April 14, 2017
Richard Beach, Professor Emeritus, University of Minnesota
In my previous post, I argued that activity such as ensemble responses to a basketball game is constituted by languaging. This raises the question as to what units of analysis could researchers employ to examine how people engage in activity mediated by languaging. In this post, I describe analysis of use of social practices within activity constituted by languaging, focusing particularly on the practice of sense-making.
As I argued in the previous post, languaging precedes activity. Since participation in activity involves use of social practices, people are employing languaging as a “meditational means” for engaging in social practices. As Bertau (2014) notes:
Clearly then, language is not a tool, not a means under control of an individual; rather, toolness of language is the result of particular societal language practices, by which the individuals can construct an outside position to their language and use it as a means… So, the medium in my understanding can also be called “medium-as-doingness.” ( (p. 528).
These social practices serve as the tools for engaging in certain actions as the means to accomplishing certain goals (Enfield, 2013). As Enfield (2013) notes, practices are the “means of which these actions are recognized and accomplished [as] tools for caring out actions specifically by getting others to recognize the actions being done” (p. 94). He distinguishes between practices and actions in that:
If actions emphasize ends, practices are means to those actions. Actions are instigated by their formulation and delivery in context, but as a species of social actions they are by definition consummated only by virtue of the rightful ascription by someone of just that action to just the selected practice. (pp. 95-96)
Enfield cites the example of the practice of
‘making a negative observation,’ that is, pointing out the absence of something. An example would be There’s no milk in the fridge. With this practice, one can produce an action called complaining…When we say that the practice of making a negative observation can be used to accomplish an action of complaining, it means that a section of words (or equivalent signs) with certain conventionalized meanings can be used by a speaker as a way of getting a hearer to recognize that the speaker is complaining…If actions are instigated by their formulation and delivery in context, but as a species of social action they are by definition consummated only by virtue of the rightful ascription by someone or just that action to just the selected practice. (pp. 95-96).
These practices are social in that participants need to collaboratively coordinate their actions with each other. To engage in collaborative actions, participants adhere to a shared intentionality and norms—to “be on the same page.” For example, people passing each other in a narrow corridor from opposite directions adhere to the same norms as to navigate past each other. At the same time, there may still be tensions between both participants sharing these norms and individuals adhering to their own individual intentions (Cuffari et al., 2015). One person in the corridor may refuse to adopt the shared intentionality and norms by barging ahead and ignoring the other person.
Addressing this tension between individual versus adherence to shared intentionality and norms requires that participants recognize the limitations of their own individual perspective as ultimately not being productive in achieving goals benefitting both participants. Person A barging ahead in the corridor may not be able to pass by Person B unless B is coordinating with A based on a shared intentionality.
People create and sustain supportive relationships through uses of bundles of social practices operating in certain contexts or space (Dreier, 2009; Schatzki, 2010). For example, within schools, teachers, administrators, and students employ various practices associated with engagement in teaching, learning, social interaction, extra-curricular activities, administration, etc. These practices are linked within activity mediated by languaging in specific spaces and time:
when the arrays of places and paths through which participants in the different practices proceed are the same or orchestrated. Practices are further linked by way of shared activities, including shared doings and sayings. A lab discussion, for instance, might be a moment in both research and teaching practices. Practices also link via chains of actions. An example is a teacher assigning a failing grade to a student leading to an advisor being notified of this grade leading to an email to the student asking for an advising session leading to a meeting between the student and his advisor. (Schatzki, 2015, np)
In these interactions, teachers and students employ languaging to engage in what Schatzki (2010) describes as “coordinated activities” (p. 68) to achieve the purpose or outcome of an activity as “a performance event” within a certain “timespace” (Schatzki, 2010, p. 175). For example, in producing a play, students engage in the social practice of rehearsing their lines with each other within a collaboratively constructed “timespace” based on a share understanding of the purposes and social practices valued within that “timespace.” This suggests the importance of having teachers with their students collectively construct the meaning of “timespaces” based on certain shared purposes, practices, and goals operating in a particular context. In describing her own teaching, Cindy O’Donnell-Allen (2014) notes that
I have organized my teaching around the notion that knowledge does not reside solely in the individual. Rather, it is constructed jointly and informed, for better or worse, by the less visible facets of the learning context—the values, power dynamics, and often conflicting goals and expectations individuals bring to collective tasks. Ideally, learners capitalize on the individual strengths and knowledge of each member. (p. 26)
Sense-making as a Social Practice
One primary social practice is that of “participatory sense-making” (De Jaegher & Di Paolo 2007) involving people collaboratively attempting to make sense of certain events or texts. Sense-making practices are most evident in instance of coping with experiences or events perceived as non-sense that resist application of familiar coherent frames for understanding these experiences or events associated with not knowing how to proceed or cope (Barnett, 2015).
