Disciplinary Discourses Research Articles

Mapping out Liberating Traces of the Fun of Undisciplined Play: A Search for an Alternative Aesthetic in Graffiti

Aim. The present study primarily engages with graffiti as a tactic of the weak who find pleasure in scandalising the dominant discourse. The prime focus here will be on the pleasure as resistance, on the construction of an alternative space into the dominant space, and on the multiple forms of evasive and resisting techniques through which the subordinate asserts their power. Thus, Graffiti can be read as a popular text, a signifying construct of potential meanings and pleasures for the subordinate. Concept. Conceptualised as the undisciplined play of the subordinate people that resists or evades hegemonic forces and a radical reimagining of the neo-liberal spaces, Graffiti has become a major expression of popular culture in recent times. The paper uses many such stances where the lateral thinking of the power helps to challenge the disciplinary discourses of the dominant. Results and Conclusion. The paper offers a popular reading of graffiti that opens up the way to escape control, scandalise top-down power and to assert bottom-up power at the micro-level. The real pleasure lies in scandalising the dominant discourse. Graffiti is read here as self-assertion of the marginalised who acquire public visibility and power through graffiti creation. Originality. The originality of the study depends on reviewing the manipulative actions of people in everyday lives and how this undisciplined play provides them with the opportunity to subvert the system and to escape social control. It supports the idea that the subordinate possesses transgressive deviation in relation to the everyday continuum.

IN HISTORY’S SHADOW: CHILD WELFARE DISCOURSES REGARDING INDIGENOUS COMMUNITIES IN THE CANADIAN SOCIAL WORK JOURNAL

This article reviews all items in the Canadian Social Work journal over its almost 90-year history that relate to child welfare practice in an Indigenous context. We review the journal contents as a way of understanding the profession’s voice, noting that a journal’s discursive practice reflects disciplinary discourse and that this journal positioned itself as a platform for social work debates. Our analysis contributes also to the truth-telling and accountability of social workers. While around 10% of the 1500 journal articles focused on child welfare practice, only 9 of these 152 articles addressed child welfare practice with Indigenous children and families. Our discourse analysis highlights that there was contemporaneous silence regarding social work complicity in the residential schools movement, the Sixties Scoop, and the current Millennium Scoop. In the 1980s, sustained critique around the role of social work in perpetuating colonization began to emerge. The journal, though, left child protection discourse unexamined and thus overlooked its role in maintaining dominant Canadian child welfare practice. We suggest that White supremacy and settler colonial discourses support the dominance of the child protection discourse, and that part of decolonizing child welfare practice relates to revealing and resisting these discourses and generating alternative decolonized discourses.

Graduate student intellectual journeys: a functional method to identify library service gaps

PurposeInvestment in graduate education is costly in various ways so completion success is a big concern for universities and stakeholders. Largely the graduate educational landscape moves along a commonly structured path from acceptance to graduation. Despite many having successfully attained the award, the research literacies that signal doctoral achievement remain obscure and scholars continue to struggle with developing clear and tangible measures for the competencies that represent attainment of the degree. Feedback gathered from faculty at a large research institution through a series of semi-structured interviews illustrated the challenge departments have to effectively communicate what it takes to get through graduate education. As a result students still have a difficult time understanding the complexity of graduate training. This study views graduate education from the lens of intellectual journeys, as opposed to the research lifecycle, as a way of uncovering distinct disciplinary discourse practices and offering libraries critical points to align services using this framework.Design/methodology/approachThe methodology is highly flexible and adaptable to many contexts besides graduate education. This study takes a different approach from previous studies in its framing of discussions with academic faculty, using journey maps, to focus on the intellectual journeys of graduate students. Faculty from different disciplines participated in one-on-one, hour-long interviews. Discussions were audio recorded, transcribed, and then coded into NVivo. Iterative review on the data continued until themes emerged. The data gathered were used to compile a detailed map of the processes and requirements that make up graduate education. This approach to the data helped to identify what faculty perceive as the greatest struggles for graduate students and provide evidence of the key places within the intellectual journeys of graduate students.FindingsThis paper provides a discussion of graduate student personas revealed through intellectual journeys, assesses the issues students encounter, shares critical time points and key places within these intellectual journeys where significant development occur, and suggests how libraries can and should connect with graduate committee members to establish missing support structures. Practical suggestions for library support are given for the areas where students struggle most. These critical services can be aligned to key developmental phases that will not only positively impact the time to completion but also retention.Originality/valueFirst, the methodology discussed is highly flexible and adaptable to many contexts besides graduate education. Second, librarians adopting this methodology can generate their own editable journey maps not only to offer the most critical services but these tools also double as visual communication and negotiation tools for graduate students and their mentors during graduate training. Third, previous research has suggested that the most instrumental factor for graduate students completing their degree was the concept of forward progress. Framing the graduate experience and orienting library graduate support through the lens of disciplinary intellectual journeys achieves an action-oriented approach that supplements and addresses structural inequities by providing consequential support at meaningful points in a student’s journey thus allowing students to make forward progress and ultimately lead to faster completion rates.

