Cinnabar and Alabaster

« November 2005 | Main | January 2006 »

December 31, 2005

simple necessities (genre 24.3/25)

Slevin, James F. "Genre Theory, Academic Discourse, and Writing within the Disciplines." Audits of Meaning. Ed. Louise Z. Smith. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 1988. 3-16.

1 sentence summary: teaching students to be aware of genres both enables them to master specific genres and enables them to flexibly interact with new genres as they work within the real disciplinary & extra-academic situations where discourse--not only or always academic--operates.

framing questions (3-4):
"how are individual acts of producing and reading texts related to one another? how do genres, discursive institutions, make these relations possible? what values, beliefs, and ways of interpreting the world inhere in the discursive forms students practice and in the process of learning them? and what kind of critical awareness of these values and interpretive strategies do students need in order to produce and not just parody these forms?"

passages:
5. "a genre is an inherited social form, a 'discursive institution,' within which a writer fuses meaning, structure, linguistic features, and pragmatic purposes and effects. genres establish rhetorical situations, including relations of power between writer and audience. understanding them and their institutional contexts is thus indepsnesable to the teaching of writing"
11. writing across the curriculum = "general practices, common procedures for teaching writing that will work in all sorts of courses...generalizations about the writing process and cognitive growth"; writing within disciplines = "what would happen if we followed and alternative view of academic genres, one that is centered on the writer's active, contributing participation in an educational community?....what a political scientist, or historian, or philosopher discusses the writing she studies and teaches...and the scholarly and student writing which intends to say something convinceinly about those texts, what does she mean by writing and how are these various texts related to one another?"
14. "neither...understanding [nor] transcending constraints...can ever be attained only from interpreting texts, no matter how attentive that interpretation might be to larger concerns. such constraints must be experienced and reflected upon from within one's own writing, which requires that student writing be an integral and equal part of any course....without this attention to writing, post-structuralist educational goals will do little more than reproduce (in different ideological form, at best; at worst merely with different ideological terms) the formulaic interpretive ingenuity that marks the educational agenda it critiques"
15. geertz on "the refiguration of social thought": "this genre blurring...[philosophical inquiries looking like literacy criticism...scientific discussions looking like belles lettres morceaux...histories that consist of equations and tables or law court testimony....has grown to the point where it is becoming difficult either to label authors...or to classify works....it is a phenomenon general enough and distinctive enough to suggest that what we are seeing is not just another redrawing of the cultural map--the moving of a few disputed borders, the marking of some more picturesque mountain lakes--but an alteration of the principles of mapping. something is happening to the way we think about the way we think. (19-20)"
16. "so the critical study of academic genres, a study that questions them as well as masters them, indeed masters them by both writing within them and contextualizing them, is pedagogically necessary for two reasons: (1) this active, productive, writing-centered experience is consistent with how we really learn, as opposed to just absorbing what others give us, no matter how complex and sophisticated the gift; (2) students, to be prepared for the variety of expectations, and even the 'blurring' of expectations, they will encounter, need not so much to be told about and practice our understanding of academic genres (which might be wrong and will probably soon be ou tof date) as to participate in their making, examining critically, on their own, the nature of those genres and the generic basis for thinking, reading, and writing in the disciplines they engage."

Posted by ttobryan at 05:20 PM | Comments (0)

electric co(llab) (collaborative writing 40/50)

Inman, James A., Cheryl Reed, and Peter Sands, eds. Electronic Collaboration in the Humanities. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2003.

1 sentence description: this essay collection takes as its project an examination of the "issues and options" that electronic resources offer for collaborative student work and that electronic collaboration offers for pedagogy and scholarship, taking particular interest in critically examining the lofty & at times false promises electronic media offer.

passages:
(jami carlacio: "what's so democratic about cmc?: the rhetoric of techno-literacy in the new millennium") 31 "computer technology may change the level of literacy among our population, but it will not change the ratio of literate to nonliterate people…we must first understand the conditions that have made possible existing socioeconomic inequalities before we can adequately remedy them….computers alone cannot address the social and economic issues that result from global multinational capitalism."
(james inman: "electracy for the ages: collaboration with the past and future") 50 "people do not have to interact in the same era for their work to be bidirectional. i can learn a great deal from people i've never known, just as they can benefit from my attention to and interactions with their ideas or prospective ideas. in this way, collaboration is transactional, as well as interactional, and thus able to span generations"; "the act of collaboration, then, comes from thinking about more than individual ideas without context; to collaborate with the past and future, individuals must develop detailed context-based understandings of any idea they consider, and they must further influence and be influenced by those ideas."
(radhika gajjala and annapurna mamidipudi: "collaborating across contexts: rethinking the local and the global, theory and practice") 76 the global context & a little realism: "how do we resolve the contradictory sentiments of seeing the internet as a panacea to the problems of the south [i.e. india]; of thinking that on the contrary, it may even be bad for us; and of asserting that this doesn't mean we don't want it?"
(nancy knowles and wendy hennequin: "new technology, newer teachers: computer resources and collaboration in literature and composition") 96 other/general benefits of collaboration: "inability to work with others is the primary reason talented workers lose jobs....second, because poor interpersonal skills can ruin otherwise successful communication, inability to colaborate can have more impact than the loss of a single job; during a treaty negotiation or a shuttle launch, for instance, the inability to collaboratie can cost lives....third, collaboration values diversity because it values diverse skils and experience, if not actual social, economic, or cultural backgrounds, and it does so in an environment of equality; members of a team may have different skills but equal responsibility for group success"
109. "neither the technology nor the collaboration need be feared. neither one is...anything new....because collaboration represents a primary means of professional work, we believe helping students to succeed means providing opportunities for them to practice. what may be unexpected is the idea that we may now collaborate with our students in the classrooms"
(mary fakler and joan perisse: "voices merged in collaborated conversation: the peer critiquing computer project") 111 "collaboration has become a buzzword in academic cirlces; other terms being used interchangeably with collaboration are coauthored writing, cooperation, and peer work"
119. the magic secret to their peer response work--students are responding to peers from another class--to strangers. consistently all semester, & developing relationships by doing so, but only w/people they don't "have to deal with...in class"
(timothy allen jackson: "imagining future(s): toward a critical pedagogy for emerging technologies") 285 "as academics, we are in the consciousness business. this is the end game of our efforts, if we are serious about the impact of ideas onto the body public as opposed to purely instrumentalist motivations driven by market forces that ultimately produce supply-side pedagogies. this is what it means to profess."
(anne ruggles gere: afterward) 379 "even though technology has helped me participate in many types of collaboration throughout my academic life, it has also presented obstacles. programs that will accept only one name on a given line, protocols that work only within the range of a given server, and research tools designed without coauthors in mind all disappoint as much as they support"
381. "community is another term that is used frequently in this collection, and it, too, merits questioning," as there's a lot of variability in what authors use it to do/refer to.
383. inman's definition of collaboration as "temporally constructed" & much more useful long-term than in semester-break bounded segments; time's also always a factor, especially in how technology intersects with collaborative ventures. "how do time constraints shape the kind sof electronic collaborations we construct? how might we use time differently in these constructions? what does time mean in the context of collaboration? what might it mean?" <--questions to proceed with.

Posted by ttobryan at 02:12 PM | Comments (0)

December 30, 2005

2nd grade in 1975 (collaborative writing 39/50)

Johnson, D.W., and Johnson, R.I. Learning Together and Alone: Cooperation, Competition, and Individualization. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1975.

1 sentence summary: all 3 modes--cooperation, competition, & individualization--have their place in the classroom as effective learning tools; the key is learning when & how much to do each.

passages:
2. "knowing how and when to structure students' learning goals cooperatively, competitively, or individualistically is an essential instructional skill all teachers need. each way of structuring interdependence among students' learning goals has its place."
14-15. "cooperative learning is the most important of the three ways of structuring learning situations, yet it is currenctly the least used. in most schools, class sessions are structured cooperatively only for 7 to 20 percent of the time....the research indicates, however, that cooperative learning should be used whenever teachers want students to learn more, like school better, like each other better, have higher self-esteem, and learn more effective social skills."
169. "students often feel helpless and discouraged. giving them cooperative learning partners provides hope and opportunity. cooperative learning groups empower their members to act by making them feel strong, capable, and committed. it is social support from and accountability to valued peers that motivate committed efforts to achieve and succeed."

(yes, those overly general observations are all this mid-70s textbook has to offer. it's very encouraging, but very general--they're talking about "students" as everyone from kindergarten through college, learning anything at all--& so not very informative.)

Posted by ttobryan at 12:20 AM | Comments (0)

December 29, 2005

even fewer givens (authorship 19.1/25)

Scollon, Ron. "Cultural Aspects in Constructing the Author." Literacy: Interdisciplinary Conversations. Ed. Deborah Keller-Cohen. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton, 1994. 213-228.

1 sentence summary: our notions of authorship are more culturally bound than we realize; other cultures' different constructions of such ideas as identity, selfhood, & the purposes of communication impact their notions of authorship just as ours impact our own--in deeply intrinsic ways.

passages:
215. "i once said in a class that a significant difference between the spoken word and the written word was one of permanence. a student, an inupiaq-english bilingual woman, said that that comment had explained something she had tried to explain to us for a long time. as she put it, 'when you say something, that's permanent; it doesn't go away. but when you write it, it's just on a piece of paper which anyone can tear up and throw away.' the permenance this student was talking about is not the physical or technological permanence of the word separated from teh body which has so attracted those of us who study and use literacy[, but]...one of committment"
216. 2 "of the features on which our contrast with the athabaskan tradition were based: the pluralism in the roles of author and reader and a face relationship of solidarity between the roles of implied author and implied reader" --b/c they "assert a nonplural, holistic person" and "we assert a pluralistic complex of social roles" our conceptions of being a reader vs. being an author, and of reader/author as somehow distinct or isolated pieces of ourselves don't make sense to their sense of self--there's no such thing as a you on the page. you're the you speaking or not speaking, in moments.
217. "i belive the problem...is with literacy itself; it is a problem with the separation of the word from the body. i believe that navajo woman was telling us something much more improtant than she did not want us to read her story. she wanted us to think about what our literacy was doing to us."
218. & face: "when i make the faice claim that you and i have a great deal in common," the common rhetorical move writers in western culture are assumed to be making in order to make their work accessible to readers, "i am emphasizing the involvement aspect of communication. that emphasis comes at the expense of granting you the right to assert that you, in fact, do not see things the way i do. this is the aspect of face that we believe athabaskans find they are unwilling to assert. traditional athabaskan narratives...take the stance of severely restricting the author's control over the interpretation made by the listener."
221. "one of [the] other dimensions is the contrast between symmetrical and asymmetrical relationships. asians are almost stereotypically hierarchical in their interpersonal relationships" & establishing/noting hierarchical arrangements is important. unlike western culture where "negotiation of relationships lies at the heart of communication," though, asian & athabaskan communication "functions more to ratify existing relationships than to negotiate them."
222. also in asian cultures, & where lies the slippery slope toward charges of plagiarism in american schools, "the primary problem of authorship is the relationship between an author and the tradition of scholarship, not between the author and the reader," which occasions the "skill in adopting the voice of others" that denotes, culturally, "an author seeking the highest form of authorial identity by losing one's own uniqueness in the language of a tradition."
224. argument: "authorship cannot be taken as a concept that can be used uniformly and universally in disucssions of literacy....if such cultural comparative analyses of face show authorship to be considerably more complex than we might have supposed it to be, then literacy itself must be too loosely constructed a term to be of much value in talking about either personal or cultural identity"

Posted by ttobryan at 08:53 PM | Comments (0)

we were using that! (authorship 18.3/25)

Miller, Nancy K. "Changing the Subject: Authorship, Writing, and the Reader." Feminist Studies/Critical Studies. Ed. Teresa de Lauretis. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1986. 102-20.

