Black, “Power and Talk”
Black begins the passage by discussing the power difference between teacher and student, highlighting how the very set up of the classroom is a power dynamic.
Students usually accept the rephrasing done by teachers. Black notes how conferences help shape a student-teacher relationship, and can help the student speak more discourse. Discourse markers during conversation can help manipulate how the conversation will be. Rephrasing the retort so that it first starts with “I agree, but...” allows for the rest of thought to be heard rather than let opposition occur before the thought it finished. The rest of the chapter focuses on specific verbal cues that shape how the conversation goes. I think this reading highlights how easy it is for people to lose meaning during a conversation because they chose to use the wrong markers. This can happen a lot with teacher-student relationships, in which the student can lose original thought in favor of “safety” and immunity from being told they’re wrong by the teacher.
Madill, “Interviews and Interviewing Techniques”
An interview is a conversation with a purpose. There are many different types of interviews. The unconstructed interview is without construct, and doesn’t follow a certain questionnaire style like that of a structured interview. The narrative style interview uses personal stories, and the free-association style narrative uses biographical and psychoanalytical. Biographical interviews focus on family and may implement the narrative style. The semi-structured interview is the most popular. One technique used in semi structured interview is the asking of nonleading questions. Nonleading questions don’t follow a pattern that would steer the interviewee towards specific answers. Either-or-questions are leading, and so are questions that take the form of a statement. An open question cannot be answered with a yes/no. The rest of the passage describes different interviews that Madill conducted and critiques of them. I like how Madill emphasizes word choice, and the idea that word choice and line of questioning influences what type of interview it is. I think this assigned reading is too long and full of too much information, and Madill should have split the information in two.
Brown, “Circular Questioning.”
Circular questioning during an interview can help stimulate new ways of viewing a problem, and finding an answer/solution. Problem definitions, sequence of interaction, compare and classification, and intervention are types of questioning techniques. This article seemed to generate a lot of ideas about one line of topic, but not really make sense of it. Brown discussed models for questioning, but didn’t really explore the organization in which to present the information. I found the organization of the text to be confusing, and thus, hard to follow or even comment about. As you can see from my summary, it is very short (and for the reason stated above). In the abstract, Brown mentions that the Milan model of questioning will be “presented within the context of other models...” I think that may be a reason why this reading was hard to follow.
I agree that the assigned reading by Madill was too long by quite a bit, and that the information could have and should have been condensed more.
ReplyDeleteThe other readings were more direct, but I agree that Brown's should have explored the organization more.
Madill's article was overly wordy and I think it could have been written more concisely while still making the same points as well if not better than she did in this format. As for Black's Power and Talk, I liked it very much. I think the exploration of the student professor dynamic made it easier to spot strengths and weaknesses in conferences.
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