Writing and Critical Thinking: Narrative in Everyday Life
About
Topical Introduction
Everyday narratives are those informal stories we tell each other about ourselves and our quotidian experiences. They may be about little things (like gossip and idle chit-chat, or what happened to you when you went to the store), or more profound things (like how you faced imminent danger or negotiated a poignant moral quandary). Such seemingly innocuous narratives reveal facets of life that we normally take for granted but which prove, on closer inspection, to have tremendous impact on who we are, our social relations, and the way we think. In this module, we will analyze everyday narratives in terms of identity politics, how they instantiate social power, and how they frame epistemological knowledge not normally associated with narrative as a mode of representation. Students will generate a corpus of genuine sociolinguistic narrative data and analyze it in an interdisciplinary framework, including sociolinguistics, psychology, anthropology, rhetoric, narrative theory, and cognitive sciences. Emphasis will be placed on three areas: the deployment of everyday narrative for identity politics; the role of everyday narrative in social organization; and the cognitive and discursive affordances and constraints of narrative in contexts not normally associated with narrative as a mode of representation/informational organization.
Rhythm of the Class
The writing you do in this class will be based on a close examination of data that you collect, together with secondary sources that you use to help you analyze that data. In general, the activities in class will consist of discussions in class about the readings, analyses of data, and examining the writing that you produce. In your writing assignments, the typical pattern will start with a low-stakes assignment to get a sense of the task, followed by a high-stakes assignment which undergoes at least one round of edits and revisions. These will in turn build up to your most substantial work, a research paper that advances an original argument about data that you (and classmates) have collected. The final assignment will be a reworking of this research paper as an opinion piece for a public audience, and you will be expected to submit it for publication to a newspaper (or other publication) of your choice. The module will be intensive, enlightening, and fun.
Learning to Write
Like all WCT modules, the overarching purpose of this module is for you to develop skills in academic writing. The main genre of writing that you learn in this module is evidence-driven academic argument; through learning this genre, you will pick up skills of analysis, argumentation, rhetorical organization, and persuasion that can be applied to writing tasks in various disciplines. Accordingly, the module emphasizes writing as a process. You will produce and revise drafts for each of the writing assignments, and thereby learn the requisite stages of the writing process: brainstorming, planning, data analysis, thesis statement formulation, initial drafting, revision after receiving criticism, and final editing. In addition, you will learn a core vocabulary for important rhetorical moves and strategies in order to be able to discuss writing, Approximately 70% of class time is devoted to teaching you how to develop questions and problems, read actively, write in an academic mode (especially argumentation), use sources according to disciplinary protocols, and use disciplinary methodologies appropriately. Through a series of sequenced assignments, you will read, respond, and question ideas generated by published writers and apply it to a data set generated by you and your classmates. This data set serves as the material about which you will formulate academic arguments and author your writing assignments.. Even as you draft your own essays, you will read and review your peers' writing. Each graded piece of writing goes through multiple drafts, and each student will engage in four formal conferences with the instructor to talk about specific aspects of your analyses, writing and argumentation.
Participation
This course is conducted seminar-style, and thus requires a high degree of participation and engagement. There is no passive learning offered here, no lectures. The class meetings are discussion-based, with a close analysis of your writing and issues germane to writing skills. In short, your participation drives the class, and one of the goals of the module is for you to develop academic habits and practices that will help propel you through your USP and NUS careers.
Assessment
Assessment
Ninety percent of the graded work in this module will be writing assignments. Another ten percent will be devoted to participation.
Here is a breakdown of the assignments, followed by a description of (and rationale for) each.
| Data Analysis | 15% |
| Précis | 5% |
| Literature Review | 15% |
| Research Paper | 40% |
| Public Commentary | 15% |
| Participation | 10% |
| Total CA | 100% |
Note on High Stakes versus Low Stakes Writing
Low-stakes writing is not graded and is not included in the module page count. Such low-stakes writing, especially when assigned early in the module, allows you to rapidly calibrate your work with the expectations of university writing standards and to recognize the areas in which you need to improve. Low-stakes writing is not an end in itself; instead, it serves as a scaffold for later high-stakes writing.
High-stakes writing is both graded and undergoes formal processes of revision through extensive commenting and conferencing.
All students are assessed individually for each weighted assignment. Group work facilitates debate and brainstorming, but no work is authored by, nor submitted on behalf of, a group.
Data Analysis 1 + 2
Data analysis 1 is low-stakes; data analysis 2 is high-stakes. Over the course of the module, you will record everyday narratives which, in aggregate, will serve as a corpus to be analyzed. Data collection is designed to be simple, but genuine. The nature (and richness) of the data collected will increase somewhat in complexity as you work towards your research papers. As part of the course, you will learn about important research issues like informed consent and protecting the rights and privacy of human subjects. The goal of these data analyses as writing assignments is for you to work with data while not yet situating your findings in the trajectory of a formal paper. You practice asserting an insight and supporting it with evidence from the data. Such analyses are intended as a scaffold for a more extended academic argument based on the data set in the research paper.
