One of the things I find most challenging to teach is the skill necessary to map out scholarly debates. I find that most professors offer a list of articles, book chapters and books that (in theory) map the field as they see it. However, I find that very few if any provide any guidance on to how to understand an entire field or sub-field of scholarship through scholarly exchanges and conversations. In this blog post I show how we can teach theoretical debates using a set of articles in Point-Counter Point-Rejoinder format (PCR).
… that deals with some questions on corruption I had been grappling with. I don’t study corruption, but I was asked to give a talk on corruption in the environmental sector, so I looked for, and consulted experts in the field (Professor Marquette is one of them).
— Dr Raul Pacheco-Vega (@raulpacheco) December 8, 2019
Anyhow…
2. Getting the basic nature of systemic corruption right: A reply to Marquette and Peiffer https://t.co/VIVUu8GPi1
— Dr Raul Pacheco-Vega (@raulpacheco) December 8, 2019
and the rejoinder:
3. Thinking politically about corruption as problem‐solving: A reply to Persson, Rothstein, and Teorell https://t.co/mmZrAt20yA
I strongly believe we ought to teach our students how to map out scholarly debates. It’s on us, rather than on them, to show them the road map: who says what in the field, who says the opposite thing (or a counter point), and is the balance of evidence supporting Theory A or Theory B or neither?
BUT they do not make these debates clear. That is, they cover the material, but ask of the student to make the connections. To connect the dots, you need to have read everything, and then you need to make sense of what you’re reading and how it relates to other bodies of work.
— Dr Raul Pacheco-Vega (@raulpacheco) December 8, 2019
To be perfectly frank, I DO think that within a course, faculty owe it to students to draw the map of the literature rather than asking of the student to make sense of all scholarly work and create the map themselves. HOWEVER, I strongly believe that for comprehensive/qualifying/preliminary exams, students SHOULD be able to map out the debates themselves.
Beyond the corruption theory Point-Counterpoint-Rejoinder set of articles I show above, I found another set that discusses environmental justice.
2. Counterpoint:
— Dr Raul Pacheco-Vega (@raulpacheco) December 10, 2019
Environmental Justice: It’s More Than Waste Facility Siting https://t.co/3VKBGaWYV7
3. Rejoinder:
Methodological Approaches to Environmental Justice: A Rejoinder https://t.co/TFX8l95Vri
This PCR set of articles discusses methods in environmental justice
Now, so far I have only provided two sets of articles in PCR format. I draw from one of these sets to showcase how to write the argumentation in a Point-Counterpoint-Rejoinder kind of way.
“We find X, and in doing so, we are NOT dismissing the work of Authors Y, Z, W. We build on their work and extend it in the following ways”.
— Dr Raul Pacheco-Vega (@raulpacheco) December 10, 2019
Rather than saying “Author X is stupid and should never be allowed to publish ever for the rest of this universe’s existence”…
Back to the PCR model. Note how Marquette and Pfeiffer use their critics’ critiques to create a road map of how they are going to respond and the new theoretical insights derived from critics’ commentaries. Note how Marquette and Pfeiffer do not say “Persson et al are wrong!” pic.twitter.com/wzEzS2yTUb
— Dr Raul Pacheco-Vega (@raulpacheco) December 10, 2019
In fact, PCR sets of articles allow you to PRECISELY show how academic argumentation should be done in a 1, 2, 3 sequence:
— Dr Raul Pacheco-Vega (@raulpacheco) December 10, 2019
1. I Say
2. They Say (in reply)
2. I Say (again, in rejoinder).
I am going to be teaching academic writing, so I do plan to use these 2 sets of articles
I also believe it is important to teach our students how to write critiques that are firm but courteous. They should also be able to highlight their own contributions without destroying the scholarship of people who came before them.
In fact, I teach them how to write their contributions:
— Dr Raul Pacheco-Vega (@raulpacheco) December 10, 2019
“I build on Pacheco-Vega 2014’s characterization of intractable water conflicts by offering an innovative typology of resource disputes that goes beyond the tractability-intractability continuum”
Or…
— Dr Raul Pacheco-Vega (@raulpacheco) December 10, 2019
“I extend Pacheco-Vega’s 2015 model by implementing a Social Network Analysis examination of the various ways in which power is shared across transnational environmental activist networks”.
We can teach our students how to highlight their contributions courteously </fin>
Hopefully this blog post will be of use to those of you who want to teach strategies to map out the literature using scholarly exchanges as examples.
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