The RSA higher ed system

http://robertpaulwolff.blogspot.com/2010/06/memoir-volume-three-chapter-three-first.html

A really interesting description of the South African university system - from the point of view of a US leftie. He can see very clearly how the system systematically disadvantages Black students.

NB the obsession with 'standards' among even seemingly radical lecturers. And also a great conversation with a lecturer who feels no responsibility for his students failure: they were not prepared properly! All of this is so redolent of Batchelor and of VU.

Hmmm! I wonder what the connection is between all this and the Bersteinian sociology of education mob? Perhaps they are conservative 'standards-driven' refugees from a collapsing system?

Globish as the global lingua franca

Perhaps this should be our 'language of instruction', not English.

At least as a developmental stage?

Or would it lead to fossilization?

(Or is fossilization really just another term for Globish?!)

Horizontal disciplines and 'paradigm shifts'

A thought:

It is precisely the shift from one vocabulary to another (within a horizontal discipline) that is involved in fundamental epistemological transformations. eg from empiricist to interpretative to critical to postie, etc. Or through the Women's ways of knowing. Or Piaget. Or any other dialectical developmental process of change.

Seems Bernstein may have used Rorty but simply turned him upside down, reinstalling a Francophile rationalism as the true goal of knowledge, universities, education, you name it. BTW quite a contrast with Halliday, who despite his commitment to 'system', is much more frank about the limits of inward-looking theory-construction and system building, and open to the messiness of instantial reality. Of course, for Halliday they constitute a continuum so there is no need to choose one over the other end of the spectrum.

Vertical disciplines are (I assume) just a continuum - like the criterion referenced approach. (Interesting that this is not my understanding of say Maths - which involved 'jumps', 'discontinuites' as you move from one level to another. Maybe this is why B places it as a horizontal discipline.)

Need to check:

- Engestrom

- Vygotsky

- re-look at Rorty

Reasoning without universals

Halliday has a really nice endnote to his introduction to his Collected Works (Vol 1, p 14) in which he adduces his grandmother who 'spoke unself-consciously in proverbs'. He then characterises a proverb as:

a theory of experience, but ... a commonsense theory, not a designed theory, and so construed in commonsense grammar, as one of a class of instances rather than a higher order abstraction.

To follow through on this would involve studying the place, uses and pedagogies of sententia in ancient rhetoric:

The sententia is an 'infinite' (i.e. not restricted to one individual case) idea, formulated in a sentence as proof or as ornatus. ... The infinite character and demonstrative function of the sententia are due to the fact that it is regarded, in the social milieu of its range of validity and application, as a piece of wisdom with the same authority as a legal judgement or written law, applicable to many concrete ("finite") cases. Sententia lay claim to validity, partly as assessments of situations, partly as statements of duty standards, which may occur as commands or as prohibitions. (Lausberg 388)

Halliday's invented 'snatch of dialogue' conforms perfectly to this schema: his grandmother is arguing that Harry (presumably a suitor) is so bad that Maggie will not be able to change him.

The best place to study this in detail, apart from rhetoric, would be in Common Law and Theology. The reasoning of both depends on invoking and applying 'proverbs' from authoritative texts - Roman law, precedents, the gospels and other church authorities. And of course, Gadamer is precisely the one who has tried to explain the rationality of this form of reasoning, abstraction and application. He calls it hermeneutics. Others call it 'case-based reasoning', 'reflective judgement' (Kant).

Grammars - functional and otherwise

A really nice story from Raqaiya Hasan (2006, 30):

Like many, I first encountered grammar in the context of being taught language, both Urdu, my mother tongue, and English, a second language. Now, the Urdu grammar did not bother me, and thinking back on it I can now guess why: its terminology was functional. So if it said that a jumla (roughly a clause) was khabriya (literally 'news-giver') then I knew that in the clause there will be some sort of 'news' about something or someone: usually the 'news' consisted of classifying or identifying information; so in terms of SFL (Systemic Functional Linguistics - RMcC) jumla khabriya was a relational clause, with some entity (called ism-e-zaat, literally 'noun/name of individual or class') classified or identified by reference to something (called ism-e-sifat, literally 'noun/name of quality'). Examples offered by Misbah-ul-Qawaed are white is my favourite colour and Zaid is a human being. But the grammar of English was considerably different: the language of description was entirely formal and the terms were neither semanticized nor put in the context of the use of that language. There was an English language and there was an English grammar, and they seemed to have nothing to do with each other. So I ignored all the inconsequentialities the teachers brought into their discourse by way of teaching grammar such as gerund, infinitive, adjectival complement, past participle and so on. It's not surprising that I came to linguistics completely convinced that grammar was a profitless pastime.

(Halliday, M. & Hasan, R. 2006. 'Retrospective on SFL and Literacy' Language and Literacy: Functional Approaches, edd. R. Whittaker, M. O'Donnell and A. McCabe, Continuum, London, pp. 15-44).

