3.25 James Gee and Workshop

Main points from Gee
Language is a social process
Discourse embodies a group's ways of doing, being, believing, and valuing = an "identity toolkit"
Discourse is learned through an "apprenticeship" (socialization => learning through doing) rather than "out of a book"
Discourses overlap, influence one another and are always changing
Our home/Primary discourse is the discourse of our home community (family)
All other discourses are secondary discourses
Dominant discourses enforce their values/ways of being on Nondominant discourses
Discourses are used for gatekeeping => excluding outsiders
tensions between values in different discourses can cause problems in terms of moving from one discourse to another successfully
Discourses require complete mastery to be counted an insider
Primary discourses can never be lieratory discoures

All writing and reading is embedded in some Discourse

Definition of discourse (in our own words)
Discourses belong to a group and shap the intentions and behaviors of the group.  They embody unconscious ways of thinking, related to a setting, and giving "rules" for how to act.  Discourses are cultural, and include beliefs and values that are embedded in ways of talking and being.

List of discursive features (what Discourse affects/shapes)
1. patterns for asserting or responding to authority
2. language choices and forms (story forms) => what and how we say things
3. body language, personal space, body position
4. who has the right to speak
5. expectations about who "others" and "other places" are (stereotypes)
6. how to behave + what to believe and think within a given profession, career, nationality, ethnicity, etc.
7.  where and when we can say certain things (context)
8. expectations about tone of voice, volume, pitch, how fast we talk and so on
9. attitudes

So it sounds to me like you've got a good hand on this.  As we discussed in class, an awareness of how discourses (our home discourses and the secondary discourses we have acquired through experience) function as "gatekeepers" can empower us.  If we learn to watch and work more consciously with the "discourses of power" - (despite what Gee says?) we can perhaps, communicate in ways which are more suited to our purposes.  Thinking about Discourse will be particularly important to you as you compose your portfolio of writing for your future profession.  We will talk about particular ways to apply ideas from Gee as we get closer to the portfolio assignment.

Focus:

What is the focus of your process narrative?  How does that focus reply to/expand on the demands for the focus of the assignment?  Describe how & whether the ideas and breadth of your focus are a good match for the assignment.   

List the points you make to develop your focus.  Describe how/whether these points are sufficient to develop your focus?  Any points off focus?  Any points you need to add?

How does each paragraph connect to/develop the focus? 

Organization:

Overall organization: What is the overall “narrative line” of your essay? (chronological description of one or more processes?  Discussion of the parts of the writing practice, in order?  a story of your growth? a comparison of your writing practices for different kinds of writing?  . . .?)  

Do you have more than one narrative line?  If so, describe how you connect them.

Considering the overall narrative thread of your essay = what is the best organization for the presentation of your points to develop your focus?

What transitions/connections do you make among the different points to develop your focus?

Internal organization of paragraphs: 

Do paragraphs lead in with a statement to set up the overall focus of the paragraph and the connection of that focus to a main point or the overall focus?

Does the developing material include analysis, illustration, example, rich description etc to “prove” the idea at the center of the paragraph (or does it simply re-state the overall point)?

Does each paragraph develop a single idea related to the overall focus?

Does each paragraph conclude with (include) a statement to tie the development to the overall point?

Development

Which points are most important to your overall focus?  What examples/illustrations from your “data” on your writing process have you used to support those points?  

Have you included rich descriptions of your process from a particular composing experience (rather than only general statments about “how you write” for a particular genre)?  If you have no descriptions of composing a particular text, what do you need to add?

Which points have the most development?  Which points have the least?  Are the points with the most development the most central to your overall discussion?

What points need more development?

For next week:
Read: Mike Rose's "Rigid Rules, INflexible Plans, and the Stifling of Language: A Cognitivist Analysis of Writer's Block"
Write: Plan for revising process narrative (post to portfolio)

If you send me your draft process narrative as an attachment to the course email, I will write comments which you can take into consideration as you work on revising your essay.

3.11 Using a design model to plan/revise writing projects

We started class with a discussion of the readingby Wysoki & Lynch.  They present a design approach to composing,  and as we noted in our conversation, this approach is particularly useful (necessary) for considering projects which use more and different media or modes different from print.  Their piece is fairly straightforward, and in sum, the set forward the steps indeveloping a communication project as follows.

1. purpose
2. audience expectations
3. larger context
4. communication strategies
5. choice of medium
6. order/arrangement
7. testing your work on a sample audience

After talking through what each of these steps entails, we read through a sample process narrative (posted in the second unit within the course readings, linked to the right).  We then assessed this project using the three methods for reflecting on writing which we have covered so far: using a writing rubric based on the requirements for the assignment; using the kind of writerly response suggested by Elbow; and using the "design" principles suggested by Wysoki & Lynch.  Each of these approaches considers the writing from a different perspective.