Archive, Photography and the Language of Administration

Jane Birkin’s recently published Archive, Photography and the Language of Administration approaches one of the most critical topics in digital humanities: archives. Organized in a series of separate but connected essays, rather than formal chapters, it covers themes from the history of image archives to the social component of archives, cataloging and descriptions, technical data, performativity and finally opens up the theme of postdigital archives. Many types of archives are covered by this book, from methodical ones from natural sciences and controlling Secret Service archives to random digital snapshot archives. The book covers the history of photography and its memory, ranging in interest from glass plates and paper items to poor images such as thumbnails. It refers to original artworks and reproductions.The book’s specific focus is on the distinction but also the relationship between image and text, which Ronald Barthes introduced in his analysis of image theory, showing how text nails down the polyvalent meaning and ambiguity of the image by its precision. Moving between the formality of Foucault’s disciplinary discourse to the narrativity of Derrida, but also the rigid dualism of Barthes, Birkin sees more practical purpose in using text in both conceptual and descriptive writing, in a variety of forms, as label, tag, ekphrasis, iconographic reading, narrative, etc. Thus, the text has a triple function; it is used to “reveal, classify and to reproduce” (p. 42) the image as a document.Archive, Photography and the Language of Administration is a substantial read. Bringing up information, theories and references in significant density, it supplements and updates both previous knowledge on archives and its theories, hardly omitting any important detail in capturing the entire thematic landscape. As such, it would be a valuable source for archivists of all kinds, but furthermore it would be a great handbook for studies in the domain.

Gendered Genius Hour: Tracing Young Children’s Uptake of Expert across the Nexus of Personal Digital Inquiry

Drawing on data from a yearlong qualitative study examining how children in a multi-age (6-9 years) classroom utilized technology to write across genres, this article examines the gendered negotiation and discursive uptake of expert in early childhood writing. Zeroing in on genius hour as a “site of engagement,” the author thinks with rhetorical genre studies and mediated discourse analysis to examine how four second-grade writers positioned themselves as “experts” across the nexus of school writing. Findings highlight how expert—both conceptually and in practice—became gendered and was interdiscursively traced through three threads: the relational, the historical, and the distributive. Through analyses of young students writing in situ, this article contributes new understandings to thinking about children’s navigation of genres, not only as rhetorical typifications of academic and disciplinary discourse but as unique social actions of curricular play and gendered uptake.

