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Literacies in Context (Foutainhead P, 2007)
FieldWorking (Boynton/Cook, 2006)
English 102: Sample Syllabus |
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ENGLISH 102: GUIDE FOR TUTORS AND TEACHERS
Theoretical Framework for English 102 (2007) Developed by Shannon Carter (January 2007) Though it probably seems counterintuitive to say so, the greatest obstacles we face in teaching many first-year students to write “college-level essays” rest not in what they don’t yet know about writing but rather in what they’ve already learned about it; in other words most unsuccessful student writers struggle to apply writing “rules” that are, in fact, inappropriate for the vast majority of “real” writing situations (see especially Street, Gee, Hull, Schultz, Brodkey, Barton and Hamilton, Cope and Kalantzis, Harrington, Adler-Kassner, and Carter among others). It’s not that they didn’t learn the rules the first time around. They did. When pressed, many of these writers can parrot the very same writing “rules” we know to be circulating among even the most effective writers (never use “I” in formal writing; be clear and concise; the thesis statement should appear at the end of the first full paragraph) No, it’s not that they didn’t get it. It’s just that while these rules may have been entirely appropriate guidelines for the context in which they originally learned them, they are unlikely to be equally applicable to every single writing context in which they may later find themselves, despite what they’ve been taught about the autonomy and portability of these rules. Still, as Brian V. Street explains, “individuals, often against their own experience, come to conceptualize literacy as a separate, reified set of ‘neutral’ competencies, autonomous of social context” (114, emphasis mine). According to key research in literacy studies (see attached bibliography), many of our attempts to simplify and universalize writing (through rules, through “general writing instruction”) actually block access to any meaningful sort of literacy. Writing is not neutral; it is, as Jacqueline Jones Royster explains, a “people-centered enterprise.” In other words, “all language use . . . is an invention of a particular social milieu, not a natural phenomenon” (21). In fact, “discourses operate at the hands and the will of a people, rather than instruments or forces of nature” (25, emphasis in original). For this very reason, general writing instruction with neutral goals like producing in students “clarity of prose” and “stronger research skills” is problematic; people exist in communities, and communities—even academic ones—are never entirely autonomous but always already “people-oriented” and therefore reproduce “[a particular] discourse [that] is a configuration of knowledge and its habitual forms of expression, which represents a particular set of interests” (Cope and Kalinowitz 21)—interests that are neither “universal” nor “generalizable” but rather time-based, people-based, place-based, and situation-specific. To a great extent the key theoretical framework for the current curricular choices for English 102 relies on two, overlapping theoretical traditions: the New Literacy Studies (NLS) and activity theory. (1) "NLS approaches,” according to Brian V. Street, “focus on the everyday meanings and uses of literacy in specific cultural contexts and link directly to how we understand the work of literacy in educational contexts” (417). In other words, NLS is primarily concerned with the way literacy manifests itself in various out-of-school contexts and, through these findings, exposing the artificiality and irrelevance of formal literacy education as it exists in most in-school contexts. (2) Activity theory has its roots in Vygotskian psychology and is largely concerned with human practice as an “activity system”:
Whereas NLS focuses mostly on the social nature of literacy, activity theory emphasizes the goal-oriented behaviors that make up the activity system we call “literacy.” When literacy is understood as a social practice, however, activity theory requires us to examine the social contexts in which these activities are mediated and reproduced. Thus, Literacies in Context and the curriculum it supports ask students to examine the ways in which literacy is a social practice (activity system) and, therefore, deeply situated and context dependent. Before we leave our discussion about why we have chosen the shape the English 102 curriculum in the ways we have, it may be useful to take a look at a rather compelling argument David Russell has made to demonstrate the futility of teaching students “to write” or “to improve their writing” in any general way (see “Activity Theory and Writing Instruction”). To this end, Russell “draw[s] an analogy between games that require a particular kind of tool—a ball—and activity systems (disciplines, professions, businesses, etc.) that require a particular kind of tool--the marks we call writing” (57). In this sense, teaching a player to use a ball or “to improve their use of a ball” in any general way is no less absurd than teaching a writer to