The great secret is no secret

MB party

2010-02-05T15:47:00.000-05:00

34.

2010-01-13T23:45:00.002-05:00

Ugh.

Edd Kalehoff

2009-12-18T23:17:00.005-05:00

I've been digging this guy's work for a long time now. I think we all have.

Edd's Wiki here.

And last but definitely not least: themes from The Price is Right.

Respect.

I learned how to do something today...

2009-12-16T17:49:00.001-05:00

Down-and-out Christmas songs...

2009-12-16T16:04:00.003-05:00

...always make me happy.

Here's a Top 10 list of most depressing Christmas songs.

I'd like to lengthen this list.

I'd also like to find Jesus this Christmas, if only for a minute or so.

DLR

2009-12-15T22:04:00.002-05:00

He's been following me around of late. Just keeps popping up, and I'm glad, because I've needed the reminder.

This is spectacular on so many levels:

Cause if you don't think so, who will?
I'ma get my edge back.

Blog study

2009-12-15T12:36:00.003-05:00

The third of three.
- not at all in love with the prose here
- much going on personally, outside this paper
- a great feeling when finished
- overall, this is decent. not my best work. not the worst.
*So much left to read. I have come to see how one's "theoretical homebase" tends to emerge. One piece easily leads to a number of others as you come to understand the field. I like what I've found so far.

One Blog, Many Voices: scenes and situations

Context
This study proposal is part of a series of papers aimed specifically at improving my teaching of Youth Cultures, a Temple University General Education course. One paper rationalizes and outlines a redesign of my Youth Cultures curriculum, based on a principled synthesis of two models: genre-theory and reflective inquiry. The second project, an action-research proposal that I will enact next semester, locates our newly implemented class-blog as the primary site of study. The class-blog serves five essential functions. First, it reorients discourse patterns by opening up additional avenues of conversations between students, each other, and me. The second function of the blog is as a site of reflective inquiry. Third, the class-blog functions as a place to conduct genre studies (of other texts). The fourth function of the blog is to serve as a site of meaningful study – as a genred “scene of writing” (Devitt, 2004). The final function is as a site of practice, where students identify, discuss, and try out the moves that count in the production of youth culture research.
To account for these anticipated functions, the following proposal aims to unite particular understandings with particular goals. This digital ethnography of Ta-Nehisi Coates's blog (www.ta-nehisicoates.theatlantic.com) seeks cues that might enhance the use of our class-blog as a "mentor" genre (for introducing and practicing a genre-theory stance), as a site of reflective inquiry, and as a site of productive dialogue.
Review of Influential Literature
In order to use Coates's (TNC's) blog as a "mentor text" for our own class-blog, I intend to investigate how the blog functions as a genre, or genre system, paying particular attention to what counts as authentic discourse. Literature across a range of fields has helped me think about ways of enacting this digital ethnography. A discussion of genre theory, which plays a vital role in my course redesign (especially via our class-blog), is followed by an overview of Bakhtinian perspectives on discourse.
Important aspects of genre theory
Once Miller (1984) placed her attention on the socially-motivated action that genres enable, theorists have rapidly expanded their conceptions of what genres are and can be. Dean (2008) synthesizes genre theorists' perspectives and categorizes genres "as social, rhetorical, dynamic, historical, cultural, situated, and ideological" (p. 11). She also suggests and understanding of genres by defining what they are not; they are not simply forms or types, not "only about literary texts," and are not fixed, clean, or easily "sortable into precise categories" (pp. 11-12). Devitt (2004) situates genres as "scenes of writing," while Bawarshi refers to genres alternately as sites, locations, discursive spaces, cultural artifacts, familiar places, rhetorical habitats, nuanced repetitions, ecosystems, typified structures, situation types, and typified rhetorical strategies. Such descriptors call forth social, historical, and functional characteristics of genre; indeed, they are "the familiar places we go to create intelligible communicative action with each other and the guideposts we use to explore the unfamiliar" (Bazerman, 1997, qtd in Bawarshi, p. 25).
Genres not only serve social functions, but they also have histories. While genres may appear as fixed types, they are actually the results of social processes repeated so often as to appear fixed and secure. In these histories are written records of human communicative needs; although the traces of such histories have faded into dust, they continue to inform the functional properties of genres.
Rhetorical genre theory's orientation toward social-function is influenced by researchers across fields as wide-ranging as applied linguistics, communication studies, sociology, education, rhetoric and composition studies, and social psychological and structuralist theories (Bazerman, 1997; Bawarshi, 2003). Halliday's (1985) systemic functional linguistics has been particularly generative. In their analysis of his approach to understanding grammar, Hillocks and Smith (2002) identify SFL’s chief goal to be the systematic explanation of “how language provides a resource for meaning," and they devote particular attention to Halliday's emphasis on function. Halliday's work calls attention to the differening ways genres function discursively, thereby suggesting "which features students may have to learn to participate in the discourse of various fields" (Hillocks & Smith, 2002, p. 726, italics added).
Bawarshi (2000) works through Halliday to explain the social nature of genre. By stepping outside text-types and into “situation types,” Bawarshi looks to the limitless range of "particular social semiotics" that make up the recurring scenarios of life (2000, p. 350). Such recurring scenarios, or situation types (e.g. “mother reading bedtime story to child,” “customer ordering goods over the phone”), are known to Halliday as “register,” and it is here where Bawarshi returns back to the written word, because not only do literary genres have parallels in the recurring scenarios that make up social life, they are such recurring social scenes.
For Halliday, register (i.e., a situation type) functions across three levels, each of which interact in fairly typified ways; these are: field (what takes place communicatively?), tenor (who is taking part?), and mode (by what channel is language traveling?) (Bawarshi, 2000). Halliday located genre at the level of mode - as "typified tools communicants use within registers" (Bawarshi, 2000, p. 351). Bawarshi, however, breaks with Halliday when he assigns genre a role beyond just mode, arguing that “genres create the conditions in which not only texts but also their writers and readers function” thereby situating genre as occuring simultaneously across all three levels of Halliday's register; he names this interaction the "genre function" (p. 351). Therefore, an analysis of genre as register, or situation type, would likely examine field, tenor, and mode.
Developing genre awareness
One important function of our class-blog will be its service as a "mentor" genre. Because we will work extensively within it, we will also study the blog as a genre, according to genre-theory principles. Therefore, it is important that I emerge from my study of TNC's blog with a concrete sense of how his blog functions generically. Sequentially, TNC's blog will serve as a mentor text for our own class-blog, which in turn will serve as a mentor model for genre-based inquiry into future texts and situations. Pedagogically, an understanding of moves that foster generic awareness can help me locate the best ways of using TNC's blog as a model for our own blog and, as a result, help me determine the elements of his blog most worth studying.
Dean (2009) argues that a genre theory pedagogy requires careful implementation, in order to make its key tenets explicit to students. One advantage of genre theory is the way it orients our attention to "scenes" that tend to enact repeatable "situations," whether these scenes are text-based or not. Such an orientation allows for a goingbackandforth which helps students recognize written genres as "scenes of writing," filled with purposeful attempts at communication with meaningful social aims (Devitt, 2004). To employ a genre theory framework is to help students develop a particular mode of inquiry oriented toward occassions, situations, and scenes. Numerous researchers offer advice for implementing a genre theory pedagogy. Freadman (1998) teaches the concept of genre as socioculturally situated by asking students to plan a meal together. She helps them see that meals (her substitute for genre) are occasions, with context-specific needs (no soup on an airline meal), including an appropriateness of tone (jacket and tie for formal affair). Ultimately, she helps her students come to realize five principles of genre: a) “genre is an organizing concept for our cultural practices;” b) genres contain a range of contrasting forms; c) genre is place and occasion; d) “cultural competence involves knowing the appropriate principle for each genre” and knowing how to code switch within and across them, “to move readily against them, to know when and how to use them;” e) genre refers to “a full range of languages” available within place and occasion (1998, p. 21-2).
Hillocks (1995) would recognize Freadman's approach as a "gateway activity" aimed at helping students detect and distinguish features across situation types (p. 149). For Hillocks (1995), gateway activities are designed to build student confidence by linking their existing procedural knowledge with accessible introductions to new concepts. Situation types, then, such as "customer orders goods over the phone," provide ideal gateway activities to concretize for students the social and linguistic aspects of individual discourse situations. As a result, they come to see that each situation carries with it a certain communicative “template” so to speak. In a Hillocksian sense, situation types may provide the ideal link for mapping how to "read" genre, since students are already experts across a range of social functions. One aim for study is to locate the best way of using TNC's blog as a "situation type" gateway to a genre-based awareness.
Bakhtinian Perspectives on Discussion, discourse, and dialogicality
While the first goal of this study is to examine TNC's blog as a genred site of written communication (via a genre theory lens, namely register), the second goal is to better understand how TNC's blog functions as a space of productive, multivoiced dialogue. To aid such understanding, we turn to a discussion of key Bakhtinian perspectives on how language functions. Bakhtin's (1986) work has profoundly informed genre theory and is particularly suited for discourse analysis in a study such as this one.
Bakhtin's (1986) central unit of study is the utterance, a unit whose length depends on the length of a speaker’s, or speech subject’s, turn. In face-to-face conversations, an utterance may be a syllable or two; in a novel, the author’s utterance may be the entire length of the book (Wertsch, 1991). The utterance, according to Bakhtin, is “the real unit of speech communication,” one that responds to and anticipates surrounding utterances (1986, p. 84). In other words, the utterance is a “link in the speech chain of communication” (p. 84) that “responds in some way to previous utterances and anticipates the responses of other, succeeding ones” (Wertsch, 1991, p. 53). In this way, the utterance echoes Bawarshi's (2003) notion of genred invention as simultaneously a beginning and departure.
Through the process of dialogicality, or dialogism, speakers form utterances that come into contact with, or interanimate, other utterances. Bakhtin insisted on taking both voices into account because the utterance “does not and can not exist” without “addressivity, the quality of turning to someone else” (1986, p. 99). Therefore, because an utterance is that speech chain “link,” it is inherently associated with at least two voices (speaker and addressee). Utterances populate two types of languages. For Bakhtin, standardized “national languages,” such as English, German, or Russian, are actually “academic fiction(s) that paper over the effects of … forces that seek to change it” (Wertsch, 1991, p. 57). Social languages, on the other hand, are those used in real life, the situated discourses that “serve the sociopolitical purposes of the day” (p. 58).
As mentioned, utterances are associated with at least two voices; here is where they become deeply multivoiced: Bakhtin says that “the production of any utterance entails the invocation of a speech genre,” (Wertsch, 1991, p. 61) in which an individual “appropriates” or “populates” the speech genre. A type of social language, the speech genre is “a conventionalized utterance type, a ready-made way of packaging speech….a resource for performance, available to speakers for the realization of specific social ends in a variety of creative, emergent, and even unique” individual performances (Bauman, 1987, pp. 5-6, qtd in Wertsch, 1991, p. 61). Speech genres are socioculturally situated; therefore, when speakers invoke, or populate, them, they are swimming in a sea of language that already exists, and the speech genres themselves shape what can be said. Of course, the speaker’s voice is his own, but it is also contains traces of the addressee’s voice, as well as the voices throughout history who have shaped the speech genre he invokes. In this way, mind extends beyond the skin. This process “whereby one voice speaks through another voice or voice type in a social language” (Wertsch, 1991, p. 59) is termed ventriloquation, where “the world in language is always half someone else’s” (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 293).
Because language is socioculturally situated, meaning is “inexorably linked with historical, cultural, and institutional setting” (Wertsch, 1991, p. 66). For this reason, Bakhtin challenged the assumptions of transmissive, authoritative discourse. According to a transmission, or conduit, model, meaning is passed from a speaker, through a channel of communication, to a recipient who decodes the message. Bakhtin (1981) associates this model with authoritative discourse or “the word of father, of adults, of teachers, etc.” and rejects it based on its assumptions that meaning is fixed and closed (qtd in Wertsch, 1991, p. 78). He favors internally persuasive discourse, which presumes openness, and favors dialogicality, where meaning is co-constructed when utterances interanimate each other. In the former, a glitch in the conduit model prevents understanding; in the latter, it serves as a “thinking device” (Lotman, 1988b, p. 37, qtd in Wertsch, 1991, p. 74).
While Bakhtin’s distinction is harsh, Wertsch (1991) reminds us that both models, in fact, have produced important insights into how we learn. Lotman’s (1988b) “functional dualism” model bridges the gap by arguing that utterances or texts can function in more than one way: to convey meaning and to generate thinking or new meaning (Wertsch, 1991, p. 75). Although authoritative and internally persuasive discourses are always in tension, fighting for dominance, one wins out, based on the sociocultural situation and the tools of mediation.
Dialogism in schools
Although Wertsch (1991) has served as the primary conduit of Bakhtin's work, other researchers offer additional perspectives. Nystrand (1997) promotes dialogic instruction as a means for replacing recitation with conversation. Drawing on Bakhtin, he argues that "discussion engenders discourse" and "recitation elicits a performance," paying particular attention to Bakhtin's notion of heteroglossia, or "multivoicedness" (p. 18). Productive discourse, according to Nystrand (1997) tends to be dialogic rather than monologic and is therefore marked by internally persuasive (rather than authoritarian) discourse. In such conversation, " the participants profit from their own talking..., from what others contribute, and above all from the interaction - that is to say, from the enabling effect of each upon the others" (Briton, 1970, qtd in Nystrand, 1997, p. 17).
Other noteworthy perspectives on Bakhtin include Knoeller's (2004) "narratives of rethinking" study, in which he examines learners' shifts in perspective via unidirectional and varidirectional discourse patterns. Knoeller explains how unidirectionality, or "voicing to illustrate or concur with a previous utterance" and varidirectionality, which "involves voiceing to question, contest, or qualify" can direct discourse analysis to such shifts in perspective (2004, p. 151).
Likewise, Lee (2004) draws on Bakhtin to explain how "the stylistic character of language use has both a private and a public face. The private face is individual. The public face involves speech genres" and "social scripts" that we take up or populate (p. 130).
One such script is that of the IRE discourse pattern, where the teacher Initiates a question, the student Responds, and teacher Evaluates the response (Johannessen & Kahn, 2005). Marshall, Smagorinsky, and Smith's (1995) have argued that such scripts function as "privileged" speech genres that become "widely and perhaps dogmatically accepted as the ‘right’ way of communicating in particular settings” (cited in Johannessen & Kahn, 2005). Gutierrez (1993) has distinguished features of IRE discourse from those of dialogic exchange, which she calls, "responsive-collaborative scripts" (qtd in Nystrand, 1997). These studies suggest that blog-based discourse has the potential to reorient discourse patterns toward authentic discussion.
Systems, spheres, and ceremonials
This discussion of influential literature concludes with a quick final note on genre. Bawarshi (2003) explains that "genres take place within what Bakhtin calls larger 'spheres of culture' (1986), what Freadman calls 'ceremonials' (1988), and what Russell, borrowing from activity theory, calls 'activity systems' (1997). Within such spheres are "interrelated genres that interact with each other" that Bazerman has called "systems of genre," or genre systems (1994). Thus far, the blogs in question, TNC's and my class-blog, have been referred to as genres. They also function as systems situated within larger systems or spheres, populated with subgenres that generate their own "field-tenor-mode complex," or register, forming a "constellation" of genres that "function together to coordinate the dynamic relations that make up the larger activity systems" (Bawarshi, 2003, p. 38). Therefore, within one discursive site (e.g., a blog), registers, or situation types (e.g., community members blogging), are embedded within larger contexts (i.e., blogosphere, or college course), but are also likely to house a range of smaller genres or situations (e.g., hyperlinks, jokes, clarifications).
Research Questions
This study of TNC's blog is meant to help me maximize the functionality of our class-blog. The above review of literature, in combination with particular needs of my curriculum re-design, as symbolized by our blog, gives rise to two particular questions: 1. How does this blog function as a genre system, according to Bawarshi's (2000) "genre function"? 2. What does authentic discourse look like here?
In conjunction with the other elements of my project, this study has the potential to yield important insights about the functionality of online discourse patterns. Postmodern classrooms are no longer defined by four walls, and calls for alternate sites of written communication increase with regularity. The class-blog as a site of collaborative and reflective inquiry deserves systematic scrutiny because it embodies so many elements of interest across fields of literacy studies, not least of which is the effect of transposing a sustained genre inquiry into a mentor genre, as is the plan for TNC's blog. At minimum, a rich description of this blog as a scene of written communication will enrich ongoing conversations centered around genre as social practice.
Research Methods
To study this blog from a genre theory perspective, I will try to identify form, function, and situatedness. To study form, I hope to list all features and then create a taxonomy of all available text-types. To study function, I seek to understand how the site is used, and for what purposes. I seek to uncover what counts as success, broadly and specifically, at this site. To study situatedness, I will try to understand how the site-at-large defines and is defined by the blogosphere. Likewise, I want to understand how available text-types within the blog define and are defined by users.
To gather data in service of understanding how genre theory illuminates the functionality of TNC's blog, I will use a range of data collection methods. First, I will use Bawarshi's (2000) notion of genre as register, or field-tenor-mode complex, to create a typology of the formal blog features, with the intention of organizing the features according to the functions they enable. Strokes are broad at this stage. To gather this data, I will pursue the following questions: What takes place communicatively? (field), Who takes part? (tenor), and By what channels does language travel? (mode). I will also apply a "register" reading of particular discussion threads, once I narrow my lens. I will also conduct online interviews, via online questionnaires (located on my own blog) and follow up emails/Instant Messages, with willing members of the blog community. These interviews will predominantly aim at understanding what works best, what motivates users to contribute, and how the blog functions for said contributors. Mr. Coates has already emailed me, offering to promote my study on his blog. Last, I will conduct close-readings, or discourse analyses, of the "Comments" section of three to five discussion threads, in order to examine how members use language to achieve authentic discourse.
Site Description
1. Population: The population here consists of Mr. Coates, his readers, his commentors, and the voices of other texts he links to.
2. Location/space: This blog is located at www.ta-nehisicoates.theatlantic.com. Coates is a writer and contributing editor for The Atlantic and one of the featured bloggers on the magazines web outlet, www.theatlantic.com. Coates's blog is accessible from numerous web locations, including the magazine's main page, via the Voices tab, which is prominently located top-center. In face, this tab is accessible from every single page on theatlantic.com's entire network. Coates's blog remains always a click away, which is interesting, because the magazine's subject matter, in total, is vast.
Access to Coates's blog is also available from varies corners of the "blogosphere," in two main ways: 1) a blog may list Coates's page on their "blog roll"; 2) a blog may hyperlink to one of Coates's posts. Again, this makes TNC's blog a single click away.
3. Structure/layout: The left half of the page is the running blog, which consists of a series of posts by Coates, each of which is titled in a blue font that, when clicked on, hyperlinks to a reproduction of the same page, sans all other posts. This new page contains only the particular post that has been clicked on. When other bloggers want to link to a particular post, this is the type of page they'll link to (as opposed to Coates's main page). As readers scroll down the page, the posts move from most to least recent. Each post is labled by date and time.
A key feature of Coates's blog space is the "Comments" button. Many bloggers do not provide a comments option, for various reasons. Fellow Atlantic blogger, Andrew Sullivan, for instance, cites the enormity of his readership as his reason. Other bloggers have found that their "comments" sections too quickly dissolved into name-calling, flame wars, and thread-jacking. Here, each post has a comments button and a number in parenthesis that signifies how many contributor comments have been posted for that article. What is noteworthy about Coates's blog is the communal nature of the "comments" section. I'll discuss this in more depth below.
The right side of the page is also organized vertically, so that the reader encounters different features when scrolling downward. The uppermost set of features links to various feature sections of theatlantic.com. The next section, titled "Voices," provides direct links to the website's six other featured bloggers. Of course, the "Voices" tab is also located at the top of the page. Beneath this is a variety of the blogger's promotional links, including an amazon link to purchase Coates's book, a complete list of his blog archives, and featured long-form essays composed by Coates. Finally, the "Blog Roll" section provides direct links to other blogs in Coates's corner of the blogosphere. On the whole, the site is very easy to navigate and by nature situates itself in the midst of broader conversations.
4. Members/etiquette: As mentioned, a crucial element of Coates's blog is the role of commenters. From what I've witnessed (as a semi-regular reader and occasional commenter), the comments section is often as rich as the blog posts themselves. Commenters are an overwhelmingly articulate and, at least among those who choose to post, considerate bunch. On the surface, there seems to be a balance of female and male readers; many seem to be college-educated, and quite a few, like Coates, are able to employ a range of discourse-styles to match or challenge the tone of the conversation, and also, in my opinion, to announce themselves as "stylistically multilingual." Overwhelmingly, traits such as curiosity, consideration, open-mindedness, and playfulness are valued more than one's ability to linguistically show off.
Recently, Coates's increase in popularity (thanks in part to regular links from Sullivan), has brought in a new batch of readers and commenters. New members are spottable in various ways, such as the breaching established etiquette or the asking of questions about "common knowledge" topics. I saw this happen a few times and was intrigued by the subtle, almost collective response by the insider community. Coates sets the parameters of what can fly, and the community as a whole pretty much collectively enforces said norms. I'd like to spend more time exploring what counts as insider knowledge in this community. For example, a post such as the following implies that readers already "know what to do."
・ Open Thread At Noon
・ Go for it...
・ Permalink :: Comments (20) :: TrackBacks (0) ::
I wonder what other standard protocols exist on this site? And what are those subtle, rarely stated codes of conduct that make the public discourse so effective on this site?
5. Content: The subject matter of Coates’s posts varies widely, ranging from NFL to Civil War talk; from childhood reminiscences (often accompanied by music videos) to discussions of writing “voice” to discussions of the usefulness of race-as-critical-lens. He also links to and comments on other blogger’s posts and, occasionally will post an excerpt from his own comment boards. Increasingly, as this site develops a reputation for insightful comment boards, other bloggers feature posts by TNC's commentors.
6. Time elements: As stated, Coates’s posts are labeled by date and time, and although the blog often has the feel of real-time communication, it’s actually closer to an oft-updated message board. Certain threads are loaded with posts, with comments coming in faster than you can read them. Other threads are less immediate, and the comments there tend to be shaped more by the passing of time. One interesting thing about a blog’s relationship to time is the way comments are shaped by time between posts. From what I read, those threads with less time between comments are more likely to lead to meta-conversations regarding etiquette (as a result of passionately typed – and potentially offensive or misunderstood – comments between members). I’d like to look deeper into this. One of the unspoken traits of this community is the willingness to forgive misspoken comments, in service of the immediacy factor. In fact, such immediacy seems to train one’s eye and ear for audience, while refining one’s level of self-reflection at the word and sentence level.
Site Advantages
Regarding community access, I have increased my contributions to the "Comments" section lately, and many of them have been met favorably, so I am slowly gaining status within the community as a person with something to say. I have also gained mild favor with the host, which is immensely beneficial. Another obvious advantage to digital ethnography is that I can save time on transcriptions, as all communication is already typed. Another advantage is the general stability of the blog's formal features, which allows me to more easily ground my functional typology.
Site Disadvantages
The "virtual" entry into this community is both advantageous and problematic. There is no face-to-face communication; all discourse is text-based, as are all nuances and cues. Based on the brief site description I have already conducted, a few challenges have arisen. Pictures (and other visuals) are worth a thousand words, so the lack of visual stimuli is a challenge. Also, I had to lean on assumptions when describing the characteristics of community members (I can't say much about race, gender, class, etc. -- actually, I can, but I'd have to devote a lot more time and maybe conduct some discourse analysis regarding self-identifying statements). It was also difficult for me to approach this systematically.
Ethical Challenges
There is no way that I can get consent for this study from all members. I am not sure about the ethics of that. As I apply my findings from this study to our own class-blog, and conduct an action-research project about the blog, ethical concerns will become more apparent. With this in mind, I will conduct this present study with an eye on potential ethical issues.
Tools for Data Analysis
Since TNC's blog will serve as our class's own mentor blog, two goals have guided this study: developing a "blog genre awareness" and investigating discourse patterns and options. To these ends, two primary tools of analysis will guide the interpretation of data. Bawarshi's (2000) concept of "genre function" serves two purposes here, while Bakhtinian perspectives shape discourse analysis alone. As mentioned, the three elements of genre function (field, tenor, and mode) shape the organization of my functional typology of blog features. The same tool will be applied to transcripts of blog threads by asking the following questions: What takes place communicatively? (field), Who takes part? (tenor), and By what kinds of channels does language travel? (mode). To look more closely at language functionality in these threads, a Bakhtinian analysis will accompany Bawarshi's genre function, resulting in a coding system that includes the following: field-shifts, tenor-shifts, mode-shifts, ventriloquation, authoritative discourse, internally persuasive discourse, varidirectionality, situation types with special attention paid to particularly rich exchanges. To analyze interview transcripts, I will keep an eye out for comments about success, motivation, reflection, and community. Perhaps, patterns gleaned from these interviews will influence my discourse analysis coding system.
Implications
In conjunction with the other elements of my project, this study has the potential to yield important insights about the functionality of online discourse patterns. As the borders of postmodern classroom continue to extend beyond traditional four-walled spaces, the call for alternative site of communication will increase. However, technology alone is an insufficient answer without a principled rationale for its implementation. A class-blog as a site of collaborative and reflective inquiry deserves systematic scrutiny because it embodies so many elements of interest across fields of literacy studies, not least of which is the effect of transposing a sustained genre inquiry into a mentor genre, as is the plan for TNC's blog. At minimum, a rich description of this blog as a scene of written communication might inspire further studies of a similarly literacy-rich site. Such studies might investigate blogs as communities of practices, contact zones, or scenes of ideological becoming, for example.

