Papers on Language

Papers on Language


Peter Cleave








ISBN

978-1-877229-19-0


Campus Press
26 Sycamore Crescent
Palmerston North

Thanks to Micah and the team
at Warehouse Stationery
Palmerston North


Bound by New Life Bookbindings
28 Avenue Rd
Greenmeadows
Napier

Contents

Introduction
Page 5

1 What do we know about the mark on the wall?
Page 7

2 A Note on three kinds of verb
Page 25

3 A Note on teaching i and ki
Page 27

4 On teaching o and a
Page 29

5 An Ethic of Empathy
Page 35

6 Native Voice
Page 43

7 The communications marae
Page 55

8 Broadcast identity and social work
Page 63

9 Strengthening language: some more thoughts on Maori and Samoan
Page 69

10 Notes on Anna
Page 75

11 Said, heard, written, read
Page 81







Introduction

This collection of papers takes work from a variety of sources. The intention is to draw a fairly long bow.

There is some work on literacy which is nor about any language in particular. There is work on Maori grammar. And a paper on strategies for language retention. And there is recent work on literacy and oral communication in Aotearoa.

The transmission of an ethic through language and song is considered in another paper.

The Note on the two or three verb classes in Maori applies to the o an a categories and to the use of i and ki. They are short but hopefully important links which make sense, I think, of a range of questions that might come up.

There are also papers about voice and tone. There is even a paper about a song. These are offered in the hope that language might be considered in the broadest possible terms.

The first paper might be more about cognition than about language. This raises the question as to what does constitute a paper about language. The criteria I am using with regard to selection is simply whether a paper makes me think about language.

And so its all a little subjective I suppose...

Having said that the hope is that the reader thinks about language after reading this collection,

Yours,

Peter Cleave










1 What do we know about the mark on the wall? Images, rules and prior knowledge.
INTRODUCTION

How readily our thoughts swarm upon a new object, lifting it a little way, as ants carry a blade of grass so feverishly.

Virginia Woolf The Mark on the Wall (1919)


To think that we understand better now than then is the idea behind this paper. It took

form in a critique of the concept of ‘High Literacy’ as this term is used by Bereiter and

Scardamalia in 1987 and developed in subsequent papers (c.f. Bereiter and Scardamalia

1987b, Bereiter 1992). But the idea might have been discussed with reference to other

texts, other signs, other points or marks of distinction. Virginia Woolf herself and

commentary on her writing (Holst) might be another place to start and is here used as a

cross reference to the literacy commentators.


Bereiter and Scardamalia's first paper from 1987 has an explicit goal; ‘constituting’ new models of curriculum and instruction that can bring the benefits of high literacy to students who do not already come from highly literate backgrounds.

The present paper goes on to examine the premises, explicit and implicit in recent literature or literacy and cognition. In particular there is a questioning of the focus on approaching new conditions of learning and the value placed on prior knowledge which has come to be the major preoccupation. What follows is a literature review concentrating firstly on the way literacy and cognition are used by writers and then on the relationship between prior and new knowledge. The latter is seen to be problematic in several ways some of which are to do with confusion in the uses of literacy and cognition. The discussion of prior and new knowledge may lead to a reconsideration of the goals of language research and the general set of premises now current in language research.

A typology set out by Bereiter and Scardamalia (1987) is discussed. This isolates three distinct learning situations (these might be variously described as ‘learning models’ or ‘learning cultures’) and sets up a critical distinction between ‘knowledge telling’ and ‘knowledge transforming’ situations. The latter is taken to refer to ‘High Literacy’.

The way literacy is used in language research literature is then reviewed with particular emphasis on the work of Resnick and Resnick (1977). It is argued that their notion of two traditions of literature is questionable in several respects. The confusion of cognition with literacy is a major difficulty and this leads to problems that we now have in, for example separating out the meanings of ‘higher literacy’ on the one hand and ‘accelerated cognition’ on the other. Cognition seems too easily to become literacy and vice versa in the research literature.

It is not so easy to see the entry points, where literacy starts to look like cognition, or the vanishing points, where literacy becomes something else. It is argued that the models of the mind that inform the literature are in some respects inadequate and in other respects not well understood. The needs first to acquire new knowledge and then to deal with 'useless information' also bound up with our conceptions of literacy and cognition.