improve their “writing,” as he explains: Some people are very adept at some games and therefore at using some kinds of balls, whereas they may be completely lost using a ball in another game because they have never participated in it. (I play ping-pong pretty well, but my 9-year-old daughter laughs at my fumbling attempts to play another game with a ball of a similar size—jacks.) However, ways of using a ball (ball handling, if you will) are “generalizable” to the extent that in two or more games the tool (ball) is used in similar ways and for similar object(ive)s. A good croquet player might easily learn to putt, or a good tennis player might learn squash. However, there is no autonomous, generalizable skill called ball using or ball handling that can be learned and then applied to all ball games. (Russell 57, emphasis mine) The activity “ball handling” exists as a recognizable practice only within the particular communities of practice using the ball—the game for which the ball is intended. The tool (ball) varies from game to game (“large, small, hard, soft, leather, round, oblong”) in response to the objective of the game itself, the history of the game as it relates to the overall objective and key strategies players typically use to reach that objective, and so on. A ping-pong ball makes little sense as a tool in a football game as the objective of the game (to reach the opponent’s goal) and the material conditions of the playing field (very large) demand that the ball chosen be able to travel vast distances. An oblong shape is, therefore, most appropriate, and uses of this oblong-shaped ball within a given activity system (football) must achieve the objective of reaching the opponent’s goal in ways that do not violate the rules and values established and maintained within the communities of practice of which football is a part. Literacy cannot be reduced to an autonomous skill-set, but neither can it be reduced to a particular content. The content thus becomes shared knowledge among members of a given community of practice, and these members both produce and maintain the “content” most appropriate for them and their key objectives. The knowledge football players/viewers/coaches/fans share is multifaceted, dynamic, and historically situated. Football and its rules are historically-situated, and they are not even consistent throughout the relevant communities of practice, as college football differs in some ways from high school football, which differs still further from professional football. The rules, tools, and objectives for fans within this community of practice also differ from the objectives of the players, which differ again from the coaches and those officiating this sport. Thus literacy, and, therefore, literacy education, must be treated as entirely dependent upon context, which is what we will do here—and what we will be training our students to do through ethnographic research and scholarly inquiry. In other words, the current English 102 curriculum is designed to resist that pervasive myth that literacy is an autonomous and completely portable skill set by guiding students through key scholarship and then their own ethnographic research into the ways literacy functions in specific contexts and for specific purposes. Assignments "[T]he subject of this writing course is," as explained in Literacies in Context (LC), "literacy as it it exists when put to use by real people for specific purposes and in specific places" (6). The reading and writing assignments included in LC are designed to (1) introduce students to the general conversation in literacy studies through key scholarship that offers arguments and evidence in support of the theoretical framework I described above while (2) generating the space these writers need (and deserve) to test/resist/expand those arguments as presented. In other words, writers in this course will begin "(in Chapter 2) with an exploration of the ways in which various people--growing up at different times and in somewhat different locations--describe their experiences with literacy and literacy education." At first, this "people-oriented" (Jones-Royster) investigation will be represented through Deborah Brandt's ethnographic study "Sponsors of Literacy." After being introduced to what this highly influential scholar has said about literacy, the students will be invited to test her theories--sponsorship--and key arguments via an investigation of literacy as it exists among the people in their own lives (through the first writing assignment, page 39). In Chapter 3 ("Expanding Notions of Literate Practice") and in their second formal writing assignments, the analysis turns to "a variety of places in which literacy is put to use--and how these places and the needs of the people inhabiting them largely determine the shape and function of literate behavior (in church, in the restaurant, at home)" (6). They will first be introduced to these arguments and evidence through Barton and Hamilton's essay and the research of established scholars like Beverly Moss, which students will then be asked to extend (or even resist) through their own investigations of literacy as