Subject: Re: Coming to terms
From: Ania Lian (ania@lingua.arts.uq.edu.au)
Date: Mon 24 Jan 2000 - 11:31:50 MET
Date: Mon, 24 Jan 2000 20:31:50 +1000 (EST) From: Ania Lian <ania@lingua.arts.uq.edu.au> Subject: Re: Coming to terms
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On Sat, 22 Jan 2000, Muhammad Khalifa Betz wrote:
> Certainly the examples of WebQuests, Waldens Paths, and Virtual
> Architecture offer integrative and interactive means to use Internet
> in a classroom learning situation.
Do they offer such conditions? What does interactive mean and what does it
mean in relation to education? The danger is that the interactive models
of communication with all their huge misrepresentations flow
uninterruptedly to education only to be given a status of inherently just,
natural, and reflecting the nature of real-life communication.
In my reflections upon Judy Harris's paper I tried to show that the
interaction proposed in her model appeared one-sided. If this was not
enough troubling, let me ask the following: Is interaction just about the
possibility to click somewhere? Is teaching methodology an alternative
between looking for unspecified things or for highly specified things? If
interaction, as Muhammad puts it, were unproblematic as it is everywhere,
is there a secret worth a PhD in wondering what interaction in
education may mean?
Regarding the concept of interaction, let us look at a few thoughts from
Bourdieu, a sociologist:
"Utterances receive their value (and their sense) only in relation
to a market, characterized by a particular law of price formation."
Who or by virtue of what mechanism is therefore in our interaction-models
this law of value of our explanations, exploratory structures
that we design, established? Let us get back to Bourdieu:
"The value of the utterance depends on the relation of power that
is concretely established between the speakers' linguistic competences,
understood both as their capacity for production and as their capacity for
appropriation and appreciation;"
So where is this power in our utterances/exploratory models coming from?
From our understanding that what we give is good? that our teaching
materials are explanatory, comprehensive, understandable, inherently? Back
to Bourdieu:
"it [the value] depends, in other words, on the capacity of the
various agents involved in the exchange to impose the criteria of
appreciation most favourable to their own products (as in this IFETS
discussions we do). This capacity is not determined in linguistic terms
alone. It is certain that the relation between linguistic competences
[...] helps to determine the law of price formation that obtains in a
particular exchange."
In other words, some understandings can be established but these
themselves tell yet us little about what actually regulates
interactional events. Back to Bourdieu:
"But the linguistic relation of power is not completely determined
by the prevailing linguistic forces alone: by virtue of languages spoken,
the speakers who use them and the groups defined by possession of the
corresponding competence, the whole social structure is present in each
interaction (and thereby in the discourse uttered). That is what is
ignored by the interactionist perspective, which treats interaction as a
closed world, forgetting that what happens between two persons - between
an employer and an employee or, in a colonial situation, between a French
speaker and an Arabic speaker or, in the postcolonial situation, between
two members of the formerly colonized nation, one Arabic-speaking, one
French speaking - derives its particular form from the objective relations
between the corresponding languages or usages, that is, between the groups
who speak those languages." (Bourdieu, 1991: 67)
Interaction hence appears a lot bigger, or more encompassing, than it is
generally thought. It may well be a challenge to reflect whether and how
should this impact on the ways in which we think about learning and
teaching.
Ania Lian
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