The readings for this week—grouped under the title Theories of Pedagogy—ask questions about ways in which we teach composition. Which pedagogy is most effective? Are experimental methods useful? How can we classify these pedagogies? Do all theories need to apply to the classroom setting? Whatever the question asked of by each scholar this week, each study seeks to expand the field of composition studies by re-envisioning the composition classroom and the main elements (writer, reader, teacher, reality, and the such) that make it work.
We open with George Hillocks, who presents a massive meta-analysis of over 500 experimental studies of the composition classroom between 1963 and 1982. Utilizing the sophistication and scientifically tangible results of statistical analysis, Hillocks brings a great deal of credibility to experimental studies in the writing classroom. For example, Hillock classifies his 60 sample studies into different categories depending on such elements as the mode of instruction in the classroom and the focus of instruction in the classroom. Using these classifications, Hillocks proves that classrooms which create an environmental mode of teaching (which, among other things, promotes both peer and teacher feedback to work and direct instruction to clearly-outlined goals) perform better than those which implement a natural mode (where teacher is simple facilitator of positive feedback) or individualized mode (where instruction is done on an individual basis, mostly by tutors).
Furthermore, Hillock proves something that must have been rather shocking for his day and audience: when studying the focus of instruction, Hillock proves that classrooms that study grammar and mechanics perform nearly a third lower than classrooms that study no grammar and mechanics. Taking up these controversial topics in the early 80s, Hillock paves the way for more experimental research in theories of pedagogy in a time when many thought they were to a large extent a waste of time and energy.
Going even a few years before Hillock, we then turn to Berlin who, writing in 1982, outlines the major pedagogical theories of the time. Interestingly, Berlin supports a classification of pedagogical theories not interested in the emphasis of one element of the composing process over the other (e.g. writer, reader, reality) but rather by the way in which these elements are envisioned and how they are changed from one theory to the other. Not surprisingly, then, most of his classifications are based on philosophical interpretations of rhetoric: the dominant Current-Traditional Rhetoric and his reactionary Neo-Platonic, Neo-Aristotelian, and New Rhetorics.
These divisions are not so new to me, but as I became reacquainted with these schools of thought I was surprised to see how much my own philosophies on rhetoric have changed over the past five to seven years. I recall first being introduced with the New Rhetoric and being totally won over. But now I see major compositional problems with viewing a writer as creator of truth and audience as shaper of the writer’s universe. Instead, I keep being yanked back into reader-response and wonder as this theory does about the relation between writer and reader, or more importantly about communities. If the writer is actually at most times a reader who actualizes her own text as her audience must do after publication then this would not place the creation of truth inside the writer as New Rhetoric does but in the community, in the writer as a reader. But I digress; Berlin’s contribution to our list of readers this week is that studying different pedagogies does not merely mean we study different subject areas over others, it means we begin to be taught different theories of reality, different theories of truth.
Our final three readers bring theories of pedagogy into the current century with Breuch writing in 2002, Fulkerson in 2005, and Downs in 2007.
Breuch finds problems with the contemporary (negative) view of that post-process approach to teaching composition, that process theory is simply a call for the codification of writing steps which can be taught in the composition classroom. Specifically, she argues that post-process theory contributes to theories of pedagogy not as a concrete application to the classroom but rather as a redefinition of writing as "an activity rather than a body of knowledge” and that “communicative interactions with students [are] dialogic rather than monologic" (98-99). Her work suggests that studying theories of pedagogy goes beyond simply applying study to the classroom; her work suggests a reexamining of the definitions and players within that classroom itself.
Fulkerson and then Down and Wardle argue that writing has dramatically changed since the turn of the new century. Fulkerson supports that writing in college has become a topic of great argumentation among composition scholars since the boom of cultural studies hit the university. Down and Wardle argue that teaching writing in the new century has become an opportunity to teach writing as a legitimate discipline. They suggest, too, that writing in the new century has become a battle to support one method of thinking over another; however, this thinking envisions writing as a sect of scholarship with a rich and diverse history with much to add to study at the university aside from its function in preparing students for the writing they must complete while in college.
4.08.2010
Proposal for: Composition 2.0: Erasing Authorship and Considering (for Real) Communal Writing
In the opening to their most recent specially-edited edition of Computers and Composition (Jan 2010), Michael Day, Randall McClure, and Mike Palmquist call for a new understanding of Web 2.0 and the Web 2.0 Movement. This vision, which they name Composition 2.0, realizes Web 2.0 as it has had drastic effects on the composition process, collaboration within composition, and participatory writing. Embracing hypertext composition for its advances in online collaboration, scholarship both in and beyond this edition have explored the influence collaboration has taken on the writer; however, very little if anything has been done to examine the influence Web 2.0 and collaborative computer-mediated composition has taken in blurring the lines between authorship and readership. Johndan Johnson-Eilola, in his groundbreaking work Nostalgic Angels, supports a deconstructionist view of hypertext composition. Using the foundations build by his study, a social understanding of hypertext composition begins to realize the internet as an actualized deconstruction of society in which borders are easily broken and the rules which govern its composition are continually being renewed and altered by even the most unassuming participant. From these foundations a stronger understanding of hypertext authorship can be understood as the product of collaborative communities rather than the product of an individual who can be constantly and limitlessly censored.
This paper will argue that a collaborative view of hypertext composition reveals new roles for traditionally defined players such as writer and reader, roles which easily become obfuscated and create social space where authorship becomes the product of collaboration.
As such, this paper will suggest new ways of viewing online composition. As influenced by Johnson-Eilola, it will suggest a strongly social view of online collaborative efforts such as blogs and wikis. It will begin with a brief introduction on current pessimism in hypertext studies and then suggest a social view of computer-mediated composition. This social view, as well as seeing an important and unmistakable obfuscation of author and reader, will open up discussion for potential ways in which Web 2.0 (or Composition 2.0) has pulled apart the writing process and allowed for writing in ways never before imagined.
Furthermore, it will be of benefit to those interested in the field of computers and composition, especially to scholars who are working to understand the impact of social networking sites and online collaborative efforts on composition. It will also be of interest to individuals who are interested in the impact continued social studies of the internet have on composition in general and those who either agree or disagree with the statement that the internet has changed permanently altered the way writing is done in communities.
This paper will argue that a collaborative view of hypertext composition reveals new roles for traditionally defined players such as writer and reader, roles which easily become obfuscated and create social space where authorship becomes the product of collaboration.
As such, this paper will suggest new ways of viewing online composition. As influenced by Johnson-Eilola, it will suggest a strongly social view of online collaborative efforts such as blogs and wikis. It will begin with a brief introduction on current pessimism in hypertext studies and then suggest a social view of computer-mediated composition. This social view, as well as seeing an important and unmistakable obfuscation of author and reader, will open up discussion for potential ways in which Web 2.0 (or Composition 2.0) has pulled apart the writing process and allowed for writing in ways never before imagined.