References

Bakhtin, M. (1986). Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press.
Bawarshi, A. (2000). “The genre function.” College English. 62, 3, 335-60.
Bawarshi, A. (2003). Genre and the Invention of the Writer: Reconsidering the Place of Invention in Composition. Logan: Utah State UP.
Bazerman, C. (1994). "Systems of genres and the enactment of social intentions." In Freedman, A., & Medway, P (Eds.) Genre and the new rhetoric. London: Taylor & Francis. 79-101.
Bazerman, C. (1997). "The life of genre, the life in the classroom." Genre and Writing. Ed. W. Bishop and H. Ostrom. Boynton/Cook, 1997: 19-26.
Dean, D. (2008). Genre Theory: Teaching, Writing, and Being. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English.
Devitt, A., Reiff, M. J., & Bawarshi, A. (2004). Scenes of Writing: Strategies for Composing with Genres. New York: Pearson/Longman.
Freadman, A. (1998). “Models of genre for language teaching.” South Central Review, 15, 1, 19-39.
Halliday, M.A.K. (1985) An Introduction to Functional Grammar (2E 1994). London: Edward Arnold.
Hillocks, G. (1995). Teaching Writing as Reflective Practice. New York: Teachers College Press.
Hillocks, G. & Smith, M. W. (2002). "Grammar and usage." Handbook of research on teaching the English language arts. New York: Macmillian. 591-603.
Knoeller, C. (2004). "Narratives of Rethinking: the inner dialogue of classroom discourse and student writing." In Ball, A., & Freedman, S.W. (Eds.) Bakhtinian Perspectives on Language, Literacy, and Learning. New York: Cambridge UP.
Lee, C. (2004). "Double voiced discourse: African American Vernacular English as resource in cultural modeling classrooms." In Ball, A., & Freedman, S.W. (Eds.) Bakhtinian Perspectives on Language, Literacy, and Learning. New York: Cambridge UP.
Miller, C. (1984). “Genre as social action.” Quarterly Journal of Speech. 70, 151-167.
Nystrand, M. (1997). Opening Dialogue: Understanding the Dynamics of Language and Learning in the English Classroom. New York: Teachers College Press.
Wertsch, J. (1991). Voices of the Mind: A sociocultural approach to mediated action. Harvard University Press.
Johannessen, L., & Kahn, E. (2005). "Engaging students in authentic discussions of literature." In McCann, T., Johannessen, L., Kahn, E., Smagorinsky, P., and Smith, M.W. (Eds.) Reflective Teaching, Reflective Learning. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 99-116.

Curriculum paper

2009-12-11T16:17:00.002-05:00

A couple of notes:
- a ton of time put into this, both in front of computer and away, in head
- and still not enough to be efficient (a serious issue for me. needs improvement)
- small sections of the last paper imported here. only one or two left unchanged. (i hate to do that, but issues of time and practicality matter)
- i'm very upset with myself for using "toward" in the title. I hate crap like that. it's irritating.
- I haven't read this yet; i hope i assembled all the parts in a coherent, meaningful way.
- this was written for a course i really dug.
- i have a ton of leftover sources, data, etc.

Toward a principled approach to curriculum: a genre theory model of collaborative inquiry

Background
        This paper is part of a larger set of projects, each aimed at creating a more powerful learning dynamic in the course I teach, Youth Cultures. One project, a digital ethnography, draws upon Bawarshi's (2003) and Halliday's (1985) work on register in order to understand the functionality of Ta-Nehisi Coates's blog, as a "scene of writing," (Devitt, Reiff, & Bawarshi, 2004) in order to import its best elements into a newly implemented Youth Cultures class-blog. The project enacted in this paper
aims to articulate a principled redesign of our Youth Cultures curriculum. The third project is an action-research plan that seeks to study the functionality of our new class-blog over the course of the Spring 2010 semester.
Introduction
        My own teaching needs work. I conclude my third semester of teaching "Youth Cultures" feeling dissatisfied, particularly as I locate myself within Temple University's doctoral program in Education. In this transition from high school English teacher to "professor" of undergraduates, I enter simultaneously into new discourse communities, where my new points of reference become field experts; like most TAs, I negotiate the floating roles I play as student and instructor, always learning, always inspired, but pulled in multiple directions at once.
        As a result, my teaching has been erratic, inconsistent, and discordant at times. It is not uncommon for me to change my plans last minute, based on my enthusiasm from the previous night's seminar. However, my enthusiasm has not always benefited my students, and upon reflection and through conversations with them, I have located particular areas in need of improvement. While distinct, each area is situated in relation to each other area. These include: poor sequencing, the lack of guiding questions, haphazard planning, strikingly imbalanced discourse patterns, failure to draw upon students' background knowledge, an emphasis on the distant over the immediate, unfulfilled class-as-community potential, inconsistent goals and feedback, uninspired use of technology, scattered use of reflection, and sadly, not enough joy.
        This array of practical problems begins with my insufficiently considered attempts to enact our class curriculum. Curriculum design requires choices, and all choices have benefits and costs. To think hard about such choices is to ask big questions about relationships: between teachers and students, between classrooms and schools, between students and authors, between members of communities, across physical and virtual space, between motivation and performance. The list can go on and on, but again, if everything is important, then how do we know where best to focus our attention. In this project, I aim to identify the fundamental principles of curriculum theory most deserving of focused attention, by taking seriously the best thinkers in the field of curriculum studies. My guiding question is very straightforward: How do I construct a meaningful curriculum design based on these core principles?

Review of Influential Literature
All researchers cited herein have engaged in the serious practice of asking, "what are we in Education doing here, and how do we do it best?"
Foundational thinkers on curriculum
        Bobbitt (1918) located schools as sites of socialization, and emphasized the role of efficiency and wise choice-making in real-world curricula. He understood that curriculum design required cost-benefit analyses, and advocated a "scientific management" approach that involved surveying the adult employment landscape in order to isolate, and then, teach the requisite skills and knowledge for productive social participation (p. 15). Critics of Bobbitt's approach take issue with the child's proscripted role as future-adult-worker in this model; however, his emphasis on efficiency, on thinking hard about what counts, and on the importance of structured instruction remains influential.
        Montessori (1912) echoes Bobbitt's emphasis on science, but shifts her focus from the adult workplace to the classroom itself, where the social interactions of children function as the educator's data. She argues that the "free, natural manifestations of the child" will instruct the teacher "how to perfect himself as an educator" (p. 27). Like Bobbitt, Montessori's influence endures through teacher-inquiry of real students in real classrooms.
        Montessori's emphasis on the social echoes in Dewey's (1929) "pedagogic creed," where "the school is primarily a social institution" (p. 34). Unlike Bobbitt, Dewey positions schools not as reproducers of social order, but as sites of social reform. A range of Dewey's core beliefs continue to inform education, including the use of curriculum to break down barriers, such as those between the disciplines, between home and school, and between the present and the future. He argued for the need for activity, for the importance of the social, for emphasis on "the present life," but also for the importance of transfer (p. 36). Dewey also laid the groundwork for both reflective inquiry and genre theory approaches, which emphasize the importance of making learning visible in order to enable students to recognize and "perform those fundamental types of activity which make civilization what it is" (p. 37). Ultimately, for Dewey, the ideal school is one where student and school interests match.
        Addams (1908) took this last point seriously by creating curricula that capitalized on the needs and talents of her students. She advocated inquiry into big questions, pertinent to the lives of her students, and rejected standardized curricula in favor of approaches that harmonize learning with community needs and resources. To match school and student needs, pertinent subject matter became the universal materials of industry as well as the cultural knowledge of her students. She wonders why "we send young people to Europe to see Italy, but we do not utilize Italy when it lies about the schoolhouse" (1908, p. 44).
Thinking about objectives
        While some curriculum theorists advocate clear, measurable objectives, others question whether they are appropriate at all. Popham (1972) believed that objectives were not only essential but should be constructed by outside experts, because asking "educators to construct their own measurable objectives is, generally speaking, an unrealistic request" (p. 103). Popham's position has been challenged in multiple ways. Eisner (1967) fears that the exactitude of objectives can easily become dogmatic, and perhaps more troubling, he argues that they enact the Thorndikean assumption that transfer is limited. He uses MacDonald's words to offer an alternate view of objectives as "heuristic devices which provide initiating consequences which become altered in the flow of instruction" (qtd in Eisner, 1967, p. 111). This conception implies that learning is a bit messy, an inquiry process of trial and error that might leave room for some unfinished business, as Bruner (1966) advocates. For Eisner, achieved ends "ought to be something of a surprise to both teacher and pupil," the results of an ongoing and shifting pursuit (p. 109).
        Noddings (2003), like Eisner, challenges Popham by questioning the necessity of objectives and by suggesting that teachers and students should function as curriculum-makers. By shifting focus from objectives and goals to that of aims, she advocates "continual, reflective discussion of aims," where all school participants regularly think hard about what should be taught and why, and she worries that overly premeditated objectives foreclose "the freedom of students and teachers to participate in the construction of their own learning objectives," (2003, p. 427). Embedded in Eisner and Noddings's claims are arguments for creativity and happiness, where students and teachers have space to question, reflect, create, and play.
        But what might these shifting, curricular works-in-progress look like? Some researchers advocate turning the lens back on ourselves, as a starting point for aims-oriented inquiry. Connelly and Clandinin (1998) suggest that "there is no better way to study curriculum than to study ourselves" (qtd in Pinar, 2008, p. 498). Such an orientation has the capacity to unsettle - because no schools or classrooms are perfect - but it can also increase empathy towards teachers and students (Jackson, 1990). Jackson (1990) advocates pulling back the curtain on the "hidden curriculum," so teachers and students - and administrators - can talk frankly about the lives they share together (p. 115). Such conversations may run counter to scripted curricula, unless they are embedded into the plans, but they reveal important real-world truths, such as the socialization effects of schooling, where "learning to live in a classroom involves...learning to live in a crowd" (p. 119). Jackson values a collaborative inquiry into the hidden curriculum, where "teachers are indeed more powerful than students," where "good behaviors pays off," and where the student lives amidst "the constant condition of have his words and deeds evaluated by others" (Jackson, 1990, pp. 119-121).
        Apple (1986) extends this empathy to teachers as well, by charting the effects of labor intensification, where "professionalism and increased responsibility go hand-in-hand" - when teacher autonomy decreases as record-keeping and quality control increases - as the "absent presence" of proletarianization (p. 206). Like Jackson, he argues that hidden and official curricula are interrelated, and that teacher, like students, have the right to enjoy their work.
These concerns, regardless of the degrees of their accuracy, serve to remind us that curriculum choices are complex and their consequences are real. To help us consider how such choices might play out in real classrooms, we turn now to literature on curriculum design that speaks to each of the concerns raised above. An overview of rhetorical genre theory, a core component of my curriculum redesign, is followed by a discussion of genre-based pedagogy, and an exploration of what Smith and Wilhelm's (2002, 2006, 2009) model of meaningful learning.

Rhetorical Genre Theory
        Bawarshi (2003) provides an extensive overview of rhetorical genre theory and then promotes a genre-based approach to writing instruction as a means of uniting classical, Aristotelian rhetoric with recent sociocultural assumptions of literacy. Genre theory helps us situate genres as scenes of writing (Devitt, 2004), and throughout Bawarshi's text, genres are described as sites, locations, discursive spaces, cultural artifacts, familiar places, rhetorical habitats, nuanced repetitions, ecosystems, typified structures, situation types, and typified rhetorical strategies.  Such descriptors call forth social, historical, and functional characteristics of genre; indeed, they are "the familiar places we go to create intelligible communicative action with each other and the guideposts we use to explore the unfamiliar" (Bazerman, 1997, qtd in Bawarshi, p. 25).
         This means that genres are not limited to literary types, because genres are sites of communication that organize a range of social motives; and while genres may appear as fixed types, they are actually the results of social processes repeated so often as to appear fixed and secure. In actuality, genres have histories, and in these histories are written records of human communicative needs; although the traces of such histories have faded into dust, they continue to inform the functional properties of genres.
        Rhetorical genre theory's orientation toward the social is influenced by researchers across fields as wide-ranging as applied linguistics, communication studies, sociology, education, rhetoric and composition studies, and social psychological and structuralist theories (Bazerman, 1997; Bawarshi, 2003). Halliday's (1985) systemic functional linguistics has been particularly generative. In their analysis of his approach to understanding grammar, Hillocks and Smith (2002) identify SFL’s chief goal to be the systematic explanation of “how language provides a resource for meaning," and they devote particular attention to Halliday's emphasis on function. Halliday's work calls attention to the differening ways genres function discursively, thereby suggesting "which features students may have to learn to participate in the discourse of various fields" (Hillocks & Smith, 2002, p. 726, italics added).
       Bawarshi (2000) works through Halliday to explain the social nature of genre. By stepping outside text-types and into “situation types,” Bawarshi looks to the limitless range of "particular social semiotics" that make up the recurring scenarios of life (2000, p. 350). Such recurring scenarios, or situation types (e.g.“mother reading bedtime story to child,” “customer ordering goods over the phone”), are known to Halliday as “register,” and it is here where Bawarshi returns back to the written word, because not only do literary genres have parallels in the recurring scenarios that make up social life, they are such recurring social scenes.
        For Halliday, register (i.e., a situation type) functions across three levels, each of which interact in fairly typified ways; these are: field (what takes place communicatively?), tenor (who is taking part?), and mode (by what channel is language traveling?) (Bawarshi, 2000). Halliday located genre at the level of mode - as "typified tools communicants use within registers" (Bawarshi, 2000, p. 351).  Bawarshi, however, breaks with Halliday when he assigns genre a role beyond just mode, arguing that “genres create the conditions in which not only texts but also their writers and readers function” thereby situating genre as occurring simultaneously across all three levels of Halliday's register (p. 351). This matters because a genre-theory pedagogy draws upon register to orient students' attention toward "scenes of writing," or discursive situation types. It is to such a pedagogy that we now turn our attention.

Genre theory as framework for reflective inquiry
        One advantage of genre theory is the way it orients our attention to "scenes" that tend to enact repeatable "situations," whether these scenes are text-based or not. Such an orientation allows for a goingbackandforth which helps students recognize written genres as "scenes of writing," filled with purposeful attempts at communication with meaningful social aims (Devitt, 2004).
        To employ a genre theory framework is to help students develop a particular mode of inquiry oriented toward occasions, situations, and scenes. Numerous researchers offer advice for implementing a genre theory pedagogy. Freadman (1998) teaches the concept of genre as socioculturally situated by asking students to plan a meal together. She helps them see that meals (her substitute for genre) are occasions, with context-specific needs (no soup on an airline meal), including an appropriateness of tone (jacket and tie for formal affair). Ultimately, she helps her students come to realize five principles of genre: a) “genre is an organizing concept for our cultural practices;” b) genres contain a range of contrasting forms; c) genre is place and occasion; d) “cultural competence involves knowing the appropriate principle for each genre” and knowing how to code switch within and across them, “to move readily against them, to know when and how to use them;” e) genre refers to “a full range of languages” available within place and occasion (1998, p. 21-2).
        Hillocks (1995) would recognize Freadman's approach as a "gateway activity" aimed at helping students detect and distinguish features across situation types (p. 149). For Hillocks (1995), gateway activities are designed to build student confidence by linking their existing procedural knowledge with accessible introductions to new concepts. Situation types, then, such as "customer orders goods over the phone," provide ideal gateway activities to concretize for students the social and linguistic aspects of individual discourse situations. As a result, they come to see that each situation carries with it a certain communicative “template” so to speak. In a Hillocksian sense, situation types may provide the ideal link for mapping how to "read" genre, since students are already experts across a range of social functions.
        Bazerman (1997) might agree, for, in his words, genres are “environments…locations…the familiar places we go…and the guideposts we use to explore the unfamiliar” (p. 20). Genres are “the communicative domains” to which “we travel,” and as teachers:
we constantly welcome strangers into the discursive landscapes we value. But places that are familiar and important to us may not appear intelligible or hospitable to students we try to bring into our worlds. Moreover, students bring with them their own landscapes of familiar communicative places and desires. Students, bringing their own roadmaps from their previous experience, would also benefit from signs posted by those familiar with the new academic landscape. However, guideposts are only there when we construct them, are only useful if others know how to read them, and will only be used if they point toward destinations students see as worth going toward (p. 21).
Bawarshi draws once again on Bazerman by arguing that teachers "can and should make...'genred' discursive spaces (Bazerman, 2002, p. 17) visible to students, not only for the sake of fostering in students a critical awareness of what genres help us do and not do, but also for the sake of enabling students to participate in these spaces more meaningfully and critically" (2003, p. 18). Bawarshi ultimately argues that teachers:
"ought to promote the idea that good writers adapt well from one genred site of action to another" and that "the rhetorical art of adaption or repositioning should become central to our teaching of writing, especially our teaching of invention, which would then become the art of analyzing genres and positioning oneself within them" (2003, p. 156).
        Bazerman (1997) suggests that deeply engaged practice with genre early in a course should pay off later across a range of genres demands - a claim that deserves serious scrutiny, as the implications are profound. He says:
"Once students learn what it is to engage deeply and write well in any particular circumstance, they have a sense of the possibilities of literate participation in any discursive arena. Moreover, in any new discursive circumstances they may enter into, they will have at least one set of well-developed practices to draw analogies from and contrasts to. Further, if we provide students some analytical vocabulary to reflect on how genres relate to the dynamics of situations, they will be able to observe and think about their new situations with some sophistication and strategic appropriacy" (p. 26).
It is this final quote to which my project speaks, most profoundly through our class-blog, which serves multiple functions, including that of the early-in-course "particular circumstance" upon which students might "draw analogies from and contrasts to" (p. 26).

Planning for meaningful learning experiences
        Smith and Wilhelm's (2002, 2006, 2009) research on adolescent literacy practices and meaningful teaching suggests that Bazerman's claim deserves serious consideration. In an attempt to articulate reliable characteristics of meaningful learning, Smith and Wilhelm (2002) condensed Csikszentmihalyi's eight characteristics of flow experiences into four key principles. Meaningful learning experiences tend to create or require a sense of control and competence, require an appropriate degree of skill, provide clear goals and feedback, and place a focus on the here and now (2002, pp. 29-30). Together, these principles create the backdrop and motivation for meaningful learning, providing teachers with a useful framework with which to explore the question, "Where do we start when we plan instruction?" (Smith & Wilhelm, 2002, p. 50). They suggest putting the tempting question of "what am I preparing my students for?" aside until a more urgent question is addressed: "What is the quality of the experience I want them to have today?" Such a question requires serious thinking about the why and how (not just the what) of what teachers teach, and they turn first to Vygotskian apprenticeship models for guidance:
teachers need to provide students with a repertoire of expert strategies for approaching and completing particular tasks. This is a break from other views and models of learning that see teaching as transmissing information or allowing for student discovery....Teaching, then, should precede development, leading the learner into uncharted and challenging waters that can be navigated with assistance" (2002, pp. 37-38, 40).
While this Vygotskian approach may guide and, ultimately, skill students in the what and how of learning, it fails on its own to address the why, so Smith and Wilhelm (2006) turn elsewhere for support, drawing upon Wiggins and McTighe (1998) to round out their model of meaningful learning. Wiggins and McTighe's "understanding by design" inquiry model creates a shared "problem orientation toward learning" based on the pursuit of essential questions, which "immediately" make learning "a social project of exploration" (Smith & Wilhelm, 2006, pp. 54, 60). Smith and Wilhelm (2006) argue that immediacy and functionality are essential for meaningful learning to occur, and that inquiry units achieve immediacy by requiring "the making and doing of something" in a social context, as well as a Bruner-esque# (Bruner, 1959, Barra, 2009) iterative pursuit, where new understandings are repeatedly tested against recently formed conceptions under the umbrella of essential questions (p. 64). Also required is the consideration of "why the conceptual material and tools we are teaching were created, what issues they were meant to address, and what this knowledge can do" (p. 58).
       Within these principles are echoes of genre theory, with its emphasis on function, use, and sociohistorical situatedness. Perhaps the strongest link between inquiry-based curriculum units and genre theory emerges in the way Smith and Wilhelm (2006) highlight the importance of sequencing in their design. For them, a strong unit is organized by a shared pursuit of essential questions, which establishes an inquiry stance via sequenced lessons that define and build upon what Wilhelm (2009) has called "portable problem-solving sets" that carry across a range of increasingly difficult but generically similar tasks and problems in order to facilitate students' independence and recognition of strategic appropriacy. In many respects, Smith and Wilhelm (2002, 2006, 2009) advocate the use of smartly sequenced inquiry units to achieve what Bazerman suggests genre theory achieves. In both approaches, transfer is the goal. In both approaches, strong frontloading is necessary, as is explicit teaching and naming, and the establishment of portable problem-solving sets, or repeatable heuristics, enables students, theoretically, to transfer learning from one context to the next.

Putting it into practice: a curricular redesign
The situation: who, what, where
       The study takes place during the 2010 Spring semester. Class meets three days per week: Monday and Wednesday are face-to-face (F2F) classes and Fridays take place online (OL). The primary OL space we will occupy is the class-blog.
       "Youth Cultures" is an interdisciplinary General Education course offered to undergraduates at Temple University. Approximately five years old, this course aims to introduce students to a variety of social science texts and research methods used in the study of youth cultures. Course texts range from peer reviewed sociological research to features located in magazines such as Spin, Vibe, or Skateboarding. A range of multimedia texts are presented, and students are introduced to basic media literacy principles.
       Class size typically ranges from 28-33 students, across a range of majors, grade levels, interests, and abilities. It is not uncommon for a 19-year old freshman who did not learn to read until seventh grade to share a class with 23-year old graduating senior completing a 30-page thesis on African literature. The culminating project for this course is known as the "RP" where the R = research and the P remains flexible, alternately functioning as project, paper, pursuit, performance, or possibilities. Through this project, students must identify a youth culture they would better like to understand, conduct a range of research, and present their findings, in the form of a traditional paper, a multimedia project, or a multigenre research paper. To encourage the idea of scholarship as discourse, the RP contains three guiding categories: 1. "They Say," which consists of published texts (i.e. what they are already saying about the subject of study), including documentaries or multimedia; 2. "I Find," which includes qualitative, experiential data collection in real-time from real people. Some examples include face-to-face or online interviews, in-person or online participant-observations, focus groups, and narrative notetaking, among others. 3. "I Say," which offers interpretation and analysis of the subject of study, based on evidence from parts one and two, which often draws significantly from course content over the semester.
        As part of the curricular redesign, we will conduct an extended study of the RP-as-genre system by way of collaborative inquiry into a "practice" RP: the culture of choice will be our class-as-culture, and we will implement a range of methods, most of which will mimic the moves performed by researchers who populate assigned class texts. Therefore, our inquiry into the genres of youth culture research will include trying out the moves that published authors make within the scenes of those genres. To aid our exploration of our own class cultural dynamics, we will read Jackson's (1990) chapter on hidden curriculum.

The Role of the Class-Blog
        My action research project is situated within a larger project: a curricular redesign that involves trying out a genre-theory pedagogy, primarily through the introduction of a new scene of written communication, the class-blog, which is partly motivated by the desire to re-direct patterns of discourse, mainly by increasing student-to-student exchanges.
        The class-blog serves four essential functions. First, the class-blog is intended to reorient discourse patterns by opening up additional avenues of conversations between students, each other, and me. The second function of the blog is serving as a site of meaningful study – as a genre “scene of writing” (Devitt, 2004).   Third, the class-blog functions as a site of reflective inquiry. The fourth function is as a site of practice, where students identify, discuss, and try out the moves that count in the production of youth culture research.
         Every Friday, our class will meet online, via our class-blog. Discussion will be guided by 5-6 blog threads, each of which begins with an anchor post. A rotation of students will create anchor posts from week to week, although all students will perform the role of commenter each week. Anchor posts will be required to: 1. further our pursuit of relevant essential questions, both content- and genre-based; 2. extend or initiate conversations about course content; 3. foster conversations about our class-as-culture, and thereby contribute to our "practice RP." There will also be "open-threads," which are free-flowing conversations with no set topic.
Ground rules will be established, based heavily on the etiquette that permeates Ta-Nehisi Coates's blog. Part of our "reading" of "class-blog as genre" will be a collaborative implementation of these ground rules. Essentially, I will know them in advance and will guide the class toward discovery and agreement of the rules. Contributions to the class-blog will account for 20% of a student's course grade.

A note on the blog, sequencing, and genre-theory
Smith & Wilhelm (2002) articulate the role that sequencing plays in the how and why of meaningful learning:
"unless curricula are structured so that the understandings students gain in one text or activity can be brought forward to the next one, they can't develop. Instead...they are likely to feel overmatched and then resistant. But if students can bring their learning from one text to the next, they can feel equipped to meet the challenges they encounter....Moreover, they'll be more likely to understand why they're doing it (p. 51).
By moving from situation types (outside the classroom) to those that take place in classrooms to the class-blog as "scene of written communication" --- our continued use of this scene throughout the semester serves two purposes: 1. we get to explore the genre of the class-blog while using it; 2. this exploration serves as the backdrop for a genred exploration of a range of texts and situations during the course.