Learning the Disciplines Through Linguistic Feedback: Contribution to the Development of a Discipline-Specific, Formative Evaluation of Students’ Assignments

Students write to learn. Besides, enculturation to the disciplinary discourse happens during writing. Feedback on the assignments from the students scaffolds students’ writing development and learning paths. However, knowledge about the relationship between language, including argumentation in the discipline, on one hand, and the content of the discipline, on the other, is needed. This article is based on a socio-cultural approach to writing in the disciplines, and theory on feedback, and focuses on the relationship between the meso-level of texts (sentences, clauses, word choice) and the content of the discipline. We discuss how insight into the meso-level of texts may be used to improve and to develop feedback and formative evaluation. Cases from an intervention project in a Danish upper secondary school are included, and indicate that teachers and students assign a lower priority to feedback on the meso-level. This article claims that providing feedback on the meso-level strengthens writing development and students’ learning processes. To illustrate how this may be accomplished two texts are analyzed: one from a history class and one from a biology class.

A Multimodal Social Semiotics Perspective on Teaching and Learning Using Biomedical Visualisations.

Over recent years, there has been an explosion of digital technologies and infrastructure, and many biomedical education contexts have taken advantage of these new tools and platforms for teaching and learning visualisation practices. However, there are uncertainties, concerns, and debates in the literature, regarding the impact of digital technology on biomedical visualisation, and education more broadly. In this discussion paper, a multimodal social semiotics perspective is applied to examining visual representations, and the visual language we use to make meaning with these representations, in four different ways. Firstly, in terms of the function, role, and positionality of visual representations within the biomedical sciences. Secondly, within the context of a disciplinary Discourse, wherein visual language functions as just one of many socially specific languages, or modes, such as the written, verbal, and symbolic modes, and through which we animate the discourse and make disciplinary meaning. Thirdly, consideration is given to the meaning-making affordances and limitations of biomedical visualisation practices, affirming that no single mode or media is superior and that multimodal integration is a necessity. Finally, there is a discussion of the approaches to teaching and learning for the acquisition of a disciplinary Discourse, which highlights a need to focus on explicating the hidden curriculum. This discussion presents a perspective that offers some valuable insights into the uncertainties expressed in the literature and empowers educators with some productive pedagogical strategies.

Assessment, Recognition and the “Contact Zone” in Landscape Architecture: How Much Is “Enough”?

Extended Curriculum Programmes have a responsibility to validate the resources and experiences students bring to their learning environment. However, designing assessment practices that encourage diverse students to draw on their resources in order to both access and challenge disciplinary discourses can be complex. This article is framed in terms of how students balance their own experiential knowledge while engaging with the disciplinary discourse. It aims to interrogate students’ negotiation of the “contact zone” and how they negotiate their brought-along resources with assessment guidelines. A multimodal social semiotic approach is taken to explore ways of contributing to a socially just pedagogy by enabling recognition of a range of students’ resources, while at the same time acknowledging the need to access the conventions of the discipline. We argue for recognition as the positive side of assessment, which could enable more diverse students’ resources to be acknowledged. We interrogate the meaning-making trajectories of two students, Xola and Sonwabo, in a first-year landscape architecture course. While both students bring their own resources into a spatial model project, they each have varying “success” in mediating these in relation to the dominant conventions of landscape architectural design.

Characterizing Disciplinarity and Conventions in Engineering Resume Profiles

Background: Resume preparation is a common activity within technical writing classes, but the advent and increased use of resume profile and job-hunting sites, such as Indeed.com, require instructors and researchers to re-think common practices in the teaching of resume writing, particularly for writing instructors with limited disciplinary experience. Prior research for conventional resumes has quantified the disciplinarity of resumes as a function of resume quality using metrics of disciplinary discourse density, which may be useful in analyzing online resumes profiles. Research questions: 1. How do online engineering resume profiles demonstrate disciplinarity? 2. What formatting and stylistic conventions are observed within engineering resume profiles? 3. How do rhetorical disciplinarity and conventions vary with resume profile quality? Literature review: Although past efforts have examined the resume as a critical genre for entering a professional setting, few researchers have sought to interpret the relationships between discursive and stylistic expectations and quality in online resume profiles, while also accounting for aspects of disciplinarity. Methodology: This study compares engineering (all disciplines) resume profiles from Indeed.com with a corpus of conventional engineering resumes through qualitative genre analysis and quantitative methods for calculating disciplinary discourse density. We also characterize stylistic and rhetorical conventions for resume profiles, and statistically compare these facets as a function of resume quality. Results and conclusion: Results determined that discursive strategies were significantly different between strong, moderate, and weak engineering resume profiles. Qualitative analysis captured differences in style and form that were also statistically linked with quality. Based on our results, we call for further investigation into resume profiles and reconsideration of current pedagogical approaches.

