Language: February 2008 Archives

I say "another" because the most powerful use of research that I've encountered is proof of the national sovereignty of the Hawaiian Kingdom.

Rigorous scholarship now aims to re-interpret the Islamic Haddith.

They want me to reduce the confusion. I think we are in the transition from "forming" to "storming."

The feedback provided to me roughly falls into five categories: confusion, grading, peer evaluations, structure, and general. All of the feedback is constructive and everyone explains some aspect of class that they really like (which in some instances are also the things that draw criticism), even if it is only their peers. :-)

Within the next two weeks (before spring break), I want to cover the work of D.O. Hebb (1966) who studied the relationship between emotional stimulation (what he labeled "arousal") with learning ("cue function") (in Luft, 1984). Hebb's "experiments ... show that as tension increases (along the horizontal axis), so does motivation to learn (on the vertical axis), up to a certain point" (emphasis added, p. 28, Group Processes: An Introduction to Group Dynamics, 3rd Edition). The tricky balancing act is to keep the tension high enough for learning and low enough for sustainability.


One of the most intriguing bits of feedback speaks, it seems to me, to one of the ways I try to maintain this balance:

I am pretty sure that I move from one activity to another when it seems (to me) that we have gotten the most productive use out of the activity, and/or I feel compelled to move on to another activity that I imagine will benefit the group. This is not a matter of me possessing some "hidden meaning" (as one student suggested), as much as it is of me trying to anticipate the smoothest move from where we seem to be to where (I imagine) we could go . . .

The feedback on "switching" informs me of two things:

1. the "logic" of switching may not be transparent to students, and


2. some "switches" feel more intense than others.

I don't recall a particular awareness of the potential impact of "switches" in-and-of themselves . . . At least, not more specific than noticing, sometimes, a group-level awkwardness, as if everyone is recalibrating. This is a fascinating tension! As it played out in the group last class (#5; according to recollection), I established a fishbowl activity in which a substantive decision-making process was begun by a subset of students. My expectation was that this would be just a beginning, a taste, of short duration: "ten minutes, unless you're hot, then up to fifteen." The students were hot (!), and I let them go nearly twenty minutes, at which point we had a check-in, and I agreed to let them expand the process to include the "spectators" observing their deliberations from "outside" the fishbowl. (This meant letting go of some planned activities; no biggie, in this case.)

A classic dilemma developed: the members of the fishbowl had come to a decision by polling. It appeared (in retrospect, according to how things unfolded) that this subset of members of the class then expected a vote from the rest of their peers to be unproblematic. Not so. New topics and debates emerged, cutting off a formal decision-making process with a stream of informal handclasps and self-authorized agendas. The decision-by-minority "inside the fishbowl" "Does Anyone Object" method "failed" in the larger group. I use the quotation marks, however, because this is a relative failure, pending where one emphasizes or prioritizes the elements of group dynamics. Rushing to define content (a material product) was resisted - not necessarily because agreement is impossible, but because the process had not yet accounted for diversity of visions. From a process point-of-view, this development opens up the possibility for creative distillation of the guiding premise or gist of the eventual course wikisite.

Eventually, I stopped the process. The topics that emerged are important and need to be addressed (did anyone take notes?), but the momentum had been lost and the "flopping" had served its illustrative point. I guess this is the particular "switch" referred to in the feedback above; I was aware in the moment of a collective "pause" as that particular activity ended and we turned our attention to something else (defining feedback). As I reflect upon that transition, now, I imagine the authority dimension (Weber). I (the teacher) gave students space and time to begin to exercise their own authority (to design the wikisite) - and they took it! When I agreed to let the fishbowl group attempt to extend their decision-making process beyond themselves to the rest of the class, I did not reiterate (should I have?) that this was a time-limited situation with conditions attached, i.e., "you can keep going as long as you're hot and when/if you lose it, I'm taking over."

So, when I did "take over" - by restoring the structure of the classroom with an actual lecture - it may have felt extreme by way of contrast (from one extreme of teacher non-interference to the other extreme of teacher domination) and by virtue of the preparedness of students to do this on their own. One self-evaluation comment argues that two students "could probably run the class....it would suck, but we could pull it off."

