Facework on Facebook as a new literacy practice

• laid out what Facebook is/how it's used
• Interviewed people about their usage of Facebook
• Researcher was shown the Facebook profiles of the people that were interviewed
• Analysis of each Facebook profile & how they are used

I found this interesting because I might want to analyze Twitter for my ethnography, so this shows me a way that analyzing a social media website can be done. 

En Los Dos Idiomas

• 5 yrs. in Chicago, 6 weeks in Mexico
• Participant-observation & open-ended interviews with adult members of the families in the study & audiotaped informal discourse in the homes of members and in public settings in the neighborhood
• Families in the study are Mexicano immigrants (approx. 45 people) 
• working class - blue collar jobs
• limited education - 0-8 years of schooling
• Compadrazgo: refers to the Mexican system of godparentlike relationships that function as a reciprocal exchange network to facilitate economic survival and provide emotional and social support. 
• provides a means in which traditions are easily passed
• crucial in urban areas such as Chicago
• The individuals who were raised in Chicago have more schooling than those raised in Mexico since those raised in Mexico had to help support the household
• Literacy skills generally correlate with level of education, but some people had personal motivation to learn & use literacy, such as religious reasons and personal obligations (maintain correspondence with people in Mexico)
• Learning literacy lirico
• picking up literacy informally from others who used only spoken language to pass on the knowledge of writing
• Would learn to read and write from magazines or cigarette cartons
• when people need these skills, they will be motivated to learn them - school isn't necessary
• bare bones approach - don't know grammar, etc. only know letters
• Social nature of literacy learning
• Maintain personal relationships
• the learning process itself is social
• Literacy skills are needed for shopping, paying bills, and jobs
• Education doesn't only enhance literacy skills, but it enables people to deal with people more effectively and to handle life's problems
• *I found this very interesting. Education improves social skills immensely because you're always surrounded by people. 

The Ethnography of Literacy - John F. Szwed

• Everyone seems to agree that literacy is a necessity in the modern world.
• Associated with earning a living, achieving goals, etc.
• Particularly in the US, illiteracy is a cause for poverty.
• Shifts in reading habits around the world
• US: the reading & publishing of novels is declining, reading of poetry and plays is at almost zero level, non-fiction is increasing
• What are reading and writing for?
• How is language used by people?
• Goal of education is to produce a society who are equally competent in reading and writing.
• No society has yet to do this.
• *even those who are educated have different literacies. The CEO of a company probably doesn't have the same set of literacy skills as a doctor does.
• Schools don't take into account what students read outside the classroom
• Ex: someone who might not be able to read assigned texts could be reading baseball record books at home & have a lot of skill in that area.
• *sometimes it's hard to read assigned texts - they could be boring or confusing and if people don't have the motivation to do that, they might be seen as illiterate just because teachers don't see what students are doing at home.
• No set definition of what "literature" is. 
• Public literacy vs. private literacy
• If a school assumes a child reads at home, even though the child may not, the child will be at a disadvantage compared to other kids who do read at home.
• Ability to read a sign is a different set of skills - ex: stop signs all look the same, so if you don't know how to read, but someone tells you a red octagon means stop, you'll know that every time you see one you need to stop. 
• Literacy varies in socioeconomic classes, age groups, ethnic groups, etc.
• We have inherited the idea that "mass" everything is good (mass-education, mass-literacy, etc.)
• *our society has such a need to categorize things, so we just categorize people into groups, when it's so much more than that. Sometimes things don't fit into neat categories.

Street - At Last....

• New Literacy Studies (NLS): approaches focus on the everyday meanings and uses of literacy in specific cultural contexts and link directly to how we understand the work of literacy in educational contexts; represents a shift in perspective on the study and acquisition of literacy, from the dominant cognitive model, with its emphasis on reading, to a broader understanding of literacy practices in their social and cultural contexts; people who support NLS advocate an ethnographic perspective. 
• Autonomous model of literacy: literacy itself will have effects on other social and cognitive practices, irrespective of social conditions and cultural interpretations of literacy.
• Ideological model of literacy: culturally sensitive view of literacy practices. Literacy is a social practice, not simply a technical and neutral skill.
• People who are labelled "illiterate" are literate in specific contexts which they need to be literate in. 
• Ex: a construction worker may not be able to read, but he is literate in the skills he needs to do his job. People who can read may be illiterate in the field of construction. 
• Literacy doesn't just apply to being able to read and write.
• Literacy event: any occasion in which a piece of writing is integral to the nature of the participants' interactions and their interpretive processes.
• Literacy practices: a means of focusing upon the social practices and conceptions of reading and writing.
• We need to rethink, redefine, and redesign language and literacy in the classroom to meet the contemporary needs and skills of students.

A World Without Print

• Written language is different from oral
• oral language is employed within a shared physical context, but written language is the opposite; usually the writer and the reader don't share the same physical space. 
• Written  language is used  to make a permanent thought or argument or story. 
• Written language & oral language are usually worded differently
• Written: "Down the hill ran the green, scaly dragon."
• Oral: "The dragon ran down the hill. He was green and had scales."
• Effect on Donny & Timmy
• they don't understand the need for print. In the example where Donny makes a kite & shows Victoria Purcell-Gates, she says she could help him write a book on how to make a kite. However, he doesn't understand why he can't just show everyone how to do it.

