Paging Dr. Phil

How does Dr. Phil wield his power? That was essentially the question at the center of the class today. The groups discussed briefly their understanding of discourse models (which I keep calling cultural models, despite Gee’s sound reasoning for not doing so) and then launched into analyses of a Dr. Phil column from a recent Oprah magazine. My question to the groups was this: what discourse models are at work in the column? As they worked, I tweaked that question by pointing out that Dr. Phil is working within the established genre of advice columns, which itself is an established part of the genre of women’s magazines.

What impressed me today was how quickly these groups got to work and how seriously they took the task at hand. It would have been easy not to do either. That is, in a class where my authority is lessened by a group-driven participation policy, a lack of an attendance policy, and no system of quizzes or other check points, the students could choose to fake it. But as I walked around the room, I saw people who looked like they actually enjoyed talking to each other about Dr. Phil’s penchant for playing the psychological mechanic—y’know, Mr. Fix-it. My larger point here is that I witnessed students engaging each other in what appeared to be friendly and cooperative ways—and these conversations made good use of the terms presented by Gee. And they also made good use of the students’ own observations of the world they’re living in. These analyses were grounded in immediate contexts and informed by the students’ past experiences with the genres.

Perhaps Dr. Phil is too easy a mark? Certainly one could argue that he works in an overly-constructed or overly-determined genre. To me, that’s the point. A genre such as his needs critiquing for the very cultural (or discourse) models it assumes and presents. Dr. Phil's power comes from the cultural models that establish him as an authority.

The students today demonstrated today something I’ve been believing for some time now—the text isn’t the issue. The reading/discussing process is. I know that sounds obvious, but juxtapose that statement with the curricula established by English departments around the country. We’ve fetishized the text and we expect our students to do the same. And when they don’t, we imagine their refusal as failure or deficiency.

Let’s talk about that.