We have begun receiving and reading manuscript submissions for the Department's new scholarly journal, The Communication Review. I am hoping to integrate this year's departmental colloquium series with the needs of the journal. I hope and expect this will create a new locus of intellectual activity within the Department. Please spread the word about The Communication Review. The first issues is scheduled for Spring, 1994.
Finally, the Department wishes to congratulate Professor Carol Padden and her associate, Claire Ramsey, who have been awarded a $457,000 three year Department of Education grant. The title of the proposal is "Deaf Children as Readers and Writers: A Mixed Mode of Research Approach."
Now that the codification of rules is largely accomplished and we have continued to grow, we can concentrate on other aspects of the program as a collective; namely on building an intellectual community. Graduate school is an anxiety- producing machine in that it has high demands, constant critical scrutiny, intermediate checkups, time limits, and a structural power differential between students and professors. If the program allows anxiety to become its chief product, we are in deep trouble. The anxiety producing features are strengthened by social isolation and fragmentation. They are kept in check when there is a community of critical practice and productive scholarship. To create and nourish such a community, we need above all collaboration and open communication, what one might simply call, trust. A bit of laughter will help, too. I'd like to see this year as a period of community building in the program.
A community is crucially dependent on having something like a common object to share. In our case, the common object is the complex and multi- faceted phenomenon of communication. To keep this object of inquiry in the focus, the graduate students and their advisors should use opportunities to make presentations on their work and generally share their questions, ideas and findings. There are several channels for this. Course Group and ComNotes are the most informal ones. There are also two new journals, The Communication Review edited by Robert Horwitz with the assistance of other faculty and graduate students, and Mind, Culture and Activity, published by the Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition and edited by Mike Cole, Yrjo Engestrom and Olga Vásquez. A final word to all participants in the department, "Don't hide your work and ideas from your fellow students and faculty."
Prof. Engestrom is Graduate Advisor for the Department of Communication.
I had always hoped that my research would contribute to relevant debates in academic and policy-making circles, but what has happened this last spring and summer is beyond my initial expectations. Our work has allowed us to understand Mexican manufacturing industries and the labor market structure. The analyses we have conducted reveal the fundamental flaws inherent in the arguments and assumptions surrounding the NAFTA agreement. Our research has served us to advise congresspeople and senators on issues of labor, wages and productivity under the proposed NAFTA agreement.
As currently negotiated, NAFTA would link the economies of Canada, Mexico and the United States in a free trade zone. The changes in tariffs and regulations would be phased out over the next 15 years, reducing the shock of combining three vastly different economies. The side agreements, on the concerns about labor and the environment which Candidate Clinton required for his support of NAFTA, were recently signed.
The research itself has required a great deal of resourcefulness, patience and attention to detail. For example, I have been the principal, and at times, the only contact with authorities of Mexico's central bank and the National Institute of Statistics, an organization analogous to the Bureau of Labor Statistics in the United States. The frustration of getting through on the phone, an achievement in itself, is quickly overshadowed by the challenge of finding the person who can answer my questions or comply with my requests. These otherwise, typically frustrating moments, are quickly forgotten when I think about memorable moments from the last several weeks:
After a couple of presentations, my friend Victor from the AFL-CIO, also scheduled to speak, asked me to say a few words about my research on Mexico's workforce and industrial potential. After my initial reluctance, I took the next half hour to write out a brief outline. When Victor, at an awkward juncture in his speech, said, "Mr. President, I would like to ask your permission to invite Isaac Mankita to say a few words about Mexican workers," I got up, as if on automatic, and spoke for 20 minutes.
On the phone, Harley tells me that people at the Bureau of Labor Statistics are interested in our sources and contacts in Mexico. Apparently, ours are better than theirs. Who would have ever thought this possible?
While I have worked hard and am very, very tired, I am also incredibly excited at being a part of a research team exploring issues critical to the welfare of workers in North America. It has been rewarding to watch a major international debate unfold in front of my eyes, knowing at times, the likely twists and turns it could take.
My work in the last 6 months has been, by far, the best intellectual, educational and overall stimulating experience I could ever have imagined. I am also happy that I can still fit into a couple of suit jackets and slacks although they are a bit tight.
Crystal Shannon-Morla is a Chancellor's postdoctoral fellow at the Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition (LCHC) at UCSD. She completed her doctoral dissertation on language and emotion on the code-switching of African American bilinguals in May of 1992. She is currently doing research on how children in an afterschool computer mediated literacy program utilize two languages as they acquire common (standard) English literacy skills.
Several recurring themes which emerged from the analysis of 5 quarters of student writing, mark relations between theory and practice among this group of students. Although the undergraduates rarely use the terms "theory" and "practice," the tension between the university classroom and the activities at the 5th Dimensions plays a role in their initial responses to the course, the roles they attempt to adopt in order to enter into play with the children, and in their searches for incarnations of theoretical constructs at the 5th Dimensions. In addition, by the end of the course, many UCSD students apply theoretical notions (although not always theoretical terms) to their own learning in other university courses.
What is "practice" and what is "theory"?
