3.6 Cultural stories and re-authoring relationships to writing

Note:  I posted Chandler, Chapter 3, to the right, under Handouts.

Chandler.  The first section of this piece illustrated how dominant cultural discourses about literacy and "success" shape our thinking about ourselves and our accomplishments, often in ways that may not be appropriate for the community we actually live in or the particular experiences we may have had.  And while the opening story illustrated problems that can be created with dominant discourses such as the Literacy Myth or the American Dream are a bad match for individuals actual life situations, it is also true that there is "truth" in these stories, and that they do in fact serve as important elements within belief systems that can be supportive and constructive.  So - our discussion of dominant cultural discourses for writing and for school needs to be taken with a couple of grains of salt:
1) individuals connect to and "believe in" these discourses in many different ways and from many different perspectives;
2) whether a cultural story is "good"/constructive/helpful or "bad"/limiting/unhelpful depends on the ways individuals and groups relate to and represent themselves within those stories;
3) cultural stories are not about Truth -  rather they are pervasive representations that are "out" in the culture, and whether we believe them or not - shape the way we talk about a given topic.

With those caveats, we spent some time exploring our perceptions of the elements in dominant cultural stories about writing.  We came up with the following features.

good writing
has to be interesting
correct sentences
there are correct forms (genre requirements)
correct spelling
well written = readers will understand it + it will be liked
text-based ( as opposed to visual or electronic)
not fan constructed (individual author, not collaborative)

Different kinds of writing
academic, expressive, personal, journalism
novels= literature
"classics"=> the literary canon = the defining standard of "good writing" in the dominant story

how people write
you have it or not
it's hard work
by yourself
can't teach writing
inherent ability
solitary
traumatizing => if you are a "genius" writer you die young by suicide, drugs or alcohol abuse

who owns writing
white people
academics
educated people
middle class
male

We also had a short conversation about "stereotypes" within the cultural story for school/schooling.  we didn't get into this too much but came up with:

expected to meet standards
takes all the creativity out of writing
students don't like it

Again, these are reductive, one-dimensional representations, but they are certainly part of the Conversation about issues associated with school.


Chamberlain. The questions we used to apply Chamberlain's systems approach to "re-authoring" past experiences are posted on the previous blog.  As usual, we were pressed for time and didn't have quite enough reflection on how the approach works.  It is important to note that we worked through a reflective process meant to be used over a period of months, even years, and that were designed as interactive => explored through conversation.  While moving between writing and thinking reproduces some of the features of conversation - it certainly loses many possibilities for expanding perspective that are available in interpersonal talk. 

That said, and with the small amount of conversation I had about the "talking" part of this evening's exercise, it seems reflective conversations which place "problems" with writing outside the individual and within cultural systems and which invite the kinds of externalizing, contextualizing, deconstructing, and re-authoring posed by the question => pose a constructive approach for:

awareness: making "wounded" relationships to writing visible and non-stigmatizing
exploration: allowing ways to work through the cultural assumptions and systems that contribute to the writer's position (distress)
re-authoring: creating new stories about causality, responsibilities, agency, ownership and other problems within relationships to writing.

We did not have time to explore possible classes, classroom exercises, assignment series, or other pedagogical tools or personal practices to use this method - though that is the long-term intention for bringing this material into our class. 

As set up in the first part of class, there are different categories for learning to write.  Some learning tasks are about mastery of forms and correctness - including Discourse, and some are about accessing language.  Problems associated with accessing language often connect to formative experiences that allow writers to feel "authorized" (or not) in terms of their "right" to put words on a page, to control/own the meanings they produce, to value their own work, and so on.  As pointed out by Sondra Perl in her essay on working with unskilled writers - teachers need to take stock of the composing patterns and issues that student writers bring to the class

Issues associated with voice, ownership, value, and other relationships to writing connect to a significant number of the "really important things writers need to learn that we generally learn on our own" list that we created on the first day of class. 

For next class:
Read: Chandler, Chapter 3=> name the stories in your interview trancript
Blog: the set of named stories you will talk about in class + a list/discussion of some of the language features you used to do your analysis.

We will be moving on from the psychoanalytic, constructionist approach to approaches for narrative analysis, and your big assignment over the break is to finish transcribing your interview and apply some of the methods for narrative analysis introduced in Chandler, Chapter 3, to your transcript.

Come to class on March 20 prepared to give a presentation on patterns for talk that you see in  aparticular set of stories from your interview.  These  that might reveal otherwise unstated (or less well elaborated) issues associated with writing.

For example, in the analysis of Lorena's transcript, it was only through paying close attention to language that it became clear that the focus of The ESL Test => was really on Friends, right from the beginning. Of course this story is about many things, not just one thing, and that is what story analysis helps us to think about = how this is a success story, a story about conflict between two competing wishes/needs on Lorena's part, how it is both an outside in (institutional/structural) and inside-out (consequences for Lorena) story, and so on. 

As noted on the calendar, we will be moving on to narrative analysis, and spending some time developing ideas for your research projects.

Great class tonight - and have an awesome break.