Thinking Hard about Aims: The role of essential questions
Essential questions (EQs) are organizing tools for individual and collective inquiry (Wiggins & McTighe, 1998). They should be open-ended enough where no one definitive answer exists, broad enough where students (and teachers) continually refine their answers as they incorporate new knowledge, and they should be accessible and interesting (Wiggins & McTighe, 1998; Smith & Wilhelm, 2006). Good EQs help define the why of learning, and for this course, I will use two strands of EQs in order to capitalize on the what and the how.
        The first strand of essential questions are content-based, designed to aid our pursuit and reflection upon the what. Appropriate questions to pose include: What are youth cultures? What is youth culture studies? What do members of youth cultures have in common, in terms of actions, beliefs, rituals, social positioning, etc.? and What kinds of relationships occur between subcultures and mainstream cultures? Each of these questions gets at major themes in the course content. However, Smith and Wilhelm (2006) suggest that these questions, as broad as they are, may not be interesting and accessible enough, and would likely endorse the following set as a more useful starting point of exploration: Who belongs? Why do people need to belong? Who has the power? Who's in?/Who's out?, What is rebellion? What makes people feel safe? What's cool and who decides? To what extent can identity be purchased? Students are likely to have something to say about this second set of questions and, therefore, want to dig into them right away. They allow us to get at key content and concepts, but offer a broader umbrella beneath which students are likely to feel connected and safe, which are two requisite characteristics for collaborative inquiry. This is important because transfer is more likely to occur within a classroom that generates a spirit of inquiry (Smith & Wilhelm, 2009).
        The second strand of essential question are genre-based, designed to aid our pursuit and reflection upon the how. Such questions aim to situate texts as genred scenes and students as participants who function across range of communicative roles within a classroom that contains specific and numerous "situation types" (Bawarshi, 2003). One set of essential questions points toward research: What is research? What do researchers do? What do they produce? How do they proceed? Another set capitalizes on the language of genre-theory: What are "situations"? What are "scenes of writing"? Who operates within them? What types of communication do they use? How do they know the "rules," or the "lay of the land"? A third set of questions aims to position students as researchers who use what they learn: Can we do what they (researchers) do? What do we learn when we ask the kinds of questions they ask and collect the kinds of data they collect? This last set of questions guides our practice RP, in which we study one culture as a group in order to identify and practice the range of moves necessary (or at least available) for the enactment of their own RPs. For our practice RP, the culture we will study will be our own class.

Implications & Intentions
By paying careful attention to curriculum studies scholars and thinking deeply about my own practice, I have located six core curricular principles that matter most to me: the importance of the social, the importance of the real, the importance of showing students the way, an emphasis on aims over objectives, an emphasis on transfer, and the organizing power of collaborative and reflective inquiry.
As I continue to refine my curriculum for next semester, I need to think hard about the types of experiences my students will engage in. I have targeted the following areas as in need of gateway lessons and meaningfully sequenced practice: facilitating conversations between texts, using lenses and frameworks, developing a scene-based orientation, collecting data, grouping and analyzing data,
generating authentic discussions, developing strategies when overmatched by readings.
There is much work to do.

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Pinar, W. F. (2008). Curriculum theory since 1950: Crisis, reconceptualization, internalization. In F.M. Connelly, M. F. He, & J. Phillion (eds.), The Sage handbook of curriculum and instruction, (pp. 491-513). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Popham, J. (1972). Objectives. In D. J. Flinders & S. J. Thornton (Eds.) The Curriculum Studies Reader (pp. 93-106). New York: RoutledgeFalmer.
Smith, M.W., & Wilhelm, J. (2002). Reading Don't Fix No Cheveys: Literacy in the lives of young men. Portsmouth, NH: Heineman.
Smith, M.W., & Wilhelm, J. (2006). Going with the flow: How to engage boys (and girls) in their literacy learning. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
Smith, M.W., & Wilhelm, J. (2009). "New Life for the Literary Elements." NCTE Annual Convention presentation, Philadelphia, PA, November 20.
Wiggins, G., & McTighe, J. (1998). Understanding by Design. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development

Repetition

2009-12-10T17:48:00.003-05:00

Writing about the same topic over and over, as I've been doing over the last two semesters, has been extremely helpful. Each time I summarize genre theory, I understand it better. As a result, my write-up reads more and more gracefully, yet simply. It's nice.

Good things happening with the curriculum theory paper.

Class-blog action research proposal

2009-12-08T00:41:00.002-05:00

An exciting process, but I've simply run out of gas. Next semester, I'll have the chance to implement this one.

Big achievement here: synthesizing genre theory with reflective inquiry (and knowing what I'm talking about while doing it).

Note: a significant portion of this paper was drafted while driving, via the iPhone "Voice Memo" app. A really interesting approach to composition and invention. Mediational means, yo.

When Learning Matters…and Lasts: the class-blog as genred site of reflective inquiry
An action-research study proposal

Genre is a rich multidimensional resource that helps us locate our discursive action in relation to highly structured situations. Genre is only the visible realization of a complex of social and psychological dynamics. In understanding what is afoot in the genre...we become aware of the multiple social and psychological factors our utterance needs to speak to in order to be most effective.
Charles Bazerman, "The Life of Genre, The Life in the Classroom"

Situating This Study
The following proposal is part of a larger set of projects, each aimed at creating a more powerful learning dynamic in the course I teach, Youth Cultures. One project, a digital ethnography, draws upon Bawarshi's (2003) and Halliday's (1985) work on register in order to understand the functionality of TNC's blog, as a "scene of writing," (Devitt, Reiff, & Bawarshi, 2004) in order to import its best elements into a newly implemented Youth Cultures class-blog. The second project involves a curricular redesign, based on inquiry models articulated by Bruner (1959), Wiggins and McTighe (1998), and Smith and Wilhelm (2006). In this redesign, the class-blog functions as a crucial vehicle for two strands of reflective inquiry: one is content-based and the other is genre-based, rooted in contemporary genre theory. The following action-research plan seeks to study of the functionality of this newly implemented scene of written communication - our class-blog.
Introduction & Background
This action research proposal represents an attempt to better understand and improve my own teaching by synthesizing a range of interests that have intensified over the course of this semester. I could not have designed this project without the influence of a multitude of voices, including those of my students.
Before discussing the key researchers that have guided the shape of this project, which is set in the undergraduate "General Education" course I teach at Temple University, I hope to rationalize articulate my desire for improving my teaching.
Like many teachers, I worry about my shortcomings more than I celebrate my successes. While I know a fair amount about good teaching, in theory and practice, I end my third semester of teaching "Youth Cultures" feeling dissatisfied, particularly as I locate myself within Temple University's doctoral program in Education. In this transition from high school English teacher to "professor" of undergraduates (quote marks intentional), I enter simultaneously into new discourse communities, and my new points of reference, then, become field experts; like most TAs, I negotiate the floating roles I play as student and instructor, always learning, always inspired, but pulled in multiple directions at once.
As a result, my teaching has been erratic, inconsistent, and discordant at times. It is not uncommon for me to change my plans last minute, based on my enthusiasm from the previous night's seminar. However, my enthusiasm has not always benefitted my students, and upon reflection and through conversations with students, I have located particular areas in need of improvement. While distinct, each area is situated in relation to each other area. These include: poor sequencing, the lack of guiding questions, haphazard planning, strikingly imbalanced discourse patterns, failure to draw upon students' background knowledge, an emphasis on the distant over the immediate, unfulfilled class-as-community potential, inconsistent goals and feedback, uninspired use of technology, scattered use of reflection, and sadly, not enough joy.
The following project aims to account for and improve these loose ends via a more systematic approach to instruction that allows my students and me to capitalize on the intellectual excitement and curiosity that so drives my graduate studies, primarily by situating each of us within an inquiry process. This study, I hope, will yield interesting findings about a range of topics, including: a. classroom as "activity system"; b. the role of genre theory in an undergraduate course; c. uses of online communication technology; d. teacher and student roles. The heart of this project is a redesigned pedagogy that places students in the dual role of learner-researcher, of participant-observer. Later in this paper, this role with be fully articulated, as will my own roles as teacher, participant, and researcher.
Ultimately, I envision this project as one with a multitude of beneficiaries. My students should benefit in this class and beyond, as a result of their positioning as participant-observers and as scholars, and from the systematic approach of my instruction. My own teaching should improve considerably, as should my awareness as a planner, theorist, and communicator. Lastly, other teachers and researchers may learn from this project if it articulates struggles felt but not often said.
On a personal note, this project is a start - a systematic, reflective pursuit of a rigorous, joyful, creative, and collaborative pedagogy. It is also the start of fully exposing myself, in order to enter into big conversations unafraid, and to become for once the reflective practitioner I long to be. I admit that, as a teacher, I am profoundly self-interested - perhaps selfish is more accurate - as I find my own moves and processes as interesting as both the course content I teach and the moves and processes of my students. At this stage in my career, I am uniquely positioned to converse with fellow researchers, teachers, and students, and I want to dive headlong into such talk, across a range of registers and locations. So yes, this project is a start, but as I have learned from genre-theory, all beginnings are departures, and no starting point is an isolated one. In fact, we begin always amidst a larger conversation. It is this conversation to which we now turn our attention.
Review of Influential Literature
I. Rhetorical Genre Theory
In his book, Genre & the Invention of the Writer: Reconsidering the Place of Invention in Composition, Anis Bawarshi (2003) provides an extensive overview of rhetorical genre theory and then promotes a genre-based approach to writing instruction as a means of uniting classical, Aristotelian rhetoric with recent sociocultural assumptions of literacy. According to genre theory, genres - much more than mere text-types - are the "social and rhetorical conditions," or locations, "in which writers acquire, negotiate, and articulate" motivations and desires to communicate (p. 7). Genres, then, are "ecosystems" that are shaped by and shape writers; that is, when writers work within genred spaces, they contribute to what genres are and could be, but at the same time, their rhetorical possibilities are defined by what the genre allows.
Genre theory helps us situate genres as scenes of writing, and throughout Bawarshi's text, genres are described as sites, locations, discursive spaces, cultural artifacts, familiar places, rhetorical habitats, nuanced repetitions, ecosystems, typified structures, situation types, and typified rhetorical strategies. Such descriptors call forth social, historical, and functional characteristics of genre. They are "the familiar places we go to create intelligible communicative action with each other and the guideposts we use to explore the unfamiliar" (Bazerman, 1997, qtd in Bawarshi, p. 25). For Bawarshi, this means that genres are not limited to literary types, because genres are sites of communication that organize a range of social motives; therefore, "humble genres," such as greeting cards and patient medical history forms receive attention in his work. Additionally, although genres appear as fixed types, they are actually the results of social processes repeated so often as to appear fixed and secure. In actuality, genres have histories, and in these histories are written records of human communicative needs; although the traces of such histories have faded into dust, they continue to inform the functional properties of genres.
Genre theory raises intriguing pedagogical implications, particularly in literacy-based coursework. At its core, Bawarshi's book is about invention and is, therefore, about beginnings. For Bawarshi and others working from within genre theory, individuals never invent in isolation; rather, all moments of invention (e.g., beginning to write) are in fact connected to prior moments - and not just within the individual's own experience. All beginnings, then, are "at once an act of initiation and an act of continuation" (p. 2). Although writers write, language does not begin magically as a brain- or even heart-spark, because all moments of invention are "situated and textured," and scenes of production are populated and informed by a variety of social forces, not least of which is genre. His book is concerned with the teaching of writing, and according to genre theory, invention is not only the articulation of a writer's ideas but also the acquisition of the desire for those ideas. Ultimately, for Bawarshi, genres are the socially-oriented locations - the "discursive and ideological conditions that writers have to position themselves within and interpret in order to write" (Bawarshi, 2003, p. 170).
Rhetorical genre theory's orientation toward the social is influenced by researchers across fields as wide-ranging as applied linguistics, communication studies, sociology, education, rhetoric and composition studies, and social psychological and structuralist theories (Bazerman, 1997; Bawarshi, 2003). For purposes of this paper, our discussion will begin with the influence Halliday's (1985) systemic functional linguistics. In their analysis of Halliday’s (1985) approach to understanding grammar, Hillocks and Smith (2002) identify SFL’s chief goal to be the systematic explanation of “how language provides a resource for meaning," devoting particular attention to Halliday's work with "speech functions" (p. 725). For Halliday, language functions as "information exchanges," most importantly at the level of the clause, where six different processes occur: material, mental, relational, behavioral, verbal, and existential (Hillocks & Smith, 2002). Collectively, these six categories "and their extensions and elaborations permit the analysis of how genres of discourse differ from one another….These analyses suggest which features students may have to learn to participate in the discourse of various fields (Hillocks & Smith, 2002, p. 726, italics added).
Bawarshi (2000) also draws upon Halliday's work in order to explain the social nature of genre. He explains that Halliday is concerned with “situation types,” or the “particular social semiotics within social reality” that make up the recurring scenarios of life (2000, p. 350). Such scenarios (e.g. “mother reading bedtime story to child,” “customer ordering goods over the phone”), are known to Halliday as “register,” and it is here where text meets “its sociosemiotic environment, because register assigns a situation type with particular semantic properties” (qtd. in Bawarshi, 2000, p. 350).
To understand register, Halliday suggests using these three terms to our advantage: a.) field: what takes place communicatively? (the field of discourse represents the institutional setting in which language occurs); tenor: who is taking part? (the tenor of discourse represents the relation between participants – their role relations – within the discourse); mode: what role is language playing? (the mode of discourse represents the channel of communication adopted by the participants). All three levels interact in particular and fairly typified ways with register (all italics are Bawarshi, p. 350).
In Halliday’s system, genre functions at the level of mode, and thus are “relegated to typified tools communicants use within registers to enact and interact within a particular semiotic system” (Bawarshi, 2000, p. 351). Bawarshi, however, breaks with Halliday when he assigns genre a role beyond just mode, arguing that “genres create the conditions in which not only texts but also their writers and readers function” (p. 351). As a result, Bawarshi makes a move toward “genre theory” by extending Halliday’s language theory by positioning “genre as social semiotic” (p. 351). By this he means that genres are not simply an aspect of register, but “are also how we constitute register and all the semantic, social, and lexicogrammatical con-figurations within it” (p. 351). For Bawarshi, genre functions simultaneously at all three levels of Halliday's register.
[Note #1: register is the analytic tool I am using to conduct a digital ethnography of Ta-Nehisi Coates's blog (www.ta-nehishicoates.theatlantic.com), which will serve as the model for the class-blog that functions as the centerpiece of this study. Later in this paper, I explain how our class-blog will serve a range of communicative functions in our class next semester.]
II. Genre theory pedagogy
Numerous researchers offer advice for implementing a genre theory pedagogy. Freadman (1998) teaches the concept of genre as socioculturally situated by asking students to plan a meal together. She helps them see that meals (her substitute for genre) are occasions, with context-specific needs (no soup on an airline meal), including an appropriateness of tone (jacket and tie for formal affair). Ultimately, she helps her students come to realize five principles of genre: a) “genre is an organizing concept for our cultural practices;” b) genres contain a range of contrasting forms; c) genre is place and occasion; d) “cultural competence involves knowing the appropriate principle for each genre” and knowing how to code switch within and across them, “to move readily against them, to know when and how to use them;” e) genre refers to “a full range of languages” available within place and occasion (1998, p. 21-2).
Hillocks (1995) would recognize Freadman's approach as a "gateway activity" (p. 149) aimed at helping students detect and distinguish features across what Halliday (1985) calls "situation types." For Hillocks (1995), gateway activities are designed to build student confidence by linking their existing procedural knowledge to accessible introductions to new concepts. Situation types, then, such as "customer orders goods over the phone," provide ideal gateway activities to concretize for students the social and linguistic aspects of individual discourse situations. As a result, they come to see that each situation carries with it a certain communicative “template” so to speak. In a Hillocksian sense, situation types may be the ideal means of mapping how to "read" genre, since students are already experts across a range of social functions.
Bazerman (1997) extends this metaphor of mapping so beautifully that I feel compelled to cite him at length. To Bazerman, genres are “environments…locations…the familiar places we go…and the guideposts we use to explore the unfamiliar” (p. 20). Genres are “the communicative domains” to which “we travel,” and as teachers:
we constantly welcome strangers into the discursive landscapes we value. But places that are familiar and important to us may not appear intelligible or hospitable to students we try to bring into our worlds. Moreover, students bring with them their own landscapes of familiar communicative places and desires. Students, bringing their own roadmaps from their previous experience, would also benefit from signs posted by those familiar with the new academic landscape. However, guideposts are only there when we construct them, are only useful if others know how to read them, and will only be used if they point toward destinations students see as worth going toward (p. 21).
Once he emerges from his landscape metaphor, Bazerman raises a series of practical considerations for teaching genre. “If we want students to learn to write,” he says, “we must locate the kinds of writing they will want to work hard at, the kinds of writing problems they will want to solve.” (p. 23). Before exploring possible curricular responses to this challenge, we will contemplate the essential claims of a genre-based pedagogy, as articulated by Bawarshi and Bazerman.
Bawarshi draws once again on Bazerman by arguing that teachers "can and should make...'genred' discursive spaces (Bazerman, 2002, p. 17) visible to students, not only for the sake of fostering in students a critical awareness of what genres help us do and not do, but also for the sake of enabling students to participate in these spaces more meaningfully and critically" (2003, p. 18). Bawarshi ultimately argues that teachers "ought to promote the idea that good writers adapt well from one genred site of action to another" and that "the rhetorical art of adaption or repositioning should become central to our teaching of writing, especially our teaching of invention, which would then become the art of analyzing genres and positioning oneself within them" (2003, p. 156).
Bazerman (1997) suggests that deeply engaged practice with genre early in a course should pay off later across a range of genres demands - a claim that deserves serious scrutiny, as the implications are profound. He says:
Once students learn what it is to engage deeply and write well in any particular circumstance, they have a sense of the possibilities of literate participation in any discursive arena. Moreover, in any new discursive circumstances they may enter into, they will have at least one set of well-developed practices to draw analogies from and contrasts to. Further, if we provide students some analytical vocabulary to reflect on how genres relate to the dynamics of situations, they will be able to observe and think about their new situations with some sophistication and strategic appropriacy" (p. 26).
It is this final quote to which my project responds, most profoundly through our class-blog, which serves multiple functions, including that of the early-in-course "particular circumstance" upon which students might "draw analogies from and contrasts to."
III. Curricular Design, Sequencing, and "Portable problem-solving sets"
Smith and Wilhelm's (2006) research on adolescent literacy practices and meaningful teaching suggests that Bazerman's claim deserves serious consideration. Advocating a series of inquiry-based units in order to teach students the "how" and "why" - not just the "what" - of course content, Smith and Wilhelm draw upon Wiggins and McTighe's (1998) "understanding by design" inquiry model, which creates a shared "problem orientation toward learning" based on the pursuit of essential questions, which "immediately" make learning "a social project of exploration" (2006, pp. 54, 60). Smith and Wilhelm argue that immediacy and functionality are essential for meaningful learning to occur, and that inquiry units achieve immediacy by requiring "the making and doing of something" in a social context, as well as a Bruner-esque (1959) iterative pursuit, where new understandings are tested against recently formed conceptions under the umbrella of essential questions (2006, p. 64). Also required is the consideration of "why the conceptual material and tools we are teaching were created, what issues they were meant to address, and what this knowledge can do" (p. 58).
Within these principles are echoes of genre theory, with its emphasis on function, use, and sociohistorical situatedness. Perhaps the strongest link between inquiry-based curriculum units and genre theory emerges in the way Smith and Wilhelm (2006) highlight the importance of sequencing in their design. For them, a strong unit is organized by a shared pursuit of essential questions, which establishes an inquiry stance via sequenced lessons that define and build upon what Wilhelm (2009) has called "portable problem-solving sets" that carry across a range of increasingly difficult but generically similar tasks and problems in order to facilitate students' independence and recognition of strategic appropriacy. In many respects, Smith and Wilhelm advocate the use of smartly sequenced inquiry units to achieve what Bazerman suggests genre theory achieves. In both approaches, transfer is the goal. In both approaches, strong frontloading is necessary - as is explicit teaching and naming - and the establishment of portable problem-solving sets, or repeatable heuristics, enables students, theoretically, to transfer learning from one context to the next. One wonders, then, why shouldn't this approach work if such "sets" are genre-based, as Bazerman (and Bawarshi) advocate?
[Note #2: the backdrop for this action research project is the implementation of an "understanding by design" model, in which essential questions will coexist on two realms: that of content and that of genre. Therefore, students will engage in two types of extended inquiry: the pursuit of Youth Culture-based questions, such as "How and why do subcultures form?" and the pursuit of genre-based questions, such as, "How do social science researchers pursue and share their findings?" I will explain this in greater depth in the "Design" section of this paper.]

IV. Action Research as Project Design
Such curricular design represents a shift from postpositivist to interpretivist conceptions of knowledge, represented by emphases on understanding over explanation, on collaborative inquiry over transmission, and on sequentially-based transfer over scattershot attempts at "coverage." Likewise, genre theory itself, lends itself to interpretivist theories of knowledge, most clearly illustrated in the notion of a genre-as-ecosystem (where genre and author create each other), and a genre-system (or activity-system) as a living organism, as "not a container for actions or texts" but "an ongoing accomplishment" (Russell, 1997, p. 513, qtd. in Bawarshi, 2003, P. 142). Both stances suggest and inquiry-based approach, where knowledge is not fixed but situated, and yes, co-constructed; these implications are echoed in the research method I am bringing to this project.
Numerous researchers have defined action research, with generally consistency among them. Nonetheless, I would like to highlight three separate introductions to action research, in order to suggest distinctions in tone, audience, and goals. Ferrance (2000, p. 1, 9) introduces action research as "a process in which participants examine their own educational practice systematically and carefully" via routines that are "loosely guided by movement through five phases of inquiry," which include problem-identification, data collection and organization, interpretation of data, data-based action, and reflection. Ferrance acknowledges a range of action research types but suggests that they all share "four basic themes: empowerment of participants, collaboration through participation, acquisition of knowledge, and social change (2000, p. 9).
Action research, as defined by Willis (2007), is a strand of interpretive research that involves an iterative, cyclical process of "reflection on a situation, action to solve a problem, and reflection on whether the action was effective" (p. 231). When this cycle invites participants to contribute to the reflection, the research becomes "participatory" (p. 232).
As conceptualized by Carr and Kemmins (1986, p. 164, qtd. in Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009), action research requires three core conditions: 1. the subject of the research is a social practice that can be improved upon; 2. the project uses a structured and interrelated "spiral of cycles of planning, acting, observing, and reflecting"; and 3. participation in the project gradually widens to include those affected by the social practice. Action research, according to Cochran-Smith and Lytle (2009), has too often been misrepresented and watered-down, "presented as a recipe or technique for instrumental problem solving that has little to do with what Carr and Kemmins intended (p. 122). They argue that action research requires "inquiry as stance," which "redefines leaders as learners and thus blurs the boundaries between leaders and followers" (p. 123).

Research Questions
The literature outlined above suggests moves that teachers can make to not only create the conditions of meaningful learning but also increase the likelihood of transfer. Coupled with literature from the field of curriculum theory, it has also informed the redesign of my approach to teaching Youth Cultures, including the implementation of a class-blog, which essentially serves as the primary symbol through which these changes are enacted. For this action-research project, I'm choosing to look at our class-blog through a dual lens - both as a site of inquiry and as a genred site of written communication.
Two questions guide my examination of our class-blog as a site of inquiry: 1. How do we get the most out of our class-blog as a tool for reflective inquiry? (*prospective beneficiaries: students and me); 2. Might I formulate my own "portable problem-solving set" of strategies that aid and enable essential question-based inquiry and reflection, via a class-blog, across any range of EQs? (*prospective beneficiaries: teachers).
I am also looking at the effects of genre theory on students' ability to formulate and transfer their own "portable problem-solving sets" across various sites of written communication. Bazerman (1997) identifies this ability as "strategic appropriacy" (p. 26). I am specifically choosing to look at how early-course immersion in one genre (the class-blog) might transfer across other written genres, especially those enacted in the RP? Assuming such transfer is even documentable, does it happen differently for different students? (*prospective beneficiaries: students, me, teachers).
Definitions of terms
For the sake of this paper, I am using the following terms accordingly: Transfer refers to the capacity to take what one has learned in one situation and apply it to a new situation. Reflective inquiry refers to one's iterative pursuit of a question or problem that requires the repeated cyclical move of checking what one comes to know against what one already understands. The class-blog is an online tool of communication where users can publically post and respond to each others' writing. Scenes of writing are the places in which communication takes place between members who share a common purpose. In this study, the class-blog is one such scene. It is also a genre-system (or activity-system) because multiple genres are used within it in order to enact different purposes according to the demands of different situations. Essential questions are the big, important questions that motivate the inquiry and shape an academic unit.
Potential Limitations
One of the interesting things about Ta-Nehisi Coates's blog - the primary model for our own class-blog - is that the anchor posts (i.e. the opening posts of a thread) rarely ask questions. I am concerned that the question-based orientation of our class-blog (as site of reflective inquiry) could backfire. I may find that the conditions that determine a highly functioning class-blog are dependent on too many variables to be considered reliable. There is also the possibility that this class may become overly self-referential, to the detriment of core content. It is important to guard against that.
The Project Design
Context
The following proposal is part of a larger set of projects, each aimed at improving my teaching of Youth Cultures. One project, a digital ethnography, seeks to understand the functionality of TNC's blog, as a scene of writing, in order to import its best elements into a newly implemented class-blog. The second project involves a curricular redesign, based on inquiry models articulated by Bruner, Wiggins & McTighe, and Smith & Wilhelm. In this redesign, the class-blog functions as a crucial vehicle for two strands of reflective inquiry: one is content-based and the other is genre-based, rooted in contemporary genre theory. The following action research plan seeks to study of the functionality of this newly implemented scene of written communication - our class-blog.
The Scene of Study
The study takes place during the 2010 Spring semester. Class meets three days per week: Monday and Wednesday are face-to-face (F2F) classes and Fridays take place online (OL). The primary OL space we will occupy is the class-blog.
"Youth Cultures" is an interdisciplinary General Education course offered to undergraduates at Temple University. Approximately five years old, this course aims to introduce students to a variety of social science texts and research methods used in the study of youth cultures. Course texts range from peer reviewed sociological research to features located in magazines such as Spin, Vibe, or Skateboarding. A range of multimedia texts are presented, and students are introduced to basic media literacy principles.
Class size typically ranges from 28-33 students, across a range of majors, grade levels, interests, and abilities. It is not uncommon for a 19-year old freshman who did not learn to read until seventh grade to share a class with 23-year old graduating senior completing a 30-page thesis on African literature. The culminating project for this course is known as the "RP" where the R = research and the P remains flexible, alternately functioning as project, paper, pursuit, performance, or possibilities. Through this project, students must identify a youth culture they would better like to understand, conduct a range of research, and present their findings, in the form of a traditional paper, a multimedia project, or a multigenre research paper. To encourage the idea of scholarship as discourse, the RP contains three guiding categories: 1. "They Say," which consists of published texts (i.e. what they are already saying about the subject of study), including documentaries or multimedia; 2. "I Find," which includes qualitative, experiential data collection in real-time from real people. Some examples include face-to-face or online interviews, in-person or online participant-observations, focus groups, and narrative notetaking, among others. 3. "I Say," which offers interpretation and analysis of the subject of study, based on evidence from parts one and two, which often draws significantly from course content over the semester.
As part of the curricular redesign, we will conduct an extended study of the RP-as-genre system by way of collaborative inquiry into a "practice" RP: the culture of choice will be our class-as-culture, and we will implement a range of methods, most of which will mimic the moves performed by researchers who populate assigned class texts. Therefore, our inquiry into the genres of youth culture research will include trying out the moves that published authors make within the scenes of those genres.

