Collaborative Learning can be subdivided into two categories, abnormal discourse and normal discourse.
Normal Discourse is the conventional way that people tend to think and learn. An example would be to write a 5 paragraph paper for a class that included introduction, thesis, body paragraphs, and conclusion. This tends to be what most people think of first the way that we have all been taught since first entering school.
Abnormal discourse is much different in the fact that it is doing addressing something through an unusual way. For example most people would not consider if a teacher asks to write a summary of a particular story for the student to make up a completely different plot, characters names, setting, ect but have the story still have the same themes. This would be considered abnormal discourse. I find this to be much more interesting but there are dangers associated with it. For some professors/classes this would be impossible to do and completely unacceptable. If someone was to be doing a scientific report to be entered into a medical journal it is most likely that any form other the normal discourse would be accepted.
In the book that I am doing, The Language of God, Dr. Collins goes about much of his life with an abnormal discourse approach. For him to believe in God and creationism is very interesting because for someone that is a genetic evolutionary biologist this is rare. He is considered abnormal among most of his colleagues because of his beliefs.
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I guess my previous comment was lost to the world wide web, so here it goes again, Brendan:
ReplyDeleteI know you were thinking about shifting topics, which is fine.
My basic sense is this: If you want to focus on the role of normal vs. abnormal discourse, your book works fine.
And, in a sense, dialogism and heteroglossia work as well: you might find a key moment in "THe Language of God," in which meaning is extremely dependent on context and explain the way that context shapes that particular moment (or, as Bakhtin would say, "utterance").
Of course, you might also switch gears entirely and focus on an video or an ad. Either way, the same general principle would apply: Describe your text. Then focus on a few key moments in that text. Draw from our growing vocabulary of collaborative terms to help explain this moment to your readers.