Source #1: Ira Shor in Conversation with Paolo Freire
Shor, Ira; Freire, Paolo. A Pedagogy for Liberation: Dialogues on Transforming Education. Bergin & Garvey Paperback. 1986.
Context: Shor and Freire’s conversations do not focus solely on writing, but rather address teaching as a whole in its potential to liberate individuals. Their dialogues address issues about types of students, ways of teaching, and global issues in teaching; in Chapter 5 specifically, though, they address “first-world” students and ask whether these students too need liberation. Shor is notable in composition studies, so in some ways takes Freire’s work and applies it towards the work we do specifically.
Summary (pages 124 – 137 only): The chapter addresses students in the “first world,” asking whether they, like “third world” students, need to be liberated. The authors’ implicit answer is “yes.” The excerpt I’m using discusses a few ways student alienation can manifest itself, including general passivity (a “Culture of Silence”), irritated aggression (a “Culture of Sabotage”), and development of low expectations towards school. Shor and Freire discuss differences between “reading the words” and “reading the world.” This speaks to the perceived or real divorce between the topics of schoolwork and the real stuff going on in the world, also described by Shor as “school-words versus reality.” This separation, too, has an effect on student engagement or passivity.
Evaluation: For my purposes, the selection is useful because it points out the clear consequence of taking relevance out of schoolwork: removed or disengaged students. It also provides another way for me to discuss the passivity that can grow out of unproductive labor – labor that’s meaningless to the individual, that takes them farther from their “essence,” or that becomes strictly a commodity of exchange (traded for money or for grades, in this case). I found one aspect of the text limiting: aggressive and “sabotaging” students were discussed mainly as a problem. I didn’t feel like the authors recognized all of the potential engagement that can be brought out of active anger or conflict – though they did attempt ways at dealing with the issue in the classroom. At any rate, I felt this was a missed opportunity.
Source #2: Sean Hawthorne on Barriers to Engagement with Writing
Hawthorne, Sean. “Students’ beliefs about barriers to engagement with writing in secondary school English: A focus group study.” Australian Journal of Language & Literacy. 31.1 (2008): 30 – 42.
Context: Hawthorne discusses students’ approach to writing not only in terms of the writing process, but by considering the literature on student “motivation.” He cites studies on motivation, and refers to students’ falling abilities in writing and increasing dislike of writing (often across Australia and New Zealand); he hopes to address these issues by discovering what aspects of writing make writing assignments engaging or not engaging.
Summary: Hawthorne’s study concerned secondary students divided into two general groups: the “engaged” writing students and the “reluctant” ones. In focus groups, the students discussed six potential reasons for disengagement; the dominant factor was a lack of interest or perceived (or real) relevance in the writing topic, and it was shared across groups. Students also reported the importance of “environmental” factors, including computer vs. paper, home vs. school environments, and, notably, the extent to which writing becomes public in a classroom. Overall, students preferred classrooms in which their writing could be shared with other students.
Evaluation: For my purposes, the selection is useful because it helps me narrow the theoretical perspective I’m coming from towards practical classroom decisions. The study reports specific changes in assignments and assignment contexts that can contribute to student engagement or alienation. For other 538 students, limitations of the piece might include its small sample size (28 students), the age of the students (10th grade), and the country of origin (Australia). I was also concerned that as the study used focus groups rather than surveys – a decision with many strengths, of course – student answers might be swayed or colored by the answers they’d already heard from their peers.
Monday, March 31, 2008
Wednesday, March 19, 2008
Some Important Works in Composition Theory, Part 1
Some Important Works in Composition Theory
A nowhere near exhaustive list in no particular order
Lev Vygotsky. Thought and Language. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 1962
Born in 1896, Vygotsky was a major figure in Soviet-era psychology. Thought and Language¸ first published in 1934 after Vygotsky’s death, presents a comprehensive theory of intellectual development as a consequent of social interaction through language.
Dense and deeply theoretical, this book is not for the faint of heart. It provides a wealth of tools for thinking about how people learn to form and communicate concepts. If you're way into cognitive or developmental psychology, contrast with Piaget.