There is then a discussion of other recent critical reviews of the literature notably Alexander, Schallert and Hale (1991). While many terms are very well reviewed by them some, like ‘prior knowledge’, are left virtually unscathed. It is a feature of virtually all the literature that knowledge may be divided quite neatly into ‘prior’ and ‘new’ knowledge as though people know things that they remember or have experienced. Genre and schema theory, it is argued, depend on this division. The supposedly ‘liberating’ and ‘empowering’ aspects of genre and schema theory are mentioned but not discussed at length.



* * * *


Literacy n. ability to read and write. NZ Pocket Oxford Dictionary.

As research in cognition and literacy continues to mature it becomes increasingly important for those engaged in that research to have a shared basis for communicating their thinking about knowledge. Without some consistency in the usage of the terminology of knowledge, researchers run the risk of misconceiving their studies, misjudging their results and misinforming their readers.

Alexander, Shallert and Hale. Review of Educational Research Vol 61: pp 336-337, 1991.

Bereiter and Scardamalia (1987, 1987b, 1992) classify teachers as types A, B and C. Teacher A typically assigns reading selections with little preparation and then has students answer oral or workbook questions about them. Teacher A then goes through the selection with the class, asking more questions and explaining what it says for the benefit of those who have not understood it. Writing assignments are also given with little preparation. When they are handed in, Teacher A grades them on the basis of content and language and makes suggestions as to how they could be improved. Usually, however, there is no further revision of the papers.

Teacher B is careful to select and sequence reading material so its builds gradually on students’ existing knowledge. Before students read a selection, Teacher B carries out activities designed to activate relevant knowledge that students already have available. After the selection has been read, Teachers B guides discussion with questions that lead students to draw inferences from what they have read and to relate what they have read to their other knowledge. In writing, Teacher B emphasises students’ writing about what they know best. Teacher A and Teacher B are engaged in what Scardamalia and Bereiter call ‘knowledge telling’.

Teacher C’s approach can best be described as taking all the things that Teacher B does and trying to teach students to do them for themselves. This is not accomplished all at once, of course and so much of Teacher C’s behaviour resembles that of Teacher B. But Teacher C’s goal is that eventually it should not be necessary to conduct activities for activating students’ prior knowledge, to ask them questions in order to relate new knowledge to old, and so on. Students should be doing that by themselves and on their own initiative. Teacher C asks students themselves to recognise what is new and what is old information. In writing Teacher C makes use of external prompts, modelling, and peer co-operation to enable students to carry on their own Socratic dialogues, by means of which their knowledge is not only activated reconsidered and evaluated in relation to what they are trying to write. Teacher C is engaged in what Scardamalia and Bereiter call ‘knowledge transforming’.

The novelty of model C lies in its focusing of instructional effort so that what the literacy curriculum is primarily about is the deliberate transfer to students of those competencies that in other models belong to the teacher and indeed define what it is to be a good model A or model B teacher. Only model C, it is argued, has the potential to make high literacy an attainable goal for students who do not already come from environments of high literacy. The trick is to change the situation from one where students are exercising their competencies to one where they are developing and extending those competencies. Bereiter and Scardamalia argue that a normal child entering school already has the required competencies in such areas as identifying picture details, story details, supporting details, main ideas and referents, sequencing, drawing conclusions, predicting outcomes, inferring causes and effects and making comparisons. The pupil is to become the teacher by moving from a passive to an active role; from transcribing to transforming knowledge.

In many ways this is a well recognised model. It sits well with the idea of empowering students, and transferring responsibility. At the same time a number of issues that seem to me to be questionable are taken for granted. Teacher C is engaged in a kind of literary literacy. In fact it is questionable whether this is literacy at all. The student is supposedly playing with symbols, re-figuring them, looking of new meanings of meaning, new alternatives for alternates. Instead of literacy being a means to the end of reading and writing given texts in this usage it seems to mean something like ‘comprehension’ where one understanding gives way to another and then to another and then to another and so on, in an aetiology of the mind without limits.

A first response by a social anthropologist looking at the proposition that the pupil already has certain competencies might be to suggest that these competencies are, in many respects culturally bound or encased. The competencies may depend on cultural needs rather than school requirements. This would also seem to apply to any proposed extension or development of the competencies. They would be requirements of the student’s cultural circumstances rather than the school curriculum. Towards the end of high school a significant difference between school and home culture starts to emerge. There is obviously a gap between the demands of Teacher A and Teacher C larger than might be explained in cultural terms. It might also be argued that the student’s culture and the school curriculum are interwoven and difficult to distinguish.

