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Focus: selective perception
Verbal snapshots: 5-10 details
Descriptive vs. general language
People’s practices/appearances
Use of photos/videos: digital storytelling
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“Ethnography of a University”: video clips
Triangulate: cross-check with others
Mapping spaces
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Where things are located
What type of people are sitting with
whom (race, class, gender)
People’s body positioning/relationships
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Leander: classroom maps
F-formation: position of lower body
Facing versus turning away
Immersing: Fast Food
Restaurant/Cafeteria
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Take dual-entry field notes on left side about specific
aspects of the Décor, people, conversations, ordering
rituals, language
Map the site noting who sits where; who interacts
with whom and how
Reflect on the right side next to specific notes on the
 Cultural norms, roles, beliefs, assumptions
 Social interactions between people
 One’s own relationship to the place
 Sense of how you are positioned
Social construction of spaces
as relational
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Physical positioning: power relations
Leander study: Naureen’s English class in
an alternative school-within-a school
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“Derogatory Terms Activity”: Huck Finn
Language/power relationships
List words used to put down others
Put words on a banner
Interviewing
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Developing questions based on prior
research about the person
Asking “grand tour” questions about the
overall “big picture” experience
Asking open-ended vs. yes/no questions
Follow-up questions to foster elaboration
“Pointing” interviews to focus on specifics
Analyze transcript: Interview
with your participant
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the amount/rough percentage of time each person
talked
the turn-taking and topic focus
the kinds of speech acts employed by each person
the voices adopted reflecting certain roles or stances
and how these voices or stances positioned you or
your participant (Ribeiro and Schiffrin chapters).
adoption of any discourses reflected in these voices
or stances
the influence of the interview genre itself
nonverbal cues/markers on the exchange.