What Matters Who Writes?
What Matters Who Responds?
Andrea Lunsford, Rebecca Rickly, Michael Salvo,
and Susan West
But first let me sketch in some of the ways most
contemporary
classrooms are based on and perpetuate traditional concepts of
authorship, authority, and ownership of intellectual property--all
those constructs that are so threatened by theoretical arguments
and by practical demonstrations in the electronic arena. Until
very, very recently, teachers themselves embodied an important kind
of ownership--of the knowledge they passed on to students. Teachers
could move up in status, in prestige, in power, and in financial
gain, by virtue of how much "knowledge" they could lay claim to and
how much they could generate, mainly by way, of course, of
publishing textual evidence of their claims to ownership of
intellectual property. Our nearly compulsive scholarly and
teacherly attention to what I call hypercitation and to endless
listing of sources, in fact, are manifestations of the need to own
intellectual property or knowledge that can be commodified, traded,
and so on. In some important ways, we have also attempted to "own"
the space of the classroom, label it with our individual knowledge
claims, and in many instances, we have appropriated the writing of
students (in the kinds of assignments we give and, especially, in
our readings of and responses to student writing) in much the same
way that Disney has appropriated the folktales of Africa. Put most
cynically, as Disney commodifies and trades in the commercial value
of these tales, so do we commodify and trade in the commercial
value of student writing: where would we be, in fact, were it not
for that student writing?
Next *
Previous
Postmodern (un)grounding *
Collaboration *
Copy(w)right/Ownership *
Possible Futures
Title Page *
Conclusions