James Moffett. Teaching the Universe of Discourse. Boston: Houghton Mifflin 1968.
Working from a structural perspective, Moffett elaborates a theoretical framework that orders different kinds of discourse in terms of their increasing levels of abstraction and the relations among speaker, hearer, and subject. On this basis, Moffett proposes a curriculum that, in his view, corresponds to the natural order of discursive development in children.
Moffett does lots of theoretical heavy lifting to arrive at a discourse taxonomy not very much different from many others, but he provides some food for thought on the question of what is a reasonable order in which to teach language skills. And I particularly like the part of his last chapter titled, “The Case Against Textbooks.”
Ann E. Berthoff The Making of Meaning Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook 1981.
Ann E. Berthoff, who did her graduate work with I. A. Richards, urges composition teachers to think philosophically about their work rather than merely swap recipes for classroom practices. This collection of her lectures and articles (she calls them casual harangues and serious polemics) argues that “if we are to teach writing as a process of making meaning, we will need a philosophy of language that can account for meaning . . . as a plant that has grown” (v). Berthoff engages the work of Tolstory, Vygotsky, Freire, William James, C.S. Peirce in search of ideas to think with.
Berthoff is deliberately arcane and thoroughly cranky. Read “Composing is Forming” and “Reclaiming the Imagination.”
Mike Rose. Lives on the Boundary: A Moving Account of the Struggles and Achievements of America’s Educational Underclass. New York: Penguin. 1989.
Rose, a faculty member at UCLA, writes about his work with students deemed “remedial” of “underprepared” in the context of his own life experience, which included a period of being deemed in need of remediation. Makes you think about how we mark of turf and boundaries in the world of schools, and what it really means to be literate.
While we’re on the subject of Mike Rose, see also his Possible Lives, which chronicles visits to a wide range of classrooms, with different problems and different approaches, over a period of years. Read about people working on education in Los Angeles and Calexico; in Mississippi and Montana, at Berea College and the University of Arizona. Get some hope for it.
And I’ve mentioned this article before, also by Rose, also about remediation:
“The Language of Exclusion: Writing Instruction at the University.” College English 47: 4 (April 1885). Pp. 341-359
Hephzibah Roskelly and Kate Ronald, Reason to Believe. SUNY Press. 1998
“How does the history of thinking about education and learning and spiritual understanding in this country . . . connect to the work of teachers now?” Roskelly and Ronald explore how American philosophical pragmatism, as expounded by William James and John Dewey, among others, can work together with the rhetoric of American romanticism (Emerson, Thoreau) to provide a usable framework for teaching writing in the 21st century. Roskelly, a protégé of Ann Berthoff, is also co-author of An Unquiet Pedagogy, an approach to teaching geared to high school students and based in the work of Paulo Freire.
A nowhere near exhaustive list in no particular order
Lev Vygotsky. Thought and Language. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 1962
Born in 1896, Vygotsky was a major figure in Soviet-era psychology. Thought and Language¸ first published in 1934 after Vygotsky’s death, presents a comprehensive theory of intellectual development as a consequent of social interaction through language.
Dense and deeply theoretical, this book is not for the faint of heart. It provides a wealth of tools for thinking about how people learn to form and communicate concepts. If you're way into cognitive or developmental psychology, contrast with Piaget.
James Moffett. Teaching the Universe of Discourse. Boston: Houghton Mifflin 1968.
Working from a structural perspective, Moffett elaborates a theoretical framework that orders different kinds of discourse in terms of their increasing levels of abstraction and the relations among speaker, hearer, and subject. On this basis, Moffett proposes a curriculum that, in his view, corresponds to the natural order of discursive development in children.
Moffett does lots of theoretical heavy lifting to arrive at a discourse taxonomy not very much different from many others, but he provides some food for thought on the question of what is a reasonable order in which to teach language skills. And I particularly like the part of his last chapter titled, “The Case Against Textbooks.”
Ann E. Berthoff The Making of Meaning Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook 1981.