It is also important to examine the basic premises of Bereiter and Scardamalia (1987, 1987b, 1992). They take a thesis set out by Resnick and Resnick (1977) arguing that two traditions of literacy exist. To paraphrase Bereiter and Scardamalia, ‘high literacy’, a tradition in education of the elites in Europe and America, has been aimed at developing the linguistic and verbal reasoning abilities, the literacy standards and sophistication, and the moral values and precepts appropriate to leaders of society. Mass education grew out of a ‘low literacy’ tradition of efforts to promote the minimum levels needed for religious practice. However it happened - this seems to me to be a complex question to say the least - Resnick and Resnick (1977) and Bereiter and Scardamalia (1987, 1987b, 1992) are adamant that two qualitatively different forms of literacy, ‘high’ and ‘low’ now exist.

‘Literacy’ as used by Bereiter and Scardamalia is to do with performance. In this sense it is an outcome resulting from cognition, literacy and other things. Something of this performance aspect can be seen in the central expectation that Bereiter and Scardamalia have of the teacher: to activate the knowledge of the student. It is as though teacher are to set the stage but not to direct the performance. To use their categories Teacher A is like a director, Teacher B is like a stage manager and Teacher C is like a theatre critic - depending on how ‘high’ the ‘literacy’ of the student is. At an advanced point the teacher might well make a mark on the classroom wall and ask the students what they know about the mark on the wall. Knowing something - that the mark is there perhaps - allows the student to begin a ‘transforming’ process so that the mark comes to mean something.

A great deal of the difficulties this writer perceives in the argument of Bereiter and Scardamalia (1987, 1987b, 1992) comes back to the distinction put forward by Resnick and Resnick (1977). Literacy is an ability to understand and communicate with written symbols. In this case the symbols are the letters of the alphabet and their aggregation into words. Understanding and communicating are done through reading and writing. This is a minimal definition but it is, I think, reasonably clear. Qualitative differences in reading and writing have a post-literacy teleology. Literacy is the ability to read and write. It is neither high nor ‘low’ unless we say that low literacy is illiteracy which is, of course, no literacy at all.

For example, when Bereiter and Scardamalia make a distinction between ‘knowledge telling’ and ‘knowledge transforming’ they are restating Resnick and Resnick’s distinction (1977) between ‘low’ and ‘high’ literacy. The mistake is shared by both sets of writers: ‘high literacy’ is a misnomer. The phenomenon they are talking about is better described in several ways each adding something to its description. It might be useful to simply call it ‘better thinking’. It could also be legitimately called cross-cultural thinking in that the student is being asked to step out of one frame of reference (‘low’ or ‘functional’ literacy) into another. ‘Accelerated cognition’ is a usage from the literature (Adey 1991: 79-95) that captures the thrust of the phenomenon, which is to allow faster, more independent minds to develop.

It could be said that Bereiter and Scardamalia are evoking models of the mind. Teacher A is working in a ‘steady state’ situation: what is given out by the teacher is taken in by the student. Teacher C is in a strong ‘feedback’ situation: what goes in is transformed into something else.

The newness of the phenomenon of accelerated cognition is difficult to assess. The notion that people might broaden their horizons has a number of histories some going back a long way but Resnick and Resnick appear to suggest (1977) that the demand for a sophisticated, ‘higher’, literacy is post World War I. This would coincide with several developments as diverse as thinking machines (artificial intelligence) and the reception of Frazer’s ‘The Golden Bough’ by a relatively wide reading public. Many possibilities for an expanded consciousness, a greater awareness or a higher intelligence have been suggested since that time including the recent proliferation of colleges of accelerated learning. Some critical points might be the ‘new criticism’, the poetry of Pound and Eliot which demanded multiple conversancies or 'readings' and, more recently, post-modernism which might be a later reaction to the phenomenon.

So far the distinction between teacher and researcher has been seen as critical. There is a further distinction, to be drawn between school culture (within which the researcher’s queries function as well as the teacher’s work) and the culture of the student. Where mass society rather than the society of elites is concerned the school culture/student culture distinction relates to functional or low literacy demands in the student culture as opposed to accelerated cognition demands in the school environment.