Peter Elbow

Arguments for teaching nonacademic discourse in freshman writing classes
1. very few students will have to write academic discourse after college.
         -the best test of a writing course is whether it makes students more likely to use writing in their
          lives by choice.
         -if colleges only teach academic discourse, they will fail their students in helping them to write
          by choice throughout their lives
2.  take a larger view of human discourse
          -students leave college unable to find words to render their experience
          -discourse that renders often yields important new cognitive insights
3. nonacademic discourse helps students produce good academic discourse
           -"The use of academic discourse often masks a lack of genuine understanding. When students
            write about something only in the language of the textbook or the discipline, they often                       distance or insulate themselves from experiencing or really internalizing the concepts they are             allegedly learning. Often the best test of whether a student understands something is if she can             translate it out of the discourse of the textbook and the discipline into everyday, experiential,               anecdotal terms."
**The above quote is proof of the fact that colleges produce really good bullshitters. Students learn to write papers using the language of their textbooks and this language makes their papers sound as if they know what they're talking about, but if you ask the writers of these papers, most of them will have no idea what any of it means. Teachers believe that since students are using the "right" words, they understand them, but that's simply not the case.

-Professors are not qualified to teach academic discourse if they don't have experience in the specific area.
**So should students who do not have experience in academic discourse be required to write in it?

-Academic discourse's language is more confusing and convoluted than it has to be.
"For example, academic discourse leads Berlin in just one paragraph to say "full significance of their pedagogical strategies" rather than "implications of how they teach"; "mode of operation" rather than "how they act."

-Academic discourse can exclude ordinary people.
         -by using formal language, academics are basically saying that they are professionals who don't
          invite conversation with nonprofessionals.
                -Ex: doctors don't say "thumb bone," they use the correct medical term.

-We want to impress people, so we use fancy language to show off.

Unpackaging Literacy

• Is there a writing crisis? If there is, is it a matter of national concern? 
• Literacy has produced a great divide in human modes of thinking.
• The "writing process" is identified with the production of written discourse or text. 
• Transactional writing: writing in which it is taken for granted that the writer means what he says and can be challenged for its truthfulness and its logicality. 
• Most of our notions of what writing is about is tied up with school-based writing. 
• Most writing in secondary schools is transactional.T
• This approach binds the intellectual and social significance of writing too closely to the image of the professional and academic member of society. 
• Promotes the idea that writing outside of school has little importance. 
• Vai script isn't taught in schools – completion of lessons isn't the endpoint of learning, like seems to be in American schools.
• Unlike American society, writing in Vai serves a variety of social functions (like letter-writing and record keeping). 

This chapter leads me to believe that we must somehow change our school system so writing is looked at in not just an academic way. Maybe teachers could be less stringent about requirements for papers so that writing seems more fun to students. That way, they'd want to write outside of school as opposed to now where students are so sick of writing boring research papers that they've filled their personal writing quota. 

Inventing the University

• Students must write what universities want to see.
• analyzes the work of basic writers (whose writing didn't impress the university) and successful writers (whose writing did impress the university).
• "To speak with authority student writers have not only to speak in another's voice but through another's "code"; and they not only have to do this, they have to speak in the voice and through the codes of those of us with power and wisdom..." (p. 17)
• Basic writers don't necessarily make a lot of mistakes in their writing (sentence level errors), but just don't know how to operate within the specific discourse community that they need to be operating in.

Audience Addressed/Audience Invoked

Audience plays a significant role in composition theory and pedagogy.

Audience addressed:

• a writer has a concrete audience
• assumption that knowledge of this audience's attitudes, beliefs, and expectations is not only possible (via observation and analysis) but essential.
• Mitchell & Taylor's general model of writing: written product --> audience --> responding process --> response --> feedback --> writer -->writing process --> written product (cycle continues)
• "In their model, the audience has the sole power of evaluating writing, the success of which "will be judged by the audience's reaction: 'good' translates into 'effective,' 'bad' into 'ineffective."' Mitchell and Taylor go on to note that "the audience not only judges writing; it also motivates it" (p. 250),10 thus suggesting that the writer the audience over both evaluation and motivation." (p. 158)
• "as they compose, writers must rely in large part upon their own vision of the reader, which they create, as readers do their vision of writers, according to their own experiences and expectations." (p. 158)
• writing makes meaning for the writer and the reader

Audience invoked:

• audience is a construction of the writer (a created fiction)
• writers cannot know the reality of their audience like speakers can (with speakers, the audience is right in front of them)
• writers use the semantic and syntactic resources of language to provide cues for the reader. these cues help define the role(s) that the writer wants the reader to adopt in responding to the text
• a writer must construct his audience in his imagination
• pedestrian audience: people who happen to pass a soap box orator
• passive occasional audience: people who come to hear a noted lecturer in a large auditorium
• active occasional audience: people who meet only on specific occasions but actively interact when they do meet

Rhetoric and Its Situations

• "Writers who wish to be read must often adapt their discourse to meet the needs and expectations of an addressed audience. They may rely on past experience in addressing audiences to guide their writing, or they may engage a representative of that audience in the writing process." (p. 166)
• When a colleague, boss, or teacher reads a person's writing, they are a powerful stimulus to the writer, but it is ultimately up to the writer to decide whether or not they want to listen to the suggestions of these people.
• "writers conjure their vision-a vision which they hope readers will actively come to share as they read the text-by using all the resources of language available to them to establish a broad, and ideally coherent, range of cues for the reader." (p. 167)
• 
  

Presentation Proposal

I'm choosing the article entitled "What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy" by James Paul Gee.
(The article was found in the folder under the class schedule)

The article states that video games can help enhance learning.