Furthermore, it will be of benefit to those interested in the field of computers and composition, especially to scholars who are working to understand the impact of social networking sites and online collaborative efforts on composition. It will also be of interest to individuals who are interested in the impact continued social studies of the internet have on composition in general and those who either agree or disagree with the statement that the internet has changed permanently altered the way writing is done in communities.
Literacy and Community: The Ties that Bind in Literacy Theory
This week’s readings—or rather the readings for our last class that I switched up with the readings for this week—examine the influence of literacy on daily life, community, and profession. It seems clear from the readings that literacy studies is a crucial subfield of composition studies that asks questions just as much of scholarship as it does of society. Looking at the readings as a whole, it appears as though literacy studies calls for a reexamination of literacy, teaching on a community-by-community basis. Heath, Hull, and Cushman suggest that looking within the community’s complex literacies for the best solution to literacy-inspired problems will create better employees, better citizens, and a better understanding of the field of literacy studies as a whole. Brandt and McCarthy argue that locally based sponsors/teachers dramatically enhance/detract from the student’s learning of literacy and literacy abilities. On a community level, these teachers shape the literacy of their students and with it their abilities in composition as well.
As our earliest sampled theorist for the week, Shirley Brice Heath explores the “protean” or ever changing, complex task of assigning one stage of literacy to any one community. Using data collected from the community of Trackton, located in the Carolinas, between 1969-79, Heath explores the influence of literacy as it comes into contact with life from all angles, and concludes that literacy events and the literacies of communities exist in many forms that cannot easily be categorized on the scale developed by Goody for cataloguing a community somewhere between oral and literate. Rather, communities like Trackton—and arguably all communities—encounter different stages of literacy through different literacy events in different social transactions over time. As Heath states, "the nature of oral and written language and the interplay between them is ever shifting, and these changes both respond to and create shifts in the individual and social meaning of literacy" (466). So Heath’s contribution to literacy studies is not purely a call to view literacy events as varied event to event in each community, she also offers a call to understand that literacy events occur within a social context, one which shapes and creates meaning for both the individual and the community itself. Lucille McCarthy, who writes five years after Heath, suggests such a study could also apply to students whose many different communities are each class they take. Each must be examined and its literacy understood and learned separate from the other. Since each course may have different goals and objectives, it is difficult to gauge its placement on a literacy scale, just as it is difficult to place a community as described by Heath on a literacy scale.
I believe this is a very humble study that could easily be applied to prejudice for/against the literate/illiterate as defined by the scale Heath mentions as described by Goody. It is very important to not simply label a community by one or two literacy events but far more useful to examine, as Heath does, the interplay of literacy and orality within each community and perhaps the extent to which traditionally high-level literate communities exhibit oral activity and high-oral communities embrace literacy events. This is the very topic Ellen Cushman brings this very idea to fruition in her article where she defends the importance of the oft-neglected lower classes in policy making. Particularly looking to faculty members as potentially large contributors to policy change, Cushman argues that literacy studies gives weight to arguments made outside of the upper-class ranks of government.
Deborah Brandt, like Heath, sets out to view a historical understanding of literacy with fresh eyes. Outlining the rise and fall of apprenticeships at small, decentralized print shops of the American antebellum, Brandt concludes that like the sponsors of these programs, contemporary writing scholars "haul a lot of freight for the opportunity to teach writing" (183). Scholars, she suggests, must carry the burden of ideological influence of their teaching, especially that suggested from the classic argument from business employers that students who graduate college do not know how to write. Brandt hopes, in her final statement, that her work promotes an understand of composition not as a field which prepares its students for the job markets they wish to enter but rather as one which assists and studies individuals in their pursuit of literacy, and also of the literacy that pursues them.
Glynda Hull turns her study on literacy to the workplace. Investigating the current understanding of literacy in the workplace, Hull looks beyond the engendered stereotypes to see the potential for new understandings of workforce potential and literacy in the workplace. Interestingly, Hull suggests the benefits of an apprenticeship-style program may aid in instructing employees in the literacy of a particular workforce that may be simple to some but inaccessible to others. This reminds me greatly of the work I have done while at Starbucks Coffee Company, which is steeply entrenched in a literacy of its own making. I have had many opportunities to train new employees and have often found that the most learning comes from watching a skill in progress as a silent observer, learning about the skill, observing once again, and then attempting to carry out the skill. Just as Hull suggests workers cannot assumed to be fully-literate in their workplace without seriously rethinking the ways they are trained, teaching a new employee at Starbucks the entire culture of coffee as well as the company’s spin on this culture is a weighty process that works best when tailored to fit the person learning the material instead of the company or person teaching the material.
As our earliest sampled theorist for the week, Shirley Brice Heath explores the “protean” or ever changing, complex task of assigning one stage of literacy to any one community. Using data collected from the community of Trackton, located in the Carolinas, between 1969-79, Heath explores the influence of literacy as it comes into contact with life from all angles, and concludes that literacy events and the literacies of communities exist in many forms that cannot easily be categorized on the scale developed by Goody for cataloguing a community somewhere between oral and literate. Rather, communities like Trackton—and arguably all communities—encounter different stages of literacy through different literacy events in different social transactions over time. As Heath states, "the nature of oral and written language and the interplay between them is ever shifting, and these changes both respond to and create shifts in the individual and social meaning of literacy" (466). So Heath’s contribution to literacy studies is not purely a call to view literacy events as varied event to event in each community, she also offers a call to understand that literacy events occur within a social context, one which shapes and creates meaning for both the individual and the community itself. Lucille McCarthy, who writes five years after Heath, suggests such a study could also apply to students whose many different communities are each class they take. Each must be examined and its literacy understood and learned separate from the other. Since each course may have different goals and objectives, it is difficult to gauge its placement on a literacy scale, just as it is difficult to place a community as described by Heath on a literacy scale.
I believe this is a very humble study that could easily be applied to prejudice for/against the literate/illiterate as defined by the scale Heath mentions as described by Goody. It is very important to not simply label a community by one or two literacy events but far more useful to examine, as Heath does, the interplay of literacy and orality within each community and perhaps the extent to which traditionally high-level literate communities exhibit oral activity and high-oral communities embrace literacy events. This is the very topic Ellen Cushman brings this very idea to fruition in her article where she defends the importance of the oft-neglected lower classes in policy making. Particularly looking to faculty members as potentially large contributors to policy change, Cushman argues that literacy studies gives weight to arguments made outside of the upper-class ranks of government.
