from Issue 12; Summer 1990; The Rhetorics of Talk; Editors: Donna Marsh and Kelly Hawkins
Talk Shows as Practice in the Studio:
Researching the Chaos
Kate Sommer
Why would you use a talk show in a writing studio?
The best way for me to explain why I would use a talk show in a studio, especially a 205 studio, is to trace what began as an exhausting struggle against students' tendency to reduce and deflate the idea of discourse community, a struggle which then opened up into a mass of complexities well beyond what I'd imagined. In attempting to fully explore how discourse moves within a community and defines community, my students and I stumbled into a mire of complexities. In this article and in the conversations woven into this article, I again attempt to explore the complexities that emerged in studio, to reveal and work through some, and to uncover the nature of attempting an exploration of discourse community through both students' talk and teachers' talk.
James Porter, who is commonly cited on this topic, defines a discourse community as:
...a group of individuals bound by a common interest who communicate through approved channels and whose discourse is regulated ...shares assumptions about what objects are appropriate for examination and discussion, what operating functions are performed on those objects, what constitutes "evidence" and "validity," and what formal conventions are followed...(38-39)
Porter's definition makes the idea of discourse community manageable, and in doing so, makes it possible to envision discourse communities as discretely categorized, monolithic entities, as if we could at any point in time define them or circumscribe them or demonstrate the boundaries around them. It's not so much that Porter is wrong, but that he is limited and potentially limiting, and I wanted to use Porter not to define and limit, but to generate and explode ideas of discourse communities. The complexities that Porter seems to suggest are too easy to gloss over until they are experienced.
Students need to complicate Porter's definition themselves. Sending them out to explore discourse communities in the library and through interviews complicates both the notion of exploring a discourse community and the idea of the community itself, but these explorations still fall short in some way. Students may explore one community and think they have somehow found the point of entry (i.e., through reading sociological journals one can determine the nature of the discourse community of sociologists). Students may also, mistaking the goals of the task, confidently and categorically define what this or that community is, does, says, and how. The task of working the messiness of their discoveries into individual papers necessitates a deflation and reduction of the complexities of discovery. They may not see the intense interdependency of communities upon each other, the dynamic relationships within, on the boundaries, and between these communities, the dynamic quality of discourse itself. In order to demonstrate the dynamic quality of interrelationships, students really need to hear and speak the chaos of the idea "discourse community." And what is more chaotic or more energetic than conversation?
But why a talk show? Initially, I thought this would make the assignment more accessible to students, give them a forum for sharing their discoveries, give them an opportunity to make connections between their discoveries and others' discoveries, force them to see the difficulty of joining a discourse (academic or otherwise), and I had some vague idea of "talking about the idea of a talk show." I knew it was ambitious, but I didn't know what I had gotten into until we were well into the project.
Students were asked to generate a topic for a talk show and then to choose roles as experts. Two students acted as hosts or mediators. Some students were audience members. Groups of students researched the communities through "reading" indices, journals, and articles. A heavy emphasis was placed on recognizing where communities overlapped with or otherwise related to other communities. Using Porter's questions at the end of his article and using additional questions, students attempted to describe communities and to gather enough research to be able to speak from community perspectives. The three weeks of critical research culminated in a talk show, which was followed by a "play-back" phase and two weeks for the collaborative writing of papers. The papers attempted to describe the communities, but also attempted to talk about the difficulty of doing so, and to reflect upon the talk show as form, and our talk show specifically.
Students think they "know" talk shows. And they do, in some way, and are comfortable with the forum. They were asked, however, to "play a part" (as my students put it) with which they were very uncomfortable. They constructed a conversation out of their research about the community, through texts that were not their own, with voices that were foreign and yet more familiar to each of the researchers than to any of the other participants. They were un-expert-experts speaking unfamiliar, overtly constructed roles on a seemingly "natural" and familiar stage. This tension between the natural and unnatural mimics in some ways the tension all writers experience when attempting to voice an idea in an already ongoing discourse, a tension especially felt by student writers. Initially, then, students knew what they wanted to say, had researched piles of information, but had not anticipated how uncomfortable they would be using the language of the discourse communities they had explored. Initially, they perceived the work of digging into discourse communities as the real work and ignored the forum of the talk show and the nature of discourse itself. Not anticipating the importance that the latter would gain, and attending to the ways in which their projects were coming along, I saw the talk show merely as a pivotal point in the unit: the end point of the library textual research and the beginning point of constructing ideas of a particular discourse community and the idea of discourse community more generally.
When preparing to take on their roles in the talk show, students became mired in the intricacies of their discourse communities, saying things like, "Well, I thought I knew where my discourse community was [in the library, figuratively and literally], but it's getting more and more difficult, and I didn't know doctors would be cited in a criminology journal and..." I had anticipated their difficulties defining or circumscribing a community, but then the talk show itself emerged in an insistent way as an object of analysis in the days just preceding the show. While constructing the "talk show" arrangement, we began to see how each component of the format and physical arrangement of the stage affected the conversation itself. Students began to squirm at the thought of speaking like a criminology professor and maintaining credibility, not just presenting the information as a twenty-year old college student might. The "natural" quality of the familiar forum became less natural; the foreign quality of academic discourse became less a matter of deciphering monologic "high falutin' language" and more a matter of gaining a comprehensive sense of connections, boundaries, powers, and dependencies. The boundaries which seem to separate disciplinary communities blurred rapidly in pre-talk show discussions. All of these emerging complexities served to increase the tensions of the studio because we not only had to construct, talk about and listen to the content of the discourse but we also had to attend to the denaturalized nature of discourse itself.
