IIEMCA

Dr Carolyn Baker died on Saturday, 12 July 2003. Earlier this year she had been diagnosed with cancer. She was a loved and respected colleague and friend who made great contributions to the field of early childhood education, and studies of childhood and young people, for over three decades.

Carolyn held a BA, MA and PhD from the University of Toronto. Her MA and PhD were undertaken in the Department of Sociology in Education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. Carolyn’s first appointment in Australia was at the University of New England, Armidale, in 1976. In 1991, she was appointed as an Associate Professor in the School of Education, The University of Queensland, where she worked until her death.

Her work is very well known in the qualitative analysis of language and literacy, and social interaction. She published over 60 refereed journal articles and book chapters, and three books. Her work appears in significant journals such as Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, Harvard Educational Review, Language in Society, Human Studies, Journal of Pragmatics, Qualitative Inquiry, Narrative Inquiry, Language and Communication, the British Journal of Sociology of Education, Childhood, and Early Education and Development. She contributed chapters to distinguished international volumes on language and literacy, qualitative methodology, and the new sociology of childhood. Her work in qualitative methodology drew on ethnography, conversation analysis, and ethnomethodology, which she applied to written texts and talk-in-interaction in institutional and informal settings.

A significant feature of many of her publications was the analysis of adult talk with and about children and adolescents. This represented a unique contribution to the sociology of childhood as well as to the field of language and social interaction. Over the years, she collaborated generously with a number of colleagues, at times leading to shared publications. Her research in early school literacy began with a major project undertaken by Peter Freebody that formed part of the ‘new literacy studies’ in Australia. The project investigated the contents of children’s first schoolbooks and was also concerned with how teachers’ talk with students constructed a form of ‘classroom literacy’. Carolyn contributed significantly to the field of helpline calls through the ARC project (1999-2001) undertaken with Mike Emmison and Alan Firth. This work was the basis of an international symposium on ‘Calling for Help’ in Denmark in 2000. More recently, her project with Susan Danby and Mike Emmison investigated calls to Kids Help Line, a national helpline for children and young people.

 Carolyn had been an associate editor and member of the review board of the Australian Journal of Language and Literacy, and on the editorial boards of Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, The Reading Teacher, Reading Research Quarterly, Ethnographic Studies, and Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education. She served on advisory committees to major national research projects such as the DEET-funded project Everyday Literacy Practices In and Out of Schools in Low Socio-Economic Urban Communities and the DETYA-funded Classroom Discourse in the Upper Primary and Early Secondary Years.

Carolyn is especially remembered by James Heap, Professor and Dean of the College of Education, Ohio University. James supervised Carolyn’s PhD Thesis and he would like to share the following words about her:

Carolyn completed an MA in 1973 at OISE, having been admitted to a Master’s/doctoral track in 1972. When I began working with her in the late seventies she was on leave from the University of New England and was intent on bringing interview data with adolescents into shape as a dissertation. She had decided that the approach she was using from structural functionalism was not productive in ways that met her evolving interests. What she wanted was an ‘interpretive approach to to the study of adolescent socialization and identity’ (the title of her thesis in 1980). Carolyn met with a number of faculty at OISE and was interested in how she could use interpretive approaches, like ethnomethodology and the ‘social construction of reality’ work of Berger et al, to revisit her data and see things that would be more compelling, more informative, something that would be more grounded in experience, more real.

It was amazing and inspiring to see Carolyn achieve a paradigm shift. In less than six months she consumed volumes of interactionist literature. She went from feeling that her data had real limits in terms of representativeness and validity [the n was 43 adolescents, age 12 to 15], to feeling that her data had robust capacity for revealing how adolescents display and produce ‘adolescent’ behaviour and knowledge in and through interaction with an adult. Rather than trying to use her data as a report on ‘adolescent identity’ – as phenomena transcedentent to the interview situation, Carolyn was able to see and treat the interview situation as an instance of the state of affairs on which it purportedly was reporting. She worked intensively to understand the shift in perspective that she needed to achieve. She closely read studies in ethnomethodology and interrogated her data repeatedly. She worked with the hope, and emerging belief, that engagement with her transcripts would leverage her to a new perspective, from which the interactional work of reality construction would become visible and reportable.

With spirit and determination, and exceptional analytic skill, Carolyn achieved her goal, and wrote a provocative, accessible dissertation. She was able to restructure her methodological standpoint, resuscitate her data, and completely rewrite her thesis in record time. She reinvented herself as a scholar, and opened a path of productive scholarship. I am grateful to have had the opportunity and honor to work to work with such a gifted thinker. I mourn her, and our, loss.

James

Carolyn is also remembered by Jenny Perry for her support and encouragement for Jenny to present a paper at the Talk and the Moral Order Conference (TAMOC) in Brisbane, Australia, July 2002. Without Carolyn’s support Jenny’s trip to Australia would not have been possible.

