Response to Mutnick and Moran

Reading Mutnick’s article I realized that it is the first time that I read the word “basic writers”. Personally, I don’t like this denomination. I would call them “unexperienced” more than “basic”. I guess this is part of the conventions in the field, which I do not completely manage. While reading the text, I also realized that the development of the conceptualization of learners’ errors is similar to the development it had in the foreign language education field. From being almost something that should be avoided, something bad, errors started to be seen as part of the learning process, as Shaughnessy claims, according to Mutnick. I do agree that teachers need to learn from learners’ errors since these are not random: “Shaughnessy’s approach revealed error to be logical, a sign of intention and intelligence as the writer groped for conventional forms” (p. 186). On the other hand, I am not sure if I agree with Horning, when she claims that “basic writers develop writing skills in the same way that other adults develop second language skills” (p. 187). L1 and L2 writing processes, in my opinion, are different just by the mere fact that the L2 writing process counts with the L1 not only as a resource but also as an intervening factor in the process itself. However, it is true that error research is much more developed in L2 research, and composition teachers could gain some insights from it.
Reading this article made me think that the basic paradox between the liberatory or democratic role of school. What do we want as composition teachers? Socialize our students to be neat academic writers or lead them to develop their own “voice” (and here we go to the beginning of the semester!)? Train them to be one more in the mainstream or give them tools to defy it? Well… I chose education as my path, thinking that I could change the world. Today I think that we don’t have such a power. We are one component of a huuuge system. Up to now my only stance is to offer what I have: my passion for writing and my commitment as an educator. After all, I am human! And a graduate student one! And I am still trying to go beyond conceptualizations of my own experience with writing that enable me to write in the American academy and at the same time bring my otherness into it. I am still trying to find my Anzaldúa!

Reading Moran, I thought about Shipka’s question: do we have to include technology and multimedia texts in our courses? Is it our field? Well, I do think that we need to include this things in our curriculum. I am not certain about how much importance they should have, but I discover that in my teaching, Blackboard has become a huge resource for my class. In some way I “force” my students to use it (one example: homework is in Blackboard) because I think it is a great extension of the class.
When reading the section “Applications of computer technologies for writers and teachers” I wondered if there is any research on composing online and offline in second language. As a second language speaker, the word processor is my great friend when it comes to spelling, and I feel that this affects my writing process. Up to now, I could not find any substantial body of research on this. When you type “foreign language” and “word processor” in ERIC, for example, you have only one page with search results! And most of them are articles from the end of the 1990s. I guess we got fascinated by internet and forgot that the word processor is also a tool that influences our writing process. Most of the bulk of research in FL teaching is in the use of Computer Mediated Communication (CMC) since it provides the opportunity to link native speakers with FL students. Another thought: when I did the textbook research task, it called my attention how in the older book students were taught how to use the library and even jot down citations in flashcards when researching. In the same lines: shouldn’t we teach how to use word processors and libraries databases? I am still wondering.

Response to McLeod

McLeod: “the person who has the disciplinary knowledge base and writes the discourse as a mother tongue is the person who can best serve as mentor into this professional-apprentice relationship” (p. 155). This quote reminded me of Lave and Wenger’s theory where learning is seen as becoming a participant in a community of practice. It is why learning to write in a discipline is such a tricky thing because one does not only have to learn the content in the disciplines to establish a conversation in the field, but also has to learn how to take on that conversation. And it is in this intersection between knowing and saying that writing to learn and writing to communicate come closer to each other.
How to ask professors to “demystify their own disciplinary discourse for students” (p. 155)? How to engage professors in this? This is hard not only due to personal interests but also because this is institutionally compartmentalized. It is hard for me to imagine a chemistry teacher choosing to read the “resources for teachers in the disciplines” (p. 155) that McLeod suggests instead of an article in a journal in his/her own field.
I absolutely agree with McLeod when he asserts that faculty worshops should “model the pedagogy they are promulgating” (p. 159) and this made me think about my last presentation about writing and how little we made experience the teachers we were in theory training for teaching writing in a second language.
Hobson’s article made me think about the fact that the writing center provides an unique place to practice (as an exercise and as a social action). I think one of the main factors that influence this is that in this space the student is not evaluated and can establish a different relationship with the tutor than he/she would do with a student. However, writing tutors lack the expertise that the professors have and this sometimes can be negative, especially for ESL graduate students. This is why I would question the “democratic” space that Hobson proposes. Sometimes writing tutors can’t provide a the support students need due to their lack of knowledge of the subject matter. However, I do believe in collaborative learning and I see this as one of the best characteristics of the writing centers along with the bridging function that it brings. As far as I know writing centers do not exist in Argentine universities and I think it would be great if they were implemented.

Response to Jarratt

Reading Jarratt I started to think why if so many scholars want to change the system (in general terms) they didn’t achieve it. Well, I think that it has to do with what Foucault states about power: there is no power without resistance. I think that instead of reading only the “resistance” in pedagogies such as feminist, cultural, critical, as something that failed (because the system is still there) we should read them as signs and products of their own historical time. Within their claims lays, I think, something that is as valuable as change and that in some way brings change: reflection. The fact that many scholars have been questioning what should be taught in composition courses, in my opinion, is not bad. It is a good sign that there is a lot of reflection going on in the field.
I liked the fact that Jarratt recognizes that “there are differences within “feminism,” and some of the essays recommended here write about women as though they were an undifferentiated group; some fail to make connections with other forms of social difference” (p. 117). I liked this in the same way I liked how Bridwell-Bowles accepted her limitations at the time of being in front of a class and even questioned why she was teaching. This shows that there is commitment and openness in these scholars, and I think that openness together with the closeness that sometimes comes with passion is what keeps the field moving.
Regarding the critiques that feminist pedagogy has received: I think that as teachers it is better to be clear with our students, and express our alignment with certain ideologies. Does this mean that we are trying to get students to like what we like or to think as we think? I don’t think so. The student who will follow the teacher’s game to get a good grade is still gonna do it whether the teacher is explicit about his/her ideology or not. And the student who will contest the teacher will also do it. Why play obscure games? Why not make it clear from the beginning? I do not buy the objectivity myth, and I think that my teaching should be coherent with this. As Jarratt states: “one of the strengths of feminist pedagogy is its relentless capacity for dialogue and self-critique, and its ability to read and listen rhetorically” (p. 117). I don’t know if I would call myself feminist, but I definitively agree with this quote. Being open allow us to be contested and by being contested we can reformulate our ideas. I think in general lines, Jarratt’s text acts out the core of many feminist theories: being not prescriptive (as the paternalist discourse) but opened to new possibilities.