Ann E. Berthoff, who did her graduate work with I. A. Richards, urges composition teachers to think philosophically about their work rather than merely swap recipes for classroom practices. This collection of her lectures and articles (she calls them casual harangues and serious polemics) argues that “if we are to teach writing as a process of making meaning, we will need a philosophy of language that can account for meaning . . . as a plant that has grown” (v). Berthoff engages the work of Tolstory, Vygotsky, Freire, William James, C.S. Peirce in search of ideas to think with.
Berthoff is deliberately arcane and thoroughly cranky. Read “Composing is Forming” and “Reclaiming the Imagination.”
Mike Rose. Lives on the Boundary: A Moving Account of the Struggles and Achievements of America’s Educational Underclass. New York: Penguin. 1989.
Rose, a faculty member at UCLA, writes about his work with students deemed “remedial” of “underprepared” in the context of his own life experience, which included a period of being deemed in need of remediation. Makes you think about how we mark of turf and boundaries in the world of schools, and what it really means to be literate.
While we’re on the subject of Mike Rose, see also his Possible Lives, which chronicles visits to a wide range of classrooms, with different problems and different approaches, over a period of years. Read about people working on education in Los Angeles and Calexico; in Mississippi and Montana, at Berea College and the University of Arizona. Get some hope for it.
And I’ve mentioned this article before, also by Rose, also about remediation:
“The Language of Exclusion: Writing Instruction at the University.” College English 47: 4 (April 1885). Pp. 341-359
Hephzibah Roskelly and Kate Ronald, Reason to Believe. SUNY Press. 1998
“How does the history of thinking about education and learning and spiritual understanding in this country . . . connect to the work of teachers now?” Roskelly and Ronald explore how American philosophical pragmatism, as expounded by William James and John Dewey, among others, can work together with the rhetoric of American romanticism (Emerson, Thoreau) to provide a usable framework for teaching writing in the 21st century. Roskelly, a protégé of Ann Berthoff, is also co-author of An Unquiet Pedagogy, an approach to teaching geared to high school students and based in the work of Paulo Freire.
Wednesday, March 12, 2008
Technical Communication Texts
Killingsworth, M. Jimmie, and Michael K. Gilbertson. Signs, Genres and Community in Technical Communication. Amityville: Baywood, 1992.
Three part theory of technical communication, beginning with semiotics, then genre studies, then community studies. The main argument of the communities section of the book is that technical communication is best understood, and best managed, as people in identifiable groups creating documents together for consumption by other groups. This provides a good model for a writing classroom because it is rooted in actual business practices that students will certainly encounter once out of school. But, because the text is focused on professional practices of technical communication, linking it to pedagogy may be difficult.
Miller, Carolyn R. "What's Practical about Technical Writing?" Technical Writing: Theory and Practice. Bertie E. Fearing and W. Keats Sparrow, Eds. New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 1989.
Miller suggests that, though scholars denigrate the action-centered "bread-and-butter" writing that business relies on, they allow businesses to define what they teach in the classroom while exerting little influence over the practices of the businesses where their students will work. Her definition of practicality provides a good starting point for questioning the aims of the writing class, but her conclusion that rhetoric be understood and taught as a mode of conduct, rather than production, might be a tough sell in a core writing classroom of business and engineering majors.
Three part theory of technical communication, beginning with semiotics, then genre studies, then community studies. The main argument of the communities section of the book is that technical communication is best understood, and best managed, as people in identifiable groups creating documents together for consumption by other groups. This provides a good model for a writing classroom because it is rooted in actual business practices that students will certainly encounter once out of school. But, because the text is focused on professional practices of technical communication, linking it to pedagogy may be difficult.
Miller, Carolyn R. "What's Practical about Technical Writing?" Technical Writing: Theory and Practice. Bertie E. Fearing and W. Keats Sparrow, Eds. New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 1989.
Miller suggests that, though scholars denigrate the action-centered "bread-and-butter" writing that business relies on, they allow businesses to define what they teach in the classroom while exerting little influence over the practices of the businesses where their students will work. Her definition of practicality provides a good starting point for questioning the aims of the writing class, but her conclusion that rhetoric be understood and taught as a mode of conduct, rather than production, might be a tough sell in a core writing classroom of business and engineering majors.
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