On "On Invention" -1

Reflections on Invention and Method: Two Rhetoricial Treatises form the Hermogenic Corpus, Kennedy 2005

1. In the very first chapter, after having laid out his very first illustration of what to say in your prooemium (preamble) if you have ascertained that the audience (judges) are happy with what has happened, the author writes:

Don't worry about the simplicity of the style, for as a teacher does I have tried to bring out the technique dispensing with the force of language and putting the bare thoughts so that they will be clearer. (p 7, Kennedy)

This metacomment glossing his own practice brings out nicely the separate treatment of inventio from style. The wording of the arguments will be basic and bare. This seems to me to be an excellent principle for teaching argument.

2. Examining the prooemia it becomes clear that there is a significant existential difference between a prooemia in an Athenian court and an introduction to an academic essay. Creating 'attention, receptivity and goodwill on the part of the audience' is much more critical in a court case. However when an academic paper is presented or 'read' at a conference, then they align. Both involve acknowledging and aligning the fore-structures, the prejudices of the audience, by framing the speech you are about to embark on. This is done by showing your own good will and fellow feeling, your sense of community with the audience.

[Sue Hood has studied how this prooemium is necessary at the presentation of an academic paper at a conference. That is, quite separate from the Introduction within the paper itself, the very performance of the paper itself must be justified and accounted for - especially if the paper/speech is going to disagree with the audience's stance.

Notice that this is usually done by addressing the audience directly, ie not reading. Often the speaker positions themselves away from the speaking position for the actual paper. That is, it is done in a different, more personal and disingenuous voice or persona. One that includes social relationships and personal biography, not just disciplinary relationships. ]

The equivalent in a book for the prooemium of a speech is the Preface. It is in the preface, as opposed to the introduction, that the author adduces their sincerity and sense of community with the reader, by presenting themselves as reflectively looking back on their completed text and describing its intentions and hopes etc as an intervention/event.

So, we could say that the prooemium and preface focus on the risks of the speech act itself as an action/event. They address questions such as: Why are you standing up to say something? Who are you? Are you trying to be helpful or malicious? So, this is the place where the rhetor tries to demonstrate their 'good will'.

More on Language & learning support

There is not just coaching.

If I could layout a table, there would be something like this:

Object of instruction (

in the discipline - needs understanding -ranges from context of culture to context of situation

in the language - needs enhanced text patterns - ranges from region to specific structures/patterns

in English language - needs English patterns - ranges from lexis to grammar to idiom to collocation

Mode of Instruction (pedagogy)

fix - fix mistakes & indicate correction

show - fix & ??

coach - fine-tuning, finessing, extending by making conscious of a detail

instruct - ????

teach - explicit & extensive coverage, extended drilling

This is a continuum from performed to explained, from performed to theorised, from praxis to poesis.

praxis is judgment in hot action; poesis is application of a consciously formulated theoretical or general rule. From 'how' to 'what' to 'why'.

Fit/cross/intersection with Bernstein mob and Jim/Rob article? vertical vs horizontal
Also what I wrote for Rovers on training/helping.

Do all this as topology, not typology.

My interest in SFL

I'm reading a new very interesting collection of articles on Systemic Functional Linguistics (Continuing Discourse on Language, vol 2) and it has made me think about: what exactly is my relation to SFL?

[My goodness it was interesting trying to punctuate the end of that sentence: italise 'is' or place it as the last word - 'what exactly my relation to SFL is'; colon or no colon].

I think of it like this: my interest is in plundering SFL to find things that can be re-purposed as guides for writing and reading in educational contexts. Thus I am not interested in describing as such, but in prescribing. My frame is a practical context, not theoretical. So I am not interested in exhaustive description of language or texts, nor in trying to define descriptive terms so that they form a coherent theoretical or analytical fabric for describing or explaining any and all text.

I think of Wittgenstein's insistence that we are not paralysed in belief or action simply because we have not or until we have grounded ourselves in a legitimating foundation. (fix this - see On Certainty). Similarly, our students are already 'in language'. They are not starting from scratch or ground zero. They are already highly skilled in language and understandings. What they need is their understanding, attunement, to the context - call it exigencies - tweaked. And fluency in some new text patterns needed to respond to these demands of the situation. In contemporary education this largely means understanding the task and being able to perform it. It is more like a sports coach intervening by saying 'Put more pressure on your left foot as you step off'. Or some such. That is, they bring to consciousness, focus attention on, one small aspect of the total performance as a point of leverage for rebalancing or re-something the whole performance. They (coaches) are not giving their charges a theoretical account, nor pointing to a cause underpinning the entire event, but rather getting the performer to use their body slightly differently by getting them to attend to one aspect of the performance, not some other. and the assumption is that this conscious attention will gradually fade away but in the meantime a new alignment of movements will have been established.

So, as coaches, Language and learning support is a matter of fine tuning, re-aligning, bringing something to consciousness, steering, guiding. In short, shaping. (I should look at Alexander and Dewey on all this. And guy on phil as therapy, aesthetics, body -???). Shaping, not teaching from scratch where all students follow a set of procedures for instrumentally producing an object. Different students need different treatment.

For future: This raises the question about the balance between discussing the content and discussion of the language.