6.2 Thinking about purpose & form

This is a sort of freewrite meant to let you know what I am thinking about as I work on the proposal.

At this point I am thinking I might analyze one of my writing courses as a Discourse community as a way to characterize practices + ideology.  I'm not sure where that would go - maybe a 3rd chapter in the first section ?  A kind of sample for what the other ethnographies do?  This ethnographic description would be alongside the pieces you are writing and would serve as a ground for the final chapter where we look at how ideologies/practices in writing communities differ - and how writers might draw more constructively from mediated experiences as they move from one community to another.  I am realizing there are problems with this approach - and am at a "we'll see where this goes" stage of thinking about it

1. What is our book about?  We are asked to " Briefly describe the ebook or scholarly project—no more than two single-spaced pages."

In terms of aboutness, so far I have got:

• ethnographic study of online communities as a way to characterize t personal experiences of ideologies (that is, not the representation of the ideologies associated with particular community genres - like fanfiction communities - but rather to characterizes the ideology(-ies?) that individual participants, or local groups of participants, enact within a specific community
• exploration of the flows & circulation within belief systems and practices, and across contexts and Discourse communities, etc
• some curious theorization of points of entry/flexibility with respect to moving across ideologies/belief systems (or at least being able to "hear" across belief systems)
• (as part of the last point) speculation about what our study might show about the "

      

2. Connections to Conversations in other research.  The proposal guidelines ask us to place our work "within the context of an academic field and key conversations in that field."   What follows is some drafty writing to give you and idea of what I am thinking.  This is not the last word - but rather an effort to put a focus out there so we can look at the different writing communities with a shared focus/goal.


Identifiers for our field are:  new literacies, online communities, ethnography, discourse analysis (which includes narrative analysis), pedagogy

Relevant Conversations.

Online communities are Discourse communities where meanings, identities and practices are mediated primarily through writing. 

This conversation might include Gee (who coined he term Discourse), Swales essay to define discourse communities, and earlier discussions from social constructionism (Rorty, Bruffee, Gergen, etc).  As pointed out in these discussions, features of Discourse communities are often either partially or completely unarticulated so that participants generally can act in terms of the communities' assumptions, values, and beliefs, but may not be able to articulate those features.  This suggests, as pointed out by Lankshear & Knobel, that when participants in online communities participate in "related" communities (like school), they (at least initially) bring belief systems and practices associated with communities where they spend the most time/feel the most at home in/are most strongly identified with.  When those beliefs and practices are not a good match, their can be confusion and frustration. 

Literate identities and literacy practices are continuous with, not separate from, experiences in both mediated and unmediated contexts.  This engages the points made by Leander and the researchers he summarizes.  It suggests methods from "connective ethnography" will be necessary to accurately characterize the "literate lives" of mediated communities.

Ethnographies in Section II  will explore participants, practices, belief systems, and contexts surrounding online communities as shaping and shaped by experiences from social interactions in the material world. Because of this, data  will necessarily include information on both:

• participant identities, literacy practices, and relevant experiences (stories) and relationships within their material world lives
• participant reflections on connections between their participation in the online community that is the focus of the study and their lives in general.

Identities are created and experienced through social constructions flowing through particular individuals.   I am not sure which theorists to invoke here = but this is going to be the justification for focusing on the experience of community through the eyes of one or several (as opposed to many) individuals, and for choosing a point of convergence for our research group (students/faculty at Kean) rather than putting forth repersentations from a broader perspective.

Learning communities in general, and writing classrooms in particular benefit from increased awareness of ideologies and practices from diverse Discourse communities, and how flow and circulation among those ideologies can affect successful membership in multiple communities.

Still working on this.

What our study can contribute
Our study contributes characterization of the literacy practices and ideologies inhabited by participants within 7 different Discourse communities associated with mediated identities.   Ethnographic descriptions in individual chapters provide detailed descriptions of a range of online communities.  These descriptions offer context specific, connective characterizations of  assumptions, values and beliefs that embody literacy practices within (and across the material world lives) of participants. Our analysis examines correlations between structural features of contexts and participants' choice of and style for using particular literacy practices;  this analysis pays particular attention to structural similarities (and differences) in contexts (mediated and physically enacted) where similar practices are used.

Within this analysis we look at the flow and circulation of positionings within literacy practices and ideologies as they play out within personal, local, and larger cultural contexts.  This analysis notices that while these individual performance present enactments of practices and ideologies engaged for particular audiences, they also constitute an interactive continuum where each performance in each setting integrates experiences from all contexts. 

Our analysis focuses on context, social relationships (including mediated relationships), features of literacy practices, and contextual-ideologies.  Focus on these features should allow observation of patterns in how, where, and when participants choose negotiate/resist/obviate or innovate ideologies associated with the many discourses they participate in while taking part in the Discourse community that is the focus of the study.  This observation may provide clues to what kinds of contexts allow for moves across ideology and discourse => the kinds of moves necessary to move into new Discourses, including academic Discourses.


Any comments would be appreciated.