This all happened, more or less...
Yesterday I collected new data of pre-service teachers playing a structured roleplaying game focused on the experiences of schooling and the schooled. While I will provide a fuller context in class and in my writing, I am very excited as this data in general reflects a low stakes dialogue about the classroom, the role of the teacher, and the experiences of students. And while fictional or hypothetical, my goal is to use CA to focus on the micro-interactional features of collaborative storytelling to investigate how “stories” are constructed through a very real negotiation of the practical realities of school. Second, this activity was a personal design achievement that I feel led to talk in various forms (many of which may be uncommon in formal pre-service teacher classroom settings), offering the potential to problematize institutional talk. In preparation for sharing this data with my classmates and as the focus of my final paper, I will use this blog post to outline my preliminary thoughts and approaches to analysis.
For this blog, I think it will be particularly fruitful to discuss my overall lens for approaching the data – this is, professional vision (Goodwin, 1994). This semester, I have spent most of my “free reading time” focusing on the work of Chuck Goodwin. Not only do I find his work interesting and writing brilliant, but his ideas have generally been taken up in bridging talk-in-interaction and the learning sciences (in particular interaction analysis). Although much of his foundational work is now two decades old, I see the potential for narrative to further the discussion of both professional vision and talk-in-interaction.
In rough and few words, professional vision describes the how members of a profession or disciple set apart, scrutinize, and negotiate theories, artifacts, and organizations of activity in domain specific ways of “seeing” the world. Put differently, “seeing together” is socially situated, historically constructed, and enacted in disciplinary discourse. As noted by Goodwin (1994), what a farmer sees in the soil is much different than that of an archeologist or layperson (who sees something that gets stuck to their shoes). While at first glance this may seem commonsensical, Goodwin presents two cases in great detail that focus on the structure of talk-in-interaction as the foundation for building and contesting a shared professional vision. Following Goodwin the linguist who credits conversation analysts attention to talk, I will approach my data with an analytical focus on talk as used by participants to co-construct experiences within ongoing social interaction.
The notion of professional vision has been taken up and used in a variety of research contexts, including pre-service and in-service teacher development. In many ways, teacher’s professional vision is quite scruffy, as students behave differently than dirt in the ground, atomic particles, or mathematic equations. Therefore, whether it is behavior management or student reasoning, what teachers potentially "see" is vast and varied. In any case, professional vision has been mainly understood as the act of “seeing”. An alternative interpretation of professional vision is the ability to construct a vivid mental image of the future. Put differently, professional vision not as not just the ability to “see” through the lens of a discipline but predict, hypothesize, and orient toward future action, activity, and domain-specific knowledge. With this in mind, it is possible that this form of professional vision takes the form of story or narrative.
This now feels like a long-winded introduction to my analytical approach: to re-examine professional vision as future oriented talk-in-interaction and apply this lens to pre-service teacher storytelling situated in the fictional production of school and schooling. Now to dig into the data…