Week of 2/11 Cont'd

Juzwik, et al: “Writing into the 21st Century: An Overview of the Research on Writing”

Summary: Exactly what the title says it is: an overview. The authors identify four foci:

1.) General problems researchers investigated between 1999 & 2004.
2.) The age groups of the populations being investigated
3.) The intersection of the kinds of research and the age groups
4.) The methodologies the researchers used

They hope their data will provide an idea of what kinds of research are being done and what kinds need to be done, and a direction for research funding reform in light of federal funding’s discontinuities with federal mandates.

They examine reviews of research and a meta-analysis to get an idea of “the range and coexistence of different epistemologies, problems, age levels, and methods considered important in contemporary research” (457). In keeping with APA research writing, they begin by stating who they are and naming the three databases from which they drew their data. They clearly state that their research is limited to “empirical research on writing” (460). Next, they describe the process by which they evaluated the content and relevance of the articles they reviewed, and the process by which they “inductively” developed their coding categories.

Moving to their findings, they identify 10 problem categories and 6 age categories. They explain why they grouped the ages as they did. They indicate clearly, with the aid of two visuals, the relationship between age and research problems being explored. The methodologies used in the research they examine are described, distinguishing between interpretive methods “such as discourse analysis,” “experimental or quasi-experimental group designs . . . correlational designs such as factor analysis . . . historical research . . . and single-subject design methodology” (467).

Next, the authors move to the discussion, where they explore what their findings indicate. In this section, they conclude that certain problems are researched more often using certain populations, and they attempt to draw some conclusions about what these correlations and lacks might indicate about the larger social context. Finally, they imply that federal research funding guidelines should be revisited since the methodologies that have proved most fruitful in writing research do not meet the USDOE’s guidelines for federal funding, and they indicate that a review into who is providing other sources of funding remains to be done.

Musings:

Like Juzwik et al, I am surprised that more research on assessment is not being done, especially since it’s such a hot topic in education these days. I’m interested in understanding how assessment tools and methods are themselves assessed. I’d also find a study that indicated the sex/gender, ethnicity, and class of subject populations and the writing contexts explored more helpful to my own research. One of the shortcomings I’ve noted in my research on reading practice is that the research always takes place in either a classroom context or in a context in which the subjects know that their practices are being studied. Since my primary research revolves around American domestic humor, and since this humor is rarely either read or written in an academic context, I’d like some information about how context affects process, too.

This article, by the way, drove me to a statistics text for definitions at least four times.

Yancey: “Made Not Only in Words: Composition in a New Key”

Summary:

In her four-part essay, Yancey begins by interrogating our definitions of writing and composing. She catalogues a number in ways people are reading and writing outside academic settings and posits that the revolution in public writing parallels the revolution in reading in the early modern period. She notes that some data indicate that English departments may already have become “anachronistic” (302), and suggests that the revolution in writing may be a preliminary “tremor” indicating a “change [in] the very topography of higher education” (303). Yancey calls attention to the role of the screen in our lives, the ways it has transformed our language and interactions, and the questions that its presence raises about what it means to write, in the process articulating some of the ways the screen complicates the notion of literacy. She says that we must investigate three changes: “Develop a new curriculum; revisit our writing-across-the-curriculum efforts; and develop a major in composition and rhetoric” (308).

According to Yancey, the process movement has been the most influential change in composition. However, attempts to define a post-process curriculum “remain . . . chiefly focused on the writer qua writer,” and the teacher-student relationship is still paramount (309), which she views as a contradiction “if we believe that writing is social” (310-311).

Yancey lists some things students might do to expand the range of compositional possibilities as a means of proposing a new paradigm for composition curricula, and she argues that circulation (including intertextuality, variety, and remediation), the canons of rhetoric, and deicity are all crucial. Next, she addresses the issue of how the relationship between technology and the writing process is and ought to be understood, concluding that technology is central to the process, not something “outside the parameters governing composing” (320). Finally, Yancey notes that composition programs help “create writing publics” and implies that the end of teaching composition is to produce global citizens “whose commitment to humanity is characterized by consistency and generosity as well as the ability to write for purposes that are unconstrained and audiences that are nearly unlimited” (321).

Musings:

Okay. I get what she’s doing, but I found the slides, sidebars, and text-wrapped quotes distracting. Paper is NOT hypertext. I guess my difficulty indicates that we establish different sorts of reading practices as appropriate to different media, and it throws us off when a text doesn’t conform to our reading practices. I wonder if it doesn’t also indicate that there is a kind of generational split in which younger people are returning to the kind of discontinuous reading practices that were common when even secular texts carried marginal glosses designed to guide the reader to relevant biblical passages. In other words, those of us who are adapting to the Internet and those of us who have grown up with it may in fact employ different reading practices. When I read text with hyperlinks, for instance, I read the whole text first and then go back and check out any hyperlinks I’m interested in. My nieces, on the other hand, interrupt their reading to check out the links as they go and then pick up where they left off—if they get back to the original text at all. Just a thought.