Developing disciplinary discourse in a first-year engineering course: The DELNA initiative

First-year students in higher education settings tend to face ongoing challenges with variations in discursive practices and genres within their discipline. Within this context, a Diagnostic English Language Needs Assessment (DELNA) was administered to first-year engineering students to assess the strengths and needs of their ability to navigate academic language. The purpose of this paper is to report on our initiative to support student’s development of academic literacy, specifically their disciplinary language proficiency through the implementation of pedagogical support activities.

Unity through disunity: Strengths, values, and tensions in the disciplinary discourse of ecological economics

Ecological economics has existed as a field for over 30 years. The field has since its inception strived to transcend traditional disciplinary boundaries and incorporates many substantially different perspectives. Despite continuous discussion about the fundamentals and direction of the field, ecological economists maintain a perception that ecological economics is at its core one field, although there are various approaches within it. The present study draws on the concept of disciplinary discourse to explore the field's perceived strengths and the values pursued through its research. I carried out interviews with editors and editorial board members of the journal Ecological Economics in order to investigate how actors in a central location expressed this discourse. Respondents hold that the field's strengths are its theoretical robustness, breadth, and open and dynamic nature. They also hold that the field should pursue the scientific values of consistency, societal relevance, and novelty. However, the operationalization of these values in the institutional and intellectual environment of ecological economics is underscoring tensions within the field, including the question of whether to enforce strict exclusionary boundaries against mainstream economic approaches.

INVESTIGATING LEXICAL BUNDLES IN THE CORPORA OF ENGLISH AND INDONESIAN RESEARCH ARTICLES WITH THE SKETCH ENGINE

The low publication rate of Indonesian researchers in reputable international journals, particularly in arts and humanities,is caused, among others, by difficulties they faced in producing precise expository texts in English, which are differentfrom texts in Indonesian. The present study examines lexical bundles in the corpora of English and Indonesian researcharticles (RA) on literature and linguistics to describe the similarities and differences of conventionalized phraseology inthe scientific genre of English and Indonesian by using corpus software, namely Sketch Engine. The study focuses onthe frequency, structural and functional characteristics of lexical bundles using a mixed-method research design. TheEnglish corpus comprises 1,351,048 words derived from 124 RA, while the Indonesian corpus consists of 637,910 wordscollected from 124 RA. We found that three-word lexical bundles are more prevalent than four-word lexical bundles inboth corpora. Based on the structural forms, prepositional-based bundles are the most frequent form in English RA, whilenoun-based bundles are the most common form in Indonesian RA. There were no participant-oriented bundles foundin the Indonesian RA corpus in terms of functional classification, whereas the English RA corpus involved more variedfunctional categories of lexical bundles. The findings provide an understanding of phraseological combinations in Englishand Indonesian scientific writing, characterizing disciplinary discourse as well as native and non-native English speakers’rhetorical style, and have pedagogical implications for EAP practitioners.

Leveraging incidental and intentional vocabulary learning to support multilingual students’ participation in disciplinary practices and discourses

This article discusses the role of vocabulary learning in supporting multilingual students’ participation in disciplinary practices and discourses in K–12 content‐area classrooms. First, the authors discuss the strengths and limitations of incidental and intentional vocabulary learning. They then propose a new approach to vocabulary instruction in particular and disciplinary language development in general: embedded teaching. This approach has three key characteristics: (1) prioritizes students’ engagement in sensemaking in the disciplines, (2) defines the language of school as encompassing everyday as well as disciplinary discourses, and (3) leverages both incidental and intentional vocabulary learning. The article illustrates the embedded teaching approach through examples that show how it can support multilingual students’ understanding of language in the disciplines. The authors foreground the importance of paying attention to students’ evolving understanding of disciplinary concepts, supporting the expression of student agency, and developing students’ metalinguistic awareness.