Deborah Brandt, like Heath, sets out to view a historical understanding of literacy with fresh eyes. Outlining the rise and fall of apprenticeships at small, decentralized print shops of the American antebellum, Brandt concludes that like the sponsors of these programs, contemporary writing scholars "haul a lot of freight for the opportunity to teach writing" (183). Scholars, she suggests, must carry the burden of ideological influence of their teaching, especially that suggested from the classic argument from business employers that students who graduate college do not know how to write. Brandt hopes, in her final statement, that her work promotes an understand of composition not as a field which prepares its students for the job markets they wish to enter but rather as one which assists and studies individuals in their pursuit of literacy, and also of the literacy that pursues them.
Glynda Hull turns her study on literacy to the workplace. Investigating the current understanding of literacy in the workplace, Hull looks beyond the engendered stereotypes to see the potential for new understandings of workforce potential and literacy in the workplace. Interestingly, Hull suggests the benefits of an apprenticeship-style program may aid in instructing employees in the literacy of a particular workforce that may be simple to some but inaccessible to others. This reminds me greatly of the work I have done while at Starbucks Coffee Company, which is steeply entrenched in a literacy of its own making. I have had many opportunities to train new employees and have often found that the most learning comes from watching a skill in progress as a silent observer, learning about the skill, observing once again, and then attempting to carry out the skill. Just as Hull suggests workers cannot assumed to be fully-literate in their workplace without seriously rethinking the ways they are trained, teaching a new employee at Starbucks the entire culture of coffee as well as the company’s spin on this culture is a weighty process that works best when tailored to fit the person learning the material instead of the company or person teaching the material.
3.25.2010
Composing on Computer: Discovering the Stakes of Compu-Writing
The readings for this week, grouped under the heading Computers and Writing, begin to discover the possibilities and limitations for composition done through emerging technologies. While some scholars see great potential in the methods of teaching and composition possible through the advent of the computer, others debate some very poignant warnings (perhaps evolutions of the same warnings scholars have always given toward writing) that computer-based and processed writing still engender language and embed fierce power struggles that may be overlooked at first glance. Still, computer writing appears to be here to stay and a few powerful programs have certainly overtaken our composition processes (McGee and Ericsson note that it is estimated about 80%-90% of word processing is done on Microsoft Word). As such, it is an important subfield of study and certainly worth more and deeper investigation.
Patricia Sullivan opens the week as our earliest featured scholar, which is perhaps not saying much since she publishes in 1991. Arguing that new developments in page-layout manipulations in word processing platforms have given great (and perhaps foreign) power to writers, Sullivan diagrams the ways in which computer writing has blurred the process method. The writer (notice the careful word choice here: writer, not author) traditionally has submitted text to a publisher and then with careful critique and revision, the publisher prints the final form of the text for the reader. Sullivan argues that with the implementation of word processing programs, the writer can manipulate text as traditionally only could a publisher. As such, the drafting process becomes obscured as writer now has more control over their text before submission to readers. Interestingly, I believe Sullivan’s argument could even be taken a step further. Perhaps the drafting process does become obscured through computer-based word processing, but if we see computer-based writing in its most organic form—hypertext—we can begin to see that computer-based writing also obscures the roles and identities of writer/reader. Who really is the writer of the text of a wiki? How do we define the writer of a blog comment, as reader or as writer? I didn’t read any of the optional articles on internet plagiarism by Purdy or Howard, but I suspect that they might also tend toward viewing hypertext composition (especially with the theories of Web 2.0) as a collaborative effort on behalf of writer and reader instead of the more traditional composing processes as described (and antiquated) by Sullivan.
Harris and Wambeam being to this week’s reading perhaps the most encouraging article for computer-based writing. Their work, “The Internet-Based Composition Classroom: A Study in Pedagogy,” describes and expounds upon a “pedagogical experiment” conducted in the spring semester of 2004. Working with complimentary syllabi, these two professors set out to test if teaching composition through an internet-based classroom would be more effective than not. Utilizing multiple cutting-edge, yet accessible and what sounds like pretty inexpensive, resources like MOO, the classes found some startling results. From a purely statistical standpoint, students in the internet-enriched classroom became significantly better writers from the start to the end of the semester while student in the controlled non-enriched classroom actually became marginally worse writers. Furthermore, students in the control significantly disagreed with the statement “I enjoy writing” by the end of the semester while students in the enriched classroom significantly agreed. Despite proving that students actually perform better in the enriched classroom, Harris and Wambeam make a compelling argument that the enriched classroom also creates students who are enthusiastic about writing.
McGee and Ericsson take a startling shift in tone from that of Harris and Wambeam. Their study on Microsoft and the development of its grammar checker (MSGC) open a whole new area of study but most importantly reveals hidden power struggles latent within computer-based composition. I immediately connected with this article because I have often thought—as I’m sure we all have—of the ineffectiveness of MSGC. It is startling that in comparison to the hundred of thousands of English teachers who teach grammar, MSGC influences tens of millions. It is depressing that so many of those who use MSGC cannot ignore shoddy suggestions and actually (as my little brother has) take its word over that of their teacher’s.
But I have to shed some positive light on this article (just as Mueller does with the digital underworld) and take us back to Sullivan. Yes, we are (as McGee and Ericsson claim) entrenched in MSGC and can never get around it as long as we compose on the computer; however, just as Sullivan urges the contemporary writer to become part publisher, I urge today’s writer to become part programmer. MSGC has an amazing feature within its settings that actually allows users to program suggestions into its algorithm. What this means is that we can manipulate what MSGC constantly monitors. I first discovered this when I took advanced composition as an undergraduate in a computer-enriched classroom. Someone has actually programmed MSGC as a monitor for sexist language. Every time I wrote “he,” a squiggly green line appeared and prompted me to change to “he or she.” So, yes, I must agree with Harris and Wambeam that MSGC does favor some and marginalize others, but the program is easily manipulated and must also be seen for its ability to aid a writer in monitoring any number of errors for which he (or she) wishes to watch.
Finally, and quickly since I already seem to be rambling, I chose to read Diehl, Grabill, and Hart-Davidson’s “Grassroots.” A compelling illustration of the social use of computer-based composition, these scholars recount the efforts of a program entitled Grassroots which is described as an “asset-based mapping tool” and its contribution to the conversation on knowledge work, analytical thinking requiring abstract reasoning. Essentially, I see this article as an example of how the Web 2.0 movement has obfuscated lines between writer and reader and created web programmers as “producers” of text in a more theatrical context—they are those who allow for text to be created but do not necessarily act as either reader or writer. It’s an incredibly thought-provoking article, but in its impact further proves that there is still so much more we can learn from the study of writing with computers.
