Onlooking or Engaged? Negotiating Basic Writing Needs at the Crossroads of Technology, Culture & Class nlooking or Engaged (original) (raw)
Related papers
Students’ perspectives on academic writing in the digital age
TechTrends, 2014
This study brings together three student comments and three theoretical constructs taken from Bakhtin's (1981) collection of essays The Dialogic Imagination, written in the 1930s. Bakhtin's concepts of the chronotope, interanimation and the monologic provide lenses on a shifting student perspective on authoritative writing in universities and a potential change in future forms of academic writing. The result is an exploration of how time and space together affect and alter modes of academic communication, how communication itself emerges from dialogues that combine our own and others' thinking, and how attempts to close down and conventionalize academic practices will (and can usefully) be overcome through experimentation with genre. Being dialogical entails engaging with the emergent culture, not ditching its immediate predecessor: we will not 'unlearn' how to read and write for print but we can expand our repertoire beyond it.
Academic Writing Online: Crossing Cultures, Courses, Languages, and Educational Levels
Addressing the conference theme of cross-cultural issues in the teaching of writing, we present a model for online discussions of academic subject matter by students from three diverse cultures and institutions (two in the U.S. and one in Sweden). Students participated in online discussion of four published English translations of one Swedish poem by Tomas Tranströmer. Writing in English with references to Swedish words and phrases, students explored on a Web discussion board the language of these different translations and the ways that readers' understanding of writing is affected by their own cultural experiences and their reading of each others' reflections and analyses. Through the conversational discourse of their online discussions, students demonstrated their understanding of rhetorical features such as audience, purpose, and voice as well as their understanding of writing for various genres and media. In this "new community of critical and creative discourse" (Moulthrop and Kaplan," 1991, p. 8), our students learned about writing, reading, literature, translation, interpretation, culture, technology, and each other. Our presentation suggests a model for designing such cross-cultural online activities and suggestions for further research and development into the discourse features of conversational, academic writing.
Our paper offers two cases in which we examine the powerful literacy moves made by both a secondary high school English student and a secondary English preservice teacher. Through the case of the high school student, Reema, a young Iraqi refugee woman now living in Sweden, we show that student narrative writing actually limits teacher understanding of the student while simultaneously giving the semblance of empowering the student. It does so for two reasons: 1) the writing in which Reema is being asked to engage inadvertently privileges a private reflective stance by making it public and in doing so forefronts an affective rather than analytical stance toward a problem; and 2) the semblance of authenticity in the narrative writing masks important contextual and historical experiences which not only backgrounds critical thinking, but also backgrounds the multi-dimensional identity that Reema brings into her school context. Finally, our analysis of classroom academic talk and writing shows that linguistic features of academic and analytical language use are distinct from narrative ones (Schleppegrell, 2004) and are important to address in light of state and national achievement expectations. While Reema’s case illustrates the ways in which the narrative writing requirements promote a problematic effacement of the writer’s self, the case we present of the secondary English preservice teacher illustrates another expression of the writing curriculum in the Unites States: writing for testing. A preservice teacher in an urban teacher residency, Sam learned to teach in a school that required her to tether her entire writing instruction to the ACT, the standardized test intended to measure college readiness. Throughout the year, Sam struggled to find ways to help her students find authenticity in their writing within a context that was largely geared toward students “filling in the bubbles,” an orientation that bled into her students’ approach to writing wherein they routinely asked Sam, “What do you want me to put next?” Taken together, our analysis of these two case studies illustrates a bipolar writing curriculum in American schools--writing as reflection and writing as formula. Neither orientation emphasizes the kinds of critical and analytic thinking that ought to be foregrounded in writing instruction in schools.
On Class, Race, and Dynamics of Privilege: Supporting Generation 1�5 Writers Across the Curriculum
2015
The purpose of this qualitative study was to better understand genera-tion 1.5 student perceptions of WAC and writing faculty, their interac-tions with white, native English speaking peers in the classroom, and to hear ideas from them about ways to create more inclusive writing practices and environments across the disciplines. The study found that despite being valued for their diversity of thought and experience, these multilingual students experienced discrimination both inside and out-side the classroom. It is argued in this essay that in order to create and maintain inclusive classrooms, instructors must also take into consid-eration attitudes pertaining to the socioeconomic, racial, and linguistic climate of their institution. Diversity must be couched within a context of institutional engagement, be driven by transformational leadership, be valued by the faculty community, and be experienced by all students as a core component of their educational experience. —James A. Anders...
International Students in First-Year Writing: A Journey Through Socio-Academic Space
2018
Many in international education are well aware of increased international student mobility trends and internationalization efforts around the world. The United States in particular has been home to over one million international students for the last few years. The push for internationalization has become a buzzword on American campuses. It is within this context that Megan Siczek seeks to put a face to what is often only discussed in numbers. In her dissertation-turned-book, International Students in First-Year Writing: A Journey through Socio-Academic Space (2018), Siczek describes the lived experiences of 10 international students enrolled in a firstyear writing (FYW) course at an American university. Chapter 1 points out that the overall goal of Siczek's book is to look beyond traditional conceptualizations of international students. Instead of focusing on numbers, language issues, adjustment challenges, assimilation, or even broader themes of culture, Siczek takes a more individualized approach in order to inform policy and praxis through reality-the lived experiences of students. She follows students as they are "projected" into an FYW course, considered to be the most highly enrolled course in American higher education. In particular, the FYW course at the research site included theme-based courses meant to intellectually engage students while helping develop their writing skills. Chapter 2 gives background on the 10 participants, who come from China,
Un/Blocked: Writing, Race, and Gender in the American Academy
American Quarterly, 2023
This essay examines writer's block (and flow) in the American academy. It critically maps the production of blocks in higher education policy, the organization of knowledge, and academics' lived experiences with inquiry. University studies scholars, such as Marc Bousquet and Christopher Newfield, have powerfully critiqued academia's corporatization. This work, however, at times glosses over the diversely felt impacts of institutionalized oppression on writing and learning. In contrast to university studies, faculty development literature has provided granular accounts of writing in a publish-or-perish climate, as in Robert Boice's classic Advice for New Faculty Members or Paul Silvia's How to Write a Lot: A Practical Guide to Productive Academic Writing. The latter work, however, tends to offer individualized advice that risks exacerbating the very problems of the knowledge economy. The present essay underscores that written inquiry is both personal and political, bringing intersectional American studies together with university studies and affect studies to extend work on academe and social justice—such as Roderick Ferguson's The Reorder of Things: The University and Its Pedagogies of Minority Difference and Eli Meyerhoff's Beyond Education: Radical Studying for Another World. "Un/Blocked" argues that writer's block is less a psychological syndrome than a symptom of nationalist investments in academic writing as a way to manage knowledge, labor, and subject-formation. The slash in the title, then, marks writers' ongoing efforts to grapple with knowledge's terms and conditions—hard work that is part of academic inquiry itself.