1 sentence summary: although there are ways feminism can make good of/put to use the postmodern demotion of the author, it's not a unilaterally positive change in dominant theory for feminist agendas.

passages:
104. "to the extent that the author...stands as a kind of shorthand for a whole series of beliefs about the function of the work of art as (paternally authorized) monument in our culture, feminist criticism...should have found a supporting (if not supportive) argument in the language of its claims. it is, after all, the author...who excludes the less-known works of women and minority writers from the canon, and who by his authority justifies the exclusion. by the same token, feminist criticism's insistence upon the importance of the reader...should have found affinities with a position that understands the birth of the reader as the necessary counterpoint to the death of the author"--but "the removal of the author has not so much made room for a revision of the concept of authorship as it has...repressed and inhibited discussion of any writing identity in favor of the (new) monolith of anonymous textuality, or 'transcendental anonymity'" (as misha calls it)--"it matterns not who writes"
105. what barthes does offer is an "interest in the semiotics of literary and cultural activity" that "intersects thematically with a feminist emphasis on the need to situate socially and symboliclly the practices of reading and writing. like the feminist critic, barthes explores and exploits the complex and tricky relations between the personal and the political; the personal and the criical; the interpersonal and the institutional"
107. "feminist critics in the united states have on the whole resisted the fable of the author's demise on the grounds that stories of textuality which trade in universals--the author or the reader--in fact articulate marked and differentiated structures of what gayatri spivak has called masculine 'regulative psychobiography.' they have looked at the material of the female authorial project as the location of perhaps a different staging of the drama of the writing subject."
109. & adrienne, adrienne... "the girl or woman who tries to write...comes up against something that negates everything she is about: she meets the image of woman in books written by women. she finds a terror and a dream, she finds a beautiful pale face, she finds la belle dame sans merci, she finds juliet or tess or salomé, but precisely what she does not find is that absorbed, druging, puzzled, sometimes inspired creature, herself, who sits at a desk trying to put words together."
114. "my hope for the fraternal (as opposed to sororal) model is that its oddness in feminist discourse saves it--if only rhetorically...from the automatic solidarities of sisterhood that have recently come under attack in so many quarters as being repressive of the differences between and among women"
116. "if women's studies is to effect institutional change, we cannot afford to proceed by the unequivocal rejection of 'male' models. rather...the possiblitiy of future feminist intervention requires an ironic manipulation of the semiotics of performance and production"; "i want to float the suggestion...that any definition of the female writing subject...that we may try to theorize today must include...ambiguities. that is a process that...acknowledges our ongoing contradictions, the gap, and the (perhaps permanent) internal split that makes a collective identity or integrity only a horizon"

Posted by ttobryan at 06:26 PM | Comments (0)

analogous (genre 25/25)

Fishclov, David. Metaphors of Genre: The Role of Analogies in Genre Theory. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State UP, 1993.

1 sentence summary: the metaphors scholars use to describe (literary) genres limit & allow their interpretation & thus how critics use them to know/make sense of texts; understanding genre through any/all of these, pluralistically, is a good approach to seeing how (in different ways) it works.

the major analogies (1-2):
1. biology (evolution)
2. families (trait-sharing & close or distant related-ness)
3. institutionality: "social institutions, like literary genres, provide a netowrk of normal through which our experience is made culturally meaningful"
4. speech-acts (a direct analogy, wherein genres are written "imitations or representations of speech acts"--but this doesn't work for all genres)

the overall argument is for "a pluralistic approach to genre theory.... a given theoretical model may be highly relevant to some kinds of genres, or to some aspects of their evolution, but only partially relevant or even totally irrelevant to other genres or other problems in the field. note that this pluralistic view is not a relativistic one, because not every conceptual analogy is relevant to the same degree (or even necessariily relevant at all) to genre theory"

his definition (8-10): genre is "a combination of prototypical, representative members, and a flexible set of constitutive rules that apply to some levels of literary texts, to some individual writers, usually to more than one literary period, and to more than one language or culture" <--this def should "distinguish genre from certain other types of groupings of literature" and "apply to all existing (and future) 'historical genres'" where "historical genre" means "they are transmitted through history," "are concrete configurations of texts in specific periods and literatures," and "they actually shape how writers produce, and readers respond to,literary works."

11. "there are no stable paradigms of genres, because if the critic's purposes shift, so do his 'generic' groupings of works"
12. "in every generic category we witness an intimate, hermeneutical relation between paradigmatic instances and the associated rules: generic rules are drawn from, and exemplified by, those representative cases. to cut this gordian knot connecting prototypical members and the associated generic rules would result either in disregarding the stable, paradigmatic instances, or else in denying that authors and readers (consciously or unconsciously) draw from those instances a flexible set of generic rules"
15. "although i do not propose to determine how many authors should write within a generic framework, there is no doubt that a genre cannot remain an individual endeavor. no matter how important a specific writer is in a given generic tradition, he is always only a part of that tradition."
17. "in...cases where the very channels of intercultural and interlingual communication are blocked, the generic system will remain confined within its linguistic boundaries. however, this situation in its pure form seems to be the exception in literary history; interlingual and intercultural contacts are the noem. where such contacts occur, literary genres commonly migrate across the borders and establish 'colonies' in neighboring countries or languages"
89. an important note about convention: "it does not entail...any actual conformity to the convention. in other words, a convention is not primarily based on statistical grounds; people may rebel against prevailing conventions or ignore them, yet we can still speak of those prevailing conventions as long as people believe that some specific 'oughtness' is part of the cultural scene in which they operate."

Posted by ttobryan at 05:27 PM | Comments (0)

far from heaven (collaborative writing 35.2/50)

Corder, Jim. "Tribes and Displaced Persons: Some Observations on Collaboration." Theory and Practice in the Teaching of Writing: Rethinking the Discipline. Ed. Lee Odell. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1993. 271-288.

1 sentence summary for all its promise, collaborative writing--especially if it becomes a tribal mantra--has the potential to overrun the ways of working of those who do work best alone, to dominate individual interests in the interest of the state; it's not necessary that it reach such extremes, but neither is it necessary that this way become the way for all.

passages
272. ..."about the writer-reader relationship...of course it's collaborative, thought we're not sure just how....for example, is it a collaborative relationship...or a competetive relationship, author and reader wanting to occupy the same place, each rhetoric seeking to displace the other?"
273. definitions: "by the phrase collaborative writing, i believe i intend to designate writing done jointly by two or more persons, where each person participates in the response to an occasion or need, the conception of the project, the discovery of its sources and possibilities, its design, style, and presentation to an audience"; examples from his own life/work: "i collaborated with one colleague in the production of a textbook, and with another in writing three articles....many times with editors....with the enemy, that is, those who have assigned or expected me to participate in the composition of work that i could not regard as my own....with the world, because that's not to be avoied, and with myself, pirating lines from earlier work, vandalizing passages i had intended to use elsewhere."
276. "i keep coming upon attacks against the 'myth of the great artist as solitary genius.' i don't want to hold on to...great or artist or genius, but i do want to hold on to solitary"; "tentative conclusion: why does it have to be one way or another? either collaboration or solitude? if we paid attention, we'd know: you're always with other, but sometimes you're desperately alone."
277. "on monday, we go to our literature classes and agree with barthes that 'the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the author,' but on tuesday, we go to our composition classes and tell student writers to show themselves to us in their personal essays"; "perhaps i'm angry...at what i read as recommendation that we submit to the group....it is clearly a possible consequence of excessive devotion to collaboration: eventually the group is privileged, and then perhaps the corporation, and then perhaps the state."
280. "to oppose arguments for collaborative writing is odd, in the first place, because collaboration is probably the prime hope citizens have for survival on the planet....[and] to set myself against collaborative writing is strange, in the second instance, because my own log shows that i was always collaborating in some way"
281. "i am at best a member of my classes, not a teacher, and the classes ought to be participatory, experimental, and collaborative, for there is no one who knows, and that is true and always was. when i write, i do not write, for what i write is intertextual and collaborative as all past language writes me, and that is true. when i have written, i disappear as readers create the only self that they can find"; all this postmodern worldview aside, "some of the arguments for collaborative writing exhibit problematic features and predict, i think, disasterous consequences."
less significantly, the readings of history used to justify these arguments are inconsistent & sometimes unclear; more importantly:
283. "some arguments fail to distinguish among writers and among kinds of writing"--a lot of writing is collaborative, but also "some people write when there is no one else in the room save the inescapable monologues and dialogues inside the head, the solo voices and choral ensembles that ring and echo around us."
284. "the composing i is always plural, but the responsible i is typically singular"; "when the decision for collaboration is made beforehand, a program begins to take shape. its end is not collaobraive writing. collaborative writing is a mode, not the end. the ultimate consequence...is the dimunition or elimination of the individual as a source of meaning in order to seve whatever collective is at hand"
286. potentially highly distructively, "arguments for collaborative writing, like many academic arguments, evince the power of the tribal" ("academics will do tribal dances."): "tribal magic is powerful and wrong. when you join the tribe and accept the tribal rhetoric, therby the tribal magic, then any outsider who does not immediately accede is already a fool and may be a villain"; "some of us take our pleasure, our strength, and our energy from others, learning with them and through them, seeing with them and through them. some of us take our pleasure, our strength, and our energy from what we catch inside our private headbones, turning our experience, looking at it this way and that, trying to see what sense we can make of it. why should we ever imagine that any one conceptualization of writing would serve us all? we are too various, too lovely, for any single vision to hold us."