Patricia Sullivan opens the week as our earliest featured scholar, which is perhaps not saying much since she publishes in 1991. Arguing that new developments in page-layout manipulations in word processing platforms have given great (and perhaps foreign) power to writers, Sullivan diagrams the ways in which computer writing has blurred the process method. The writer (notice the careful word choice here: writer, not author) traditionally has submitted text to a publisher and then with careful critique and revision, the publisher prints the final form of the text for the reader. Sullivan argues that with the implementation of word processing programs, the writer can manipulate text as traditionally only could a publisher. As such, the drafting process becomes obscured as writer now has more control over their text before submission to readers. Interestingly, I believe Sullivan’s argument could even be taken a step further. Perhaps the drafting process does become obscured through computer-based word processing, but if we see computer-based writing in its most organic form—hypertext—we can begin to see that computer-based writing also obscures the roles and identities of writer/reader. Who really is the writer of the text of a wiki? How do we define the writer of a blog comment, as reader or as writer? I didn’t read any of the optional articles on internet plagiarism by Purdy or Howard, but I suspect that they might also tend toward viewing hypertext composition (especially with the theories of Web 2.0) as a collaborative effort on behalf of writer and reader instead of the more traditional composing processes as described (and antiquated) by Sullivan.
Harris and Wambeam being to this week’s reading perhaps the most encouraging article for computer-based writing. Their work, “The Internet-Based Composition Classroom: A Study in Pedagogy,” describes and expounds upon a “pedagogical experiment” conducted in the spring semester of 2004. Working with complimentary syllabi, these two professors set out to test if teaching composition through an internet-based classroom would be more effective than not. Utilizing multiple cutting-edge, yet accessible and what sounds like pretty inexpensive, resources like MOO, the classes found some startling results. From a purely statistical standpoint, students in the internet-enriched classroom became significantly better writers from the start to the end of the semester while student in the controlled non-enriched classroom actually became marginally worse writers. Furthermore, students in the control significantly disagreed with the statement “I enjoy writing” by the end of the semester while students in the enriched classroom significantly agreed. Despite proving that students actually perform better in the enriched classroom, Harris and Wambeam make a compelling argument that the enriched classroom also creates students who are enthusiastic about writing.
McGee and Ericsson take a startling shift in tone from that of Harris and Wambeam. Their study on Microsoft and the development of its grammar checker (MSGC) open a whole new area of study but most importantly reveals hidden power struggles latent within computer-based composition. I immediately connected with this article because I have often thought—as I’m sure we all have—of the ineffectiveness of MSGC. It is startling that in comparison to the hundred of thousands of English teachers who teach grammar, MSGC influences tens of millions. It is depressing that so many of those who use MSGC cannot ignore shoddy suggestions and actually (as my little brother has) take its word over that of their teacher’s.
But I have to shed some positive light on this article (just as Mueller does with the digital underworld) and take us back to Sullivan. Yes, we are (as McGee and Ericsson claim) entrenched in MSGC and can never get around it as long as we compose on the computer; however, just as Sullivan urges the contemporary writer to become part publisher, I urge today’s writer to become part programmer. MSGC has an amazing feature within its settings that actually allows users to program suggestions into its algorithm. What this means is that we can manipulate what MSGC constantly monitors. I first discovered this when I took advanced composition as an undergraduate in a computer-enriched classroom. Someone has actually programmed MSGC as a monitor for sexist language. Every time I wrote “he,” a squiggly green line appeared and prompted me to change to “he or she.” So, yes, I must agree with Harris and Wambeam that MSGC does favor some and marginalize others, but the program is easily manipulated and must also be seen for its ability to aid a writer in monitoring any number of errors for which he (or she) wishes to watch.
Finally, and quickly since I already seem to be rambling, I chose to read Diehl, Grabill, and Hart-Davidson’s “Grassroots.” A compelling illustration of the social use of computer-based composition, these scholars recount the efforts of a program entitled Grassroots which is described as an “asset-based mapping tool” and its contribution to the conversation on knowledge work, analytical thinking requiring abstract reasoning. Essentially, I see this article as an example of how the Web 2.0 movement has obfuscated lines between writer and reader and created web programmers as “producers” of text in a more theatrical context—they are those who allow for text to be created but do not necessarily act as either reader or writer. It’s an incredibly thought-provoking article, but in its impact further proves that there is still so much more we can learn from the study of writing with computers.
3.18.2010
De-Emasculating the Marginalized Voice
This week’s readings describe composition theory as the opportunity to explore marginalized voices in writing. In the words of Elizabeth Flynn, composition studies “demonstrate that the works produced by established authors are often the result of an extended, frequently enormously frustrating process and that creativity is an activity that results from experience and hard work rather than a mysterious gift reserved for the select few” (572). In essence, composition studies becomes a field which embraces these other voices since the goal is to understand and explore the composition process and its influences rather than produce an elite society and mystify the sacred and revered act of writing. This week, we are familiarized with the field’s interest in marginalized voices and the contribution they make not just to the larger study of composition itself but also to a better understanding of the experiences of marginalized academics in general.
As already mentioned, Flynn represents the feminist voice and envisions composition studies as an outlet for this marginalized voice in academic settings. By no means the first feminist, Flynn does, however, write at the earliest time among our sampling of seven scholars, 1988. At this time, as we have already studied, more and more developments were being made in the field and Flynn writes at a time when major changes and innovations were being made to composition studies. Among her ideas, I particularly was interested in the idea (reiterated by Culler) of reading as a woman. This process, which is admittedly difficult, is incredibly useful in that it seeks out the male-driven givens in our society, makes connections between facts and ideas that have been left unconnected by male-driven society, and empowers the individual female experience by using it as a tool to de-immaculate itself. I find this idea particularly interesting because it is one I continually use when critically reading. Trusting my own experience and intuitions has led me to great disagreements with academics or inspirations for papers. Whether or not I fit into the demographic of “white, middle-class male” is of unimportance. Reading from my own personal experience and perspective makes me an individual who can bring something to the discussion that no one else could. I feel like this—coupled with the importance of retrieving the female experience—is the heart of Flynn’s message and also Royster’s message in “When the First Voice You Hear Is Not Your Own.” She, like Flynn, advocates readers become alert and aware of voices which marginalize their own and argues we tune our own voices to become both “well-spoken” and “well-heard” (622).
Ritchie and Boardman also write on the marginalized feminine voice. Providing a brief history of the feminist voice from its emergence in the 70s to its explosion in the 90s, Ritchie and Boardman claim that while study of the feminist voice has flourished in the past years implementation of its study have not. “Many women still teach composition in the ‘basement,’” they write, “and the wider institutional, economic, and cultural conditions continue to create barriers against improving their status” (605). I find that this is still true today, over 11 years after Ritchie and Boardman write. But I agree with these scholars that feminism will do nothing but continue to improve our field and within the next 40 years there will be great changes even from now, to the point—I would not be surprised—that it dominates our study.
