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.