Response to George & Trimbur and George

Needless to say that being Brazil’s neighbors Freirean pedagogy is common currency in Argentina. But I absolutely agree with George: coordinate means and ends within it is a tricky issue. When reading about radical teachers in the section “Who is to be liberated from what?” I thought about my position here in the US as a teacher and my past experiences as a teacher. When teaching in Argentina, I worked in really poor areas, where some of my students were sharing a bed with a sibling due to lack of resources, shootings were everyday reality, and food was many times provided only by the school. I thought my position was similar to the one that George describes. I did learn a lot working in these areas. Sometimes I think that is more what I learnt than what I taught. On the other hand, here in the US, many times I am the one who is in a lower social position. And not only because I make less money than most of the students in my class, but also because I lack many other resources, including cultural ones. On the other hand, there is something that positions me in a different space and that is the fact that I am not American and I am here to study. I think that all these things have to influence my teaching and I think that swimming among books all the time in my PhD studies many times sets me away from the world. The thought that kept on coming to my head and it keeps on coming every time I hear, read, or try to profess a critical pedagogy is that one thing is the pedagogy and the other is classroom practice. Many pedagogies sound great but when it comes to apply it in the classroom teachers find themselves in not one but many crossroads. I do think, though, that informed decisions are better than non-informed ones. And that’s why many times I think that the phrase: “to know it’s to hurt” holds a lot of true. Because the more we know the more conscious we became and the more we have to acknowledge that sometimes reality overwhelms us and that there are many things that we could have controlled and we did not. There is a good thing in all this: we learn from our errors. These are some of the more than two hundred teenagers that taught me so much in Argentina:

George and Trimbur text got me absolutely lost. I guess this is in part because it establishes are really high-context dialogue with many authors and trends in the composition field. In addition, in the section “Connections to composition”, where the authors start to define how British cultural studies were connected to the composition field, I felt that they were using the term “cultural studies” as an umbrella term, that included many “trends” (as the authors call it). Reading the trends that were included in cultural studies I felt that everything was included. Leaving aside the cognitivists, the author included almost every movement that we had analyzed in class. At the same time, got really lost because I felt the authors were bouncing between defining pedagogies in the composition classroom, theories in the composition field, and content of the composition classroom. The three aforementioned elements are, in my opinion, interrelated but are not homologous. One more thing that I’d like to mention is that it was hard for me to see a straightforward relationship between the cultural theories outlined at the beginning of the chapter and the composition classroom. Again, I guess this is due to my lack of knowledge, but I would have liked to have a little more contextual information.

Response to Covino and Moore Howard.

When reading Covino I thought it was weird that the expressivists and those who were against current-traditional rhetoric found “support in the stress on rhetorical invention voiced in a number of historicized approaches to pedagogy” (p. 37). I got a little mixed trying to understand if these authors were advocating for teaching the history of rhetoric or for applying old rhetoric methods in the classroom. I guess my lack of knowledge about rhetoric helped this. I got confused and did not understand if the author was analyzing how the concept of rhetoric was taught in composition classes or how, depending on how people interpreted the concept of rhetoric, composition classes were conceptualized. I liked how Covino related the disappearance of a rhetoric linked to contextual properties with the “rise of science” (p. 43). I don’t know much about the field but I liked Covino’s idea that current-traditional rhetoric is a parenthesis in the development of a field that has always conceptualized rhetoric in an expansive sense. Along with the author’s last sentence, it is my opinion that there is no good or bad rhetorical model but everything depends on how it is applied in the classroom.
Moore Howard’s (are both her last names?) text was really nice to read. In my practice (as much as I can) I like to apply collaborative pedagogy. Actually, I am thinking to apply this concept along with distributed cognitions to a paper that I am writing about the use of the discussion boards in language classes. I enjoyed reading the section where the author analyzes how collaborative learning interrogates how we conceptualize authorship, learning processes and the writing activity itself. I think that the concept of authorship at the same time is related with the capitalist mode of production and it is reflected in the concept of copyright. Knowledge as something that can be possessed is a modern conceptualization and it is consistent with the romantic and individualist notion of authorship. I did not understand completely the section “Writer/text collaboration” and I would love to go over this part in class.

Response to Wysocki

I like the way she organized her text and how she combined her personal experience when looking at the Peek ad and the theories to analyze it. I agree with the author that we need to be conscious that the ways we read and analyze visual texts nowadays are a result of our cultural history. Actually, science is a product of society so it will always be an account embedded in socio-historical and material conditions. I like the way she reflected how the mode of production of our historical era is reflected in the theoretical apparatuses that we use to analyze products of our culture. On the other hand, it was a little hard for me to understand how she tried to bring together the universal (in Kant’s aesthetics) to the particular when analyzing visual texts. I felt that not knowing much about Kant’s aesthetic theory I missed a great deal of what Wysocki was proposing. However, I was able to grasp and agree with the notion of beauty not as something that can be possessed but as something that we build in relation to others. I think this is also consistent with our historical era and the emergence of postmodernism. I related the universal of beauty expressed in Kant’s aesthetic with the monolithic discourses that Lyotard states the modern era brought. On the other hand, I related the concept of beauty as something that is built in “the interaction between two beings” (p. 169) with the multiplicity of discourses that the postmodern era claim and with the falling or inexistence of fundamental truths.
I think the activities proposed by Wysocki are really good. I picture students being really engaged with the activities. On the other hand, I do not know if I could implement these activities right away, since I lack computer skills and basic vocabulary to talk about visual work. Nevertheless, I especially liked activity number 6 since the students are producing or re-designing a real web page and I think that there is nothing better that propose to students compose texts that will be actually published and will impact a real audience (one that it is beyond the classroom walls). In addition, students have the opportunity to analyze professors’ web pages, which I also consider academic texts. One last thing that I think it is really good about this assignment is that students can have the opportunity to relate to faculty in a different way and seriously take and practice the role of designer and teacher. At the same time, I was thinking about how many constraints we can find in the classroom if our students do not know how to build web pages. I think this is a kind of literacy that should be taught at the university. And I should learn it!
On the other hand, reading Josh's blog, his last words are still kind of bouncing in my head... maybe lady visual composition should fight for have her own classes... something to think about.

