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?