Interpersonal Communication class with three elements: a simple model of .....
interpretive theories in the book and the observations they make in the field.
Often.
C122: Interpersonal Communication Course Portfolio, 2009-‐10 Teagle Collegium on Inquiry in Action Mack Hagood, Associate Instructor Indiana University
ABSTRACT This portfolio documents the rationale, implementation, and outcomes of teaching innovations developed during a fellowship year with the Teagle Collegium on Inquiry in Action. The project’s fundamental premise is that ethnography can function as a signature pedagogy to develop critical thinking and flexible knowledge in students possessing no prior ethnographic experience. Seeking to address common difficulties in ethnographic training and make ethnographic practice more central to students’ classroom experience, I augment an Interpersonal Communication class with three elements: a simple model of ethnographic analysis, in-‐class practice opportunities designed to simulate fieldwork experience, and an end-‐ of-‐semester review/assessment activity.
Table of Contents Course Background.................................................................................................................3 Ethnography as a Signature Pedagogy .............................................................................3 Objective .....................................................................................................................................4 Implementation .......................................................................................................................5 The Model............................................................................................................................................ 5 Practice Journal................................................................................................................................. 7 Semester-End Assessment Activity...........................................................................................11 Data ........................................................................................................................................... 13 Assessing Exercises and Student Work During the Semester .........................................13 Findings.................................................................................................................................... 14 Revisiting Anticipated Benefits .................................................................................................15 Future Improvements ...................................................................................................................16 Works Cited ............................................................................................................................ 17
Table of Figures Figure 1. Slide showing model of ethnographic analysis. ..........................................6 Figure 2. Slide showing example of ethnographic analysis.......................................6 Figure 3. Notes on a scene from Pulp Fiction in a student's practice journal. .....8 Figure 4. Practice journal activity in which students apply theories to videos..9 Figure 5. A student's journal response to the cues in fig. 4. ................................... 10 Figure 6. Connection brainstorm worksheet. ............................................................. 12 Figure 7. Students are asked to assess the brainstorm activity and practice journals. .......................................................................................................................... 12
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Course Background
C122 Interpersonal Communication is an introductory-‐level course offered by Indiana University’s Department of Communication and Culture. In contrast to the prescriptive, practical orientation of many interpersonal communication courses, the focus in C122 is on “denaturalizing” communication to better understand its cultural underpinnings. Reading key texts in fields such as cultural anthropology and performance studies while doing ethnographic research among their university peers, students learn how communication and culture constitute one another. As ethnographers, students practice “reading” communication for cultural assumptions, performative aspects, power structures, gender dynamics, and other features. C122 is a multiple-‐section course, taught by graduate students to a wide variety of non-‐CMCL majors in groups of 24. Instructors all use the same book, follow a prepared syllabus, and are encouraged by the course supervisor to promote an interactive, participatory class structure, but are otherwise free to plan class time as they wish. Instructors frequently use multimedia examples to illustrate course concepts and stimulate discussion, sharing these resources with fellow instructors on a website. Fifty percent of students’ final grade depends on their completion of an ethnographic portfolio consisting of a proposal, two sets of fieldnotes, field recordings, and conversation transcripts, and a 5-‐7 page ethnography.
Ethnography as a Signature Pedagogy
My philosophy of teaching is guided in spirit by the praxis of Paulo Freire and in practice by my training in ethnographic methods. I believe that student ethnography is praxis as Freire defines it: “reflection and action upon the world in order to transform it,” something that emerges through dialogue rather than the deposit of information into students’ heads (2000:36). Contemporary ethnographers read critical theory from a wide variety of disciplines and then leave their offices to bring theory into dialogue with their observations “in the field,” a process they can share with their students as a signature pedagogy. Through the praxis of ethnography, students actively engage their world, paying closer attention to social dynamics, and reflecting critically upon everyday communication and its cultural context. An ethnographic pedagogy is Frierian praxis in that it breaks through the boundaries of the classroom and is inherently dialogic, encouraging dialogue between text and student, student and teacher, student and student, student and world, and text and world. As a signature pedagogy, ethnography encourages students to think and act like experts (Gurung et al, 2009:3), transforming their own
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world by seeing it through a new critical lens. Finally, ethnography encourages the “flexible transfer of knowledge” (Bransford et al, 2004:64), as students apply classroom ideas in diverse “real world” contexts, gaining a deeper understanding of key concepts than they otherwise might.