Renewal out of the spirit of the own tradition? On continuity and change of nation-specific patterns of the cognitive and social organisation of educational studies

The institutionalisation of Education as an academic field of study just as of the social sciences more generally has occurred/taken place, since the late 19th century, under the conditions of different nation-states, in the context of divergent academic institutions, and in connection with varying academic cultures. The resulting discipline formation patterns have become the subject of analyses carried through by the recent history and sociology of the sciences. Analyses of this kind have come to distinguish between the model of «comprehensive social science» (as represented, e.g., by the Durkheimian programme of sociology in France), of «formalised disciplinary discourses» (as particularly realised in German universities), and of «pragmatically specialising professions» (as observable in U.S. developments). The article takes up such models und investigates the issues of continuity and change of nation-specific patterns of the cognitive and social organisation of educational studies up to the present time, drawing mainly on citation analyses of German, French and (Anglo-)American education journals and encyclopedias.

Transmodalising pedagogy: Developing STEM disciplinary literacy for young emergent bilingual learners

ABSTRACT This paper explores how transmodalising pedagogy contributes to equitable STEM literacy education for emergent bilingual learners (EBLs). Attending to the urgent call for serving linguistically and culturally diverse learners in STEM classrooms and informed by the supporting theories and practices of transmodalising pedagogy, this paper provides a repertoire of transmodalising pedagogy to support elementary school EBLs’ STEM disciplinary content and literacy learning. Particularly, this paper shares two elementary teachers’ lessons in mathematics and science classrooms to showcase how transmodalising disciplinary literacy instruction for young EBLs can afford equitable access to STEM curriculum while engaging EBLs in disciplinary discourse practices.

On Family, Fieldwork, and Liquid Gold

ABSTRACT In this essay, I story my discovery of breastmilk markets and my subsequent fieldwork and research program in the milk banking industry. I discuss how my experience growing up as the oldest of six children and daughter of a Labor and Delivery nurse foregrounded my curiosity and commitment to the organization of donor milk. I then use concrete research poetry to convey the political conditions that gave rise to this industry. In response, I reflect on the contrast between my childfree identity and the lived circumstances of milk donors/recipients by pondering the shared consequences of pronatalist and disciplinary discourses. Finally, I note the importance of community knowledge of milk banking (regardless of parental status) and offer questions to inspire further research in health communication.

Frequency and distribution of the units of general scientific (academic) lexicon as the markers of disciplinary affiliation of a discourse

This article is dedicated to a corpus-based research of functionality of the units of general scientific (academic) lexicon in various types of disciplinary discourse, the purpose of which lies in verification of a hypothesis on a special function of the academic lexicon to indicate disciplinary affiliation of the scientific text. In the era of increasing mathematization and digitalization of scientific knowledge, corpus linguistics becomes a paramount instrument of empirical research aimed at acquisition of knowledge on the language through quantitative and qualitative analysis of compilations of texts, the scope and subject of which can be set in accordance with the specific objectives of the scholar. Special role in corpus-based research is assigned to the methods of statistical analysis for effective processing of the obtained quantitative data on linguistic realias, thereby considering linguistic research equivalent to the research of exact and natural sciences by degree of verification. The article describes the fragment of comprehensive research on functionality of the general scientific lexicon, which using the statistical method of correlation analysis on the example of more than 100 general scientific words (nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs) established correlation between frequency and distribution of the units of general scientific lexicon and the type of disciplinary discourse. The scientific novelty lies in the holistic approach towards analyzing the characteristic features of distribution of the frequency of general scientific lexical units in 8 types of disciplinary discourse, as well as in in application of the methods of descriptive and mathematical statistics that demonstrate that academic lexicon same as terminological lexicon may serve as marker of disciplinary affiliation of the discourse.

