What Matters Who Writes?
What Matters Who Responds?
Andrea Lunsford, Rebecca Rickly, Michael Salvo,
and Susan West
For 300 years, we have placed value in the textual product and
given rights of exclusive ownership of that product to a construct
called "Wordsworth." Now, if Foucault and contemporary writers
like Esther Dyson are correct, we are going to place value
elsewhere--we are going to ask, in Foucault's words, where
[Wordsworth] has been used, how "Wordsworth" has circulated, and
who has been able to appropriate this work. Moreover, we are going
to ask how this work is being used today, and we are going to value
those that can bring new ways of using it and working with it--and
value the processes we go through in doing so. As teachers of
reading and writing, then, we need to start imagining and
documenting alternative ways of assigning value, alternative ways
of producing and working with information of all kinds. At the very
least, we must start imagining more inclusive and expansive ways of
responding to student reading and writing, more inclusive and
expansive ways of figuring the acts of reading
and writing in our classrooms, more
inclusive and expansive ways of assigning credit or value or grades
to our students. Third, we are going to have to reimagine the space
of the classroom. Once delimited by institutional and material
walls that held pre-arranged desks facing front, the classroom has
been inviolate--a teacher's private space. Such metaphoric space is
no longer commensurate with theories of learning or with the
realities of late twentieth-century existence in a quite literally
electrified world. We are going to have to reimagine our classrooms
as open and public, as not bound by walls of any kind, as often
virtual places where people meet to make meanings together, not as
places where information is dispensed and people credentialed. And
finally, we are going to have to find new understandings of what
constitutes knowledge.
Next *
Previous
Postmodern (un)grounding *
Collaboration *
Copy(w)right/Ownership *
Possible Futures
Title Page *
Conclusions