summercomfort (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
summercomfort) wrote2006-08-09 10:49 pm
summercomfort) wrote2006-08-09 10:49 pm
I miss academic writing
I miss constructing arguments, I miss the a-ha! moments, I miss the excitement of finding your point provable, the despair of losing it again, and the joy of making everything fit, one by one. Rigor!
Education does not seem to be a discipline. Everything's hypenated. There's education-anthropologists, education-linguists, education-psychologists, education-historians. Each academic discipline has its own immutable traits. You read a paper and you can say "this is a history paper" or "this is a political science paper". History papers is about periodization, about using primary sources to challenge historiography. There is always a progression, and multiple causes. But what seems to make a paper an education paper is that it has the words "education", "teacher" or "child" in it. Race in schools (sociology), Critical thinking in schools (psychology), cultural interaction in schools (anthropology), group vs. individual in schools (philosophy).... where is the education in schools?
Education does not seem to be a discipline. Everything's hypenated. There's education-anthropologists, education-linguists, education-psychologists, education-historians. Each academic discipline has its own immutable traits. You read a paper and you can say "this is a history paper" or "this is a political science paper". History papers is about periodization, about using primary sources to challenge historiography. There is always a progression, and multiple causes. But what seems to make a paper an education paper is that it has the words "education", "teacher" or "child" in it. Race in schools (sociology), Critical thinking in schools (psychology), cultural interaction in schools (anthropology), group vs. individual in schools (philosophy).... where is the education in schools?
no subject
please impart your paper-writing schools upon me. please.
no subject
Example 1: History is a good example of a discipline; the term "history" is a relatively small blanket. History has different subfields -- history-sociology, which is studying the contribution of social groups to the unfolding of the historical narrative; history-psychology, which is either studying the motivations of Abraham Lincoln or charting the future of the entire universe, depending on whom you ask; history-epistemology, which is challenging conventional historiography; and so on -- but the subfields are very closely allied, and a historiographer can productively elaborate with a historical sociologist.
Example 2: Linguistics is a mediocre example of a discipline; "linguistics" is a broad and rather makeshift blanket. You can have phonetics (physics), neurolinguistics (neurology), syntax and semantics (both psychology, but different kinds), phonology (psychology and physics), language acquisition (neurology, psychology, and sociology), historical linguistics (history and sociology), Chomskian linguistics (psychology and the suspension of disbelief), computational linguistics (any of the above depending on what you do with it), and so on. Some of these subfields -- really, fields in themselves, often with their own subfields -- are too far afield from each other to make linguistics a really coherent discipline. If Henry Higgins and Ferdinand de Saussure were locked in a room together, there would be an awkward silence, as neither has anything to say to the other.
Yet even though linguistics is not a very good example of a discipline, I generally know when I am reading a linguistics paper. Why? Because I am learning about language. This paper is about how meaning gets attached to strings of sounds. Aha! This is a paper on psycholinguistic semiotics, and I am learning the theoretical underpinnings of how language can be used to communicate! I am (by bits and pieces) Learning Linguistics!
Education too is a set of loosely allied fields. Just as different linguists make different areas of linguistics their concern, so too do eduactionologists (?!?) worry about different parts of education. Maybe I care deeply about pedagogy, while you want to make sure kids are properly socialized in educational settings. We might have a few words to share with each other, but we are studying basically dissimilar things. Nevertheless, if I read a paper you write, I will understand that I am Learning Education, as you will if you read a paper of mine.
Can our respective blankets be tightened? Can someone show that the aspects of linguistics or education are more closely related than we thought? I think the answer is yes for linguistics; what about education?