The assignment sheet-based assessment looked at writing as a product = a "thing" which either has or does not have the required features.

Elbow's approach looks at writing as an interactive communication - which evokes (or not) particular responses from its various audiences.

Wysoki and Lynch's list of design principles looks at composing as a process, and engages writers in reflecting on whether and how they have successfully engaged different considerations within that process.

Reviewing your work in light of these different perspectives can help you decide uponwhat and how to revise a work in process.

This review took all but about 5 minutes of the class, so you didn't really have much time to work on your draft process narrative.   Hopefully, what we did do - reading/evaluating the sample process narrative - gave you some ideas for thinking the form and content for your narrative.

For next class:
Read: "Origins & Forms of Writing" Denise Schmandt-Besserat and Michael Erard; <= (We won't be reading this first one.)  Introduction to Sociolinguistics and Literacies: Ideology in Discourse, James Gee
AND
the sample process narratives.
Write:  Draft process narrative - send as an attachment to the course email + post to the portfolio.

Make sure you have done the pre-writing  (writing to the various prompts on your writing process which are posted on the blog) and posted it to your portfolio before you do the draft.  As stated in the assignment sheet, this essay should document (describe in detail from observation) and analyze your writing process, and to do the analysis you need observations.

For the draft - don't worry about editing/spelling/perfect (or even complete) sentences.  Focus on getting all your observations and ideas onto the page.  IF the focus is not quite clear to you - that is OK, too.  We will work on in in the peer review on 4.4.

What we will do in class. After discussing the readings, we will review + evaluate the sample process narratives.

Have a great break, and see you in two weeks!

3.4 Cooking = more writing for the process narrative

Grades for literacy narrative:  Each of you should have recieved an email with the scoring for your literacy narrative.  If you have missing documents and you want to receive full credit for your work - all revised/make up work for the literacy narrative is due by 3.11 = next week.  No work for the literacy narrative will be accepted after that time.

Also - I added up the points wrong (gave scores out of 100 points when it should have been out of 125).  I don't think this error will change anyone's letter grade, and I will give you corrected scores with the next unit.

Cooking!
Cooking is the where we get the energy for our ideas - the "OH!  I want to write this. . .! " feeling that propels us forward and takes us deeper into our understanding of our material as well as our facility in putting that material into words.

Elbow said that when he started thinking about cooking, he understood it to be simply writing freely = freewriting.  As he pursued this idea he realized that it is not JUST the open access to ideas such as freewriting allows - but the "interaction between contrasting or conflicting material." See the top of p. 49 for a more detaileddiscussion.  We started with reviewing your ideas + freewriting to set you up for the cooking exercises.

1. Read through the writing you have done so far for the process narrative.  This includes all of the writing you have done to document your writing process for the literacy narrative, plus the writing you did for homework last week to document any other process which you might want to focus on for the process narrrative.    I also invited you to note or add  any other information you thought would be important to include for the process narrative.

2. Freewriting.  The next step in our overview of the cooking process was to do a freewrite.

3. After freewriting, you did some "looping": noting patterns/repetitions in the freewrite and then doing a second freewrite to develop those ideas.  Some patterns you might look for include: associations to feelings (which parts were positive/which parts were negative?  what are the connections between these feelings and the content?); repetitions of words or ideas; overall themes.

Looping is one way to move from the immersion of freewriting - into the particularity+ self-consciousness of analysis and then back to immersion (in the  next freewrite).  As Elbow points out the contrast/conflict between these ways of thinking can help generate the energy/ideas that can move you forward in your writing.

4. Our next move was to write a list of metaphors for your writing process.  Then step back and look at the features of the metaphors you chose.  What does each metaphor say about your writing process?  Do the metaphors present a common theme about your process?   The idea here is that a metaphors pose features which you might not have named by themselves, but which you will see as present in the metaphor.

5.  Finally - we crossed modes by desribing your writing process as an image, a song, a dance or some other "non-languaged" system for representation.

After we finished "cooking"using a range of Elbow's approaches, you talked in groups to pull together the ideas you gained through the various processes we worked through.  The protocol for these conversations is as follows.

1. Characterize/discuss your writing process in terms of the different prompots we worked through for cooking: Freewriting, looping (moving between words + ideas, immersion and stepping back); listing-analyzing metaphors; moving among modes.

2. Describe what you think you might use as a focus for your proces narrative in light of these cooking exercises.

3. Discuss what additional observations you might need to gather/use to develop this focus for your essay.

4. Discuss which exercises worked best for you.

For next class:
Read: Ann Wysoki and Dennis Lynch: "A Rhetorical Process for Designing Compositions"
Write: Post today's class writing to your process page as "cooking" and develop any additional observations you will need to write the process essay with the focus you have decided on.