The Role of the Class-Blog
My action research project is situated within a larger project: a curricular redesign that involves trying out a genre-theory pedagogy, primarily through the introduction of a new scene of written communication, the class-blog, which is partly motivated by the desire to re-direct patterns of discourse, mainly by increasing student-to-student exchanges.
The class-blog serves four essential functions. First, the class-blog is intended to reorient discourse patterns by opening up additional avenues of conversations between students, each other, and me. The second function of the blog is serving as a site of meaningful study – as a genre “scene of writing” (Devitt, 2004). Third, the class-blog functions as a site of reflective inquiry. The fourth function is as a site of practice, where students identify, discuss, and try out the moves that count in the production of youth culture research.
Every Friday, our class will meet online, via our class-blog. Discussion will be guided by 5-6 blog threads, each of which begins with an anchor post. A rotation of students will create anchor posts from week to week, although all students will perform the role of commenter each week. Anchor posts will be required to: 1. further our pursuit of relevant essential questions, both content- and genre-based; 2. extend or initiate conversations about course content; 3. foster conversations about our class-as-culture, and thereby contribute to our "practice RP." There will also be "open-threads," which are free-flowing conversations with no set topic.
Ground rules will be established, based heavily on the etiquette that permeates Ta-Nehisi Coates's blog. Part of our "reading" of "class-blog as genre" will be a collaborative implementation of these ground rules. Essentially, I will know them in advance and will guide the class toward discovery and agreement of the rules. Contributions to the class-blog will account for 20% of a student's course grade.
Data Collection
This action research project emerges from a desire to synthesize theory and practice in order to teach more effectively. I am focusing particularly on the role our class-blog plays as a tool for reflective inquiry and as a scene of written communication. Each research question lends itself to certain means of data collection and analysis.
1. In order to get the most out of our class-blog as a tool for reflective inquiry, I will collect the following data, with the help of my students.
a. I should lead the way here, but there's no reason students can't help me.
b. All blog posts/conversations, with particular emphasis on...overtly rich threads as well as underdeveloped ones (students can nominate "threads of the week" perhaps...they can help me identify them, and they can justify why these threads deserve to win....This is good data.)
c.

2. In order to formulate a procedural heuristic for the use of class-blogs as sites of reflective inquiry, I will collect the following data:
a. Journals
b.
3. In order to better understand the effects of genre theory on students' ability to formulate and transfer their own "portable problem-solving sets" across various sites of written communication, I will collect the following data, each of tries to get at a student's sense of "strategic appropriacy" (Bazerman, 2007
- they demonstrate what students can articulate about their own moves and strategies, while simultaneously creating the desire for students to make these strategies public, to readers and to themselves.

a. process reflections
b. interviews
c. relevant blog posts dealing with generic transfer

At some point, students (individually, or in groups) must compose a written reflection about the class-blog as a genred site of written communication, in order to demonstrate a basic understanding of genre-theory. To do this, they will focus on three aspects of the blog: a. field, b. tenor, c. mode (but not in those terms, obviously). Instead,

microethnographic case study (Willis, p. 242) focusing on two students from each section I section I teach. For these students, I will examine their written process reflections, and I will conduct thirty minute interviews with them, utilizing a scripted protocol to understand their conceptions of generic transfer. Should these interviews turn into tutoring sessions, these sessions will aid the student and me.

Perhaps, they might instead select on aspect of the blog and discuss register accordingly, instead of focusing on the entire blog.
"strategic appropriacy"

how students do or do not formulate their own heuristics

Data Analysis
Tools for data analysis will be acquired at the beginning of next semester, when I enact this project and analyze it through the second half of this methods course. I look forward to it.

References

Bawarshi, A. (2000). “The Genre Function.” College English. 62, 3, 335-60

Bawarshi, A. (2003). Genre and the Invention of the Writer: Reconsidering the Place of Invention in Composition. Logan: Utah State UP.

Bazerman, C. (1997). "The Life of Genre, the Life in the Classroom." Genre and Writing. Ed. W. Bishop and H. Ostrom. Boynton/Cook, 1997: 19-26.

Bruner, J. (1959). “The Functions of Teaching.” Address to Rhode Island College of Education, April 13. Located in Bruner, J. (2006). In Search of Pedagogy: Vol. 1 & II.: The selected works of Jerome Bruner. New York: Routledge.

Cochran-Smith, M. & Lytle, S. L. (2009). Inquiry as Stance: Practitioner research for the next generation. New York: Teachers College.

Devitt, A., Reiff, M. J., & Bawarshi, A. (2004). Scenes of Writing: Strategies for Composing with Genres. New York: Pearson/Longman.

Ferrance, E. (2000). Themes in education: Action research. Brown University: Educational. Alliance, 1-34.

Freadman, A. (1998). “Models of genre for language teaching.” South Central Review, 15, 1, 19-39.

Halliday, M.A.K. (1985) An Introduction to Functional Grammar (2E 1994). London: Edward Arnold.

Hillocks, G. (1995). Teaching Writing as Reflective Practice. New York: Teachers College Press.

Hillocks, G. & Smith, M. W. (2002). "Grammar and usage." Handbook of research on teaching the English language arts. New York: Macmillian. 591-603.

Smith, M., & Wilhelm, J. (2006). Going with the flow: How to engage boys (and girls) in their literacy learning. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Smith, M., & Wilhelm, J. (2009). "New Life for the Literary Elements." NCTE Annual Convention presentation, Philadelphia, PA, November 20.

Wiggins, G., & McTighe, J. (1998). Understanding by Design. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development

Willis, J. W. (2007). Foundations of Qualitative Research: Interpretive and critical approaches. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

writing and hair

2009-12-07T12:55:00.000-05:00

My wife today told me that when she took cosmetology courses in high school, the girls would all experiment on each others' hair. Blacks, hispanics, whites, asians - and they'd have a good time with it and learn a lot about each other.

What might this look like in a literature or writing classroom?

big ideas

2009-12-05T18:15:00.001-05:00

gettin closer.

Gimme some paradigm

2009-11-23T17:29:00.001-05:00

This paper introduces and compares three central research paradigms, as presented by Willis (2007), in Foundations of Qualitative Research: interpretive and critical approaches.

The first paradigm, postpositivism (PP), is an extension of positivism in that it replicates key assumptions and practices, save two: falsification and purity of data. First, in Popper's conception of PP, empirical studies do not prove anything but instead add to a theory's list of evidence. A study can only reject a null hypothesis, as opposed to accepting a hypothesis as truth. Further, postpositivists acknowledge that data collection itself is based on theory, and therefore, can not be truly objective, unpolluted, or raw. Second, whereas positivism was used to generate theory, PP is used to test it. Aside from these two primary distinctions, the two paradigms largely overlap, so the discussion of PP from here on can also apply to positivism. PP, like positivism before it, attempts to displace religious or metaphysical thinking in favor of science. It posits an accessible, external, and physical reality that can be discovered and explained with the aid of "gold standard' experiments that utilize the scientific method. Such research is designed to identify universals (beliefs, concepts, ideas) that transfer across contexts. Researchers are expected to minimize bias and maximize objectivity, in the name of research purity. Problems should be clearly identifiable and hypotheses and methods should be clear-cut, using precise, specialized language if necessary. Experiments designed to test theories are conducted outside the realm of practice; they can not be embedded within everyday use but are instead conducted in controlled conditions to eliminate contextual contamination. Ideally, PP research not only tests a theory but generates rules that practitioners are to follow.

Critical theory research (CTR), the second major paradigm discussed here, is similar to PP in its conception of reality. Both paradigms suggest that reality is external, knowable, and quantifiable. CTR differs radically from PP, however, in how it interprets the truth of its research findings, even when the data is "equally true." CTR, in its aim to identify groups of people whose needs are not being met in order to help them acquire power, is by nature, emancipatory. PP is not. Critical theory researchers use ideologically oriented inquiry (Guba, 1990) to find out how the current situation has come to exist and also to uncover hidden relationships otherwised overlooked. Therefore, while critical theorists may agree with PP results, their understanding of those results are likely to differ because CTR situates the findings in a power dynamic they are likely to criticize. Such criticism is grounded historically in Marxism. Marx is the common ancestor of CTR in that his world view was critical of an unequal system where the Haves inevitably suppress the Have-Nots. Whereas Marxist critique emphasizes class-based power dynamics, CTR at large has come to examine numerous types of power relationships, such as those concerning gender, sexuality, or ability.

CTR differs from PP in its central purpose: whereas PP "looks for universals," CT "looks for local instances of universals" (Willis, 2007, p. 98). Whereas PP aims to understand the way things are, CTR is aimed at making apparent the "false consciousness and ideological distortions" often mistaken as truth. Ultimately, according to Willis, the primary goal of CTR is to get research participants to believe the way the researcher does, in order to enact emancipatory behaviors and free themselves from the circumstances of their oppression. For critical theorists, power matters, and it manifests itself in ways that are not always obvious. Those oppressed by the forces of power deserve to be counted, and such forces need to be exposed. Numerous truths become more complicated when applying a power-based lens to them. And a CTR project that produces data without change is a failed endeavor. As a result, CTR differs radically from PP in its synthesis of research and practice.

CTR is best exemplified by its emphasis on why, rather than how questions. Studies aimed at uncovering hidden curriculum elements are highly valued. For example, one project might examine why lower status students speak less in during group work, in order to recommend ways of changing this situation. Another study might introduce the use of art and music into a language arts classroom to examine their effects on lower performing students. A different study might compare three groups' readings of a series of modern short stories, where one group uses a queer theory lens, another uses a Marxist approach, and a third uses no theoretical lens. This study can simultaneously introduce new reading approaches, while bringing to the surface issues of gender, class, and sexuality.

The third paradigm up for discussion is Interpretivism. A useful introduction to the interpretivist research (IR) paradigm begins with Wittgenstein's “language games.” According to Wittgenstein, the real meaning of language emerges from real-world use, as opposed to dictionary definitions. Different language communities, or discourse communities, play different language games, and words evolve according to members' needs. In the real world, language is situated, and truth depends on context.

This understanding of language encapsulates IR at-large, particularly in its emphasis on the situatedness of truth. IR, like PP and CT, does accept the idea of an external reality, but it rejects the notion of a single, external truth. Instead, knowledge is subjective and context-specific, and truth is multiple. As such, IR does not seek to explain but rather to understand. As opposed to discovering universal truths, IR examines how multiple subjectivities (different realities for different individuals) interact in particular circumstances. It also adapts Wittgenstein's language games approach to understand how knowledge is socially constructed – how meaning-making is a group or social process. For example, certain terms, procedures, and data may have meaning because a group of scholars has agreed on that meaning; in other contexts, meanings may differ.

While PP looks for universal truths and CT looks to uncover the underside of those truths, IR looks for "understanding of a particular context" (Willis, 2007, p. 98). Such an approach calls into questions assumptions of universality because knowledge is thought to be situated, and understandings are contextual. Three interpretist movements, verstehen, hermeneutics, and phenomenology, exemplify this spirit of research. Verstehen, the German word for “understanding,” grounds the interpretivist pursuit as honorable and suggests that social sciences require different methods than do hard sciences. Whereas hard sciences require etic explanations, social science research should aim for an emic understanding of the participants' point of view. In the former, the scientists judge truth, according to the scientific method; in the latter, what is true is what members of the community agree on, and the researcher's job is to understand and capture this.

Another IR approach is hermeneutics, the theory and practice of interpretation, which emphasizes the importance of language in understanding and the importance of context. According to Willis (2007), there are three current versions of hermeneutics, each concurrent with a major research paradigm. Validation, based on PP, uses hermeneutics to scientifically discover truth. Critical hermeneutics is deeply suspicious of validation because "it fails to account for the possibility of historically formed ideological distortion and false consciousness" (p. 104). Philosophical hermeneutics reflects interpretivism in that it aims for understanding and rejects the certainty of foundationalism, which suggests there are sure ways of discovering truth. IR sees PP and CT as foundational because researchers are given privileged positions in both and emic perspectives are de-emphasized or ignored. Critical to hermeneutics is reflection, typified by the “hermeneutic circle,” which is the process of going back and forth between content, context, and one's own understanding in order to develop meaning. This process is typified by the “reflective practitioner model” of Donal Schon (1987).

The third type of hermeneutics, phenomenology, exemplifies the emic ethic in its study of people's perception of the world. Rather than trying to discover the world as it really is, phenomenology uses rich reports to capture contexts, and its methods are aimed at uncovering the ways participants perceive the topic up for study.

The subjective nature of IR allows for a range of data collection methods, both quantitative and qualitative, including reflections, stories, and conversations. Standards are useful, but not universal, as are the results of research. In some ways, IR overlaps with the other paradigms: like PP, falsification theory is useful, and like CT, historicity is useful. Interestingly, while PP utilizes what Schon (1987) has termed the “technical rationality” approach, where “research leads to general rules which are then applied by practitioners to particular situations" (Willis, 2007, p. 113). IR, on the other hand, holds that research results apply on a much higher, conceptual level: here, "research adds to our understanding of different contexts and situation, but our application is not technical; it's reflective" (p. 113). IR relies on “best accounts” and depends on “reflective practitioners” drawing upon a “list of exemplars” rather than hard-and-fast rules of practice (p. 114). Indeed, reflection necessitates informed choice-making,
which can and should be defended, even if there is no definite right answer. The interpretivist makes her choice, fully aware that other approaches may too be useful.

As Willis suggests, IR is noteworthy for the sheer range of projects it affords. Researchers use numerous methods to collect data, including coding/retrieval, case study, narratives-as-evidence, ethnography, and more. Due to emphasis on socially constructing knowledge, studies tend to be emergent, and interviews may be seen as a process of creating and constructing data, as opposed to just collecting it. In order to study transfer across various types of writing required at a university, one might conduct a case study of a single student across his college career. Another teacher may design an action research project aimed at asking how students might become co-authors of a curricular unit's content and means of instruction. Those students would likely influence the design itself. Another study might pursue the following question: how might a high school Language Arts teacher uncover and adapt best practices used by teachers of other disciplines in her school? Or, how do students conceptions of good art teaching compare with their conceptions of good literacy teaching?

Willis, J. W. (2007). Foundations of Qualitative Research: Interpretive and critical approaches. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

The X and Y of J. Bruner’s Curricular Theory

2009-11-23T17:22:00.003-05:00

You are a traveler, crossing a boundary, armed with only so much knowledge and experience. To what degree can you use what you know amidst the plight of the unknown in order to not just survive but thrive and achieve your ultimate self? You are Jerome Bruner’s student, and he is most concerned with how you will adapt and use what you have learned in order to be independent and self-sufficient.

Bruner advocated curricula designed to spark curiosity as a means of embracing new information and to require reflection to test the accuracy of that curiosity. Ultimately, this child-centered approach advocated skilled teachers “permitting the child to put things together for himself, to be his own discoverer" (1961, p. 57).

A proper introduction to Bruner's work might as well begin with an overview of key concepts, terms, and themes. In order to examine his curricular views more deeply, it is best to consider his views on learning and teaching. A foundational conception of education is his idea of the learner/thinker barrier, which posits that only when actively using information does one become thinker, as opposed to just learner. Early in his career, Bruner (1959a) argued that “learning something in a generic way is like leaping over a barrier. On the other side of the barrier is thinking” (p. 24). In order to use or manipulate information, one must organize it, which leads to thinking, or the “proper reward of learning” (p. 25).

Bruner, as a theorist, was feeling his way at this point, but his own early instincts, based in large part in recent cognitive science breakthroughs, would shape his most profound contributions to the study and enactment of education. Particularly insightful was the role that discovery, inference, and intuition play in a students’ movement from learner to thinker. Throughout his career, Bruner has advocated the power of taking risks, making predictions, testing such hypotheses against facts, and learning from the discrepancies. Endlessly, he reiterates a simple, yet profound, idea: students must feel that they are safe to take chances and to fail, and that error can be instructive . Such a stance enables a teacher to utilize an inquiry approach that asks students to use what they know to make inferences about what might happen next – instructionally, in a story, in a learning sequence, however – in order to shift learning from passivity to discovery, at best, and active integration, at minimum.

By using recently acquired knowledge combined with background knowledge, the student “can get maximum regenerative travel from the material to which he has been exposed” (1959b, p. 34, italics added). Bruner stresses this utility of knowledge as the key learner-thinker prerequisite, where “travel” represents not what one has learned, but what one can do with what one has learned. That is, what can we generate based on what we know? Bruner (1959b) argued that learning-by-doing best facilitates this process by countering the passivity gap often created by transactional models of teachings :

By thinking I mean the operation of going beyond that which has been given to that which might be likely. Any operation that involves going beyond the information given is what constitutes the link between the isolated learning of the teaching situation to the requirement of action based on what has been learned. It is such action - these operations of going beyond - that constitutes the condition of getting travel out of what has been learned. (pp. 34-35).

At this point, Bruner had few practical methods designed to pull this off (he was a cognitivist, not yet a curricularist), but he knew activity was key. What’s interesting about this type of inquiry approach is how is engenders a go-for-it spirit in students. The “going beyond” to “get travel” element is not meant to be random; it’s a means of testing-out, of taking chances, and speculating – and it’s quite active. It doesn’t simply end with the chance-taking; there is, in fact, accountability, but it’s different than penalty. In Bruner’s “spiral” model, which evolved slowly over his career, the students’ inferences are compared with the “official” curriculum, as revealed by the teacher. These comparisons are reinforced each time the teacher “circle(s) back later in a more powerful, more generative, more structured way to understand it more deeply with however many recyclings the learner needs in order to master the topic and turn it into an instrument of the mind, a way of thinking” (Bruner, 1991, p. 145).

This does not work with a curriculum of randomly assigned tasks, or with activities that are thoughtlessly sequenced. Therefore , a curriculum geared primarily toward “coverage” is not what Bruner had in mind. Instead, he envisioned a somewhat methodical construction of key foundational principles that are frequently tested and refined over the course of an extended and shared inquiry. Later in this paper, I’ll discuss Bruner’s take on who should decide which foundational principles deserve attention (i.e. what’s worth knowing and who decides). First, though, I’d like to briefly illustrate:

In an attempt to integrate new information ( Y) into what we know about X, the teacher asks, “Based on what we know about X, what can we anticipate with Y?” If Y doesn’t meet our hypothesis, we need to “spiral” back and revisit our assumptions about X. Through such revisiting, we do one of two things: a) we form deeper conceptions of the principles that undergird X so that our future predictions become simultaneously more refined and more adaptable, as concepts that we may apply independently of the classroom; b) if our new findings don’t relate to X at all, we might make room for a conception of “Y.”

To explicate this fully, it is crucial to examine the prerequisites for X and Y, as well as who should determine them. This will take up much of the remainder of this paper, so before I begin, let’s look at Bruner’s illustration for how one might make room for that new conception of “Y” in the literature classroom. Here’s where Bruner’s inspiration becomes reality:

"the teacher of literature has a function akin to the teacher of empirical subjects such as science and history. Where the latter attempts somehow to provide a model, indeed alternative models of the external world one encounters, it seems to me that it is the function of the teacher of literature to use the corpus of novels and drama to elucidate the internal world and its alternative expressions....What better exercise for the development of a tragic sense - without which there can be no sense of compassion - that to have to make an attempt at writing the last act of Hamlet having read the others that preceded it" (1959b, p. 37).

This is a rich, value-laden paragraph, and it implies a particular curricular approach. Guiding this writing task is Bruner’s philosophy of the function of literature instruction as an elucidation of internal worlds. It’s important to start there. He speaks not of teaching the formal features of the “tragedy” but of developing “a tragic sense – without which there can be no compassion.” Linking a sense of tragedy to one’s sense of compassion suggests that the “X” here is more than a student’s conception of genre or narrative arc, or simply how the story should end, even though that may be what the student believes the X is. To the teacher, the X (i.e., the imaginative writing of the final act), is situated within the larger framework of the curriculum’s foundational principles and questions.

If we step back, though, the X can also be other things, including organizational structures, such essential questions or subquestions (e.g. “What is the function of story?” “What can literature teach about ourselves and others?” “Why is Shakespeare so famous?” “How do writers capture inner worlds?”). Throughout a unit, semester, or school year, the X changes as students and their sense of working knowledge changes. Ultimately, though, for Bruner, the foundational X is rooted in a philosophy of the subject matter (e.g. literature as mirror to inner worlds) and the key questions and principles that undergird such a philosophy. And crucially, in the end, students do incorporate the Y – i.e. the formal understanding of tragedy - into their repertoire of knowledge as well. In conjunction with the X, the Y changes during the course of applied learning. The function of each, however, remains the same: the new (Y) challenges or adds to conceptions of the old (or recently new, X). The more the teacher, through the curriculum, spirals back to help students reflect on what they know and believe, the more the foundations that organize those beliefs emerge into view. Whether they are unearthed or constructed, they are intended to match up with the very principles of knowledge selected as most important by the curriculum designers.

So who, for Bruner, decides the content of these variables? For one thing, the business of curriculum reform was far too serious to be left in the hands of the teachers. As he wrote in 1959, "I do not wish to mince words. The educational and cultural level of the majority of American teachers is not impressive." (1959a, p. 29). For Bruner, “the object of learning is to gain facts in a context of connectivity that permits them to be used generatively” (1959a, p. 28). This requires a design based on connectivity and the elaboration of organizational concepts. In his view, “often it is the case that the teacher, like her students, has not learned the material well enough to cross the barrier from learning to thinking" (1959a, p. 29). His spiral curriculum model, exemplified by MACOS (1965), was in fact designed by a team of experts, representing a range of disciplines. For Bruner, field experts, working in conjunction with child-learning experts and hand-picked expert teachers should be creating curricula that are economical, prioritizing that which is most worth knowing. Essential questions, as well as the key organizational principles, are to be determined by this group, who must solve “formidable intellectual problem(s) ourselves in order to be able to help our pupils do the same” (1971, p. 126).

What then is worth knowing and experiencing? The answer to this first determined by Bruner’s conception of an educated person. Only then is consideration of crucial and real content attempted. Educated people are those who, “by virtue of the teaching they have received, are able to go beyond what they have been taught to the formulation of their own identity and individuality" (1959b, p. 39). It is not enough for schools to produce well-rounded, productive citizens; this is cliché. Such a goal invites mediocrity and banality, “pablum rather than plight” (1959b, p. 39). He wants thinkers, who are trained to internalize “the instructiveness of error” in order to have “an acquired sense of the varieties of the human condition,” and he wants the controversy and conflict necessary for “the artistically gripping presentation of human lives,” dark themes, contradictions, and all (1959b, p. 39).

The curriculum of a subject, then, is the vehicle through which such deep questions are pursued, and those questions:

"should be determined by the most fundamental understanding that can be achieved of the underlying principles that give structure to that subject. Teaching specific topics or skills without making clear their context in the broader fundamental structure of a field of knowledge is unecomomical (because) knowledge one has acquired without sufficient structure to tie it together is knowledge that is likely to be forgotten" (1960, p. 46, italics added).

I italicized field of knowledge in order to call into question Bruner’s notion of expertise. When we realize that seeds planted by Bruner fifty years ago have borne out as revelations at the end of the century (see Wiggins &McTighe’s (1998) “Backwards Design” & Yancey’s (1998) “Stages of Reflection”), we should conclude that this is a man worth listening to, even if this involves speculating upon what he might say today . So, in the spirit of Bruner himself, I’m going to take a stab (my “X” hypothesis) at what he would say about a current curricular interest of mine: what should be the role of teachers in terms of curricular content and design? In a moment where so many teachers feel powerless under the weight of federal mandates and pressured to teach-to-tests, I would suspect that Bruner today would reject his own (1960) assertion that “designing curricula (in such a way) is a task that cannot be carried out without the ablest scholars and scientists” who must solve “formidable intellectual problem(s) ourselves in order to be able to help our pupils do the same” (1971, p. 126). Bruner’s learned a lot since 1959, and more importantly, he has taught the rest of us a new way of conceptualizing education. He realizes that we are listening, I believe, and has come to respect a nation’s able scholars (teachers) who have been “struggling to carry out this daunting task these last two decades, and under the circumstances have been doing it with much courage and skill and against enormous odds" (Bruner, 1991, p. 143).

Bruner today, I assert, would argue that teachers should not only have more say over curriculum design but should work collaboratively (occasionally across disciplines) as its primary architects. In fact, he’d probably enjoy talking to me about teachers – and even students – helping each other solve those “formidable problems” necessary for stellar curriculum design .

References

Bruner, J. (1959a). “Learning and Thinking.” Harvard Educational Review. 29, 184-192.
Bruner, J. (1959b). “The Functions of Teaching.” Address to Rhode Island College of Education, April 13.
Bruner, J. (1960). “The Importance of Structure.” The Process of Education, Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Bruner, J. (1961). “The Act of Discovery.” Harvard Educational Review. 31, 21-32.
Bruner, J. (1971). “The Growth of Mind.” The Relevance of Education, New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.
Bruner, J. (1991). “The Meaning of Educational Reform.” National Association of Montessori Teachers Journal (Special Edition: Schools of Thought: Pathways to Educational Reform), 16, 29-40

Note: all sources above have been collected in:
Bruner, J. (2006). In Search of Pedagogy: Vol. 1 & II.: The selected works of Jerome Bruner. New York: Routledge.
All cited page numbers herein reflect this collection.

