Knowledge and discourse: Mediated discourse and distributed cognition in two Balinese gamelan classrooms in the United States

This project is an ethnography of communication that utilizes the research methodology of nexus analysis (Scollon and Scollon, 2004a) combined with the theories of mediated discourse analysis (R. Scollon, 2001a, 2001b) and distributed cognition (Hutchins, 1995) to explore the ways knowledge is created and distributed within two Balinese gamelan classrooms. I argue that there are three ways of thinking about knowledge and discourse in social interaction: knowledge is displayed through discourse, knowledge is constructed in discourse, and knowledge is distributed during social interaction. These three ways of thinking of knowledge and discourse are actualized in three aspects of social interaction---social organization, the process of intersubjectivity in social interaction, and the role of the individual social actor. I define knowledge in this study as the result or outcome of a mediated action.; To approach this problem I conducted an ethnography of communication of classroom discourse in two music classrooms in the United States where Balinese gamelan music is studied and learned. Balinese gamelan gong kebyar is taught through an oral tradition in both classrooms. In each classroom students adopt strategies for learning through this oral tradition that is based on their own personal experience, habitus (Bourdieu, 1977) or historical body (Scollon and Scollon, 2004a). I analyzed the mediated actions that students used to display and construct knowledge using concepts from interactional sociolinguistics and pragmatics.; My findings suggest that students use participant structures in the classroom as a mediational means to display and construct knowledge. The mediational means, both verbal and nonverbal, that students use to display and construct knowledge serves as a device that enables them to manage the process of intersubjectivity. Social actors gain access to the system of distributed cognition during interactions in which some aspect of their knowledge becomes a salient feature of that interaction. What emerges is a theory of knowledge and discourse that is a dialectic among social organization, the process of intersubjectivity, and what the individual social actor brings to the interaction.