"Goffman begins by dividing the world into an empirical part - a 'strip' - which he defines as 'any arbitrary slice or cut from the stream of ongoing activity' (p. 10), and a subjective part - a 'frame' - which he defines as the 'principles of organization which govern events - at least social ones - and our subjective involvement in them' (p. 10-11). . . . We 'frame' 'strips' of activity by seeing them as

• natural "(unguided events") or social ("guided doings") - the two fundamental frames; or as
• fantasied or faked - two of the man instances of secondary frames Goffman discusses.

"The cellular aspect of frame analysis involved describing the membrane around an activity - the spatial and temporal brackets of each particular frame...[and] also involves distinguishing the nucleus of an activity from its surrounding cytoplasm - the inner official events ... from the outer ... occasion.

"The concentric (onion skin) aspect of frame analysis involves discriminating the various levels or "laminations" that frame a strip of activity and specifying the ways natural and social frames (basic) are transformed into other, less fundamental frames.

I guess we are roughly ending the "forming" stage and getting ready to head into "storming." I offered up the prelude to the Week 4 class outline with, "Things are starting to get serious!" because I had come across the first instance of interaction between students that seemed a bit testy. Then, we had group reports to open the class and three of the four teams were woefully unprepared. They put on a good show (well, they tried to put on a show). Obviously - painfully so - the contrast between the one team that stepped up and the three teams that hadn't was probably the main point.

Students have begun to discuss content for the course wikisite, and also to sort out questions/concerns about the research study I hope to conduct on establishing a correlation between peer evaluations and the stages of group development.

So far, I have to say, so good. :-) We are learning skills and working on applications of those skills; the collective discourse of the group is developing within contours that I believe will yield both a quality outcome and a productive process.

The living room of the eleventh floor apartment in graduate student housing has the air of place accustomed to lively debate and rough teasing. Good Neighbor Sergei barely escaped to his own apartment with all of his fresh whiskers. He was double-teamed by Sangria Girl and Tatiana to go ahead with a practice presentation to colleagues this Friday. Sergei’s topic is wicked cool: how a social movement in Spain was created against a government policy on dam-building, through the proactive merger of seeking out embracing persons with the resources to complement a burgeoning discourse of resistance and critique. His study seems to me to be “language as action and performance” in the real world: discourse as – simultaneously – outcome and effect.

Sergei’s hesitation stems from the quantitative bias of his department. He has not (yet?) run an envivo content analysis, nor hitched his analysis to a single theoretical foundation. Rather than framing discourse as an independent variable (apparently a traditional approach in economics – or is it violin?!), Sergei wants to pose discourse as a dependent variable. A functionalist emphasis on controllable experiments with imposed (and necessarily limited) boundaries resists the interpretive move of how people manage the complex range of factors that influence both the conditions of daily life and their (perceived and actual) range of motion/choices within those conditions.

Sangria Girl, in the meanwhile, just rocked some of her peers with a report on effects of an experimental “game” that community participants described as life-changing. What happens when science in the lab is shifted to application in real human lives? From the campesinos perspective, the arrival of a development team with its “external” aims and objectives is simply one more variable in their own routines of community survival. How they are “internally” affected must be the result of interaction between their own ambitions and claims for the present and future with the opportunities presented (or closed off) by the institutional initiative.

Tatiana’s personal library was an asset to our comfortable conversation over wine and chips. Social Movements and Organization Theory (2005) popped up, and was I ever tickled to find Vangie listed in the references! (2001. Complicating Gender: The Simultaneity of Race, Gender and Class in Organizational Change(ing).” Center for Gender in Organizations Working Paper No. 14; and with Creed Briefing Paper on Working Across Differences Project, both for the Center, Simmons School of Management, Boston.) Not only this, but Tatiana also wanted me to take it easy (!) on the EU “newcomers” when I return (as I earnestly hope) next year to interview Members of Parliament on their uses of interpreters/conceptions of interpreting. Bulgaria apparently doesn’t have what I’ve heard experienced EU interpreters describe as a “culture of interpretation.” Spain is a different story. Sergei studied in Catalonia for some time, where he could understand Catalan but never learned to speak it because in conversation his interlocutors consistently code-switched to Spanish and on exams he was allowed to write in Spanish. Ah….perhaps I’ll soon be recruiting them to my cause, eh? :-)

Note to self, re: etiquette: Sangria Girl did not complain when I ate half her dinner without offering even a bite of mine. (For shame!)

Research Note from the blog: Adequate Information Management

Audism vs Deaf Culture (Round # Infinity-minus-one - I don't know how the Romans would show an indefinite, apparently unbreakable, repeating pattern.... I need more math!)

