Chad Marshall

Dr. Quoss-Moore

ENG comp/research

15 March 2019

The Newtype Theory

In this study, I will be exploring the difference between two academic based discourse communities and why diversity in a small system creates a community which promotes positive attitudes and facilitates learning through communication. Samples are chosen from two different learning institutions: the Francis Tuttle Technology Center’s Computer Science Academy (CSA) and the University of Central Oklahoma’s Computer Science Department. I have had the honor of being a part of both institutions, as I am a recent third year graduate of the CSA and I am a neophyte in the Computer Science Department at UCO. That being said, I hold bias toward both institutions. There will be times where I may interject my perceptions of both my personal experience and about my observations of both institutions to justify my argument. Francis Tuttle Technology Center’s Computer Science academy was founded in August of 2015. The goal of the Academy is to better prepare students for not only college, but for their eventual career in the field of Computer Science. While this may not be unique to most career-tech schools, it is unique that the CSA strictly houses highschool students in their curriculum. The Computer Science Department at UCO was founded in 1984 and houses both undergraduate and graduate students. The goal of the CS Department is to provide the necessary resources for students to pursue their interested field of study and eventual career. John Swales defines discourse as, “groups that have goals or purposes and use communication to achieve these goals.” (Swales, 1990) Both institutions are discourse communities in their own way. The students of CSA all have the broad goal of graduating highschool, and if they continue with the program, then they will be prepared for college. Students can enroll in the CSA starting their sophomore year of highschool and can continue until their senior year. With only four instructors, each student will end up seeing every instructor every year for at least one or more classes per year. The students of the CS Department have a similar goal of graduating, and with a degree, but discourse is dispersed differently since the department is much larger than CSA. Instead, the discourse is split amongst smaller group under the notion that a friend of an acquaintance’s cousin is also a friend because that cousin could help with your calculus homework. Like CSA, there lives a social support network in which students can help each other, but it is much less natural since everyone does not know each other.

Literature Review

Literature on Francis Tuttle’s CSA is sparse, as the academy has only been around for less than four years, thus the majority of my secondary research must be much broader. I came across articles regarding communities of discourse that are similar to discourse communities but break at least one rule, corrupting them of their status as a discourse community. They will create interesting validations for separating the idea of a discourse community by the goal or purpose of the group. The first article, by Andrew Hershberger and Dan Madigan, reviews what a discourse community is and discusses a term called a “Learning community”, where it shares every aspect of a discourse community, except members do not have to be from the same field. Instead, members must be students who are learning; specifically, they are graduate students who are balancing research and teaching undergraduates (2005). The second article, by Silvia Wen Yu Lee and Chin Chung Tsai, discusses patterns of collaborative knowledge exploration and suggests new analytical dimensions for investigating online discussion (2011). The concepts of a discourse community and transition community were adopted in the analysis. My third article is by Jian Zhao, Lijia Lin, Jiangshan Sun, Xudong Zheng & Jia Yin, which discusses whether knowledge diversity matters in the classroom (2018). The study takes several small groups with a specific distribution of knowledgeable students who have limited prior knowledge on the activity vs. lower level students who have knowledge of the activity. Scholarly sources pertaining to FTTC specifically are scarce, so I have found a news articles and interviews with the first-year students of 2015. Looking at this topic through a broad lens will give diverse insight in how pre-college CS students and CS students can adapt different views of language to their desired goal.

Methodology

While the objective of my interviews was to explore how diversity affects discourse from the local classroom setting to the global size of the entire Computer Science Academy, to get fair results, my interview questions had to reflect both positive and negative outcomes to each question or stay completely neutral. I partook in six interviews (three students and three instructors) at the Francis Tuttle Technology Center and six interviews (five students and one instructor) at the University of Central Oklahoma. Both the student (Form-S) and instructor (Form-I) forms contained basic demographic information like “Where are you from?” Form-S contained questions asking where the students went to high school and how does their experiences in various mediums compare to higher education institutions like FTTC or UCO, depending on which sample I was inquiring. Regardless of higher educational institution, I used these key questions to start building my argument: 1) How does language define your relationships with your instructors? 2) Do you think that builds on your experience here as a student here at [BLANK]? 3) Do you feel that there is a sort of social support within this community, being made up of the students/instructors here at [BLANK]? Form-I is structured in a similar manner where questions vary from general demographics, instructor’s relationship with students to instructor’s relationship with students. The key questions for the sample of instructors are have little difference from the student’s key questions listed above.

