Discursive affordances

233 Pages·2017·1.84 MB·English

by  Robert John Terry

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Electronic Theses and Dissertations
12-2013
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Robert John Terry
University of Louisville
Follow this and additional works at: https://ir.library.louisville.edu/etd
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Terry, Robert John, "Discursive affordances : police, transfer, and the performance of identity." (2013).
Electronic Theses and Dissertations. Paper 1422.
https://doi.org/10.18297/etd/1422
This Doctoral Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by ThinkIR: The University of Louisville's
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DISCURSIVE AFFORDANCES:
POLICE, TRANSFER, AND THE PERFORMANCE OF IDENTITY

By
Robert John Terry
B.A., University of Texas at Dallas, 2005
M.A., University of Louisville, 2008

A Dissertation
Submitted to the Faculty of the
College of Arts and Sciences of the University of Louisville
in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements
for the Degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

Department of English
University of Louisville
Louisville, Kentucky

December 2013

DISCURSIVE AFFORDANCES:
POLICE, TRANSFER, AND THE PERFORMANCE OF IDENTITY

By

Robert John Terry
B.A., University of Texas at Dallas, 2005
M.A., University of Louisville, 2008

A Dissertation Approved on

August 2, 2013

By the following Dissertation Committee

_____________________________
Joanna Wolfe, Dissertation Director

_____________________________
Beth Boehm

_____________________________
Paul Griner

_____________________________
Mary Rosner

_____________________________
Thomas Hughes
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DEDICATION

This dissertation is dedicated to my wife

Abbey Kuehne Terry

and my stepdaughter

Maia Kuehne-Seeber

and to all those people, countless,

who had faith in me when I did not.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank my director, Joanna Wolfe, for all of the assistance she
provided me in making this dissertation possible. Without her, none of this would have
been done. I would also like to thank all of my committee members, who believed that
this dissertation would come together when it seemed like it was an impossibility, and
who provided countless moments of support and interesting and useful insight. I would
especially like to thank Thomas “Tad” Hughes for granting me access to the Southern
Police Institute, one of the most fascinating educational organizations in the United
States, and Paul Griner, for all the support he has shown me during my time at the
University of Louisville. I would also like to thank my wife, Abbey, and my
stepdaughter, Maia, for the support they have given me during this process. I also thank
my friends and classmates in Louisville, especially Kenny Smith and Shyam Sharma, for
the support you have shown me when I felt like leaving this process behind.
I also wish make my feelings about the student participants of this study and the
work they do as police officers clear. I feel this clarification is necessary because police,
as a profession, inhabit a complex cultural space because of their relationship with
dominant Discourses. In the constructions forwarded by certain Discourses, police are
almost canonized as unflawed heroes, as individuals whose service to the public renders
them free of any and all of the flaws and complexities of human existence. Certainly, I
absolutely believe that the five participants in this study are all dedicated public servants,
individuals who have committed their lives and considerable capabilities to trying to
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contribute to some version of the greater good. Each of them has been heroes to others in
life and death situations, literally saving lives and bringing some kind of resolution to
heart-wrenching situations. Because of their commitment to their profession, each of
them has gone willingly into dangers that most people would do anything to avoid.
However, these positive representations of police are not the complete picture.
For many Discourses, police are enforcers of an unjust social order, agents of a corrupt
government that serves the elite while suppressing the lower classes, that maintains large
portions of racial and gender inequality. Multiple historical examples exist to support this
understanding of police, so even those less critical of police must acknowledge this
complex background. At times, such as when viewing the rhetoric of Christopher
Dorner’s (the former L.A.P.D. officer who went on a well-publicized revenge rampage,
targeting his fellow officers, in early 2013) “manifesto,” the paramilitary elements of
policing can also seem alarming to a public that participates in very different Discourses.
The military-ish elements are often also points of conflict with a public that mostly
operates outside military Discourses, even if echoes of such dominant organizations
always make their way into other Discourses.
From my experience with my student participants in the AOC, working police are
neither the saints nor the villains that different Discourses present them to be. Like
teachers, who are often placed under similar Discursive binaries, they are individuals
placed in morally complicated situations who do the best they can with an extremely
difficult job. Sometimes they get it right, sometimes they get it wrong, but most of the
time they just do what they can with the best of intentions based on their axiological and
epistemic understandings. Still, like all Discourses, significant points of contention occur
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on those lines. Throughout my discussion of these participants and their experiences with
their academic writing, I have done my best to fairly represent each of them, honoring
their strengths and abilities while also attempting to fairly explain how elements of their
performance of identity have complicated successful performances and recognitions of
transfer. I thank them for their bravery in opening themselves up to the type of scrutiny
this research required, and I hope that they, likewise, recognize that I worked from the
best intentions.
I would also like to thank my instructor participants for spending as much time as
they did discussing their courses, their pedagogies, their writing assignments, and their
understandings of the AOC and its students. Each of them possesses a great amount of
expertise in their fields, and all are accomplished and highly capable teachers. Tolerating
a graduate student’s constant probing of their understanding of their writing assignments
and their expectations for those writing assignments can’t be a pleasant experience, but
each of these instructors never hinted at any annoyance, cheerfully answering yet another
question about their assignments and their understanding of their students.
In the discussion of my experiences in their classrooms, it may sometimes seem
as if my analysis of their performances and interactions in the classroom may seem like
they are evaluations, but they are not. Although I will be highlighting elements that some
readers may find problematic in their pedagogy, I believe that each of these instructors
was, at all times, themselves weaving a fine line of identity possibilities. Anything that
may seem problematic should be understood not as a reflection of the instructor or their
pedagogy but as a response to a complex situation with a complex population. In clearer
terms, readers should be careful not to infer any kind of negative evaluation of these
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instructors based on the analysis of classroom interactions presented here. Rather, as I
will explain in this chapter, attempting to soothe potential Discourse conflicts in order to
promote more useful alignment between teachers and students is a complicated,
sometimes ideologically dangerous process. While it always begins with the best of
intentions, it sometimes can lead to complex, confusing situations with no easy
resolution, and I believe that each of my teacher participants is fully aware of the
complexities of what may seem like problematic statements or actions, intending only to
use them as a way to build better bridges between the ideas of the course and the
students’ identities. All teachers work in the less-than-perfect constraints of reality where
there is never such a thing as a perfect pedagogy, and we all work with the best of
intentions.

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ABSTRACT
DISCURSIVE AFFORDANCES: POLICE, TRANSFER, AND THE PERFORMANCE
OF IDENTITY

Robert John Terry

December 6, 2013

This dissertation is an analysis of how the performance of identity affects the
possibilities for the transfer of writing strategies. It begins with a literature review of the
existing research on transfer within the field of composition and posits that an
undertheorized understanding of identity may be leading to misunderstandings related to
the transfer of knowledge. It then provides a framework for understanding the
performance of identity developed through James Paul Gee’s Discourse theory and
provides a framework for understanding and identifying Discourse conflicts related to the
performance of identity. After providing an overview of the research site, the
Administrative Officers’ Course (AOC) held at the Southern Police Institute (SPI), and
the research participants, it provides an analysis of how identity performance at both the
student and instructor level affected the possibilities for productive or unproductive
transfer. In the conclusion, I propose an approach to performing an instructor identity that
may enable more productive transfer.
The dissertation is divided into five chapters, providing a theoretical introduction,
an overview of the research methodology, analysis of the performance of identity at both
the student and instructor level, and a summary of research findings with potential
pedagogical applications. The first chapter provides a literature overview of existing
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