A memorial and thanksgiving service was held for Carolyn on Friday 18 July in the Chapel of Emmanuel College at The University of Queensland.

Susan Danby, James Heap and Jenny Perry.

Baker, C. (1982) Adolescent-adult talk as a practical interpretive problem in Payne, G. and Cuff, E. (Eds.) Doing Teaching London: Batsford

Baker, C. (1983) A ‘second look’ at interviews with adolescents Journal of Youth and Adolescence 12(6): 501-19

Baker, C. (1984) The search for adultness: Membership work in adolescent-adult talk Human Studies, 7: 301-23

Baker, C. (1991) Literary practices and social relations in classroom reading events in Baker, C. and Luke, A. (Eds.) Towards a critical sociology of reading and pedagogy, Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins: 161-88

Baker, C. (1992) Description and analysis in classroom talk and interaction Journal of Classroom Interaction. 27:2. 9-14.

Baker, C. (1997) ‘Ticketing rules’: Categorization and moral ordering in a school staff meeting in Hester, S. and Eglin, P. (Eds.) Culture in Action: Studies in Membership Categorization Analysis Lanham, MD: University Press of America. pp. 79-102.

Baker, C. (1997) Ethnomethodological studies of talk in educational settings in Davies, B. (Ed.) The Encyclopedia of Language and Education, vol. 3: Oral Discourse and Education Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic

Baker, C. (1997) Membership Categorization and Interview Accounts in Silverman, D. (Ed.) Qualitative Research: Theory, Method and Practice London: Sage

Baker, C. (1997) Transcription and representation in literary research in Flood, J., Heath, S.B. and Lapp, D. (Eds.) A Handbook for Literacy Educators: Research on Teaching the Communicative and Visual Arts, New York: Macmillan

Baker, C. (1998/1994) The Analysis of School Texts with Regard to Gender. in Husen, T. and Postlethwaite, T. (eds.) The Encyclopedia of Education, Second Edition. Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1994, Vol.9, pp. 5299-5302. Republished 1998 on CD-ROM

Baker, C. (2000) Locating culture in action: membership categorisation in texts and talk, in Lee, A. and Poynton, C. (Eds.) Culture and text: Discourse and methodology in social research and cultural studies, St. Leonards, NSW: Allen and Unwin

Baker, C. (2002) Ethnomethodological Analyses of Interviews. in Holstein, J. and Gubrium, J. (eds.) Handbook of Interview Research Sage, pp.777-796

Baker, C. (in press) Membership Categorisation in Educational Texts and Talk in Lee, A. and Poynton, C. (Eds.) Culture and Text: Critical Approaches to Discourse Analysis, Sydney: Allen and Unwin

Baker, C. and Freebody, P. (1985) Children’s First School Books: Introductions to the Culture of Literacy. Harvard Educational Review Vol.55, No.4, 381-398.

Baker, C. and Freebody, P. (1987) ‘Constituting the child’ in beginning school readers British Journal of the Sociology of Education 8, 55-76.

Baker, C. and Davies, B. (1989) A lesson on sex roles, Gender and Education, 1: 59-76

Baker, C. and Freebody, P. (1989) Children’s First School Books: Introductions to the Culture of Literacy. Oxford: Basil Blackwell

Baker, C. and Freebody, P. (1989) Talk around text: Constructions of textual and teacher and teacher authority in classroom discourse in de Castell, S., Luke, A. and Luke, C. (Eds.) Language, Authority and Criticism: Readings on the School Textbook London/Philadelphia: Falmer Press

Baker, C. and Luke, A. (eds.) (1991) Towards a Critical Sociology of Reading Pedagogy: Papers of the X11 World Congress on Reading. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, Pragmatics and Beyond New Series, xxi+278pp

Baker, C. and Freebody, P. (2001/1993) The Crediting of Literate Competence in Classroom Talk. Australian Journal Language and Literacy Vol.16, No.4, 1993, 279-294; reprinted in Fehring, H. and Green, P. (eds.) Critical Literacy. Newark, Delaware: International Reading Association, 2001, pp.58-74

Baker, C. and Keogh, J. (1995) Accounting for achievement in parent-teacher interviews Human Studies, 18(2): 263-300

Baker, C. and Keogh, J. (1997) Mapping moral orders in parent teacher interviews in Marcarino, A. (Ed.) Analisi della conversatione e prospettive di recerca in etnometodologia, Urbino: Editioni Quattro Venti: 25-42

Baker, C. and Johnson, G. (1998) Interview Talk as Professional Practice. Language and Education 12,(4), 229-242

