Consider this a test drive...

Hello PEOPLE students! This is a model of what your blog might look like. This blog was created and maintained as a requirement for a class I took last summer. Ignore the lengthy final project post-- that was our final assignment and not really a good indication of how I used this blog to reflect on the readings and classroom discussion.

Scroll through the blog (you'll want to look at some of the older posts as well), and you'll see some elements you might want to include in your blog:
* Complete, thoughtfully composed sentences, which avoid spelling and mechanical errors
* A variety of ways in which I approach the readings
* Use of hypertext links and multi-media (The Public Enemy video is particularly cool!)
* Comments from others in my classes

After you take a look around, check out some of these blogging resources.
* Anton Zuiker's Blogging 101, which gives the basic features of a blog
*Dennis Mahoney's How To Write a Better Weblog, which provides writing conventions and tips to consider when creating your blog

Now that you've looked at some examples and resources, it's time to start your blog!

Begin by going to blogger.com and click on the "Create Your Blog Now" tab. Follow the directions and you'll soon have a functioning blog. Have fun!

final project

One of the main thematic links between the articles we read for class is that good writing is contextual. What counts as “good” depends on a complex interplay between author, audience, intent, expectations, genre, and cultural background, to name just a few of the factors. As our peerless leader put it, the bumper sticker du jour in Comp and Rhetoric is “Writing is Socially Situated.” Numerous of the authors we read commented on this idea, in one form or another, including Barthlomae, Elbow, Delpit, Canagarajah, and Sirc. How the teacher of writing was supposed to respond to the socially-situated nature of writing varied depending on who was tackling the issue— Delpit had vastly different thoughts on the subject than Canagarajah, for instance— but all of these authors seemed to agree that what writing is, and what it is meant to accomplish, varied from one context to the next.

With that in mind, I have designed a mini-unit designed to allow students to reflect critically on their the varied writing discourses in which they participate. Geoffrey Chase in particular stressed the need for critical reflection on these discourses, stating in “Accommodation, Resistance, and the Politics of Writing” that students need “to problematize their existence and to place themselves in a social and historical context through which they can come to better understand themselves and the world around them” (21).

During the mini-unit, students will:
* Be introduced to the concept of socially-situated writing discourses.
* Reflect on the varied contexts in which they write.
* Consider the conventions, opportunities, limitation, and values of these discourses.
* Create a piece of writing that harnesses these different discourses towards a clear thematic and creative end.

This mini-unit was created to be used with a high school English class consisting of juniors and seniors.


Part One: Introduction to discourse
The unit will begin with an introduction to the concept of discourse. Students will begin by brainstorming all the ways in which they write. The instructor will work to allow the students to consider realms of writing that might not be readily apparent (i.e. emails, text messages, social networking websites, graffiti, etc.).

After students come up with a list of the varied ways they write, they will work with partners to develop lists of what constitutes “good” writing in these different contexts. For example, how is good poetry differ from good emailing? If time allows, the students could then attempt to write in one context while following the conventions of another: text message poetry, research paper love letters, etc.

These activities will lead to a discussion of discourse. Students will be presented with a definition/introduction to the idea of discourse, and will, as a class, reflect on what can be said about the discourses the students participate in.


Part Two: Privileged versus marginalized discourses
In this section of the mini-unit, students will begin to reflect on how some discourses are privileged depending on the writing situation. Reflective journal writing will help accomplish this, along with an introduction to some of the extant debates in Composition Studies. Student could be presented with excerpts from writings by Bartholomae & Elbow or Delpit & Canagarajah and asked to summarize/respond to the arguments being presented. Additionally, the class could read and analyze news coverage and editorial commentary surrounding the Oakland Unified School District’s 1996 decision to attempt to formally counter the marginalization of Black English.

Student will be asked to consider the political and social implications of the privileging of discourses. They will also reflect on where their own writing voices fit within this debate.


Part Three: Multigenre paper
As a summation of our study on socially-situated writing discourses, students will compose a multigenre paper that consists of many different types of writing, both privileged and marginalized.

For this paper we utilize a type of academic writing known as multigenre papers. This is a antidote to stale, forced, and formulaic “academic” essays that students are made to write in many educational contexts. Tom Romano, from Miami of Ohio University, has done a lot of research on this type of student academic writing; click here for Romano’s multigenre writing website. Briefly, a multigenre paper will explore a theme through numerous genres. To give an example, a student might write a paper on William Shakespeare, but rather than utilizing the typical academic genre of literary analysis or research paper, he or she may explore Shakespeare’s works and life through a combination of genres, both analytic and creative. When done well, this type of assignment allows for a very rich and authentic exploration of a theme.

