Academic Resources as Anchor for an Instructor's Logic

• In Event: 61.046 - Uncovering Intellectual and Conceptual Underpinnings of Innovative and Nontraditional Contexts for Learning Across Disciplines

Abstract

Objectives or purposes

In higher education, there is an increasing demand for instructors to design courses for
21st century students. In designing these courses, instructors have to take into
consideration their area of expertise, and how to make it visible to students. Missing
from this dialogue is how to research the agency of instructors, who are undertaking
new ways of engaging students. The questions guiding this study was: How and in what ways did the instructor introduce students to and engage students in academic literacies (Lea & Street 1998) required to study the history of opera as a musicologist? Guided by an interactional ethnography perspective (Green, Dixon & Zaharlick 2003), this study examines the work of a musicologist in designing a non-majors’ history of opera course.

Perspective(s) or theoretical framework
Theories of academic literacies as socially construct and situated in particular disciplinary practices (Lea & Street, 1998) grounded the exploration of how social practices were constructed in and through discourse and how these practices signaled to students particular ways of reading, and writing of texts (oral and written) as well as participating in class discussions. A statement in the first moments of the first day, this is not a survey course, indicated that students were facing a challenge—how to understand what it meant to study opera.

Methods, techniques, or modes of inquiry
Interactional ethnographers seek to understand and analyze how the individual parts are related to the broader whole in the community they are studying (Green, Dixon, Zaharlick 2003). As a result, the researcher enters the field with initial questions guiding their lens of inquiry in order to analyze how the individual parts relate to the broader whole. I seek to uncover the processes and practices of what the instructor proposes as a form of literacy in relation to the discipline of musicology.

Data sources, evidence, objects, or materials
The records collected included video records and field notes of daily class sessions, published materials and resources made available to students, interviews of the instructor at different points in the participant observation process, and field notes taken in a graduate student run conference as a reviewer of proposal and chair of a session. The instructor provided an introductory chapter her new book.

Results and/or substantiated conclusions or warrants for arguments/point of view
Triangulation of various texts led to the identification of what counted as musicology, and the ways of thinking in the discipline was constructed within the course. The introductory book chapter made visible the use of metaphors (Lakoff & Johnson 1980) that led to the identification of elements central to understanding what counted as the history of opera

Scientific or scholarly significance of the study or work
This paper contributes to work on new literacy studies by uncovering ecological and cultural processes of literacy that defined literacy not a predefined phenomena in this
course but as locally developed (Street 1997). The contrastive analysis (triangulation) of texts in this study made visible how the instructor constructed what counts as musicology.

Authors

• Azure Janee Stewart, University of California - Santa Barbara

• Stephanie Tcharos, University of California - Santa Barbara