Baker, C. and Campbell, R. (1999) Children, Language and Power in Campbell, R. and Green, D. (Eds.) Literacies and Learners: Current Perspectives, Sydney: Prentice-Hall

Baker, C. and Campbell, R. (2000) Children, Language and Power. in Campbell, R. and Green, D. (eds.) Literacies and Learners: Current Perspectives. Sydney: Prentice Hall

Baker, C. and Johnson, G. (2000) Stories of Courtship and Marriage: Orientations in Openings. Narrative Inquiry 10(1), 1-25

Baker, C., Emmison, M. and Firth, A. (2001) Discovering order in opening sequences: calls to a software helpline in McHoul, A. and Rapley, M. (Eds.) How to Analyse Talk in Institutional Settings: A Casebook of Methods London: Continuum

Campbell, R. and Baker, C. (2003) Children learning language. in Green, D. and Campbell, R. Literacies and Learners: Current Perspectives (2^nd ed.) Frenchs Forest, NSW: Prentice Hall

Christensen, C. and Baker, C. (in press/2002) Pedagogy, Observation and the Construction of Learning Disabilities. Pedagogy, Culture and Society, 10(1)

Danby, S. and Baker, C. (1998) How to be masculine in the block area, Childhood, 5(2), 151-175

Danby, S. and Baker, C. (1998) What’s the problem? Restoring Social Order in the Preschool Classroom in Hutchby, I. and Moran-Ellis, J. (Eds.) Children and Social Competence: Arenas of Action, London: Falmer:: 157-86

Danby, S. and Baker, C. (2000) Unravelling the Fabric of Social Order in Block Area in Hester,S. and Francis, D. (Eds.) Local Educational Order: Ethnomethodological Studies in Action Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company

Danby, S. and Baker, C. (2001) Escalating Terror: Communicative Strategies in a Preschool Classroom Dispute. Early Education and Development 12(3), 343-358

Freebody, P. and Baker, C. (1996) Categories and sense-making in the talk and texts of schooling in Bull, G. and Anstey, M. (Eds.) Lexicons of Literacy, Sydney: Prentice Hall: 145-59

Freebody, P. and baker, C. (2003) Categories and accounts in literacy research and education: changing targets. in Bull, G. and Anstey, M. The Literacy Lexicon (2^nd ed.) Frenchs Forest, NSW: Prentice Hall

Honan, E., Knobel, M., Baker, C. and Davies, B. (2000) Producing Possible Hannahs: Theory and the Subject of Research. Qualitative Inquiry 6(1), 9-32

Honan, E., Knobel, M., Baker, C. and Davies, B. (2001) La Produccion de Posibles Anas: La Theoria y el Objecto do la Invetigacion. Desencuentros: Revista de Analsis Educativo y Social 2, 14-38 (Spanish translation of Honan et al. 2000)

Johnson, G. and Baker, C. (1998) Australian- Italian Courtship and Marriage Stories, Queensland: Central Queensland University Press. XV1 + 139pp.

Leiminer, M. and Baker, C. (1999) A Child’s Say in Parent-Teacher Talk at the Preschool: Using Conversation Analysis in Early Childhood Settings. Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood 1(2), 135-152

Leiminer, M. and Baker, C. (2002) Negotiating Competing Versions of ‘The Child’: An Analysis of a Child’s Competence in Participation in Parent-Teacher Talk at the Preschool. in Mason, J. and Wilkinson, M. (eds.) Taking Children Seriously. Conference Proceedings, Childhood and Youth Policy Research Unit, University of Western Sydney, Macarthur, pp. 276-299.

Moni, K., van Kraayenoord, C. and Baker, C. (1999) English Teachers’ Perceptions of Literacy Assessment in the First Year of Secondary School. Australian Journal of Language and Literacy 22(1), 26-39

Moni, K., van Kraayenoord, C. and Baker, C. (2002) Students perception of literacy assessment. Assessment in Education, 9(3), 319-342

Moni, K., van Kraayenoord, C. and Baker, C. (2003) An investigation of discourses of literacy assessment in two first year high school English classrooms. Australian Journal of Language and Literacy, 26(1), pp. 67-83

Moni, K., van Kraayenoord, C. and Baker, C. (in press) Reading the Texts of Assessment Task Sheets in Two Year 8 English Classrooms. Language and Education

Roulston, K.J., Baker, C. and Liljestrom, A. (2001) Analyzing the Interviewer’s Work in Generating Research Data: The Case of Complaints, Qualitative Inquiry, 7(6), 745-72

Silverman, D., Baker, C. and Keogh, J. (1998) The Case of the Silent Child: Advice-Giving and Advice-Reception in Parent-Teacher Interviews in Hutchby, I. And Moran Ellis, J. (Eds.) Children and Social Competency: Arenas of Action, London: Falmer: 220-40