Let us Talk

International Journal for Dialogical Science, 2007

2011

Digital Culture & Education, 3(2), 98–122., 2011

Thomas and Brown (2007) suggest that games and virtual worlds allow play and learning to merge, enabling “learning to be” rather than “learning about.” In this context, I address the challenge of designing game-based learning to enact a pedagogy of “learning as becoming” in classroom contexts. I argue that the theory of human information processing fails to provide a tenable account of human learning. I propose a pragmatist notion of education that foregrounds experience and inquiry to provide an alternative foundation for envisioning education today. I then draw on social theory to provide a theoretical framing for game-based learning design. I instantiate this framing via the Performance–Play–Dialog (PPD) Model and argue in favor of a shift to performance as a key construct for framing human learning. I illustrate the PPD Model using the game Legends of Alkhimia, a multiplayer game addressing the chemistry curriculum in lower secondary school.

Lausanne: Frontiers Media SA, 2020

Understanding the cultural nature of human psychological functioning requires exploring the psychological means that bring about cultural forms of human conduct and experience. Cultural forms of perceiving and acting in the world are usually understood as being primarily rooted in socially shared normativity. However, it is rarely clear what exactly is to be understood as “sharedness” and “normativity” and what psychological means enable shared normativity. The research topic aims to contribute to a better understanding of these concepts by taking a closer look at discursive, embodied and affective engagements with the world. Cultural psychologists agree that humans develop as participants in cultural communities (Rogoff, 2003) and that the way we perceive and understand the world is mediated through social interaction, primarily through semiotic sign systems such as language (Vygotsky, 1978, Wertsch, 1991; Valsiner, 2014). Social constructionists argue that is through discursive practices that we construct specific versions of social reality (Harré, 2012; Gergen, 1985). Language here is understood as an activity, as social practice including embodied and affective dimensions that go beyond mere verbal talk (Shotter, 2008; Bertau, 2014). Language practices (‘languaging’) and consciousness constitute each other (Vygotsky, 1978; Linell, 2009; Harré & Gillett, 1994) and constitute forms of life (Wittgenstein, 1953). Slunecko & Hengl (2007) describe this as language “‘owning’ or ‘having’ us,” arguing that humans are not simply beings who are disposed to language; rather, they are beings, who are acquired, modified, or formatted by language, and thus by their culture. Geertz’s (1973) describes of “humans as animals suspended in webs of significance they themselves have spun” and culture as the symbolic “fabric of meaning in terms of which human beings interpret their experience and guide their actions” (p. 145). Developing this idea further, Brockmeier (2012) argues that it is through language — particularly narrative — that we are weaving this symbolic fabric (p. 442). Looking merely at discursive practices in terms of verbal talk, however, sidelines the relational-affective nature of languaging, as well as on other embodied aspects of social interaction. As Charles Goodwin (2000, 2013) has convincingly shown, discursive practices need to be understood as part of a complex, collective and cultural human activity composed also of bodies, material artefacts and the space. The contributions of this Thematic Issue aim to further develop these ideas and to shed light on the processes involved both in the sharedness of certain ways of understanding the world and the normative dimension of social life. These processes are conceived of as action based, mutually shaped, dynamic and fluid, ever evolving, and situated in ecologically embedded social interaction. With this Thematic Issue we also intended to go beyond mere theoretical discussions and to illustrate how shared normativity can be empirically studied. Larrain & Haye develop a theoretical argument about human psychological life as part of a living process of becoming by laying out a discursive and aesthetic view that takes the phenomenological experience of self into account. Karsten & Bertau develop a theoretical argument on how ideas come into being and convincingly lay out how thinking is social, embodied and dialogically organized because it is entangled with language. Trying to understand cultural aspects of experience and human conduct inevitably invites taking a developmental perspective to studying how shared normativity is enacted in interactions with children. Several contributions stress the role of affect in these processes. Forrester pinpoints the shortcomings of common discursive approaches to address human affect and emotion. He proposes that psychoanalytical thinking might inform our understanding of how socially shared normativity emerges during infancy and early childhood. Fantasia, Galbusera, Reck & Fasulo address shared normativity by studying the relational dynamics in interactions of mothers suffering from postpartum depression with their infants. Their findings challenge traditional views on “intrusiveness” as based on specific individual behaviors and suggest that what hinders mutual coordination in these interactions is the absence or violation of interactional norms. Cekaite & Ekstroem and Cekaite & Andrén studied emotion socialization practices in Swedish preschools using micro-analytic multimodal video analysis. They identified specific communicative practices through which the expression of negative emotions is responded to as well as how laughter functions as an intricate process of inviting others into the common emotional and experiential ground. The studies shed light on the varied societal circumstances for learning and developing the norms and values that are communicated through these practices. In a similar vein, Takada studied the use of the term hazukashii (indicating shamefulness or embarrassment) in caregiver interactions with small children in Japanese families. His findings reveal that the term was commonly used to frame an action or act as inappropriate in a given context, but also to frame an activity as teasing and promoting a cooperative and pleasant atmosphere. Wiggins’ paper discusses how the enjoyment of food and the sharing of mealtimes become a normative cultural and social practice by studying video-taped infant mealtimes in families in Scotland within a discursive psychology framework. Her findings reveal that eating enjoyment can be considered as much an interactional achievement as an individual sensation. Sirota’s study looks at how children in U.S. middle class families in California are apprenticed into perceiving, appraising, and reacting to the emotions of self and others as cultural indicators for proper comportment. From a slightly different perspective, Aarsand investigated digital literacy practices in children’s everyday lives at a Norwegian preschool. His findings shed light on how digital media become part of how children are instructed to experience, interpret, understand and act in the world. Raudaskoski & Klemmensen discuss the “turn to affect” as assemblage and emergence, and propose how linkages between episodes of affect as embodied social practice can be traced by drawing on Goodwin’s multimodal ethnomethodological conversation analysis (EMCA) when studying institutional interactions with people who have an acquired brain injury. All together, these papers provide a deep discussion of shared normativity as rooted in social interaction by considering its discursive, embodied, affective nature embedded in a material world. They also provide concrete suggestions for how to analyze these concepts empirically.