Objective My objective during the 2009-‐10 Teagle fellowship year was to address the concrete difficulties of ethnographic training and to make the practice of ethnography more central to my students’ classroom experience. Although C122 is often taught by graduate students with ethnographic backgrounds, and basic concepts are included in the textbook’s “Ethnographer’s Toolkit,” students’ final projects frequently reflect a lack of practical knowledge—particularly of how to use critical theory to interpret field experiences. C122 instructors teach critical theory and assign a fieldwork project in which students are expected to show how the data they collect “support or complicate the theoretical arguments found in the readings.” However, none of the course materials explain the process through which ethnographers connect theory and data, probably because such analysis is a “fundamental ability” that ethnographers take for granted. Using ethnographic practice as a signature pedagogy required rethinking the role of critical analysis. Rather than something implicit that students “just do,” the critical interpretation of data needed to become the central practice that students learn to do in class. With this in mind, I assembled a simple model of ethnographic analysis, a structure for classroom practice opportunities, and a means for assessing students’ analytical development in class. More generally, I made sure that all discussions of specific theories frequently referred to their applicability in the fieldwork project. I anticipated three key benefits to these changes: 1. Repeated practice of applying critical theory learned in class would lead to better retention and “flexible knowledge.” 2. In-‐class practice would better prepare students for the unfamiliar practice of ethnographic research—specifically, the analysis of observations, recordings, and transcriptions. 3. The repeated classroom practice of critically examining everyday cultural artifacts (see below) would make students better critical thinkers and readers of cultural texts, while also demonstrating to students the utility of critical thinking in everyday experience.
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Implementation
C122 is, at bottom, a class about interpersonal communication, not the practice of fieldwork; therefore, I needed to find ways of developing students’ practical ethnographic skills without taking time away from learning communication theory. This will be the case whenever ethnographic practice is used as a form of pedagogy—the development of practical skill must be aligned with the development of knowledge. Because this was not a fieldwork class, spending a large amount of class time on fieldtrips was neither desirable nor necessary. Instead, I found ways for students to practice the kind of data analysis one might do on returning from the field. The plan I implemented centered on providing a model for ethnographic analysis, providing practice opportunities in class, and providing a semester-‐end opportunity for teacher and student assessment.
The Model By the end of my first year of teaching C122, I had come to realize that most students do not “naturally” know how to make connections between the interpretive theories in the book and the observations they make in the field. Often students’ ethnographies present observations that accord with factual claims made by the book’s authors, but don’t rise to the level of engaging the authors’ theoretical claims. Ironically, this sometimes serves to reinforce the very stereotypes we seek to complicate or negate. For example, a student ethnographer may observe “gossip” or “relationship talk” among women in the field and write, “This is just how Maltz and Borker say women talk,” leaving aside these scholars’ theory, which provides cultural (not biological) reasons for difference in male and female speech styles. Because the student didn’t know how to bring theory to bear on data, she reinforces rather than denaturalizes a cultural stereotype. Beginning in the fall of 2009, my third semester of teaching C122, I began centering the course around a model of critical analysis. In order to help students connect theory to observation, I created a PowerPoint slide that illustrates the difference between theoretical and factual claims, as well as how to connect abstract theory and concrete observations (fig. 1). In this model, a theory is abstract, generalizable, and explanatory of concrete phenomena, while points of data are simply things heard or observed “on the ground.” What connects theory and data are patterns, for example the factual claim that women tend to use language more frequently to establish relationships, while men use it more frequently for self-‐display. As a pattern, this factual claim does not rise to the level of a theory, but can be used to connect a group of field observations to a cultural theory, such as Maltz and Borker’s claim that these differences in speech arise from boys and girls playing separately in what are essentially different socio-‐linguistic subcultures (fig 2).
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Figure 1. Slide showing model of ethnographic analysis.
Figure 2. Slide showing example of ethnographic analysis.
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Though this model of ethnographic analysis is admittedly limited in some ways, I used it in class as a simple, memorable, repeatable model of doing critical analysis to help students bring theories from the book into dialogue with their everyday worlds. After introducing “connecting data to theory” at the beginning of the semester, I brought it back repeatedly, particularly as students began their fieldwork assignments. Assignments were framed in terms of the number and quality of “connections” expected. These connections are intended to focus students on finding cultural reasons for the communicative practices they observe, thus denaturalizing differences they might otherwise take for granted.