While interviewing four different samples total, questions were similar enough where I would not be lost sea of data that I was collecting. The first sample that was interviewed was the three students from Francis Tuttle. I had the liberty of choosing one student from each grade; grades included were Sophomore through Senior year. The reasoning was that I thought that I receive different results from different grade with the dependent variable being the amount of time that one has been attending Francis Tuttle. I created the questions in such a way that answers could be vague and would require open ended responses. Aside from general demographics, key questions, and comparisons between CSA and their high school, I asked them questions regarding friend circles and how language affected their relationships. Following the student sample, I had the opportunity to interview three out of the four instructors at the CSA. Key questions remained the same, but the questions were more focused on comparisons between the instructor’s experience at teaching at a high school institution versus teaching at FTTC. Under normal circumstances, this inquiry would be risky and a waste of time if the instructor had not taught at a previous institution, but because I had prior knowledge of the background information pertaining to most of the instructors, I made the most of my resources and went ahead with the question set. The other question set for the student sample of the CS Department were similar to the ones used for the CSA. The question set for the instructor sample had slight deviations. For example, because the goal was to compare the instructor’s teaching experience to some educational institution aside from the University of Central Oklahoma, I had to focus my question set to be versatile if the instructor had not taught at a different educational institution. Ideally, the best instructor sample would include those who have taught at different institutions.

I partook a class observance during my information gathering phase at FTTC’s CSA. The goal of my observances was to be as unobtrusive as possible so that I could capture the natural progression of classroom interactions between students and their instructors and between students and their peers. For the observance at the CSA, I sat at the back of the classroom and took notes. Details about the observance will be discussed in my Findings Section. There was one last sample size that was implicitly interviewed, which included students like myself, who have recently graduated FTTC’s CSA and are incoming students in UCO’s CS Department, who play a unique role in the evaluation of my data. As a whole, they are included in my CS Department sample but will be referred to individually as my Veteran sample if needed.  

Findings - CSA

My hypothesis for my CSA student sample was that by interviewing students from each grade, I would get different results. Out of the three students interviewed, all three students used adjectives like “close knit”, “personal”, and “close”, while two students used the noun “family” to describe the academy. The students, Hayden and Brenden who used the noun “family” are in their junior and senior year respectively. Both the student sample and the instructor sample agreed that the language shared between both instructors and students is informal. The use of informal language creates a relaxed atmosphere. Senior Brenden noted how the use of informal language makes the connection between instructor and student more person. Similarly, Sophomore Brad noted that such a close connection builds trust between the students and their instructor. While all three students are from Edmond Oklahoma, they each come from different schools. Students come from an array of school districts which include schools from Cashion, Crescent, Deer Creek, Putnam City, Western Heights, and Edmond. This makes the CSA’s student body a rather unique mixing pot. This creates a form of invisible diversity where students have unique thoughts and beliefs that shape their visible identity (Du Plessis and Bisschoff, 2007). If a student continues the program, then the instructors will inevitably become a large catalyst for the student’s academic and personal development. The same idea goes for the student’s peers.