Rather than perceiving intentions as contained individuals’ minds, enactivist theorists posit that sense-making evolves through people enacting a “shared intentionality” (Tomasello, 2014) in the “in-between” “interworld” across individuals, bodies, objects, and cultures (Linell, 2009; Thompson & Stapleton, 2009). Sense-making involves broader, more personal processes than meaning making in that it involves “participatory sense-making” “distributed across brains, bodies, other individuals, objects, artefacts, cultures, and interactivities” and “can be automatic and cognitively impenetrable as a process, e.g. in sense-making in perception, through the senses. In other words, it can be more or less immediate, and even subconscious” (Linell, 2015, p. 123)
Defining sense-making as fostered by enactive intersubjectivity assumes that:
- Social understanding is as much an interactional as an individual affair.
- Intersubjectivity relies heavily on embodiment in a rich sense of the word, i.e.
- on dynamical and embedded whole-body actions.
- Intentions are not opaque and hidden but are expressed in action and can be
- perceptible to others.
- Intentions are not pregiven and static but can be generated and transformed in
- the process of interacting. (Fuchs & De Jaegher, 2009, p. 469)
These intentions are understood as emerging through interaction with others. As Popova (2014) notes:
We act in the world in no small measure because we expect our actions and intentions to be understood as meaningful, to be made sense of, by other people. Human lives in all their inherent complexities take place in the open space of shared realities and shared meanings, not within individual isolated brains. More importantly still, while the agency of an individual is of great importance for sociality, it is acting for and through one another (interacting) that ultimately defines who we are. (p. 2)
Sense-making differs from meaning-making in that it involves an immediate uses of the senses including the subconscious while meaning-making in a more conscious process (Linell, 2009; 2015). Shotter (2012) notes that this requires making sense of the “unfolding time-course of movements occurring around and within us…similarities in what people show us in their expressions that allows us to get a first sense of their “point”, what their expressed intentions are like for us (Shotter, 2012, p. 136). Certain aspects of the current event trigger or evokes recollections of previous, similar events, for example, a person senses that when friend describes the experience of going off to college for the first time, that this event evokes recollections of one’s own experience of going to college.
In his description of Bertau’s (2014) theory of “doingness,” Shotter (2014) notes the importance of languaging as an “agential activity that is enacted or performed—and which, if we ourselves are to “enter into” it to give expression to our own experiences from where we are in its unfolding flow, requires mental effort or work in our doing of it” (p. 594). He perceives languaging as fostering certain internal ways of embodied sense-making in which:
we must at first “wander around” within it, testing possible ways in which to express its nature in words, while listening to (sensing) how it “talks back” to us as to whether our words are fitting or not. And this is something that our body does for us, so to speak, in a kind of hermeneutical/holographic process in which the sense of, or feeling for, a particular unitary whole gradually emerges, prior to our being able to use language in that situation in a “fitting” representational fashion. (p. 594)
Given the importance of these personal experiences associated with students’ own “symbolic resources” for making sense of events (Zittoun, 2014; 2017), it is important that teachers support students’ sharing of their unique experiences, including drawing on their embodied experiences associated with tentative, exploratory sense-making. (For a description of making-sense of a teacher’s instruction, particularly her embodied interactions with students, see my Commentary http://tinyw.in/EX4N.)
Participatory sense-making entails coping with tensions associated with the degree to which participants adhere to the same shared norms as evident in the instance of two people walking in opposite directions in a narrow corridor, a reflection of how sense-making is mediated by adherence to collaborative sense-making (Cuffari, et al., 2015).
