a cross-disciplinary approach to genre analysis

1. a cross-disciplinary approach to genre analysis • integrating concepts from linguistics, literary theory, film theory and rhetoric studies • S

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

3. 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.

4. 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

5. 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.

6. 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

7. 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.

8. 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.

9. 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.

10. (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.

11. (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.”

12. 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.

13. 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)

14. 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