Re: Gender and Power Issues in Conferences

[snewmann@sfasu.edu]

Eric, the book you mention looks interesting.  Are you writing a review of
it for the publisher?

stephen


On Thu, 22 Oct 1998, Eric Hobson wrote:

> Several weeks ago someone posted a request for information about issues
> of gender and power, etc. in wc conferences. There really wasn't much of
> a response, partially, I know, because in doing a thorough search of the
> community's literature (thanks to the the fabulous annotated bib. that
> Chris Murphy, Joe Law and Steve Sherwood published) we really have not
> done much with the topic beyond the most general and generic discussion
> that the issue is real.
> 
> Get to the point, Eric....
> 
> Anyway, I've been reading a new book __Between Talk and Teaching:
> Reconsidering the Writing Conference__ by Laurel Johnson Black (Utah
> State UP, 1998). While it does NOT work with WC conferences/tutorial, I
> am convinced that much of what she presents applies. What separates this
> book from others about conferences is this: Black uses the analysis
> tools of discourse analysis and sociolinguistics to look carefully at
> the interactions taking place in teacher/student conferences at the
> level of the talk taking place. 
> 
> Her intro. chapter is though provoking. The gist of her into/rationale
> for the book is this: conference talk and conversation are NOT the same
> thing, although the discipline almost always wishes to present
> confereces as conversations. Noting this difference is critical, because
> "if one participant thinks a conference is a conversation and the other
> thinks it is teaching, then there is going to be confusion: who speaks
> when? What topics are appropriate? What role should each play?"
> 
> The TOC is a follows:
> Ch.1 Conversation, Teaching, and Points in Between
> Ch 2 Power and Talk
> Ch.3 Gender and Conferencing
> Ch 4 Cross-cultural conferencing
> Ch 5 The Affective Dimension
> Ch 6 Possibilities
> 
> Folks, this one is worth a close read. It would be a very useful book to
> use in a tutor-training course, a discourse analysis course, a grad.
> composition course, a reading group.
> 
> Eric Hobson
> 
>