V

2009-11-19T20:15:00.000-05:00

Who ain't no damn alien?

What I've realized

2009-11-18T20:48:00.003-05:00

A deep grounding in a theory can help me understand the way the world works - completely.

Alternately, you may be as deeply grounded in another perspective, and may in turn, fully understand the way the world works - completely.

Our understandings may not correspond. They may still be equally complete.

This seeming illogical idea is perfectly reasonable. But you have to let go of some things to see why and see how.

a new course of study

2009-11-13T21:32:00.001-05:00

I'm planning on posting this notice on my office door and a few bulletin boards this week. I wonder what might happen:

I’m interested in forming an experimental “class” that will meet once - maybe twice - a week for 1-2 hours.

The course is simple: everyone gets a notebook and a pen.

These are the only course materials. No books, articles, videos. No syllabus. No objectives.

The rest we take from there.

8-10 members should be enough.

If interested, show up ___________ at _____________ on ______________ .

using it

2009-11-12T19:10:00.003-05:00

And now the work begins
And now the joy begins
Now the years of preparation
Of tedious study and
Exciting learning
are explained.

- first stanza of "Commencement Address," Maya Angelou

Lots of inspiration this week. Good things happening.

The value of a college education, for me, is so clear on days like these.
And it has nothing to do with money.
It's using it.

Teaching as Intellectual Work

2009-11-11T15:25:00.001-05:00

Random quotes from the first few pages of "Teaching as Intellectual Work," Chapter 6 of Sonia Nieto's What Keeps Teachers Going

First, we explore what Steve Gordon called "the need for adult conversations"
by looking at examples of how teachers"do" intellectual work
through dialogue. Second, we examine how PattyBode, anart teacher in a
middle school, and Steve, an English high school teacher, ponder what it
means to develop curriculum that is both vital and scholarly.

My work with teachers over many years has convinced me that it is
time to challenge the perception of teaching as a private effort.

But adult conversations, while necessary, can also be troubling.

One obstacle to true dialogue is that many teachers are reluctant to expose to others what they perceive to be their shortcomings.
In this they are simply human.

If teachers are to develop as intellectuals, having to engage in what may be disquieting.

Dialogue is part of the price to be paid. In the end, this kind of dialogue (what
Cochran-Smith describes as "hard talk") is a prerequisite both for developing
the intellectual community that is desperately needed in schools and for
imagining different possibilities for teachers and their students.'

space

2009-11-11T13:56:00.000-05:00

space shapes

heaven
is empty
space to fill
with dreams of
seekers and sinners
and the emptiness
(full of nothing)
is potential
is poetry
thus, all empty space
is poetry.

example: words
coursing from head
to hand
to page
to eye
are shifts of space
electrified.
the renewed longing.
the poetry of empty space.

li-death-fe

2009-11-11T13:46:00.002-05:00

Everyone knows that we live then we die:
Mortal bodies destined to fall apart,
Remains, returned to Earth, forever lie,
And stilled, finally dead, the lifeless heart -
Gone from eye's sight like we'd scarce existed.
The cruelest joke - time's blunt brutality.
The point? The purpose? I fear I’ve missed it,
Kissed goodbye, goodnight, by mortality.
Yet with how much faith should we trust in death?
When merely skin and bones return to dust?
What of year upon year exchanging breath?
Each exhale flavored with personal musk
Are our insides, then, not dispersed through air?
And beyond death, are we not everywhere?

(unfinished. unrefined.)

red pill surfing

2009-11-11T13:32:00.000-05:00

red pill surfing

nine windows open
eight hrs gone
eyes everywhere

powdery angels
skystripes
orgonized warfare

blue-blazer'd newsman
or reptoid? or pj?

rowdy roddy piper
allseeing sunglasses

lizard cashiers

psychobsessed

awake

teaching

2009-09-29T16:36:00.000-04:00

sucked today. some days I feel invincible, others worthless. The truth is somewhere in between. Unless the truth is multiple, as in all of the above.

Other things going on that I care more about. Sometimes I resent teaching, and the role school has in my life. Longing for norms...

some days.

just to say

2009-09-16T19:43:00.001-04:00

Feeling good.

Remembering

2009-07-15T10:59:00.002-04:00

Tough week. Two lost, loved grandparents.

Two lives well lived.

An absolutely killer Puzo essay comes to mind:

"How did they ever have the balls to get married, have kids, go out to earn a living in a strange land, with no skills, not even knowing the language? They made it without tranquilizers, without sleeping pills, without psychiatrists, without even a dream. Heroes. Heroes all around me. I never saw them."

So it goes.

What works best at TNC's blog?

2009-06-11T15:05:00.004-04:00

Dear friend,

Thank you very much for your time and interest in my project. I will definitely keep you in the loop as this project develops.

Here is my guiding research question: "What works best at TNC's blog?"

And my key subquestions: a. "How might such successful 'moves' inform the use of blogs in writing-based classrooms?" b. "Can a blog become a community?"

By the way, my name is Anthony Barra (i.e. "kerouax"), and I'm a doctoral student at Temple University, in Philadelphia. One night not long ago, I read TNC's blog (on my phone) for 90 minutes straight while driving home from school - in the rain. I couldn't stop. Not safe, but I couldn't help myself. I love dropping in on your community, and I feel as though I'm slowly becoming a part of it. When I visit the blog, I usually get stuck there for a long time. It's addictive.

Please take a few minutes and answer the SEVEN QUESTIONS below. Your identity will remain anonymous. I intend to use your blog commenter name, so please include that in your response.

Again, thank you, and please reply to this thread OR email your responses to me at: Anthony.Barra@temple.edu

THE SEVEN QUESTIONS:
1. What, in your view, works best here at TNC's blog?

2. In what sense, if at all, do you feel part of a community here? Please explain.

3. When you are here, are you more conscious of your identity (or sense of your self)?

4. I am a teacher of adolescent and young adult (15-21) writers, and I'd like to create an effective blog space for my students. I'm not sure how actively I'll participate in it, but I do know that I'd like to use TNC's blog as a model.

In your view, which elements of his blog (and its atmosphere) seem to lend themselves best to this endeavor? [I know this question is broad-based; at this point, I prefer it that way.]

5. What is the name you use at TNC's blog (optional, but encouraged)?

6. All-time most memorable post/exchange?

7. Anything you'd like to add?

Thank you very much for your time.

Anthony
(kerouax)

P.S. Here's a prime example of why I'm so drawn to this site, as a reader and researcher-in-training: http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200906u/andrew-tanehisi

What counts...

2009-05-05T11:46:00.002-04:00

What counts as success? as intelligence?

in your home? family? relationship? classroom? prose? blog? status update? in the gym? in your friendships? in an introduction paragraph to an essay on bowling? in the mirror? in waiting on tables?

And how well do your answers match up with answers to the following:

What counts as success, or intelligence, in institutions of power?

Can we even flesh out the answers to these questions, and is it worth the time?

Vygotsky, Bakhtin, and Wertsch: a foundation

2009-05-01T14:07:00.005-04:00

Now here's one I feel better about. Not exactly in line with what was assigned but important for my development, I think. I make no real breakthroughs here other than fully grasping something deep, a theoretical perspective that should inform and generate new insights indefinitely.

The Influence of Vygotsky and Bakhtin: a sociocultural approach to mind

James Wertsch’s (1991) seminal text, Voices of the Mind: A sociocultural theory of mediated action, makes an important distinction regarding the social turn of learning theory. “A sociocultural approach to mind,” he says, “begins with the assumption that action is mediated and that it cannot be separated from the milieu in which it is carried out” (p. 18). If we start with this premise, it is important to distinguish key terms, such as sociocultural, mediated, and milieu. However, neither Wertsch, nor the two other theorists whose voices with dominate this paper, L.S. Vygotsky and M.M. Bakhtin, would be pleased with an offering of dictionary-like definitions. In fact, such an approach would counter the central assumption offered above. Therefore, a discussion is in order, one that will inevitably be multivoiced, will, in fact, be shaped by the tools that produce it (including this keyboard under my fingertips) and by particular moments in time – my time writing it and your time reading it. Hopefully, through this dialogue, we can better understand the complexities and subtleties of Wertsch, Vygotsky, and Bakhtin’s voices as they interanimate with our own.

Mind extends beyond the skin
While sociocultural theory is deeply concerned with cognitive processes, all three thinkers “believe that it is difficult if not meaningless to isolate various aspects of mental processes for separate analysis” (Wertsch, 1991, p. 14). Wertsch (1991) illustrates this theoretical movement beyond cognition by privileging the term mind over cognition. Mind is defined as something “’that extends beyond the skin’ in at least two senses: it is often socially distributed and it is connected to the notion of mediation” (Wertsch, 1991, p. 14). Implicit in approach is a rejection of human mental functioning as something that occurs in vacuo; in fact, the very notion of humans possessing isolated minds is called into question. An important foundation of this theory is its rejection of “atomism,” or the “disengaged image of the self” as separate from sociohistorical forces (Wertsch, 1991, p. 69). Instead, the theory relies heavily on social, cultural, historical, and institutional effects on mind. Before jumping too far ahead of ourselves, though, let us start closer to the beginning (which of course is in conversation with and influenced by its own antecedents) to see what led these men to such radical positions.

Dialoging with Vygotsky
According to Vygotsky (qtd throughout in Wertsch, 1991), who focused mainly on the individual during childhood, we are born with lower mental functioning - with our genetic, natural abilities - unable to take care of ourselves because we possess no independently functioning consciousness. Only when we learn to achieve higher mental functioning do we gain independence. Indeed, the primary difference between us and human-like apes, who create and use tools, is our ability to attain higher mental functioning.

Vygotsky was concerned with the process by which social exchanges, or interpsychological mental functioning, translate into internalized (or intrapsychological) mental functioning. The process results in a shift from lower to higher mental functioning, with shifts in consciousness resulting from social processes. Over time, interpsychological (intermental) contact between persons becomes internalized, whereby the voice of the other remains present, but only in a silent form. The learner comes to rely less and less on the voice of the other because she begins to anticipate its speech. As that voice moves from an “other’s” audible, concrete utterance to an abbreviated, internalized thought of one’s “own,” the learner moves toward higher mental functioning. This is not as straightforward as it sounds; distinctions between self and other are dicey, as the learner does not simply internalize the words of his speech partner.

Vygotsky claims that higher mental functioning is uniquely human in that it is mediated by tools and sign systems, including language. This results in a rejection of Darwinistic explanations of cognitive development in favor of a sociocultural approach. In fact, Vygotsky claims that organic evolution culminates in the use and invention of tools (i.e. as far as apes are able to get) and “now the site of genesis is in meditational means rather than the gene pool” (1930, p. 3, qtd inWertsch, 1991, p. 25). The implications of this claim are profound. What counts here is that a “’cultural line of development’ involving mastery of meditational means provided by a culture is combined with a ‘natural line of development’ involving development and maturation” accounts for the development of mind (Wertsch,1991, p. 25). This cultural line is crucial and will be explored in depth throughout this paper. Implicit here is a central concept that fuels Wertsch, Bakhtin, and Vygotsky’s work: that persons acting with meditational means, or tools, in particular sociocultural moments produce mind. The three underlined terms are intertwined, and to isolate any of them is to misunderstand how mind actually works, in real life, with real people.

Vygotsky (1981, p. 163) challenged existent notions of mind by beginning with a basic foundational premise:
Any function in the child’s cultural development appears twice, or on two planes. First it appears on the social plane, and then on the psychological plane. First it appears between people as an interpsychological category, and then within the child as an intrapsychological category. This is equally true with regard to voluntary attention, logical memory, the formation of concepts, and the development of volition… [I]t goes without saying that internalization transforms the process itself and changes its structure and functions. Social relations or relations among people genetically underlie all higher functions and their relationships (qtd in Wertsch, 1991, p. 26).

This was a radical notion, yet he saw the examination of interpsychological (from here on intermental) functioning as the key to understanding individuals’ mental functioning (Wertsch, 1991). Indeed, all thinking is rooted in the social, and “even when we turn to mental [internal] processes, their nature remains quasi-social. In their own private sphere, human beings retain the functions of social interaction” (1981, p. 164, qtd in Wertsch, p. 29). His remark that is “goes without saying” that intermental processes are internalized in different forms as intramental functions is interesting in that it suggests that no two people can have exactly the same intramental processes; they can, however, have a lot in common - as shared cultural reproductions (a concept that will be fleshed out below).

Vygotsky’s research of intermental functioning resulted in profoundly generative insights about the nature of mind. The most well-known of these is the “zone of proximal development,” which developed from his interest in mediated means. Before examining the ZPD, a cursory discussion of mediated means is on order. In my discussion of Bakhtin’s work, mediated means will be more tightly scrutinized.

Sociocultural theory claims that people, tools, and moments are mutually dependent, but what might this mean? To understand how the first two terms are inseparable, we hear Vygotsky explain that mediational means take two general forms: technical tools (e.g. pens, shovels, keyboards) and psychological tools, or signs and sign systems (e.g. language). Now we begin to understand how mind might extend beyond the skin. For example, Bateson (1972) asks us to consider a blind man with a walking stick tapping his way across a room. Where might the man’s mental system start and end? Is it bounded at the handle of the stick? Halfway up or at the bottom of the stick? For Bateson:
“these are nonsense questions. The stick is a pathway along which transformations of difference are being transmitted. The way to delineate the system is to draw the limiting line in such a way that you do not cut any of these pathways in ways that leave things inexplicable” (p. 459, qtd in Wertsch, 1991, p. 33).

But how to do that? First, some assumptions must be challenged. In this case, the stick is the meditational mean (i.e. technical tool), and it shapes the way he gets around. Further, it hasn’t arrived in his hand out of thin air but has been produced according to the needs of certain members of certain communities at certain moments in time. The tool itself has a history – why does it have a certain shape, thickness, color, and length? There are some reasons for this. What if the tool is not a stick, but a sign or sign symbol? What if the tool is language? Where does the mind begin and end, and what are the properties that have shaped the tool, and how does the tool itself shape the way the user uses it?

One of Vygotsky’s great accomplishments is the way he approached language and other sign systems in terms of how they are part of our mediated, human action. His approach to language did not isolate words from their actual real-life use; he thought it “meaningless to assert that individuals ‘have’ a sign or have mastered it, without addressing the ways in which they do or do not use it to mediate their own actions or those of others” (Wertsch, 1991, p. 29). After all, sign systems are context dependent, and different forms of speaking are related to different forms of thinking; he was concerned with function.

Vygotsky’s concern with the interaction between psychological tools and mental processes produced the idea of dual simulation, wherein the tools do not simply facilitate mental functioning but actually “alter the entire flow and structure of mental functions…by determining the structure of a new instrumental act, just as a technical tool (e.g. walking stick) alters the process of a natural adaption by determining the form of labor operations” (1981, p. 137, qtd in Wertsch, 1991, pp. 32-33).

Mediational means, then, work in dual stimulation with mental processes to create meaning. But there is a third factor at work as well, a sociocultural (or sociohistorical, or socio-cultural-historical) one. Vygotsky asserts that cultural, historical, and institutional factors also play an essential role, since many tools originate in social life. Bakhtin take this notion a step further, as we will see later in this paper. Unlike most people, who take means as a “given,” as if they have always been around, Vygotsky recognized that meditational means “emerge in response to a wide range of social forces” (Wertsch, 1991, p. 34). Therefore, as higher mental functioning is achieved, through culturally situated mediated intermental processes, “egocentric speech…grows out of its social foundations by means of transferring social, collaborative forms of behavior to the sphere of the individual’s psychological functioning” (Vygotsky, 1934, p. 45, qtd in Wertsch, 1991, p. 34).

But that’s not all. Because means emerge in response to situated social forces, their use is not always appropriate. Means have histories, and they also have what Wertsch (1991) calls “semiotic potentials,” or “predisposition(s) to be used more easily for certain purposes than for others” (p. 38). We can think of a walking stick, and we can think of language. In terms of language (i.e. psychological means, or sign systems), its semiotic potential is reached when the language is used appropriately for certain purposes. Therefore, semiotic potentials do not correlate with decontextualized dictionary definitions, per se, but rather with discourses, or speech genres.

Vygotsky viewed the ability to appropriately match language to speech genre as signal of higher mental functioning. This led him to part ways with Piaget on the notion of egocentric speech. Whereas Piaget (1923) as “one of several phenomena that reflect the general egocentricity…of young children,” Vygotsky saw egocentric speech as the child’s emerging ability to differentiate between speech functions (qtd in Wertch, 1991, p. 40). As the child increases his ability to differentiate speech functions, egocentric speech transforms into inner speech, or in Vygotsky’s terms, it “goes underground” (1962, p. 18, qtd in Wertsch, p. 38).

Through a series of experiments designed to test this notion, Vygotsky discovered two interesting properties of inner speech: syntactic and semantic properties (Wertsch, 1991). Syntactic inner speech is a uniquely abbreviated, recontextualized version of external speech. For example, the uttered phrase, “he went to the basketball game last night,” might become “he went it” in its syntactic inner speech form. Semantic inner properties are those that capture sense as opposed to meaning, and according to Vygotsky, sense predominates over meaning (Wertsch, 1991). As a result, “in inner speech, the word, as it were, absorbs the sense of preceding and subsequent words, thereby extending almost without limit the boundaries of its meaning” (Vygotsky, 1934, p. 308, qtd in Wertsch, p. 43, my italics). This notion of absorbing preceding and subsequent word sensations is tremendously important in that it contextualizes Bakhtin’s work with dialogism and the socialization of mind.

Vygotsky’s most well-known concept is the zone of proximal development is “the distance between the actual developmental level as determined by independent problem solving and the level of potential development as determined through problem solving under adult guidance or in collaboration with more capable peers” (Vygotsky, 1978, p. 86). When the ZPD is accurately identified, the more capable “other” gradually makes instruction less explicit as the learner imitates and practices discourse strategies that first occur on the intermental plane. In time, the learner internalizes those strategies, but not in a way that replicates them verbatim; instead, they are incorporated into the learner’s higher mental functioning. This concept is illustrated in Bakhtin’s approach to dialogicality.

Dialoging with Bakhtin
Vygotsky’s unit of analysis was the contextualized word, in its real use for real purposes, and he avoided static, linguistic analyses that treat utterances as if they do not belong to anyone. Bakhtin, too, cared about the living, animated properties of language, and like Vygotsky, rejected traditional linguistic analyses. His unit of study is the utterance, a unit whose length depends on the length of a speaker’s, or speech subject’s, turn. In face to face conversations, an utterance may be a syllable or two; in a novel, the author’s utterance may be the entire length of the book. The utterance, according to Bakhtin, is “the real unit of speech communication,” one that responds to and anticipates surrounding utterances (1986, p. 84). In other words, the utterance is a “link in the speech chain of communication” (p. 84) that “responds in some way to previous utterances and anticipates the responses of other, succeeding ones” (Wertsch, 1991, p. 53).

Through the process of dialogicality, or dialogism, speakers form utterances that come into contact with, or interanimate, other utterances. Bakhtin insisted on taking both voices into account because the utterance “does not and can not exist” without “addressivity, the quality of turning to someone else” (1986, p. 99). Importantly, the addressee need not be located in the immediate speech situation for addressivity to occur; therefore, face-to-face contact is not a prerequisite. However, Bakhtin’s concern with an utterance’s addressivity involves both concern with who is doing the speaking and with who is being addressed. Therefore, because an utterance is that speech chain “link,” it is inherently associated with at least two voices (speaker and addressee). As Bakhtin’s theory builds, it concretizes Vygotsky’s claim that inner speech results from intermental social processes, but it also complicates the claim.

For Bakhtin, the “primordial dialogism of discourse” (1981, p. 275) occurs when one utterance interanimates, or meets, another utterance, resulting in understanding. The mediated means here are psychological tools, or sign systems (i.e. language). Vygotsky explained that all means are sociohistorically situated; therefore, the voices we have been discussing here can not be decontextualized from their social, cultural, and institutional history. Just as the properties of a blind man’s walking stick (e.g. height, thickness, etc.) have not appeared magically, language, too, has a history. For Bakhtin, standardized “national languages,” such as English, German, or Russian, are actually “academic fiction(s) that paper over the effects of … forces that seek to change it” (Wertsch, 1991, p. 57). Social languages, on the other hand, are those used in real life, the situated discourses that “serve the sociopolitical purposes of the day” (p. 58).

As mentioned, utterances are associated with at least two voices; here is where they become deeply multivoiced: Bakhtin says that “the production of any utterance entails the invocation of a speech genre,” (Wertsch, 1991, p. 61) in which a concrete, individual “appropriates” or “populates” the speech genre. A type of social language, the speech genre is “a conventionalized utterance type, a ready-made way of packaging speech….a resource for performance, available to speakers for the realization of specific social ends in a variety of creative, emergent, and even unique” individual performances (Bauman, 1987, pp. 5-6, qtd in Wertsch, 1991, p. 61). Like walking sticks, or other tools, speech genres are socioculturally situated; therefore, when speakers invoke, or populate, them, they are swimming in a sea of language that already exists, and the speech genres themselves shape what can be said. Of course, the speaker’s voice is his own, but it is also contains traces of the addressee’s voice, as well as the voices throughout history who have shaped the speech genre he invokes. In this way, mind extends beyond the skin. This process “whereby one voice speaks through another voice or voice type in a social language” (Wertsch, 1991, p. 59) is termed ventriloquation, where “the world in language is always half someone else’s” (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 293).

Because language is socioculturally situated, meaning is “inexorably linked with historical, cultural, and institutional setting” (Wertsch, 1991, p. 66). For this reason, Bakhtin challenged the assumptions of transmissive, authoritative discourse. According to a transmission, or conduit, model, meaning is passed from a speaker, through a channel of communication, to a recipient who decodes the message. Bakhtin (1981) associates this model with authoritative discourse or “the word of father, of adults, of teachers, etc.” and rejects it based on its assumptions that meaning is fixed and closed (qtd in Wertsch, 1991, p. 78). He favors internally persuasive discourse, which presumes openness, and favors dialogicality, where meaning is co-constructed when utterances interanimate each other. In the former, a glitch in the conduit model prevents understanding; in the latter, it serves as a “thinking device” (Lotman, 1988b, p. 37, qtd in Wertsch, 1991, p. 74).

Bakhtin’s distinction is harsh, and Wertsch (1991) reminds us that both models, in fact, have produced important insights into how we learn. Lotman’s (1988b) “functional dualism” model bridges the gap by arguing than utterances or texts can function in more than one way: to convey meaning and to generate thinking or new meaning (Wertsch, 1991, p. 75). Wertsch leans on Lotman’s functional dualism to answer Bakhtin’s question of who is doing the talking. Although transmissive and internally persuasive discourses are always in tension, fighting for dominance, one wins out, based on the sociocultural situation and the tools of mediation. Therefore, Wertsch’s unit of analysis becomes mediated action, or person(s)-acting-with-mediated-means-in-sociocultural-settings, wherein persons, means, and settings are inextricably linked. This broadens Vygotsky’s ‘word’ and Bakhtin’s ‘utterance’ to account for why certain voices are privileged above others in particular contexts, while incorporating the multivoicedness and ‘mind-beyond-the skin’ elements of sociocultural theory.

Pedagogical implications
In the classroom, sociocultural theory is enacted in various ways. Byrnes (2001) presents two established models that have derived from Vygotskian thought: scaffolding and reciprocal teaching. Scaffolding takes place within the learner’s zone of proximal development, wherein instruction is designed to use mediational means in order to shift intermental discourse to intramental functioning. In other words, teachers or more capable peers help use technical tools and language to help learners grasp concepts that they can not reach on their own. In Palinscar and Brown’s (1984) reciprocal teaching model, the scaffolding is structure in a stage model (Byrnes, 2001). Teachers or experts model a behavior or skill, while – importantly – verbalizing their thought process aloud to the class. Students ventriloquate the teacher’s approach in two ways: first via testing the method, then by assuming the role of expert by teaching peers. Teacher and students alternate leading the class, and the extensive modeling and practice aid internalization, or higher intramental functioning.

The scaffolding and reciprocal learning approaches require expertise on the teacher’s part. In practice, teachers’ may claim to invoke Vygotskian principles while actually misunderstanding them. Lotman’s functional dualism is important here, in its stance that utterances and texts can mean in more than one way, and that transmissive and internally persuasive language are both valuable, depending on contextual needs. Sociocultural approaches to teaching can become damaging when teachers abandon their role as experts to the detriment of students in need of explicit instruction. Delpit (1995) among others has documented the real-world damages of sociocultural approaches gone awry, when misguided assumptions have trumped the reality of students’ needs. Wertsch and Lotman remind us: everything in its own time and place.

An unforeseen side-effect to sociocultural approaches to teaching is the unintended maintenance of the status quo, as captured in Delpit’s (1995). According to Bordieu’s (1977) theory of cultural reproduction, the cultural capital that is valued in schools is the habitus formed in middle and upper class homes. When students are left to their own “internally persuasive” devices, those not possessing the habits of mind that count most in institutional settings may be disadvantaged. While Bakhtin rejects the “authoritative” discourse of fathers, institutions, and schools, Bourdieu points out that those discourses are laced with power. Therefore, teachers must take into account that each student’s ZPD is different, so “a capacity to recognize specific speech genres and their patterns of privileging would provide an analytic tool” for the teacher as well as the researcher (Wertsch, 1991, p. 147). According to Wertsch, however, this tool is “one that is currently all too infrequently encountered, for understanding sociocultural settings and the psychological processes associated with them” (p. 147).