There is a real difference between literacy and cognition. Literacy is to do with understanding and communicating written symbols. Cognition is to do with processing information. The system used for processing information and the systems used for communicating and understanding written symbols overlap and may even be shared. The alphabet is a set of symbols. Knowing how to read and write the alphabet is a function of literacy. Knowing how to use the alphabet in patterns, words and sets of words is a function of cognition. Reading and writing a story involves literacy. Knowing what a story means involves cognition. Making up new stories has to be described with different terms such as creativity, thinking, projecting, gambling even. A new dimension of operations is involved.

Part of the confusion is to do with the ready acceptance by language scholars of work by their colleagues in artificial intelligence. For example, the reliance of many language scholars on the work of Rumelhart (1972) and Schank (1982) has meant an equation of reading with thinking, of ‘the reading machine ‘with’ the thinking machine’

While we may have terms to describe how we understand and how we process information I am not sure that we know how information is generated. Later the concept of ‘prior knowledge’ is discussed along with schema and genre theory. At this stage the major difficulty is that literacy, which refers to understanding symbols, and cognition, which refers to processing information, are both used to describe the generation of knowledge.

The recognition of written symbols is literacy. The use of those symbols is cognition. Language is literacy combined with cognition, intuition and other ineffable things. Most of the above is obvious and self-evident but it needs to be stated in order to deal with difficulties found in the literature generally as well as in the specific instance of Bereiter and Scardamalia. Where they talk for example about ‘high’ and ‘low’ literacy there are serious problems; literacy is a skill of recognition and description. It does not easily yield to such divisions as ‘easy’ and ‘hard’ or ‘low’ and ‘high’.

Even more problematic is the way the concept of ‘task’ is used in the ESOL literature generally. Tasks it seems are part literacy, part cognition creatures. There are reading tasks, writing tasks and tasks of classification and order, tasks of organisation, and then reclassification and re-organisation.

How is the concept of a ‘knowledge-transforming task’, so common not only in Bereiter and Scardamalia but in the literature generally, to be regarded? To begin with, a set of ‘key’ phrases seem to ensue once one accepts that there are such things as ‘knowledge-transforming tasks’. ‘Problem solving’ (as a subject), ‘High Literacy’, Bereiter and Scardamalia’s ‘Teacher C’ all rest upon this idea of a ‘task’.

But the idea is pernicious. Not only is there a confusion of literacy and cognition there is also an entry into a culturally inappropriate discourse. In order, for example, to enter a fully operative ‘Higher Literacy’ context Teacher C must have students who are ‘disembedded’. This term is used to describe a situation where apparently the student is not fettered by too literal a form of literacy, in other words by the constraints of local understandings.

A student of literacy cannot be removed or disembedded from their own literacy. Models of logic can of course be introduced, developed and changed. Whether a student of Teacher C can ever be ‘transformed’ by a ‘disembedded’, ‘Higher Literacy' seems unlikely and impossible. This is partly because of the confusion of meanings in the concept of task and also because of assumptions about what is being transformed. Usually this is taken to be a loose idea of ‘knowledge’ considered to be ‘prior knowledge’.

One reason for the emergence of terms like ‘disembedded’ is to do with the emphasis on the mastery of new knowledge. There are several points of view besides the one found in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages research. Pana (1989) talks of ‘English as a second life’, and the blending of language learning and new experience found in her work is in some ways reminiscent of the confusion of literacy and cognition so far discussed. Also the power of new objects discussed by post-modernists such as Baudrillard (1990) may need to be considered in these terms, especially as new objects present themselves or are captured in print. There is also, as James Collins (an American Anthropologist) has recently reminded us (1995:75-93) questioning from certain quarters whether literacy leads to cognitive or social development. Collins quotes Levi Strauss:

Writing is a strange thing ... The one phenomenon which has invariably accompanied it is the formation of cities and empires, the integration into a political system, that is to say, of a considerable number of individuals and a distribution of these individuals into a hierarchy of castes and classes ... It seems to favour rather the exploitation than the enlightenment of man kind.

(Levi Strauss: 1961:292-2)

Neither Levi Strauss nor Collins makes anything like a distinction between high and low literacy. Collins does come to what he calls a Great Divide (1995:76) but with a distinction between what he calls unitary literacy and multiple literacies, a kind of West versus the Rest approach. The corresponding idea that industrial societies are single task centred while traditional societies involve people having a multiplicity of tasks to perform might be worth exploring in relation to kinds of cognition and kinds of literacy as might the idea of multitasking as this word is used with regard to gender difference: men deal with one thing at a time and women can deal with several. Whether this distinction applies to the same or a comparable extent for women and men in traditional societies as it does elsewhere might also be explored.