An individual participant will sometimes perceive a mismatch between what she intends and what actually happens that in general contrasts with non-interactive situations, and this mismatch, this form of heteronomy from the agent’s perspective, has its origins in the double normative dimension of participatory sense-making (Cuffari, et al., 2015, p. 1100).
This raises the question as to “how is it that we talk about, and out of, different experiences, such that we are understood by others?” to engage in shared sense-making (Cuffari et al., 2015, p. 1115). Misunderstandings in interactions derives from autonomous participants attempting to use language to achieve some consensus understanding as itself a sense-making event, achievement that requires some ethical considerations of the need to address misunderstandings.
To manage the tensions between individuals’ intentions and shared “participatory sense-making,” Cuffari et al (2015) propose a focus on participants’ use of social agency to collaboratively adhere to certain norms operating in an interaction. They perceive social agency as constituting languaging.
We call the form of social agency able to negotiate between interactive and self-directed meta-regulation linguistic sense-making, or languaging. Languaging as the reflexive and reflective negotiating with one’s self as with an other is the ‘seed’ ability out of which abstraction, imagination, and reasoning grow, as one’s sense-making powers incorporate the moves, perspectives and expectations of others, and the horizons of significance in which they are embedded. (p. 1092)
Engaging in Participatory Sense-making in the Classroom
In participatory sense-making in the classroom (De Jaegher & Di Paolo, 2007), students employ languaging by drawing on and double-voicing each other’s languaging, resulting in students’ development of “participatory agency” based on employ “co-actions” for collaboratively sense-making with others (Linell, 2016). In doing so, students construct in-between meanings through dialogic interaction between different perspectives or voices (Beach, 2016).
For responding to texts, teachers can have students engage in what Aukerman (2013) describes as “comprehension as sense-making” that invites more open-ended exploration of responses than is the case with “comprehension-as-outcome” where students are limited to achieving a pre-determine outcome or “comprehension-as-procedures” where students must demonstrate use of certain cognitive strategies. “Comprehension as sense-making” builds on students own unique “symbolic resources” (Zittoun, 2017) based on personal experiences and connections to other texts for exploring alternative meanings of texts, leading to collaborative development of “in-between” meanings (Bertau, 2014; Lysaker, 2014). These “in-between” meanings that becomes “the source of the operative intentionality of both partners. Each of them behaves and experiences differently from how they would do outside of the process, and meaning is co-created in a way not necessarily attributable to either of them” (Thompson & Stapleton (2009) p. 24).
Teachers can also make explicit their own languaging processes to foster metalinguistic awareness for use of languaging to engage in social action, what Newell et al (in preparation) define as “languaging thinking.” “Languaging thinking” involves reflecting on how one thinks in using language in oral and written interactions in a particular context, including uses of texts and resources in those interactions. Building on Kim and Bloome’s (2017) analysis of a teacher engage with “languaging thinking” with her students, Newell et al. posit that “languaging thinking” is therefore a social practice given that it:
is practiced as people act and react to each other. For example, when a teacher languages his/her thinking in teaching how to make an argument using textual evidence from a literary text, the ways of ‘how’ the teacher languages thinking, ‘what’ part of thinking the teacher languages, ‘in which order’ the teacher languages thinking, or ‘what’ is foregrounded or backgrounded in his/her languaging thinking are influenced by his/her understanding of who the students are, what the students already know, what they do not know, what they are struggling with, or even how the teacher positions herself/himself in the class, etc.
In engaging in “languaging thinking” related to argumentative writing, a teacher describes their thinking processes in oral interactions with others or in creating written texts. For example:
In an argumentation classroom where a teacher and students are making their literary argument after reading Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper, a teacher might narrativize how he/she selected pieces of textual evidence, why he/she selected those pieces of evidence, how the pieces of evidence are used to support a claim about the relationship between the husband and the wife or about the symbolism of the room, and what kinds of background knowledge he/she is used in linking the evidence and the claim.
In summary, languaging supports use social practices to engage in specific action, including the practice of making sense of events or texts. Students are more likely to be engaged in uses of languaging when teachers create activities involving use of social practices to change in the status quo and employ “languaging thinking” to support students’ use of languaging.
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