Posted by ttobryan at 04:01 PM | Comments (0)

December 27, 2005

rocky climbs to grand vistas (collaborative writing 38/50)

Peck, Elizabeth G., and JoAnna Stephens Mink, eds. Common Ground: Feminist Collaboration in the Academy. Albany: SUNY P, 1998.

editors' framing claim: "might we assume...that collaboration is a magical merging of hearts and minds? and that women, because of their other-directed socialization, are likely to be able to work together without conflict? we think not" (4).

passages
33. (nesbitt & thomas--"beyond feminism: an intercultural challenge for transforming the academy"): "authentic collaboration is 'chronologically messy'; mutual respect and trust must develop before the fruits of collaboration can be harvested for publication. requisite openness by the partner with a greater stake in the dominant paradigm is needed for her to radically question how she constructs her assumptions and conclusions. while transformative, this can wreak havoc on a tight research schedule."
37. collaborators originate in different places & bring these places with them, always; "doing collaborative research is likely to be more costly to the woman of color than the white woman. but, the woman of color has the advantage of knowing subjectively and emotively about categories of knowing and meaning from her experience of being marginalized. this is critical information for those interested in transforming the academy"
39. "part of any collaboration involves doing one's own work. in my case and in that of my european american colleagues, it involves doing my 'white' work. naming this represents an embarrassment, a recognition that what i've percieved as scholarship in general is in fact a very particular perspective through the lens of racial dominance"
41. "it is important to understand what the dominant system establishes as authoritative. as a black woman living in the united states, i must understand the structures of the dominant culture and decide what expectations i will fulfill and which ones i will not....there are times when i must take my own authority and move out into the deep."
66. (singley & sweeny--"in league with each other: the theory and practice of feminist collaboration") term/title from a previous work they co-edited: "anxious power" = "both the ambivalence women feel about claiming their rights to language and the ways in which they express this ambivalence through their work....[since] throughout history, women have been discouraged from expressing themselves in written discourse" and, when they did it anyway, "reviled by others or [led to] judge [themselves] as either coldly masculine or uncontrollably hysterical"
71. van pelt & gillam "identify four kinds of conversation in collaborative composition: procedural talk, substantive talk, talk about the writing process, and social talk. we find that we engage in all four modes, shifting easily and instinctively from one to the other. we now conceive of the writer not as an isolated figure in a garret but as two people--each holding a telephone receiver to her ear."
73. "we switch back and forth easily between the roles of dictator and recorder. when one of us comes up with a good idea or an effectively worded phrase, the other instinctively writes it down. we discover or invent meaning in the process of negotiating"; "so far we have described the collaborative process as if it involves relatively little conflict. that is not the case. indeed, conflict is an important, volatile, but often ignored issue in feminist interaction in general. collaborators must face differences in moods, methods, schedules, and energies....[they] may also find that assumptions about women and competition--which many women internalize--make feminist collaboration even more difficult. as adrienne rich puts it:
'women have always lied to each other.'
'women have always been in secret collusion.'
both of these axioms are true. ('women' 189)
74. "these essentialist notions....ignore women's actual differences as well as their ability to overcome them. indeed, they say more about a hostile patriarchal climate than about women"; helena michie...coins the term sororaphobia to describe the ambivalence, even hostility, that women may feel toward their literal and figurative sisters."
174-5. (leiby & henson--"common ground, difficult terrain: confronting difference through feminist collaboration") "the 'common ground' of feminist collaboration--with its 'distinctive pleasure'--exists simultaneously with feminist collisions; common ground is also difficult terrain." back when women in the academy were fewer & so female collaborators "thus were more isolated," "their 'pleasure' of collaboration came, in part, from the greater sense of security and belonging it afforded them"--in today's academy the external pressures are different & so have different effects on collaborations.
179. "in the academy, collaborative ground is not merely difficult terrain, but virtually uninhabitable....does the academy see those who collaborate as 'collaborationists,' enemies of the academy itself? it is clear to use that this resistance to collaboration is also resistance to a pedagogy of and for difference"
181. students' & evaluators' read on classroom appropriateness & authority for these women as coteachers revealed prejudices & distorted impressions left by expectations--the lesbian in the duo was critiqued for spending too much time talking about "women's issues" when most of this content had actually been led by the other member.
220-1. (o'meara & mackenzie--"reflections on scholarly collaboration") "collaborating scholars not only share the research, writing, and meaning-making processes but also serve as an audience for each other; when one is collaborating there is always at least one other person who is willing and interested in reading and talking about one's work. collaborating...doesn't make outside readers unnecessary, however. we found that after producing a text we sometimes lacked the necessary distance and objectivity to evaluate its clarity and emphasis, in much the same way as we did when we wrote single-authored texts" (although or maybe and other pairs have reported feeling less possessive of & so more flexible regarding proposed changes to collaboratively-authored texts).

249. (karls & weedman) & this one's just for mommy: "we share an office smaller than most federal prison cells, and with less light, located in the basement--excuse us--the 'lower level' of the fine arts building on our campus."

Posted by ttobryan at 06:15 PM | Comments (0)

which doesn't really mean (collaborative writing 37/50)

Graham, Peg, and Sally Hudson-Ross. Teacher/Mentor: a Dialogue for Collaborative Learning. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 1998.

brief summary: a description detailing a cooperative program designed to revamp teacher-training by combining forces at both the university where the training took place and 6 local schools where teachers currently in classrooms were able to mentor university students.

by "collaborative" they mean that people at these varying levels at this handful of institutions worked together toward the improvement of this system, & everybody learned more about teaching & mentoring in the process.

c'est tout.

Posted by ttobryan at 06:10 PM | Comments (0)

the flaw in the metaphor (collaborative writing 36/50)

Roskelly, Hephzibah. Breaking (into) the Circle: Group Work for Change in the English Classroom. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 2002.

1 sentence summary: theorizing classrooms as circles presents them as both equilateral and closed, giving students the job of breaking into academic environs & representing them/ourselves as unified in ways we aren't; students' work in small groups enables them both to work toward increasing proficiency in real, meaningful ways and involves them in a multitude of circles with real power-differentials to negotiate.

passages:
xii. "our students have expectations for their roles and for ours, just as we have expectations of them. insofar as everybody understands these expectations, it's a safe circle. to the extent that students' lives don't match those of one another or those of the teacher, or the myth of the student or the classroom activity, the classroom can't be safe. too many experiences and opinions and values get shut down or closed out. we lose these students, even if we're unaware of it. only when we acknowledge difference and use it can the classroom become what it needs to be, a place of trust where we can together cross from the safe circles of unquestioned assumptions into the wilderness of new ideas and divergent experience and opinion." (she's got great stories to tell here, truly she does, but i have a really hard time even in the face of them allowing "acknowledgment" to suffice as a recipe for trust. i'm not sure i'd believe anything as a recipe for trust, really. acknowledgment is necessary, certainly; we can get closer to trust with candor than without it, but "closer" might never be more than a matter of millimeters.)
2. attitude: students "don't relish [group work] particularly, because they don't believe that it matters particularly."
5. "the primary reason that group work so often fails when it's attempted is that the practice of using groups conflicts with theories about knowledge and achievement that teachers, students, and institutions hold on to, most often unconsciously. how can a student be simultaneously collaborative and competative with others? how can a teacher be at once the authority and the novice? how can achievement be evaluated in a context in which individual achievement counts for little?"
8. from noddings: "kids learn in communion. they listen to people who matter to them and to whom they matter. the patterns of ignorance we deplore today are signs that kids and adults are not talking to each other about everyday life and the cultural forms we once shared." --> "group work promotes precisely this kind of communion and caring when it's initiated and sustained in an organic, integral part of classroom learning...[it] makes students into active, engaged learners" who "begin their own process of conscientitizao" (friere's term = "critical consciousness")
23. putting noddings' ideas about care to work is crucial--if we can get students to care about each other and each others' work, they "would be unlikely to remember themselves as 'the only one who worked' in a group"
24-5. lunsford's claims that hepsie believes in:
1. "collaboration aids in problem finding as well as problem solving...
2. collaboration aids in learning abstractions...
3. collaboration aids in transfer and assimilation; it fosters interdisciplinary thinking
4. collaboration leads not only to sharper, more critical thinking, but deeper understanding of others...
5. collaboration leads to higher achievement in general
6. collaboration fosters excellence"
32. "i've often told students that one reason i like them to write for one another and to show one another their work is that they'll write and turn in things to me that they'd never give to someone they cared about, like their fellow students" (cute, but realistic? at large schools they start & mostly end, even with my insistence on name-games & quizzes, as strangers. why should/would they care what these strangers think? my opinion is at least connected to their grades; when they walk out the door i'm the only one who hangs over them like a spectre; the rest all disappear.)
43. typical gender-spreads: "single-sex male groups often have difficulty interacting....they complete assignments quickly, often superficially, and then lapse into silence or occasional commentary. in contrast, women who work together often seem to thrive in single-sex groups....they get enthusiastic, they solve problems together....when males and females are mixed, males are often the dominant voices, or the females in the group encourage them to be drawn into the conversation, sometimes to the detriment of other females....[in the example on the preceding pages] you can see the female striving to include the male in the task and the male allowing himself to be included" ("why are you being so nice to me?" "...because you're letting me.")
65. "underlying all these [demonstrated] problems with groups is a mistrust, sometimes a fear, of what might take place in a group where Authority, as it's defined in the teacher's role, is absent."
69. "one of the most important strengths of small-group work...lies in its ability to make a chorus heard in a classroom....however, the chorus is precisely the problem. teachers and students fear what will happen when the many rather than the one have a say, when there is no single voice to dominate or direct, when there are many directions and many paths and therefore potentially many outcomes to any activity. the fear is simply the fear of chaos."
72. reality is: "biases and prejudices about class background, ethnic characteristics, sex and gender roles, and race relations inevitably and unconsciously frame the conversation in the small group. and this means that women and minorities might not have any better chance at involvement and power than they have had traditionally in the world outside the classroom." but because groups are also places there "knowledge is made, not merely acquired," group work "values and nurtures something more than the 'normal discourse' of the academic environment, and so has the hope of valuing the contributions of those who have not had access to this discourse or who have resisted it."
79. just putting them together doesn't (no matter how much we might wish it would) "mean that understanding will occur, that transformation will occur, primarily the transformation of the more powerful group member"
83. the condensed version of the tips list: "1. the virtues of groups--compromise, turn taking, and connection--all practices associated with feminism and with feminine attributes--can work against the group as well as for it....in the name of compromise [the women in one group] remained silent; in the name of cohesiveness and connection, they followed the rules laid out by one [male] member....2. principles of equality must be established overtly in the group by its members and in classrooms by the teaching" (which might include repeated & significant intervening)....3. neither gender is aware to what extent their reactions and habits are govered by role-playing and falling into cultural expectations for their gender. they are often resistant to being made conscious of these factors outside themselves, preferring to label reactions according only to individual personality"
84. "learning to write and speak in a community is more than learning to participate in the conversation and practices the community has ratified....students who work together in groups work toward connecting themselves to one another through language and asserting their own language within the group and in the larger context of the class and the community of learners. but they can't perform this work if teachers fear the conflict that dissensus presents--the speech of dialect, the odd form, the stream-of-consciousness comment."
87. cautious teachers (typically) use group work "if there's time in an overcrowded class period, if there's dead space where students seem starved for talk with one another, or if the class is responsible enough to handle 'the freedom'....[it's] a reward for students who have already proved they are socialized into the normal discourse of the classroom well enough not to go too far outside its bounds once they talk together."
130. hepsie's maxims:
1. "make group work organic
2. teach people how to work in a group
3. make membership in a group permanent
4. make the group's work real"
137. alongside the more traditional roles of "president" & "recorder" she adds "the reflector" to all groups, defined as "commentators and responders to whatever the group engages in on any one day--the reflector's assigned task is to look back at the work and consider what's been accomplished and where the group needs to go."

