Paper Summary
Share...

Direct link:

I'm Going to Turn You Into a Fan!" Learning to Love One Direction

Fri, April 5, 12:00 to 2:00pm, Metro Toronto Convention Centre, Floor: 800 Level, Room 809

Abstract

What does it mean to learn in an ethnographic interview? Conventional definitions focus on learning decoupled with teaching, concentrating on how the researcher will “discover new information and expand existing understanding” (Schensul, Schensul & LeCompte, 1999, p. 125). However, Stevens (2010) argues that learning must be “a mutual concern of participants” (p. 84). Thus, if we consider learning as a members’ phenomenon, we must consider both participants’ intentions during ethnographic interviewing. The purpose of this case is exploring the ways that learning in an ethnographic interview is co-constructed between participants. This paper is framed by definitions of learning as a member’s phenomenon (Stevens, 2010) as well as legitimate peripheral participation (Lave & Wenger, 1999). Resisting the idea that learning happens in just “one direction,” I examine the ways members negotiate participation frameworks (Goffman, 1981; Goodwin, 1981; Boblett, 2012) and figured worlds (Holland, Lachiotte, Skinner & Cain, 1998), which inherently frames their interactions and shapes what it means to learn.
My data source is a one-hour ethnographic interview at an urban after-school teen tutoring center between Olivia, an 11th grade young adult, and myself, the researcher. The purpose of the interview was to explore Olivia’s experiences with the boy band One Direction as part of a larger project studying how young adults make sense of content they love. Both video and screencapture data were recorded using Icecream Screen Recorder and annotated through the video annotation software InqScribe. I use the method of multimodal interaction analysis (Goodwin, 2010) to identify and investigate moments of endogenous learning (Stevens, 2010).
Results show how the interaction begins with two conceptions of the activity at hand, with participants drawing upon the conflicting interactional frameworks of an ethnographic interview and of introducing a newcomer to a fandom community of practice. Because these two frameworks have different presuppositions about participant roles, the members must build on conversational and interactional substrates (Goodwin, 2017) to navigate toward a co-constructed understanding of the activity. Despite the researcher’s attempt to frame the interaction as an exploration of the participant’s experiences with One Direction (“Let’s look at the One Direction stuff that you love”; “I want the songs that you like the best”), the young adult’s concerns that the researcher learn about the band and become a fan leads the researcher to instead orient toward Olivia’s positioning as a fandom oldtimer initiating a newcomer (“I’m going to turn you into a fan”).
The significance of this work lies in its exploration of how identity can become a joint concern in learning and its expansion of factors analysts might consider when examining learning as a members’ phenomenon. The learning taking place over the course of the ethnographic research was tied together by participants’ mutual interest in the researcher’s emerging identity as a fan of One Direction. This was not only established and laminated through displays of co-constructed knowledge and relational positioning but also through contextually appropriate emotional responses and embodied reactions to the collectively edited (Ma & Munter, 2014) environment.

Author