For the most part, the UCSD students in this course are not in a teacher education program, or in any program of professional preparation. As a result, they differ from pre- service teachers in their expectations for themselves, and for their participation in "practice." While some may be considering a teaching career, for most of them this future goal plays a small part in their participation in the course and at the sites. Although students sometimes comment that the course solidified their decisions to go into teaching, child psychology, school counseling (or parenthood), students have also confessed by the end of a quarter as Wizard Assistants that they didn't find working with children as interesting as they had expected to, and were changing their career plans.
"Practice" in this context, then, does not indicate actions taken to learn or perfect a set of professional skills. Rather, the UCSD students move between a university classroom, a setting in which they expect to be "passive," to the 5th Dimensions, where they quickly learn that they will be expected to engage in activities, with children, in settings that are both "fun" and educational. Practice in this setting can best be thought of as "action."
The UCSD students' background knowledge about child development, learning, literacy, computers, and play varies greatly. Most of them have heard of Piaget. Students majoring in Communication tend to have heard of Vygotsky (or "that Russian guy" as one student blurted out), but at the outset of the class many students groan and mutter about the difficulty and uselessness of reading the "theory" articles. (They are assigned a very reasonable amount of reading from primary sources, which requires careful and mature reading, but which is supported in the course by lectures, discussions and in-class writing.) In addition to the course readings, in this context, theory also refers to class discussions (and eventually peer group discussions) of the reading and the theoretical framework that structures the 5th Dimensions, as well as in-class writing about the readings.
The set of ideas presented in the course readings (including the "Incomplete Guide" to the 5th Dimension) is alien to many students, who find it counter-intuitive to count as "learning," actions that children do not accomplish on their own, or who are surprised to discover that a university course where undergraduates are known to "play with kids" has any academic or theoretical component. The problems inherent in engaging in off-campus activities as part of a course, of taking a theoretical stance toward their activities, and of relating theory and practical activity are new to them. Students who negotiate this new territory do so, in part, retrospectively, through the descriptive and reflective fieldnote writing they produce twice a week about their activities, play and conversation with children at the sites.
UCSD Students' Initial Reactions to the Practicum Course
Students' initial reactions to the course reflect their difficulties in adding thoughtful practice to their coursework. The local economy of grading influences students' expectations about the amount of work that is appropriate for a 4-unit course, as well as the grade dividends that they feel they should be earning from the time invested in the course. Many students find the "theory into practice" feature of the course burdensome because it is simply time-consuming. However, students report that a course that combines activity off campus with conventional course work course is unusual and disturbing for more theoretically interesting reasons as well. Many students write that they know how to be students in large lecture courses, where they take notes, do assigned reading, and take exams. The same students are nervous about losing the security of anonymity in large lecture halls, and about performing as learners in a new way. Demonstrating learning in activities with children, in discussions in class, and in fieldnote writing threatens their sense of their own competence as university students.
Their responses on the first day of class, when faculty explain the details of the commitment they will make during the course, range from happiness and relief to gaining admission to the course, to nervousness at the loss of their anonymity in such a participatory setting, to fear that they will not know what to do when they must talk to and play computer games with real children as opposed to working with "subjects" in a lab-like setting. Over half of the students report that the first few days of class and site visits at the 5th Dimensions, are overwhelming. A surprising number of these UCSD upper-class members have purposely avoided using computers, and playing computer games and using the UNIX system and electronic mail are fear-inducing experiences.
One of the first "theory to practice" tensions the UCSD students face, then, is the challenge to their own definition of studenthood and the definitions of learning and teaching that their views entail. If "learning" means absorbing received knowledge from professors and from books, and reproducing that information on exams and in papers, then it is hard to imagine learning and development taking place in social settings, through activities and talk, among pairs or groups of people traveling along zones of proximal development.
UCSD student roles at the 5th Dimensions
The second practical issue students face is defining the roles they should adopt at the 5th Dimensions. This problem is also theoretical, since the students' developing definitions of learning and development influence the ways they imagine they should engage with the children. The confusion about roles, and the effects their roles have on the children, occupy the UCSD students throughout the course. Nearly half the students in the sample discuss their dilemmas discovering a niche at the sites.
Students sometimes enter the class expecting to wear white lab-coats and observe children through a one-way mirror. Others label their expected role as "teacher" or "tutor." Most of the students who struggle with their roles begin by assuming that they must act as authorities (on computers, games, discipline, mathematics, etc).
A widespread fear among the USCD students highlights the problem of locating the elusive Wizard Assistant role (that is, the practice or activity of Wizard Assistants at the sites) and understanding its theoretical potential. At the beginning of the course, while students try out the "teacher-authority" role, they worry that the children will know more than they do about the 5th Dimension, about computers, and about the computer games, and that they will fail in their attempts to teach, maintain discipline and help the children to succeed in the Fifth Dimension. (It is a fact that many of the children initially know more about these topics than the UCSD students). If the children know more than the UCSD students, they ask, then how can the older students "teach" the younger children? This fear diminishes as the students relinquish the authority that they imagine they must pretend to have in order to successfully interact with the children.