Villanueva opens the discussion of marginalization in composition studies up vastly with his work. By clearly asserting that we should not overlook concepts brought up by others due to racism or hatred, especially in his examples of the Latin Americas or Native Americans. His work reminds me of my first experience reading Marquez’s “One Hundred Years of Solitude.” So many of the concepts brought up in the novel are so foreign to me and I could not understand what they meant or why I was so drawn to them. Later I read the novel again in college in a literary theory class and realized that I was a marginalized voice in the novel, or rather the book was not written to my usually-heard voice of the white, middle-class man. It was much more playful, childlike, and awe-struck instead of commanding, authoritative, and direct. I loved it, and I completely agree with Villanueva in the assertion that discoveries like these are trademarks in becoming better scholars and better citizens.
Silva and also Zamel further explore the marginalize voice, but turn study to ESL students. From our sample, it seems as though the ESL student has had very little attention until very recently, Silva writing in 1993 and Zamel in 1995. This seems to be the hot topic of our current study, much like feminism was twenty to thirty years ago. The ESL student is completely lost in today’s systems of literacy, and even though it may be a long and hard right to reconcile with the student whose entire method of understanding and cultural givens differ from the traditional English voice of high literacy, the understanding that can come from this reconciliation holds major implications for the future of global communication, understanding, and knowledge. Suresh continues this point, arguing that there exist so many different voices left undiscovered, even within English. It will undoubtedly be a great contribution that composition studies will make to academia each time it considers and celebrates another marginalized voice; however, how long will it take before we finally realize that we all exist in plurality? Convention is the tie that keeps us together, but no one is ever fully exactly like the one beside him/her.
As already mentioned, Flynn represents the feminist voice and envisions composition studies as an outlet for this marginalized voice in academic settings. By no means the first feminist, Flynn does, however, write at the earliest time among our sampling of seven scholars, 1988. At this time, as we have already studied, more and more developments were being made in the field and Flynn writes at a time when major changes and innovations were being made to composition studies. Among her ideas, I particularly was interested in the idea (reiterated by Culler) of reading as a woman. This process, which is admittedly difficult, is incredibly useful in that it seeks out the male-driven givens in our society, makes connections between facts and ideas that have been left unconnected by male-driven society, and empowers the individual female experience by using it as a tool to de-immaculate itself. I find this idea particularly interesting because it is one I continually use when critically reading. Trusting my own experience and intuitions has led me to great disagreements with academics or inspirations for papers. Whether or not I fit into the demographic of “white, middle-class male” is of unimportance. Reading from my own personal experience and perspective makes me an individual who can bring something to the discussion that no one else could. I feel like this—coupled with the importance of retrieving the female experience—is the heart of Flynn’s message and also Royster’s message in “When the First Voice You Hear Is Not Your Own.” She, like Flynn, advocates readers become alert and aware of voices which marginalize their own and argues we tune our own voices to become both “well-spoken” and “well-heard” (622).
Ritchie and Boardman also write on the marginalized feminine voice. Providing a brief history of the feminist voice from its emergence in the 70s to its explosion in the 90s, Ritchie and Boardman claim that while study of the feminist voice has flourished in the past years implementation of its study have not. “Many women still teach composition in the ‘basement,’” they write, “and the wider institutional, economic, and cultural conditions continue to create barriers against improving their status” (605). I find that this is still true today, over 11 years after Ritchie and Boardman write. But I agree with these scholars that feminism will do nothing but continue to improve our field and within the next 40 years there will be great changes even from now, to the point—I would not be surprised—that it dominates our study.
Villanueva opens the discussion of marginalization in composition studies up vastly with his work. By clearly asserting that we should not overlook concepts brought up by others due to racism or hatred, especially in his examples of the Latin Americas or Native Americans. His work reminds me of my first experience reading Marquez’s “One Hundred Years of Solitude.” So many of the concepts brought up in the novel are so foreign to me and I could not understand what they meant or why I was so drawn to them. Later I read the novel again in college in a literary theory class and realized that I was a marginalized voice in the novel, or rather the book was not written to my usually-heard voice of the white, middle-class man. It was much more playful, childlike, and awe-struck instead of commanding, authoritative, and direct. I loved it, and I completely agree with Villanueva in the assertion that discoveries like these are trademarks in becoming better scholars and better citizens.
Silva and also Zamel further explore the marginalize voice, but turn study to ESL students. From our sample, it seems as though the ESL student has had very little attention until very recently, Silva writing in 1993 and Zamel in 1995. This seems to be the hot topic of our current study, much like feminism was twenty to thirty years ago. The ESL student is completely lost in today’s systems of literacy, and even though it may be a long and hard right to reconcile with the student whose entire method of understanding and cultural givens differ from the traditional English voice of high literacy, the understanding that can come from this reconciliation holds major implications for the future of global communication, understanding, and knowledge. Suresh continues this point, arguing that there exist so many different voices left undiscovered, even within English. It will undoubtedly be a great contribution that composition studies will make to academia each time it considers and celebrates another marginalized voice; however, how long will it take before we finally realize that we all exist in plurality? Convention is the tie that keeps us together, but no one is ever fully exactly like the one beside him/her.
3.11.2010
Annotated Bibliography!
Bromme, Rainer and Elmar Stahl, eds. Writing Hypertext and Learning: Conceptual and Empirical Approaches. Amsterdam: Pergamon, 2002.
Bromme and Stahl’s edited work is a fantastic and rich resource on the teaching and reception/learning of hypertext. The main purpose, as stated in the book’s introduction, is to give readers a general familiarity with what little has been said on the empirical and conceptual effects of learning hypertext. The collection of work that follows is a fierce collaboration of scholars who write on everything from the interference of linear and unlinear text, ideas of collaborative grading, the design (shape) of hypertext space, new ideas of authorship, to a new concept to me: hypervideo. For my research, the book is especially useful in chapters six and seven, where Karsten D. Wolf and A. Talamo and A. Fasulo write on the influence of hypertext on collaboration in the composition classroom.
Chakrabarti, Soumen. Mining the Web: Discovering Knowledge from Hypertext Data. San Francisco: Morgan Kaufman, 2003.
Essentially a users manual to the mechanics behind a useful web mining program or search engine, this book is all mathematic jargon and algorithm building for the web programmer save one final section at its end entitled “Profiles, Personalization, and Collaboration.” Web mining, defined as “the automatic discovery of interesting and valuable information from the Web” (vii), may be understood as the ultimate trailblazing of hypertext as it is the programmer’s duty to effectively weed out useless lexia while sorting and ranking useful lexia. What makes this section of Chakrabarti’s manual interesting my research is that he states in his final chapter “The Future of Web Mining” that “despite their increasing sophistication, the most popular Web search engines remain impersonal” 305). Pointing to collaborative context analysis as the solution, Chakrabarti prophesies collaborative efforts to be the future of hypertext trailblazing. The academic connection between teaching collaborative hypertext media and this envisioned future of search engines has yet to be made.
Hanrahan, Michael and Deborah L. Madsen, eds. Teaching Technology, Textuality: Approaches to New Media. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillon, 2006.