It seems The Alexander Graham Bell Association for the Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing is quite unhappy with Pepsi's pre-superbowl commercial featuring classic deaf humor in American Sign Language. AG Bell claims to be "the only representative" of deaf and hard-of-hearing people who "use spoken language and hearing technology to communicate" with what they deem "mainstream culture."

The logic of the letter relies on an extreme bifurcation, as if no continuum of communication technologies can possible be mixed in use by individuals, as indicated by Jamie Berke in Deafness Blog:

"...although I am very oral in my communication, I need sign language to communicate and understand people. I depend heavily on writing back and forth on notepad at work when an interpreter is not available."

AGBell accuses Pepsico of presenting "a limited view" based on a "somewhat misleading stereotype." These organized advocates of oralism are concerned, apparently, with the exposure of Deaf Culture in a normalized context: a few friends encountering a typical problem and resolving it in a humorous, albeit quite practical way. The insidious prejudice exposed in the AGBell organization's aggressive letter proposes that Deaf individuals who have embraced American Sign Language as their primary technology for communication have somehow failed to exercise the imagined "courage" necessary to "meet the challenge" of their "condition."

Pathological thinking could hardly be more explicit. The perverse twist in the letter's conclusion is the need to "promote appreciation for those individuals that go above and beyond to overcome the absence of something many of us take for granted." One might infer that (some of) these heroic individuals are apparently in doubt of what, exactly, they have "overcome" and what or how they have benefitted from "going above and beyond" in order to satisfy the longings or fears of other's imaginings.

I have no doubt that many individuals whose lifepaths have taken them away from sign language/deaf culture and toward speech and what we can only call " hearing culture" are happy, satisfied, and not even curious about "what if" things had been different. Probably most individuals who have chosen or been encouraged along this route are as happy as anyone else, given all the challenges, barriers, and obstacles to meeting that illusive modern fantasy of stable contentment. This is the essence of what it means to be human: we embrace the conditions of our lives and make the best of them, whatever they are.

There's no venue for social-group betting, but if we could, what an experiment that would be....how many hard-of-hearing people would find themselves able to form bonds of commonality with members of the Deaf community if proper communication accommodations were made - enabling them to meet as persons, instead of being posed in classic confrontation as abstract enemies by the auspices of national organizations?

Here is the text of the official statement read around the world on February 4th, this one specific to the protest I attended in Boston.

The banner is from a march in (I think) Bogota.

The anti-narco-terrorism conversation continues. Can millions of people force change? We may have been disheartened - pacifists worldwide could not stop the war against Iraq, millions organizing against neo-liberal economic policies that keep the disenfranchised down have so far not had much of an impact on eradicating systemic injustice....however the number of wars in the world is down and a larger percentage of people worldwide have moved out of poverty than in any time in history. (See The Economist, The world's silver lining, January 24, 2008.) However, each time we try to learn new tactics and improve strategies. Each time we gain new friends and allies; each time we strengthen bonds of collaboration. Each and every time we send a message to the wealthy and powerful that our tolerance for being pawns in their games of dominance is lessening.

The especial trick is not to close the vise so tightly that brutal and bloody violent resistance is the only option available to those on the other side. We have to keep squeezing, we have to force restructuring that enables alternative avenues for the expression of human desires, but we have to do it in such a way that we do not allow ourselves to become "them." We have to do it in such a way that "they" want to become a part of "us."

Beginning to read Gabriel Garcia Marquez' nonfiction concerning Colombian drug dealer Pablo Escobar's efforts to escape extradition to the U.S. is intense. Not only am I still feeling the effects of a friend's "news of a kidnapping," I am trying to imagine a way out for the millions of Colombians who only want to go about their daily lives, rather than being pawns in someone else's brutal "game" for wealth and power. In the opening acknowledgments, Garcia Marquez' describes the "belated realization" that, rather than a coincidence of several unrelated abductions occurring at the same time, his friend's abduction was part of "a single collective abduction of ten carefully chosen individuals, which had been carried out by the same group and for only one purpose" (1996, tr. 1997, this version 2008).