Posted by ttobryan at 03:40 PM | Comments (0)

writing centers on (collaborative writing 35.1/50)

Eodice, Michele. "Breathing Lessons, or Collaboration is..." The Center Will Hold: Critical Perspectives on Writing Center Scholarship. Ed. Michael A. Pemberton and Joyce Kinkead. Logan: Utah State UP, 2003. 114-129.

1 sentence summary: theoretically, collaboration is what we do all the time, just like breathing; pragmatically, keeping this in mind will enable us to make much better--and bolder--use of the rare opportunities for truely collaborative work that writing centers offer, especially in terms of their ability to build/be bridges to/with the rest of university communities.

passages:
114. her mission statement (literally): i believe...that collaboration is like the 'air we breathe,' like many travelers who sometimes wish for fresher, healthier air in a cabin full of strangers, or like a poor swimmer gulping and gasping, i often have my moments of distress: wishing for breathable air, for a writing partner, for voices of collusion; longing for the better angel of my nature."
115. "i find fascinating those who insist that this alchemy of collaboration is an 'inexplicable or mysterious transmuting' which is too scary to engage in, or, when it is in fact a practice for some, there is no effort to make it visible or valued. one result: institutional resistance to collaboration gives students permission to ignore, dismiss, or cheapen learning and writing with others"; another = "writing centers themselves practice one of the most powerful forms of collaborative learning (and yes, collaborative writing) embodied in the peer-consulting model. however, when asked, many writing center directors will say that their peer relations, their relationships with their institutions, their identity politics, are anything but collaborative, and they may even say that what happens in consulting sessions is not really collaborative writing." but it is: "collaboration (in, over, during) text production--the writer-to-writer talk, the mix of handwriting coloring a document, the shared excitement about a simple (re)construction, the alternate achievement of clarity or chaos in the feedback, the way time passes differently, the un-aloneness of work--all of these embody our centers"
118. me's "friend and assitant director, emily donnelli, says, 'collaboration is not collaboration only when it is with those who deserve it or with those who are sufficiently enlightened.'"
119. one necessary step: "recognizing and studying the collaboration...the collaborative writing as well as the collaborative learning about writing--that takes place in our centers" in light of not only their difference but their inherent "sameness"--"what we do with student writers is much more like the collaborative writing we practice when we academics, writers, or teachers seek feedback, participate in peer review, or work with editors; it is much more a form of intrusive caring about texts; it is much more an exchange than a one-way service"
121. moving outward: "i want to talk back to the pervasive attitude that faculty collaborate but student writers cheat....ironically, it seems collaboration is the only practice to which academics do not want to acculturate their students"--& when they do talk about it, "collaboration is most often framed as a qualifier in relation to an official writing center position on plagiarism"
123. to really become "good citizens" of the academic community, writing centers & what they know about collaboration need(s) to bleed out into "campus life"
126. sosnoski's term is "concurrence" for what binds working-groups where "a common ideal or telos does not hold the group together. intellectual compassion and care hold the group together."
129. so, the message: "professional and social networks are already formed and formidable within the writing center community; these are powerful and productive and ferry our goodies back and forth to each other, but to go beyond this we need to become a 'smart mob'--a homegrown initiative that utilizes our workaday knowledge to reach others in ways that can impact policy, influence administrative and institutional leaders, and help us grow leaders from among our writing center fellows. we can and should demand collaboration and continue to work toward boundarylessness, even with the knowledge that these actions will never be fully accomplished, completed"

Posted by ttobryan at 01:49 PM | Comments (0)

community means (genre 24.2/25)

Miller, Carol. "Rhetoric and Community: The Problem of the One and the Many." Defining the New Rhetorics Ed. Theresa Enos and Stuart C. Brown. London :Sage, 1993.

1 sentence summary: "community" is a difficult term in modern rhetorical studies, one that butts up against competing theoretical frames in potentially problematic ways; rather than presenting an insurmountable problem for rhetoric, however, it can be understood as a theoretical problem to which rhetoric offers--is--the solution.

passages:
80. the "problem of the one and the many" are still "relevant today, capturing for us the elusive goal at the center of a series of troubling issues, political cultural, theoretical, pedagogical....should community standards prevail over freedom of expression in matters of obscenity or nudity? can we claim that a single language, a single cultural tradition, ought to form the basis of public education? what standards and goals should prevail in higher education--those of disciplinary authority, those of students' 'home communities,' those of the capitalist-industrial community of which those students want to become members?"; main claim: "rhetoric should take seriously its social grounding by exploring and using the concept of community more fully and more critically"
81. "plato rejected rhetoric as inevitable demogoguery because it is grounded in community: rhetoric can only say what an audience already knows or wants to hear; rhetoric panders, manipulates, deceives"; community--esp. "discourse community"--has become important in comp: "in social constructionism, the 'one' and the 'many' are complicated and interdependent: individuals are constructed in important ways by the social milieu in which they develop, and knowledge concepts, even 'reality,' are all seen as distinctively social products"
83. bitzer defines community alongside public: "as a communiy, a public must be maintained by the arts of communication and must have a fund of common, or public, knowledge that it authorizes"--he questions whether such a public exists today when rhetoric has such "vicious circularity"--"good" is what the authorities say it is & tell us to believe it is: "a good reason is a reason that will be accepted as a good reason."
87. the problem w/rhetoric & liberalism: "liberalism promotes anomie and disaffection and ultimately the conviction that reasoned argument is not possible, because each individual is entitled to his or her own conception of the good, incommensurable by definition with everybody else's." (in walter's words, on 88, it is "a self-subverting doctrine" (15) because it "distains its own traditions" (14))
89. modern & postmodern pluralism are not the same; in the latter neither "individuals or communities can be unities" as both are "inherently full of conflict"
90. metaphors for this pluralism include young's model of "city life" as "the being together of strangers": "in living together, city dwellers have 'some common problems and common interests, but they do not create a community of shared final ends, of mutual identification and reciprocity' (238)"; others are mouffe's definition of "radical democracy" and corlett's "politics of extravagance"
91. miller's suggestion: "perhaps we should seek a rhetoric of play, of experiment, of advocacy that is both tentative and committed, of dialogic agonism that is exploratory and possessive"--the danger is that "postmodernism may leave us with a community that is so fragmented, perforated, intermittent, and attenuated that it no longer performs any rhetorical work....but...a rhetoric that does without community will be impoverished--certainly it will be neither fully social or political" & so the tightrope must be walked: "the problem of the one and the many has a rhetorical solution. the task of a new political rhetoric will be to construct one out of many, over and over again."

Posted by ttobryan at 12:22 PM | Comments (0)

December 25, 2005

the music of disharmony (collaborative writing 34/50)

York, Lorraine. Rethinking Women's Collaborative Writing:Power, Difference, Property. Toronto: U of Toronto P., 2002.

1 sentence summary: idealized models of women's collaboration as undifferentiated examples of harmonic concord deny the real generative power of dischord & the interaction of discrepant voices.

claims:
3. "the act of collaborating on texts does not in itself determine a specific or consistent ideological stance, feminist or any other"; although "all collaborations are, in some miniscule measure, challenges to the status quo at this particular historical moment in many countries and cultures," the project sets out to "theorize women's colaborations as ideological projects that harbour various ideological potentials, some more hierarchical, some more liberatory and subversive."

defining terms:
4. "for the methodological purposes of this study, collaboration will mean any overt co-authorship or co-signature of a work of art."

passage:
6. "expressions of difference in...collaborations can be...grating and uncomfortable, but they also may allow the collaboration to run, to engage the gears of dialogue and exchange. so without denying or forgetting the very real sustenance and pleasure that collaborating on texts has given literary women, i will nevertheless resist idealizing those relationships as necessarily revolutionary, sisterly, or morally superior."
10. "in the face of so much suspicion and at times, open hostility" it "can hardly be surprising" that "the unhealthy, shameful collaborative relationship has become, in reaction, an idealized lighting of torches."
13. the famous elizabethan playwrights did it too.
15. coe in ede & lunsford highlights "the association of multiply-authored works with a type of grass-roots political activism that many publishers might wish to avoid seeming to take seriously": "the real social tendency is toward collective writing. this is especially true of progressive writings. a union leaflet is rarely the work of one person"; & "the association that coe makes arguably functions within the ideological discourses of publishing, government granting bodies, and academia"
19. in nesbitt & thomas's definition, "authentic collaboration" is "a collective working arrangement that is 'naturally egalitarian rather than mediated by vigilant awareness of status difference' (32). that is, they do not regard scholarship that maintains the dominance of a senior academic as authentically collaborative; neither does research that pays lip service to various perspectives without actually incorporating multiple voices"
20. at least they acknowledge that this is impossible, but they project it as "a horizon to work toward"--ly disagrees.
22. stillinger's work is to foreground the behind-the-scenes collaborations in a lot of heretofore recognized as independent works & is "valuable as a querying of single authorship as a normative social and historical practice"
29. atwood's conception of foucault's author: "a kind of spider, spinning out his entire work from within"
37. overview: "the discourse that is contemporary women's collaborative writing has many, many placements: ways of expressing not only the moments of harmony and fusion that many of its critics have discovered, but also the differences, property issues, and negotiations of power that i find when i read these texts. when i come to the supposedly cramped and overcrowded quarters of two or more women authors 'in a birth,' i find, instead of an easy harmony, the much more absorbing cultural spectacle of women who are differently engaged."
42. cixous and clément as an example of "two collaborators inhabiting one conventionally singular author position...without ceding to a fusion theory of collectivity. this provides a space for intellectual disagreements to occur and be recorded without creating the impression that the collaboration is a failure."
47. gilbert and gubar as the flagship american duo whose "fact of friendship is of more than circumstantial interest; north american collaborators tend to see their collaborations as correlates or extensions of friendship. this is a telling sign of hot they tend to encode critical collaboration as mutuality rather than adopting a more strictly professional demeanor as the italian feminist groups do"; it also "often does suggest comfort with acknowledging difference and disagreement, but all too often...such complexities are overshadowed by the need to present a unified front," or what holly laird calls "'coalition collaborations' wherein 'women acknowledge their differences both in the immediacy of trying to write together and in their retrospective meditations, yet their more conscious aims and desires are to bridge those differences and to achieve solidarity with each other' ('preface' 15)"
53. the american academy system's "lack of respect" for collaborative efforts only encourages this, of course.
60. leonardi & pope on proper behavior: "'one of the problems with the conversation model is that conversation and dialogue, at least as they are practiced by 'good girls' seem so often repressed by social convention. one shies away from serious disagreement, one doesn't interrupt, one doesn't too obviously stake out one's territory, one tries not to digress. one never, ever screams' (267). as a result, leonardi and pope are explicitly wary of any fusion theory of collaboration"
61. (::snicker::) "this is what i have found in north american critical collaborations: a combination of institutional pressures and internalizations of conventional theories of critical authorship. the Author whose death Roland Barthes was conventionally said to have heralded is alive and well and seeking tenure and promotion at a university"
67. o'neill and limbert "suggest the term 'composite authorship' to describe" the efforts of "co-creators" whose work was begun by one author but is then picked up at a later time and added-to by another.
74. the difficulties--or playful tendencies--shown by the efforts of "michael field" to represent themselves in pronouns can also be read "as a sign of cultural anxiety, a joke which at least partly relies on a sense of two women collaboratively writing as an authorial circus trick."
184. york reflects on her own entrenchment: she delayed discussing the material with her graduate students "until [she] could ensure that [she] would complete a draft of this book, because [she] has always felt uneasy about teaching topics that [she is] currently writing about to graduate students. what if [she] were to unconsciously reflect [her] students' work in [her] own writing? how could [she] by sure, if a parallel were to arise between [her] own work and a graduate colleague's, that [she] had not clossed the line that [she's] been analysing in this book--the line between 'mine' and 'yours'?"
188. the whole project is motivated by "a persistant concern that women, in particular, not jump to the conclusion that collective work needs to be seen as productive only when it proceeds on the basis of agreement and likeness of opinion....ultimately...the fault lines that run through women's collaborations make them all the more compelling."