The multigenre paper will fit very with the ongoing discussion of writing discourses. Student will choose a theme, and then explore this theme through a variety of the discourses in which they engage. This will provide academic sanction for typically marginalized discourses, allow for authentic inclusion of student voice, and prompt reflection on the benefits and limitations of different types of writing. As a conclusion to the multigenre paper, students will be asked to critically examine their use of genre and discourse with in the paper. They will be also be given the opportunity to perform parts of their paper to the class.

fellow travellers

In his near-litany of metaphors and allusions pertaining to composition, here are few that Sirc missed:

Writing classroom as brick wall and can of spray paint:




Writing classroom as Ikea:




Writing as post-9/11 cultural mashup:

safe houses versus academic ghettos

It was perhaps apropos that Canagarajah (do you suppose he goes by Professor C in his classroom?) referenced boxing in his article “Safe Houses in the Contact Zones.” (By the way, Tyson won the match via TKO in the first round). I can definitely see Canagarajah and Lisa Delpit circling each other in some Atlantic City boxing palace, gloves laced, mouth guards firmly in place.

It was interesting to read Canagarajah immediately after Delpit. Both dealt with the same basic theme: the relationship between dominant and marginalized discourses within the classroom. But they have dramatically different perspectives on this theme. While Delpit thinks that teaching students of color via their own cultural-linguistic background is tantamount to relegating them to the academic ghetto, Canagarajah argues that it is the job of the progressive, transgressive educator to support and promote these marginalized discourses and to find ways to bring them into the formal classroom discourse.

At several points in his article, Canagarajah makes points that strike, like an uppercut, at Delpit’s beliefs. On page 192 Canagarajah states that “simply acquiring the established academic/institutional discourse is not to be speak but to be silenced.” I couldn’t help but wonder if this wasn’t an intentional jab (to continue with the boxing metaphor) at Delpit’s “Silenced Dialogue.” On page 193 Canagarajah argues that bringing work from the safe house into the classroom “convey(s) to students that their vernacular discourses are valued academically.” Delpit might very well take the stance that they aren’t valued academically and to pretend otherwise is to do a disservice to the students. And, finally, many of Canagarajah’s strategies to legitimatize the writing done in the safe houses are suspiciously process-oriented in nature. Lisa Delpit, take that. It was interesting to me to see that Delpit was pointedly not cited in this piece.

At the end of the article, Canagarajah qualifies his stance a bit (see the paragraph that begins on page 194 and continues to page 195). Delpit, too, does this in “The Silenced Dialogue.” Both of these qualifications bring them much closer together, argument-wise, than most of their arguments would indicate, and brings to mind Don’s advice from an earlier blog post: “BALANCE, BALANCE, BALANCE.”

As a bit of a postscript, here are some clips of interest to those trying to place in context Canagarajah’s students’ cultural references:


Mike Tyson's TKO of Carl Williams:




Public Enemy doing "Fight the Power:"

progressive or hegemonic?

As a white writing instructor that considers himself “liberal” or “progressive” in the classroom and who strives for a democratic, socially-just pedagogy, it was with some trepidation that I read Delpit’s “The Silenced Dialogue.” After all, my brand of teaching—progressive, liberal, process-orientated, whatever you want to call it—has been generally smiled upon in the academic contexts I have found myself. I have been, so to speak, playing for the home team. So, when I read lines from Delpit like the following, it came across as somewhat of a personal attack:

“It was incumbent upon writing-process advocates—or indeed, advocates of any progressive movement—to enter into dialogue with teacher of color, who may not share their enthusiasm about so-called, liberal, or progressive ideas.” (pages 281-282)

After all, who wouldn’t be enthused by my teaching style?

But I was intrigued by Delpit’s argument. While I agree with her five points on the nature of power within the classroom institution, I have never considered the fact that avoidance of fundamental writing instruction was a method of denying access to dominant discourses. It rankled a bit; I have, after all, spent a large portion of my writing career trying to get beyond what I considered superficial, disconnected, skill-and-drill grammar exercises to “authentic” writing, in which the student had ownership and an authentic audience. This seemed liberating to me, a way to make writing matter. I hadn’t considered that doing so might disenfranchise a segment of my classroom.

I thought of the scenario I shared in class on Monday, the one where I had one African American student recently transferred from Indianapolis in my freshman English class. This student wrote and interesting essay, full of detail and voice, about growing up in an urban environment so different than the affluent suburban conditions he currently found himself in. It was original and insightful, but it was also absolutely riddled with spelling, grammatical, and syntactical errors. The department expectation was that I should grade this paper harshly; after all, half the grade was to be based on mechanics. Instead I fudged, made many positive comments on the student’s content, and ignored many of the errors.

