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Articles Conference Reviews |
J.8 (Re)Envisioning PerspectiveJ.8 ‘The Way I See It’: (Re)Envisioning Perspective in Academic Discourse The focus of this session was questioning traditional and received notions of academic writing and all four presenters, three from Lehigh University and one from Kutztown University, approached the question from distinct perspectives. Patricia Pytleski from Kutztown began the panel with her presentation, "Synthesizing Students’ Perspectives," by advocating for incorporating the personal, subjective “I” and “we” voices into the conventional notion of academic discourse as objective third-person only. By particularly emphasizing the “we” as representative of the classroom community, Pytleski shared her students’ experiences crafting shared reflections on identity that explicitly used the “we” voice to capture the social and community aspects of writing both within and outside the academy. Edward Lotto, from Lehigh University, followed and his presentation "The Subject is Academic: A Utopian Perspective" reframed the familiar Elbow-Bartholomae debate regarding academic writing using the concept of utopia as a fantasy, dream-like happy place where no one can actually exist. In many ways, Lotto’s analysis goes, the divide between academic and personal writing is just such a utopian perspective. While acknowledging the value of Elbow’s critiques, Lotto argued that the advantages of conventional academic discourse in helping students interrogate the nature of evidence and the reasons behind the interests and positions of others should not be overlooked. Kristina Fennelly, also from Lehigh, was up next with her exploration of the disadvantages of the agonism that seems unavoidable in traditional constructions of academic discourse in "Deliberation and the Town Hall Meeting." Weaving together the work of such disparate scholars as Betty Friedan, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, and Deborah Tannen, Fennelly proposed a new metaphor of the “town hall meeting” as a replacement for the persistent “argument as war” perspective. She then identified five priorities of a town hall meeting as a classroom practice: listening, writing as an ethically infused act, inquiry-driven versus asserting claims, coalescent argumentation, and a moderator persona. These five priorities, Fennelly argued, adjust but do not outright reject the academic discourse students are likely to be expected to produce in future courses. The final paper was presented by a third Lehigh representative, Christy Wenger, whose focus was on the value of “embodied” and felt knowledge to challenge the conventional separation in academics between body and mind in her presentation "From the Body: The Meeting of Matter and Meaning in/as Embodied Writing." Combining feminist theory (primarily from Donna Haraway) with the yogic philosophy of B. K. S. Iyengar, Wenger described her move toward an “embodied pedagogy” that involved, among other elements, asking students in her first-year composition course to learn and practice yoga, under the supervision of a certified instructor, with the explicitly stated goal of asking them to reflect on the ways in which their physical bodies influenced the writing they produced. Through a series of “body blogs,” Wenger reported students’ initial resistance but then eventual reflection of the value that increased self-awareness and focus on their bodies can bring to their experiences in the classroom. Overall, the four papers in this panel demonstrated the diversity of means through which composition instructors can engage as well as challenge the received notions of academic writing in our classrooms. |