There are obviously a great many things in the gap between teaching practices especially at the high school level and the research perspectives of academics in the tertiary sector. The ways of understanding the situation and needs of the student involve different vocabularies. In the case of the researcher I have tried to show the obscure and confusing nature of the terms used. It would be interesting to look at the terms students and teachers use for literacy and cognition at some future point in time.

Why is there such a gap and how did it emerge? Resnick and Resnick (1977) may supply some of the answers: two different kinds of symbolic understanding (‘literacy’) are involved. One is an older form, call it ritual based (‘functional literacy’?). Another is figurative metaphorical or metaphysical, a symbolic understanding that proceeds to organise metaphors and metaphorical relations. Secondary school teachers are stuck with the former as a matter of cultural demand while researchers are beckoned by the grail of the latter which is new, historically and, I would argue, not, as yet, understood.

The secondary teacher/researcher divide is structured in terms of this change in the use of written symbols. Some teachers are conservative, reactionary even. Some researchers including Bereiter and Scardamalia are quite simply over-the-top. One extremely useful piece of work is Alexander, Schallert and Hale’s model (1991) which leaves word knowledge as a distinct entity able to provide access to content which is then classified in various ways, and discourse which is then classified to include the way language works.

Literacy and cognition have been confused and in the language research literature they have become fused. Coming at this fusion or solipsism directly will probably not help a lot although the review of the way they are interchangeably used may help to clarify matters.

Further directions seem to me to come from a study of the early artificial intelligence research in the first instance. In particular I think the way we use concepts like memory needs to be reconsidered in terms of the way language learners employ and are caught up in concepts of time. Once memory is considered as not necessarily being lineal then our concepts of prior knowledge may change in a way that sheds light on the uses of literacy and cognition. A general reconsideration of metaphor might also be useful. But many other entry points need also to be examined.

Alexander, Schallert and Hale (1991) provide an excellent review and a worthwhile clarification of terms used to designate what they call knowledge constructs. Especially interesting is the emphasis those writers give to prior knowledge. This is not the place to pursue their arguments but prior knowledge is at the crux of the higher literacy/accelerated cognition phenomenon. Bereiter and Scardamalia’s ‘knowledge transforming’ or Cummings' ‘gist’ arguments depend on one state of knowledge becoming changed or rearranged. The notion that knowledge could be an accretion, a rather slipshod, unhandy gaggle of matters and thoughts seems never to occur in the research literature. The image of the thinking machine, the processor with its clear simplicities is pervasive. When we ask 'What do we know about the mark on the wall?' we are asking 'What do we know about the mind? As Witte points out in an excellent recent article there are many conceptualizations of writing. Witte may be correct or at least he might be pointing in the right direction when he suggests that we should reconsider the work of Vygotsky and Pierce. Other approaches seem reductionist by comparison.

At least part of the problem with definition is to do with the effect that schema or genre theory has had on the way reading and writing are understood. This general approach lifts the significance of prior knowledge. Instead of using a minimal idea of literacy where the ability to understand and communicate with symbols might be considered as a kind of basis upon which understanding is built, literacy is equated with prior knowledge and then classified into different kinds of understanding. One’s ‘literacy’ in this sense is how well one understands a subject. We say in everyday speech that so and so is ‘computer literate’ but we don’t mean that so and so knows everything inside the computer. He or she knows how to use the computer’s symbols.

In turn this greater emphasis on prior learning derives from the importance given by genrists and schema theorists to work done in artificial intelligence especially by figures like Rumelhart (1977-1980) and Schank (1982). From there the genealogy of ideas probably goes back to cybernetics and information theory possibly to rest on an idea of ‘feedback’ (c.f. Bateson 1972). This genealogy leads in fact to a question: has literacy been confused with memory or system? If the confusion has been with system then perhaps this is not a confusion after all: literacy may be said to be the understanding of a system even if that set of symbols and the manipulation of them involved in literacy is dreadfully unsystematic.

On the other hand the concept of system is dangerous in this context as we are still too close to equating literacy with sense. Literacy is not and cannot be memory. Nor is it logic. And literacy is not prior knowledge. The latter is an extremely difficult beast to deal with as is the schema and genre theory that accompanies it.