it functions in particular and more familiar contexts (through the second writing assignment, page 113). In Chapter 4 ("Dominant and Vernacular Literacies"), they will be asked to examine--again beginning with published scholarship and then through their own experiences--the ways in which out-of-school literacy practices are often and largely usurped by in-school ones. At this point, students are more than ready to begin to make meaningful contributions to the field regarding the ways in which literate practices manifest themselves within a particular context and among a particular community. In many cases, first-year writing programs training students to conduct ethnographic research ask them to investigate a particular community and somehow "represent" that community through fieldwriting. As Sustein and Chiseri-Strater explain in the popular textbook FieldWorking, "
We want students to develop the skills required to be "accurate and sensitive fieldwriters," but we want them to shape this fieldwriting in ways that will, first of all, develop in them the metacognitive awareness necessary to negotiate a variety of different writing tasks in a variety of different rhetorical contexts. In other words, by asking them to investigate and share the way literacy functions in a particular context, we help them understand literacy in reality-based and people-oriented ways--ways that require them to examine each new rhetorical context, the project at hand, and their own goals as writers before making any decisions about which rules or strategies to apply. In doing so, they develop what I have called elsewhere "rhetorical dexterity", "the ability to effectively read, understand, manipulate, and negotiate the cultural and linguistic codes of a new community of practice based on a relatively accurate assessment of another, more familiar one" (The Way Literacy Lives, 22). By focusing on literacy as both an object of scholarly inquiry and the product reproduced through said scholarly activities, we treat first-year composition as "a course about how to understand and think about writing in school and society" (Wardle and Downs 9). By focusing on literacies as they exist in context, and asking students to contribute to this scholarly conversation, we help these beginning college writers develop a better understanding of "the ways writing works in the world and how the 'tool' of writing is used to mediate various activities" (9). More importantly, we make that writing really matter--not as an empty exercise but as a chance to create real knowledge. In her study of the various ways writing instruction is often used by student writers and their teachers, Cheryl Geisler argues that writing cannot be successfully used by learners to create knowledge except among those marked as “experts.” Working against the growing number of claims by composition scholars that writing actually creates knowledge, Geisler insists that “learning already extant knowledge and making new knowledge are quite distinct activities. . . ” (101). She continues:
Geisler’s argument rests on the problematic and ubiquitous practice of assigning writing merely to display knowledge generated by experts elsewhere and presented to them via teachers and the texts with which they interact. In other words, “in the academy, students do not actually do very much extended writing and the writing they do is for the purpose of demonstrating knowledge to the teacher as examiner” (108). Even “analytic writing,” she argues--based on studies by Applebee and Langer (1984), Copeland (1985), Penrose (1992), Langer and Applebee (1987), and Schumacher and Nash (1991)—“is not a good way for students to acquire the kinds of information routinely tested in school” (111). The results are dramatically different, however, when the tasks for which writing is assigned “made significant departures from the standard knowledge-transmission purposes of the schools” (113). Our goal in the current sequence and certainly in many other sequences included in our own writing program and elsewhere was the latter, though I accept the fact that such literacy experiences are uncommon among lower-division college writers. A critical theoretical framework, however, insists that educators liberate learners by refusing to participate in what Paulo Friere calls the “banking model” of education, insisting instead that we make use of “problem posing” education. In the former, “education . . . becomes an act of depositing, in which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor [and] . . . the scope of action [for the student] extends only as far as receiving, filing, storing the deposits” (Pedagogy, 72). In the latter, however, “people develop their power to perceive critically the way they exist in the world with which and in which they find themselves; they come to see the world not as a static reality but as a reality in the process of transformation” (83). In doing so, they come to “name” that world, which is, according to Freire and other critical theorists, crucial for any real meaningful learning to take place. As Friere explains, "to exist humanly is to name the world, to change it. Once