Précis 1 + 2
Precis 1 is low-stakes; precis 2 is high-stakes. These are critical accounts of course readings on which you will be able to elaborate, and which you will be able to develop into a literature review and later use as part of your research paper. These writing assignments will help you work responsibly with secondary sources. In conjunction with these assignments, you will also receive instruction in the use of library resources and proper modes of citation.
Literature Review
The literature review is high-stakes. The object is to synthesize readings to establish the context for a viable research question. This literature review will seed a more extensive one that will be part of the research paper, and will be based on précis 1 + 2 plus additional review work.
Research Paper
The research paper is high-stakes, and constitutes the culmination of the scaffolded writing assignments preceding it. The paper will be based on an analysis of collected data in conjunction with secondary sources, both those assigned in class and those which you find on your own. It will include a literature review, close analysis of data, and original academic argument based on that analysis. Each previous assignment is designed to develop skills germane to this research paper, such that together the scaffolded assignments and the research paper develop writing, analysis, and argumentation skills transferable to future academic demands that you will face in your undergraduate careers.
Cross-Genre Writing: Public Commentary
High-stakes. This writing is intended to increase transferable skills--in this case, for you to move between an academic genre and a popular one. The key to the assignment is finding an ongoing social issue emergent in popular media related to your research paper topic, and then writing a public opinion piece that you will submit for publication based on your previous analytical insights in the research paper.
Readings
Sample Readings (This changes semester to semester!)
Bruner, Jerome. ‘The Narrative Construction of Reality’. Critical Inquiry 18 (1991) pp. 1-21.
Labov, William and Joshua Waletzky. ‘Narrative Analysis’, in J. Helm (ed.) Essays on the Verbal and Visual Arts, pp. 12–44. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1967.
Schiffrin, Deborah. ‘Narrative as Self Portrait: Sociolinguistic Constructions of Identity’. Language in Society 25: (1996) pp. 167-203.
Wortham, Stanton. ‘Interactional Positioning and Narrative Self-construction’. Narrative Inquiry 10:1 (2000) pp. 157-184
Bauman, Richard. Story, Performance, and Event. Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Tannen, Deborah. ‘Waiting for the Mouse: Constructed Dialogue in Conversation’ in Tedlock, Dennis and Bruce Mannheim (ed.s) The Dialogic Emergence of CultureUniversity of Illinois Press, 1995. pp. 198-217.
Hamilton, Heidi. ‘Reported speech and survivor identity in on-line bone marrow transplantation narratives’. Journal of Sociolinguistics 2:1 (1998) pp. 53-67.
Norrick, Neal. ‘Retelling and Retold Stories’ in Conversational Narrative Storytelling in Everyday Talk. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2000 pp. 67-91
Blommaert Jan. ‘Investigating Narrative Inequality: African Asylum Seekers’ Stories in Belgium’. Discourse & Society 14:4 (2001) pp. 413-449.
Herzfeld, Michael. ‘Embarrassment as Pride: Narrative Resourcefulness and Strategies of Normativity among Cretan Animal-Thieves’. Anthropological Linguistics 30:3/4 (1988), pp. 319-344.
Wertsch, James V. ‘The Narrative Organization of Collective Memory’ Ethos 36:1 (2008), pp. 120–135
Rowe, Shawn M., James V. Wertsch and Tatyana Y. Kosyaeva. ‘Linking Little Narratives to Big Ones: Narrative and Public Memory in History Museums’ Culture & Psychology 8:1 (2002) pp. 96–112
Instructor
Instructor
A/P Peter Vail
Email: peter.vail@nus.edu.sg
I am a cultural anthropologist and sociolinguist, working mostly in Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia.
My office is in Cinnamon Learning Lobe, on the second floor, above the USP reading room, near the sofas.
My other modules:
UHB2207: Language, Cognition, and Culture
In this module we explore the connections between language, thinking, and culture by exploring case studies from different parts of the world and by examining our own linguistic practices. We focus on three main areas: codeswitching, linguistic relativity, and gesture.
UWC2102C: State Minority Relations in Mainland Southeast Asia
This is an intensive research and writing module that is only offered in summer sessions, and not every year. The class focuses on research, epistemology, and the process and entailments of producing academic knowledge in the human sciences. It includes several weeks of intensive ethnographic research in remote parts of Laos and Thailand. Highly adventurous and not for the squeamish!
USE2315: Participatory Social Development in Southeast Asia
In this module we collaborate with NGOs and peers from Chiang Mai University in Thailand to work in a research paradigm called ‘participatory action research’. In PAR you work as a student, researcher, and social activist at the same time. The module involves several weeks of intensive fieldwork in Mae Chaem district of Chiang Mai Province, Thailand, working on pressing social issues in extremely marginalized communities. Because of the intensity and extended fieldwork, it is only offered in summertime.