• motivational - motivation drives learning
• get to make choices 
• producers not consumers (can co-create game world) - "too often, students in schools consume, but do not produce, knowledge, and rarely get to help design the curriculum."
• "games can show us how to get people to invest in new identities or roles, which can, in turn, become powerful motivators for new and deep learning in classrooms and workplaces."
• collaboration in games can prepare workers for modern workplaces
• study:
• 7-year-olds play the game "Age of Mythology," which motivates them to read and write about mythology all on their own outside of school. 

I think this article is interesting because it shines a different light on video games. All you ever hear is that children should cut back on playing video games because it essentially melts their brain. This article makes a case that video games are a good learning tool, which people might not realize. 

For a complementary article, I will probably select something that challenges the view that video games can help people learn. 

The Queer Turn in Composition Studies

Main point: "As a discipline, rhetoric and composition needs a better understanding of how heteronormativity operates in society at large, in our classrooms, and in the pages of our books and journals—for numerous reasons: because 5 to 10 percent of the population is lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered or transsexual; because gay marriage is a hot-button civil rights issue debated in election campaigns as well as in the pages of composition readers; and because unpacking the problematic ways that American society deals with sexual identity has the potential to help all of us to understand not only how we are positioned in society but also how we contribute to the positioning of others for good or ill."

An education system that recognizes a multicultural world can give students a better education --> embrace multiculturalism not marginalize it

"Our analysis of this literature reveals three distinct theoretical and pedagogical moves in 

this scholarship: the need to confront homophobia, the desire to be inclusive of LGBT people, and the possibility of using queer theory to break down the homo/hetero binary as a constraining mode of thinking about identity and agency."

Terms:

• Heteronormativity: umbrella concept that refers to the set of cultural values and practices that presumes that LGBT sexual identities are abnormal. 
• Homophobia: refers to overt, intended acts that directly challenge or threaten the existence of LBGT people and practices.
• Heterosexism: refers to more subtle and often unintentional acts that reflect heternormativity. 

Revision of Bazerman blog post

• Genres are a tool to learn new things. (p.290)
• The use of a familiar genre in a new situation can teach you new things. 

Revising your work is just as important, if not more important than the process of writing. When you look over your work, you can sometimes find things that you didn't realize were there while you were writing it. Bazerman talks about the fact that writing helps you to better understand things, and I feel that is true.

Genre in writing definitely matters. People write differently based on the genre they are writing in. Being well-versed in many different genres increases your cognitive ability. I think this quote explains it really well: "For example, though there may be variation among the writing processes of students writing an impromptu essay in their class, that same group of students will engage a different set of processes when they are at work on the student newspaper, and a different set of processes when they are filling out forms the next morning in the registrar’s office."

Throughout this article, Bazerman is focusing on how students learn. He mentions Vygotsky's theory of zones of proximal development in which learning occurs when novices collaborate with experts. This represents the cognitive rhetoric theory because it is saying that writing is a ways to solve problems and learning is a series of problems that students must constantly be solving. 

I'm still not sure I understand the four cognitive mechanisms....

Midterm Reflection

       Out of all the readings we have done, the one that has resonated with me most was Dennis Baron’s From Pencils to Pixels: The Stages of Literacy Technologies. I definitely agree with his claim that literacy technology is always evolving and it is such an interesting concept that what seems ancient to us now (e.g. a pencil) was once a new piece of technology that was met with skepticism. With each new invention, people fear that we as a society will depend too much on it and therefore it will weaken our minds. Baron writes, “Plato was one leading thinker who spoke out strongly against writing, fearing that it would weaken our memories.” Plato feared that since we could now write things down, we wouldn’t rely on our minds anymore and so we wouldn’t be able to remember anything anymore. Clearly, we can still remember things and we’ve been writing things down for hundreds of years. In addition, Baron points out that when computers were invented, professors didn’t allow their students to use spell-check because they feared they would forget how to spell. Years and years of spelling words won’t just evaporate into thin air the minute someone invents spell-check. I think Baron sums it up very well when he writes, "we have a way of getting so used to writing technologies that we come to think of them as natural rather than technological. We assume that pencils are a natural way to write because they are old — or at least because we have come to think of them as being old." Since writing has been around for so long, we forget it is a form of technology.

            The reading that challenged my beliefs about literacy was Aria by Richard Rodriguez. Though I am not bilingual and don’t have any of the experiences he’s had, I disagree with his claim that children shouldn’t be taught their native language in school because a person’s native language is something that is private to them. However, I believe that if children were taught their native language in school, their transition would be much easier. It wouldn’t be such an abrupt change from speaking all one language to speaking all another language. Rodriguez was forced to only speak English and it negatively affected his Spanish and maybe if he were encouraged in school to speak some Spanish, that wouldn't have happened.