Generally speaking, sociocultural approaches have given rise to a boom in collaborative learning approaches to learning which seek to maximize on the social nature of learning articulated so well by Vygotsky, Bakhtin, and Wertsch. However, in accordance with the theory’s principles, all practice is situated, and O’Donnell and King (1999) demonstrate that collaborative learning is by no means effective by nature alone. Multiple forces and variables, including group size, heterogeneity, and student training, among others, affect the degree to which students learn. As most teachers already know, collaborative work does not equate to higher thinking. Nonetheless, it is impossible to deny the power of an approach that has been built on the study of real-world communication, views learning as socially situated, and identifies communication gaps as sites for meaning-making.

References

Bakhtin, M.M. (1986). Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Bourdieu, P. (1977) Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Delpit, L. (1995). Other People’s Children. New York: The New Press.
O’Donnell, A. & King, A. (1999). Cognitive Perspectives on Peer Learning. Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Ehrlbaum.
Wertsch, J. (1991). Voices of the Mind: A sociocultural approach to mediated action. Harvard University Press.

Identity-as-genre

2009-04-29T17:24:00.003-04:00

This was a disgusting process. Misguided, poorly executed. Frustrating. Exhausting.
And I'm not at all happy with the final product. Probably sixty hours of work all together, but you'd never know it. So many false starts and misdirections. So much writing left on the cutting room floor. I can't remember the last time I've been this pissed about a piece. On the plus side, I get the big ideas here, and that's huge because I'll be building on them down the line.

Identity-as-genre? Presentation of self and mediated action on facebook

Purpose, background, and goal
Throughout the semester, I have tried to process, accept, challenge, and generally come to grips with the notion of the fragmentation of the self. I have tried to understand the element of sociocultural identity theory that suggests that the self is not fixed, that is does not exist in a vacuum but instead is socially constructed – constantly and endlessly. Let’s face it. This is a radical notion, one that is not easy to passively accept. Are we really not the stable beings we appear to be? Do we have a true self? Is it worth wondering about?
I come to this topic from a variety of angles. As a teacher of writing, I seek to help my students develop identities as writers. As a writer, I am interested in how experiences are constructed, re-constructed, and interpreted through language. As a scholar, I notice trends across fields under the umbrella term, sociocultural. As an internet user, where I spend considerable time reading and writing, I seek to examine the effects of this aspect of my life. Lastly, as an individual who has reconfigured, struggled with, and negotiated seemingly core elements of his identity, or sense of self, I approach this notion of fragmentation with self-interest.
As a scholar, negotiate my way through unfamiliar terrain, I am excited by the discovery of emergent patterns. They help me connect dots, which in turn sparks curiosity and increases my sense of belonging here. Over the past few months, I have been exploring genre and have come to find similarities between genre theory and the poststructuralist notion of identity as a site of struggle, as subjectivities - as identities. I have come to understand genre as something more than meets the eye. I had not considered that genres are more than just text-types, and once I was pushed to consider genre as sites of social functioning, as avenues for particular communication, I came to understand more of genre's complexities. For example, I realized that genres are not pre-fixed forms that have appeared out of nowhere; in fact, they come into being over many years because they have served as reservoirs of communication that have been populated by humans with communicative needs. The forms only appear to be fixed, but in fact are ever-reproduced, ever-tweaked with each subsequent use by real humans in real time. Slowly, as our needs change, the ways we use genres change - or we develop new ones.
What if a similar notion applies to our identities? What if "identity" itself is a genre? Might our assumptions about "self," "selves," and "others" be challenged? Might our "identity" be some sort of reification of social processes that developed throughout time according to human communicative needs?
Might our self, or our mind even, not really end where our skin ends? And since the present moment - the right now - has already passed, might we be inextricably fused with the past and the future as well?
I suggested earlier that genres are places we can inhabit; they contain familiar, normalized patterns. And they provide useful frames for communication. When they fail to serve particular needs, we must better familiarize ourselves with their capabilities, in order to tweak them to our purposes, or we must invent new means of communication, because communicate we must.
As a teacher of writing, I have been successful when guiding my students to collaboratively examine, and eventually make explicit, text-based conventions of particular genres, such as memoir, sonnet, or concise argument. Rarely, though, have I used a genre theory approach, which examines how genres function socially. This approach, I suspect, will uncover many text-based conventions while simultaneously treating language as a living, functioning organism.
Might I test such an approach to language and simultaneously explore my hunch that identity itself may in fact be a genre? This question, above all others, has led to the formulation of the present study.
So I seek here to bridge, or at least compare, certain elements of genre theory to those of sociocultural identity theory. What better place to start than with the postmodern social networking phenomenon, facebook? Specifically, I seek to explore the following:
• How do users of facebook construct, negotiate, and present their sense of self through the site?
• Additionally, as a teacher of writing deeply interesting in genre theory, I seek to explore how facebook functions as a genre and which language features promote identity work?
• Finally, I seek to explore a hunch: might the work of two theorists, Erving Goffman and James Wertsch, interanimate each other?

Theoretical Lenses
I. The work of Erving Goffman
Canadian sociologist Erving Goffman used face-to-face human interaction as his primary unit of analysis, and as a result, he came to believe that our human identity is not as fixed as many have come to believe.
Goffman deeply influenced symbolic interactionism, a field of sociology that situates humans as “pragmatic actors” who continually adjust their own behaviors according to their interpretations of other actors (McClelland, 2000, para. 2). To symbolic interactionists, each of us actively constructs our own social world, as we adjust our means of self-presentation both across and within interactions with other humans. Situated within this paradigm are two of Goffman’s most significant concepts: dramaturgy (1959) and “face-work” (1955).
Goffman’s dramaturgical model suggests that life is a performance, and he refers to humans as “actors,” ever-performing, ever-refining our roles according to situational contexts (1959, p. 22). Fifty years ago, Goffman rejected notions of fixed identities in favor of what Weedon (1987) would come to call subjectivities. For Goffman, the self is always context-dependent, always in flux, depending on the actor’s dramaturgical present-moment, which includes theatrical elements such as setting (time and place), dialogue, and other actors.
Goffman explains via anecdote. Upon entering a setting, an actor assesses the situation, taking note of both local color and other characters, and quickly adopts a “line” of self-presentation (Goffman, 1967, p. 14). The situation inherently contains an appropriate social code of action, and the actor, by way of sign vehicles, proceeds to create “impressions through expressions,” of which there are two types: a) those given through speech and controlled body language; and b) those given off less consciously, including face, voice, and body language elements over which he has less control (Marlow, 2008, p. 3). The actor’s goal is create and maintain a consistent “line” of self-presentation, and he tweaks his presentation based on a shared “interaction ritual” with other members of the scene (Goffman, 1967, p. 12). Together, actors follow “the traffic rules of social interaction” to help each other maintain line and save “face” (p. 12).
He explains:
When a person senses that he is in face, he typically responds with confidence and assurance. Firm in the line he is taking, he feels that he can hold his head up and openly present himself to others (1967, p. 8, italics added).
Such work, according to Goffman, is difficult and rarely occurs consciously. Nonetheless, it illustrates the social construction of one’s sense of self.

II. Wertsch’s sociocultural theory of mind: mediated action and mediational means
James Wertsch’s scholarship bridges a number of fields, including education, linguistics, anthropology, psychology, and sociology. This is not by accident; in fact, he argues in Voices of the Mind: a sociocultural approach to mediated action (1991) that he has developed a particular unit of analysis that is designed to bridge seemingly disparate fields of scholarship. His work builds upon the theories M.M. Bakhtin, which are explored throughout the course of Wertsch’s book. Before introducing Wertsch’s preferred unit of analysis – mediated action – a discussion of key Bakhtinian underpinnings is in order.
Like Goffman, Bakhtin sought to understand human interaction, in real time, in the real world. However, his lens was zoomed in on language – on utterances, in particular. According to Bakhtin, language does not exist in a vacuum because “any utterance is a link in the chain of speech communication” (Bakhtin, 1986, p. 84). In fact, he views the utterance, or any conversational turn, regardless of length, as “the real unit of speech communication,” and therefore it is his preferred unit of analysis (qtd in Wertsch, 1991, p. 50). Such an analytic unit led Bakhtin to a series of groundbreaking insights.
For example, he argued that no spoken voice exists in isolation because speech is inherently multivoiced, where an utterance reflects not only the voice of its speaker, but that of other succeeding voices. In other words, all language is spoken in response to, and in anticipation of, other language. Further, an utterance is multivoiced in that it contains the voice of whatever speech genre it inhabits. A speech genre is “a conventionalized utterance type, a ready-made way of packaging speech….a resource for performance” (Bauman et al, 1987, pp. 5-6, qtd in Wertsch, 1991). Philips (1986) defines genre as “lexicalized forms of speech” that are “typically routinized and predictable” (p. 79, qtd in Wertsch, 1991). Without realizing it, when we use language, our utterances “populate,” or “appropriate” existing speech genres that have formed over time in order to serve particular social functions. We do this in part by “ventriloquating” the voices of those who have used or are using those genres, thereby contributing to the reification of those speech genres (Wertsch, 1991, p. 70, Bakhtin’s term). We are also motivated by a “speech will…manifested primarily in the choice of a particular speech genre,” through which we enact a “speech plan” which is subject to and shaped by the variety of forces that comprise mediated action (Bakhtin, 1986, p. 78).
Bakhtin (1986) arrived at this concept of multivoicedness, or dialogicality, by rejecting models of communication that position speakers as isolated individuals in “possession” of encoded messages that are transmitted to passive receivers (Wertsch, 1991, p. 73). For Bakhtin, “interanimation,” or the contact point between utterances, is required because understanding requires one voice’s response to another (Wertsch, 1991, p. 73). The transmission model is authoritative, univocal, fixed, and static, and any breach in the communication line causes failure. His model, on the other hand, is open, and allows for the type of dialogic interanimation tests understanding and generates meaning; here, a breach in communication serves as a “thinking device” (Wertsch, 1991, p. 74).
Wertsch (1991) reminds us that both models have yielded important insights into the communication process and ultimately endorses Lotman’s (1988) functional dualism, which argues that utterances can function transmissively and dialogically at the same time. In Wertsch’s terms, “for any text, the univocal and dialogic functions are best thought of as being in a kind of dynamic tension….Sociocultural contexts serve to shape which of Lotman’s two functions will dominate” (1991, p. 79).
The last sentence is crucial because it gives rise to Wertsch’s (1991) project, typified through his preferred unit of analysis: mediated action. In order to understand how and why “different groups (or individuals) may employ similar tools (i.e. mediational means) in different ways,” he proposes a “toolkit” approach to discourse analysis because, in reality, context and tools do matter (p. 95). According to Wertsch (1991):
a toolkit approach allows group and contextual differences in mediated action to be understood in terms of the array of mediational means to which people have access and the patterns of choice they manifest in selecting particular means for a particular occasion” (p. 94).
Ultimately, he seeks to examine these choice patterns in order to a) uncover how we privilege certain means over others in particular sociocultural settings, and b) make explicit the range of means available to us in those settings. In a very real sense, he seeks to understand what it means to construct meaning.

Methods
Participants include thirty facebook “friends” and ten “student-friends,” heterogeneous across age, location, and intensity of use. Their common characteristics are their use of facebook and their membership in my immediate or secondary network of “friends.” I collected data from facebook users through four distinct means: a) surveys; b) follow-up surveys; c) analysis of over 100 status updates; d) discourse analysis of instant message (IM) conversation between me and an old friend, Mike. In the spirit of this project, no data was collected face-to-face (f2f) and all communication took place online. The initial 31-question surveys were distributed in a variety of ways, the most common involving the promotion of my study by way of my own facebook status updates on a regular basis.
Through these promotions, I solicited help from other users, namely by providing a link to my blog (http://secretisnosecret.blogspot.com/2009/03/help-me-with-my-research.html), which contained introduction and rationale for my study, as well as the protocol questions themselves. Follow-up, three-question surveys were distributed to users later in the study. Additionally, I collected the eighty most recent status update I could find and examined them according to theme, form, and function, in order to locate the range of means available within that particular speech genre. Finally, I conducted additional follow-up p2p emails with select users, based on my degree of interest in their survey responses. The energy of one of these email exchanges could not be contained within email the confines of email, so it morphed into a forty minute IM conversation (between Mike and me), which must be categorized as successful.
Transcripts of that conversation were coded and analyzed with two objectives in mind: to investigate IMing as a means of self-presentation, and to identify how mediated action shapes the particular means privileged in this conversation (see Appendix).
A sociocultural approach to the popular social networking site, facebook
This study works in stages, and each affords us a closer look at the range of text-features and functions available for use on facebook. First, text-based means are categorized according to type and social function. Next, one type, the status update, is examined in terms of its generic properties. Finally, discourse analysis is applied to a private IM conversation through the lenses of Goffman’s interaction ritual and Wertsch’s mediated action.
What do users of facebook say?
One of Wertsch’s goals is to make explicit the range of mediational means available to communicants within particular sociocultural settings. Survey data shows that users engage in a range of text-representation (e.g. Photo captions, wall captions, status updates, comments on “friends’” wall, pictures, or status updates, instant messaging/chats, private emails, mass emails, and tagged photo) with each type serving as a site of functional social performance [e.g. Sharing memories, making plans, making others feel good (e.g “because after so many years of indifference, I think birthday wishes are nice to receive and so I like to give them”), conducting business, promoting one’s self or business, reacquainting, fulfilling curiosity, self-publishing, testing out material, documenting minutiae, sharing links].
Successful use of such means is measurable and usually pleasurable [e.g. Meeting up in person with old friends, posting pictures to document friendships, receiving comments on status updates (in fact, failure to receive such comments consistently constituted “failure”), “something that starts a little back-and-forth,” instant feedback, feeling connected to communication partner, gaining customers, documenting friendships, receiving comments on status updates (in fact, failure to receive such comments consistently constituted “failure”), “something that starts a little back-and-forth,” instant feedback, feeling connected to communication partner, “finally organizing a proper group of friends,” gaining self-confidence, etc.].
These are broad strokes, so let us shift our attention to how one particular element (or text-feature, or psychological tool, or meditational mean) functions as a speech genre: the status update. The participants in this study rarely made a neutral comment about this pre-Twitter venue for sharing utterances with the world, described alternately as “narcissistic wanking (and) self-aggrandizement without anything to, well, aggrandize” and as a place where “my only goal, primarily is to make people laugh…. I posted a link to pictures of a "meat ship" - a pirate ship composed entirely of meat. This, without a doubt, was probably my most successful post as I received over 14 responses, mostly people telling me how disgusting it was.” What counts as meaningful is clearly up for debate.
In an analysis of eighty status updates, I have found that users “populate” this speech genre in a variety of ways. Philips (1986) defines genre as “lexicalized forms of speech” that are “typically routinized and predictable,” but Wertsch (1991) reminds us of “an array of means to which people have access and the patterns of choice they manifest” in privileging certain moves over others (p. 79).
Self-to-world utterances via status updates are shaped by time, place, and occasion (by nature, they are instant!), as well as the digital tools that help create them (limited space, ability to hyperlink; immediacy). They are also inhabited by utterances ranging from event-promotion, tech-slang, daily minutiae (to some: poetry), event organizing (i.e. “ski trip scheduled for Monday…if you’re interested), posted links and videos, inside jokes, appropriated song lyrics, Top 5 lists, attempts at humor and wit, announcements of social plans, and, on this day, a range of updates mourning the loss of Bea Arthur, linking users in a shared experience, publically, from the privacy of their own homes.
Such a wide range of speech functions speaks to the above quotes by Philips and Wertsch. Certainly, predictable patterns emerge, but each utterance is indeed shaped by the particulars of the writing occasion. For now, we can see the speech genre of the status update as one still forming, and though shaped by boundaries of time, space, and meditational means, it is increasingly populated by the voices of users who help define its characteristics – through their desire to satisfy communicative needs.

Discourse analysis of a facebook IM chat
My use of facebook, prior to this project, was spurred by curiosity about others’ lives and as a means of keeping in touch with old friends. Like many users, I preferred the traditional, “backstage” means of dialoging offered on the site, namely p2p emails and IMs. A discourse analysis of one such exchange illustrates Goffman’s and Wertsch’s theories quite well. Although Goffman’s work was based on face-to-face contact between people, his lens does, in fact, apply to non-f2f, p2p contact. Wertsch’s model is custom made for such discourse.
To recap: in Goffman’s model, actors enter settings and immediately adopt lines of self-presentation. They seek to maintain that line, and also help other actors maintain their line via the process of face-work. The maintenance of such a line requires endless negotiating (it’s hard work) – tweaking of one’s own stance in response to perceived and actual feedback from the other actor while, simultaneously helping (consciously or not) the other actor maintain “face” by validating his or her “line.” This happens constantly, and thus, there is no stable “self” – only a negotiated presentation of self which via roles, line, and face-work.
For Wertsch, his unit of analysis is mediated action, whereby agents (Goffman’s actors, Bakhtin’s speech subjects) use meditational means to communicate within specific sociohistorical moments. It is a mistake, he says, to isolate any one of these elements (agents, means, moment) because they are mutually dependent. In this particular chat, the lens of mediated action bridges Goffman’s work with that of Bakhtin, where “interaction ritual” takes form as the “interanimation” of utterances, or dialogicality, with “line” indicated by of the actors’ “speech will” and face-saving adjustments to line represented by “speech plan” adjustments (Bakhtin, 1986, p. 78).
Unsurprisingly, this is a difficult task, complicated immediately by any attempt to define the agents. The agents (i.e. participants in speech act) in this IM include Mike, a 40 year-old American living in Qatar with bicultural family, and Anthony, me, a 33 year-old American working on research paper on language and identity). These descriptions are perhaps arbitrary, but I use them to indicate the line each participant takes in the IM because these were primary personality traits driving the conversation. Wertsch warns against isolating any single element of mediated actions, and indeed, if we applied an “identity-as-genre” notion, then the persons themselves must be considered as works-in-progress, as subjectivities instead of selves, and as laden with myriad “text-features” whose patterns are privileged according to the principles of mediated action. Perhaps, privileged, patterned “text-features” of the self are what constitutes personality traits, which are often thought of as fixed or innate. To the larger point: Wertsch’s lens requires that we consider the persons as complex, yet inextricable elements of the unit of study.
Our dialogue began as an exchange of facebook emails and shifted into IMing the moment Mike asserted his speech will by clicking on the IM feature. I recall feeling a concrete rush of adrenaline at the moment because I knew the pace was about to take off and because I have an affinity for IMing. Different meditational means lend themselves to particular communicative functions, and Mike’s conscious choice to inhabit the speech genre of IMing precipitated a shift in dialogue type but also signaled a sincere desire to engage in conversation with me, which felt good.
As a genre, IMing contain particular mediated means, or tools, including physical (keyboard, monitor, broadband lines) and abstract (language) ones. This particular IM conversation is also characterized by a variety of tools used, particularly those of pacing, multivoicedness, backtracking-claryifying-questioning combinations, and “line.” Such characteristics, I would argue, define this chat as a successful one.
Pacing is important and as it ebbs and flow, it shapes what is achievable. On its own, conceptually, it’s meaningless; but here, in action --- with actors --- it’s a powerful shaping force. As mentioned, the pace increased as soon as Mike decided to switch from email to chat, which approximates a real-time conversation in certain ways. Energy levels increased with the pace, due to the challenge of reading each others’ utterances (links in the chain of speech communication) while simultaneously typing our own rejoinders, which clearly were created in part by previous utterance and the anticipation of uttered responses. Bakhtin’s theory is accurate in this case.
Particular moves worked well here, such as “yes, but…” rejoinders, which serve to keep speech subjects alert, open, and busily thinking. Additionally, they mark the exchange as dialogic, as internally persuasive, because utterances here are not transmissive, although there was no conscious acknowledgement of privileging this tact. Perhaps, it arose from the line each of us took: Mike as an American intellectual living a bicultural life abroad, and me as a graduate student reflecting on the connection between language and identity. Such a line, which Goffman says is always being tweaked according conscious or unconscious feedback of others, is indicative of our presentation of self at a particular moment in time. The “yes, but” statements here concretely illustrate how such feedback can spur the tweaking on one’s line, and as a result how one struggles with, modifies, and tests out his subjective identity infinitely.
This chat also illustrates Bakhtin’s concept of multivoicedness and speaks to his preoccupation with the question of who is doing the speaking? The language between these two speakers is populated with the voices of many others, including those of specific people (Michelle, Goffman, Jack Kerouac, Leonard Cohen) and those of types of people (Buddhists, Taoists, zen masters, Qataris, technical writers, stepdaughters, etc.). Goffman, Jack Kerouac, Buddha, Zen masters, Taoists. The actual utterances that pop up on the computer screens, then, are multivoiced, not only because the “selves” that are uttering them are in flux, but because they are speech chain “links” that interanimate, and thus, partially create each other. Further, they are created within the speech genre of the IM, which itself is populated with the reified voices of all those who have helped shape its existence in order to fulfill a variety of human communicative needs.
Another crucial feature to the success of this chat is that of the backtrack-clarify-question bundle. IMs are characterized by the discursive jumping around necessary to follow each other’s thoughts. In this chat, multiple lines of communication co-exist when a speaker introduces a new line of thought before an existing line is closed. In order to maintain clarity, speakers backtrack, clarify topics and intentions, and question each other to avoid breaking those lines unintentionally. Ideally, the members anticipate the ending of one line and transition rather smoothly into the other line. Backtracking, clarifying, and questioning are all practical moves that enable such graceful, face-saving transitions.
According to Wertsch (1991), it is a mistake to isolate the person-in-action without considering the meditational means through which the action is situated. In this case, the speech subjects construct utterances and a rapid pace, by responding to and anticipating the response of past and future utterances. Concrete tools of mediation, including keyboards, monitors, broadband connections, and the email and IM features of facebook help to shape the constructed conversation. Of the myriad language means available within the genre of IMing, particular patterns of use are privileged, and as a result, this particular exchange, within its own particular sociohistorical moment, succeeds.

Implications
As stated, I approached this study with from a range of interest points. As a student, I sought to test the internal persuasiveness of a bizarre sociocultural concept: that the self is not fixed; that the self, in fact, is not an isolated “self” at all. It makes perfect sense now. As a scholar, I sought to explore bridges between sociocultural identity theory and genre theory, based on a hunch that Goffman’s, Bakhtin’s and Wertsch’s work would interanimate each other. They do. My phrase for this is identity-as-genre. Lastly, as a teacher of writing, I sought to concretize, through discourse analysis, the notion of genre as a sociohistorical construct whose text-features serve, and have served, particular communicative functions for humans over time and across cultures. I have begun this process, but would need twice the space of this essay to finish is, so the remaining discussion will be devoted to pedagogical possibilities.
Genres do indeed contain a range of shared, recognizable features; however, certain features are more appropriate in certain situations – for particular communicative purposes, mediated by particular tools, at particular moments in time. These variables are infinite, as no single occurrence of mediated action is actually reproducible. Tendencies, however, do reify, based on communicative needs being (or not being) met.
What might be the value in devoting instructional resources to the function of language? Wertsch (1991) reminds us that “the capacity to recognize specific speech genres and their patterns of privileging would provide an analytic tool” (p. 147). Might “mediated action” be a proper unit of analysis for the teaching of writing? In other words, what are the implications of making explicit (or, even, making discoverable) the notion that communication is mediated by actors through the use of particular means in a dialogic interchange shape (and restricted) by specific sociocultural moments? Might this alter students’ (and teachers’) views of what counts as success in the writing classroom?
If mediated action were incorporated as a pedagogical tool, what would such instruction look like? How would genre be taught?
Again, Wertsch (1991) reminds us that generic assumptions are taken for granted – “meditational means are often used with little or no conscious reflection” - until alternative means are applied within a particular genre (p. 126). In other words, outliers return our eye to the norm. Indeed, it is often only when confronted with a comparable example that one becomes aware of an imaginable alternative” (Wertsch, 1991, p. 126).
Might the use of outliers be used as a teaching tool, in order to call conscious attention to – and even debate - the range of meditational means available? Wertsch (1991) defines privileging as the recognition that “one meditational mean (or pattern of means) is more appropriate or efficacious than others in a particular sociocultural setting” (p. 124). What, then, is good writing? Perhaps it is the efficiency of privileging appropriately – in the name of effective communication. Perhaps it has to do with who we are.

References
Bakhtin, M.M. (1986). Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Austin: University of Texas Press
Goffman, E. (1955). “On face-work: an analysis of ritual elements in social interaction.” Psychiatry: Journal for the Study of Interpersonal Processes. 62:264-74.
Goffman, Erving. (1967). Interaction Ritual. Pantheon: New York, 1967.
Goffman, E. (1959). The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Doubleday: Garden City, New York, 1959.
McClelland, K. (1995). Symbolic Interactionism. Retrieved March 22, 2009 from: http://web.grinnell.edu/courses/soc/s00/soc111-01/introtheories/symbolic.html.
Marlowe, H. (2008). “The Presentation of Self: Goffman’s Dramaturgical Model.” Retrieved March 22, 2009 from: California State University, Long Beach. http://www.csulb.edu/~hmarlowe/SOC335/Goffman_Dramaturgical_Model.pdf
Weedon, C. (1987). Feminist Practice and Poststructuralist Theory. Oxford: Blackwell.
Wertsch, J. (1991). Voices of the Mind: A sociocultural approach to mediated action. Harvard University Press.

TNC-heads. Over here!

2009-04-23T12:36:00.003-04:00

Dear friend,

Thank you very much for your time and interest in my project. I will definitely keep you in the loop as this project develops.

By the way, my name is Anthony Barra, and I'm a doctoral student at Temple University, in Philadelphia. The other night, I read TNC's blog (on my phone) for 90 minutes straight as I drove home from school - in the rain. I couldn't stop. I love dropping in on your community, and I feel as though I'm slowing becoming a part of it. When I visit the blog, I usually get stuck there for a long time. It's addictive.