Posted by ttobryan at 05:17 PM | Comments (0)

everybody sing 'biko' (collaborative writing 33/50)

Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy in Process. NY: Seabury P, 1978.

1 sentence summary learners need to be actively involved in creating knowledge about the things they need to know, in ways and via materials relevant to the problems they face and the realities they participate in, not preached-to about others' concerns and curricula in the name of education; viewing knowledge as a process rather than a product makes this not only possible but necessary.

passages:
9. "our political choice and its praxis also keeps us from even thinking that we could teach the educators and learners of guinea-bissau anything unless we were also learning with and from them. if the dichotomy between teaching and learning results in the refusal of the one who teaches to learn from the one being taught, it grows out of an ideology of domination. those who are called to teach must first learn how to continue learning when they begin to teach"
42-3. his ideal is not "instruction in a school that simply prepares the learners for another school, but about a real education where the content is in a constant dialectical relation with the needs of the country. in this kind of education, resulting in practical action, itself grows out of the unity between theory and practice. for this reason, it is not possible to divorce the process of learning from its own source within the lives of the learners themselves. the values this education seeks are empty if they are not incarnated in life. they are only incarnated if they are put into practice. thus, from the earliest cycle of instruction...participation in common experiences stimulates social solidarity rather than individualism. the principle of mutual help, practical creativity in the face of actual problems, and the unity of mental and manual labor are experienced daily. the learners begin creating new forms of behavior in accordance with the responsibiltiy they must take within the community"
54. "in the dialectical unity between teaching and learning, the saying 'whoever knows, teaches the one who doesn't' takes on a revolutionary meaning. when the one who knows understands first that the process by which he learned is social and, second, that in teaching something to another he is also learning something that he did not know already, then both are changed."
89. "knowledge is always a process, and results from the conscious action (practice) of human beings on the objective reality which, in its turn, conditions them. thus a dynamic and contradictory unity is established between objective reality and the persons acting on it. all reality is dynamic and contradictory in this same way. from the point of view of such a theory and of the education which grows from it, it is not possible:
a) to separate theory and practice;
b) to separate the act of knowing existing knowledge from the act of creating new knowledge;
c) to separate teaching from learning, educating from being educated"

Posted by ttobryan at 04:37 PM | Comments (0)

constructing with vygotsky (collaborative writing 32/50)

Lee, Carol D., and Peter Smagorinsky, eds. Vygotskian Perspectives on Literacy Research: Constructing Meaning through Collaborative Inquiry. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 2000.

1 sentence summary using vygotsky's theoretical approaches as frameworks for field work about language, meaning-construction, and literacy will enable researchers to address current gaps and misunderstandings.

vygotsky's "core assertions include these principles":
1. "learning is mediated first on the interpsychological plane between a person and other people and their cultural artifacts"
2. and "often involves mentoring provided by more culturally knowledgeable persons, usually elders, who engage in activity with less experienced or knowledgeable persons in a process known as scaffolding" wherein, importantly, "meaning is thus constructed through joint activity rather than being transmitted from teacher to learner"
3. "the mediational tools...that are drawn on in the act of meaning construction, are constructed historically and culturally; thus cognition is 'distributed'....people, tools, and cultural constructions of tool use are thus inseparable....[which] suggests that learning is inherently social, even when others are not physically present"
4. "the capacity to learn is not finite and bounded"

passages:
35. [vera p. john-steiner and teresa m. meehan: "creativity and collaboration in knowledge-making"] "knowledge...is both reconstructed and co-constructed in the course of dialogic interaction. it involves agentive individuals who do not simply internalize and appropriate the consequences of activities on the social plane. they actively restructure their knowledge both with each other and within themselves. such reconstruction can occur as the outcome of positive shared dialogue and joint activities. it is also a consequence of criticism, rejection, and resistance to events that occur on the social level"
37. some of the more "useful aspects of creative apprenticeship": "when interaction across generations are successful and the mentor conveys his or her style of thought to the learner, their joint activity is meaningful to both parties. it provides renewal for the mentor and shared knowledge for the novice"; "long-continued collaboration between a more and a less experienced partner may lead to the beginner's becoming imitative as a result of too much internalization. the novice can resist that danger by remaining exposed to more than one mentor or distant teacher"
38. "an essential part of the dialectic of creativity is intellectual interdependence" & "just as interdependence with mentors is crucial during formative years, sustained interaction with one's peers is essential thereafter"; for successful creative peer groups "emotional support was no less essential than the intellectual stimulation" working together produced.
43. "the book" in a particular study "required many reworkings, a process that would have overwhelmed either person working alone. the power of their collaboration is in the complementarity of their disciplinary training and vision. it is also in their mutual support during this long project. it let them share risks and take artistic and emotional chances."
46. in a recent study of collaborators finishing each others' sentences, john-steiner & meehan found that "collaborators more deeply ingaged in joint thinking produced the largest percentage of co-constructed utterances. in contrast, those in complementary relationships managed their interaction somewhat differently, taking longer turns to produce their ideas and having fewer co-constructed utterances"
65. [g. wells: "dialogic inquiry in education"] "the teacher should be involved as a coinquirer with the students in the topics that they have chosen to investigate. to be able honestly to say, in response to a student's question, 'i don't know. how could we find out?' is probably more important, in creating an ethos of collaborative inquiry in the classroom, than always being able to supply a ready-made answer....to be able to wonder out loud about these issues and to take action to understand them better not only provides an excellent model for students to emulate, it also demonstrates the authenticity of the teacher's committment to inquiry"
67. the real problem with the banking model is that in its "treating knowledge as a thing that people possess, it loses sight of the relationship between knowing and acting and of the essentially collaborative nature of these processes. knowledge is created and re-created between people as they bring their personal experience and information derived from other sources to bear on solving some particular problem. what we refer to as knowledge is thus both the enhanced understanding of the problem situation gained by the participants, on the one hand, and the representation of the undersanding that is produced in the process, on the other."
81. "just as our students benefit from participation in a dialogic community of inquiry, so too do we, their teachers"; "vygotsky's theory of learning and development, with its core concept of artifact-mediated joint activity, can integrate some of the most important insights that have been gained in recent years from research in education....we can see how collaborative group work, dialogic knowledge-building, and an inquiry-oriented curriculum are essential and interdependent components of a vision of education that...recognizes that both convention and invention are necessary for the development of society as well as for its individual members"

Posted by ttobryan at 03:18 PM | Comments (0)

"mutuality" (collaborative writing 31/50)

Bleich, David. The Double Perspective: Language, Literacy, and Social Relations. New York: Oxford UP, 1988.

1 sentence summary: the "doubling" bleich speaks of refers to his desires to & propositions for participating in classrooms as both a teacher and a learner, an authority figure and a mutual collaborator.

