Making learning ordinary: ways undergraduates display learning in a CMC task

Abstract

We report findings from a discourse analysis study situated within a discursive psychology framework that examined how undergraduate nutrition science students took up a computer-mediated communication task in which they were asked to write about what they learned after attending a lecture. Students made learning displays by orienting to the lecture as a news receipt and making assessments of this new information in variable ways. Some did this by marking an extreme change of state through surprise tokens and realization patterns, functioning to position the new information as so extreme that anyone would have learned something new. Others displayed more neutral assessments of the information or claimed no change of state at all, functioning to distance themselves from having learned anything. Both strategies are ways of "doing being ordinary," while completing a delicate task that presented them with a potential dilemma of displaying their learning for an invisible audience of their peers.

Graduate Students’ Construction of Researcher Identities Explored Through Discourse Analysis

“…As Attenborough (2011) pointed out, there is a delicate balance of navigating a newfound identity and guiding students through this process. Identity work, particularly when linked to displaying what you know, can be inherently risky for some students, and brings with it the potential for losing face in front of peers (Paulus & Lester, 2013). An example of this is the way students in this study worked to minimize their knowledge prior to making any claims to a particular paradigmatic orientation or research identity.…”

“…Discourse research has focused on a variety of university environments, including office hours (Limberg, 2007), blogs (Lester & Paulus, 2011;Paulus & Lester, 2013), face-to-face tutorials and small group discussions (Benwell & Stokoe, 2002, 2005Cromdal, Tholander, & Aronsson, 2007), and textbook marginalia (Attenborough, 2011). Much of this research has pointed to how students delicately display their knowledge and even resist displaying 'knowing' and 'learning' for others.…”

“…All of the posts and comments were collected, organized, and analyzed. It is not uncommon for researchers working with online discussion data to focus their analysis on the initial posts (see, for example, Lester & Paulus, 2011;Paulus & Lester, 2013;Varga & Paulus, 2014). Because our purpose was to capture how students began to develop their research identities, we wanted to see how they first oriented to this new phenomenon in response to the initial prompt.…”

“…Many DP studies of education discourse, have highlighted the ways in which students' talk functions to minimize their status as knowledgeable (Benwell & Stokoe, 2002, 2005Paulus & Lester, 2013). Benwell and Stokoe (2010), for instance, noted that students often "...work to produce a particular culture … in which 'being a student' involves appearing detached from the academic endeavour," wherein "students co-construct the discursive limits in which being 'too clever' is problematic" (p. 93-94).…”

“…We interpreted this discursive move to act to minimize the students' claims to knowing and distance them from having to account for the research paradigm(s) that they claimed to align with. Being a student is a fragile social act (Paulus & Lester, 2013), as you are typically being asked to show whether you 'know' something or not, a potentially face-threatening act. Thus, perhaps it is unsurprisingly that many of the participating students structured their posts to minimize the risk of being questioned or positioned as "wrong".…”