named, the world in its turn reappears to the namers as a problem and requires of them a new naming. . . . Dialogue is the encounter between men [sic], mediated by the world, in order to name the world" (88). Geisler accepts the importance of this “problem-posing” education, but argues that writing is “at odds with learning—when learning is characterized as the acceptance of a web of cultural knowledge” (116), when “students” are treated as “depositories” of knowledge rather than creators of it (Freire 72). “We write,” Geisler argues, “both to contribute to and to counter the current trajectory of our culture” (116). Thus “writing to learn” “extant knowledge” may be ineffective, but writing to create new knowledge is, in fact, what “motivates us to pick up the pen (or turn on the computer) in the first place” (Geisler 116). Teaching students to write (or to use a ball) in any general way is problematic from the standpoint of application as neither writing “skills” nor knowledge of writing as content separable from the context in which it is used enable writers to create knowledge; however, it is also problematic from the standpoint of motivation, as general skills instruction or lessons in “general” knowledge (“what every American needs to know”) asks writers to accept without critique the “cultural facts and values” perpetuated in the academy." Teaching what Joseph Petraglia calls “General Writing Skills Instruction” (or “GWSI”) is, therefore, oppressive because it necessarily and consistently validates the “content” shared by scholars in our various disciplines and invalidates the content shared among members of communities of practice not directly associated with the academy. As Geisler explains, “the move to professionalize can, in fact, be defined as a move to remove knowledge from the public sphere” (116). We should instead make use of what Antonio Gramsci calls “organic intellectuals.” As Gramsci explains, “there is no human activity from which every form of intellectual participation can be excluded” and everyone “carries on some form of intellectual activity. . . , participates in a particular conception of the world, has a conscious line of moral conduct, and therefore contributes to sustain a conception of the world or to modify it, that is, to bring into being new modes of thought.” Thus, “organic intellectuals” can be agents of change in ways “traditional intellectuals” cannot. Inasmuch as we believe these writers to be capable of making meaningful contributions to the field of writing studies, they become "agents of change" and "writing to learn" thus becomes a much more transferable skill for them--and for us. When we treat their ethnographic projects as existing within a very real and much larger scholarly conversation in which they function as the "organic intellectuals" who are capable of making knowledge that is, in fact and in many ways, much more meaningful that that being generated by "traditional intellectuals," we've developed in your first-year writing classroom an activity that extends far beyond the walls of that classroom (see, especially, Amy Robillard's recent essay “Young Scholars Affecting Composition: A Challenge to Disciplinary Citation Practices” [College English 68 (2006): 253-70]).. Extending the Conversation We formalize their role as "organic intellectuals" who have developed expertise in a particular research site and a particular series of research questions that are part of a particular and much larger (ongoing) scholarly conversation by "Celebrating" this work near the end of the term (during finals week). Modeled after the celebration by the same name held at Eastern Michigan University (see http://www.emich.edu/english/fycomp/celebration/index.htm),our own "Celebration of Student Writing" at Texas A&M-Commerce will serve as the culminating activity for many sections of English 102 and even a few sections of English 100 and 101. English 102 students involved will bring their ready-for-presentation Research Portfolios and (perhaps) outlines of their Final Ethnographic Project to serve as communication points through which they will share her hard work with faculty, students, and administrators throughout our university. A week or so before the event, I will collect the project titles and names of participants (students in all TA-taught sections of English 102 will be required to participate), publish these titles online, and invite (via listserv and website) members of the university and surrounding community to select what they find interesting and participate in one or more of our three sessions. Many TA-led sections of English 100/101 will require their students to participate as well; these 100/101 students will interview current English 102 students, learning what they can about this type of research so they’ll be in a better position to do it themselves when they become English 102 students. It is also my hope that some of these final projects will be top contenders for the journal Young Scholars in Writing Studies: Undergraduate Research in Writing and Rhetoric. Young Scholars is part of this growing movement in composition studies to introduce students