            One term that is a bit challenging for me to understand is “social-epistemic rhetoric.” Here’s what I do know about it: this rhetoric states that we write to discover language and to critique economic, social, and political situations. This rhetoric also states that in order to write, we must constantly revise our work. Another concept I have trouble grasping is “writing on the bias.” I’m not exactly sure what that means or how to do it. Is she talking about a bias as in the sewing definition? Here’s what I think I know about it: if we look at “writing on the bias” in sewing terms, it says that fabric cut on the bias has more give/stretch to it. So maybe Brodkey’s writing has a lot of room for interpretation (a lot of give). I also don’t understand Bazerman’s four points (four cognitive hypotheses). I don’t really think I can explain what I know about them. Another concept that was hard at first was “cognitive apprenticeship.” However, with some in class explanations, I now know that a cognitive apprenticeship is basically a novice learning something from an expert. Vygotsky’s theory was confusing at first, but I understand it now to be that novices need scaffolding (specific steps) to reach the expert level of something. For example, when a child is learning to count, they need specific steps like pointing to the object to achieve their goal.

            One question about writing theory that I hope to get answered by the end of this semester is how do people from different socio-economic backgrounds learn and interpret writing? Another question is how does political and cultural contexts alter the education system? Lastly, how does cognitive apprenticeship affect people of different socio-economic backgrounds differently? For example, are the masters of skills in a poor area worse than the masters in a richer area?

Bazerman Concept Map

Revision of Literacy Narrative

Danielle Zickl

Composition Theory

Mary Lourdes Silva

10/19/14

Literacy Narrative

            The New York Public Library was easily my favorite place as a child (other than ballet class). Here, I’d wander the children’s section for what seemed like hours, handing my mom or dad every book I picked out so I wouldn’t have to hold them all. At the tender age of six I got my first library card with a signature that was close to illegible (when I got older I just had to get a new one because I couldn’t stand how sloppily written my name was), but what mattered most was that it was my own; it was a portal to a different world. When I’d finish raiding the children’s section, we’d go to the adult section so my parents could browse around. I remember being in awe of how long these books were compared to my books and couldn’t wait until I could read them all. But the one thing I didn’t like about the adult section was how quiet it was. In the children’s section, there’d be parents reading to their kids on the various couches that were around, or kids just being loud and obnoxious because they’re little and that’s what they do. But none of that happened in the adult section. It was just grown-ups picking up a book, quickly scanning its contents, and either putting it back on the shelf or holding on to it while they repeated the cycle, and all of this was done for the most part silently.

            Spending time at the library with my parents gave me a chance to bond with them. Many parents could have easily left their child’s school in charge of their reading if they were too busy to do it themselves, but since I’m an only child, it was pretty easy for parents to make time for my literacy. My mom worked part time as a pre-school teacher and was always home when I was to take me to the library if I wanted to go, and even though my dad worked a full time job and wasn’t home as much as my mom was, he would never say no to a trip to the library. Though my dad never liked school and didn’t continue on to college, he’s an avid reader. He just enjoys reading for fun as opposed to being forced to read for educational purposes, and I think he wanted to impart that habit on me early — way before forced reading had a chance to ruin my love of it.  

             My grandma got me my first journal when I was in third grade. I’m not really sure why she got it, but maybe because it was my favorite color she knew I’d like it. It was purple and sparkly and you could only open it with the key that it came with and I guarded that key with my life. I scribbled down my thoughts on my classmates, my friends, my family, my animals and anything else my little eight-year-old mind could think of until I ran out of pages. Though I’ve never been one to religiously keep a journal (I’ve had a few since third grade), this was my first brush with writing just for myself as opposed to writing for academic reasons, and I liked it.

            Ninth grade was the year that I discovered just how much I really liked to write. At the time, I was big into the show Gilmore Girls—my mom and I watched it religiously every week—and one of the characters, Rory, wanted to be a journalist. When I found out that journalism was one of the electives my high school offered, I jumped at the opportunity to take it. I loved journalism because it gave me a sense that what I was writing really mattered (not to mention, I felt pretty official getting to interview people). This class had me constantly writing and I enjoyed every minute of it. Though I sometimes found it difficult to piece together a story, I welcomed the challenge (unlike the challenge of math, which was unbearable). The same year was also my mom’s first parent-teacher conference at the high school and that day, she asked me how to get to all of the classrooms. It was my first instinct to write a detailed list of steps that took up about three sheets of computer paper. For whatever reason my mom told my journalism teacher, Mrs. Baron, about what I had done and Mrs. Baron told her that she remembered doing the same kind of thing when she was younger. My mom took it as a sign that I was meant to write. I can see how many parents might take their child’s desire to be a writer and immediately worry that they won’t be able to find a job (or at least a high-paying one) and beg them to find something else. But if parents give their child the freedom to choose their own path, it makes for a much happier child. What’s worse than living an unhappy life and resenting your parents? Or vice versa, what’s worse than having your child resent you for the rest of their lives because you were too controlling back when they were younger? It’s just better to just support anything and everything your child wants to do, unless they want to become a serial killer or something, in which case I’d say get help immediately!