Often enough, some students are there for three years and end up seeing the same peers come back each year. FTTC student Jeff said in his 2015 interview with Oklahoma Horizon TV that there were 30 kids total, so he feels “that [the] bond is a lot stronger between all of [the students]” (Koch, 2015). This bond creates a social support network where students can go to each other for help and progress towards their goal of graduation. The small class sizes and setup also play a similar role in acting as a hub for social connection. The class rooms are along the right side of a large hall. This aspect, and that the large windows that stretch from one side to the other for each room, making the rooms a sort of fishbowl. The instructors that teach in these classrooms perceive how language defines their relationship with their students differently. While verbal, written, or body communication is shared between all instructors, I have picked segments out of my interviews in which I believe that the instructors elaborated well on a respective form of communication. Science instructor Mr. Martin noted that open dialogue contributes to an open discussion within a collaborative setting. He is known among, of the student sample that I collected, as a relatively laid-back instructor that pokes fun at his students. Veteran student Sydney coins this act as “Friendly banter”, which is what I will be using for the remainder of this analysis. Math instructor Mrs. Voss advocates the use of digital communication through email to her students because it allows for students to discreetly ask questions in case they do not feel comfortable asking in class. She also says that the use of email communication early in the student’s high school career is vital for preparing them for communicating with their professors by email, in college. Among the student sample, is said Programming instructor Mrs. Owora displays a “Death stare”, when she speaks with her students. When I asked her about this, she told me that what she is doing is observing body language. With consent, I can share that Mrs. Owora was originally from Uganda. I think that the observing of body language is something that is not taken in consideration in normal discourse unless the message of the language is obviously unnatural, or one is actively looking for body language. Mrs. Owora noted that this difference in culture serves both as an advantage and an obstacle to her teaching career as it allows her to better understand the state of discourse, but often leaves students with the impression that she is not active in the conversation.

When I walked in Mr. Martin’s AP Physics classroom, I could immediately see that there was a distinct distribution of students at each table, even with a small class of 7 students total. Oddly enough, discourse was not limited to this three, as there was mingling between people from across the classroom. From attending CSA myself, I knew that the distribution of students at each table was based on the length of that the students knew each other, as I recognized a few familiar faces. One table held 3 third year students while another table held 2 first year students, and the last held 2 first year and 1 third year student. Aside from the one outlier at the last table, a large variable is time. Other variables that I feel that cannot be looked are grade level and common group interest. The latter explains the outlier at the last table. There was much interaction between Mr. Martin and his students. Much of the observations that center around the instructor are based around individual personalities. If Mr. Martin felt that a student was not paying enough attention, he would point them out and create a reference the course material as a way to partake in friendly banter with the student in question. This would disrupt the flow of learning, but act as a break for the students to gather their thoughts and have a laugh along the way.

Findings – CS Department    

I received mixed results for whether the students thought that the language used between the professor and their students was formal or informal. Most of my student sample said that the use of formal versus informal language was mixed. The students who are CSA veterans were more inclined to say that the language used between professors and students was informal, while those who came from home schooling said that language was more formal. Programming professor Dr. Joe A. says that the language used between him and his students was informal. He noted the teaching styles that works between him and his students works by giving information to his students that is enshrined in a balance between efficiency and functionality.  His reasoning is that as a programming instructor, it is his duty to instill a habitual balance between efficient and functional code in his students. Unlike my data for the CSA student sample, my data for the CS Department is quite skewed. There is greater diversity regarding the number of places that each student has lived. It got to the point that if a student had more than three locations of residence that they would consider that they were raised in, rather than a sporadic relocation, then I would just list it as “everywhere” in my data. This is common among the instructors of both samples, but that is because they have lived longer than the students. Student Joe come from a private school while the rest of my student sample went to public schools, save Mickey and Chris who had home schooling. Three students of my sample stated that there is a greater respect that is shared between the professors and the students.

On the contrary, when it came to building connections, all five of my student sample noted some difficulty in making connections with other students. From my veteran sample, three students noted that students in the CS Department are not as close as the students at CSA. Veteran student Stephan compared his experience at college to his high school, in which the majority of the student body was just faceless actors that overall did not matter. That said, all five students said that there was a social support network within the CS Department, but three students noted that it takes effort to reach out to others for help. When I asked professor Dr. Joe A. how teaching at UCO is different than teaching at another educational institution like Oklahoma State University (OSU), he said that the classes are easier at UCO because of the smaller class sizes. Similar to my CSA findings, smaller class sizes offer more 1 on 1 interactions between instructors and students.

Discussion

Looking at communities similar to discourse communities to provide a narrower lens that can distinguish and compare communities like CSA and the CS Department. English Graduate student Andrew Mara says that the learning community at his university “helped [him] write an article detailing this unification: benign pressure, an atmosphere focused on unifying teaching and learning”, which is where the social support network question that was in both Form-I and Form-S comes in (Hershberger et al., 2005).  Learning communities provide everything to accommodate the process learning, but do not cover the preparation and transition past the common goal that the community has. CSA was founded on the principle that the academy will prepare students for not only college, but for their eventual career in the field of Computer Science. Similarly, the CS Department’s mission goal is to prepare students for their eventual career within the field of Computer Science. Because the goals of both is a means of transitioning to one scene to another, both CSA and the CS Department are transition communities.