During the "play-back" phase (which was literally a studio conversation centered on the play-back of the videotape I'd made of the talk show) we gained some space from the action, some space for reflection upon what was done, said, or absent, some space to theorize about the generative points in the conversation between contrastive rhetorics of different fields, the commonalities of approach, and the boundaries that speakers secured and defended in the conversation. For instance, we talked about what students wore and why, how they used "facts" or statistics and how those went unquestioned. We talked about a student responding to an audience member, "You're asking the wrong people that question. Wait for the next panel; they're interested in the drug as a problem, not the people who use drugs." We also talked about the fact that the mediators arranged all the military and police in one panel and the social workers and educators in another, separating the people who might have, through such extremely different approaches, generated a lot of talk about how the "talk show issues" were talked about. Foregrounded in the studio discussion of the show was the seemingly unconscious (natural) decision to separate the speakers and the fact that speakers were constrained in what they could say by the mediators' questions, the audience's interest and reaction, and other speakers' ongoing discussion.
Students also described the palpable fear they feel "when they must dare to speak it [the university's language], or to carry off the bluff since speaking and writing will most certainly be required long before the skill is 'learned'" (my italics; Bartholomae 5). The talk show and research not only complicated their reading of Bartholomae, as I had anticipated, but it also brought into play the differences between spoken and written texts: the immediacy of conversation with the presence of listeners who can rebut or reassure versus the scripting of a paper without an immediate audience, the restrictions and freedoms of each, and what flies in conversation that would be caught in a text. I found very interesting their insistence upon having this tape made available for second and third viewings because "with a real text, you can go back and look again, and I can't just look at this once and know how to see it." It's a nice byproduct: revision and rereading become valued activities as the dynamic, spinning quality of talk becomes apparent.
The play-back phase is essential; without it, the force and the complications of conversation would be nearly lost. This force is gained or regained through collective, generative recall in conversation and then through still more reflection in composing papers. Students begin to understand conversation itself as discovery, as a recursive part of the writing process. The difficulties they encountered in trying to develop into the roles determined by already existing discourse (both those roles researched in the library and roles as they emerged in the conversation of the talk show) complicated even the claims they could make in their papers about how far into the discourse communities they were able to venture, how complicated the immersion must really be.
Interestingly enough, in this play-back phase and again in their papers, students identified their roles as "performances" and the conversation as "not a real conversation." In "real conversation" students have well-defined, familiar roles (daughter, mate, college student, middle-class individual) that allow them to "say what they want without worrying about every word." I was a little disconcerted to hear these objections to "playing a role." In studio I didn't capture what I later captured in conversation with another teacher: this objection to "playing a role" is a key into realizing and denaturalizing the "roles" we play in "real" conversation.
In thinking through my project (both before and after), I listened closely to many voices, but one in particular. Dorothy Heathcote (in Dorothy Heathcote: Collected Writings on Education and Drama) discusses methods and theories for what she calls "educational drama," some of which are applicable to the drama which occurred before, during, and after the "talk show."
No one teaches a teacher how to teach. Teachers are made in the classroom during confrontations with their classesŠ I define educational drama as being anything which involves people in active role-taking situations in which attitudes, not characters, are the chief concern, lived at life-rate (that is discovery at this moment, not memory-based)...aims at surprise and discovery for the participants rather than for any onlookers (61-62) Š In educational drama, it is the awareness of the class creating the play that we want to stimulate. In order to do this we create an opportunity for a collection of attitudes to relate together in problem-solving. All the attitudes available in the group can provide the spectrum for solving the problem, thus as a result there is opportunity for a 'widening' sphere of attitudes to be experienced, a widening appreciation of scales and numbers of problems and therefore a greater number of relationships and associations with the experiences of others to be brought into orbit and made available to the group. This is not a teaching process in the conventional sense. It comes about by a series of confrontations between persons and their ideas. The game provides the safe framework for such confrontations (71).
Reflecting upon Heathcote's vision of drama in the classroom, I see that the "talk show" was a "series of confrontations between persons and their ideas" that taught students to look for moments of "surprise and discovery" (what I call generative moments of contrastive rhetorics) in conversation, but the project itself and studio talk viewed comprehensively taught students an awareness of "creating"--at "lived-rate"-- conversation and rhetoric, a head-spinning awareness. I also see that the familiar talk show pressed against an exploration of disciplinary communities (the familiar confronting the unfamiliar) generated many complications that could serve ultimately to help complicate students' understanding of their own multiple voices.
Although it's daunting, I don't feel less successful for having stepped (in studio, in conversations with others, in this article) deeper into the mire of complications, for having left untouched some of those complications. I realize that I may never work through these emerging complexities in any fifteen-week course and that I may never work them out in conversation surrounding the course--which, quite frankly, is why I'm convinced it's worth doing at all.
Works Cited
Bartholomae, David. "Inventing the University." Journal of Basic Writing Volume 5.2 (1986): 4-23.
Heathcote, Dorothy. Dorothy Heathcote: Collected Writings on Education and Drama. Eds. Liz Johnson and Cecily O'Neill. Portsmouth: Heinemann Educational Books, 1988.
Porter, James E. "Intertextuality and the Discourse Community." Rhetoric Review 5 (1986): 34-47.