175. "collaboration among the students alone in necessary, but not enough to change the classroom from what it is now. the most intractable feature of the classroom structure is the unchanging authority of the teacher who assigns grades"--so doing away with grading (at least in so far as can be done with particular activities) enables genuine teacher-student collaboration that can't happen in any other ways. "cooperation is itself an ambiguous idea. many parents use the word to mean 'follow my instructions.' a child who does not follow instructions is 'not cooperating'."
180. workshops fostering sharing & creativity among faculty create a sense of membership & belonging between faculty members that can then be shared/recreated with students--"when the leadership begins to function collaboratively, it is no longer difficult to promote collaborative work in classrooms, nor for teachers and students to collaborate with one another. also important here is the purely local character of these changes. this community, working within its own constraints, found some ground for creating a collective identity"
182. "heath's studies propose...each use of language is anchored in a generic social act, and it is not a paradox to use a new form of social initiative to change, enhance, or understand an existing social situation. by understanding language in this thoroughly social sense, it no longer makes sense to approach it as if it were an abstract and infinitely variable code; it is considered instead as a feature of identifiable human interests....[and] it is not an academic matter to study language, but an ethical, social, and political project which requres active collaboration among individuals, communities, and classes"
183. writing, like talk in literacy classrooms, usually goes from teacher to student and from student to teacher; in jr. high students pass notes around that "are forms of writing, and they represent student interests...which have a legitimate place in the literacy classroom. they are spontaneous writing efforts and their value ought not be underestimated. why shouldn't writing efforts in university classrooms be directed toward other individuals in that class? why shouldn't texts be exchanged fluently, not just for 'peer evaluation' but for interest and reflection on what they say."
185. in a classroom where teachers and students all provide feedback on one anothers' work, "an important compensation for students' lack of experience...is their tendency to 'close ranks' and collaborate in the search for what the teacher is not aware of"
186. in the exchanges in this ideal class, "teachers and students are mutually implicated in one another's uses of langauge; the students' relationships with one another are more important than individual students' relationships with the teacher; collaborative group efforts among students and including the teacher are essential; individual histories of language-use strategies may be compiled to reveal present language-use strategies; literary experience and response statements are necessary to understand the stereoscopic experience and action of language;" and "all forms of language use in the classroom, including the oral and the informal, should be understood as potential contributions to the general project of simultaneously studying and cultivating literacy"
253. in bleich's dream world, "teachers and students should be considered members of the same class....instead of considering the classroom and the academy as two classes...all members of a classroom [are] members of a single class or genre, 'classroom members.' this conception of the classroom admits into it the reciprocity of pedagogical function--a reversible 'syntax' of mutual teaching....the reversals of subject and predicate refer to new social relations which can enable a new access to authority for all classroom members" (of course in real rooms this doesn't happen)
281. part of why we're not very good at teaching w/groups is that we don't know much about how groups function; all of our energy has been spent on studying individuals. we believe groups need leaders, but we don't know much about how the leadership in groups morphs with tasks & situational demands. groups of three are less "easy" than pairs but have an "essential political feature...--the presence of a majority and a minority." disputes between only two members "would have no social source for possible resolution, and it would be too easy for individual positions to become fixed in a stalemate"; a group of three "is a structure which, because of its own political character, makes it possible to introduce political considerations of a larger order. issues of genre, race, and class, for example, might not be confined to the subject matter of students' study of language, but might also find expression in the deliberations of the group itself"; it also "has a meaningful history in each person's childhood development" as "the basic idea of the group of three as two two-versus-one configurations develops: the child's relation to two parents"; "potentially, there are actually four modes of membership--two in which one is in the majority, one in which one is a minority, one in which there is consensus among all members"
283. "finally, the group of three is the smallest unit in which peer-group psychology can come into play. for many young people, the peer group is affirmative, a set of others who can be trusted more easily than parents, teachers, and other authority figures....a small group functions in part as a 'safe haven,' a place where one's doubts about authority can find a sympathetic response to begin with; perhaps an even more permanent set of views can be cultivated and nurtured with less compliance to the teacher than if one had these views by oneself. belonging to a group thus helps to validate differences between students and teachers and creates more authority for each class member to find common ground with teachers"
318. "in spite of his obviously generous intentions, the conversations bruffee has in mind seem to be between members of a privileged community--the teachers--and members of underprivileged communities--students. the social task of teachers is to 'convince' students to be less loyal to their own already established set of communities and, presumably, increase their loyalty to the teachers' communities"; "the basic idea of conversation seems to have been overridden by the presupposition that it is better to be in the teachers' community than in whatever community the students are already in....which leads to the second problem: the implied conception of what a community is impoverished" (i can't read that sentence. i keep trying. somebody here is impoverished.) & "finally, i'm not sure it does anyone any good to assume that students ought to be members of our community. even those who actually wish to become teachers will work in communities far different from ours and will have different purposes and be confronted by different problems"
321. tom fox's observation that ethnographers' intent being to "inscribe culture, not change it" is intrinsically erroneous: "consider the thought that one can write about something without actually changing it....both the researcher's joining of the new community and the writing about it, is already a change in that community relative to both the researcher's community and the one being studied."
322. "almost all...students assume traditional individualist values, namely, that they are in the literacy classroom to improve their individual skill, and that the unquestioned path to that end is to secure, in a one-to-one relationship with the teacher, either authorized approval or official instruction in a problem-solving way, to achieve the real ultimate end--a high grade."

Posted by ttobryan at 01:44 PM | Comments (0)

vive la resistance (collaborative writing 29.3/50)

Clark, Suzanne, and Lisa Ede. "Collaboration, Resistance, and the Teaching of Writing." The Right to Literacy. Ed. Andrea A. Lunsford, Helene Moglen, and James Slevin. New York: MLA, 1990. 276-85.

1 sentence summary: collaborative learning initiatives tend to rely overmuch on the idea of built communities as uncomplicated boons rather than seeing in them their ability to continue dominanting students and their varied positionalities; there is still (necessary) room for resistance theories in examining what collaborative classroom strategies do and allow.

passages
277. it is important to remember that "terms like conversation, collaboration, and community are hardly value-free"--"community," for instance, is never presented with an opposite that's also-positive, & it's easy to get sucked in to believing it's an uncomplicated good, but "despite teachers' intentions, collaborative learning practices can enable teachers merely to embody their authority 'in the more effective guise of classroom consensus,' which, according to myers, can have 'a power over individual students that a teacher cannot have' (159)."
278. "collaborative learning theories implicitly if reluctantly contribute to an autonomous model of literacy, one that assumes that the classroom can function as a neutral site of learning, a magic epistemological circle of chalk dust separating students and teachers from the world at large"; thus "it is not enough...that collaborative learning developed in response to the cultural, political, and ideological needs of real students and teachers in real colleges and universities. theorists who have thus far emphasized epistemological issues must now explore culture, politics, and ideology in equally critical ways," & their suggestion for a key way = "the concept of resistance," which "enters into our dicussion of collaborative learning in two ways: as a mode of opposition to ideology and as a mode of learning."
279. in althusser's "bleak" conception, "the dominant state ideology uses schools (ideological state apparatuses) not only to reproduce social conditions but also to construct students as subjects of ideology" whose "resistance is futile" because "resistance itself is complicit in producing inequality" & in which system "collaborative learning...is inevitably a poor trick played on students by well-meaning teachers"; resistance theory (aronowitz and giroux) holds that "since literacy is in culture--and thus not homogeneous but multiple, heterogeneous, and contested--the reproduction of ideology through schooling cannot be...seamless" and the "opposition" that is always part of students' responses to schooling is "part of the sociology of learning" and "provides the opportunity for students to act as agents--to rewrite the ideologically, culturally, and politically embedded narratives of their lives."
284. the challenge, then, is for collaborative learning theorists to refuse to "oversimply their experiences" & instead pay attention to "the significance of resistance," which "is not simply oppositional. resistance opens up possibilities for learning for teachers and theorists, as well as students. resistance threatens education itself because it crosses the borders between the classroom and the world, but the threat is also the promise. what happens in a writing classroom can make differences that matter in students' lives....the mutual interrogation of ideas does not inevitably lead to critical dominance and repression. instead, resistance can catalyze a fruitful complication and a more rewarding, enabling understanding."

Posted by ttobryan at 01:22 PM | Comments (0)

December 24, 2005

samantha's books (genre 24.1/25)

Himley, Margaret. "Genre as Generative." The Structure of Written Communication: Studies in Reciprocity between Writers and Readers. ed. Martin Nystrand. Orlando: Academic P. 1986.

1 sentence summary: the writing of a young child just learning about writing's visual and purposeful elements learns because of and within the structures of assigned and example-genres; her awareness of a situation's expectations determine what she writes more than what she "wants to say" does.

passages
defining genre loosely & then zooming in on miller's "social action" definition, she claims:
139. "as a child comes to appropriate and rework a genre (to 'own' it, in bakhtin's [1981] sense), she comes to learn not only the typical substance or formal features associated with the discourse but also--and surely more fundamentally--the situations that typically give rise to the genre, the social action she may accomplish with it, and the social and interpretive roles she may adopt with it. indeed, what a child learns is a new way of acting and making meaning"; when we learn new genres, "we discover new ways to mean and thus how to participate more fully in the actions of the community"
142. the young writer's "interpretation of 'book' at any moment in her development as a writer...defines those text points that are salient and then, in turn, appropriate text options. her notion of the genre--of the social and interpretive roles entailed in that genre--establishes a kind of overall meaning potential"--what she thinks "book" means "defines a series of choice points for samantha to identify and respond to. in a sense, then, the genre itself--or more precisely her interpretation of it--generates a kind of momentum that draws samantha forward as she composes, and that may encourage, perhaps even enable her to discover and invent new text-creating options"
146. clearly, in her early "books," "it appears that samantha's purpose primarily is to act like a student and to fulfill a class assignment--and to do so within her understanding of the Draw and Write genre"
150. when in one example the text she generates is too short, "not meeting the genre requirement of three lines--a requirement that draws the writer forward. driven by the syntactic-semantic momentum of the first part, samantha 'invents'" words to fill the lines; "neither her teacher nor her mother can explain the reference to violet day. when i asked samantha herself, she grinned sheepishly and merely shrugged. in a sense, it is the genre, not samantha, speaking."
154. in samantha's easter-bunny letter she follows "the formal structure of a letter. the tone is formal and polite, and all the extra periods and attempts at cursive suggest how samantha seeks to use all appropriate written language conventions. after all, she has an important audience, the easter bunny--who she truly believes is real--and an important statement to make"--rather than an artificial assignments, she's speaking to someone, and for a reason.
156. "for samantha, the effect of genre is clearly generative. her notion of how a particular genre works--the social role the writer adopts, the interpretive act she performs, the situations that give rise to the genre, the discourse features--defines for her a series of textual choice points which she negotiates as she creates text....she moves from texts that 'look like' certain genres to texts that 'say something' and then to texts that mean solely within the resources of written language. this growth is facilitated by her evolving notions of genre. to experiment with a genre is a way to create new situations, to learn new ways to make meaning and to interpret events and to be. in a sense, genre is like the hub of a wheel, related to and bringing together the several aspects of writing."

Posted by ttobryan at 11:35 PM | Comments (0)

December 23, 2005

like virginia (collaborative writing 30/50)

Adams, Katherine H. A Group of Their Own: College Writing Courses and American Women Writers, 1880-1940. Albany: SUNY UP, 2001.

1 sentence summary: one key reason women writers weren't as prolific or as much of an artistic force during this period as men were is that the ways and means of getting together to learn about, share, and practice the craft—college courses, clubhouses and meeting-rooms, academic groups & other scholarly & literary circles—weren't open to women, so those who wrote did so in isolation; when group venues for teaching, learning, and shared participation opened up, so did the quality & quantity of woman-authored work.

passages:
xvi-ii. rapid shifts in women's publication rates & entrance into editing & journalism were due to "not just the training secured in college but the encounter there with a model for professional endeavor, a working routine and support mechanism that these women carried with them from college into careers. immediately after graduating, they began participating in clubs, workshops, political parties, and government agencies where they could continue working within groups as they had done in college. although they might not be wanted in existing groups where men had dominated, and forming new ones could be an all-consuming endeavor, these women proceeded doggedly, creating a pattern of collaboration as well as possibilities for women writers that had never existed before" that allowed them to "enter[] the previously closed circle of Writer"
xix. "the real choices made by the generations of women who shattered the definitions of writer/non-writer, both in their college classes and then in their careers, can enable us to truly examine écriture féminine and the learning environment needed to nurture it: these writers reveal to us not new theoretical possibilities but specific models of work that nurture creativity and transform lives"
185-6. "the larger picture of these years" shows us not just women in isolation but "women working as individual writers and within a variety of groups, a successful means of breaking through the accepted circles of earlier generations. for what these women really did was define collaboration for women. in elinor's college career (1906) julia schwartz focused on the group's role in providing the motivation for creative work....the four women discuss the reasons that so many women had given up on writing: the needs of families, the control of men, the inadequacy of their professional training. but...their leader, posits that what women have lacked is an ongoing form of group committment": "why do you write poetry...? because you're simply bursting with something that has to be said? pooh! you write it because you want my approval, i write it because i want yours...it's women who demand things of each other; women who accomplish do it because they are driven by" one another (150 in schwartz). "in networks of friends and colleagues, in clubs, in graduate workshops, and in political organizations, they forged a method from which they never retreated. with the support of such groups, they assumed voices of authority without denying the isolation of writing and the dedication it requires."