Practice Journal In the spring of 2010, I retained the model of ethnographic analysis as a centerpiece of the course and added a new element, the practice journal. The purpose of the practice journal was to formally facilitate classroom activities that would develop ethnographic skills. At the same time, I hoped that the physical presence of the journal would encourage a sort of meta-‐awareness that we were engaged in the practice of developing our ethnographic skills, as in, “Take out your practice journals so that we can practice applying this theory to a real-‐world example.” We used the practice journal in roughly half of our class meetings, often towards the end of class, after a short lecture and group discussion. There were two main types of activities that involved journaling: developing skills in observation, description, and transcription, and practicing critical analysis. Observation, Description, and Transcription. Roughly a third of journaling was dedicated to developing the basic ethnographic skills discussed in the Ethnographer’s toolkit. Students practiced basic tricks of the ethnographic trade such as doing jottings, the “thick” description of people, settings, and events, and the transcription of field recordings. In keeping with common practice among C122 instructors, I played videos and audio recordings for students to describe or transcribe (fig. 3). My only deviation from standard practice in teaching these basic skills was taking the students out for one fieldtrip. Once the students had some in-‐ class practice of describing video events, we spent one class period in the Indiana Memorial Union. There, students did individual observation of people in the building, doing jottings in the practice journal, before meeting as a group to discuss the successes and challenges of the day’s activities.
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Figure 3. Notes on a scene from Pulp Fiction in a student's practice journal.
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Critical Analysis. Two thirds of the students’ journaling was practicing the application of theory to data, usually video, audio, or still images from popular culture. It is common for C122 instructors to use such resources as illustrations of the theories taught in class and as discussion starters. My innovation was to frame the use of multimedia as an occasion for the practice of critical analysis of the sort they would do in their own ethnographies. I emphasized the analogous relationship between cultural texts such as film clips and the everyday speech students recorded in the field, explaining that connecting theory to a video in the practice journal would prepare them to write their ethnographies. For example, towards the end of a class on the concepts of metapragmatics and participant structure, I presented a slide with two videos of performance events (fig. 4). After taking jottings on the videos of a drum circle in a park and a musical theater performance, students analyzed the differences between these musical events in terms of metapragamatics and participant structure (fig 5). Class concluded with a group discussion of students’ analysis.
Figure 4. Practice journal activity in which students apply theories to videos.
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Figure 5. A student's journal response to the cues in fig. 4.
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Semester-‐End Assessment Activity At the end of the semester, we spent a full class on a “Connection Brainstorm” session, in which five groups of students were each given a different video to analyze, making as many connections to the book as they could come up with. Students were encouraged to use book, class notes, syllabus, and practice journal to jog their memories. For each connection the student made, s/he was expected to mark whether this was a connection to fact (i.e., a pattern of the sort shown in the second tier of the analysis model) or a theoretical connection, offering a brief explanation of the connection (fig. 6). After brainstorming connections individually and writing them down on the supplied worksheet, students discussed their ideas within their groups before finally presenting their video and analysis to the rest of the class. As this activity occurred a week before students’ final ethnographies were due, it provided a wide-‐ranging review of class theories and their applications, one that harnessed the “wisdom of the crowd.” I emphasized this point frequently during the group presentations, encouraging students to consider how theories raised might connect to their own data. Perhaps more importantly, this activity allowed for several types of assessment. From my point of view, it allowed me to assess the number, depth, and variety of theoretical and factual connections students were capable of making. From the student perspective, the brainstorm provided an opportunity to look back on the core concepts of the course, evaluating their applicability to the everyday activities of film and television watching. At the end of class, I asked the students to assess the usefulness of both the brainstorm session and the practice journal (Fig. 7).
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Figure 6. Connection brainstorm worksheet.
Figure 7. Students are asked to assess the brainstorm activity and practice journals.
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Data
The design of this project generated a substantial amount of data, including the practice journals (which include student work from 15 in-‐class assignments), the connection brainstorm worksheets, and the end-‐of-‐semester student assessments just mentioned. Group discussions after the practice journal exercises and the group field outing provided me with opportunities to gauge student information retention, skill development, and interest. Finally, the completed ethnography portfolios, which account for 50 percent of the C122 grade, could be assessed for changes in quality. Due to the subjectivity of grading ethnographies and the qualitative nature of ethnographic research, I determined that grade comparisons or rigorous quantitative analyses of the data would likely be neither valid nor helpful to my future teaching. However, the large quantity of qualitative data allows me to assess individual student development, the usefulness of individual journal exercises, and the cumulative efficacy of the implemented course changes. The latter will be addressed below in “Findings,” but I would like to first return to one of the previous examples to show its utility in assessment during the semester.
