thescholarshipofcockfighting- u w faculty web server（thescholarshipofcockfighting - u w教员web服务器）.docVIP

The scholarship of cockfighting Sally Fincher and Josh Tenenberg University of Kent, UK; University of Washington, Tacoma USA Abstract Why do teachers need a scholarly literature in teaching and learning? In the first part of this paper, we look at the SoTL scholarly forms, arguing that they emerge from a rhetoric of SoTL that is more focused on legitimisation than improvement. In the second part, we argue that teaching is different and that different representational forms are required. We discuss the distinctly non-scholarly representation of teaching practice, the course portfolio, and the novel way in which we have used it as a means for practitioners teaching the same disciplinary subject to make their work visible to one another. Questioning a Scholarship of Practice Ever since Clifford Geertz (1973) first published “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight”, the paper has been one of the canons of anthropological literature. In it he describes the highly situated and specific practices of cockfighting: the care of the birds, the (semi-illicit) preparations for a fight, the elaborate ringside betting rituals. But he goes beyond the merely descriptive, providing an interpretive frame of this cultural practice in its context, whereby cockfighting symbolises Balinese constructions of maleness and cultural loyalties. The audience for this work is Geertz’ anthropological colleagues and, ultimately, a wider readership from the Western World. Against this background, it strikes us as absurd that cockfighters themselves might hungrily read Geertz to gain competitive advantage over their rivals. This absurdity is not confined to cockfighting. It is equally hard to imagine this sort of literature being appropriate in other areas of practical activity, hard to imagine that the practice-based communities of photocopier repairmen, taxi drivers or handymen would consider the “scholarship of X” helpful with regard to the practice of X. Rather, photocopier repairmen cons