That the use of terms is messy and somewhat incoherent is established convincingly by Alexander, Schallert, Hale (1991) and others. It may be that some of the comments above on the way ‘literacy’ has been used in the literature contributes to this critique. More interesting though is the need to look at what the terminology, imperfect as it might be, seeks to accomplish and why it has come to exist as a set of explanatory concepts.

Virginia Woolf’s ‘The mark on the wall’ (1919) comes to mind as does Janet Holst’s excellent article (1988) about this story. What was Woolf’s prior knowledge of the mark? Where did the story come from? How was it generated? Holst’s article concentrates on the use of time in the piece. It is also interesting to ask about the way people ‘read’ and write about uncertain symbols. The thrust of the academic literature, it seems to me, has since at least the early eighties been in the direction of knowledge generation especially as written text. This focus has produced the most readily available ‘answers’ - the easiness of genre and schema theory where knowledge is generated along predictable lines. Is the mark a sign? Is it part of a text (or, as Witte would have it, a context, a text or what he calls an intertext? Do we suppose that the mark is a message written on the wall? Do we suppose we know what writing is?Campus Press Update

Review of: Works published in 2008 by Peter Cleave
Reviewer: Professor Paul Moon
Date: March 2008

In the past ten years, Peter Cleave, in conjunction with Campus Press, has been at the forefront of research into a range of topics relating to Maori in the modern world. This, in itself, may not be remarkable, but what makes Cleave’s works stand out are three things: the breadth of disciplines he draws on for his analyses; the range of subjects he explores; and his persistence in ensuring that the material he publishes is relevant to a wide spectrum of readers. At a time when much academic research is dominated either by drilling into obtuse areas, or by studying topics for which funding is provided, the latest collection of Cleave’s works to be issued by Campus Press provide a fresh and engaging perspective on issues affecting Maori.
This corpus of works covers topics as diverse as social work, Maori media, language, culture in the workplace, as well as Cleave’s groundbreaking work – now in a revised edition – ‘Rangahau pae iti kahurangi: Research in a small world of light and shade’. This wide-angle approach allows the reader to build up an impression of some of the thinking that either applies or ought to apply to current developments in these fields.

Some new titles from Campus Press (Est 1992) each priced at NZ 37.50 plus postage COD;
From the Depot Takirua, Second Edition
by Peter Cleave
Iwi Station: a discussion of print, radio and television in Aotearoa/New Zealand
by Peter Cleave
Papers on Language, Second Edition
Culture in the workplace: a book of exercises
by Peter Cleave
What do we know about the mark on the wall. A study of literacy
by Peter Cleave
Rangahau pae iti kahurangi: research in a small world of light and shade, Second Edition – most popular Campus Press book so far in 2008
by Peter Cleave
And from our back pages:
Papers to Conference- most popular Campus Press book in 2007
by Peter Cleave
Papers on Social Work - includes work on broadcasting
by Peter Cleave 
Papers of Contest, Second Edition
by Peter Cleave
 
And for a discussion on line of literacy in nineteenth century New Zealand by Peter Cleave go to;
http://puffcom.blogspot.com/2008/01/said-heard-written-read.html
Find extended discussions of this in Iwi Station
And see the discussion of Brian Sibley's book on Peter Jackson in From the Depot Takirua, Second Edition

Forthcoming in puff books in April
Isis, the days of the voles
by
Benjamin Drum

Please order by email to puffmedia@yahoo.co.nz or Campus Press, 26, Sycamore Crescent, Palmerston North, New Zealand or telephone 0064 6 3537773


Title descriptions
Papers to Conference

Third Edition

A collection of mostly old but some new work

by Peter Cleave
ISBN

978-1-877229-17-6

The present collection starts with a paper on literacy in Aotearoa/New Zealand in the nineteenth century.This is the most recent paper. The collection finishes with a paper on literacy and there are one or two references to this subject throughout without literacy being a major theme.

In fact,the demand for his collection was largely to do with older work and this constitutes the rest of the collection. Some papers are so out of date as to be quaint. Others like the paper on Samoan and Maori may be old but they might have a current application.

One debate that may not be quaint or out of date may be the one discussed in the review of Francis Pound and Wystan Curnow from the early nineties about icons and symbols. We might well ask what happened to this discussion. We might well also ask what the conditions for a talk like this are in 2008.