2017

The foundational view of discourse as a descriptive mode of representation and writing as a retrospective stabilizing tool has been criticized in organization and management research. The purpose of this paper is to inquire into a more emergent, unfinished and relational writing used throughout the research processes. To that aim, I develop the notion of ‘dialogical writing’ by drawing on literature on performative utterances and a collaborative fieldwork project where writing became an integrated part of the research process. I come to understand this form of writing as one in situ where addressivity, responsiveness and unfinalizability are emphasized. This enables writing to be part of a conversation; writing as a response to that which has been said and in anticipation of the next possible utterance. I close with implications for writing in organization studies, such as the possibility of thinking of writing as an offering of the tentative.

Theory & Psychology, 1995

The conversational background to our lives is strange in that we cannot turn it around into an object of thought, to be explained like all else in our world in terms of either rules, theories or models. Its strangeness, it is argued, arises out of the fact that all actions by human beings involved with others in a social group are, as Bakhtin (1986, 1990) claims, dialogically or responsively linked in some way, both to previous, already executed actions, and to anticipated, next possible actions. Or, as Searle (1992) has argued: all utterances within conversations are necessarily related to each other, internally; they have shared intentionality. Within situations with shared intentionality, it is as if the situation itself is an ethically active, living entity that, as much as the others around us, requires our respect. Thus, like the others around us, 'it' also can exert a formative influence upon what we do within it. Some of the consequences of this extraordinary circumstance for psychology are explored in the article.

Symbolic Interaction, 1996

HAT DISCOURSE AND TECHNOLOGY are intimately related is not a new perception. Even the philosopher Nietzsche got in a word on the subject—“Our writing tools are also working on our thoughts”—according to Arthur Krystal (2002). Our interest in this volume is not to try to demonstrate that discourse and technology live in a symbiotic relationship. Our interest is in presenting a selected set of papers from the Georgetown University Round Table 2002 (GURT 2002), which opened up a discus- sion among discourse analysts and others in linguistics and in related fields about the twofold impact of new communication technologies: The impact on how we collect, transcribe, and analyze discourse data, and, possibly more important, the impact on social interactions and discourses themselves that these technologies are having. Discourse analysis as we now know it is in many ways the product of technolog- ical change. At the time of the epoch-making 1981 GURT (Tannen 1982), Deborah Tannen chose as her theme “Analyzing discourse: Text and talk.” Discourse analysis was just then emerging as a subject of linguistic research. The papers in that confer- ence and in that volume were about equally divided between studies of text (dis- course in the form of written or printed language) and talk (discourse in the form of spoken language captured in situ by means of the tape recorder).

Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 2009