Wednesday, October 29, 2014

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. 

Tuesday, October 28, 2014

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.

Sunday, October 26, 2014

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)

Monday, October 20, 2014

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. 

Sunday, October 19, 2014

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.






Sunday, October 12, 2014

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.

Friday, October 10, 2014

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.

Wednesday, October 8, 2014

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

Monday, October 6, 2014

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.

Sunday, October 5, 2014

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.

Thursday, October 2, 2014

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.