3/25 - Literacy Theories (and other business)

We have several things we can cover today:

• Website tutorial
• Workshop research paper proposals
• Review feminist rhetorics and other voices readings
• feminist rhetoric, contribution to comp studies
• rhetoric of racism
• distinct nature of L2 writing
• teaching ESL
• Review literacy theory readings
• oral vs. literate traditions
• sponsors of literacy
• workplace literacy
• writing across the curriculum
• public intellectualism, service learning, activist research

3/4 - Social Theories

"If the student knew what he was up against better than the teacher giving the assignment seemingly does, he might ask, "Who wants to know?" (Ong 59)

"The case of the diary, which at first blush woudl seem to fictionalize the reader least but in may ways probably fictionalizes him or her most, brings into full view the fundamental deep paradox of the activity we call writing." (Ong 73)

"Writing is an attempt to exercise the will, to identify the self within the constraints of some discourse community. We are constrained insofar as we must inevitably borrow the traces. codes, and signs which we inherit and which our discourse community imposes. We are free insofar as we do what we can to encounter and learn new codes, to intertwine codes in new ways, and to expand our semiotic potential--with our goal being to effect change and establish our identities within the discourse communities we choose to enter." (Porter 41)

"As representatives and delegates of a local, disciplinary community, and of the larger community as well, teachers are responsible for the continued vitality of both the knowledge communities we value. Responsible to both sets of values, therefore, we must perform as conservators aand agents of change, as custodians of prevailing community values and as agents of social transition and reacculturation." (Bruffee 432)

"We will need...to look at collaborative learning not merely as a process of consensus-making but more important as a process of identifying differences and locating these differences in reltation to each other. The consensus that we ask students to reach in a collaborative classroom will be based not so much on collective agreements as on collective explanations of how people differ, where their differences come from, and whether they canlive and work together with these differences." (Trimbur 470)

"But if we take away that hierarchy [between “original” text and “borrowed” text] we remove the impulse for students to lie about it. If a piece of the assemblage is valued primarily for its function rather than its place in a hierarchy, students are no longer pushed so hard to hide the citations for their sources. In fact, if skills at making assemblages are made the focal point, then teachers would want to put great value on the ability of students to find existing chunks of text they can reuse. Re-inventing the wheel becomes an inefficiency, a misplaced waste of effort.“You borrowed that chunk? Great! Where did you get it from? Maybe I can use it, too.”" (Johnson-Eilola and Selber 400)

Key concepts

• "Audience is a fiction"
• Admissible ignorance
• Audience addressed vs. audience invoked
• Intertextuality (iterability and presupposition)
• Discourse community
• Forum analysis
• Collaborative learning
• Conversation / Social construction
• Normal discourse vs. abnormal discourse vs. acratic discourse
• Consensus vs. dissensus
• Originality / Creativity
• Assemblage