to what scholars are saying about them as writers and ask them to speak to (and perhaps against) these key arguments. Most of the contributors are upper-division English majors, so asking first-year composition studies to submit their original research may be rather unusual. However, given the structure of our program, I don’t think it’d be at all inappropriate. In fact, I think it might even be inevitable. The Sequence The textbooks for this course are--as you know--Literacies in Context (see above) and FieldWorking (3rd Ed). The first (LC) is intended to introduce writers to the general conversation in this specific area of literacy studies ("community literacy" and "multiple literacies") and give them some heuristics for thinking of literacy in these new ways. The second (FW) is designed to support writers as they take on their own ethnographic research. The focus throughout the first several weeks will be LC and their writings in response to these readings and the conversations they generate. Throughout each of these projects (especially WA2-3), however, you should remind students that they are to be thinking about potential research sites and research questions. As noted many times, any one of the writing projects they develop throughout these first several weeks (WA1-WA3) may be extended into their final ethnographic project. As WA1-WA3 will require some level of ethnographic inquiry, it seems wise to begin working them through FieldWorking several weeks before they will be required to settle on a research site and submit their research proposal for your approval. They should also begin keeping their Research Portfolio, which in the beginning need be little more than a bag, notebook, or accordion-style folder in which they begin collecting their writings, notes, reflections, artifacts, and everything else they generate this term that might be--eventually or at least potentially--related to their larger ethnographic project. You should also spend quite a bit of time speaking to the ethics of selecting a research site and gaining the requisite permission (written and verbal). As the authors of the forthcoming textbook Translating Culture explain, "You [researchers] are ethically obligated to let the people you are studying know what you are doing when you begin" (79). Make sure they understand all that entails, and be certain they articulate that understanding and how they will address it somewhere in their research proposals, which should also include permission forms they generate themselves and have signed by key informants within their research site before they begin the actual research. The ethnographic research process should include lots of field observations (recorded through fieldnotes and extended later through reflection and analysis); little else is more crucial in developing a good ethnographic project than keeping and extending excellent fieldnotes. I suggest that after the research proposals are approved you require each researcher to spend at least an hour at his/her research site every week, taking extensive fieldnotes, collecting artifacts, and later "extending" them (see FW) by reading them over, developing narratives/reflections/further analyses based on this rereading, and otherwise filling in the gaps to "tell the story of" how literate practices manifest themselves in a particular context and among members of a particular community. Where's the text? You should ask students to turn in these fieldnotes (which they may decide to keep in Dialogue Journals or Double Entry Notebooks [again, see FW]) after the first visit. Respond to these quickly and with encouragement, but remind them that the more they write during these observations the more useful they will find their fieldnotes when they begin writing their final ethnographic project. Before they make their first visit to their research site, it may be a good idea to have them visit a public space on campus--together--and take fieldnotes for 15-20 minutes, then report their findings. This may give you a chance to talk about how they might create more accurate ("thicker") and useful fieldnotes when they visit their own research sites (by relying on more of their senses, for example, or freewriting as quickly as possible without paying any attention to whether or not they'll make sense to another reader). They should not leave these fieldnotes alone for very long, however. They should continually read over them, reflect on them, and otherwise "extend" them, which should give them an increasingly complex ("thick") understanding of the community under investigation and how literacy functions within it and among the people reproducing it there. After a couple of weeks, you should also start requiring that they begin organizing, re-reading, thinking about, and reflecting upon the contents of their Research Portfolios, which at this point are likely to include evidence of at least two field observations, reflections on those field observations, some discussion with their key informants, and perhaps even a few artifacts (brochures, notes, sketches, etc). You could devote a class period on this for them to do a review with the guidance