Not surprisingly, I found the visual metaphors of these articles very compelling. Between terms like field, play, follow the ball, and follow the game, I couldn’t think about these articles without a vivid picture of a youth soccer field in my mind. I’ve been coaching my 6-year olds son’s AYSO soccer team for the last couple of months, and that space became the perfect image for applying these terms.
For the record, I am not a soccer guy. I haven’t played soccer since I was a little kid myself, and I can’t recall watching a soccer game in person or on T.V. Unlike my tenure as a T-ball coach where I could at least claim to be a fan of the game, I didn’t coach soccer out of a love for the game, just a love for my kid. That, and the fact that the league was very desparate for coaches. I’ve finnally learned that at this level the main requirements for youth coaches are for us to be willing and available, to pass a criminal background check, and to know (at least slightly) more about the sport than the kids.
I say all of this to extend the metaphor of how coming to understand genre field analysis for a novice or developing communictor is very much like understanding soccer field analysis for a novice or developing player/coach.
Communication is nothing if not a complex set of interactions, and interactions are what happened with my soccer team. We interacted with non-responsive elements (the boundaries, the goals, etc.) which form the Genre-agents, but also with other responsive elements (the other players – both teammates and opponents) which formed the player-agents. Just being on the same field at the same time didn’t necessarily force interactions, those interactions were limited to tranformitive locales which in our case wasn’t usually far from where the ball was; stopping or changing the direction of the ball or scoring a goal with the ball was the focus of the game. Of course none of this takes place without play scenarios or strategic choices that we made in an attempt to increase the likelihood of us scoring goals.
As a novice coach I found much of my energy early on was to understand the genre-agents – those non responsive elements of the game, the rules of play, the dimensions of the field, etc. More experienced coaches (especially those with playing experience) could take these for granted, but I couldn’t. As a result, and also because of my lack of experience, I was woefully dificient in the play scenarios. “Kick the ball into the goal!” was about as sophisticated as my coaching (or my players appreciation for the game) ever came.
As a communication teacher, I see the need for us to help our students understand these four elements. We teach various genres of communication (the resume, the persuasive essay, the motivational speech, etc.) but how often is our instruction as simple as “kick the ball into the goal!”
One of my go-to essays in rhetorical theory is Lloyd Bitzer’s The Rhetorical Situation. In his essay, Bitzer defines the rhetorical situation as being defined by exigencies, audiences, and constraints. I’ve always liked this approach better than genre theory, but the more I’m coming to understand genre theory (and these readings were very illuminating), the more helpful it is becoming to me. At any rate, I think of this situation or genre-field as the field in which we operate. In many ways the audience and constraints are like the boundaries of the soccer field.
I guess my take-away from all of this is that Moeller and Christensen (2010) give us a helpful way for analyzing the spaces in which communication takes place. Understanding this framework of analysis can make us and our students more effective communicators.
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