I felt I was doing right by the student, showing that his voice and experiences and communication style were valued in my classroom. I also didn’t want to give a C to a student who wrote so honestly about his life. What would Delpit have said about this? Was I unconsciously oppressing this student by not explicitly giving him the tools he needed to survive in a world dominated by a hegemonic discourse? Was I praising his voice at the expense of his future? I don’t know, really. I need to further ponder these questions.

aggressive acts

There is a curious line that caught my attention in one of the supplemental readings, David Bartholomae’s “Inventing the University.” On page 595, Bartholomae states that writing “is an act of aggression disguised as an act of charity.” I’ve never thought of writing in quite this manner. Sure, there can be writing that is aggressive, but can’t there also be charitable writing, or political writing, or romantic writing, or whatever? Doesn’t the author determine the function of a particular piece of writing? To make a blanket statement relegating all written communication to an act of aggression is an idea I couldn’t quite get my head around.

But then I thought of Bartholomae’s words in “Writing With Teachers:” “there is no writing without teachers.” So, drawing from this, if all writing is an act of aggression, then all writing instruction is instruction in aggression. Or, maybe, writing instruction is an inherently aggressive act. This idea, somewhat repellant to me as an English teacher who often looks at literacy instruction as liberation, made more sense upon reading Mina Shaughnessy’s “Diving In: An Introduction to Basic Writing.” Her point that academic writing is an elite, exclusionary discourse fits well with Bartholomae’s concept as writing as aggression. How much writing instruction is actually a chance for the teacher to point out the deficiencies in his or her students’ writing. To show, as Shaughnessy puts it, “what is wrong with students.”

It made me think about my own writing classes. How often have I made a student’s paper “bleed ink,” as Joyce so memorably put it, thinking that I was doing that student a favor? It would be very easy for this student to consider my interventions, as benevolent as they seemed to me, as aggressive and demeaning. This, it doesn’t need to be said, is the least of my goals as a writing instructor. Shaughnessy’s call to for the teacher to critically examine the hidden implications and power structures of writing instruction is essential.

Make prose, not war.

The teacher as tyrant

Having read the arguments and rebuttals of David Bartholomae and Peter Elbow, I can think of many threads that might be interesting to explore: the ability of writers to "own" their work, the ways in which social construction play into the writing process, how reading impacts the composition process, etc. In this post, however, I won't focus on these. Hopefully someone else will take up the discussion, or maybe it'll happen at the Union as we slap mosquitoes away from ourselves.

What I'd like to discuss, or rather start a discussion on, is the idea of authority in the teaching process. I'm choosing this topic partially because both Bartholomae and Elbow touch on it, albeit in different ways, but mainly because it dovetails nicely with an experience I had during the first day of my PEOPLE class. I started with an activity where students shared what their favorite piece of writing of all time was, and what made it so important to them. A student shared her experience writing a narrative about the last Christmas she spent with her grandparents. As a postscript to the discussion, she added that she got a bad grade on it. The class was outraged-- it was a story about her dead grandparents, after all-- and one student, in high dudgeon, said, "What gives teachers the right to say what writing is good and what isn't?" It's a somewhat obvious question to ask, in some ways, and one that I struggled with a lot in my first years of teaching as I tried to apply a grade to a student's essay or poem or story. But the question resonated with the class, and several of the students nodded in agreement, sharing the indignation over self-appointed experts deciding what counts as good writing.

It's a situation that both Elbow and Bartholomae touch on. It deals with writing as situated and author ownership, both illustrated by Bartholomae in his example of the student writing about divorce (p 66). But it also illuminates issues of power and authority in the classroom. The student in my example wrote her essay presumably because some teacher ordered her to write it, and received a grade because the school demanded that grades be given. Maybe it was supposed to be a research project, and the narrative about that memorable Christmas failed to meet the teacher's genre expectations. Maybe it was riddled with spelling and mechanical errors, and this particular teacher valued grammar and spelling above emotion and sentiment. In any event, the whole situation exists due to the teacher's authority to dictate the process of writing.

How would E & B respond to this? I think Bartholomae would say that what needs to be done is to acknowledge this authority: to deconstruct it, to examine its roots and limits, and to look at other forces-- gender, race, class-- that might be at play. This is the true work of academia, it would seem, at least according to Bartholomae.

Elbow, on the other hand, would advocate a surrender of the teacher's authority and power. He might recommend movement towards "non-instruction" (p 89), or maybe a form of instruction that frees up space for the student to explore language, memory, family, whatever, in the form the author finds suitable. Elbow says that he feels the need to "take out the grading pressure" (p 91). But, practically speaking, how can you do that in a typical public high school?

It's an interesting fragment of the larger debate between these two academics duking it out in very academic ways, and I'm not sure where exactly I stand on the issue. Perhaps I'll take ten minutes, but on some jazz music, light some incense, and do a nice, cathartic freewrite on the matter, see what comes out...

Opening salvo

Hey hey!

More intellectually stimulating blogs will be coming soon, but, in the meantime, please enjoy the following vintage clip of Reg Kehoe and His Marimba Queens. I play bass, and the bass player in this video is pretty much all I aspire to be.