             Both of my parents love Stevie Nicks and growing up, her music echoed through my house. I fell in love with Stevie’s music at an early age and she is the reason I like poetry. “Classic” poetry had never done anything for me; they were so outdated and hard to understand. Why was William Carlos Williams’ eight-line poem about a wheelbarrow so important? I hadn’t realized that songs were poems until I watched countless interviews where Stevie talked about how all of her songs started out as written poems; she never added a melody until it was time for the band to record. Stevie’s words have always me in a way that I had never experienced before; unlike “The Red Wheelbarrow,” or any other poems I read in high school, I could actually relate to what she was writing about (“never have I been a blue calm sea, I have always been a storm”).

             Deborah Brandt talks a lot about families as sponsors of literacy. For example, Dora Lopez’s family drove her 70 miles away because they felt access to Spanish-language literature was still important even though they didn’t live near Mexico anymore. In the case of Raymond Branch, his father’s job gave him access to computers when he was young. This translated into an interest in and career with computers. In turn, my own family has played a huge part in my literacy. The sense of intimacy and literacy bonding throughout my life is strong. My family has contributed to my literacy journey and supported me in how I chose to continue on its path.

Revision of Chapter 14 Sociocultural Theory

1. what is sociocognitive apprenticeship?
    a) what is an apprenticeship?
             an apprenticeship is when you learn something from someone else.
    b) what does cognitive mean?
             it means thinking.
    c) what would be a cognitive apprenticeship?
            learning a specific type of knowledge from someone.
    d) what would be a social apprenticeship?
             learning how to interact with people.
    e) what would be a sociocognitive apprenticeship?
             it would be a novice learning from an expert about certain knowledge.

2. Learning isn't something that is individual. Novices need steps (scaffolding) to become experts. These steps are shaped by other people, culture, and the activity that goes on in the person's life. 

3. The MEAL structure we learn in high school offloads aspects of thinking because the formula is already there for us; we just have to insert our knowledge into it. It makes our writing and thinking more visible because no information will be missing. If we didn't have this structure, we might forget to analyze something, or we might forget to include evidence. This structure ensures that all the information is there and in the all the right places so teachers can easily locate these aspects. 

4. Number 4 on the prompt is just a quote - I'm not sure what I'm supposed to do with it so I will just interpret it. 
Procedural facilitators are very important in education. The way the education system is structured, students rely heavily on instruction and are unsure of what to do without it. For example, I remember an exercise in class where you didn't give us any instruction just to see what would happen. We are all used to looking to you (and other teachers since they are authority figures) for directions that we were a little confused when you stood back and let us figure out what to do. Procedural facilitators help students reach their classroom goals and help explain things.

5. A community of practice is a group of people that collectively learn something and develop expertise in it. Its characteristics are that they share what they know so everyone can learn from each other. They share stories and experiences, and they are able to solve problems to accomplish specific tasks. 

Bazerman

"When we emerge from these writing episodes we have solved problems
novel for us, had thoughts new to us, and developed perspectives we may not
have had before." (page 279)
~The first part of this quote reminds me of the cognitive theory because that says that writing is a process that is used to solve problems.

On the top of page 282, I found it very interesting that in order to look at cognitive writing practices, you must look at many different kinds of writing and not just academic based writing. For example, filling out a form or writing for a newspaper are two very different processes and are not to be looked at in the same way.

Important quote: "Vygotsky’s view, however, posits that learning prepares the learner for new
stages of development, where at some point the learned material becomes more
than the sum of its parts, but is rather added up, reorganized, and reintegrated
at a different level, so it becomes seen in a different light. This enables reflection of knowledge, perception, and understanding from a new perspective." (page 284)

"Insofar as we teach grammar and syntax it tends to be in situ, in revision, in correction comments, or in individualized conference—that is the point of practical need."
~This represents the formalist theory where teachers pay attention to grammar and syntax when they read/grade a student's paper.

Important quote: "This development of new ways of thinking, of approaching experience, of adopting new stances and engaging new experiences occurs within culturally and institutionally shaped Zones of Proximal Development." (page 290)
~Vygotsky's theory that this developmental process will help people understand perception, thought, and activity.

Cognitive theory has to look at specific genres because all genres are different and aspects of the cognitive theory must be applied differently for each genre that is looked at.

Sociocultural theory writing prompt

1. what is sociocognitive apprenticeship?
    a) what is an apprenticeship?
             an apprenticeship is when you learn something from someone else.
    b) what does cognitive mean?
             it means thinking.
    c) what would be a cognitive apprenticeship?
            learning a specific type of knowledge from someone.
    d) what would be a social apprenticeship?
             learning how to interact with people.
    e) what would be a sociocognitive apprenticeship?
             it would be a novice learning from an expert about certain knowledge.

2. People need help learning. Novices need steps (scaffolding) to become experts. They can't just automatically get there.

Prior - Sociocultural Theory of Writing

The sociocultural theory of writing looks at how writers select places for writing and structure the times at which they write. For example, writing everyday from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m. in their study while drinking coffee.

Also, writing is learned implicitly rather than explicitly. Furthermore, writing is an implicit activity, which means that it is connected to us personally without outside influences. Who are we as individuals? Where have we been and where are we going?

"Sociocultural theory seeks to understand how culturally and historically situated meanings are constructed, reconstructed, and transformed through social mediation."

Learning happens through social interaction.

Novice --> takes steps to reach expert level

What is ideology?

Ideologies are values that have to do with political, social, cultural, and economic beliefs. There are always many ideologies that compete with each other, not just one that guides everything. Ideology is transmitted through language because nothing is independent of language.