Response to Sirc

OK, let’s collect my thoughts while reading this text:
First piece:
I could not understand the way he framed the only “historical box” (as Sirc calls them) that I knew little about (this is Benjamin). Sirc attaches to a Marxist philosopher a bourgeoisie conceptualization of the collector? Puzzled here.
“the student is a cyber-flâneur in the virtual urban”??? well, I guess it is a little different the way centuries ago the term “flâneur” was being conceptualized by these guys who were breaking their heads trying to break a romance conception of authorship and re-framing it in a heavily-political-embedded context. They were devoting their lives to this, not only going for credits. Puzzled here as well.
Authors and more authors quoting authors. Orphan page numbers between parentheses. Sirc text is a big box with mixed things. Puzzled again.
Sirc wants passion out of their students by following an artist way of living and conceptualizing art? By developing those skills? But the flâneur is immersed in experience, is an object of art, does not “acquire it”! Oh, and OK: they start the virtual urban tour in his website. Puzzled one more time.
Second piece:
Well, I guess I got the idea and foundation of the activities by reading them. But I would definitively invest more in the reflective commentary. I loved the idea of the teacher as a curator and the class as a museum, with its institutional frame. A couple of pieces of the puzzle matched!
And having finished the text, I will collect the pieces of my puzzled brain, hold hands with my Dionysian side, put myself in a box and go to bed.

Challenge:
Do you think the website foundmagazine.com would pass Sirc composition course with flying colors? Now: who would the grade belong to? Is collective composition part of the new technologies of composing?

Response to Selfe

I liked Selfe’s chapter. I think the activities she proposes are well designed and are consistent with what she proposes regarding implementing new media texts in the classroom. I think that it is true that teachers resist working with new media texts in part because of the lack of knowledge and analytical apparatuses. On the other hand, I also think that we must acknowledge that new media is just emerging and that especially in the academic environment, it has less status that printed media. We were discussing this in class a couple of weeks ago, when talking about getting published and how publishing in an online journal has less value than publishing in a printed journal. I was also thinking about how, for example, the journal “Computers and composition” is different online and in print. Why is this? Well, in my opinion this is due to the fact that the academic environment in general keeps on endorsing more printed media than online texts. This also influences what we teach. I think that in the educational field there is always a kind of anachronism with what is included in the curriculum and it takes some time for new knowledge to be included in the curriculum. I definitively agree that visual literacy should be taken more seriously in school settings given the prominent place that is gaining in our world. In this, I agree with the new London group and I advocate for “literacies” instead of “literacy” and for a definition of “composition” broader than the alphabetic one. On the other hand, I do feel that in many ways I am illiterate and I lack the analytical apparatus and knowledge to better understand the visual. I think that teachers exploring together with students these issues in the classroom could be a good start point. But on the other hand, I would also love to see that in teacher education this gains a more prominent place. This is: yeah, the ballerina shoes are cute but the rationale behind them is awesome! Why people keep on looking to the “cute”?

Response to Dietrich & Sommers

I think that Dietrich's piece shows that already in the 70s there were advocates to apply conferencing with students. While reading I found that I do not agree with the following paragraph: “The first benefit of this requirement [explanatory paragraph] is that it forces students to have a rhetorical strategy. Initially, I suspect, some students write their essays and then think of a strategy to fit”. (p. 195). First, I think that everybody has a rhetorical strategy in any kind of writing. In my opinion, the mere action of writing is already a rhetorical strategy. Now, if with “rhetorical strategy” she refers to a text that fits in traditional rhetoric characteristics, well, that’s a different story. In addition, I do not think that strategies are previous to the text or ex post facto. Process theory demonstrates that we elaborate our rhetorical strategies during the whole composing process, not only at the beginning and end of it. On the other hand, I liked the following quote: “It would be sadly ironic if a writing class led students to confine their writing to what is safe rather than give them a wider range of options” (p. 196). But again, I think this depends on how the teacher teaches the class and how writing tasks are proposed to the students. And sometimes even the best teachers’ intentions don’t guarantee that students will explore “a wide range of options” instead of just fulfilling assignments.
Regarding Sommers’ text: I loved how explicit he is, giving details such as “the memo questions can usually be placed on the same sheet as the essay assignment, making it easy for students to see the connections between the two writing tasks” (p. 176). I agree with the function he assigns to memos: guide teachers in what kind of feedback offer students and being a real reader and helping students to reflect on their composing processes. He proposes, similarly to Brannon and Knoblach, that teachers should give the benefit of the doubt to students. However, Sommers states that teachers should not try to be completely ignorant of audience and purpose since they need to play the role of editor or collaborator. I also liked the fact that Sommers proposes to change the questions in every writing memo students have to answer and he explains that this is because the memo has to be linked with the writing task. I enjoyed reading this text. I would love to apply this in the second language classroom to learn more about the composing process of my students.

