Any response to Tannen’s article cannot be complete without some idea of Tannen’s purpose in writing the article. As it is, the article is activist in nature, rather than militant. Tannen does not so much seek to stridently prove a thesis than to raise awareness of how current teaching methods disadvantage women, as well as to suggest an alternative model. This is not to say that argumentation does not exist in Tannen’s writing, but that it is far more subtle, often implied. Part of this indirect approach is present in her writing style. The article is informal, even deeply personal, written almost like a first-person narrative. Her use of a case study from her personal experience (anecdotal), her relating of her conversations on the topic with her colleagues makes the article highly accessible, and easy to read. Given the (often) highly personal nature of teaching methods to teachers, Tannen’s friendly prose serves a second purpose in slipping past the automatic defensive instinct in a way that an aloof and critical scholarly essay would not. Criticism of the status quo in education is implied, not explicit, and coupled with her personal anecdotes, allows her to take the position of a fellow educator as well as a scholar, allowing readers (educators, presumably) to relate much better to her article.
On those grounds then, I must necessarily conclude that Tannen’s conscious choice of writing style has been rather astute, given her intended purpose. However, some other choices, I feel, are a little more dubious. As part of this decision to write in an informal manner, Tannen references research only lightly. While she mentions the work of sociologists and anthropologists (Lever, Goodwin, and Eder), their findings are summarised, in order to form the foundation of evidence her fundamental essentialist premise depends on. Their research only supports her arguments (minimally), in an attempt to add academic rigour to the article as well as to clearly frame it in view of the larger academic discourse on gender and (mis)communication. Personally, this strategy seems vaguely discordant to me, if only because Tannen’s case study (and the basis on which she formulates her analysis on the flaws of the current education system, with regard to females), deals primarily with her graduate class. Lever, Goodwin, and Eder, on the other hand, have been cited as dealing primarily with communication in children. While it may be considered fair to extrapolate research done on children to include behaviour in adults, to me, this is still too big a leap of logic, and an assumption better avoided, since it is this research which grants Tannen’s article a veneer of academic depth. Consequently, it is all the more essential for research to be appropriately used.
I also find Tannen’s premise that the conversational styles (and thus effective learning styles) of men and women differ, faces a problem of multi-causality. Given, as mentioned above, that she only uses one appropriate case study, while it clearly fleshes out the concepts she presents, it cannot sufficiently prove that gender is the major influencing cause behind the different reactions each student had towards her teaching style. Issues of ethnicity and culture are barely deflected by an example of similar cultural rituals worldwide, which attempts to suggest that the common factor must be gender instead of ethnicity. However, because the sample size is so small (there are about twenty students, she mentions, in her graduate class), trends generalised from the class tend to skew perceptions. While the three Asian men should not normally be significant, their number takes on significance because of the small size of the group, although they could be outliers. To add to the confusion, she notes differing social contexts causes the learning behaviour of her students to change. Given this observation, I suggest that perhaps using her graduate class as a case study was not even appropriate in the first place. If we are to accept her arguments at face value, then we necessarily run into a slight discrepancy. If social context alters behaviour, then spending years in a male-oriented education system, and various cultural contexts should necessarily alter and train various types of behaviour into her students, the results of which comprise her findings. While tabula rasa is impossible to ask for in the social sciences, it may even be more to her benefit to study the behaviour of younger children.
The most ironic, perhaps, is that Tannen’s article reflects what seems to be a more feminine style (as mentioned in her own article.) She skillfully indicates weaknesses in the current state of the education system, and sugests personal anecdotes to illustrate what she means, and offers an alternate model. By sacrificing depth for a more welcoming style, she limits her role in the academic discourse on gender and communication. However, while this renders her article less academically rigorous and less incisive, given her purpose is to raise awareness of the different education needs of women, and to incite questioning of the education status quo, the trade-off between palatibility and incisive analysis seems well worth it.
ETA: Thanks, Kel, for the concrit! :D
No comments:
Post a Comment