Changing ideas about what "writing" is: Most language researchers no longer think of writing as a a system for representing speech. As far back as the early 1980's language researchers including Brian Street and James Gee have posed approaches to the study and teaching of language and writing = reject the autonomous model of writing => for an ideological model of literacy. Within autonomous models, writing is seen as an entirely self-supporting mode of communication, where all the elements for meaning are included in and conveyed through writing itself. Language researchers including Jack Goody, David Olson and Walter Ong and others proposed theories for language and writing within this model. New literacy theories, social constructionism, and deconstruction have moved the teaching and study of language beyond autonomous models - to what Brian Street referred to as an "ideological model" = where literacies are seen not only as fixed codes or cognitive practices, but as social practices embedded within particular social situations within particular cultures, and within the power structures that allow and disallow particular meanings (Street).
To put this in plain English, new literacy approaches assume that writing "means" not only in terms of what the words on the page "say," but also in terms of readers' experiences and identities, and in terms of larger cultural patterns for making meaning. This means that your understanding of this blog is not only about the dictionary meanings of the words on this screen and the grammatical rules I used to combine them; it about your experiences with academic texts about language theory, the way you talk and think in terms of your home Discourses, and the way our different ways of thinking and being interact to create meanings In other words - communication through writing is always an interaction, and it will always depend not only on the writer, but also on the reader, the communication context, and the nature of the interactions that take place in that context.
How literacy studies can inform the teaching of writing: Teaching in most writing courses which emphasizes the importance of rhetorical analysis: thinking about audience, purpose, and form as a way of deciding what to write. Within this approach, writers are taught to consider their audiences' expectations about concepts, writing genres, and language use as a way to figure out the best "form" for their communications. As such, in its present form, writing is primarily taught in terms of how best to "say." But as emphasized by Jame Gee, the meanings conveyed by writing draw from not only from how language can "say" things. Communication through writing also depends on the reader's ability to connect to the writers assumptions/values/beliefs about the ways writing allows us to do things and be things.
Communication is certainly a primary function of writing, but as new literacy researchers have observed, language and writing also function to "build" things. In An Introduction to Discourse Analysis, James Gee points out seven building tasks of language. By building - he means the ways we use language to bring ideas, relationships, actions into being. What we "build" becomes real both in our minds - and in the world - in ways that they were not real before we put them into words.
Quote from Gee:
It is as if you could build a building by simply speaking words. While we cannot build a building by simply speaking words, there are, indeed things we can build in the world by speaking words that accopmlish actions and enact identities.
Let's take a very simple example. An umpire in a baseball game says "Strike!" and a strike exists in the game. That is what the rules of the game allow to happen. It is a strike if the umpire says it is. Similarly, the rules of marriage allow a marriage to happen in the world when a properly ordained minister or a judge says "I now pronounce you man and wife." Umpires actually make strikes happen and ministers actually make marriages happen. . . .
We make or build tghings in the world through language. . . . Whenever we speak or write, we always (often simultaneously) construct or build seven things or seven areas of "reality."
As you can see in the handout, Gee goes on to list what he names the seven building tasks of language, along with questions discourse analysts aks about the language-in-use (discourses) that build our language world.
What we are going to do in this course:
Our work in this course will be:
- to explore what college composition courses teach - and what they do not teach - that encompasses writing as "saying, doing, and being";
- to review pedagogies that seem to teach writing as a whole language, and to consider how we might add to their approaches;
- to explore related disciplines and their research methods for practices that might be relevant to teaching writing as "saying, doing, and being";
- to explore the usefulness of those practices through applying them to data and experiences from our class community;
- to pose theories and patterns that will be useful for creating college writing courses that teach whole-language writing.
While I have read research relevant to the focus for this course, I have not fully mastered the ideas we will be exploring. I am have a lot to learn. I predict that there will be gaps in my knowledge, conflicts in my "explanations", and "mistakes" in my recommendations for what we need to focus on. I am hoping our work together will be a collaborative exploration, and I fully expect that each of you will bring ideas and expertise that go beyond the ideas I have brought to the conceptualization of this course.
Thank you in advance for cutting me some slack.
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