Although the problem of "what exactly is the role of a Wizard Assistant" is never completely resolved, by the end of the quarter many students have taken an important, theoretically interesting step. They cease to worry about their authority at the sites, and begin to write instead about the quality of the affiliations and relationships they formed with the children. Through readings, class discussions, and experience at the sites, students come to see themselves as partners, mentors, playmates, and surrogate siblings. In particular, after class discussions about "leading activities" (Griffin & Cole, 1984) and the zone of proximal development (Vygotsky, 1978), UCSD students expand the possible roles they may occupy with the children. This aspect of their participation in the course and in the 5th Dimensions is clarified for students who take a theoretically thoughtful stance toward their activities.
While experience at the sites helps in this process, students who take the theoretical readings to heart come to understand that "more experienced partners" in zones of proximal development are not necessarily the older partners. Several students write eloquently about this refreshing experience. One pair of students labelled it a "reverse" zone of proximal development (that is, the direction of assistance is from younger citizens to older Wizard Assistants). Others describe the many ways the children at the sites socialize and teach the UCSD students, and draw them into relationships. At this point in their learning, these university students begin to regard the fact of affiliation, the quality of engagement, and the structure and content of interaction through talk as important pieces of the puzzle of understanding learning, even though they may not yet completely understand the theoretical underpinnings of the entire 5th Dimension project or be able to consciously apply theory to their activities at the sites.
Reflections of Theoretical Understanding
As noted, many UCSD students find that the practicum in child development course challenges their notions of their own studenthood, especially the ways they characterize their own learning, and their accustomed ways of measuring and demonstrating their learning. A high proportion of UCSD students overcome this challenge, and claim that they learn more or come to deeper understanding of course material in the practicum course than in other university courses. In their written reflections, students account for their enhanced learning with the importance of hands-on experience to bolster readings, and with the importance of affiliation, friendship, and interaction with their UCSD peers. UCSD peer interactions take root during class, at the sites, in the computer labs where students write fieldnotes, and in car-pools to and from sites.
Just as experiences in the 5th Dimensions prompt UCSD students to re- define learning in the context of "child" development, experiences in class prompt a high proportion of UCSD students to scrutinize the opportunities for learning that the university offers them. Participating in discussions within a community of classmates is an unusual experience for many of the undergraduates. In addition, (and somewhat surprisingly) so are opportunities to make friends with other UCSD students, and to establish groups of peers who work together outside of class, to jointly solve problems. Although neither feature is unique to this course, small classes are unusual for undergraduates at this university. In addition, because they have grappled with theories about learning and development over the quarter-long course, many UCSD students realize that the enhanced learning they detect in themselves is compatible with the theoretical notions they were exposed to in class.
Claire Ramsey is a visiting scholar in the Department of Communication.
Maribel Castaneda: B.A in Mass Media Communications from UCLA. She is interested in how access to and images in the mass media represent the social and political positions of people of color.
Tamara Falicov: BA in Sociology from U. C. Berkeley. Recently, she has been involved in independent video work in San Francisco. She's interested in alternative media forms and methods for democratizing television and radio.
Vanessa Gack: B.A. in Communications from U. C. San Diego. Currently in the indisciplinary program in Cognitive Science, she is interested in the socio-cultural and historical approach to the study of Mind. This year she will be involved in the organization of a National Academy of Education Discussion Network.
Corinne Mc Sherry: BA in Politics from U. C. Santa Cruz. She is interested in how media reflects and reinforces political culture and how this in turn affects democratic theory.
Honorine Nocon: Master's in Spanish (Linguistics) from SDSU. She is interested in language use in multi-lingual, multicultural groups.
Monica Owusu-Breen: BA in Modern Culture and Media from Brown University. Recently a freelance coordinator for music videos in New York City, she is interested in popular culture and youth, and issues of race and gender in popular film and television.
Nick Sammond: BA in Theater from Wesleyan University. He has worked in Theater production and taught in the U. S. and abroad. For the past five years he has worked at the Exploratorium, a science museum in San Francisco, as a teacher and writer.
Alison Schapker: BA in American Studies from Williams College. She is interested in combining her background in Women's Studies and political theory with the study of media and communications technologies, particularly the relationship between mass-mediated society and political culture.
Karin Swann: BA from U. C. Berkeley in Popular Culture Studies and an Master's in Political Science from University of Wisconsin-Madison. For two years following her undergraduate work, Karin worked in the news media, including an internship at the MacNeil-Leher News Hour during the Gulf War. She is interested in the history of the news media.
Melinda Stone: BA in Speech Communication and Journalism from Humboldt State and an Master's in Mass Communication from San Diego State. She is interested in the movie-of-the-week phenomenon and how real life stories are re-constructed in a two hour format. She is interested in becoming an advocate of media literacy in the public schools.
Lisa Tripp: BA in Community Studies from U. C. Santa Cruz. Her interests and background include video and interactive multimedia production, bilingual/bicultural education, and the effects of different technologies on learning and education.
If you wish to contribute to the newsletter or have suggestions for us, please contact Olga Vásquez at the Department of Communication, (619) 534-6284/4410. Graduate student assistant for this issue: Jill MacDowell. Technical Editor: Bruce Jones.
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