The essay on the Pa Maori which is really just a review of Best's book may leave questions unanswered in the wider literature.

In the paper entitled Native Voice and in some of the journal work in Aotearoa, especially that found in Illusions in the nineties there is a discussion of new things happening in the arts in Aotearoa.

The discussion of o and a, the so-called case system in Maori is here through demand. It is also a discussion of commentators which is unusual in this area.

By contrast to the the work on literacy and the Pa Maori the social work papers won prizes and were published in international collections. In this sense the collection is a mix of the known and the obscure.

More on
http://puffcom.blogspot.com/2008/04/papers-to-conference.html




Iwi Station. A discussion of print, radio and television
in Aotearoa/New Zealand

by Peter Cleave
ISBN
978-1-877229-27-5
This book is about communication and power from a tribal point of view in Aotearoa/New Zealand and the world at large. The tribe concerned is the iwi as distinct from the hapu, the sub-tribe or the whanau, the extended family.

The iwi is considered in several historical periods. In each there is a consideration of the communications environment of the iwi be that oral, to do with reading or writing or literacy or to do with electronic media including radio, television and the internet.

There are also two, at least, intense periods of change, the 1850s when Maori was displaced by English as the language of the majority and the period from the early 1990s until the present day characterised by the development of iwi radio and Maori television and the advent of the internet.

The discussion of the internet is really a series of questions. Does the internet allow increased specialisation as well as a greater internationalisation? Are Maori better able to identify common ground and communicate over more space and time than ever before? Is it now possible to find new ground? Does the internet offer freedom from the shackles of a small nation state?

All chapters are about the way that tribes manage communication in the context of a mainstream. Choosing the ground for communication is itself important in this context and there are recurrent issues of control and power.
For more go to
http://puffcom.blogspot.com/2008/04/iwi-station.html


From the Depot-Takirua



Second Edition


by
Peter Cleave

ISBN

978-1-877229-29-9

There was something of a moment in the late eighties and early nineties in Wellington theatre and over the years From the Depot Takirua has been there as an attempt to grapple with what happened.

This Second Edition of the book begins with an older essay containing reviews of work done at the Depot Takirua. Some of the original essays have been retained and new work on Peter Jackson and Maori Television has been included.

The moment at the Depot Takirua, if such it was, quickly became overtaken by other things. Matters were complicated and, it must be said, enriched by film. The workshopping of the warrior proceeded to the film Once were Warriors and elsewhere. Peter Jackson happened from the early nineties and there was a shift of attention and resources to film. A connection between the work of Peter Jackson and the kind of work work done at the Depot-Takirua is found in the writing of Harry and Stephen Sinclair.

With the advent of Maori Television it is possible to see people who were involved in theatre in the early nineties moving to film and then to television.

But there was a period in the early nineties at the Depot Theatre when things came together. The question now, nearly twenty years later, is how they might line up again in a comparable blaze of creativity or whatever. It might involve the same people. Stephen Sinclair features in the Depot-Takirua story as a writer just as he does in the Peter Jackson story.

The papers on Suzie Cato and on Maori Television are offered on the grounds that television, especially Maori Television, may be the place where things come together in a creative step like that which was made at the Depot Takirua all those years ago. The paper on the grotesque which features the piano is offered as a route taken, as it were, out of the kind of thing happening at the Depot Takirua in the early nineties but so far at least not taken further. Something similar seems to have happened with the warrior project, if that it might be called. These sit in the corners of our minds now like dead ends or cul de sacs. Will we come back to them and will new media like Maori Television be used to do so?

For more go to
http://puffcom.blogspot.com/2008/04/from-depot-takirua-second-edition.html


Culture in the work place. A book of group exercises

by Peter Cleave

ISBN
978-1-877229-25-1

How do you work out how to work with other people?

This book is designed to help you do this. The first thing is to consider of culture in your workplace. Then to find better ways of working.

These are the things that matter no matter how removed they might seem from the job at hand. Religion, dress, diet, eye contact and body language. All of these things and more contribute to positive or negative work situations.

This book is not meant to be prescriptive or to tell people what to do in their own workspaces and with their own culture.

The exercises below are offered that they might allow readers to work out their own situations. The idea has been to keep it simple and to allow discussion to happen in a easy fashion.

For more
http://puffcom.blogspot.com/2008/04/culture-in-workplace.html




Papers of Contest
Third Edition

by Peter Cleave

ISBN

978-1-877229-28-2

The theme of this collection of papers is contest. There is a challenge in each paper.