Response to Probst & Beach

The flexibility that Beach proposes (p. 130) is necessary to have to perform self-assessment falls into the abysms of his own writing: a series of fixed steps to conferencing with students and to scaffold them. This is opposed to the idea of dialogue that the teacher-student conference, in my opinion, should have.
In addition, I thought the way of representing the assessing techniques that the author proposes is not too “happy”. He claims that “assessing is, furthermore, a recursive process” (p. 131). And I cannot see this recursive feature in the figure he presents. I guess that all the “I”es that I found in the text made it hard for me to believe that this guy would let a student talk more than 2 minutes in a conference. Hahaha!!!! And he “diagnoses” them! (p. 137).
On the other hand, I have to accept that I finished reading this text late tonight and according to transactional theory maybe my transaction is not the best ever.
And talking about Probst text: when I read Jensen and DiTiberio’s characterization of personality traits, I could not avoid thinking about my writing process and Liz’s writing process. When doing the transcription, I realized how different our processes were. And I guess I do not need to name who is in which dimension especially when referring to the extraversion-introversion one. I also related this text with my last blog, especially page 75, when he proposes that teachers should “abandon the illusory goal of objectivity”.
One last thing that I would like to add: any of you ever felt that “sense of completeness that successful writing yields? (p. 78)… not me… :(

Response to Brannon and Knoblauch

I agree with the authors that any pedagogical change implies a great deal of attitudinal change. However, while reading the following sentence
“Student writers, then, are put into the awkward position of having to accommodate, not only the personal intentions that guide their choice-making, but also the teacher-reader expectations about how the assignment should be completed” (p. 158).
I was wondering: Do not any writing demands this from the authors? Yes. But maybe writing in the classroom exaggerates this. However, other kinds of writing also pose this kind of demands on the writers. Take for example academic writing. Even if you are a consecrated scholar, you will have to adjust to the ideal text of the reviewers. And this is even more noticeable with second language writers, since many times papers are rejected not because they communicate bad research but because they communicate it in a “bad” way. My point is, many times readers determine “what the writing will be about, the form it will take, and the criteria that will determine its success” (p. 158). With this I don’t want to communicate the message: the world is not an easy place and school has to prepare you for it by treating you in a bad way in order to toughen you up. What I wanna say here is that this depends on what we set as an objective for the composition course.
On the other hand, I do agree that teacher feedback should be based in negotiation and that teachers should care more for what the students are intending to communicate to be able to guide them better in the composing process. Sometimes, I found that the negotiation process with my students appears only when I don’t understand what they are trying to say, taking as something given that I understood the rest. I also found myself giving them form-centered feedback.
Another thing that I would like to add is that the model the authors are trying to go against is, as they say, deeply rooted in pedagogical assumptions about the teacher and students role that it is really hard to change. For example, when I was reading this phrase:“what might be regarded as “errors” on a single-draft assignment may be seen as opportunities to clarify or refine relationships between intention and effect” (p. 162) the following image came to my mind: how much some students hate to scratch what they wrote and reformulate it. I think this is rooted in a linear conception about writing that it is deeply embedded in our culture. So, as the authors say: “attitudes are more important than methods”, and I think it is there where our most deep assumptions about writing and writing pedagogy have to be changed. Not an easy task.

Random blog... response to many readings

Tension between the universal and the subjective are more marked in composition studies?

What is the “lore” of composition studies?

Writing is that interstitial space between the common places and the originality of subjectivity. Between the universality in theory hidden in the canon and the originality embodied in the writer as a singular subject. Classics and romantics, postmodern and literacy scholars. Each one of them define and redefine the purpose of composition courses. And I am lost in the middle! :( or :)?

Response to Bridwell-Bowles &Carroll

I loved both texts. I guess that in them I found the balance or the middle ground that I was so eager to find in the previous reading. When finishing both texts I got the goose bumps (is this how you spell it?). Why? Well, first, I felt identified. Who, as a teacher, has never felt as Carroll explains in her last paragraph: “I sometimes lose the delicate wonder why I am standing in the front of the classroom” (p. 932)? Second, I think these two readings can be situated in the middle of the previous text. And this middle ground is showed in the content and in the form of both readings. I would characterize both texts as academic texts, and at the same time both authors act out their claims. Carroll, does it by giving different endings and through this she re-appropriates the postmodern discourse that “resists closure” (p. 930) and in this way she tries to build her authenticity and authority not as something finished. On the other hand, Bridwell-Bowles’ ending was appealed to me because I think the self-reflection she offers about her practice shows her consciousness about her own limits. I really enjoyed reading the phrase “I can afford the luxury of experimentation because I am a tenured and reasonably secure member of the profession” (p. 366). I think this was the phrase that I was lacking when reading Elbow’s claims. I think this is a key phrase. Consciousness of our own limitations. Consciousness about how diverse the students who are in our classrooms are and how diverse our own pedagogies can be as the time passes by (issue that Bridwell-Bowles also mentions). When finishing reading this texts I started to think how would I take this texts in my own practice. I said in previous blogs that if I were teaching a first year comp course I would be somewhat eclectic. I would go half for academic writing (yeah, old and hated research paper ladies and gentlemen) and half for a more personal writing. But with personal writing I do not refer to the personal essay. I would try to create an space in my classroom where students compose how and what they want. And this is in a broad sense: through whatever medium, media, students would have to make a point, present an argument. And this would go beyond the linear essay. Because if my intention is to let them explore ways of manipulating different voices on a topic and present their own, therefore, I should let them choose the modality they want to use. I don’t know. i guess in this regard I am somehow postmodern. I do not agree with Elbow and (this is my interpretation, of course) his idea of “uncovering the authors that students can be” or helping students “to find a voice”. As Flower and Hayes stated, this is a myth. A myth that implies that those things are out there, waiting to be unveiled. Being able to compose, to “have a voice” are things that need to be constructed, the composing process is not a hide-and-seek game between a self and the reality, but a complex process where each individual constructs his/her unique way of expressing (in writing or through any other symbolic mediation) his/her own relationship with the world. The composing process is not simple and it is not a one-way one (me describing the world and discovering my voice). The composing process is complex, it is between ourselves, our perception (can it be singular “perception”?) of the world, others’ perception of the world, the history of our perception of the world, the history of the others’ perception of the world, the actual world (does it exist?), and the way each one of these elements interacts with itself and with the other elements. Yeah, I guess that the complexity of the composing process is all that you must be able to see in my messy text. Well… it’s so hard to describe in a linear way something that I conceptualize as multilayered and in constant change. Maybe writing was not the best tool to compose this. J