Assessing Exercises and Student Work During the Semester The practice journal exercise shown in figure 4 was designed as an opportunity for students to apply the analytical concepts of metapragmatics and participant structure in simulated field settings. Reading student responses allowed me to assess the both the value of the exercise and individual students’ progress. Figure 5 shows the work of one student, which I would assess as average in quality. The response reflects a basic understanding of ethnographic practice and of metapragmatics as the “unwritten rules” of communicative participation. For example, under the heading “Drum Circle,” the student did some jottings on the participants in the video and their activities. Although I had instructed the students to pretend they were ethnographers at the field site, I did not specifically ask for jottings. The student’s response indicates her knowledge that jottings are an expected ethnographic practice. There are, however, limitations in the student’s analysis that provide openings for intervention. The content of the jottings shows that she is still struggling to denaturalize her own cultural biases, as when she describes the drum circle participants, as “dirty-‐looking people.” For the instructor, this is a moment of pedagogical opportunity, in which the professional practices of ethnographic description and analysis are in alignment with course’s goals of undermining cultural stereotypes and assumptions. Questions to raise with this student therefore include: What is it that makes the participants “dirty-‐looking”? What cultural assumptions about clothing, hairstyles, and demeanor are you projecting onto the
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subjects of your ethnography? Are there ways you could describe rather than judge their appearance? Are they part of a subculture with different “rules” of appearance from yours? What might the underlying social business of those rules be? What is the underlying social business of your style rules? In her analysis of participant structure in the drum circle event, the student writes that “there seemed to be no rules at all,” though she acknowledges in the next sentence that there was “a common rhythm.” This is a moment to encourage the student to deepen her analysis. Productive questions here might include: Is rhythm (and music in general) a form of communication with rules? What would happen if someone played out of time and very loudly? Are there any types of instruments that might not be welcome here? Are there unspoken genre expectations? For example, what if someone started playing a synthesizer or singing a military fight song? What are the rules of being a “no rules” drum circle participant and what is the social business of those rules? In our group discussions after this exercise, many such questions were raised and debated, giving me insight into the level of student understanding. I found the exercise to be a success, particularly because it opened up a discussion of the ways that participants’ experience of freedom and play is undergirded by underlying structure and rules of participation—not only in the “structured” musical theater, but also in the “no rules” drum circle. The activity and ensuing discussion fostered student engagement, ethnographic skills development, and critical analysis in ways that a lecture would not have. There is, however, one serious limitation in the way the practice journal was implemented in this and other in-‐class exercises. Because of the logistical issues of collecting and reading 48 notebooks, I collected them for analysis only twice—once at the midterm and once at the end of the semester. This had definite implications for the feedback I could provide. Less outspoken students, some of whom mentioned their appreciation of the journals as an alternate form of self-‐expression in class, got little feedback on their ideas. Also, more controversial views were sometimes expressed in the journal but not aloud. Since the discussion about metapragmatic and participatory rules was relatively uncontroversial, for example, it was readily voiced in class. The “dirty-‐looking people” comment, however, was not raised in class, so I missed the opportunity to raise the critical questions suggested above. By the time I read the “dirty-‐looking people” comment, the semester was over.
Findings Reflecting on the course changes I implemented in C122, I find that centering on ethnographic practice provided increased focus for both instructor and student, providing countless “meta moments” in which we reflected on what we doing in
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class and considered how we could relate it back to the practice of ethnography. Repeatedly asking, “How would you use this theory in your fieldwork?” seemed to give the class increased sense of purpose. Based on student comments and journaling, I perceived an increased understanding of what we were doing and why, and decreased confusion over what was expected in fieldnotes assignments and the final ethnography. I found that the model of ethnographic analysis helped me in teaching, defining expectations, and grading papers as, more than before, I knew what to expect of myself and my students. Explicitly framing class activities— including writing assignments—as the practice of connecting theory to observation gave the class increased clarity and momentum.
