a cross-disciplinary approach to genre

analysisintegrating concepts from linguistics, literary theory, film theory and rhetoric studies

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Susan GerofskyDept. of Curriculum and PedagogyUniversity of British Columbia<susan.gerofsky@ubc.ca>

Cross-disciplinarity & genre

Genre analysis has been developed across the disciplines of linguistics, literary theory, rhetoric studies, film studies, folklore studies...and now education

I will present an argument for the explanatory power of an interdisciplinary take on genre for (mathematics) education, which goes beyond a systemic-functional linguistics approach.

work on genre in mathematics education

Pimm, Beatty & Moss (2007) on the written genre in an online mathematical forum •Morgan (1998) on genre in British school mathematical investigations•Nardi & Iannone (2005) on genre in undergraduate mathematics•Bouwer (2008) on mathematics teacher talk•Braathe (2008) on genre in student teachers’ mathematics. •Solomon & O’Neill (1998): Marks & Mousely (1990); Ernest (1999) •Artemeva, Fox & Paré on ‘chalk and talk’ undergraduate mathematics lectures as genre•Gerofsky: genre studies of word problems, calculus lectures, the archaeology of graphing, worksheets

limitations of sfl approach to genre

The SFL approach takes into account conscious communicative intentionality, while much of what characterizes genre is unconscious -- for example, see Jamieson’s (1978) work on the history of genre and unintended effects.

This style of analysis tends to conflate purpose or function, register and genre and thus can miss much of what is potentially interesting about a genre -- its history, echoes and cultural effects, its poetics.

avoiding a too-linear, structuralist approach:

It is important to acknowledge that not everything of importance can be captured through oppositions or minimal pairs

‘the tyranny of the grid’, of taxonomies, and of solely linear and intentional approaches make it impossible to see emergent, complex, fractal and complicit patterns in cultural phenomena

a cross-disciplinary genre analysis in education offers:

an approach to ontological questions about cultural forms: asking the “what” questions: what is this form or genre, and what are its history and resonances?

Educators can then know better what intentions can and cannot (constitutionally) be enacted through use of a genre in pedagogy...

...and can learn what intended and unintended messages are carried by the generic medium in itself.

Genre as cultural object: useful cross-disciplinary concepts

Bakhtin (literary theory): genre characterized by addressivity and chronotope.

Tudor (film theory): how to break through the ‘empiricist dilemma’ in identifying genres?

Sobchak (film theory): genre/ generic ‘utterances’ made, not in imitation of life, but of other items within the genre.

Schatz (film theory): genre a tacit contract between [film] makers’ intentions and audiences’ cultural expectations.

Genre as cultural object (continued)

Neale (film theory): genres as relational process incorporating both repetition (recognition) and innovation (surprise).

Altman (film theory): consideration of genre history shows genres are not fixed Platonic categories.

Jamieson (rhetoric): genre history/ archaeology shows that the intentions of antecedent genres continues to be carried (unwittingly) by new genres.

(continued...)

Miller (rhetoric): “What we learn when we learn a genre is not just a pattern of forms or even a method of achieving our own ends. We learn, more importantly, what ends we may have.”

Colie (rhetoric): Genres as schemata that shape our always-mediated expectations of the world.

(and more...)

Todorov (literary theory): “Genres are precisely those relay-points by which the work assumes a relation with the universe of literature.”

Frye (literary theory): Genres useful “not so much to classify as to clarify…bringing out a large number of relationships that would not be noticed otherwise.”

So we can say that genres:

are universally recognized within a culture (though often ignored);

are nearly all-pervasive and self-referencing,

carry historically encoded intentions and meanings a speaker/writer/maker is generally unaware of

serve to format both the means and the intentions of a society.

genres are not only linguistic, but often multimodal

For example:

•online genres (blogs, wikis, memes like LOLCATS)

•genres in film, television and other media

•educational genres (lectures, investigations, graphs, worksheets)

educators need a broader cross-disciplinary approach to genre:

to go beyond static taxonomies to an understanding of dynamic, emergent cultural phenomena

to recognize unconscious patterning as well as conscious intentionality in genre

to be attentive to historical and intergeneric resonances/ echoes

to acknowledge a blurring of the distinction between ‘performer’ and ‘audience’, as audiences are complicit in the development of genres