Exploratory Interactive Explaining (EXINTEX): Constructing Disciplinary Knowledge in Two Multilingual University Settings

Abstract The rise of English-medium education has led to considerable academic interest in communicative practices in multilingual university settings. However, there is still little research into disciplinary knowledge construction in higher education contexts where English is the academic lingua franca. To address this gap, we embrace the central role of explaining in education by proposing Exploratory Interactive Explaining (EXINTEX) as an analytical tool, which identifies the elements of explanatory episodes in the joint development of disciplinary knowledge. We then apply this tool at the micro-level of interaction to two comparable contexts differentiated primarily by the presence or absence of a teacher. Our findings confirm the relevance and high level of educational success of EXINTEX episodes in both quantitative and qualitative terms. They further reveal the dynamic interplay of epistemic authority and engagement in the learning process. Additionally, they show how research into educational disciplinary discourse and English as a lingua franca in academic settings can complement and supplement each other.

Teachers’ beliefs and practices with respect to translanguaging university mathematics in Iraq

The English as a medium of instruction (EMI) policy does not seriously consider teachers’ beliefs on the choice of English for their academic practices, objectives, and challenges in Iraqi universities. However, disciplinary discourses have become more translingual in academic settings across Iraq. This study investigated teachers’ beliefs around translanguaging (English and Arabic) university mathematics and how it can be enacted in their pedagogic practices within their naturalistic sites. The data comprised interviews, classroom observations, and documentary analysis of Google Classroom-based teaching and assessment materials. Following the thematic analysis, English was not identified as the only hub around which mathematics revolves in theory and practice, but rather mathematics discourses are more translanguaged and multi-semioticised as part of the individuals’ local meaning-making and knowledge-construction practices. The study also addresses beliefs against adopting an unspecific top-down EMI policy along with several recommendations for better EMI provision in the future.

메타비평, 해체, 트랜스텍스트성으로 읽는 노예법

This essay reads the slavery laws in the Covenant and Deuteronomic Codes with key words such as polyphony, construction, metacriticism, deconstruction, and transtextuality. We first observed inconsistencies within the slavery law in Exodus 21. The beginning part of the law talks about the possibility of liberation of male slaves and guarantees rights of the slave-wife taken before another one, presenting the slave owner as a generous man. But then the law regulating the owners’ violence against women and men slaves assumes that all slaves are exposed to excessive and regular violence. For us, the coexistence of the slave laws of the Covenant and Deuteronomic Codes in the Pentateuch with more differences than similarities powerfully demonstrates the polyphony of the Bible.<BR> We argued that the slavery laws as disciplinary discourses enculturate values and construct identities. The slavery laws construct class and hierarchy, serving the interest of the rich male slave owner. While the owner is constructed as both generous and violent, the male slave is constructed as one with low self-esteem, having to say that he loves his owner as he chooses to become a permanent slave. The female slave is constructed as lower than the male slave and is sexualized, being subject to her owner sexually.<BR> We observed metacritically how western scholars’ interpretations and commentaries come from their male, middle class, and western backgrounds, and how they remain in the ideologies of the text. Above all, they tend to identify themselves with the slave owner, the subject of the law. Their male-centered interpretations construct the abandoned slave-wife as the body with which they are entitled to sexual pleasure.<BR> We read the slavery laws transtextually with the Hagar-Abraham and the Jacob-Laban narratives. Abraham is described as stingy and passive, unable to protect his slave-wife Hagar and his child Ishmael. Laban is described as a (slave) owner who would not send off his (slave-like) Jacob with gifts. The characterizations of these male figures undermine the male slave-owner who was constructed as both generous and powerful by the slavery laws. Thus we argued that the narratives deconstruct and relativize the laws.