Cinnabar and Alabaster

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"