Part III: Decentering

The spatial metaphor of inside to outside links, at least conceptually, the personal and the cultural maturation of a writer. The personal move is a relatively older story, going back to Ede's "On Audience and Composition" and to Linda Flower who discusses "writer-based" versus "reader-based" prose from a cognitive standpoint. Flower explains how some texts fail because of their "egocentric focus" (154). Egocentric failures range from simply leaving out information the reader needs, to striking a tone that is thoroughly off-putting, or to assuming a shared belief when it does not exist. It seems only a small step to imagine a text failing because of an "ethnocentric focus." What the two clearly have in common is the failure to thoroughly consider the "other" in some sense.

As teachers of writing, we want to encourage our students to decenter their thinking in both personal and cultural ways. We think this decentering is an important habit of mind that forms the basis for all sorts of more specific audience-related skills such as anticipating audience questions, appealing to the values of readers, showing awareness of an audience's cultural treasures (Bizzell), and even actively shaping audience to play a certain role. Although we have no sure way of assessing what our students have gained, we see signs of audience awareness in the students' posts. We realize and hope that a good deal of thinking about audience goes on without explicit evidence in students discussion posts; nevertheless, it is encouraging to see the evidence from time to time.

Although we sought the type of audience awareness that is useful in conventional student papers, we also observed some acts of audience awareness that only made sense in an interactive discussion. That is, some acts of awareness are transferable and others are discussion-specific acts of awareness. For example, one discussion-specific sign of awareness is the asking of questions, just kind of questions one might expect in conversation: "I have always wanted to visit Cairo, can you tell some more about it?" In our cross-cultural discussion sometimes these questions were directed generally and sometimes to a particular person, as in, "How are you doing today?" or "Have you ever been scuba diving?" Even though these questions would be out of place in an essay, we think they are signs of the very decentering our discussion project hopes to foster.

In our classes we assign a number of conventional writing assignments in which audience is obviously not interactive, so we like to see--in the online discussion--acts of audience awareness that are transferable to conventional writing. For instance one AUC student wished to make a point that was illustrated by The Green Mile, a novel he had read that later was made into a film. Even though he assumed his audience knew about the film, he still made that assumption explicit: "As most of you probably know, this novel has been made into a movie staring Tom Hanks." He provides the information while affirming his readers' prior knowledge.

In a related example, a Rockhurst student was making a point about a novel as well, but her message rested on basic plot information from Toni Morrison's Beloved: "I was able to really understand the struggles of Sethe and her children. For those who are not familiar with this story, it is about an enslaved woman named Sethe who kills one of her children and attempts to kill the other three to prevent them from going back to slavery." It is hard to say whether or not the cross-cultural nature of the discussion prompted this particular accommodation of audience, but the wide variety of questions and answers about things like Cairo and Kansas City night life or about religious practices suggest that students were curious about their international counterparts and tried to imagine one another's frame of reference. When a student felt the need to explain where her hometown of Omaha was in relation to Kansas City, her accommodation was probably sparked by the international makeup of the audience. That said, other Rockhurst students from rather small towns in Missouri or Kansas failed to provide a point of reference that Egyptian students could work from. Attention and inattention are both to be expected.