Varenne: ITSF5016 -

This is the sixth in a series of notes to fifteen lectures for my class ITSF5016 "Ethnography of Education"

why "polity" (rather than "community")?

a rare word with little if any ideological connotations;
the semantic connotation that we are talking about a political (that is public, relational, comprehensive) matter (de Jouvenel, 1963);
the secondary connotation that the very grounds for participation are themselves a political matter to be fought over, and thus educated about, by all potential participants in whatever position (whether "full," "peripheral," or "outsider"). In other words, participation is a not matter of a priori assignment (e.g. birth) but an emergent and always threatened matter.
- with the methodological corrolate that the observer cannot assign people to polities except to the extent that the full set of participants display who participates, in what ways, with what rights and duties, etc

infant/mother [caretaker] interaction analyzed as polity of practice and moment for mutually directed transformation (e.g. "education")

The fundamental questions

What forms of language would a child acquire if she only experienced political speeches (university lectures, Sesame Street on television) where noone addressed her or included her, however peripherally? Would she:
1. not develop language (as can happen to children who are totally isolated from human beings)?
2. only learn a truncated form of language (Skinner)?
3. develop language automatically (Chomsky)?
4. teach herself to speak in a particular way incorporating what she has heard and transformations on this (Rancière)?
How can it be that children "learn" language from people who do not how to teach language, and who do not know any (particular, school-explicated) thing about child psychology?

What taking a determined, ethnographic, look at what parents and children actually do together might help us learn -- as long as we escape the questions that have already been framed by earlier explanations in the search for new explanation?
1. This phrasing is actually a bow to Ranciere, as well as to Garfinkel, and much earlier on to Boas and early anthropologists of all types, about the need to fear the questions that analytic traditions provide -- as well as trust that our informants, who are obviously ignorant of what we expect them to contribute to -- i.e. anthropology or psychology--, will in fact be able to teach us what we want to learn. As long of course, as we work hard at it, with discipline will.
2. Specifically what can we learn if we fear the obvious, for example this passage from Miller that is actually a counter-factual to what she actually does:
  The mother's beliefs about language learning are interesting in their own right but also embody valuable insights into language socialization. This is not to say what a mother expressed (to a particular listener on particular occasions) was the sum of what she knew about language learning. Surely, the bulk of that knowledge was tacit, more or less inaccessible to conscious thought
  
  actually there is no evidence to the last sentence. There is nothing "sure" about it when, every time researcher produces the occasion, people can produce discourse about their knowledge and beliefs. It is more probably the case that "statements of knowledge" are produced in conversational sequences organized for such statements. They do not lie fully formed in the (un-)concious. At least there is absolutely no way to prove this. In which the Ockam's razor principle should be invoked: there is no reason to invoke an invisible process when a simpler, observational, tool is available
3. Thus a determined look at what the mothers and the children are actually doing which, in this case, are
  1. naming sequences with multiple and shifting participants. Some of these are initiated by the mothers, some by children, including the children of focus
  2. speaking appropriately sequences
  3. playing verbal games
4. Note how little this has to do with the classic questions about syntactic development (a la Chomsky/Piaget) but has everything to do about finding out how to use language for action. Note how much of the mother's intructions are based on correction after potential trouble. The mothers do not test the children. They ensure that the child produces the verbal sequence that ought to be produced at this moment. If the child does not make a mistake, the child is let alone -- but of course each statement ratches up the possibility for not saying/doing the right thing. The children may be learning but they are also introduced to ever more complex forms of ignorance for which they will be corrected by an ever expanding circle of friends, peers, strangers, including hostile strangers. [This is another place when Garfinkel's comments on instruction are directly relevant]
  1. see Miller's comment (p. 98) about "the child's prior mastery of the rules of reciprocal discourse ... including turn-taking" -- which infants seem to be born with! The issue is not whether the child has "mastered" the rules, but whether the child has stopped "screwing around."
    1. see Cory Boyd's dissertation on infant literacy in the supermarket (1993).

Some questions
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