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Articles Conference Reviews |
J.10 The MashupJ.10 The Mashup: School Writing vs. Academic Writing vs. New Technologies The chair of the session, also speaker 1, advised that the word “social” should have been in the session title, in place of either “school” or “academic,” because the presenters were concerned with the differences between social and school writing; they did not wish to make a distinction between “school” and “academic” writing. The first presenter, Patricia Strong of Virginia Commonwealth U., posed the widely heard questions of whether digital forms of writing such as texting and email are or are not “writing” and whether students’ practice of these forms is “hurting” writing in general. Her position was that digital forms are indeed writing and that students’ practice of them may actually be superior in some ways to the academic writing they do. Qualifying that assertion, she allowed that practicing digital forms of writing might hurt students who already have limited English language skills. But she asserted that “many more” students are not negatively affected by these forms of writing and that the composition community could learn from students’ social writing practices if members of the community would not automatically dismiss those forms as worthless. She said, for instance, that the social writing students do is often vivid and concrete – qualities we value as marks of “good” writing--and that students’ social writing enacts authentic rhetoric. By contrast, she said, school assignments are often so broad or dull that they alienate students. Authorship--or students’ sense of it in themselves--is the key difference, she said, between school and social writing. Weak school writing is a failure of an adequate sense of authorship on students’ part, she said; it’s not a failure of text. And good writing in any case is “social” in that it enacts a relationship between writer and reader. From there, she moved on to a discussion of some ways in which aspects of social writing can be implemented in academic assignments. For example, she discussed how research paper assignments she uses in first-year composition provide a social context through the scenarios she creates for them. Even if the scenarios are fictional, they tap into the rhetorical situation that obtains in social writing. She said this helps students write better because such assignments present the writing task as a social (or rhetorical) problem that must be solved, whereas the typical academic research paper assignment, lacking any context beyond that of the classroom, is hard for students to approach that way. The idea of the “autonomy” of knowledge and of text produced by students is a fallacy, she said, that tends to promote inauthentic writing. To support this contention, she drew on the work of Bereiter and Scardamalia that distinguishes between “knowledge-telling” and “knowledge-transforming” writing. This difference involves a writer’s willingness to revise his or her thinking in knowledge-transforming writing. “Bad” writing, she said, reflects poor thinking or the idea that knowledge is “out there” as opposed to something that develops by virtue of human agency. Seeing writing as a-social, as school assignments typically do, inhibits good writing and promotes bad writing. The second presenter, Jane Fife of Western Kentucky U., promoted the use of such traditional academic genres as analysis applied to digital writing through reflection on the modes of digital writing. She said that approaching digital writing in this way helped students apply what they do in social writing to academic writing because students tend not to regard the digital/social writing they do as “real” writing, so they don’t reflect on that writing or the technological affordances associated with it. She contended that integrating multimodal forms of writing into the composition class helps students develop reflexivity about technology and writing. As an illustration of what she does in her own teaching, she cited an assignment she gives that asks students to find websites that have intellectual depth and to report to other students on what is good about these sites. The third speaker, Thomas Black, a Ph.D. student at the U. of Nevada, Reno, discussed scenarios in which students are technologically advanced beyond the teacher and those in which teachers don’t know or care much about digital modes of writing. He had tried to get a sense of the landscape across kinds of institutions by studying situations at a large state university (not his own) a two-year college, and a for-profit institution that offers online courses and degrees. He found that these schools differed greatly in the available technology and their use of it. He found a range between a heavy reliance on print-only texts at one end and virtual classrooms on the other as well as variation among them in terms of students’ and teachers’ technical knowledge. He worried about a generational disconnect between students and teachers, citing the approach to research writing as a locus of this disconnect. Some teachers see the library as the center of research, while some students see the Internet that way. He closed with a recommendation that graduate programs in composition and rhetoric prepare future teachers in multimodal spaces not just in multimodal literacies. I found this session informative, not so much in terms of approaches to teaching with technology or in the differences between school and social writing, but in terms of the range of practices and attitudes that the presenters suggested is current across the country. |