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.
I'm always torn on this idea: "The skill I think our students should have is freeing themselves from the “academic discourse” complex." In theory, I 100% agree with you and feel that academic discourse truly excludes certain voices from being heard. In other ways, as someone who grew up in a rural, low income, public school system, I find myself somewhat thankful that my college instructors pushed to me to learn academic discourse, as I wouldn't be where I am today without it (I was a mess when I got to college, as my high school experiences were just so awful). I suppose, perhaps, there's a balance here? Maybe?
ReplyDeleteYancey's idea that writing is a social activity definitely meshes with your ideas on home discourses. This, of course, assuming that our students' home discourses include digital media. Today, I think this is generally the case, however I always wonder who we might be excluding (which we'll talk about in week 3 of class)
As I've mentioned to most everyone else (I realize I wasn't clear on this in my assignment) it will be a good practice for everyone to work with the reading a bit more in these posts. That is, any quotes, summaries, or direct references you can make to the reading(s) for the day will help me see how you all are understanding things, and can also help you in the future by serving as a reading journal of sorts (so you can go back and see what you thought of Yancey, for eg). You made some smart connections here, just a bit more on Yancey would've been nice.
Thanks for your thoughts.