56 Similarity
in this case (.)
[+ positive uptake]
Ms. A.: Um- the Buyer’s duty to tender the ten // thousand- //
Prof.: // no //
[- negative uptake]Although there was one instance of uptake in this excerpt, the exchange is over-
whelmingly characterized by nonuptake, and thus resembles more closely discourse
in the lower- rather than higher-status classrooms of the elementary school stud-
ies. And this particular exchange is taken from a Socratic dialogue with a virtuoso
student who was able to sustain the dialogue with only minimal interruption for
the entire class hour. Although there was some variation among the professors in
this study, professors frequently interrupted students, and they generally main-
tained tight control of the discourse. Indeed, professors who differed widely in
philosophy and style of teaching still controlled classroom discourse to the point
that students were almost never permitted a verbal exchange among themselves
that was not mediated by the professor. (For example, rather than permitting one
student to respond to another directly, professors would interject comments such
as “Mr. X., what is your response to Ms. Y.?”)^34 Use of uptake structure to focus
students’ attention on particular aspects of the text varied by law school classroom
in this study but was found in most of the classes.
If we stopped our analysis at this point, we might conclude that the uptake
structure of classic Socratic law school classroom exchanges resembled that of low-
ranked reading classes rather than high-ranked ones. However, a more detailed look
at the pragmatic structure reveals some key differences. Although these law school
exchanges are largely characterized by nonuptake, there is uptake, and it does not
come at random points. In Transcript 4.3 above, uptake occurs when the student
produces a pair of technical terms. Nonuptake occurs when the student attempts
to produce a narrative that tells us a story about two people (albeit Buyer and Seller).
We saw a similar pattern in the exchange centered on Sullivan v. O’Connor, in which
the professor interrupted an attempt to give us the story of the woman and the
surgeon. If we examine that first exchange (Transcript 4.2) from the point of view
of uptake structure, we see a very similar pattern, with negative uptake through-
out until the student produces a procedural term (“appealed”), at which point the
professor responds with positive uptake. A pattern with only one uptake for every
four exchanges between professor and student appears in both examples, in each
case highlighting and picking up on students’ appropriate invocation of legal cat-
egories. In this subtle way, stories of human conflict, complete with their social
contexts and moral overtones, are inexorably supplanted by new readings focused
on layers of textual and legal authority.
Ideologies of Text in Socratic Legal Pedagogy
What model of text is being conveyed by this tightly controlled turn-taking? In both
of the examples above, uptake, pointing to (or indexing) a successful response,
occurs when students produce technical terms. And these are not just any techni-