Response to the Bartholomae/Elbow debate

I think yesterday’s class discussion was interesting. And sorry if I got a little “heated” into it. As I said in class, my experience in the educational field in Argentina made me suspicious of any stance that claims that teachers should be democratic in the classroom. Why is this? Well, because I truly believe that we can ameliorate but not to eliminate the power structures and main discourses that are embedded in the formal education institutions. And it is here were first-year composition courses are situated! That’s why I would choose to teach “students to be able to work closely with the ways their writing constructs a relationship with tradition, power and authority”, as Bartholomae proposes. Let me explain myself. I am not rejecting each one of Elbow’s claims. I am rejecting them when related to a first-year composition course. I think that Elbow’s ideas are great for a creative writing workshop, or to take into account once in a while in the first-year composition course. But I would never teach a first-year composition course following exclusively his approach. If I would do this, I would feel that I am consciously committing the sin of not give my students the opportunity to learn what is necessary for their academic life. In addition, I agree with Elbow when he proposes that his struggle is aimed “to make the academic world less pompous and more able to exploit the cognitive power of the believing game and the intelligence of feelings.” But he proposes this once he had his tenure, once he is a renowned author. He is in the field so he can play the game. I agree with this stance, and I think that feminist theories about science building and communication are useful in this regard. And let me say more about this in the next post with Bridwell-Bowles.

Response to Connors’ reading

I guess that the fact that rhetoric was associated to be able to talk about any area of knowledge is understandable in the old times. The corpus of science was tiny. Nowadays, after of the industrial revolution and the hyper-specialization and compartmentalization of science: how do we do to talk about any subject?
My attention was caught in the part that Connors explains the steps that Quintilian recommended for practicing writing. I know nothing about classical rhetoric but while reading the text, I realized how many elements are still operating nowadays. Actually, I didn’t notice a big difference between Quintilian’s steps for practicing writing and the modes of discourse proposed by Alexander Bain. If I remember well, textbooks for literature and writing classes in Argentina, even nowadays follow this structure where narrative and personal writing are considered the departing point and argumentation is considered more complex and therefore, taught at the end. Regarding imitation: that’s the way I was taught how to write: we were supposed to imitate literary consecrated texts in our writing.
It also occurred to me that the analysis that Connors proposes runs along the lines of what Habermas states in his book “Historia y crítica de la opinion pública” (History and critic of public opinion???). Habermas states that in the XVIII century public and private spheres separate, there is an empowerment of the individuality in the subjectivity and this leads to different types of writing and conceptualization of the writing activity. Habermas relates this analysis with the appearance of genres such as the personal diary and the bourgeois novel.
In addition, a question that kept on coming into my mind regarding personal writing: why do we need to know about what we are writing? Why we can’t conceptualize writing as a knowledge-building activity. And here I absolutely advocate for Reither’s and Berthoff’s claims. Students can discover new interests if they face the writing activity not as a mere account of their experiences but as a way of exploring a topic.
Lastly, when I read the phrase “the form of a kind of resignation about how students asked to write on political or social or educational problems lose themselves in “the intense inane of the general, the intangible, and the vague.”” (p. 179) I thought that this changes among cultures. Vagueness and intangibility can be evaluated in a different way in a different culture. As Kaplan once stated, I do think that rhetorical patterns vary among cultures.
What is my implicit stand about what is important to teach? I guess that here I belong to the majority, as Connors states, because I choose a sort of middle position. As I said in a previous blog: I would teach half of my classes following the writing process movement and the other half following the cultural literacy’s postulates.

Response to March 1st readings

I absolutely agreed with Berkenkotter when she affirms that thinking-aloud protocols affect what is being observed. And this goes along with the idea that writing is a social activity, and therefore, contextual features play a major role in it. Along the same line, I don’t think that her study was “naturalistic”, there is a layer of superficiality in it as well, but this layer may be attenuated as the time passes by. At the same time, I took this study as it is: a case study, which says a lot but only about the subject studied. We can’t generalize and say that everybody writes that way. At least, though, by getting a little in a writer’s life, we could better understand how writing processes are highly personal and how different variables play a role in them.
Regarding Flynn’s article, I appreciate her effort to include gender theory in the composition field. I think that some of her claims are true, because after all, we live in a patriarchal society and as Virginia Woolf states, the capitalist system haven’t done much to help in this regard. One thing that I didn’t like was the way Flynn chose to finish the article: “We must alert our women students to the dangers of immasculation and provide them with a critical perspective. But we must also encourage them to become self-consciusly aware of what their experience in the world has been and how this experience is related to the politics of gender. Then we must encourage our women students to write from the power of that experience” (p. 188). I think that this statement doesn’t do more than reinforce the static distribution of gender roles. Why we must encourage only our women students? What about our “men students”? (I was gonna write “male students”, but maybe Flynn wouldn’t have liked it). In any case, if we are expecting any consciousness about gender roles to promote changes, we should do not reproduce what we are trying to demolish: a static and binary way of defining masculinity and femininity.
As I said in class, my response to Murray’s article is kind of mixed. I did not enjoyed reading it as much as I felt Kasandra did. Things that I didn’t like: his examples. I think they pose the risk of falling in the flat argument of saying that writing is autobiographic because we name our childhood. Things I liked: I do think that we put ourselves in our writing, but I think that this is related to the fact that language is social and it has embedded in itself pieces of history, as ourselves. In this regard, I grab Bakhtin’s “dialogicality”, put it under my arm and keep on living my life as an unwritten autobiography.

What you have to do and what you get to do

Today’s (well, already yesterday’s) reading in class was amazing. I enjoyed “The geranium and the window sill just died but teacher you went right on” a lot. The book as a cultural object it’s absolutely interesting. Its discourse about schooling reminded me of the Italian educator Francesco Tonucci (author of the picture). Let me translate it: Do it in this way! (6 years old) / Do it in this way! (8 years old) / you always have to do it in this way! (10 years old) / You choose / Choose? To choose? / What does “choose” mean?
As usual, while walking away from the FA building I was thinking about tons of things to add in my post. I think this is great, I love assisting to classes that after finished, keep me hooked. That’s how I define a good class. And one of the things that I think makes this class good is Shipka’s passion for the subject matter. And this leads me to answer one of the questions that came up in class: how to make students go for the “get” and not for the “have”. I claim that the best thing a teacher can do is show passion in the subject matter he/she teaches. When Shipka was pointing at the bunch of articles she dived into, I was thinking to myself (yeah, I didn’t raise my hand so I was not allowed to said it out loud in class! Hehe!): I would love to have my passion as narrowed down as she has it! Because I can’t say I don’t get passionate about things. I do. But at this point in my life, I still haven’t decided where to “dive in”, and sometimes I feel lost. You want a cheese phrase to explain this better: too much love spread around! Hahhaah!!! And as Erika (if I am not mistaken, it was Erika) was saying: lack of time is cruel. Because most of the times are my “haves” and not my “gets” what define the way I distribute my energy. For example: as I stated before, I did leave the class thinking about a bunch of staff to write in the blog. But then, a couple of steps later, when I arrived to my office and met one of my students, I had no time to write what I was drafting in my head. However, I do appreciate that I have the chance to take a class where I “get” a lot of things going on in my head and where more than once I “get” to do the readings and the assignments.

