Jargon, Terms of Art, Method, and Membership in Scholarly Communities

Intended students: first- and second-year college and community college students, and advanced college-bound high-school students.

Resources needed: web access to the "Jargon 4.2.0" page run by Arjan de Mes mes@science.uva.nl
Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science University of Amsterdam, to whom the author of this exercise owes hearty thanks for explaining much of the inner world of Computer Science's outer limits.  (Warning: some quoted material may contain profanity, but nothing worse than is heard in typical dormitories or mainstream cable TV shows.  The site, itself, is not prurient.)

Rationale:    Every scholarly discipline is founded upon accepted methods of study, theory which explains why those methods and not others are appropriate, and terms of art which uniquely describe the discipline to its members.  To play the scholars game requires membership in the community of people who already know the method, theory and terms of art, but students typically are forced to pick majors long before they're familiar with these essential conditions for "knowing."  Because so many high schools still teach memorization of facts as "knowing," first- and second-year students tend to struggle with the difficulties of learning how those facts became knowable and how scholars discuss them in writing.  As in most cases, making this process something more game-like sometimes can increase students' intrinsic motivation to learn and that may help them begin to bond with the scholars who will be teaching them.

        First introduce the basic description of a college "major" as an apprenticeship in a scholarly discipline which defines who belongs to it and how good a given piece of work is thought to be.  This can demystify the whole process of grading, paper topic choice, and writer-audience relations.  If you have time for a day or more of free-wheeling discussion, you can lead students to understand how to understand why research is done, what plagiarism is,, and a host of other complex ethical issues.  Please try to make time for this additional ethical dimension to emerge, either before or after the exercise.  It may be students' best chance to develop an adult, scholarly respect for ideas as intellectual property, and it could save your institution a great deal of legal and administrative heartache in later years.

     Then tell students to open their computer's Internet browsers and connect to http://www.science.uva.nl/~mes/jargon/ where they may surf freely in Arjan de Mes's Jargon 4.2.0 site.  Warn them that they will be responsible for understanding what "jargon" is in Computer Science and for bringing to class their favorite definitions of things in CS jargon.  At least one of those jargon terms should be a word they or their friends had used before without knowing clearly what it meant or (perhaps) where it came from.  In class, try to get them to distinguish between "pure jargon," the slang of a profession, and the kinds of jargon that really are "terms of art," peculiar ways of understanding the discipline that are related to the rules members follow (their method) or beliefs they share about how things should be done correctly (their theory).

     Finally, at the end of the second or third class, pass out an assignment that requires them to do some version of the following things, perhaps over three to five days to allow for faculty in other disciplines to cooperate:

1)  Go to the office(s) of faculty in the major you believe you will chose, and make an appointment for a conference lasting between 30 and 60 minutes with as many instructors as you have time to meet.  Tell the faculty member(s) you will want to interview them about their scholarly specialization.

2)  Before the interview, refresh your memory about what good interviewers do, and provide yourself with at least a convenient pad of paper or clip board on which to record notes, and perhaps a tape recorder if your subject will consent to taping.

3)  At the interview, ask the faculty member to list five or more terms s/he believes all members of the discipline would use when discussing their research but that very few or no members of the general population would know.  Ask for definitions of the terms in words a layman can understand, and a brief explanation of why the term is preferred to something more simple.

4)  Ask the faculty member to explain what kinds of things the discipline would consider "intellectual property" and how ownership is determined if there is a dispute. 

5)  Ask the faculty member whether the discipline has any slang terms or jargon, and if it does, ask for definitions of the terms and circumstances in which they'd be used, as well as any in which they should not be used.

6)  After the interview is over, compile the results into a short dictionary of terms of art and jargon for the discipline.  Look at the entries in an unabridged dictionary as a guide.  Provide some guide to pronunciation, indicate what part of speech it is, give a derivation if it's known, near-synonyms and/or antonyms if they exist, and then define it, providing usage examples in short complete sentences that indicate the context in which it would be used correctly.  Warn readers if the term is slang, offensive, obsolete, etc.  Enterprising students may want to expand their entries by using information from the Oxford English Dictionary, or other professional dictionaries.  All student dictionaries should have a "Bibliography," "Sources" or "Works Cited" section, properly formatted for the discipline, and citing faculty informants as required.

     On the day the assignments are due, students can be asked to present their best or most obscure or funniest term, with explanations of its use.  This process also lends itself to creation of websites or printed components of a major-selection portfolio, etc.  If assignments are graded, some attention should be given to the quality of the students' investigative interview, including accuracy and thoroughness, as well as the literacy of the dictionaries that are produced.

     A good follow-up assignment would send students back to the departments to ask faculty what professional journals they publish in, which journals they follow to remain current in their field, and which journals they subscribe to themselves.  That can lead to a study of journals' disciplinary focus, their style sheets, their editorial and peer review processes, their time-to-publication and other practical professional issues.  Finally, it can be used to prepare students to do an independent research project using those journals to prepare a "review of the literature" on a topic that is currently being debated by professionals in the field.  The rapport students develop with faculty during the interviews can be a big help later in this process, and it also can facilitate their choice of a major adviser unless that process is handled by the department, itself.