Reflective Learning Log: Social Practices in World Literature

To recap:
For this assignment, you are required to select a number of tasks that you have engaged in during the first eight classes, and using these to reflect on your learning and your developing thoughts on the subject. The tasks may consist of, for example, a piece of transcription that you produced, an observational task that you were asked to carry out, a reflection you were asked to produce regarding differences in behaviour across different groups. There will be a wide range of tasks given to you over the course of the module. You will select a number of these to discuss.
Make sure that you include a reference list, and that you reference literature correctly. The reference list is not included in word count.
With 1,500 words (10% more or less), there is not a huge amount of space for you use for your writing. As discussed previously, we would advise you to stick to no more than 3-4 tasks, and to make sure you focus on reflection on your engagement and learning, rather than use the space to describe the tasks in too much detail. You can use an appendix if you want to include any work you did on the task/exercise that you are discussing (for example transcript or notes). The appendix will not be assessed, nor will it be included in the word count.
I will add an example document where you can see some of the reflective learning logs on tasks from before.  You do not have to use this format. It is there to show the kinds of reflection that would be appropriate. Please refer to the resources uploaded last week for other ways to approach this, or other aspects you might like to include.
The overall format may be the following:
1. Cover sheet (important)
2. Introductory paragraph
3. 3-4 entries of reflections
4. Reference list (not included in word count)
5. (Optional) Appendix (not assessed, not included in word count)
I include one example here, to show the kind of things we are looking for. There are other examples, which we'll make available nearer the time of the assignment.
(This example relates to an exercise that was part of the module in a previous year.)
Reflection 1 ‘Social practices in world literature’ (see Appendix 1)
I have always been a keen reader of literature, and so it was nice to be working with some literary texts for a change. Although I had never thought of using literature in this way, the exercise forced me to not simply go with the story or the writing style, but to use the text as a window into studying cultural practices. First, by scanning each text in order to locate one social practice, I was aware that I was treating the writing as data rather than simply as prose. It was not only a fictional account of characters, their thoughts and story that I was looking at, but a documenting of a culture and the ways people in that culture organise their affairs.
The section that I chose came from Murakami’s 1Q84. In this section, two characters have been drinking tea together, and here they bring the meeting to a close. This is not achieved by having them announcing this in their speech, but rather in the actions the author presents them as doing. This does combine elaborate mutual expressions of appreciation and gratitude, but also the physical loosening of the stable configuration of the tea drinking. Standing up for example can be understood to signal that a person is closing the conversation, especially here where the watering can suggest a switching to a different activity. This brought to mind Laurier’s 2008 study on how people in a café signal the ending of a meeting there, and use multimodal resources to coordinate their closing of the conversation. In Laurier’s study, he notes how the manipulation of certain objects (cups, watches) in particular ways can project a closing, and that these actions are either validated by the co-participant in what they do in response, or contested. This adds a multimodal perspective to earlier work on closings in conversation. Especially relevant would be Schegloff & Sacks’s (1973) study of the systematic practices for moving towards a closing.
Interestingly, the section in the Murakami novel describes one such ‘opening up a closing’, which we see has some very different elements from the closings described by Laurier and Schegloff & Sacks, with far more displays of appreciation included. I wondered if this is a cultural difference – Murakami describing a Japanese scene, Laurier a Scottish setting, and Schegloff & Sacks a North American setting – or whether it relates to levels of formality.
This also led me to consider how we could use historical literature as a way to study cultural practices of the past, or how they change over time. I remember a discussion in one of the lectures about Erasmus, who when visiting England in the 15th Century noted how everybody kissed one another as a form of greeting, and how this was different from his own home culture in The Netherlands. If by looking at literature we are able to chart social routines over time, we can learn more about the dynamics of cultural change.
Laurier, E. (2008). Drinking up endings: Conversational resources of the café. Language & Communication, 28(2), 165-181.
Schegloff, E. A., & Sacks, H. (1973) Opening up closings. Semiotica, 7, 289–327.