Posted by ttobryan at 03:02 PM | Comments (0)

the bottom line (collaborative writing 29.2/50)

Ashton-Jones, Evelyn. "Coauthoring for scholarly publication: Should you collaborate?" Writing and Publishing for Academic Authors. Ed. Joseph M. Moxley and Todd Taylor. Lanham, MD: UP of America 1992. 269-288.

A: (if you also mean "in the humanities," it's a qualified) yes.

tips & warnings
177. in other fields it's more common/accepted, but in the humanities "slower to capture a niche, despite such efforts to boost it as the national endowment for the humanities' relatively new grant-funding category for collaborative projects"  the endowment for the humanities thinks this is a good idea and we don't? and we don't even know about it?
181. in some fields, collaboration means less investment & more reward—for 30 pages of writing 2-6 people can get credit instead of just one. but this (esp in the humnaities) "may not nessessarily be the case"—"as coauthors have themselves observed, collaboration can change the dynamics of the writing process in ways that the uninitiated might not bargain for" which makes it in many ways harder (& definitely more time-consuming)
183-4. cautions include this list from fox & faver: (these are ways potential collaborators need to 'fit')

• more partners means more potential for disagreement
• "relative rank of partners (peers expend more time and energy than those in a hierarchal relationship, in which the senior partner often calls the shots)"
• gender can cause issues (& probably it's not the only thing that can)
• "complementarity in work habits and styles ('highly disparate tendencies may agitate the partnership and obstruct fulfillment of the project's tasks and goals');
• differences in energy level….
• 'primacy of work' for each partner (relative importance of work for each participant can be an impediment to the project's progress
• the problem of competing commitments….
• 'emotional tendencies and habits' (anxiety can be exacerbated in collaboration)
• 'achievement orientation' (a partner motivated by 'extrinsic' rewards may not be a good 'fit' for one motivated by 'intrinsic' rewards)"

; "one collaborator, who ultimately concedes the value of collaboration, nevertheless laments that it should be called 'collaborative fighting' rather than 'collaborative writing' (allen, atkinson, morgan, moore, and snow, 80-81)."
189. academic vetting processes are still "incompatible" with collaborative work/processes, but hopefully not for long: "perhaps the suspicion with which collaboration is sometimes viewed within the academy is only a temporary response" reflecting this discrepancy w/convention & thus "the problem…does not inhere in collaboration itself but in an outdated system for determining scholarly merit, a system that may indeed breed 'coauthor abuse'"; the final answer: "if you're in a discipline where collaboration is…something you can take or leave, then you're probably not in a profession where collaboration is even remotely valued"—but if it's valued the value might be negative & then it'll take a fight. bottom line is it has a lot of benefits, they aren't without cost, and at our current "transition point where two contradictory systems are in conflict" it's "certainly a risky venture" but one that can move writers past limitations working alone entails.

Posted by ttobryan at 02:40 PM | Comments (0)

CLN (not really about) (collaborative writing 29.1/50)

Sosnoski, James J., Patricia Harkin, and Ann Feldman. "Collaborative Learning Networks: A Curriculum for the Twenty-First Century." Beyond English Inc.: Curricular Reform in a Global Economy. Eds. David B. Downing, Claude Mark Hurlbert, and Paula Mathieu. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 2002. 219-230.

brief summary: CLN is a blanket-term for positive models of how to institutionalize interdisciplinary teaching/learning efforts. the examples described in the article are fascinating but don't have much in common with one another & so offer ideas for how other programs could construct similarly productive programs, but don't really focus in on a method or result; this isn't so much abour "currucular reform" as technological opportunities to rethink how curricula are isolated and defined so that, with new definitions considered, reform will be possible.

Posted by ttobryan at 10:05 AM | Comments (0)

without oedipus (authorship 18.2/25)

Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. "Infection in the Sentence: The Woman Writer and the Anxiety of Authorship." The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven: Yale UP, 1979.

1 sentence summary: for women writers, the traditions and expectations of authorship and authority provide uncertain direction; designed by and for men, they don't weigh heavy on women's efforts in the same way they do on men's, but crush them in different directions that leave women writers constantly searching for women readers, precursors, "subculture" sisters to provide context & tradition.

passages:
46. "that writers assimilate and then consciously or unconsciously affirm or deny the achievements of their predecessors is, of course, a central fact of literary history....more recently, some literary theorists have begun to explore what we might call the psychology of literary history--the tensions and anxieties, hostilities and inadequacies writers feel when they confront not only the achievements of their predecessors but the traditions of genre, style, and metaphor that they inherit from such 'forefathers.' increasingly, these critics study the ways in which, as j. hillis miller has put it, a literary text 'is inhabited...by a long chain of parasitical presences, echoes, allusions, guests, ghosts of previous texts.'"
46-8. harold bloom's paradigm for literary achievement--the new poet configures himself as the son of the older poet(ic tradition) & is in an automatic oedipal struggle whereby he has to kill the father to achieve his own glory. he's been critiqued for how there are no women in this story, but the g&g think his "oversight" is important/good--there are no women in that story, & the plight of woman writers has always been that there is such a dominant story and they don't fit into it.
48. the woman writer doesn't have the same "anxiety of influence" men do, as writers, because her predecessors are "almost exclusively male, and therefore significantly different from her" & influential in very different ways: "not only do these precursors incarnate patriarchal authority...they attempt to enclose her in definitions of her person and her potential which, by reducing her to extreme stereotypes (angel, monster) drastically conflict with her own sense of self--that is, of her subjectivity, her autonomy, her creativity. on the one hand, therefore, the woman writer's male precursors symbolize authority; on the other hand, despite their authority, they fail to define the ways in which she experiences her own identity as a writer. more, the masculine authority with which they construct their literary personae...semm to the woman writer to directly contradict the terms of her own gender definition. thus the 'anxiety of influence' that a male poet experiences is felt by a female poet as an even more primary 'anxiety of authorship'--a radical fear that she cannot create, that because she can never become a 'precursor' the act of writing will isolate or destroy her."
50. "the woman writer...searches for a female model not because she wants dutifully to comply with male definitions of her 'femininity' but because she must legitimize her own rebellious endeavors"; "thus the loneliness of the female artist, her feelings of alienation from male predecessors coupled with her need for sisterly precursors and successors, her urgent sense of her need for a female autience together with her fear of the antagomism of male readers, her culturally conditioned timidity about self-dramatization, her dread of the patriarchal authority of art, her anxiety about the impropriety of female invention" all bog her efforts down.
51. this "anxiety of authorship" = "an anxiety built from complex and often barely conscious fears of that authority which seems to the female artist to be by definition inappripriate to her sex....this anxiety of authorship is quite distinct from the anxiety about creativity" male writers feel; "indeed, to the extent that it forms one of the unique bonds that link women in what we might call the secret sisterhood of their literary subculture, such anxiety in itself constitutes a crucial mark of that subculture"; "if contemporary women do now attempt the pen with energy and authority, they are able to do so only because their eighteenth- and nineteenth-century foremothers struggled in isolation that felt like illness, alienation that felt like madness, obscurity that felt like paralysis to overcome the anxiety of authorship that was endemic to their literary subculture"
73. "when we consider the 'oddity' of women's writing in relation to its submerged content, it begins to seem that when women did not turn into male mimics or accept the 'parsley wreath' ["of self-denial, writing in 'lesser' genres--children's books, letters, diaries--or producing what george eliot called 'Silly Novels by Lady Novelists'"] they may have attempted to transcend their anxiety of authorship by revising male genres, using them to record their own dreams and their own stories in disguise. such writers, therefore, both participated in and--to use one of harold bloom's key terms--'swerved' from the central sequences of male literary history, enacting a uniquely female process of revision and redefinition that necessarily caused them to seem 'odd.' at the same thime, while they achieved essential authority by telling their own stories, these writers allayed their distinctively female anxieties of authorship by following emily dickinson's famous (and characteristically female) advice to 'tell all the truth but tell it slant--.'"; "thus these authors managed the difficult task of achieving true female literary authority by simultaneously conforming to and subverting patriarchal literary standards."

Posted by ttobryan at 08:37 AM | Comments (0)

December 21, 2005

what's cooking? (collaborative writing 28/50)

Elbow, Peter. Writing without Teachers. New York: Oxford UP, 1973.

1 sentence summary: the title claim hinges on the notion that teachers are superfluous to learning/learners (we can't be teachers without students, but students' status doesn't hang on us); the text purports to exemplify methodology by which students interested in writing better--primarily envisioned in terms of strategies for generating more writing and obtaining genuine feedback regarding what the generated writing does--can do it without teacherly guidance--but not alone.

cooking:
(frankly, i think this is the sloppiest, least developed, most un-useful metaphor he has, but he's peter elbow, & so you have to be able to talk about things in his term, don't you, to get credit for playing well with others disciplinarily?)
49. "i think i've finally figured it out. cooking is the interaction of contrasting or conflicting material....[there are] various kinds of interaction that are important in writing. but in any of them cooking consists of the process of one piece of material (or one process) being transformed by interacting with another: one piece of material being seen through the lens of another, being dragged through the guts of another, being reoriented or reorganized in terms of the other, being mapped onto the other."
cooking as interaction between people
49. & on through the explanation: "the original, commonest, easiest-to-produce kind of interaction is that between people....i write a paper; it's not very good; i discuss it with someone; after fifteen minutes of back-and-forth i say something in response to a question or argument of his and he says, 'but why didn't you say that?...i want to shout, 'but i did say that. the whole paper is saying that.' but in truth the whole paper is merely implying or leading up to or circumnavigating that....two heads are better than one because two heads can make conflicting material interact better than one head usually can."
50. "the process [of arguing a point back & forth] provides a continual leverage or mechanical advantage: we each successively climb upon the shoulders of the other's restructuring, so that at each climbing up, we can see a little farther."
cooking as interaction between ideas
50. "just as two people, if they let their ideas interact, can produce ideas or points of view that neither could singly have produced, a lone person" can "maximize the interactions among his own ideas and points of view"--"the way to do this is to encourage conflicts or contradictions in your thinking"
other forms of interactional cooking
51. between "the medium of words" and "the medium of ideas and meanings"--rather than debating whether it's better to write to see what you mean or to figure out what you mean before writing it, practice moving back & forth between the levels. see what just writing seems to mean/lead to, & step out of the writing to see what meanings aren't making it onto the page.
53. & "between metaphors"--play w/them, look at them, see what they offer in terms of relational understanding & avenues of interpretation, limitation, extension.
& modes & symbols & etc.

alice

"but 'glory' doesn't mean 'a nice knockdown argument,'" alice objected.
"when i use a word," humpty dumpty said in a rather scornful tone, "it means just what i choose it to mean--neither more nor less."
"the question is," said alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things."
"the question is," said humpty dumpty, "who is to be master--that's all."

the doubting & believing games:
171. "i think of the doubting game as the dialectic of propositions because the more you get ideas and perceptions into propositional form, the better it works. and i think of the believing game as the dialectic of experience because the more you get ideas and preceptions into the more experienced form, the better it works"--the idea behind both is that it's the "cooking" from above--the interactions between people, between ideas, between ways of approaching words on pages--that makes either/both doubting & believing generative. doing either alone in a box accomplishes nothing; they exist at the intersections of readers & texts, writers and listeners, ideas and other ideas.
175-6. "both games are...inherently social....for entrance into the intellectual world, we tend to require willingness to play the doubting game. this would be all right if we also required willingness to play the believing game....though the two games are complementary and mutually beneficial, they cannot be played simultaneously. we cannot say, 'well let's try not only to be as critical as we can, but also be a bit more believing too.'"
182. the inevitable danger of groupthink: the doubting game, although you'd imagine otherwise, actually "supports groupthink because it promotes the feeling that a new or minority idea must disprove the reigning one before it need be seriously entertained--which in most cases is not possible"

Posted by ttobryan at 10:05 AM | Comments (0)

December 20, 2005

whose notions? (authorship 18.1/25)

Greene, Stuart. "Making Sense of My Own Ideas: The Problems of Authorship in a Beginning Writing Classroom." Written Communication 12.2 (April 1995): 186-218.

