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Created: December 10, 2001
Latest Update: December 10, 2001
jeannecurran@habermas.org
When you're missing the boatJournal entry by jeanne
Copyright: Jeanne Curran and Susan R. Takata: December 2001.
"Fair use" encouraged.
Jean Piaget described schemata as a partial concept. For example, the child learning to speak is encouraged to say "DA DA." One day the postman arrives and the child says "DA DA." "No, no," says the mother. "That's the postman." But the child continues to babble "DA DA" at everyone who walks up to him, wearing pants. Piaget says the child has learned part of the concept, that DA DA is a person wearing pants, and is responding to pants-clad legs walking towards him. Now, he must learn that DA DA is only one specific set of pants-clad legs approaching, his fathers'. Piaget calls that a schemata, an "almost-concept," as it were.Sometimes, when you are confused about the definition and application of a concept, you have part of the concept down, but not the whole idea. With dominant discourse, sometimes you know that it's the way things are, vaguely, but you've missed the part that it's the normative expectations that we collectively pick up from the media, and other institutional sources of information. There may be a dominant discourse within a specific group that has some non-institutional means of conveying information., like neighborhood gatherings and group get-togethers. That specific group discourse may conflict with the dominant discourse of the society at large. Peace activists and human rights activists will have amongst themselves discourse at conflict with the retaliation ethic of the dominant discourse of retaliation in America today.
What all this basically means is that the dominant discourse varies with the structural context in which you find yourself, and that there is interdependence between the dominant discourse and the discourse of the groups of which the social group is comprised. Peace activists alter the dominant discourse of retaliation, and the discourse of retaliation affects in its turn the discourse of peace. This is a simple application of agency and structural context.
What we mean by "dominant" is that it's the "modal" expectation. It's what most of us have grown accustomed to. Modal in this sense means about the same thing as the majority. But a majority is not a consensus. Not all of us share the dominant expectation. Not all of us are frightened by Middle Easterners. But some of us are, because of the dominant discourse that at this point figures most of the "terrorists" as Middle Easterners.
Although this semester we did not have enough time to develop this in-depth kind of analysis of conceptual linking, we will do so in Fall 2002, since we have now had time to develop our collaborative writing procedure. But as I explain conceptual linking, I need to use the concept of schemata, of having part of the concept, but needing to correct some of your conceptions.
An example follows.
On December 10, 2001, I received an e-mail telling me that someone was still waiting for me to respond to a previous e-mail. Of course, the student neglected to give me a copy of the e-mail, or its date, or such. In late November and early December this was helpful. (dripping sarcasm) Guys, please. I have 300 reports to prepare. Try to keep that in mind!
On Tuesday, December 4, 2001, the student wrote:
Hi Jeanne:I am waiting for a response. I know you are busy. Please respond as soon as you can.
On Monday, December 10, 2001, jeanne responded:
Please don't wait for a response. I write detailed analyses on conceptual linking, and put up detailed examples of how to measure your learning. Please read the examples. If you have had to be absent a while, it really is your responsibility to catch up. Do that by going back to the archived issues and reading what you missed. We have been following this procedure from the beginning of the semester.I do understand about absences and about your need for flexibility. But I fail to understand why you think that I can answer a question like "what should I do to catch up?" or that I can in the last week of classes respond to you instantly so that you lose no time in the work you are making up. Make up the material you missed. How do I know what that was? I have a current issue to put up every week, and student's work every week. Surely, if you were absent, you know you must make up the work?
I found an earlier e-mail from November 22, 2001:
On November 22, 2001, the student wrote:
Afghanistan is struggling on its own. Before the September 11th tradgedy, the orphans in Afghanistan were taken care of by the Taliban. I know for a fact, Afghanistan is facing hardships just as we are (New York & Washington). Now there is no Taliban - there is no one to take care of the eight thousand orphans.In the lecture you spoke about how Afghanistan is suffering. I do not think war is the answer. There will be more and more deaths all over the world......
On Tuesday December 10, 2001, jeanne responded:
OK. the topic seems to be Afghanistan and orphans and war. And your conclusion is that war is not the answer. But that about sums up the whole message.What are you responding to? Not our text, because this is not about Che and Freire. So it must be about something in the current issue. But Ifound nothing from the week of November 19, 2001 that sounds remotely like orphans and Afghanistan and the war.
This is a dilemma when you do not tell me what file you are referring to. It also doesn't make sense for other students who would like to go back and look at what you are writing about. Include the URL for whatever you are writing about. Or the hardcopy text citation and pages. Then we can look at your source for ourselves and join you in a dialog.
Let's look at your message in more detail. "Afghanistan is on its own." What does that mean? They have been scape goated as a political buffer zone, but they are by no means on their own. Islamism, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Russia have suppported them. It's about the oil pipeline.
This verges on a schemata, or what I often call "an intellectual leap." Something caught your eye and intimated that Afghanistan was on its own. The only conceptual link I can find for that is that they were the only ones we were threatening to bomb. That's why I called it "scape goating." Others certainly participated in supporting terrorism, but only Afghanistan has been publicly targeted.
The problem is that you left out the part about scape goating and you haven't given us the source of your information. That becomes particularly important when you say that you know "for a fact." Can't make such statements unless you support them with sources, so we can make up our own minds whether we agree with you or not. Can you see how "Afghanistan all alone and the orphans now having no one to take care of them" is a little like the infant's DA DA. It's part of a concept, but pretty hard to figure out what you really mean. Piaget calls that a schemata. Now you need to go back and fill in the missing parts.
If this is the e-mail for which you were anticipating a response, There's basically nothing for me to respond to here. That's probably one reason you didn't get a prompt response. I couldn't figure out what to say. This was definitely not a short-answer response.
There's another intellectual leap: " Now there is no Taliban - there is no one to take care of the eight thousand orphans." Where on earth did "the 8000 orphans" come from? You must identify a source. You can't just take it from "everybody knows" dominant discourse. And the Taliban are gone? Not so. They have been vanquished, not disappeared. The primary worry being faced right now is that they might regain their power, and that the Northern Alliance and tribal groups may not prove much different.
Now I know that it is much easier to see the analysis and understand it at the end of the semester. And I know that September 11 forced to cover material much more quickly than I had intended. But now, with the semester's overview, you should be able to go back and straighten out these misconceptions.