What's Composing

As I said in class, my experience with technology in teaching was so limited. I can say that the only course I encountered technology in was Rhetoric of Contact Zone last Semester, which provided me with a social space in which I could interact with my classmates in a “home-academic” discourse. It was academic in the sense that I was responding to academic issues that we went through in the syllabus and it was home-like in the sense that I did not feel the stress and formality of the classroom. I often blogged while I was sprawling out on the bed. I was not bound up with time and place and did not care about my style and registers. I always thought of Dr. Barbara as a host, her website as her house, we as her guests and our blogs as our conversation.

Doubtless this feeling of informality will help our students write in a better way. I always say that our students socially interact with people in a successful way. They can always talk about politics, economy and social practices. They can pose arguments, support them with evidences, refute counterarguments and reconcile disputes with others. However, when it comes to writing, they fail to do all that. The reason, in my point of view, is that our classical classrooms ( those without technology) instill in our students’ minds the idea that writing is another realm with different components and that it does not share with speaking any characteristics. And this is a fallacy. Both speaking and writing have the same components: the sender (speaker or writer), receiver ( listener or reader), and a message ( letters or sounds). However, when our students write, they do believe that there is no one there to argue with or to convince. They do not know that their ideas can be formulated in sounds or letters. In a social place like Rhetoric of Contact Zone, students will realize that their peers have access to their writing and can evaluate them, which can turn the writing process into a conversation in students’ eyes.

I totally disagree with Wysocki et al when they define new media texts as texts “designed so that its materiality is not effaced”. We need to know that not all people see the values and materiality a text embodies. Aristotle argues that this world consists of appearances seen in different ways. Each person tries to discover a rupture in an appearance and connect it to the whole. For example, since a piece of composition is an appearance, readers will understand it differently according to their political, economical and social backgrounds. Take Shakespeare’s work The Tempest as an example; Hundreds of articles and papers have been written to interpret it.

Blog Post 1

I taught writing for both high school and college for five years. From this range of experience I can tell that teaching writing is a complicated process that goes beyond the educational hierarchy ( teacher, student and syllabus). My students came to my class with different social practices and social forces. Some were students from the middle class who were taught in good schools and received better teaching while the others came from the working class with less care and privilege. This huge gap between the two classes helped the middle class students to perform better, which made me feel that it was unfair to evaluate them in the same way. No way of comparison. So, I had to look for a way by which I could judge their performances without bias.

The best way I found was to train all the students to write their own home discourses and to avoid the academic discourse that gave the middle class students more privilege. The results were amazing. Most of the students could write a one-page argumentative essay with differently interwoven arguments and different registers and styles. The aim has been achieved since most of the students could write a simple piece of composition.

The skill I think our students should have is freeing themselves from the “academic discourse” complex. The academic discourse that we need our students to learn is amorphous. I remember that when I was in high school, I noticed that every author had his own discourse, which made me wonder which one to follow, which one to learn. Yancey’s idea that writing is a social activity is the best way to help our students overcome their complex. By writing through social networking, students will be able to realize that writing is a social activity that requires them to develop their own discourses.