Michael and Madsen’s handbook to teaching “new media” (a synonym for anything essentially hypertext) is geared toward the teacher who is entrenched in high literacy and stands at edge with his/her students who seems to despite all his/her efforts to be “illiterate.” Complete with a glossary that defines “WWW” and “wiki,” the handbook might be evaluated as an experienced teacher’s guide to beginning hypertext theory. What I enjoy about this work is its subtle support for e-literacy and up-front explanation of secondary orality as the result of “inherited, interiorized” literacy (1). What will most likely make it into my research is the book’s understanding and solution for student aversion to collaborative methods in the writing classroom.
Hutchby, Ian. Conversation and Technology: From the Telephone to the Internet. Cambridge: Polity P, 2001.
Hutchby is, like McLuhan was, interested in how hypertext not only changes the way we communicate but also changes the cultural meanings about which we communicate. This work traces such an argument through multiple communication technologies (e.g. telephone, videophone, internet conferencing, artificial intelligence systems, computerized expert systems), but is especially useful to my research as it pertains to computerized media in general. Hutchby makes a two-part claim. First, that society shapes the way it uses technology. He supports this with the triumph of social constructivism, which claimed that social process has influence over all area of technology. This is important to me because it essentially proves that collaboration shapes technological use. Second, and much more theoretically, he claims that technology shapes sociality. This is important for my interest in collaboration because it suggests that contemporary hypertext theories, which have their basis in collaboration, shape discourse communities that inherently disenfranchise some and privilege others. Collaboration, then, is a skill or marketable attribute that privileges a student over others who are unwilling, scared, or unable to collaborate.
Katz, Steven B. The Epistemic Music of Rhetoric: Toward the Temporal Dimension of Affect in Reader Response and Writing. Carbondale, IL: U of Southern Illinois P, 1996.
I chose this work because of its smart-sounding title and use of the words “temporal dimension.” Just kidding. I did choose to include it, though, because it is one of the few examples (outside of Ong, of course) to utilize the term “secondary orality” to describe the renewed importance of sound for today’s writer. Katz provides many examples of implementing a vocal element into composition courses, but all involve physically speaking and having students speak their writing. This is important for my research because it once again highlights collaboration at the forefront of creating better writers in the contemporary classroom. In every scenario Katz presents as the implementation of secondary orality in the classroom, a student speaks in order to receive insight into the importance of sound in the written word and receives. The student, then, must collaboratively decide with and against other students the emotional and social meanings that lie beneath those sounds. Its an interesting pedagogical model, but once again places collaboration at the center of a contemporary composition classroom.
McLuhan, Marshall and Bruce R. Powers. The Global Village: Transformations in World Life and Media in the 21st Century. New York: Oxford UP, 1989.
Wildly influential, I choose to include The Global Village mainly because I knew it would interest my work in one way or another and, further, because I have always wanted to read it. And I was right to choose it. An eerily accurate portrait of an America thirty years in the making, McLuhan and Powers’ work makes powerful assumptions based on the iconic tetrad used as a pedagogical tool to teach the ways in which media enhance, retrieve, reverse, or negate social processes. These assumptions paint the America of 2020 as a county overrun with right-minded (or right-hemisphered) “robots” who “instead of being captured by point-to-point linear attitudes, so helpful to the mathematician and accountant, most Americans will be able to tolerate many different thought systems at once” (86). For my research, the implications of teaching collaboration become that much more important. It means that instead of viewing collaboration as simply working together, we must realize that collaboration threatens the importance of the singular authority and values the work of the society over the work of the individual. McLuhan and Bruce seem to paint this as a negative change for society (changing us from “angles to robots”), but I argue it in fact—in the long run—is not.
Torrance, Mark, Luuk Van Waes, and David Galbraith, eds. Writing and Cognition: Research and Applications. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2007.
This collection of work summarizes the cognitive movement and specifically views the cognitive changes that take place with changing writing technologies. The entire collection is divided into three sections that deal with a history of interaction with the writing process, the effects of writing on cognition, and the various writing media. My research can be influenced especially by the final section, specifically in the chapters “Learning by Hypertext Writing: Effects of Considering a Single Audience Versus Multiple Audiences on Knowledge Acquisition” and “Supporting Individual Views and Mutual Awareness in a Collaborative Writing Task.” These two chapters continue to ask questions considering the loss of personal authorship to community in hypertext-enriched classrooms and seeks to suggest that in certain circumstances collaborative efforts in fact benefit the individual as it benefits the group.
Johnson-Eilola, Johndan. Datacloud: Toward a New Theory of Online Work. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton P, 2005.
Johnson-Eilola, Johndan. Nostalgic Angels: Rearticulating Hypertext Writing. Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1997.
I have not yet had a chance to read these two works (I'm picking them up from the library today ... they're on loan from California.) But I wanted to include them just because I know I will be including them in the rough draft of my final project.
Bromme and Stahl’s edited work is a fantastic and rich resource on the teaching and reception/learning of hypertext. The main purpose, as stated in the book’s introduction, is to give readers a general familiarity with what little has been said on the empirical and conceptual effects of learning hypertext. The collection of work that follows is a fierce collaboration of scholars who write on everything from the interference of linear and unlinear text, ideas of collaborative grading, the design (shape) of hypertext space, new ideas of authorship, to a new concept to me: hypervideo. For my research, the book is especially useful in chapters six and seven, where Karsten D. Wolf and A. Talamo and A. Fasulo write on the influence of hypertext on collaboration in the composition classroom.
Chakrabarti, Soumen. Mining the Web: Discovering Knowledge from Hypertext Data. San Francisco: Morgan Kaufman, 2003.
Essentially a users manual to the mechanics behind a useful web mining program or search engine, this book is all mathematic jargon and algorithm building for the web programmer save one final section at its end entitled “Profiles, Personalization, and Collaboration.” Web mining, defined as “the automatic discovery of interesting and valuable information from the Web” (vii), may be understood as the ultimate trailblazing of hypertext as it is the programmer’s duty to effectively weed out useless lexia while sorting and ranking useful lexia. What makes this section of Chakrabarti’s manual interesting my research is that he states in his final chapter “The Future of Web Mining” that “despite their increasing sophistication, the most popular Web search engines remain impersonal” 305). Pointing to collaborative context analysis as the solution, Chakrabarti prophesies collaborative efforts to be the future of hypertext trailblazing. The academic connection between teaching collaborative hypertext media and this envisioned future of search engines has yet to be made.
Hanrahan, Michael and Deborah L. Madsen, eds. Teaching Technology, Textuality: Approaches to New Media. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillon, 2006.