Fulkerson

Main point: Fulkerson talks about what goes on in composition classes via four philosophies.
Formalist theory: some teachers judge students' work based on form and errors. Students' work tend to be evaluated based on what's wrong (spelling & punctuation errors, a paper being too short etc.), rather than what's actually written.
Expressionist Theory: explores why people write and what makes for good writing. Maximizes self-discovery. Values personal writing with an honest and credible voice.
Mimetic: a clear connection exists between good writing and good thinking. Student writing tends to not be well thought out. Teachers must help students learn as much as possible so that the students have something worth saying. First mimetic approach emphasizes logic & reasoning. Second mimetic approach says that students don't write well on significant matters because they don't know enough. Students must read about all aspects of a topic before they can write about it.
Rhetorical Philosophy: good writing achieves the desired effect on the desired audience. Judge writing based on its effect on the targeted audience.

Quote: "The paper was returned with a large D-minus on the last page, emphatically circled. The only comment was 'Your theme is not clear-you should have developed your first paragraph. You talk around your subject.' From the perspective of my four-part model, there was a conflict of evaluative
modes at work here. The assignment seemed to call for writing that would be judged expressively, but the teacher's brief comment was not written from an expressivist point of view."

The quote above demonstrates that many composition teachers fail to apply the correct philosophies when grading a paper. If the philosophy was clear, the writer would know how to structure her paper in order to receive a good grade. This situation affects classroom structure because there is no authoritative instruction as to which philosophy to base your paper on and this leads to confusion.

Defining the formalist theory: deciding how good or bad writing is based on it's form. For example, does the paper have grammatical errors? Does it not meet the required length? Do the sentences and paragraphs flow?
It was easy to define this because Fulkerson describes it in a straightforward way. It was a bit challenging to write it in a way that is different from what Fulkerson writes.

Berlin: Rhetoric and Ideology in the Writing Class

The strategies to resolve these problems are called "heuristics," discovery procedures that "are the heart of problem solving" (36). Significantly, these heuristics are not themselves rational, are not linear and predictable-"they do not come with a guarantee" (37). They appear normally as unconscious, intuitive processes that problem solvers use without realizing it, but even when formulated for conscious application they are never foolproof. Heuristics are only as good or bad as the person using them, so that problem solving is finally the act of an individual performing in isolation, solitary and alone (see Brodkey)........The community addressed enters the process only after problems are analyzed and solved, at which time the concern is "adapting your writing to the needs of the reader."

This quote is saying that in order to be a writer, you must know how to be a problem solver as well. You might need to have backup solutions if your first solution doesn't work, but you must have some sort of problem solving ability. This ties into how writing classrooms are set up because even when people suggest ideas to you in a workshop, you are still the problem solver, not them. Though they may seem like problem solvers because they are suggesting new and different ideas you can try, you are the one who must figure out how to incorporate their ideas into your story.

                                                                      ~~~

Social-epistemic rhetoric is rhetoric that studies how knowledge and language came into existence. What social groups produced and provided certain pieces of knowledge? How does the same piece of knowledge differ in one culture versus another? How do social groups go about enacting some sort of change in how we view a certain piece of knowledge?

One challenge about defining this concept was that there was so much information about it, so I had to figure out a way to condense it all.

Introduction: How Did We Get Here?

Composition studies is the recognition that writing is an important aspect of education. I found it interesting that composition studies had to shift when the education system welcomed international and GI students into their schools after WWII, and again when they welcomed women, and again when they welcomed adult, lower-income, and minority students after the civil rights movement in the 1960s.

I wonder how students were taught writing before there were textbooks to aid them. I also wonder how teachers were taught to teach writing before textbooks also, because a lot of times, teachers use textbooks for themselves as well.

I find it interesting that women dominate the field of composition studies and I wonder why that is. I wouldn't think that composition studies is seen as an "inferior" field that men wouldn't want to be associated with.

Writing Is a Technology that Restructures Thought

Walter J. Ong's main claim is that writing is most definitely a technology even though most people don't think of it that way. People assume writing is natural, but as Ong points out, oral expression is what is natural to humans; writing is just as unnatural as people perceive computers to be. Ong goes on to explain the many differences between writing and speaking. He also alludes to the idea of "haves" and "have-nots" because it seems as though people who are able to write effectively are seen as "literate" and "haves" and those who use oral communication and do not write things down are seen as "illiterate" and "have-nots."

Five sentences:

1. "Functionally, literate persons, those who regularly assimilate discourse such as this, are not simply thinking and speaking human beings but chirographically thinking and speaking human beings (latterly conditioned also by print and by electronics)." --literate people are seen as literate because they are well versed in electronics and and various forms of print media. 

2. "Although we take writing so much for granted as to forget that it is technology, writing is in a way the most drastic of the three technologies of the word. It initiated what printing and electronics only continued, the physical reduction of dynamic sound to quiescent space, the separation of the word from the living present, where alone real, spoken words exist." --if writing was never invented, we wouldn't have the technologies we have today. Writing is an invention that changed how we as a society operate.

3. "Whereas in oral communication the source (speaker) and the recipient (hearer) are necessarily present to one another, writing distances the source of the communication (the writer) from the recipient (the reader)." --this is one of the differences between writing and oral communication. When someone reads something, the writer can be in the same room or thousands of miles away and unaware that someone is reading their work. But in oral communication, there is a very high likelihood that the people are in the same room together (unless it is skype or a phone call, which are new technologies that oral communicators back in the day could have never anticipated).