Regarding my reserach, your identity will remain anonymous. I intend to use your blog commenter name, so please include that in your response.

Again, thank you, and email your responses to me at:

Anthony.Barra@temple.edu

1. In what sense, if at all, do you feel part of a community here? Please explain.

2. Why do you spend time here at TNC's blog (or, what have you gained)?

3. What, in your view, works here at TNC's blog?

4. When you are here, are you more conscious of your identity (or sense of your self)?

5. I am a teacher of adolescent and young adult writers. If I were to incorporate the best features of this blog/atmosphere, what should be my top priorities? In other words, what is most essential (bearing in mind that my students have different intellects and interests)?

6. The name you use at TNC's blog:

7. Most memorable post/exchange:

8. Anything you'd like to add:

Thank you very much.

Anthony
(kerouax)

Torture

2009-04-21T19:21:00.001-04:00

"We don't torture."

yes we do.

Who is the "we"?

Am I divorced from "we"? Are you?

function

2009-03-30T20:27:00.000-04:00

What is the function of language?

Help me with my research!

2009-03-19T13:51:00.001-04:00

Dear friends,

I hope you can lend a hand, and I suspect that you'll be pleased if you do.

My studies at Temple University require conducting original research. For my doctoral course in Language & Identity, I've chosen to pursue the following research question:

How do facebook users negotiate, construct, and perform their identities online?

A crucial task for this project is to collect original data. For my first round of data collection, I’ve chosen to distribute online questionnaires.

I would be most grateful if you would complete the following questionnaire (or at least as much of it as you feel like). Truth be told, I prefer deep, thoughtful responses (even if that means answering less questions) to rushed ones. I understand the survey is rather lengthy, and I really appreciate any time and feedback you can give.

Thank you in advance.

Anthony Barra
Temple University
CITE Program

P.S. The questionnaire is below. Please note that there is a section for both facebook and non-facebook users.
P.P.S. All answers are held in confidence. No one will see them but me. If I’d like a follow-up interview with you, I’ll just ask you.

For users of facebook:
1. Name, age, profession, degree of internet usage, preferred nickname/alias (in the case I quote from you in my paper).
2. How long have you used facebook (fb)?
3. Has the intensity of your use fluctuated?
4. How would you describe yourself – in just a few sentences?
5. How would you describe yourself – as a fb user?
6. Did you “present” yourself online in another form before using fb?
7. In your opinion, do we each have a “true” self?
8. What does fb represent, in your eyes?
9. What have you gained through fb?
10. What have you lost through fb?
11. Some people talk about mistakes they’ve made on fb? Can you share with me a story about a fb regret?
12. Over time, have you become more or less “free” about what you post?
13. What is the role of imagination in your use of fb?
14. Does fb allow for, or encourage, a degree of role-playing?
15. Who is your audience? Does it change according to different posts or tasks?
16. Do you ever think about being “discovered”?
17. In what ways do you use language on fb? Talk about that for a bit.
18. Have you ever presented yourself dishonestly on fb? How about honestly?
19. Can you think of an instance where your identity developed or became more secure as a result of social interaction via fb?
20. Has your fb identity leaked into your non-fb identity?
21. Is fb liberating for you? How so?
22. Is fb constricting for you? How so?
23. Can you think of a time when you seriously deliberated whether or not to post something, (written or visual)? What did you decide? How did you reach that decision?
24. Some scholars suggest that we do not have a fixed-for-life identity, but rather we have numerous identities that rotate and overlap depending on our situation and needs. Does this seems weird to you? Why or why not?
25. Is your online self different from your offline self?
26. Are you cooler, or more hip, on fb than off fb?
27. In what ways do you use fb to “mark” who you are? In other words, how do you represent, describe, or present yourself on fb?
28. When using fb, are you ever more aware of your identity as a male/female? As a member of an ethnic or racial group?
29. Who are you? Who do you want to be?
30. What do you ultimately get out of fb? Is it worth the investment?
31. Facebook has reached 100million users (much) faster than other technologies, such as TVs, cell phones, and ipods. What do think will be the next big thing?

For non-users:
1. Why don’t you use fb?
2. Have you been pressured to sign up? If so, please relate a brief story.
3. What does fb represent, in your eyes?
4. Do you perceive any benefits to fb use? What are they?
5. What is your preferred mode of social networking? Why?

Please email this survey to Anthony Barra via facebook or at: anthony.barra@temple.edu

Again, thank you. I OWE YOU!!!

Tanking it?

2009-03-18T22:44:00.004-04:00

I will say this:

if the powers-that-be wanted to ensure Obama's victory (to essentially CHANGE the face of the NWO*), it does explain the otherwise unexplicable:
- Sarah Palin as VP candidate
- McCain's disgusting and dangerous descent
- the elevation of certain "plumbers" to national importance

It helps to explain why one party made itself virtually unelectable.

*someone explains it this way:
"a vampire (i.e. NWO elite agenda) can't force his way into your house, but he can charm his way in, with your consent (i.e. accepting policies otherwise unthinkable)."

Again, I don't buy it, but anything that can remotely explain the atrocity of Palin is worth considering.

(No offense.)

How many rooms?

2009-03-18T22:24:00.002-04:00

Regarding the previous (Year of the Conspiracist) post - a friend's take:

"Much of the truth - that is, the true nature of reality and all the things in it - is hidden from us, much of it intentionally obscured by "them." Picture reality, and knowledge, as an endless series of rooms and chambers in an endless edifice (the line from the Bible - "There are many mansions in My house" comes to mind), each room representing a level of truth, a piece of knowledge.

And we are born into this world and routinely admitted into a certain finite set of rooms, an extremely small subset of the totality of rooms that exists.

And sometimes in the course of history, when people begin to collectively feel that there is more to it than the rooms to which they are limited, in order to prevent that curiosity, that human itch for truth, from proceeding too far, the men behind the curtain decide to open up a new room to the masses, and the people think, that's it! - we knew there was much more to this reality! the universe is enlarged
immensely, but in fact, the people do not know that they are only being admitted
to one puny room out of the immensity of all possible rooms, and, at the same time, unknown to the them, other rooms are probably being closed off.

Therefore, in the current situation, many are beginning to catch on, thanks to the internet, and the men behind the curtain, in what strikes me as a desperate move, have brought the Bilderburgers into the mainstream spotlight in order to "contain" the spreading contagion of public suspicion.

They have opened a door into a small room, previously hidden, saying, yes, here is an elite organization, that meets under incredible security, to have conversations not available to the press. Nothing to worry about, unless you're one of those
"conspiracy theorists." Their thinking is that this disclosure will allay the collective suspicion, and head off any who might be in the process of waking up.

I think it's a desperate move because the mere existence of this article in the syndicated, corporate media shows that their grip on the public's mind is loosening.

Don't be fooled into thinking this is some kind of crusading journalism: it's corporate media, and that says it all. But it will probably backfire, causing even more people to look into it on their own. For example, when Rense.com and some other "alternative" sites tried to dissuade people from using orgonite, the traffic to the orgonite sites exploded.

Watch for more of this stuff to come down the pipe. And think of all the recently unemployed people, fuming and stewing about their lost jobs and vanishing assets, with nothing to do all day but cruise the internet looking for the truth.

Interesting times, these."

Interesting, indeed.

PJs?

2009-03-15T23:02:00.003-04:00

A lot of people right now are confused and angry. If the fringe is ever to gain sway over the mainstream, the time is now. Here's today's headline on aol.com:
http://news.aol.com/article/bilderberger-conspiracy/382953
Corresponds with the release of Alex Jones's "The Obama Deception."

I've only watched five minutes of the film so far, but already I've witnessed semi-coherent rambles by KRS-ONE, Jesse Ventura, and.......Joe Rogan! Clearly, the film is targeting the mainstream.

I'm dubious.

But it will be interesting to see how the Year of the Conspiracists plays out in the mainstream and underground.

Will cool heads ever prevail?

the atlantic and food!

2009-03-14T13:58:00.001-04:00

My favorite mag blog has a new feature:
http://food.theatlantic.com/coffee-culture/appreciating-coffee-like-wine.php

everything enjoy

restaurant situation

2009-03-14T13:42:00.005-04:00

So we're running a somewhat upscale restaurant, and yet we can't afford to dine anywhere nice. Result: we're very much learning as we go, using our own tastes, and trying to be as thoughtful and smart as possible. I mean, hospitality's in the blood or it isn't. There's simply little chance for scouting, sampling, or "trend"ing, which may be a blessing in disguise.

And in many ways, this is no different from the rest of my life.

There's always the internet - and that's where I go to "eat" in fancy restaurants or drink fine wines. And it makes me wonder what else I'm doing online...what other imagined communities i'm living in...traveling around (in my chair), talking to fine people, etc. I spend too much time here, perhaps, but is it a waste of time?

And regarding the restaurant, I think we all agree that the enemy is: bullshit. There's no room for it; no place for it. Straightforward, with eyes open, and gracious - that's the tact we're taking, and if it fails, then so it goes.

(I can't wait to look back on this and laugh at the naivety. Or, maybe I'll be pleased.)

On a side note, one thing is clear: throwing myself full-force into school and the restaurant simultaneously is damn near impossible. But it's worth a shot.

33

2009-01-13T01:20:00.002-05:00

from the vault

2008-12-27T20:22:00.000-05:00

amazing

Will the Giants repeat this year?

A clip for Eddie

2008-12-26T22:24:00.003-05:00

fried stuff...and salad.

2008-12-26T17:56:00.001-05:00

Sammy's. Lunch.

It's my blog; I can post what I want.

southern christmas

2008-12-26T14:19:00.003-05:00

First impressions of New Orleans:
Bourbon Street is gross. It's a spectacle that you gotta see, but it doesn't beckon me at all. It's a fun stroll in daylight, though. If Bourbon St. was the whole of New Orleans, a six day trip would be a nightmare. But today, we got out for a stroll and hit the riverside strip, which is fantastic. Today I saw the New Orleans I came to see - the mix of people as odd as the architectural mix - and both kind of like the food. Very eclectic and low-key at once. For food, we had a lunch of fried oysters, fried alligator, and a garden salad, which came with a warm loaf of french bread...so we did po'boys in small bites. It was kick-ass. Last night, for xmas dinner, I had some crawfish etouffee, which was nice, but got redundant after five or six bites. Christina had a catfish po'boy - really nice.

A post on the people here will have to wait. I'm not interested in posting first impressions; I want to wait a few days.

Tonight we're doing a walking/drinking/eating tour. I don't know what to expect; should be really fun or really corny, and I wouldn't mind if it was both.

(side note: had a strange hipster experience at Urban Outfitters today; took me back to van gogh's ear days; how much of who we are is already determined? how much comes ready-to-consume as part of a package? e.g. hipster package incl. kerouac, cigs, coffee, notebook, etc. And you think you're discovering these things, one at a time, but, as a whole, they're all organized together for you; they're all part of a packaged identity kit, and little by little you learn the discourse. In Gee's terms, this would be the Discourse of Hip.)

on the plane

2008-12-26T11:32:00.001-05:00

N.O.

2008-12-24T22:22:00.002-05:00

Merry Christmas.

We leave for New Orleans in the morning. If we die, for some reason, remember me as someone who respected life and tried to live well. Remember Christina and me as two people who loved each other -- so no worries, no regrets.

If we don't die, I intend to post regularly from down there.

the 11-3 Giants

2008-12-21T19:31:00.001-05:00

Big statement-game for the Giants tonight.

I'm with Weej here: Giants comfortably.

genre paper

2008-12-20T19:20:00.003-05:00

(At least a third of what I was aiming for never made it in this paper. I ran out of time and steam. But that just means I'll have to revisit this again. I've yet to re-read this, so I don't know how it hangs together.)

A note on composition: When I write an academic paper, I usually have 10-12 documents open at the same time, so I can jump from thought to thought as they arise. Eventually, a quilting together of the pieces emerges - results vary, but working in many small chunks allows me to manage the whole. (again, like all posts in this blog, I write here about things that feel worthy of revisiting down the road.)

December 15, 2008

A partial topography of genre theory

In The Powers of Literacy: A Genre Approach to Teaching Writing, Cope and Kalanztis (1993) introduce an Australian group of researchers and writing teachers, known as the “genre group,” to a wider audience. Positioning the genre approach as a third-party alternative to the failed two-party system of traditionalism vs. progressivism, they suggest that “genre literacy is attempting to create a new pedagogical space” (p. 1). To support this claim, a brief discussion of “traditional” and “progressive” movements ensues, which I will quickly outline.

The traditional approach privileges objectivity and positivist truths about language, in a world that can be described with facts, rules, and regularities. Pedagogically, this teacher-centered approach tends to reproduce cultural ideologies and limit social mobility. The authors suggest that although this traditional approach is assumed to be rooted in the classical period, in ancient Greece and Rome grammar was a distinctly social practice, akin to apprenticeship models of learning (1993, p. 3). While they lament the displacement of “the social” in their rejection of this model, they do admire the teacher-as-expert element.

Their critique of progressivist teaching models is more explicit, (though unfortunately less even-handed), mainly because such modes are still fashionable. Like traditional methods, progressive pedagogy - characterized by whole language and processes approaches - reproduces social inequities, namely because its culture-bound mores of expression and immersion favor those already closest to the “dominant” literary discourse. In particular, students from middle-class, child-centered homes fair most well here. And while the approach, according to the authors, is no more motivating than traditional curricula - especially for the disaffected – what is most troubling is the reduced role of the teacher to that of manager, not expert. Often marked by a photocopied, haphazard curriculum, this approach conflates orality with literacy, resulting in student-produced texts in a limited number of genres, mainly personalized accounts. “Worse,” they write, “the most powerful written genres are those generically and grammatically different from orality,” namely scientific reports and arguments (1993, p. 6).

Unfortunately, each critiqued element of progressivism is presented as fact; no documentation is offered, nor are nuances acknowledged. Nonetheless, Cope and Kalanztis reach an interesting conclusion: that these claims are exactly why some educators embrace genre, while others reject it. Both progressives and conservatives see genre as “teaching on the side of the enemy” (p. 6). While progressives claim that this entails a “revival of transmission pedagory,” conservatives, suspicious of genre literacy’s claims for equity, fear a “threat to standards” (p. 2).

If the genre approach, then, is the true third-party solution, what exactly does it consist of? What follows is an examination of genre theory, on multiple fronts. Beginning with a short discussion of foundational theoretical texts, and then moving to an examination of the “genre school” in action, this paper will then conclude by discussing multivoiced, multigeneric approaches to literacy, followed lastly by my own ideas about genre hybridity and practical pedagogy.

Social functions of genre: Miller, Bakhtin, and Halliday
Rare is the discussion of genre theory that fails to mention the systemic functional linguistics of M.A.K. Halliday. Therefore, examination his work will dominate this section of the paper, but not before framing his contributions with the work of Carolyn Miller and Mikhail Bakhtin in the mid-80s.

In “Genre as Social Action” (1984), Miller reconfigures genre as a social process, not simply as sets of text-types. Freedman (1999) frames this Miller’s stance that generic texts are reified “in response to recurring social contexts” whose “regularities in the rhetorical situation should not be consider material…but socially constructed” (p. 764). In other words, genres (as traditionally conceived, in text-form), are borne from and reflect human communicative needs that result from “sets of events or situation types that are deemed significant and hence recur” (p. 764). Recognizable text features establish a sense of normalcy in the chaos of social experience. Importantly, this conception of genre, by definition, acknowledges the contextual variations of genre across culture and community. Generic texts, then, are not pre-fixed forms, but are living things, negotiated with by users. While a user bases his rhetorical moves on the conventions of particular genre, his contribution adds to the collective, socially scripted definition of how that genre functions – simply because he is using the genre. According to Bawarshi (2000), genres not only allow us to make sense of our lives, but they also play a part in our own identity construction. Humans define genre, and genres help define humans:
genres are implicated in the way we experience and enact a great many of our discursive realities, functioning as such on an ideological as well as on a rhetorical level. . . . thus (shaping) how we come to perceive and rhetorically act within these realities - and in so doing, how we reproduce these realities and ourselves (p. 339).
This concept – what Bawarshi calls the “genre function” – extends Foucault’s work on author-function, and will be taken up later in this paper.

Bakhtin (1986), working within literary studies, also established the social aspects of genre by proposing that all speech acts, including private diary writing, are social acts in that they respond to previous words and works, while simultaneously inviting future rejoinders. Freedman (1999) puts it this way: “No one, (Bakhtin) explains, can be Adam, the first speaker in the universe; we are all responding to or ventriloguizing others’s speech or utterances” (p. 764). [Quoting Freedman’s take on Bakhtin, it seems, illustrates her point quite well.] Bawarshi also helps us understand Bakhtin’s conception of a speaker’s “speech will,” which manifests itself as the speaker’s choice of a speech genre, drawn from the “great and multifarious sphere of everyday oral communication, including the most familiar and the most intimate” (p. 348). It is here that Bakhtin opens genre studies beyond literary realities and texts. This is a move no one within literature studies had made. As a result, subsequent discussions of genre have “helped transform genre study from a descriptive to an explanatory activity, one that investigates not only text-types and classification systems, but also the linguistic, sociological, and psychological assumptions underlying and shaping these text-types” (p. 335).

Working in the field of systemic functional linguistics (SFL), Halliday (1985) also focuses on the “mutually predictive” relationship between the text and the social; however, his primary unit of study is the sentence (Hillocks & Smith, 1991). Because Halliday’s work functions as a crucial launching pad for genre theory, I will spend a bit more time here than with Miller and Bakhtin. In their analysis of Halliday’s approach to understanding grammar, Hillocks & Smith (1991) identify SFL’s chief goal to be the systematic explanation of “how language provides a resource for meaning” (p. 725).

Halliday positions language as a series of “information” exchanges, much the same as those of goods and services. Again, his concern is how language functions. Halliday identifies four primary speech functions (offer, command, statement, and question), each of which is paired with a desired response (acceptance of offer, command being followed, acceptance of statement, question answered) (Hillocks & Smith, 1991). In effect, such exchange-functions occur precisely at the level of the clause, which takes the form of propositions, or arguable statements. (Hillocks & Smith, 1991).

According to Halliday, clauses are the gold standard of SFL, and they function in one of six different processes: material, mental, relational, behavioral, verbal, and existential. To explain, in material processes, or “clauses of doing,” some entity “does” something, which may be done “to” some other entity (Hillocks & Smith, 1991, p. 726). Therefore, material processes are those of doing and happening, and according to Halliday’s system of Process Analysis, they possess three parts: actor, process, and goal. For example, in the sentence, “Geoffrey flew the kite,” Halliday is concerned with the actor (Geoffrey), the process (flew), and the goal (the kite). Mental processes, on the other hand, are those with one participant (including things or facts) with a consciousness. Here, key features of material process clauses are swapped out with those of mental process clauses: actor, process, and goal become senser, process, and phenomenon (thing or fact) (Hillocks & Smith, 1991). An example of a mental process clause is, “Geoffery liked the kite.” Relational processes involve identification and attribution (e.g. The kite is red.). Behavorial processes, such as breathing or coughing, are physiological or psychological ones. Verbal processes involve symbolic exchanges of meaning, while Existential processes assert that something exists (Hillocks & Smith, 1991). Collectively, these six categories:
and their extensions and elaborations permit the analysis of how genres of discourse differ from one another….These analyses suggest which features students may have to learn to participate in the discourse of various fields (Hillocks & Smith, 1991, p. 726).
I will return to this crucial statement about teachable discourse features later in this paper, in the section of teaching writing.

First, however, a discussion of Bawarshi’s (2000) take on Halliday’s work is in order. Like Miller, Halliday is concerned with “situation types,” or the “particular social semiotics within social reality” that make up the recurring scenarios of life (p. 350). Such scenarios (e.g. “mother reading bedtime story to child,” “customer ordering goods over the phone”), are known to Halliday as “register,” and it is here where text meets “its sociosemiotic environment, because register assigns a situation type with particular semantic properties” (qtd. in Bawarshi, 2000, p. 350).

To understand register, Halliday suggests using these three terms to our advantage: a.) field: what takes place commicatively? (the field of discourse represents the institutional setting in which language occurs); tenor: who is taking part? (the tenor of discourse represents the relation between participants – their role relations – within the discourse); mode: what role is language playing? (the mode of discourse represents the channel of communication adopted by the participants). All three levels interact in particular and fairly typified ways with register. (all italics are Bawarshi, p. 350).

In Halliday’s system, genre functions at the level of mode, and thus are “relegated to typified tools communicants use within registers to enact and interact within a particular semiotic system” (Bawarshi, 2000, p. 351). Bawarshi, however, breaks with Halliday when he assigns genre a role beyond just mode, arguing that “genres create the conditions in which not only texts but also their writers and readers function” (p. 351). As a result, Bawarshi makes a move toward “genre theory” by extending Halliday’s language theory by positioning “genre as social semiotic” (p. 351). By this he means that genres are not simply an aspect of register, but “are also how we constitute register and all the semantic, social, and lexicogrammatical con-figurations within it” (p. 351).

This break is best understood in the context the Miller and Bakhtin sections of this paper. Again, Halliday was concerned with linguistics on a micro scale, whereas Miller, Bakhtin, and Bawarshi, as well as numerous proponents of the genre school out of New South Wales (Australia), conceive of genre more broadly.

Before examining the implications of teaching genre, in Australia and elsewhere, an extended analysis of Bawarshi’s (2000) “The Genre Function” is useful. Bawarshi considers the article an attempt to simultaneous push forward genre theory and “synthesize the multiple and often factionalized strands of English Studies, including literature, cultural studies, creative writing, rhetoric and composition, and applied linguistics” (2000, p. 336). In his account, Bawarshi proposes an extension of genre-inquiry beyond that of literary texts alone, and he illustrates theoretic concepts with a range of real-life examples.

Building upon Foucault’s “author-function,” which is limited to the world of literary studies, Bawarshi proposes “genre-function” as a means of accounting for how all discourses function, not just the “privileged discourses” of literary studies (p. 338). In his genre-function, we are all producers and consumers of multigenrics texts, and thus, we are all authors. Bawarshi contrasts this with the subordinate position students typically hold in literature classes, where the author-function is the authority, and thus, students are postioned to fail. The genre-function, on the other hand, positions students as interpreters and users of a multitude of genres, experts in social function. This “insider” status reconfigures students as agents in the classroom, where genre-based inquiry becomes the norm.

Bawarshi also provides practical illustrations of genre theory at work. Most interesting is his discussion of how antecedent genres both guide and constrain users; here, he references Jamieson’s (1975) analysis of George Washington’s first State of the Union address, and Congress’s response to it. Jamieson found that President Washington, when confronted with the task of crafting a new genre – that of the State of the Union address – relied on conventions (and ideologies) of the monarchical King’s speech. He situated himself in the socialized conditions of a rhetoric of power, in order to write. The irony of Congress’s response was not lost on Jamieson either. Congressional members “assumed a subject role scripted by the King's Speech and consequently enacted that role by responding in ways made possible by the ‘echoing speeches’ of Parliament” (Bawarshi, p. 341).

This story illustrates how genres do not simply function as text-types, but they also create and organize social actions, which in turn, are made available because the text-types exist. In other words, bringing a socio-cultural approach to genre study allows us not only to examine, teach, and practice site-specific rhetorical moves, it also enables us to examine the social, cultural, and historical situations that have endowed such genres with their current communicative function.

The New South Wales genre group

In the same way that Cope & Kalantzis (1993) sought to establish genre studies as a better option than traditionalism and progressivism, Knapp & Watkins (2005) also celebrate genre theory, but only after critiquing progressivist and socio-linguistic models. And like Cope & Kalanztis, their critique of the most modern approach (in this case, socio-linguistic) is far from even-handed; nonetheless, points are scored. First, Knapp & Watkins (2005) use Halliday to dismiss progressivist notions of immersion as “totally implausible ,” and, like Cope & Kalantzis (1993), they suggest that progressivism’s extreme individualistic/creative view eliminates teaching. In a similar vein, they critique the “social turn” as eliminating the individual. In particular, they argue that the socio-linguistic approach is particularly deficient regarding poetic and literary writing, in its tendency to leave out the individual and his or her autonomy. If the progressivist paradigm places language ability in the hands of the individual, and the sociocultural view argues that language production is entirely social, then Knapp & Watkins’:
perspective on language as a social process allows us to explain and analyze arrangements of language (texts) as grammatical structures or constructions that are formed by individuals in social contexts to serve specific social needs and requirements (2005, p. 16).
To outline this approach, they highlight the following conceptual points: a) language conventions are already in place, formed over time by society; b) nonetheless, we constantly “re-make” language each time we use it; c) we use an existing system, then, for making our meanings, and in doing so, we constantly, if only minutely, remake that system; d) ultimately, we must understand conventions in order to use them.

These conceptions are concretized in Kress’s genre model, where genres are seen as social processes that describe, explain, instruct, argue, and narrate. Knapp (1992, p. 13) explicates this model by explaining how each process functions and also by listing text-based genres that utilize those functions (qtd. in Knapp & Watkins, 2005, p. 27). For example, describing genres function “through the process of ordering things into commonsense or technical frameworks of meaning” and are commonly used in “personal descriptions, commonsense descriptions, technical descriptions, information reports, scientific reports, and definitions” (p. 27). Genres that explain function “through the process of sequencing phenomena in temporal and/or causal relationships” and are commonly used in “explanations of how, explanations of why, elaborations, illustrations, accounts, and explanation essays” (p. 27). Instructive genres function “through the process of logically sequencing actions of behaviors” and are commonly used in “procedure, instructions, manuals, recipes, and directions” (p. 27). Genres that argue function “through the process of expanding a proposition to persuade readers to accept a point of view” and are commonly used in “essays, expositions, discussions, debates, interpretations, and evaluations” (p. 27). Lastly, narrative genres function “through the process of sequencing people and events in time and space” and are commonly used in “personal recounts, historical recounts, stories, fairy tales, myths, fables, and narratives” (p. 27). This model also addresses “multi-generic products,” such as “science experiments, reviews, travelogues, commentaries, interviews, letters, news stories, articles, web pages” (p. 27). This model, rooted in, but far removed from Halliday’s sentence and clausal analyses, holds intriguing possibilities for genre-blending and blurring, and I will return to it later.