The first paper looks at literacy in the nineteenth century in Aotearoa/New Zealand.

In the next paper conventional research is challenged with an idea of indigenous modes of inquiry.

The following paper looks at confrontational theatre and film in the 1990s.

The discussion of Francis Pound and Wystan Curnow considers images, symbols and the art of a place, a country, I suppose.

The review of Martin Blythe's book involves several of the themes so far considered as well as others and tries to describe an exciting analysis.

The consideration of the native, the outlaw and the frontier widens the perspective of the collection.

The rest of the papers in the collection take the idea of contest into different areas.

The discussion of Suzie Cato takes the discussion into mainstream media in Aotearoa/New Zealand.

By contrast the next article looks at work with perhaps more limited but nonetheless highly critical audiences and the construction of or the playing with a notion of the Pakeha-Maori.

The final paper is a consideration of the grotesque. This raises a number of questions that are left hanging and that, perhaps, is what happens in a collection with the theme of contest.
For more http://puffcom.blogspot.com/2008/04/papers-of-contest.html







What do we know about the mark on the wall?
Images, rules and prior knowledge

by
Peter Cleave

ISBN

978-1-877229-26-8

There is a sense in which the work here is dated referring as it does to work done in TESOL in the early nineties. That literature could be updated. There is a question though as to which direction to take from here and there is also the fact that whatever the argument is attached to it will eventually date. The advantage, I think, of the work referred to is that it is of a very high calibre.

Other applications for the argument might well be found. Work on memory from the early childhood area is one possibility but there are others such as developments in educational theory and practice over the last half century.

It may be though that no one major kind of example emerges. The book as it is or in any revision may just use examples from here and there. The theme may be a matter of constant return, going back again and again to questions of cognition and literacy.
For more http://puffcom.blogspot.com/2008/04/what-do-we-know-about-mark-on-wall.html







Papers on Social Work
Second Edition
by
Peter Cleave
ISBN

978-1-877229-21-3

These papers venture into several areas of social work but there may be some features that set the collection aside.

The first is an emphasis throughout on social work education. This interest is set out in in the first chapter where there is a comparison between local and European traditions. Work by Carola Khulmann and Peter Cleave appears early in the collection and is then taken further in subsequent papers.

One emphasis or theme which keeps coming up is to do with a ethic. This is touched in the comparison of social work in Germany and Aotearoa/New Zealand, looked at in the article, An ethic of empathy, and touched on again in the article on iwi social services.

Another theme is to do with indigenous ways of research. The paper on rangahau is the most discursive in the collection and the intention here is to take the arguments as far as they might go without necessarily coming to fixed conclusions.

Yet another pertains to the dynamics of small group work in social work learning and teaching. This work is perhaps the most widely published while some of the other papers are offered to a broader readership for the first time.

The consideration of broadcasting and social work is different from the other papers in many respects and, along with the paper on iwi social services, a little tentative in its conclusions These are both new areas of work for me and it shows. In later editions the intention is to refine and develop the arguments involved.






Papers on Language

by
Peter Cleave

ISBN

978-1-877229-19-0

This collection of papers takes work from a variety of sources. The intention is to draw a fairly long bow.

There is some work on literacy which is nor about any language in particular. There is work on Maori grammar. And a paper on strategies for language retention. And there is recent work on literacy and oral communication in Aotearoa.

The transmission of an ethic through language and song is considered in another paper.

The Note on the two or three verb classes in Maori applies to the o an a categories and to the use of i and ki. They are short but hopefully important links which make sense, I think, of a range of questions that might come up.

There are also papers about voice and tone. There is even a paper about a song. These are offered in the hope that language might be considered in the broadest possible terms.










Rangahau pae iti kahurangi
Research in a small world of light and shade




Second Edition

Peter Cleave

ISBN
978-1-877229-23-7

Contents

1 Wahi Rangahau; Places of Inquiry 5
2 And on to the question... 11
3 Image and text 17
4 The critical scholars 34
5 Back to the house 41
6 Drama 47
7 What is being pursued? 51
8 Back to the image 56
9 Background to rangahau 63
10 Back to the whare again 75
11 Rangahau, ethics and social work education 78
12 Light, shade, action 88
Concluding remarks 102
Bibliography 106
Glossary 117