I cannot seem to relocate a critical assessment of the anti-Farc protests of a few days ago suggesting that they would have no effect on the paramilitary organization. The individual quoted worked for some kind of Latin America watchdog group which has observed the situation for years. Echoing sentiments expressed by several Colombians who responded to my questions in the Facebook Discussion (UN MILLON DE VOCES CONTRA LAS FARC) and/or in my teaching weblog (A Place in Space), the regional expert argued that Farc is well aware of the popular sentiment against them and has already taken that fact into account with all of its on-going operations.

A review of Noticia de un Sequestro (News of a Kidnapping) by the New York Times offers Americans the chance

To walk a kilometer in Colombia's shoes, let us imagine that we have a President who carries five bullets in his body as the result of an assassination attempt by drug traffickers. Let us imagine that Lady Bird Johnson and Amy Carter have both spent time in the hands of cartel kidnappers, living on tortillas, in fear of their lives in tiny cabins deep in, say, the Big Bend country. Bryant Gumble, Diane Sawyer, Katie Couric and Oprah Winfrey have all been urged by their colleagues to hang in there while they, too, endure a spell in the hands of criminals with not too much education, hairtrigger tempers and extremely high-caliber weapons. Two popular Attorneys General, thought particularly close to the President, have been gunned down, along with several successive heads of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Drug Enforcement Administration and of their respective field offices, as well as numerous Congressmen and a few senators.

I would not say that I belatedly realized how awful the situation is between the democratically-elected government of Colombia and a forty-year-old paramilitary called the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), but I have definitely been on a steep learning curve. The challenge that focuses my attention is how to shift the overall dynamic from one of tit-for-tat literal violence to inexorable momentum that disbands FARC in its current formation and integrates Colombia into one non-warring polity. The popular, global demonstrations around the world against FARC on February 4th were impressive; they signal a level of emotional commitment from "the people" that needs to be harnessed in a constructive direction rather than fractured within by divisive politicking. How?

Obviously it is neither my place nor my desire to offer advice. What I can do, though, is synthesize the information I have acquired over the past few weeks since Alf and Ana were kidnapped, and continue to emphasize the power of language to literally and materially set a shape for the future. It does matter - very much - how the problem is described. In social scientific technical terms, the description of the problem sets the parameters for possible solutions. One way of understanding the power of socially constructing reality is through the concept of a frame (see a brief powerpoint on Framing.ppt presented yesterday at the School for International Training).

EUROPA - Education and Training on Multiculturalism, offers a report of a Group of Intellectuals for Intercultural Dialogue.

In a Europe which will always be multilingual, learning languages opens doors. For individuals, it can open the door to a better career, to the chance to live, study or work abroad, even to more enjoyable holidays. For companies, multilingual staff can open the door to European and global markets.

But there is more than this. The language a person speaks is part of their identity and their culture. So learning languages means understanding other people and their way of thinking. It means opposing racism, xenophobia and intolerance.

The Commission's Eurobarometer survey in November-December 2005 showed that in some European countries, nearly everyone speaks at least two languages. This proves that everybody can be multilingual. Language learning is not just for an élite.

Language learning obviously trumps the other option. (Is there another option?!) Must everyone become "cosmopolitan"?

initiatives in line with the objectives of the Lifelong Learning Programme including activities to make language learning more attractive to learners through the mass media and/or marketing, publicity and information campaigns, as well as conferences, studies and statistical indicators in the field of language learning and linguistic diversity (‘Accompanying Measures’)

2001 was the European Year of Languages, which was/is to be sustained by the 2003 Action Plan to fulfill European Parliament Resolution B5-0770, 0811, 0812, 0814 and 0815/2001 (final text) "on regional and lesser-used European languages." The entire resolution omits (?), avoids (?) the use of "interpretation," but does not hesitate to promote "translation software:"

F. whereas languages must be used in order to stay alive; this includes their use in new technologies and the development of new technologies such as translation software,

Note: the resolution references six previous resolutions.

Motion (10 December 2001): http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?type=MOTION&reference=B5-2001-0770&language=EN

Motion (11 December 2001): http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?type=MOTION&reference=B5-2001-0811&language=EN

Motion (11 December 2001): http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?type=MOTION&reference=B5-2001-0812&language=EN

Motion (11 December 2001): http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?type=MOTION&reference=B5-2001-0814&language=EN

Motion (11 December 2001): http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?type=MOTION&reference=B5-2001-0815&language=EN

Official languages of the EU - twenty-three as of today.

A resolution for ending retour of Finnish.

AIIC's webzine.