Acting Out Participant Examples in the Classroom

Interactionally situated cognition: a classroom example

“…Instead, they used various cues in their speech to signal the interactional event they were enacting. Garfinkel and Sacks (1970), Silverstein (1976Silverstein ( , 1985Silverstein ( , 1998 and Wortham (1994Wortham ( , 1996Wortham & Locher, 1996) describe how patterns of indexical cues in language can emerge and cohere, so as to establish one model of the interactional text as most plausible. In many cases-like the classroom discussion under consideration-speakers orient to such indexical cues and the interactional texts they support, but speakers do not consciously recognize or explicitly articulate the interactional text or the significance of particular cues.…”

“…That is, in this sort of case speakers do what they say, through the same words that they use to say it (Wortham, 1994(Wortham, , 1997. The article shows how in such cases denotational and interactional structures can work together to facilitate cognition.…”

Jackie Chan drinks Mountain Dew: constructing cultural models of citizenship

“…At that point, Ivon attempts to revise and restrict Mr. Tong's generalization about women shoppers by responding in line 18: "Depends on what women you're with," which prompts Mr. Agnew to again invoke statistics to support his assertion about women being impulse buyers As Mr. Tong shifts into Lao (line 23), he moves rapidly from a general, nongendered definition of impulse buying to a participant example (Wortham, 1994) portraying impulse buying as women's behavior. In this exchange, we see a number of female students responding, with several, like Ivon earlier, displaying resistance to what is being constructed.…”

“…Such "participant examples" (Wortham, 1994), which both Mr. Tong and Mr. Agnew made frequent use of, involve a narrated event, real or imagined, in which the teller and/or listeners participate.…”

“…As such, the participants assume a character, or identity, and positioning within the event (Wortham, 1994), and convey (however implicitly, and whether playfully or not) a sense…”