4. "They separate the knower from the known more spectacularly than writing does. Between the knower and the known, print interposes elaborate mechanical contrivances and operations of a different order of complexity than writing." --electronics separate the "haves" and the "have-nots."

5. "Writing separates the known from the knower more definitely than the original orally grounded maneuver of naming does, but it also unites the knower and the known more consciously and more articulately." --since writing is a form of technology, and technology separates society, writing does the same, unlike oral communication which is the original way of communicating. However, oral communication is not always accurate, but writing is because you have a record of what someone said rather than just relying on memory. 

Something I want more info on:

On page 26 when Ong writes that administration is unknown in oral cultures, I wonder how the student/teacher binary got to be the way it is now. When teachers and students interact orally in a classroom, there is a clear hierarchy; the teacher is in charge of the students. So this is kind of the opposite of what is being said about oral communication. 

Cynthia Selfe

Selfe's central claim is that composition teachers have to pay attention to technology. Literacy and technology are linked, so if teachers don't pay attention, they are responsible for illiteracy among students. However, Selfe claims that there is a cultural and economic divide and that even though a national program for technological literacy could provide people with equal access to better education (and therefore upward mobility and economic prosperity), computers still tend to get distributed unevenly among people of ethnic minorities and a lower socio-economic standing and people of ethnic majorities and a higher socio-economic standing.

Sentences that support:
1. It is a fact, for instance, that schools primarily serving students of color
and poor students continue to have less access to computers, and access to
less sophisticated computer equipment than do schools primarily serving
more affluent and white students.

2. I believe composition studies faculty have a much larger and more
complicated obligation to fulfill-that of trying to understand and make
sense of, to pay attention to, how technology is now inextricably linked to
literacy and literacy education in this country.

3. In other words, the poorer you are and the less educated you are in this
country-both of which conditions are correlated with race-the less
likely you are to have access to computers and to high-paying, high-tech jobs
in the American workplace.

4. Computer-using teachers instruct students in how to use technology-but, all too often, they neglect to teach students how to pay critical attention to the issues generated by technology use.

5. Composition teachers, language arts teachers, and other literacy specialists need to recognize that the relevance of technology in the English studies disciplines is not simply a matter of helping students work effectively with communication software and hardware, but, rather, also a
matter of helping them to understand and to be able to assess-to pay attention to-the social, economic, and pedagogical implications of new communication technologies and technological initiatives that affect their lives.

The above sentences show some examples of what can happen when computers aren't equally distributed among schools. Also in the above sentences, it is a teacher's responsibility to not only teach children how to use computers, but to make sure they understand the effects of this technology. If children are technologically illiterate, they may not be able to get jobs.

Sentence I want more info on:
But, all too often, they neglect to teach students how to pay critical attention to the issues generated by technology use. -- Why do some teachers neglect to teach students this?


Question for class:
If the government proposes a national program to make computers equally accessible in schools, why do you think they are only going to rich/white areas?

Literacy narrative final draft

Danielle Zickl

Composition Theory

Mary Lourdes Silva

9/23/14

Literacy Narrative

            A lot of kids don’t really like reading because they associate it with being forced to read books for school that they never would have chosen on their own, but I caught the reading bug in kindergarten—long before that was an issue.

            The New York Public Library was easily my favorite place as a child (other than ballet class). Here, I’d wander the children’s section for what seemed like hours, handing my mom or dad every book I picked out so I wouldn’t have to hold them all. At the tender age of six I got my first library card with a signature that was close to illegible (when I got older I just had to get a new one because I couldn’t stand how sloppily written my name was), but what mattered most was that it was my own; it was a portal to a different world. When I’d finish raiding the children’s section, we’d go to the adult section so my parents could browse around. I remember being in awe of how long these books were compared to my books and couldn’t wait until I could read them all. But the one thing I didn’t like about the adult section was how quiet it was. In the children’s section, there’d be parents reading to their kids on the various couches that were around, or kids just being loud and obnoxious because they’re little and that’s what they do. But none of that happened in the adult section. It was just grown-ups picking up a book, quickly scanning its contents, and either putting it back on the shelf or holding on to it while they repeated the cycle, and all of this was done for the most part silently.

            Spending time at the library with my parents gave me a chance to bond with them. Many parents could have easily left their child’s school in charge of their reading if they were too busy to do it themselves, but since I’m an only child, it was pretty easy for parents to make time for my literacy. My mom worked part time as a pre-school teacher and was always home when I was to take me to the library if I wanted to go, and even though my dad worked a full time job and wasn’t home as much as my mom was, he would never say no to a trip to the library. Though my dad never liked school and didn’t continue on to college, he’s an avid reader. He just enjoys reading for fun as opposed to being forced to read for educational purposes, and I think he wanted to impart that habit on me early — way before forced reading had a chance to ruin my love of it.