1 sentence summary: students' ideas about what their roles as authors are--both in general & in the specific terms of an assignment's demands--are key to the work they'll produce & override instructors' phrasing of invitations to take on greater/different measures of authority in prose.

passages:
187. defines "authorship" as "the critical thinking skills that students use in their efforts to contribute knowledge to a scholarly conversation, knowledge that is not necessarily found in source texts but is nonetheless carefully linked to the texts they read. authoring a school-assigned text is an inherently rhetorical process that includes the ways in which students interpret, not simply report, information, as well as represent their readers and the larger context of what it means to write in school. in authoring a text, they invoke this context when they begin to account for what readers know, gauging how much given information to include to ensure that readers understand what is new"; "at the same time," students' "authority is always provisional, depending not only on the authors' ability to develop intellecutal projects of their own, but also upon the authorizing principles that exist in the social structures of schooling and the conventions of academic inquiry"
189. framing questions: "(a) what were students' interpretations of writing an essay based on sources? (b) how did these students organize their essays? and (c) what strategies did they use to advance their own ideas?"; it's hard to puzzle out, of course, b/c like all authors "although students may adopt a particular stance, conveying what might be construed as their 'own' ideas in authoring a text, the ideas they hold are expressions of shared commitments and beliefs that are rooted in different contexts." key to this study & others like it is the idea that "in seeing beginning writers as authors... it is possible to read their work as we might any other author's text, not as the 'emerging' or 'failed' work of 'outsiders'"
212-3. implications: "we find that a good predictor of what students will do is the task they give themselves" & "authorship in the context of school" requires more specific theory than just applying ideas of authorship in general: "limiting authorship to a study of rhetorical 'moves' or individual cognition ignores the complexity of representing knowledge. in particular, this complexity reflects the tenuous relationship between writers' attempts to express their own ideas in the texts they write and the authoritative sanction that readers within a given discipline provide"; "authors must learn to negotiate certain authorizing principles that exist outside of themselves as writers--for example, the texts that define the work of a discipline or a field's conventions--each of which give legitimacy to the form and substance of one's writing"
214. our obligations: "to make our instrutional models explicit" & to "offer guidance throughout the entire process of writing" to help students construct interpretations of their authorial options; "with a willingness to assume an authorial role, students must also come to terms with authority--their own authority and the authorizing principles in both text and context that influence what writers say and how they communicate their ideas"

Posted by ttobryan at 08:58 PM | Comments (0)

it's not (just) a new thing (authorship 17.3/25)

Robbins, Sarah. "Distributed Authorship: A Feminist Case-Study Framework for Studying Intellectual Property." College English 66.2 (November 2003): 155-171.

1 sentence summary: an analysis of textual/editorial practices in 18th/19th century america offer insight into the different ways authorship has been thought of and shared that have a lot in common with some of the opportunities and challenges modern practices encounter.

passages
157. "the 'new rhetoric of authorship' lunsford envisions may not be entirely new"; "dispite a historical context different from our own, these 'alternative forms' [exemplifed below] offer some strategies for what i call distributed authorship, a view of shared textual ownership adaptable to today's writing and publication circumstances"
158-9. writers of child-rearing & teaching texts--usually women esp. as the genre developed as a woman's genres--"[their] own self-representations as motherly teachers offer a highly self-conscious consideration of authorship--one interested both in claiming a distinctive role for women as authors and in casting their intellectual work as done for the common good"
160. gendered ideologies in practice? "(male) book publishers in the antebellum united states...had a vested interest in a loose, transportable ownership of barbauld's text, whereas lady editors tended to have a firmer committment to guarding the integrity of (at least some of) her writerly authority"
163. ownership is so prioritized today a website accepting submissions from young authors warns all submittors that *everything* they submit--advice, ideas, questions, works, etc.--"becomes the property of [the site] and cannot be returned": "the web site itself, it seems, becomes both publication space and author."
164-5. the unnamed female editor/re-framer of barbauld's text "helped lay some groundwork for what we today might term a strong assertion of intellectual property rights of the first author over her text. significantly, however, this introduction also suggested a gendered variation on that view of authorial ownership--one allowing for empathetic sharing between the woman writer and her female reader(s). this vision of colective authorship also imagined shared circulation capabilities, though not composition credit, based on a gender-specific ability to access the text"; thus "ownership of the lessons was cast as communal, grounded in a common gender identity and related social role, even though credit for its efficacy was still assigned to the original author"; work modern authors & lawyers are doing to create & apply "creative commons" licensing, "open to use by the public" text, & shareware on the web makes--or at least searches for ways of making--similar moves.
166. pierpont's editorial decision-making & rights-assertion (to not just "copy" but "to alter") as exemplary of a then-developing trend in "american curriculum writing that is well worth noting--a tendency to construct the 'textbook' as acquiring authority through its affiliation with a corporate author function that elides the personal identity of particular writers, and, by extension, discourages individual teachers from rewriting those texts to meet context-specific needs"; other consequences: "since his compilation failed to identify sources for his borrowed entries, which are actually culled from numerous sources, we cannot easily uncover disjunctions between his versions and the originals. his weak sense of others' authorship as a locus of control over textual integrity denied even his original readers the kind of ownership over meaning that a cursory reading of his preface would suggest they have.
167. comparisons w/web publishing: "today, with digital texts paralleling the earlier era's print explosion, we might want at least to consider following the lead of the lessons' early lady editor and her nineteenth-century discendents in maintaining authorial credit-giving even when we want to affirm more communal rights over the interpretation and circulation management of texts"; these is, after all, all this to think about: "to what extent do the social benefits of 'free' use of such fluid texts [as web publications] outweigh the problems of not being able to track where and how layers of change have occurred? are conventions for signaling such layers--in hypertextual environments, for example---developable? reliable? enforceable? desirable? with these questions in mind, we might consider the possibility of distinguishing more carefully between intellectual property issues related to attribution, textual integrity, and (collective) textual reconfigurations, on the one hand, and those related more directly to monetary compensation, on the other" (emphasis added)
168. "an extreme application of 'free use' can actually elide aspects of the social writing process behind a particular text. for instance, when packagers like pierpont and his heirs appropriated barbauldian texts without assigning credit, they began a suppression process that eventually allowed for words and thoughts which had been produced by multiple collaborators in a particular material context to be recirculated in ways that erased that context. such moves, over time, suppressed not only the individual agency of barbauld as 'author' but also the larger, ongoing contributions of many women writers to particular genres and teaching practices, thus eliding their influence on important cultural work"; "so we may need to develop more sophisticated models for recording our patterns of appropriation," "and we should try to teach practices that create a record of the meaningful, materially situated links between our writing and its sources, not because others we 'credit' with conventions like footnotes are the sole owners of their texts, but rather to show how they have shared their work with us"
169. "if we truly want to affirm a belief in the social aspects of all writing, while promoting informed critique of authorship in various contexts, we should resist either extreme characterization of the hypothetical student's writing process and instead acknowledge the complexity inherent in all collaborations (both ethical and problematic).

Posted by ttobryan at 07:01 PM | Comments (0)

the go-ahead

now that i'm almost halfway done w/this list, the committee has officially approved me doing this project & reading the things on it in the first place. halleluiah!

proposal ici, if anybody wants to see what the heck i'm allegedly doing this *for*

Posted by ttobryan at 05:40 PM | Comments (0)

safe spaces (authorship 17.2/25)

Price, Margaret. "Beyond 'Gotcha!': Situating Plagiarism in Policy and Pedagogy." College Composition and Communication. 54.1 (September 2002): 88-115.

1 sentence summary: continuing to treat plagiarism as if it can be treated in terms of blanket-definitions and regulations doesn't only skirt issues but creates impossible & threatening situations for students; what we need to do is address the complexities of the issues with them, including them as members of the academy & of academic conversations about the (changeable) conventions of academic practice.

passages
89. unrealism: "a significant obstacle to resolving this dilemma is our desires to avoid complications, to present plagiarism as something fixed and absolute," an impossible goal only further complicated by the fact that "our responsibilities include not only teaching but punishment"--how do we "offer [our] students a safe and well-defined space from which to operate"?
90. step 1: "we need to stop treating plagiarism like a pure moral absolute ('thou shalt not plagiarize') and start explaining it in a way that accounts for these shifting features of context"
91. step 2--that means producing realistic departmental documents on the subject--for many reasons including that new teachers have to use them as signposts for local contextual priorities.

the issues:
(a) common knowledge:
92 "in the neurobiology department of my university is different from common knowledge in the english department. to an extent, common knowledge is different between different groups in the english department, for example, between the composition program and the literature program"--&, really, "facts are also context-dependent"
(b) "your own work"
94. "text ownership by people we now call authors is not a historically constant value"; theory asks, too, "whether authors create texts or...it is the other way around"; even in the same time period, "the meaning of 'your own work' may shift across cultural contexts"
95. another angle of potential instability: "collaborative learning, which i define to include both collaborative writing and peer review....introduces another set of questions about what we mean when we say author or one's own work": "myka" argues "one could say the piece isn't written by two individuals, but by this third persona--the author--created by the process of collaboration" (96); so "how...shall i go about teaching an accurate and usable definition of plagiarism, while also teaching the habits, value, and values of collaborative work?"
96. and yet another: "the web itself can be seen as one vast hypertext, one 'publication' with millions of authors"
97. so to be fair & realistic with students, we need to treat both the ideas of authorship and text ownership "not as an easily defined category but as a site of discussion"--this calls for "not a fundamental change in what...plagiarism policies are getting at but, rather, a change in how their arguments are cast"--we need to emphasize that it's always "context-dependent"
(b) giving credit
98. "it is often unclear how the concept of 'borrowed inf