Revisiting Anticipated Benefits I outlined three main anticipated benefits at the start of this portfolio. The first anticipated benefit, that repeated application of interpretive theories would lead to better retention and “flexible knowledge,” was supported by the evidence in the practice journals. Through the written exercises, students were consistently able to apply theories in contexts different from those found in the book. This was illustrated in the example of the student finding metapragmatic expectations and participant structure in the drum circle video, while also retaining the ethnographic practice of jottings she learned over a month earlier. The connection brainstorm, in which students applied a semester’s worth of course concepts to brief videos, also showed the retention of flexible knowledge. Given 15-‐20 minutes to watch and analyze a clip, the average student found five connections between theories learned in class and the video they were assigned, with a quarter of the students filling or exceeding the seven blanks provided on the worksheet (fig. 6). My students and I were surprised by the number and quality of theoretical applications they achieved. My second expectation was that in-‐class practice would better prepare students for the unfamiliar practice of ethnographic research—specifically, the analysis of observations, recordings, and transcriptions. This was strongly borne out in the quality of the final ethnographies. Using the model of critical analysis as a guide for students, I repeatedly stressed that ethnographies must be centered on a specific ethnographic claim, an argument constructed by connecting ethnographic data to critical theory. While the overall quality of writing was still uneven for many of my students, only one fifth submitted a paper without a thesis and none of them cited the book entirely in facile ways that failed to engage theory. By clarifying expectations and honing skills, the practice-‐based class resulted in better ethnographies, in turn causing me to raise my standards in grading student work. Finally, I expected that repeatedly and critically examining everyday cultural artifacts would make students better critical thinkers and readers of cultural texts, while also demonstrating to students the utility of critical thinking in everyday experience. Though my students came to C122 as neophytes to ethnography, they began the class with varying levels of media literacy, making progress harder to
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gauge. However, students’ success in the connection brainstorm activity indicates an ability to read texts through critical lenses with which they were not previously familiar. Another source of data is the reflection tool I administered after the brainstorm, which asked students to comment on the activity. Comments indicate that students unanimously enjoyed the brainstorm activity and found it useful as a refresher on theories, a practice opportunity, and demonstration that, as one student put it “these theories come up in everyday life.” Another summarized a common sentiment: “The most valuable thing that I learned is that I can analyze what I see from very many perspectives and connect it with many theories in our book.”
Future Improvements The second question in the reflection tool asked students whether the practice journal added to their learning experience (fig. 7). The answers to this question were mixed, with roughly two thirds finding the journal helpful and one third unsure or finding it unhelpful. Students who liked journaling said it provided opportunities to reflect, focus on core concepts, develop and apply skills, understand muddy points, retain information, express ideas without talking in class, and “get easy points” (as students received credit simply for using and turning in the journals). The most common criticisms of journaling from those who found it unhelpful were that the journal was not used outside of class and/or was not helpful in studying for exams, and that the in-‐class assignments felt like busy work. Somewhat ironically, some students complained that we did not use the journal enough in class. What I find most interesting about the student responses to the practice journal is that, for the most part, those who found it helpful seemed to perceive its purpose to be roughly what I had intended—an opportunity to develop skills and learn concepts through practice. On the other hand, the comments of those who did not find the journal helpful mainly reflected expectations that differed from my own— use outside of class time or utility in exam study. The one exception to this is the two students who said the journal was not helpful because it was not used enough; in fact, some students who liked journaling also suggested that the journal was not used enough in class. This feedback prompts several ideas about continuing ethnographic pedagogy. First, I plan to create more exercises to further integrate ethnographic practice into the class. Next, while there seems to be good evidence that the practice journal activities are helpful, the journal itself may not be. If I am unable to frequently supply written feedback on journals in a class already known for its heavy grading load, it may be sufficient to let students do practice activities in their regular notebooks. On the other hand, without the motivating belief that their instructor will read their work, some students may not take the exercises as seriously. Not giving journal feedback also puts less outspoken students who express themselves through the journal at a
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disadvantage. Another possibility is to try to better align students’ expectations with my own, explaining from the outset that this journal will be used only in class, for the purpose of developing analytical and ethnographic skills, and not as a study guide. But perhaps the best way to align student and instructor goals, while making a stronger commitment to a pedagogy of ethnographic praxis, would be to eliminate the course exams, allocating these points instead to a graded practice journal.
Works Cited Bransford, JD, AL Brown, and RR Cocking. 2000. How people learn. Washington, DC: National Academy Press. Freire, Paulo. 2000. Pedagogy of the oppressed. 30th anniversary ed. New York: Continuum. Garung, R, N Chick, and A Haynie. 2008. Exploring signature pedagogies: Approaches to teaching disciplinary habits of mind. Sterling, VA: Stylus. Monaghan, LF, L Monaghan, and JE Goodman. 2007. A cultural approach to interpersonal communication: essential readings. Malden, MA: Wiley-‐ Blackwell.
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