            I went to the same school from kindergarten to eighth grade. It was kind of a pilot school because it tested new types of learning methods out on its students. For example, we had mixed classes of first and second graders, and third and fourth graders. The idea was that the older kids could help the younger kids out. The school also provided us laptops from fifth through eighth grade to see how the use of technology could help us learn. No other schools on Staten Island were doing these types of things at the time, which is why it was exclusive; the school held a lottery to get in. In other words, most children go to schools they’re zoned for (which are presumably close to where they live), but the school I went to didn’t abide by zoning laws. Anyone whose parents entered them into the lottery and ended up getting in could go to this school, no matter where on Staten Island they lived. So every morning for eight years, my mom drove me a half hour there and every afternoon she drove me a half hour back home all in the name of a good education.

            My grandma got me my first journal when I was in third grade. I’m not really sure why she got it, but maybe because it was my favorite color she knew I’d like it. It was purple and sparkly and you could only open it with the key that it came with and I guarded that key with my life. I scribbled down my thoughts on my classmates, my friends, my family, my animals and anything else my little eight-year-old mind could think of until I ran out of pages. Though I’ve never been one to religiously keep a journal (I’ve had a few since third grade), this was my first brush with writing just for myself as opposed to writing for academic reasons, and I liked it.

            In fifth grade, it was evident that I was ahead of my peers in the reading department. All the books in Mrs. Held’s classroom had colored stickers on them and we could only read books of the color we were assigned based on our reading level. I remember being able to read books of a higher level than most of my class and I totally loved the fact that I was reading books that no one else was; it made me feel special. Two books I read then that stick out in my mind are The Giver by Lois Lowry and The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros.

            A year later, in sixth grade, we had to write a book about ourselves. I remember including information about my dog, my hobbies (ballet and ice skating), and my friends. I found this assignment to be a lot of fun and even bound it together with ribbon instead of just stapling it. Ms. Roman thought I did a good job on it and showed the class my work (along with a few other students’ work). During this time, I was practically failing math and this book kind of let me know that I was good at something.

            I was in eighth grade when I finally got a television in my room. Until then, I had nothing to do in there but read and I think that was the point of me not being allowed to have a TV in there in the first place. They didn’t want to run the risk of me being holed up in my room 24/7 and never coming out. But I was allowed to watch TV in the living room whenever I wanted because it was a social thing. In order to watch TV I’d have to come downstairs to where my parents usually were. When I got the TV, I did read a little less at first because I was so thrilled to be able to watch TV anytime I wanted instead of having to wait for a time when my parents weren’t watching their shows, but after a while there were times where I simply didn’t feel like watching TV, so I’d go back to my books. I think this solidified the fact that books were an important part of my life and nothing was going to really change that, even though they were scared that a TV would.

            Ninth grade was the year that I discovered just how much I really liked to write. At the time, I was big into the show Gilmore Girls and one of the characters, Rory, wanted to be a journalist. When I found out that journalism was one of the electives my high school offered, I jumped at the opportunity to take it. I loved journalism because it gave me a sense that what I was writing really mattered (not to mention, I felt pretty official getting to interview people). This class had me constantly writing and I enjoyed every minute of it. Though I sometimes found it difficult to piece together a story, I welcomed the challenge (unlike the challenge of math, which was unbearable). The same year was also my mom’s first parent-teacher conference at the high school and that day, she asked me how to get to all of the classrooms. It was my first instinct to write a detailed list of steps that took up about three sheets of computer paper. For whatever reason my mom told my journalism teacher, Mrs. Baron, about what I had done and Mrs. Baron told her that she remembered doing the same kind of thing when she was younger. My mom took it as a sign that I was meant to write. I can see how many parents might take their child’s desire to be a writer and immediately worry that they won’t be able to find a job (or at least a high-paying one) and beg them to find something else. But if parents give their child the freedom to choose their own path, it makes for a much happier child. What’s worse than living an unhappy life and resenting your parents? Or vice versa, what’s worse than having your child resent you for the rest of their lives because you were too controlling back when they were younger? It’s just better to just support anything and everything your child wants to do, unless they want to become a serial killer or something, in which case I’d say get help immediately!

            It was a continuing trend all throughout middle school and high school that I was good at English and history, but not so great at science and embarrassingly terrible at math. It was only natural for me to want to pursue the things I was good at, so even though I think of my ninth grade journalism class as kind of a turning point for me, my academic record showed that I was bound for this path anyway.

            I never liked poetry until I really got into Stevie Nicks. I’d always enjoyed her music since I grew up listening to classic rock, but I really became obsessed with her during my freshman year of college. Until then, poetry had never done anything for me. Why was William Carlos Williams’ eight-line poem about a wheelbarrow so important? Why was I being forced to read poems from the 1800s that were so outdated and hard to understand? I hadn’t realized that songs were poems until I watched countless interviews where she talked about how all of her songs started out as written poems; she never added a melody until it was time for the band to record. Stevie’s words just hit me in a way that I had never experienced before; unlike “The Red Wheelbarrow,” or any other poems I read in high school, I could actually relate to what she was writing about (“never have I been a blue calm sea, I have always been a storm”).

            Looking back, my sponsors exhibit the type of life I had. I grew up in an upper-middle class household and had many opportunities that I now realize not everyone had. The kids I went to school with were very similar to me for the most part, so it never occurred to me that my socio-economic status played a large role in my literacy. The fact that I’m even writing this narrative as a student of Ithaca College is a reflection this; not everyone is able to go to college to pursue what they are interested in. Reading and writing have always been a big part of my life and I now realize that I’m not the only one responsible for that.