Answer to the prompt given in the February 22nd class.

OK, from all the questions that Shipka gave in class I will keep this one that I think will kind of summarize the others (hopefully!): What do you get of all the readings we did in class? What do you take to be truth?
Well, now I am dealing with this image in my mind: two teams of composition teachers. I associate the first team with all these guys that were proposing the happenings and are worried about process writing. The second team, I associate it with all these guys that are so worried about writing in academia. Team 1 wants to teach writing for life, team 2 wants to teach writing for school. The player in team 1 (yeah, I am Argentine, I can’t avoid picturing this as a soccer game J) tries to score a goal with a ball full of techniques for students to explore what they have to say and develop a “voice”. The player in team 2 (we can say Reither is a goal keeper) performs a great catch by saying that writing is also a knowledge building activity and, as every learning experience, it is linked to a community. The goal keeper opens the game again. Another player in team 1 passes the ball to one of his mates, this time the ball is full of opportunities for the students to explore their perceptions of the world and in this way learn rhetorical techniques. A player from team 2 takes possession of the ball by explaining that probably those techniques are not easily going to be applied in academic writing. And so, the match goes on…
My choice of using the soccer game as a way of interpreting the readings is not only rooted in my craziness, but it is also linked to Casanave’s book called “Writing games”. The author states that when we learn to write we have to learn to play a game, a game in which we do not only participate according to the rules, but a game in which we also build the rules as we play. She draws this writing metaphor from different social theories and she does it beautifully. She is also worried about writing in academia. Worry that I share. If I were a composition teacher, I guess I would try to advocate for both teams. Divide the time in my classes to score some goals for team one and some goals for team two. But as everybody knows, we all have a goalie inside us that impede that we score all the goals we want. Maybe it’s just a matter of training, and that’s why we are taking this course.

Response to February 27th readings. Landmark Essays: Berthoff, Hairston, and Reither

In her chapter, Hairston applies Kuhn’s model for revolutions in science to the composition field. She claims that a paradigm shift is (or was, in the 80s, when she wrote the article) happening in the composition field. The shift that Hairston sees is from the traditional paradigm, based in classical rhetoric and an idealization of what an efficient writer do, to the new paradigm started by process writing theories. The author offers a very good overview of research in composition and provides a neat summary of the main features of the new paradigm (p. 124). When I finished reading the three articles, I pictured Hairston’s article drawing a line in the development of composition research, where Berthoff’s article would be placed closer to the process writing theory end and Reither’s article would be situated closer to the other extreme, and closer to sociocultural theories. In some way, I found similarities between Reither’s and Berthoff’s claims. Despite I associated both authors with different trends (Berthoff being more a “literature” person and Reither being more a “social” guy), I found that both conceptualize writing as a knowledge-building activity. Berthoff (“the philosopher” in my imagination) does it in a broader way[1] and conceptualizes the composing process as a meaning-making process, as something we craft. Reither (the “social scientist”, as I picture him), on the other hand, conceptualizes writing as a knowledge building activity but more linked to the specific communities where it happens. Writing, according to Reither, is grounded in the need to communicate unknown things and is based on inquiry and thus, linked to learning. For this author, writing can’t be separated from the social-rhetorical situations.
[1] “Teaching composition as a mode of thinking and a way of learning” (p. 109)

Response to February 22nd readings - Landmark essays: Perl and Runicman

One thing that didn’t completely convinced me from Perl essay is the concept of “felt sense”. While reading this chapter, I remembered our discussions about voice, and how this felt sense concept resemble the voice concept since both of them are kind of blurry and ambiguous. What does she mean by “inner reflections” and “bodily sensations”? I felt that this chapter, in general, was more confusing than the previous chapter that Perl has in the book (chapter 3). Although, I do agree with the author that the writing process is recursive and that what is recursive in the composing process varies from writer to writer.
I think that her ideas of writing as a recursive activity resemble a lot what Flower and Hayes propose. Actually, the first two recursive elements that Perl proposes (re-reading and key words or items called by the topic) are named by Flower and Hayes in their chapter. But again, the third recursive element, the felt sense, is still not clear to me.
On the other hand, when reading Runicman’s article one question kept on coming to my mind: it all depends on what kind of writing we are talking about. Runicman mentions “the literary impulse” (p. 202). I do not necessarily associate every kind writing with an impulse or a pleasurable activity since different kinds of writing pose different kinds of challenges. However, I think that he makes a point by calling to our attention that the word “problem” in conceptualizing writing as a problem-solving activity is not a happy one. Well, that word, as Flower and Hayes state, comes from the psychology field, and in that context is not necessarily linked to a negative connotation. Although, as we all know, scientific vocabulary is never detached from everyday language, therefore, we could think of a better word to conceptualize the writing activity. Personally, I like Casanave’s metaphor: writing games.

Response to February 20th readings: Landmark Essays: Graves, Perl, Flower & Hayes, and Sommers.