Michael and Madsen’s handbook to teaching “new media” (a synonym for anything essentially hypertext) is geared toward the teacher who is entrenched in high literacy and stands at edge with his/her students who seems to despite all his/her efforts to be “illiterate.” Complete with a glossary that defines “WWW” and “wiki,” the handbook might be evaluated as an experienced teacher’s guide to beginning hypertext theory. What I enjoy about this work is its subtle support for e-literacy and up-front explanation of secondary orality as the result of “inherited, interiorized” literacy (1). What will most likely make it into my research is the book’s understanding and solution for student aversion to collaborative methods in the writing classroom.
Hutchby, Ian. Conversation and Technology: From the Telephone to the Internet. Cambridge: Polity P, 2001.
Hutchby is, like McLuhan was, interested in how hypertext not only changes the way we communicate but also changes the cultural meanings about which we communicate. This work traces such an argument through multiple communication technologies (e.g. telephone, videophone, internet conferencing, artificial intelligence systems, computerized expert systems), but is especially useful to my research as it pertains to computerized media in general. Hutchby makes a two-part claim. First, that society shapes the way it uses technology. He supports this with the triumph of social constructivism, which claimed that social process has influence over all area of technology. This is important to me because it essentially proves that collaboration shapes technological use. Second, and much more theoretically, he claims that technology shapes sociality. This is important for my interest in collaboration because it suggests that contemporary hypertext theories, which have their basis in collaboration, shape discourse communities that inherently disenfranchise some and privilege others. Collaboration, then, is a skill or marketable attribute that privileges a student over others who are unwilling, scared, or unable to collaborate.
Katz, Steven B. The Epistemic Music of Rhetoric: Toward the Temporal Dimension of Affect in Reader Response and Writing. Carbondale, IL: U of Southern Illinois P, 1996.
I chose this work because of its smart-sounding title and use of the words “temporal dimension.” Just kidding. I did choose to include it, though, because it is one of the few examples (outside of Ong, of course) to utilize the term “secondary orality” to describe the renewed importance of sound for today’s writer. Katz provides many examples of implementing a vocal element into composition courses, but all involve physically speaking and having students speak their writing. This is important for my research because it once again highlights collaboration at the forefront of creating better writers in the contemporary classroom. In every scenario Katz presents as the implementation of secondary orality in the classroom, a student speaks in order to receive insight into the importance of sound in the written word and receives. The student, then, must collaboratively decide with and against other students the emotional and social meanings that lie beneath those sounds. Its an interesting pedagogical model, but once again places collaboration at the center of a contemporary composition classroom.
McLuhan, Marshall and Bruce R. Powers. The Global Village: Transformations in World Life and Media in the 21st Century. New York: Oxford UP, 1989.
Wildly influential, I choose to include The Global Village mainly because I knew it would interest my work in one way or another and, further, because I have always wanted to read it. And I was right to choose it. An eerily accurate portrait of an America thirty years in the making, McLuhan and Powers’ work makes powerful assumptions based on the iconic tetrad used as a pedagogical tool to teach the ways in which media enhance, retrieve, reverse, or negate social processes. These assumptions paint the America of 2020 as a county overrun with right-minded (or right-hemisphered) “robots” who “instead of being captured by point-to-point linear attitudes, so helpful to the mathematician and accountant, most Americans will be able to tolerate many different thought systems at once” (86). For my research, the implications of teaching collaboration become that much more important. It means that instead of viewing collaboration as simply working together, we must realize that collaboration threatens the importance of the singular authority and values the work of the society over the work of the individual. McLuhan and Bruce seem to paint this as a negative change for society (changing us from “angles to robots”), but I argue it in fact—in the long run—is not.
Torrance, Mark, Luuk Van Waes, and David Galbraith, eds. Writing and Cognition: Research and Applications. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2007.
This collection of work summarizes the cognitive movement and specifically views the cognitive changes that take place with changing writing technologies. The entire collection is divided into three sections that deal with a history of interaction with the writing process, the effects of writing on cognition, and the various writing media. My research can be influenced especially by the final section, specifically in the chapters “Learning by Hypertext Writing: Effects of Considering a Single Audience Versus Multiple Audiences on Knowledge Acquisition” and “Supporting Individual Views and Mutual Awareness in a Collaborative Writing Task.” These two chapters continue to ask questions considering the loss of personal authorship to community in hypertext-enriched classrooms and seeks to suggest that in certain circumstances collaborative efforts in fact benefit the individual as it benefits the group.
Johnson-Eilola, Johndan. Datacloud: Toward a New Theory of Online Work. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton P, 2005.
Johnson-Eilola, Johndan. Nostalgic Angels: Rearticulating Hypertext Writing. Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1997.
I have not yet had a chance to read these two works (I'm picking them up from the library today ... they're on loan from California.) But I wanted to include them just because I know I will be including them in the rough draft of my final project.
3.04.2010
Collaboration and Consensus: A New Social Hierarchy
Readings for this week call attention to writing as a collaborative process, dispelling myths of the writer as a genius in his tower above and separated from the society to which he writes. Our sample of six articles span from early theories on a writer’s relationship within his/her invoked discourse community (Ong) in 1975 to modern-day theories of composing as assemblage, remix, or design pattern over thirty years later (Johnson and Selber). Clearly, social theories of writing are still in great demand as writing technologies expand and scholars continue to examine the influence (and confines, as Porter suggests) of audience, collaboration, intertextuality, and intellectual property.
Ong publishes in 1975, and as a result is the earliest sample of social theory available this week. He argues that writers are successful when they create a fictitious audience for which to write. For example, though the novelist may at some times think of a specific type of person who might read his/her novels, he/she must create a population of readers that does not yet exist and write to them as if they already do. This also has implications for the act of reading, Ong explains, since to read in this model is to conform to the fictitious audience that has already been created by a writer. Interestingly, in this model of reading/writing the writer is author, powerful creator of discourse communities and trailblazer of new knowledge. What is problematic for me in this view of authorship is that it is assumed all readers will approach a writer in a similar way, not at least to mention that it assumes all readers will be trained to read in the same fashion and assume the same things when reading.
Ede and Lunsford also write in response to Ong and other early social theories. Claiming in 1984 that the acts of reading and writing and intertwined, these two scholars find similar problems with Ong’s notion of audience as that of “audience invoked.” Ede and Lunsford juxtapose this invoked notion of audience with its complete opposite, that of “audience addressed,” and find that both are able to be successful modes of understanding audiences but also have severe weaknesses. “Audience addressed,” for example, neglects the fluidity between the components of writing, as outlined by Mitchell and Taylor’s general model of writing: writer, written product, audience, and response. Rather that progressing in a cycle, the process of writing is more unlinear, chaotic. Any step of the process may influence or change any other step at any time. As to the notions of “audience invoked” supported by Ong’s research, Ede and Lunsford argue a writer must always be writing in some capacity to a real audience and can be viewed, then, as a product of that audience. Rhetoric as a tool helps the writer to know when to address/invoke an audience and to what degree.