I’m wary of connecting composition to the production of “good” citizens for a variety of reasons. Most important is that my pedagogical goal is to produce critical thinkers, people who, as I said in an earlier post, are able to critically examine even their most fundamental beliefs and who understand the role language plays in the ways they interpret and participate in the construction of reality. While this pedagogy can have the effect of producing what I would call a “good” global citizens, it allows both the students and me to define what precisely “good” signifies ourselves, as individuals, thus respecting student autonomy. I fear that shifiting the focus from language and thought to citizenship could produce the effect of dictating what should be thought. In a world where political dissent (or even just religion or ethnicity) can land one in Guantanamo Bay or get one "rendered" to a torture-friendly country such as Syria, it doesn't seem a long leap from a pedagogy that focuses on citizenship to one that dictates what that citizenship should look like.

One other point: I’m also taking Gender and Interpretation, and we’ve just read Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own and several essays by Adrienne Rich. Both authors present housework and family obligations only as distractions that keep women from writing. While this has been my experience, it doesn’t describe my whole experience. Yancey’s description of the woman who uses the timer on the dryer as a kind of break from writing that allows her to think and sort things out also resonates with me. I need to occasionally walk away from what I’m writing for the same reasons. Especially academic writing.

Canagarajah: “The Place of World Englishes in Composition: Pluralization Continued”

Summary: Canagarajah presents what s/he calls “code meshing” as a way of merging multiple Englishes with Standard Written English (SWE) which s/he sees as necessary in a transnational cultural and intellectual world. Canagarajah proposes that we replace the terms “native speakers” and “non-native speakers” with Metropolitan English (ME) and World Englishes (WE) to better capture the multiplicity of Englishes currently spoken around the world. She describes the movement of a variety of Englishes across national boundaries via the Internet, television, film, and business. The author argues that even speakers of Anglo American English must become proficient in multiple Englishes. Like many of the authors we’ve read thus far, Canagarajah holds that people are developing the strategies they need outside the classroom, implying that composition instructors can learn from and need to adapt to the learning methods people actually employ as they negotiate multiple Englishes. S/he addresses issues of pedagogical practice, concluding that “rather than teaching grammatical rules in a normative and abstract way, we should teach communicative strategies” modeled on the ways multilingual interlocutors accommodate each other in conversation, while acknowledging the power relations embodied in different communication contexts (593-594).

For Canagarajah, a crucial issue is the fact that the expository texts we use are written in ME; while we use WE literary texts and other WE texts as supplements. S/he moves on to the manners in which we “segregate” codes (595), especially the many forms of stratification including macrosocial stratification. A modification of Elbow’s strategy is proposed, and the author draws on Pratt’s notions of hybridity and the contact zone to illustrate what actually happens when Englishes converge. Multimodality is also addressed, and, adding to the temporal requirement, Canagarajah introduces a spatial requirement for the emergence of successful code meshing. Finally, Geneva Smitherman’s writing is deconstructed as an example of a text that successfully meshes codes in the way that Canagarajah proposes.

Musings:

Of all of the articles we read this week, I found this the most thought-provoking. Here’s one thing for me: I love grammar. I love teaching grammar. I love the organizing power it helps me bring to language. I love the way punctuation groups words together and helps me to control the rhythm of what I write. I know that I am strange in this regard. I know that other people experience grammar as an onerous, limiting, intimidating exercise—especially first-year comp students. Still. I love grammar. My problem, then, is how to fit my love of grammar into the transnational social context Canagarajah describes so well. At least one of my problems is. Some people would say that loving grammar is a much more serious problem! No, seriously, one other problem I have with this article is the way it privileges academic discourse while seeming not to. What I mean is that in the world of business, transnational or not, people make judgments about other people’s social status and competence based on the way language is deployed. There is considerable stigma attached to the use of “non-standard” English. The way one speaks can signify one’s class, geographic origins, and educational level. Failing to expose students to the prescriptions and proscriptions of SAE could result in their inability to effectively cross class boundaries if that is their goal. Canagarajah seems to believe that s/he has overcome this objection with code meshing. I remain suspicious. I don’t believe, for example, that a student who included AAVE in, say, a scholarship application would get the scholarship. I think that the problem is that Canagarajah, for all his/her attention to the macro context, does not attend quite carefully enough to the micro. Smitherman, writing from a position of discursive privilege based on her academic standing, is able to do things in an academic context that would mark her as ignorant in other contexts. Canagarajah thus privileges academic discourse in this example.

I’m not saying that students will benefit most by a grammatically prescriptivist approach to composition. On the contrary. I don’t think they will. However, there has been, throughout US history, a resistance to and prejudice against people with accents—unless they’re British, or possibly French. Non-standard usage is a kind of accent that can reveal more than national origin. I don’t think that modeling WE in texts is enough to overcome the revelatory and performative power of language use. Modeling in textbooks hasn’t worked for SAE, has it?

All that said, I do appreciate a couple of things about this approach. I am fascinated by the possibilities of openly discussing what’s being conveyed by different Englishes. I loved the Tamil “which language am I a native of?” I think it captures our construction in and by language beautifully—in a way that SAE stumbles around but never quite gets. The open discussion of the reasons why students turn to the constructions they do is entirely in keeping with my desire for transparency in the classroom, so I’m going to look for ways to incorporate it when possible.

Sorry for going on and on so. I’ve decided to separate the required summary from the rest of the text so that those of you who have read the articles can skip that part and get to the meat without a huge time investment. This blog really is an example of what Knoblauch & Brannon call composing—working my ideas and thoughts out as I write—and sometimes it takes a while to get anywhere.

Peace to all.