Cinnabar and Alabaster

passages
121. guiding question: "do students, when they find their own voice through journal entries and e-mail discussions, know how to bring that voice, that sense of authority, into the academic conversation?"
122. because genres are epistemological lenses--ways of knowing--"having students develop a single idea in multiple genres" is cognitively valuable: different "genres potentially provide students with a richer understanding of an idea because students can use one genre as a way to step outside the epistemological framework of another"--"as a result, students may emerge with a fuller, more nuanced understanding than if they had written only in one genre, particularly if their texts do in fact inform one another and evidence...dialogic interaction"
124. much work in comp. has picked up and spun off from bakhtin's notion of the dialogic nature of utterances--that each new utterance is a response to other utterances in a continuing conversation--but most focus on the nature of the background of context that existing utterances comprise; mp's interest is in the nature of the response-utterances students generate as ways of taking up that conversation.
127. in her observation, "journals, e-mail, and essays...are not automatically or inherently different" in students' understanding; & "if all school-based writing falls into the same category for them, that may limit their ability to take advantage of the epistemological differences between genres in a way that enhances their knowledge of the subject and their ability to assert their own voice in the academic conversation"--as well as to successfully complete different kinds of assignments whose generic differences, to us, look extensive.
students' work & responses to interview questions indicate that sometimes (but not always/often) their work in one genre tangibly influences what they write in another, but they aren't aware of--and in some instances deliberately deny--the cross-influence (so it's not "mining" if they don't know they're doing it!)
132-3. the connections are there but we need to help students become aware of them, which means "using these informal texts as part of the course reading material and analyzing the ways each genre constructs knowledge" as well as "talking explicitly about what we learn by comparing and constrasting" the different forms/contexts, so that "students can begin to understand their own language choices and ideas and at the same time recognize their own authoritative voice in a conversation in the same way they recognize the voices of published "