Porter further entrenches the writer in his/her role as a product of an audience. Arguing that “according [to the view of intertextuality], authorial intention is less significant than social context; the writer is simply a part of a discourse tradition, a member of a team, and a participant in a community of discourse that creates its own collective meaning. Thus the intertext constrains writing” (35). But rather than wallow in text’s continual reference to more text, Porter suggests such an understanding gives a writer great power in writing for specific discourse communities. If in fact “readers, not writers, create discourse” (38), then a writer must guide a discourse community with the tools of that community if he/she is to be successful.
Bruffee (1984) and, later, Trimber (1989) both wrestle with implementing social theories of writing in the composition classroom. Bruffee first expounds on the importance of collaboration in teaching students the important relationship between conversation and thought: that thought is always related to social interaction. Teaching normal discourse (the discourse a student would use everyday) in a collaborative way opens up the opportunity for students to demonstrate abnormal discourse (which occurs when consensus no longer exists within a discourse community). But Bruffee ultimately claims that though collaboration is important, there is no recipe for its implementation in the classroom. Porter picks up two years later, suggesting (as noted above) that intertextuality suggests students be taught to write for specific, defined discourse communities to which they wish entrance. But Trimber responds three years later to criticisms against Porter and Bruffee, that consensus is totalitarian and collaboration focuses too heavily on discourse communities instead of knowledge structures. It is finally that Trimbur argues collaboration is effective not in conforming many voices into one but in making the students see that so many voices exist. In a sense, collaboration reveals consensus is not accommodation but conflict. Consensus leads to dissensus, a utopian notion that even though everyone does not agree a community can continue working toward solving its problems. This, trimbur asserts, is the benefit and needed element which collaboration (and consensus) teaches.
As a final scholar, Johnson-Eiola and Selber bring us twenty year later to the modern-day discussion of social theories of composition. As heated as ever, the debates over collaborative efforts of writing and consensus reveal major tensions between academic and legal functions of writing. Including problems of the theories of plagiarism and originality, Johnson and Selber suggest there remains little if anything in the world that is original. They purport: “What if the ‘final’ product a student produces—a text—is not concerned with original words or images on a page or screen but concerned primarily with assemblage of parts?” (380). This embrace with social theories of writing completely accepts assemblage (the using of unoriginal text and images in new contexts) as the breakdown of a tradition hierarchy in which originality reigns over borrowed content. The goal is to write well, not necessarily write originally. Assemblages, remixes, pattern language, design (architectural) patterns, and the like all help achieve this goal but must first be seen as legitimate. Certainly, such tools are much more accepted than they were thirty years ago when Ong wrote; however, much must still be done before a traditional hierarchy of originality is broken.
Ong publishes in 1975, and as a result is the earliest sample of social theory available this week. He argues that writers are successful when they create a fictitious audience for which to write. For example, though the novelist may at some times think of a specific type of person who might read his/her novels, he/she must create a population of readers that does not yet exist and write to them as if they already do. This also has implications for the act of reading, Ong explains, since to read in this model is to conform to the fictitious audience that has already been created by a writer. Interestingly, in this model of reading/writing the writer is author, powerful creator of discourse communities and trailblazer of new knowledge. What is problematic for me in this view of authorship is that it is assumed all readers will approach a writer in a similar way, not at least to mention that it assumes all readers will be trained to read in the same fashion and assume the same things when reading.
Ede and Lunsford also write in response to Ong and other early social theories. Claiming in 1984 that the acts of reading and writing and intertwined, these two scholars find similar problems with Ong’s notion of audience as that of “audience invoked.” Ede and Lunsford juxtapose this invoked notion of audience with its complete opposite, that of “audience addressed,” and find that both are able to be successful modes of understanding audiences but also have severe weaknesses. “Audience addressed,” for example, neglects the fluidity between the components of writing, as outlined by Mitchell and Taylor’s general model of writing: writer, written product, audience, and response. Rather that progressing in a cycle, the process of writing is more unlinear, chaotic. Any step of the process may influence or change any other step at any time. As to the notions of “audience invoked” supported by Ong’s research, Ede and Lunsford argue a writer must always be writing in some capacity to a real audience and can be viewed, then, as a product of that audience. Rhetoric as a tool helps the writer to know when to address/invoke an audience and to what degree.
Porter further entrenches the writer in his/her role as a product of an audience. Arguing that “according [to the view of intertextuality], authorial intention is less significant than social context; the writer is simply a part of a discourse tradition, a member of a team, and a participant in a community of discourse that creates its own collective meaning. Thus the intertext constrains writing” (35). But rather than wallow in text’s continual reference to more text, Porter suggests such an understanding gives a writer great power in writing for specific discourse communities. If in fact “readers, not writers, create discourse” (38), then a writer must guide a discourse community with the tools of that community if he/she is to be successful.
Bruffee (1984) and, later, Trimber (1989) both wrestle with implementing social theories of writing in the composition classroom. Bruffee first expounds on the importance of collaboration in teaching students the important relationship between conversation and thought: that thought is always related to social interaction. Teaching normal discourse (the discourse a student would use everyday) in a collaborative way opens up the opportunity for students to demonstrate abnormal discourse (which occurs when consensus no longer exists within a discourse community). But Bruffee ultimately claims that though collaboration is important, there is no recipe for its implementation in the classroom. Porter picks up two years later, suggesting (as noted above) that intertextuality suggests students be taught to write for specific, defined discourse communities to which they wish entrance. But Trimber responds three years later to criticisms against Porter and Bruffee, that consensus is totalitarian and collaboration focuses too heavily on discourse communities instead of knowledge structures. It is finally that Trimbur argues collaboration is effective not in conforming many voices into one but in making the students see that so many voices exist. In a sense, collaboration reveals consensus is not accommodation but conflict. Consensus leads to dissensus, a utopian notion that even though everyone does not agree a community can continue working toward solving its problems. This, trimbur asserts, is the benefit and needed element which collaboration (and consensus) teaches.
As a final scholar, Johnson-Eiola and Selber bring us twenty year later to the modern-day discussion of social theories of composition. As heated as ever, the debates over collaborative efforts of writing and consensus reveal major tensions between academic and legal functions of writing. Including problems of the theories of plagiarism and originality, Johnson and Selber suggest there remains little if anything in the world that is original. They purport: “What if the ‘final’ product a student produces—a text—is not concerned with original words or images on a page or screen but concerned primarily with assemblage of parts?” (380). This embrace with social theories of writing completely accepts assemblage (the using of unoriginal text and images in new contexts) as the breakdown of a tradition hierarchy in which originality reigns over borrowed content. The goal is to write well, not necessarily write originally. Assemblages, remixes, pattern language, design (architectural) patterns, and the like all help achieve this goal but must first be seen as legitimate. Certainly, such tools are much more accepted than they were thirty years ago when Ong wrote; however, much must still be done before a traditional hierarchy of originality is broken.
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