Transcript Analyzing classroom talk as forms of life

Towards
Practitioner
Research:
Analyzing Classroom
Talk as Forms of Life
Wu Zongjie
（吴宗杰）
Zhejiang University
Misleading concepts of teacher
research
•Purpose: To improve the efficiency of
classroom teaching
•Way: To develop “better” teaching
techniques
•Reason: Causal relationships between
action and result (cause and effect)
Three types of research
• Empowering research: academic research
• Disempowering research: teacher doing
academic research (action research)
• Research for understanding: exploratory
practice
Re-activate the human potential of enquiry.
Allwright, 2003
Life and work
• Work is constitutive in life, and life extends
itself through our work for a better life. Life
and work stand for a unitary phenomenon of
human beings. However, the problems of
modern society, including education,
precisely originate from the division of life
and work. ‘Living’ and ‘making a living’ are
differentiated, and made into two
contending matters.
Life and work
• “it must make a contribution to the quality
of life in the language classroom before it
can hope to make a contribution to the
quality of any teaching and learning that
take place there” Allwright (2001)
What is Quality?
Remove ghosts, you will see the life
• ``Laws of nature are human inventions, like ghosts.
Laws of logic, of mathematics are also human
inventions, like ghosts. The whole blessed thing is a
human invention, including the idea that it isn't a
human invention. We see what we see because these
ghosts show it to us. Isaac Newton is a very good
ghost. One of the best. Your common sense is
nothing more than the voices of thousands and
thousands of these ghosts from the past. Ghosts
and more ghosts. Ghosts trying to find their place
among the living.'‘ (Pirsig)
The quality of life emerges when language
is put in a proper position.
• 荃者，所以在魚，得魚而忘荃；蹄者，所以在兔，得
兔而忘蹄；言者，所以在意，得意而忘言。吾安得夫
忘言之人而與之言哉？(莊子外物第二十六)
• A fish-trap is for catching fish; once you’ve caught the fish,
you can forget about the trap. A rabbit-snare is for catching
rabbits; once you’ve caught the rabbit, you can forget
about the snare. Words are for catching ideas; once you’ve
caught the idea, you can forget about the words. Where can
I find a person who knows how to forget about words so
that I can have a few words with him? (Zhuang Zi Chapter
26)
Classroom life beyond words
• 学完了美国诗人惠特曼的《草叶集》后，老师对草是什么东西这几节
诗进行了深挖，然后让学生到自然界去找一片叶子，创作一首诗。有
位在找的过程中对叶子产生了感情，接连化了一个星期才找了一张落
叶，因为他不忍心从树上摘叶子，他说树会痛的。下面是同学写的几
首诗歌，虽然他们的诗歌语言还不完美，但是他们所表达的情和意已
经跃在纸上。读者似乎能看到他们在创作诗歌时的那份动情。
(Teacher diary)
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The Leaf
The Leaf sitting in the middle of the tree,
Looking gently at me.
Look! She is like a newborn baby,
Clean and innocent.
And I know when it approaches summer,
She turns a bright beauty.
There is her cradle.
As an angle she smiles,
Shy but sweet.
…..
Language games as a way of
life
• ‘to imagine a language means to imagine
a form of life’. Wittgenstein (1953:sec. 19)
• ‘Meaning is never going to be satisfactorily
explained by pointing to the mental, to
things like intention’ (Genova 1995: 120)
but is an aspect of pictures and activities
within social contexts.
Language in ontological perspective
• Look on the language game as the
primary thing. And look on the feelings,
etc., as you look on a way of regarding
the language game, as interpretation.
• (Wittgenstein 1953: sec. 656; emphasis
in original)
Listening as a way of
playing a game
• A teacher or participant is listening from
a hermeneutic perspective, rather than
an evaluative stance, joining in the
game instead of trying to get the game
to take a predefined course or reach
particular known ends.
• Evaluative listening ‘tends to forget its own
responsibility in interactions’ and focuses on
eliciting correct responses. The goal becomes
clear and concise presentations of verbal
information, and listening to make sure
students have ‘got it’. Interpretive listening
includes ‘listening to what learners were
saying’, as ongoing negotiations in which the
evolution of ideas and knowledge is a social
construct and part of the language games of
society rather than known ‘facts’.
Speaking is a disclosure of your
understanding
• Speaking is essentially to speak to yourself
for understanding, rather than to enact
others’ action
• Speaking is showing
Knowledge transmitting
Knowledge making
Knowledge critique
Look at the classroom as a picture
What teachers have failed to realize as
they teach is precisely that what they
are trying to do is to share with their
students a form of life.
Exploratory practice in comparison
Being
Exploratory
Practice
Action Research
Life oriented
Work oriented
Authenticity
Efficiency
Self seized by
everyday dwellings
Self chosen from
public discourses for
its hero
Knowing
Understanding in focus
Skill/knowledge in focus
Emancipatory interest
Technical/strategic interest
Narrative (intuitive)
Paradigm (propositional)
Concreteness (primordial)
Generalisation (average)
Holistic
Analytical
Personal criteria
Official criteria
Convincing self
Situational interpretation
(convictions)
Convincing others
Theoretical interpretation
(justification)
No purpose
Purposive
Authentic critique (no value)
Critique laden with a value
Standing out by a personal
puzzle
Initiated by research and
technical agenda
Led by everydayness
dwellings
Led by expertise and
institutional conventions
Implicit (tacit) change
Explicit change
No deliberate action oriented
Action oriented (Behaviour
manipulation)
Sustainability
Project bound
No steps to follow
Systemic institutional means
Community tied to an
marginal practice
Community tied to an
institutional practice
Communication with private
language (for showing things)
Communication with public
language (for exchanging ideas)
Doing
Genre as form of life
Genres are not just forces. Genres are forms of life,
ways of being. They are frames for social action.
They are environments for learning. They are
locations within which meaning is constructed.
Genres shape the thoughts we form and the
communications by which we interact. Genres are
the familiar places we go to create intelligible
communicative action with each other and the
guideposts we use to explore the unfamiliar.
Bazerman (1997:19)
Thanks