Torrington: Method, Methodology, and Context (oh my!)

I find Gee's discussion of the relations among discourse, meaning, and culture--what he describes as "the social and cultural nature of meaning and communication . . . with due deference to individual human agency and responsibility" (87)--particularly useful in considering the frames with which we approach our research. For my own research on learning and the uptake of literate activities, his distinction between "acquisition" and "learning" (in Chapter 9, which we weren't assigned) in light of this network of relations is especially compelling. He writes,

Acquisition is a process of acquiring something (usually subconsciously) by exposure to models, a process of trial and error, and practice in social groups, without a process of formal teaching. It happens in natural settings that are meaningful and functional in the sense that acquirers know that they need to acquire the thing they are exposed to in order to function and they in fact want to so function.  This is how people come to control their first language.

Learning is a process that involves conscious knowledge gained through teaching (through not necessarily from someone officially designated a teacher) or through certain life-experiences that trigger conscious reflection.  This teaching or reflection involves explanation and analysis, that is, breaking down the thing to be learned into its analytic parts.  It inherently involves attaining, along with the matter being taught, some degree of meta-knowledge about the matter. (167)

Differentiating between "acquisition by meaningful and functional exposure" and "attaining knowledge that triggers conscious reflection" while accounting for individual agency, responsibility, and the social/culturally mediated nature of meaning, however, becomes fairly complex for the researcher- or teacher-in-practice--that is, it is difficult to identify, code, and quantify (in the case of the researcher) or assess (in the case of the teacher) moments of learning when those moments are ever-contingent on the learner's agency coupled with the socially/culturally constituted nature of what it means to learn in a given situation. As such, my question in light of this week's readings is: as researchers, how can we use theory, methodology, and method to investigate a research question embedded in such complicated systems? In other words, how can we use our own theoretical attachments to help mitigate the complexity of doing research?

One idea related to the musings above is the notion of context that Lillis takes up. Lately, I've been considering the limiting ways that scholars not only bandy about this term, but also the narrow range of connotations implicated when a scholar invokes the context aspect of her research; what I find especially troubling about the term context in linguistics, literacy, and writing studies is that too often it stands as a black-boxed term (in the Latourian sense). Though Lillis addresses this issue, expressing frustration with methodologies and methods that lead to "truncated engagement[s] with 'context'" (355), and advocating "[e]mic perspectives, [which] are central to understanding what is relevant to participants and thus core to understanding what is significant from the very large and empirically unwieldy notion of 'context'" (360), I argue that her proposed alternative--a move to consider not the context of research but the contextualization of communicative acts, grounded in an understanding of text and context as enmeshed--may still fail to illuminate the ways that what is relevant to individual participants may obscure socially/culturally constituted meanings that emerge from the interactions of those individual participants with the tools of language and ecologies of communication at hand.