Australian genre theorists also differ from Halliday in their conception of systemic functional linguistics as a socially transformative practice (Lankshear & Knobel, 2000). Martin (1993) claims that “teaching powerful discourses expands a student's meaning potential,” while Macken (1990) sees “competence in the use of powerful kinds of texts” as a “means towards attaining greater power . . . (and) freedom” (both qtd. in Lankshear & Knobel, 2000, p. 163, p. 7). In Australia, discourses of power are explicitly taught in a curriculum of explict writing, where the “explicit teaching of genres leads to a ‘dialogue of the dominant ways of knowing . . . and other marginal discourses such that both core and margings are transformed” (Simmons, 2005, p. 303, quoting Clark, 1999). Nonetheless, “at the points where it is taken up in classroom practice things often go wrong” (Lankshear & Knobel, 2000). So what might genre approaches look like in the classroom?

Genre approaches to teaching writing
Freadman (1998) teaches the concept of genre as a sociocultural text by asking students to plan a meal together. She helps them see that meals (her substitute for genre) are occasions, with context-specific needs (no soup on an airline meal), including an appropriateness of tone (jacket and tie for formal affair). Ultimately, she helps her students come to realize five principles of genre: a) “genre is an organizing concept for our cultural practices;” b) genres contain a range of contrasting forms; c) genre is place and occasion; d) “cultural competence involves knowing the appropriate principle for each genre” and knowing how to code switch within and across them, “to move readily against them, to know when and how to use them;” e) genre refers to “a full range of languages” available within place and occasion (p. 21-2).

Hillocks (1995) would approve of Freadman’s approach. In Teaching Writing as Reflective Practice, he advocates “frame experiments,” which are proven to aid reading and writing instruction by creating “gateway activities” that serve as a bridge between what is known and doable and what is new and experimental. In his frame experiment design, Hillocks outlines an inquiry approach, where teachers work through a specific series of steps in order to identify how best to teach particular writing tasks. First, the teacher identifies a particular writing genre to teach (say, memoir). Then he composes such a text outside of class. During this composition, he seeks to analyze the specific demands of the task. (For example, a narrative essay requires, among a number of distinct features, the ability to write with specificity.) Throughout the frame experiment, the teacher seeks to identify the key features necessary for meaningful and successful completion of the particular writing task. Such features may collectively comprise data points on a rubric for said assignment. The teacher then aims to recognize which features are within and outside of students’ existing schemata.

The next step is to invent and implement “gateway activities” for each key feature outside the realm of students’ schemata that bridge the gap between what students know and don’t know. In the classroom, the sequence of learning begins with students practicing (or more often, playing with) gateway activities as a bridge to learning the specific “key feature” being taught. [For example, as a gateway to writing with specificity, students may conduct a “mindful eating” exercise, where they extend a single bit of food over two minutes, resulting in a heightened attention to detail, a prerequisite for specificity.] Such focused practice helps students devise a framework for working in particular genres. The implicit is made explicit.

Hillocks’s frame/gateway approach fulfills the promise of Halliday’s SFL insights. While Halliday’s Process Analysis categories “suggest which features students may have to learn to participate in the discourse of various fields (Hillocks & Smith, 1991, p. 726),” his “situation types” provide ideal gateway activities to concretize for students the social aspects of individual discourse situations. Hillocks urges teachers to build student confidence by accessing their background knowledge. Undoubtedly, students can detect the text features of situations such as “Customer orders goods over the phone.” As a result, they come to see that each situation carries with it a certain communicative “template” so to speak. In a Hillocksian sense, situation types are the ideal means of mapping how to “read genre.”

Bazerman (1997) extends this metaphor of mapping so beautifully that I feel compelled to cite him at length. To Bazerman, genres are “environments … locations … the familiar places we go …and the guideposts we use to explore the unfamiliar” (p. 20). Genres are “the communicative domains” to which “we travel,” and as teachers:
we constantly welcome strangers into the discursive landscapes we value. But places that are familiar and important to us may not appear intelligible or hospitable to students we try to bring into our worlds. Moreover, students bring with them their own landscapes of familiar communicative places and desires. Students, bringing their own roadmaps from their previous experience, would also benefit from signs posted by those familiar with the new academic landscape. However, guideposts are only there when we construct them, are only useful if others know how to read them, and will only be used if they point toward destinations students see as worth going toward (p. 21).
Once he comes down from his landscape metaphor, Bazerman raises a series of practical considerations for teaching genre. “If we want students to learn to write,” he says, “we must locate the kinds of writing they will want to work hard at, the kinds of writing problems they will want to solve.” (p. 23).

If the Hillocks model enables teachers to aid students in the identification and production of genre-specific text-features, in order to achieve particular social functions, how might this ability to succeed across multiple genres manifest itself in classrooms? Two innovative texts are worth closer inspection: Romano’s BlendingGenre, Alternating Style (2000), and Davis & Shadle’s Teaching Multiwriting (2007). According to Bazerman 1997), deeply engaged practice with genre early in a course, should pay off later across a range of genres:
Once students learn what it is to engage deeply and write well in any particular circumstance, they have a sense of the possibilities of literate participation in any discursive arena. Moreover, in any new discursive circumstances they may enter into, they will have at least one set of well-developed practices to draw analogies from and contrasts to. Further, if we provide students some analytical vocabulary to reflect on how genres relate to the dynamics of situations, they will be able to observe and think about their new situations with some sophistication and strategic appropriacy (p. 26).
Both Romano’s (2000) and Davis & Shadle’s (2007) approaches might be used to test Bazerman’s claim. Each approach takes risks with genre, and for each, there are costs, but also benefits inherent in them.

Romano’s approach to the multigenre paper has been so well-received this decade that, in the context of this discussion, it has become a genre of its own. This “multigenre” genre, predominantly used by Romano as an alternative to the traditional research paper, enables students to explore a topic in a multitude of ways, using a variety of genres in order to capture a three-dimensional portrait of that topic. Whether linking said texts together, by theme, imagery, mood, or content:
"A multigenre paper arises from research, experience, and imagination. It is not an uninterrupted, expository monolog nor a seamless narrative nor a collection of poems. A multigenre paper is composed of many genres and subgenres, each piece self-contained, making a point of its own, yet connected by theme or topic and sometimes by language, images, and content. In addition to many genres, a multigenre paper may also contain many voices, not just the author's. The trick is to make such a paper hang together” (Romano, 2000, p. xi).
To be sure, this approach to writing is warmly received by students and teachers alike. My own students have embraced the freedom and creativity of mixing genres, producing interesting work; highlights include: a creative non-fiction narrative about being born in Korea (to a birth mother the adopted student never met), a talking house project (using a home as extended metaphor for a family history), an imagined screenplay about shopping at the mall with characters Jordan Baker and Daisy Buchanan, and a monologue in the voice of the bullet that kills Lennie Small. While the multigenre approach sparks creativity and enthusiasm, on its own it fails to serve students’ best interests. My own failures with Romano’s approach resulted from making the same progressivist assumptions criticized by Cope & Kalanztis (1993) and Knapp & Watkins (2005). Students instructed in genre literacy, I would argue, are most likely to not only make a paper “hang together” but to also do so with style and success.

Davis & Shadle (2007) add a new, more radical dimension to the multigenre approach, particularly in its unapologetic argument against “teaching academic discourse” and its treatment of visual and concrete art as “writing” (p. 3). Their “open method of composing – where different genres, media, disciplines, and cultures my be useful or essential, depending on rhetorical situations” is not intended as the occasional project but rather functions as the central mode of writing in their pedagogy (p. 3). They situate multiwriting in a “vernacular” tradition of inquiry, curiosity, and meaning-making (p. 5). While encouraging student choice and multigenre texts, Davis & Shadle out-radical Romano because non-print texts are encouraged, as are performances and even community service projects. Their conception of what counts as genre echoes the most liberal interpretations of genre theory. Multiwriting, they argue, occurs “in the spirit of inquiry” as a “crossroad discourse” that describes “a broader set of discursive practices that emerge at the crossroads of disciplines, cultures, political practices, values, ethnicities, histories, and ways of being” (p. 15). Ultimately, the authors envision their book as “a guide to rhetorical invention that spreads, potentially, from autobiography, to the academy, and into the rest of life” (2007, p. 15).

While some critics see the explicit teaching aspect of genre theory as “stiffl[ing] creativity because it focuses on formalistic conventions and draws artificial boundaries,” numerous scholars argue strongly against this. Bakhtin (1986) suggests, "genres must be fully mastered to be used creatively" (p. 80). Kress (qtd in Simmons, 2005) points out that “If there was [sic] a predictability and recognizability of text-forms, then . . . these were things that should be made available as explicit knowledge for all learners in school." Bazerman (1997) argues that “blurring, blending and mixing genres are hardly the same thing as abandoning all sense of genre; they are rather creative acts dependent on intimate knowledge of genre” (1997).

Lankshear & Knobel (2000) identify the Internet as highly multi-generic locale, and point to websites such as “SUCK, Stephen Johnson's FEED and Douglas Rushkoff's MEDIASQUAT” as particularly illustrative sites in genre-blending. Likewise, in an apparent defense of teaching for invention and creativity, the same authors (2000) suggest that “within an attention economy, individuals seek stages - performing spaces - from which they can perform for the widest/largest possible audiences” before citing Goldhaber’s idea that such an economy is based on ‘endless originality, or at least attempts at originality.” The authors suggest that “attention economy” is part of “the postmodern condition . . . (where) the practice of deliberately blurring and subverting genres, and breaking the rules” constitutes “powerful symbolic production.”

In fact, TIME’s Top 10 albums of 2008 is rife with multigeneric efforts, signaling pastiche, invention, and playfulness as the creative order of the day. Most significant is Girl Talk’s “Feed the Animals” album, which is essentially one long song broken into individual cuts, each comprised almost entirely of samples pulled from genres ranging from hip hop to punk to country. Track one alone samples from twenty-four artists, including Huey Lewis, Jay-Z, and Sinead O’Connor. Track seven juxtaposes The Carpenter’s with Metallica, as Lil Mama’s raps “Lip Gloss” over the top. Interestingly, the open-source Wikipedia page for “Feed the Animals,” which lists every artist on every song, is as popular as the album itself.

Heeding the call

This paper began with a simple thought: how about writing arguments in the form of sonnets? I have long been interested in juxtaposing unlikely genres, for a number of reasons: to call attention to the specific features/conditions that particular genres demand; to create challenging dilemmas; to make thinking outside the box the norm. I’ve since come to realize that, in true socio-generic fashion, my ideas are not entirely my own.

Bauer (2008) found that providing her students with the claim-warrant-evidence template of Toulmin’s model of argumentation unlocked the reading (and eventual writing) of modern poetry for them. The poem-as-argument framework allowed them to approach the poetry from a concrete place (poem itself as evidence); it gave them something to hold on to in a sea of abstractness (hypotheses about author’s intent as testable claims). Because students we already comfortable with Toulmin, they felt confident adapting this reading frame across genres.

This makes sense in terms of my own sponsorship of teaching adolescents to write better. In fact, it was a simple idea about blending poetry with argument that sparked the topography of the genre landscape that is this paper – composing argument in the form of an Italian sonnet. Like Bauer’s (2008) approach, my idea combines two text-genres from a single category (Arguing) in Knapp’s (Knapp & Watkins, 2005) genre-as-social process model. [To recap: the categories are describing, explaining, instructing, arguing, and narrating.]

The Italian sonnet, by nature and function, is an argument that pivots on the volta, or turn. It is custom-made for concession and counterargument. With a particular, teachable text-structure, the sonnet is also an ideal venue for a Hallidayan lens of close-reading clauses, which tend to be strung together necklace-like in traditional sonnets. In order for students to compose an argument as a sonnet, they will need genre knowledge of form, but also procedural knowledge. As for content, argument is everywhere (global warming, staying out past curfew, passing a romantic note to a stranger on a train), but condensing one into fourteen structured lines is less easy – but fun. In my practice, I'm especially interested in merging reading and writing, so an extension of this might be to inhabit a character who is conflicted about something; the task is to compose a sonnet, in-role, as a means of working through "your" conflict.

If the sonnet functions as an argument, how might other written conventions function, especially when situated as a communicative process? I like this question because it fosters a new way of reading text, I think. Kress (1999, p. 11) assets that “’Lifting’ a genre from one context and putting it in another . . . is an innovative act, an act of creativity” (qtd in Lankshear & Knobel, 2000). And the answer to the question can spark a sort of "cross-breeding" of genres that enhances the reading-writing connection. Perhaps such an approach to reading and writing within and across genres by become the norm in a classroom, to the point where students might create and spin a “Wheel of Genres” to pair unlikely genres together.

Romano (2000) proposes a multigenre approach to writing. However, students may be likely to choose only forms they are already comfortable with. Applying a genre-as-social function lens to multigenre work can aid students in
Better yet, teaching – and even training students – in Hillocks’s (1995) frame experiment/ gateway activity design will truly put Bazerman’s (1997) claims to the test; again:
Once students learn what it is to engage deeply and write well in any particular circumstance, they have a sense of the possibilities of literate participation in any discursive arena. Moreover, in any new discursive circumstances they may enter into, they will have at least one set of well-developed practices to draw analogies from and contrasts to. Further, if we provide students some analytical vocabulary to reflect on how genres relate to the dynamics of situations, they will be able to observe and think about their new situations with some sophistication and strategic appropriacy (p. 26).

Hillocks’s work, with its core of inquiry, is social, lending itself perfectly to a SFL model. We are reminded by genre theorists that grammar does not occur at the sentence-level alone, that genres themselves have their own grammar, and that grammar is indeed a social function. Hillocks helps us locate the grammatical structures within genres, so that we may explicitly teach students ways of working in these forms. Can we teach students to do the same?

References

Bakhtin, M. (1986). Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press.

Bauer, S. (2008). “Viewing a Poem as Argument.” The National Writing Project http://www.nwp.org/cs/public/print/resource/2689 13 Dec 20008.

Bawarshi, A. (2000). “The Genre Function.” College English. 62, 3, 335-60

Bazerman, C. (1997). "The Life of Genre, the Life in the Classroom." Genre and Writing.
Ed. W. Bishop and H. Ostrom. Boynton/Cook, 1997: 19-26.

Cope, B. & Kalanztis, M. (eds). (1993). The Powers of Literacy: A Genre Approach to Teaching Writing, Falmer Press, London, and University of Pittsburgh Press, PA.

Davis, R. & Shadle, M. (2007). Teaching Multiwriting; Researching and Composing with Multiple Genres, Media, Disciplines, and Cultures. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University.

Freadman, A. (1998). “Models of genre for language teaching.” South Central Review, 15, 1, 19-39.
Freedman, A. (1999). “Beyond the Text: Towards Understanding the Teaching and Learning of Genres.” TESOL Quarterly, 33, 4, 764-7

Halliday, M.A.K. (1985) An Introduction to Functional Grammar (2E 1994). London: Edward Arnold.

Hillocks, G. (1995). Teaching Writing as Reflective Practice. New York: Teachers College Press.

Hillocks, G. & Smith, M. W. (1991). "Grammar and usage." Handbook of research on teaching the English language arts. New York: Macmillian. 591-603.

Jamieson, (1975). "Antecedent Genre as Rhetorical Constraint." Quarterly Journal of Speech 61 (Dec. 1975): 406-15.

Knapp, P. & Watkins, M. (2005). Genre, Text, Grammer: Technologies for Teaching and Assessing Writing, Sydney: UNSW Press.

Lankshear & Knobel (2000). “Strategies, Tactics and the Politics of Literacy: Genres and Classroom Practices in a Context of Change.” Plenary Address, Third National Conference on Academic Texts. Puebla, México.

Macken, M. (1990). “A Genre-Based Approach to Teaching Writing, Years 3-6.” An Approach to Writing K-12. Book 1: Introduction. Sydney: Literacy & Education Research Network & the Directorate of Studies, NSW Department of School Education.
Martin, J. (1993). “Genre and literacy-Modelling context in educational linguistics.” Annual Review of Applied Linguistics. 13, 141-172.

Miller, C. (1984). “Genre as Social Action.” Quarterly Journal of Speech. 70, 151-167.

Romano, T. (2000). Blending Genre, Altering Style: Writing Multigenre Papers. Boynton/ Cook.

Simmons, M. (2005). Librarians as Disciplinary Discourse Mediators: Using Genre Theory to Move Toward Critical Information Literacy. portal: Libraries and the Academy, 5, 3, 297-311

first friday off in I don't know how long.

2008-12-19T19:17:00.002-05:00

Posting just to post today. Just to keep it going. Without the pressure of needing to "write" something.
So with that in mind:

Trip, v.2

2008-12-18T03:05:00.000-05:00

No France. New plans.

Leave: from Philadephia, PA, 12pm, Dec. 25

Stay: Dec. 25 – Dec. 31, International House, New Orleans, LA

Return: to Philadelphia, PA, 2:50pm, Dec. 31

Eat: 9:00pm Dec. 31, 10 ARTS by Eric Ripert, Ritz-Carlton Hotel, Philadelphia, PA

Sleep: Dec. 31, Ritz-Carlton Hotel, Philadelphia, PA

finals week

2008-12-16T20:47:00.002-05:00

Finals week is almost over, and I can't believe it's been a week since my last post.

Since then, I've submitted over thirty pages in research/research design, I've convinced weej to start a blog, and I've worked the Martini Beach's last Saturday night of the season (as waiter, busser, and runner - with a full dining room and Eddie Morgan playing live).

All-in-all a good week.

France in three days.

passion

2008-12-09T19:45:00.002-05:00

Paraphrase of a quote from the Boston Legal finale:

Whatever you do, live your days with passion. When you're not living with passion, you're dead.

What, exactly, does that mean (beyond the obvious)? What are the costs and gains from living in such a manner? What are the alternatives to this philosophy? Is this philosophy realistic? idealized? wise, even?

It certainly feels good, but is it realistic? is it sensible? and what if you can't do it? have you failed? should you be depressed? is something lacking?

Make no mistake, in the moment of its utterance (from Candace Bergen's mouth), I was all in; I was right there, feeling it. But one day later, at the end of a long (and yes, passion-filled) day, I wonder how true or wise that statement is.

Death as metaphor, however, is quite interesting. Just how many ways can we die? That is, before the body goes kaput...

And along the same lines: just how many ways can we be reborn?

Just asking these questions leads my mind to religion, and, simply put: I do not practice it. My feelings toward this fact are primarily twofold:
1) I think I'm missing out. I could certainly benefit with the calm that comes post-prayer.
2) I think, perhaps, that there's something courageous about finding my own way.

I think of Bakhtin;s "ideological becoming" here:
Some people get their ideologies from religion, which instructs us how to stand on certain things; others get their ideologies elsewhere; i would imagine our belief systems are borne out of the intersecting discourses we dip in and out of from day to day. Those we participate in most regularly (or most fully), must hold sway over us, in terms of how we think and how we identify ourselves. Nonetheless, we're no doubt multifaceted, and multivoiced. It follows that our identities are not fixed - even if "habitus" tricks us into believing so.

...let's see where this blog leads me.

(and who's this audience in my head?)

a-ha!

2008-12-08T22:21:00.002-05:00

Great day today.

First a ride into Philly w/ chef patrick. Then four hours on fire in the library. Sounds hilarious, right? But it was a great library day, where maybe four or five texts I've been reading synthesized in a flash. After all the slogging - breakthrough! And again I'm reminded that the flashes of inspiration come after chopping wood, carrying water. Not until I'm ready for them, and then, only when I'm not looking.

I can take this semester alone and turn it into a book.

Genre is giving me an entirely new lens to look through re: the R-W connection.

2008-12-07T21:38:00.003-05:00

Had a ball at the restaurant last night. I miss those twelve hour shifts when you're wide awake at the end of it, yet beat at the same time.

It was a party atmosphere last night. Good to see almost all of the faces who'd been in and out over the course of the year.

And Christina can handle a packed bar with grace, humor, and goofiness - a great combination, I think. Cool under pressure. It's nice to run that place together. Hell, we've been doing this business for long enough; and we act the same way at home. Last night was nice - almost like having all those people in our home.

We'll enjoy it as long as it lasts. And then, on to the next thing...whatever that may be.

genre-blending

2008-12-05T14:27:00.003-05:00

At the tail end of my first semester, I think I'm heading somewhere interesting...genre hybridity.

I've always been into mixing things that don't seem to go together - not always with pleasant results (e.g. cooking); but with writing, I love that approach. A favorite example: McSweeneys.

But I'm looking at crossing-genres as a means of teaching writing...pretty much: writing about texts in unexpected ways. E.g. analyzing a radio commercial by composing a sonnet (because sonnets and adverts are both, in their own way, arguments). At this point, I'm thinking that genres most worth crossing are those that share a rhetorical concern (e.g. argument/persuasion). If nothing else, it's a fun game to play with writing.

But then again, that shared concern is not always necessary. Writing creative-nonfiction research narratives, for instance, doesn't seem to have a natural overlap; but this particular writing form is pretty kick-ass. And outside the norm (i.e. requiring thought.)

Other hybrids: high-fallutin' discourse analysis of fast food menus; imagined conversations between authors n' dead relatives; arguments w/ alter-egos; fashion ensemble-as-5-paragraph essay; 50-word essays; etc. (idk: these are just random thoughts)

But from what I'm reading, people are conceptualizing genres in ways I've never thought about. Not as fixed textual forms, but as social processes - pretty interesting stuff. I'm still processing it.

etc.

Returning to the blog

2008-12-05T14:23:00.002-05:00

One particular goal here:

Something worth looking back on one day.

Maybe for posts like these

testing

2008-12-05T14:12:00.002-05:00

Test post - to see if I can hyperlink.

And to see if I can add a pic...

argument is everywhere? must it be?

2007-12-04T15:42:00.000-05:00

Idea for novel:

protagonist: English teacher-type who preaches this concept: "Argument is everywhere." All work is structured and aimed toward this end. Analysis, persuasion, close-reading, etc. Tries to sell the idea that we must be able to deconstruct in order to fully comprehend. Analyzes literature, music, advertisements, film, art. How built? What point? What evidence? His entire approach is rooted in the logical, the supportable, the defensible. Argument, indeed, is everywhere.........even though the human heart is not...

the ending: he realizes that he's been wrong all along...sadly...tragically

circumstances: unsure as of now

fear: this is prophetic

the literature

2007-11-29T20:09:00.000-05:00

A student today told me she hung a handout from class on her wall: Introduction to Transcendentalism. And yesterday, we read Whitman. And most of them dug Kerouac. And next week, we're reading "Leaves of Grass." Not the worst job in the world.

Not at all. But if you asked me two days ago, I'd be singing a different tune.

And so it goes...

This week

2007-11-15T12:50:00.000-05:00

The busiest week of my career. I'm coming out of it ok. That's worth noting.

Next time, I'll try to remember this. Eventually, I'll breathe.

3 questions about fear

2007-10-18T17:04:00.000-04:00

What is the role of fear in writing?
In teaching?
In teaching writing?

The benefits and dangers of risk-taking?

figuring things out

2007-10-18T16:55:00.000-04:00

Again: a good day. Worth taking note of. Current.tv; Picasso-talk; Author's chair; feedback on my own piece - useful stuff; Cricket Club - always a good time.

I write this down so that I can remember. Some days, I'm not so pleased. Then again, some weeks, I'm nothing but seasick from the highs and lows.

We get paid in other ways. We must have screws loose, but we do what we love. And that's part of the secret.

Just a part.

(words might...maybe...set us free)

Jeez...

2007-10-15T19:54:00.000-04:00

There are days when I can hardly listen to myself talk. I hear my voice, but my mind is elsewhere. And they are supposed to listen to me?

Yes! They are. Haha.

I am the expert.

(and the clock strikes eight, and it's time to go home)

Gotta say

2007-09-20T14:39:00.000-04:00

Today was a good day. It's worth noting that.

Roles

2007-09-19T12:20:00.000-04:00

How much of teaching is acting? How much of this is a performance?

For that matter, who is not acting in a classroom? It's those moments when the masks are off - mine and theirs - that give me the energy I need to do this job.

And in between classes, it doesn't feel like breaktime. I feel like I'm recharging and sometimes like I'm spent. There's no way for me to not care.

But we're all acting all the time. Mostly.

Language analysis of "Back to School"

2007-09-18T14:55:00.000-04:00

Brief language analysis of A. Barra's blog post, "Back to School."
- by JUSTIN CHEN

The language is blunt, the sentences short and direct. Three sentences in a row contain three words each. The writer speaks of the new school year. He seems distressed; however, as he continues to write, he sounds much brighter. It is as if he is trying to be optimistic. Then, bam, he gets confident, and maybe a little cocky. He knows it’s going to be a good year.

Back to school

2007-09-05T22:27:00.000-04:00

Yesterday was a rough day for me. End of summer. Back to work. Short on sleep. It was a transition day, I guess. Today, however, was a lot of fun. It was nice to see my new students and guess what was going on in their heads as I blabbered on and on. I've changed a lot as a teacher - I don't just think it's going to be a good year; I know it is.
Lots of work. Lots of fun. Lots of thinking...

It just took one rough day for me to fall back in my groove.

What I'm doing here

2007-08-21T14:38:00.001-04:00

I wonder what will become of this blog. I think I'll use it mainly as a tool for reflection, to make public my feelings of success, anxiety, puzzlement, etc.

I'll probably post good writing here too, by me and by others. Mainly, though, I want it to turn into its own thing, to show me where it's meant to go.

We'll see what happens...