These essays are connected by the idea that writing is not a linear activity. Although Graves separates the writing episode in different phases, in his analysis and his methodology it can be seen how writing is not a linear activity and that many micro and macro factors influence it. While reading Graves’ chapter, I was wondering if the methodology employed in the study has ever been used in adults. I think that the fact that they were working with children influenced the weight that observations and thick descriptions (in the ethnographic sense) had in the study (for example, in page 27). I got a little confused by the way the writing episodes were recorded, and once I understood it, I thought that if this study were replicated (has it been replicated?) the use of a video camera would be great. I liked the fact that the quantitative and qualitative research methods were combined and the focus on the large group and the case study were switched. I loved the last sentence: “it is ironic that research devoted to the full study of single individuals is so rare” (p. 37). As a matter of fact, while doing my literature review about academic writing in the U.S. (I was focusing on non-native speakers ) I only found a couple of articles that showed ethnographic studies that lasted more than two or three semesters.
Perl, as Graves, also worried about developing methodological tools that allow them to analyze the composing process. But again, while reading the article I thought that these authors were trying to find the code of the code to analyze the code. Too complex! But I guess that these methodologies help them to systematize the highly complex process of writing.
What I like about Flower and Hayes’ article was their critic to the myth of discovery in writing and how they propose that writing is not a matter of discovering the words but of creating meaning. According to them, the writing process is a “problem-solving activity” and not a “creative accident” (p. 64). And that the problem for writers is not to discover what to say, but to find the problem to solve (the rhetorical problem) since this is what will determine our writing. I absolutely agree with them when they state that “writers build or represent such a problem to themselves, rather than “find” it” (p. 65) and here comes our role as teachers, and here comes our problem: how to best present prompts to students. I think that by having a better idea of the complexity of the writing process teachers will be able to better guide students to develop their writing. In addition, on page 69, when they provide an example of how differently experienced and novice writers draw on their knowledge to represent the problem, I don’t agree with them. I think that experienced writers would focus on what Flower & Hayes say writers focus on AND on what the authors say the novice writers focus on. All in all, experienced writers also sometimes conceptualize writing for assignments in the way novice writers do, but in a more complex way. I also think that the fact that the experts they compared with students were writing and rhetoric teachers could have influenced the fact that these experienced writers are more aware of audience and other elements of the writing process. I wonder what would have happened if instead of writing and rhetoric teachers the authors would have compared students with scholars writing a paper in their field. Would they conceptualize in such a complete way the rhetorical problem as the writing teachers? In this regard, Sommers’ study, I think, is better because she chose experienced writers in different fields: journalists, editors and academics.

Response to February 15th readings

I enjoyed Tobin text. Even though at the beginning I got lost with authors’ names and trying to figure out what was he calling “Process writing”, when I finished reading the chapter I had a somewhat vivid image of the debates in the field. I think that the way he wrote the article is also related to his postulates: he relates his experiences as a teacher and as a student with the theories and debates in the field. I think he is one of the few authors that openly accept that the link between research and practice is not a linear and neat relationship. As he states: “the differences in theory are less clear and less significant in the classroom” (p. 10). I loved his/her (?) confession: “When I arrived in grad school, I had an experiential, empirical belief in process but no real scholarly basis for my approach” (p. 8). I loved this “confession” because I think it describes how we forge ourselves as teachers and how sometimes, in the craziness of daily life and work pressures, we just “go with the flow” and don’t reflect in our teaching practices or our pedagogical beliefs. Of course, I don’t think this is good. It is my opinion that as teachers we need to reflect on why we do the things we do in the classroom, we need to recognize what makes us teach the way we do. But on the other hand, it is true that many times reality overwhelm us and we just go… and the fact that someone is voicing this in a book it is, in my opinion, good.

In addition, I also agree with Tobin when he states that “pure practitioners” of one or other theory or movement do not exist: “even the most process-oriented teachers acknowledge that a meaningful process ought to lead eventually to some sort of written product, and even the most product-oriented teacher accepts the fact that writing occurs in a series of steps and stages” (p. 7). And here again I think that what Tobin proposes is realistic. Personally, I think that being eclectic sometimes helps teachers, given the fact that he/she can justify the eclecticism. In other words, I think that as teachers, we need to try out many things but never forget to reflect and give foundation to our pedagogies (I don’t think “pedagogy”, as a singular word is good), never forget to reflect on those postulates that are in the back of our head and lead us to teach in the way we teach.

Response to February 6th readings.

I think that Geisler text provides a really good summary of research done on academic writing. While reading this text, I was thinking “how do I relate this to those authors who were talking about happenings and writing as a creative act more than as an intellectual or academic activity?”. And sincerely, even though I would love to try out the happenings, I do recognize that if I put myself in the first-year comp teacher’s shoes that would be really hard. Why? Because I do know that writing in academic settings is different than writing in other kind of social contexts. Because I think that academic writing it is highly framed by institutional and disciplinary “boundaries”. Boundaries that despite of being fuzzy, are boundaries. I do think that writing, as any other social action, highly depends on context. The problem, I guess, for comp teachers, is to decide how to define context. And if to the previous we add the fact that in many first year comp courses we have 1) students who do not know what major they will pursue (so what disciplinary field are we dealing with?), 2) students whose first language is not English (how do we teach them?), 3) students who think that writing is not important in their disciplines (or in their lives!), 4) institutional demands, 5) department demands, and so on. In summary, we have to deal with a great amount of heterogeneity not only in regards to student body, disciplinary fields, institutional frames, and type of contents taught in the class. Let’s add to this the fact that in current times, we do not only have to teach how to write one word after the other, but also include new modes of representation that affect the composing process (Are you overwhelmed yet?, I am!). And it is at this point when I read Geisler’s third alternative and it makes me feel good: we should “reinvent general education” and “remake the writing practices of the U.S. academy into something other than a tool for the creation and recreation of the Great Divide between expert and layperson” (p. 118). What I would love to know, though, is how to bring to life these beautiful words in my own teaching practice. I am still trying to find the way, reason why I took this course. I think that the mere fact that we are discussing these issues is a step further in being better teachers. Answers? Not even one. Questions? Many.

Some housekeeping

OK, in an effort to put some order and recapitulate my contributions in the blogsphere, I added labels indicating the readings’ dates. Here go some more:

My answer to Danika (http://danikarockett.blogspot.com/2007/02/not-another-random-post.html) and Erika (sorry, I could not make the permalink work) related to February 13^th readings.

My answer to Adam (http://asknatz.blogspot.com/2007/02/workshop-outcomes-open-for-discussion.html) related to February 1^st readings.

Forthcoming: neat and ordered comments about the readings.

My dialogue with Landmark Essays.

