Through the looking glass darkly

Amanda French - 0024
BERA conference paper


effective student writing requires certain kinds of 'situated' writing practices. How and why particular writing practices reflect and shape the world view of individuals and their place in any given discourse community. 


What are the values and attitudes that underpin discourses around writing in higher education. And how do these inform and shape lecturer's expectations and perceptions of students' writing. 


Her question mirrors the question I have asked - although the terrain within which it is located is different. 


The desire is to deconstruct and interrogate these assumptions. (They - the assumptions, beliefs -  must first of all be made visible). The point then of research is to disrupt, de-familiarise and problematise the 'discourse of transparency'. 


I also want to identify the tensions and trace the contours along which these tension are manifest. To arrive at a new set of metaphors for how these two notions of literacy co-exist. 


Saturated discourses - rendered invisible by their very situatedness.  Often writing is treated as the finished product. 


I remain interested and deeply curious about Bereiter and Scaramalia (1987) the role that writing plays in the learning process - which would fling me back to the position that views it as thoroughly embedded - writing what we know is thoroughly entwined in the process of what we know. 


I note in this thinking that one of the attitudes that literacy teachers often have about writing an literacy is that language is either right or it is wrong. I suspect they treat my attempts to dislodge the ultimate correctness of language - its thorough mutability as idiosyncratic. 


For some this absoluteness of language is an anchor. Like the belief in intelligence. 


My desire is to explore teachers perceptions of language, their own experience of language and theory constructions of language as a pedagogic resource with the intention of understanding how they embody or reflect particular epistemological or political world views. 


Methodology - I am here drawn to situational analysis - grounded theory pushed around the postmodern turn & Institutional ethnography. 


I am at data that has 'depth' & thickness rather than breadth. 

Rethinking Education

http://www.red-conference.ch

what next: explicit criteria sometimes lack depth

We are dealing with judgements that are not regulated by categories. I judge. But if I am asked by what criteria do I judge, I will have no answer to give. (Lyotard, 1985: 14)

Activity

Some good and constructive ground covered


1) Paper proposed to 'The Learner' Conference in Mauritius in July - Quality and Worthwhile Professional Knowledge


2) Another conference identified in Canada - and possible paper idea well formulated


3) Still waiting from Literacy & Numeracy Studies


4) Mid way through Framing Quality: what do we know? I think an American Journal as a try out or Discourse studies as option #2


5) Looking actively for collaborations - RaPAL ... any other ideas


This is beginning to feel like activity and becoming a researcher. It will all land in good time. 


Sam Duncan's - what are we doing when we read was enjoyable. 


Next I think I need an email to my UnDips to see how many feel they can participate. All that is different now - the photographs. 

Canada International Conference on Education (CICE-2011)

http://www.ciceducation.org/Home.html


View Sculpting a Literacy Practice as a starting point - an opening up of the area. Look again and redraft the paper you have sent to Derek and work it into a proposal for this conference. 

Student Writing - Lillis

The aspect of desire she explored was other than what I had imagined. 


What we want is closely aligned to what we feel are the possibilities and potentialities afforded by the context of our lives. 


Desire for educational often deferred, it is shaped in terms of other desires. The dream of salvation through romance becomes transformed into the dream of salvation through education. 


Feminist critique of essayist literacy - coded as binary

• logic over emotion
• academic truth over personal experience
• linearity of circularity
• explicitness over evocation
• closing down of possible meanings as opposed to opening up
• certainty over uncertainty
• formality over informality

Writing viewed from an either/or perspective. Unmarked form - the norm. 

addressivity - who am I writing to and is there anybody in this text. Essay as more then merely 'rat-trapping' what the lecturere has said: ventriloquating. 

Suggests 4 types of dialogue, to meet the demands and desires of 

• tutor-directive dialogue aimed at talking the student-writer into essayist literacy practice
• collaborative dialogue aimed at populating the student-writers text with her own intentions
• tutor-directive dialogue aimed at making language visible
• dialogue which facilitates student talkback as part of a long conversation

I must say that I don't find Lillis style of writing easy. I don't find the text engaging or compelling though I like what she writes about and what she has to say - how she writes about it in terms of content (it is her style that seems to jar) 

I like the way she reference's text. She seems to have a reader in mind - so often she quotes names, year as is standard - but she also quotes the chapter. 

The discussion really opens up the extent to which it is almost impossible to separate content from construct in essay writing. The dangers of an abstract approach. What I write is caught up with how I write. The cultural style of different disciplines, but also the connection between self, action, text - meaning. 

I am nervous and excited about research - postDoc. 

Table 7.1 on page 165 is also very interesting. 

• Dominant       è  resistant   

• Skills  è creative expression  è socialisation (teaching as implicit induction) è socialisation (teaching as explicit induction)  è academic literacies

• HE as homogeneous: reproduce dominant discourses  è HE as heterogeneous make visible, challenge, play with (& subvert) dominant discourses 

A Dream Deferred, 

by Langston Hughes

Here I think of educational desire. here I mean secret longings, private ambition, unrealistic aspirations. 

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up 
like a raisin in the sun? 
Or fester like a sore-- 
And then run? 
Does it stink like rotten meat? 
Or crust and sugar over-- 
like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags 
like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?