Cinnabar and Alabaster

framing quotation: "to understand is to be given, at one and the same time, new tools of potential understanding and new chains of potential enslavement, and the two are not easily separated" --j.m. balkin, cultural software

passages
192. main argument: "teaching genre awareness" means teaching "a critical consciousness of both rhetorical purposes and ideological effects of generic forms" which "may enable writers to learn newly encountered genres when they are immersed in a context for which they need those genres" and "to learn the needed genres with greater rhetorical understanding and with more conscious acceptance of or resistance to the genres' ideologies" while meanwhile "acquir[ing] new genres that can serve as antecedent genres for their future writing"
193. Freedman's argument against explicit instruction is (a) mostly about teaching genres rather than teaching genre awareness, (b) based on work w/second-language learners that might not apply to first-language learners; schoolchildren learn genres w/o explicit instruction, but that doesn't mean that being explicitly taught to learn genres wouldn't help in other ways
195. "explicit teaching may not be necessary for people to produce acceptable texts with appropriate generic forms...but it may be necessary for people to perceive the purposes of those forms and their potential ideological effects"
197. you can't identify all of the features of even any one genre, let alone be expert in them all; learners acquire genres "through immersion in the authentic situation," then "having learned how to percieve purpose behind form, the learner can discover the purposes behind [other forms]" and "having learned how to discern potential ideological effects, the learner can be alert to the ideologies underlying [other genres]"
198. explicit teaching doesn't = lecturing; hillocks calls it "environmental teaching" (presumably immersing students in or allowing them to create appropriate "environments" within which their tasks have genuine relevance)
199. several writers have shown how their students profitably learn about genre by collecting, examining, and making inferences from examples of writing within genres
202. amy saves the world again: "the teaching of genre awareness rather than particular skills gives a new potential justification for first-year writing courses and a way of helping students transfer general rhetorical understanding to particular rhetorical tasks. in that respect alone, a pedagogy of genre awareness can rescue first-year writing courses"; being aware of the influence of antecedent genres on later genre acquisition demonstrates too "a new angle on the issue of transference"
203. angle: we should choose carefully the genres students work with & study in school, b/c those are the genres that will be their antecedents for learning future genres.
204. toolboxes: "the more genres they know, the more potential antecedents they have for addressing new situations. if the genres they know influence how they would learn the new genres they encounter, then knowing more genres would give individuals more different genres on which to draw. the more genres they know, seemingly the more likely they would be to have access to a genre that would serve as a sound basis for learning any new one"
205. "genres that students learn in writing courses thus can be chosen to provide antecedents for tackling future writing tasks, but they should also be chosen with an eye to the limiting effects of those antecedents" [i.e. when all my students know about quotation marks is how to use them in stories to write dialogue, they want to always set them off with commas--their antecedents have overly determined their appropriation of new features]

the problem with princess amy is:
now there's nothing else to say. to do, for certain; her every line ends with "now somebody needs to go research this & tell us what really happens." but for exam writing, there's nothing left to make a thesis of w/o hands-on research to bring along!