Composing process are so complex that it was necessary for scholars to break them down. Each researcher collaborated adding a different perspective to the phenomenon. I think this correlates with the switch that was observed in social sciences, when researchers stopped trying to define closed and neatly defined categories or units of analysis for the social sciences (based on natural sciences’ research model) and they started to assimilate reality as a highly complex construct, where each stance is valid to add to the effort of deciphering human activity. And as the process writing scholars stated, I am implicitly assuming that writing is before than any other thing that: a social activity.
I think that the alibis that writing process scholars faced in their research activities are similar to those faced by scholars in other fields or disciplines in the social sciences, such as psychology. Actually, many of them (i.e. Flower and Hayes, 1996) based their studies in psychological theories. What were these alibis? Well, the way I see it is that at the beginning they were so concern in defining clear-cut units of analysis and defining their object. Later, they turned to ethnographic or case-study methods, which opened a new world of research. Not as in tune as previous lab research was with “mother science” (the old scientific-method speaking here). Variables were controlled, concepts clearly defined, but where was reality? And this is what Pearl claims (p. xv) in her introduction to the Landmark Essays. The thing is, I think that all this was necessary. I guess that we, human beings, historically and ontologically, need to put reality in little neat boxes, classify it, in order to later being able to kick the boxes and discover the beauty that lies out there, in the real world.
I guess this goes along the lines of what I was reading in the last class session (chat modality) when my classmates were discussing process writing. Now, after opening the word file with part of the chat record in it, I can read their statements in a different way. Again: I recontextualized my classmates statements after reading the readings I could not read last week… and that’s the beauty of communication: it depends so much on context that it is so hard to grab it and brake it down in neat categories that help us, as writing teachers, to present it to students in a clear way. Personally, if I were asked to define “writing” I guess I would be blabling for a while and end up saying “you know what? I just can’t define it. Because what I enjoy about it, it’s that: the non-definition of writing is what makes it so desirable. Because there is always something more to want in what you never finish to get to know.
Furthermore, this unfinished characteristic of writing is what every writing researcher should be more aware than any other researcher, just by the mere fact that we have to recognize that at the time of communicating through writing our findings we are also in some way creating a reality, a science tale that can help or not others to figure out the process of writing. It sounds like a tongue twister, but when we write about the process of writing, how much of our writing intertwines with the way we conceptualize it? I think this goes along with what Pearl states about the “researcher’s shaping role” in scientific discourse (p. xix). As she states, after composing what they observed, “researchers find themselves faced with another composing task: fashioning what hey have come to see into a text that will convey their understanding to others”. What is left to ask, as usual, is how well I conveyed my understanding in this post.

Voices shouting to be heard

Lambert’s last words kind of put into my face what I do really believe “finding our own voice in writing means”. His words: “Through whatever means possible – by example, by flattery, by cajolery, by thread—the composition instructor should encourage students to remove their masks and to reveal their faces—however pimply, however shallow, however frightened, however bored. These faces, at least, are their own” (p. 34). I interpreted this in the following way: he is asking for composition teachers to help students to leave their masks and show “their real faces”. Wouldn’t this be to help students to find their own voices? I think it is. And I thought: this guy in the 60s was already worried about that! Then, I recapitulated what I wrote about finding my own voice in writing and how hard it was for me in a second language. Well… let me throw here a Bakhtinean point of view. We never “own” our voice. We always speak through other’s voices because the words we use and allow us to communicate are embedded with social meaning, they carry a history in them, they don’t belong to only one person because communication does not exist in a one-way-fashion. In this way, allow me to reformulate my opinion: my problem, when writing in a second language, is not that I can’t find my own voice, but that I don’t know (because I lack many shared cultural experiences and cultural knowledge) how to use the multiplicity of voices that socially construct that thing we call English. On the other hand, I could argue that I have a different voice in English, that I write “with an accent”, an accent that can be viewed as my mother tongue trying to shut out loud what I can’t express in English.
Gracias for reading this.
Violeta

New media

Last class topic was fascinating. I guess you could notice that (yeah, I couldn't stop talking). My apologies, sometimes I can't stop when I get passionate, but, please, do not doubt in interrupting me or shutting me up. :)
This is the thing: I found myself reading how the author articulates "voices" that I heard years ago when I was studying literature in my country, and I loved it. While reading the texts I felt that my neurones were so happy "synapting" with each other!
I also liked the way Wysoki structured the text with 5 openings that came together at the end. I absolutely agree with her definition of new media, specially when she affirms that "new media texts do not have to be digital" (p. 15) and that interactivity was present in the act of reading and writing before clicking-on-the-mouse appeared in our lives. I guess this is part of how some technologies and new medias and materialities become invisible to us. For example, many times we used the phrase "writing with technology" to describe the fact that we are using computers to write. But we have been using technology to write when we grab a pen! A pen is technology. In the same way, texts have been interactive long ago, being this implied in the relationships that texts (or authors?) build with readers...
And I guess I will call myself to silence, since I talked a lot in class.
Have a great weekend, everybody!

What to do... or where is my voice in the blog?

OK, I just added the links to my classmates pages... one didn't work... I realized that the two graduate students' blogs have their last name in the url. Weird, uh? I also realized that some people is more "talkative" than others in the cyberspace... is this related to the medium? Who knows... And why did I title this post in this way? Well, because in this media I found myself lost and "not finding my voice". Let me explain this: what do I do? I write in my post or I add comments in my classmates' posts? What kind of language should I use? Informal? formal? How much should I show myself in my writing... What about register? The blog cries for informality, the class cries for formality. Auch! I am gonna cry! (Just kidding). To all the previous, let's add the fact of writing in a second language, situation in which finding my own voice is harder. And here is where I go with my argument that having a voice is putting the subject in letters. Putting your subjectivity, your "mark" in the page, screen, blackboard, wherever you write. Having a voice is when the other can "read you" between lines. I don't think it is much of having a good argument, but a good way of communicating things. Maybe my definition is closer to what others call style. And sincerely: I am still trying to construct those terms in my mind.
OK, gotta run. Friends waiting. It will continue...

Hi everybody!

This is the first posting in my blog. Wuawwww!!!!! :)