and support of a portfolio partner, as suggested in FW. Don't just throw them together, though. Guide them through it so they can begin to make sense of what they are seeing. The organization, reorganization, and re-reading, and reflection of their Research Portfolios' contents should be ongoing throughout the life of this research project; but it should also provide you with evidence that they are keeping up with the research. FW suggests that at least three times throughout the semester you require them to turn in an "annotated table of contents" and a "one-page analysis/reflection" on these contents and what they might mean (see FW, 464 and/or http://faculty.tamuc.edu/scarter/archive/research_portfolio.htm for more specifics). That forces them to keep up and keep reflecting, which will make developing that final paper all that much easier. By about Week 11 (perhaps earlier), it's time to begin writing it all up. FW provides some really useful suggestions for walking them through this process. I've offered some additional ones that I hope you'll take advantage of (see http://faculty.tamuc.edu/scarter/archive/ethnographic_project.htm) . In any case, their Research Portfolios holds the key. The better their fieldresearch, the more consistent their reflections, the better the resulting fieldwriting. In any case, a good write up for an ethnographic project begins with good research. They should review this research and trace (and try to make sense of) the patterns they see emerging from these data collected in their Research Portfolio. What might it mean? How might it inform/be informed by the research presented in LC? Works Cited “About the New London Group and the International Multiliteracies Project.” Education Australia Online. <http://edoz.com.au/educationaustralia/archive/features/mult3.html >. 10 August 2005. Adler-Kassner, Linda and Susanmarie Harrington. Basic Writing as a Political Act: Public Conversations about Writing and Literacies. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton P, 2002. Barton, David and Mary Hamilton. Local Literacies: Reading and Writing in One Community. NY: Routledge, 1998. Brodkey, Linda. Writing Permitted in Designated Areas Only. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1996. Carter, Shannon. “Living inside the Bible (Belt).” College English. (July 2007), forthcoming. ---. “Graduate Courses in Basic Writing Theory and Practice: A Review.” BWe (Spring 2007), forthcoming. ---. “Redefining Literacy as a Social Practice.” Journal of Basic Writing. (Fall 2006), forthcoming. ---. “The Feminist WPA Project.” Identity Papers: Literacy and Power in Higher Education. Brownwyn T. Williams, Ed. Utah State UP, 2006. ---. The Way Literacy Lives: Rhetorical Dexterity and the “Basic” Writer. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, forthcoming. ---. “The Writing Center Paradox: Talk About Legitimacy and the Problem of Institutional Change.” College Composition and Communication, forthcoming. Cope, Bill and Mary Kalantzis, Eds. Multiliteracies: Literacy Learning and the Design of Social Futures. NY: Routledge, 2000. Downs, Doug and Elizabeth Wardle. “Teaching About Writing, Righting Misconceptions: (Re)Envisioning FYC as Introduction to Writing Studies.” CCC, forthcoming. Geisler, Cheryl. Academic Literacy and the Nature of Expertise: Reading, Writing, and Knowing in Academic Philosophy. Erlbaum, 1994. ---. “Writing and Learning at Cross Purposes in the Academy.” Reconceiving Writing, Rethinking Writing Instruction. Ed. Joseph Petraglia, Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1995. 101-120. Petraglia, Joseph. “Introduction.” Reconceiving Writing, Rethinking Writing Instruction. Ed. Joseph Petraglia, Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1995. xi-xvii. Robillard, Amy. “Young Scholars Affecting Composition: A Challenge to Disciplinary Citation Practices.” College English. 68 (2006): 253-70. Russell, David R. “Activity Theory and Process Approaches: Writing (Power) in School, and Society" Post-Process Theory: Beyond the Writing Process Paradigm. Thomas Kent, ed. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois U P, 1999. ---. "Activity Theory and Writing Instruction." Reconceiving Writing, Rethinking Writing Instruction. Joseph Petraglia, ed. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1995. 51-77. Schultz, Katherine and Glenda Hull. “Locating Literacy Theory in Out-of-School Contexts.” School’s Out!: Bridging Out-of-School Literacies with Classroom Practice. Hull, Glenda and Katherine Schultz, Eds. Teacher’s College P, 2002. 11-31. Street, Brian V. “Autonomous and Ideological Models of Literacy: Approaches from New Literacy Studies.” Media Anthropology Network. 17-24 January 2006. <http://www.philbu.net/media-anthropology/street_newliteracy.pdf>. July 10, 2006. ---. Street, Brian V. “Recent Applications of New Literacy Studies in Educational Contexts.” Research in the Teaching of English 39.4 (May 2005): 417-423. ---. Social Literacies: Critical Approaches to Literacy in Development, Ethnography, and Education. NY: Longman, 1995. Additional Course Materials
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