Students who are a part of transition community lean on each other and converse with their own “nonstandard discourse”, being the group’s jargon (Silvia & Chin-Chung, 2011). This jargon acts as a step stool that tries to make everyone on the same level by having using a singular, unique language in the community. When everyone is on a similar level, divergence in conversation can take place. Divergence in conversation is where one adds a new topic to the discussion which creates a shared understanding by piggy-backing off someone else’s responses (Silvia & Chin-Chung, 2011). It is at this point when creative conversation is at its peak, as diverse thought makes diverse discourse. From my results, both institutions display diversity within both their student and instructor body. When an institution has a large student body per class, diversity is wasted on the limitations of a large class where open discussion is stunted due to the sheer number of students. This causes passive participation among most of the student body. Jian, Lijia, Jiangshan, Xudong, and Jia’s research study sought to see if knowledge diversity mattered in the class room, since all six small groups in their study performed the required tasks within the allotted time, they concluded that small groups have efficacy in learning (2018). The perspective that a school may have a large student body is subjective because every school is different. It could be said that the comparison between CSA and the CS Department is a lossy comparison because the institutions are fundamentally different in their framework. We could put the comparison in a frame of reference and compare the student body per class between UCO and Harvard and get similar results just be shifting roles. What makes students successful is when they use all their resources in an attempt to succeed. Not only are the instructors a resource, but the students too drive each other, not necessarily in competition, but to be kind to one another. Even if the student body in the classroom is not small, classrooms that take advantage of friend groups make them into a productive powerhouse that facilitates positive attitude and learning perform much better than students who decide to solo projects instead.

Conclusion

As with learning, this analysis is a process. If I had the chance to turn back the clock, I would attempt to address objects of error. An error on my part was not considering that the students may perceive the questions differently then I how I have written them, thus getting relevant, but inconclusive data. Fortunately, that did not happen as much as it did with my sample of students from the CS Department at UCO. For my CS Department class observance, I forgot to get consent from a professor to include details from my observations of that class in my essay. Other than those two mishaps, if I had more time to explore this subject further and perhaps perform my own study like Jian’s study, then I would. My articles that I chose were centered around diversity in small groups, while the study of large groups like the classrooms that one would see at a state university would yield more accurate results than what I could ever postulate in this analysis.

A startling realization occurred when I was compiling my data. As it turns out, diversity has much less of an impact on classrooms with a large student body per class because there is less interactions between both students with their instructor and students with their peers. Even with a normal high school class size of thirty students, there are still around a fifth of the class that does not contribute to discussions due to the phenomena of groupthink. I believe that further study with classes that have large student body counts could help systems like the high school education system move past the elitist concept of having large classes to weed out the weak. Perhaps then, can general education classes become a place of prestigious learning rather than becoming a factory to produce workers.

Works cited

Francis Tuttle Technology Center. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.francistuttle.edu/discover/p             artnerSchools.aspx

Hershberger, A & Cesarini, P & Chao, J & Mara, A & Rajaei, H & Madigan, D. (2005, August). Balancing Acts: Tenure-Track Faculty in Learning Communities. Academe, 94(4), 44-48.      DOI: 10.2307/40253430

Jian, Z & Lijia, L & Jiangshan, S & Xudong, Z & Jia, Y (2018) Students' engagement in a            science classroom: Does knowledge diversity matter?, The Journal of Educational             Research, 111(6) , 756-763. DOI: 10.1080/00220671.2018.1427036

Koch, K. (2015, March 16). NewsOK. Retrieved from https://newsok.com/article/5401195                       /states-first-computer-science-academy-to-open-in-city

Swales, J. (1990). The Concept of Discourse Community. Genre Analysis: English in Academic and Research Settings, 21-32.

Wen-Yu, L & Chin-Chung, T (2011) Identifying Patterns of Collaborative Knowledge      Exploration in Online Asynchronous Discussions. Instructional Science, 39, 321-347.       DOI 10.1007/s11251-010-9131-8