On linking my research to Discourse Analysis and further questions about Conversation Analysis

Linking my research to Discourse Analysis

Currently, I am working on a project in a rural, rustbelt community in the Midwest on the use of digital tools in the classroom. Last year I conducted a classroom ethnography in a 6th grade classroom at a school with mostly 'rural' students where the teacher had very purposefully made the use of a range of technology tools a regular part of classroom life. This year I have been working at a different elementary school in the same community (the 'town' school) with teachers as they are expected to begin to use digital tools in their classroom. Most recently as part of this service-research project, the teachers and I began discussion groups to share successes and setbacks, to brainstorm, and to plan. It is the data from these discussion groups that I have been mulling over as appropriate to approach via Discourse Analysis.

Now, why is that? Well, more specifically, I have become fascinated by the ways in which technology is considered by teachers from this specific community. The people from this community are suffering - they are poor, they are undereducated, and they are unemployed. Teachers, actually the school system as a whole, must contend with the challenges these families face in many ways - providing groceries for families, serving free breakfast for all students, taking children to doctor's appointments, making home visits to follow up on absences. In the face of an uncertain future - the major manufacturing plant, a bastion supplying the majority of jobs from the 1890s-2007, shuttered - educators have to think about what their students' futures might look like. Technology, digital tools, information communication technologies, etc. have become synonymous with the key to our stable futures. I want to know how these teachers talk about technology in the face of an unstable local economy, in the face of hungry children, and in the face of edicts to integrate tech or bust. 

So how am I thinking about Discourse Analysis in this context? Well, Woofit's (2005) description of Potter and Wetherell's approach to discourse and ideology resonated with me. She writes that, "Potter and Wetherell also emphasise the ideological nature of everyday discourse. Ideologies are ways of thinking which support asymmetries in power and advantage. Potter and Wetherell argued that discourse analysis could examine how ideologies are embodied in and reproduced through everyday discourse practices" (p. 51). This means for me, that I have support in arguing that ideologies regarding the contextualized futures of students and the ways they are currently understood by teachers can be explored via discourse found in discussion groups. Or perhaps more succinctly - ideologies related to technology integration can be understood in the context of these discussion groups, and in the ways teachers talk to each other (and a researcher) about technology and their students.

Woofit does bring up potential problems with approaching ideologies via discourse analysis (and here I quote at length to be sure I can return to think through this problem as I move forward):

However, there are drawbacks to discourse analytic studies of the ideologies which inform discursive practices. Because accounts are examined primarily to locate the workings of broad ideologies, there is a diminished sensitivity to the interactional environment in which utterances are produced. This in turn can lead the analyst to impute an ideological significance to utterances when their design may owe more to the particular turn-taking sequences which provide an immediate interactional context. There is, then, a tension between discourse analytic projects which are informed by wider political social concerns and those which focus more on the inferential or interactional tasks served by language use (p. 56).

I am guessing what this means is that according to Woofit - noted conversation analyst - I must also account for the nature of turn-taking in discussion groups if I want to make any claims regarding ideologies. This is something to be aware of.

Further questions about Conversation Analysis

As I read the section in Woofit on Conversation Analysis, I kept writing questions in the margins. These were mostly tied to the concerns I have about how one acquires the ways of speaking that allow one to participate in these  'normal' interactional sequences. I also wonder how much of this type of research is conducted in languages other than English or across cultural contexts in English speaking countries. Additionally, speaking about these conversation situations (whether formal or informal) I am concerned about the idea of deviant cases being potentially misunderstood because one or more of the speakers may be coming from a different 'turn-taking' community. I am thinking specifically of recent events related to police violence. Black people from the communities where this violence has taken place have been interviewed on news stations and have been voicing opinions on social media. The ways in which their ideas and discourse have been taken up have been skewed by the differences in these interactional sequences. I can picture in my head very clearly a young man speaking to a reporter in Ferguson. He grabbed the reporter's microphone and spoke directly into the camera. This is not typical of on the ground reporting interactions. The context made this situation very different - the young man was angry and expressed that he needed to be heard. This is what kept playing through my head as I read Woofit's summaries of the CA studies. Woofit argues that other sociological tools and methodologies do not approach this type of interaction with any certainty. Rather, conversation analysis by homing in on the 'deviant' talk in the 'normative' sequence allows us to assuredly say this young man needed to be heard - that an institution (either the police, the government or the way news is reported on the ground) are being realized as constraining. This just seems so reductive to me. Of course that is clear! What also tells us this is his jumpiness (he was nervous, keyed up, excited), his presence at the protest, his ideas (which he eloquently put forth). Why would we dismiss all of these contextual data just because CA allows us to say this as well?

What makes sense to me are the implications of CA, that "instead of viewing institutions as somehow constraining or simply determining conduct which occurs in institutional settings, we can explore how particular kinds of interactional practices 'enable' or 'realise' the institution (Shegloff, 1991; Zimmerman and Boden, 1991)" (p. 69). But I just don't think CA is the only way to get there.

References
Woofit, R. (2005). Conversation analysis and discourse analysis: A comparative and critical introduction. London, UK: Sage Publications.