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January 06, 2006
gradual negotiation (collaborative writing 35.3/50)
Greene, Stuart, and Erin Smith. "Teaching Talk about Writing: Student Conflict in Acquiring a New Discourse of Authorship Through Collaborative Planning." Teaching Academic Literacy: The Uses of Teacher-Research in Developing a Writing Program. Ed. Katherine L. Weese, Stephen L. Fox, and Stuart Greene. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1999. 149-174.
1 sentence summary: students' conceptions of what authors are/do, evinced by the language they use to talk and write about writing, are among the things they negotiate & come to better understand by working collectively in supportive groups on their writing.
passages
151. "it is one thing to create conditions of authorship by providing a supportive social context in which students write and share their writing. however, studies of collaborative writing reveal that it is quite another thing for students to enact the sort of strategies that will enable them to be authors in a mindful, principled way....how students negotiate these roles [as authors] is shaped by what they feel it means to read, write, and talk in school....a legacy of remedial education in the united states has often prevented beginning writing students from learning how to position themselves within an academic argument"
153. "students' attempts to make sense of and use a new discourse of authorship often involved a struggle between beliefs they currently held about writing and those they were being asked to adopt--a struggle influenced by competing institutional, social, and cultural concerns"; "acquiring a new discourse of authorship is marked by a complex interplay between new ways of speaking and the ways students are accustomed to talking about writing"
154. in initial responses, "TJ's imagined author" is "someone who will expand, change, get down to the facts, just play, see an overall picture, talk, compare and contrast, and who will balance the positive and negatives. moreover, the writer exist[s] not in the present tense, there in the company of his collaborators, but at some time in the future--away from the group"; his constructs influence not only his own work but the advice about authoring he gives to the other authors in his group.
163. "writers...may learn to adopt a new discourse, in this case the discourse of collaborative planning, before they are actually able to fully link this discourse to such literate acts as writing academic arguments....students' abilities to fulfill the promises of a new discourse hinge on their abilities to critically evaluate both what they know and what they need to know. if students have difficulty learning new discourses, it may be because neither writing nor the discourse of authorship are monolithic"
Posted by ttobryan at January 6, 2006 02:48 PM