shark bites and mixed discourses

On my first day of teaching, I told the 26 fresh faces before me that the one thing I hoped they would glean from our semester together was to feel less intimidated by writing. My expressed hope, or goal, wasn’t sparked by a breadth of pedagogical knowledge or teaching experience. After all, I didn’t have any of that! Rather, it was a response to the students’ first assignment, wherein I handed out crayons and asked them to draw their relationship to writing.

Roughly 80 percent of students drew graphic, violent images of writing as “the bully,” “the conqueror,” “the destroyer.” A Great White Shark circling an innocent swimmer, a deadly epidemic sweeping the nation, a rocky cliff sending a distracted hiker over its steep edge. The message I got from them: Writing is scary shit.

It seems that a common thread in our readings this week is the collective desire to make writing less intimidating and more accessible. But tell us, Doctors Bizzell and Gee, how do we make it happen? Perhaps they’d say this: by encouraging our students to experiment with mixed discourses and variant styles that they are already using in their lives outside the classroom.

Writing as experimentation. Writing as exploration. I love these concepts because of the way they seem to invite instead of exclude, unlock instead of paralyze. Both Gee and Bizzell seem to be searching for ways to make writing relevant, contextualized, and alive for students.

But what if our students aren’t interested in exploring new forms of discourse? What if they’d rather stay safe and cozy in their land of a clear-cut thesis, body, and conclusion? Further, what if they identify with the traditional academic discourse community persona, which Bizzell describes as “male, and white, and economically privileged” (Hybrid 11)? Similarly, what if they already speak the “specialist language” and prefer the “old capitalism” ways of hierarchical, assembly line, product-driven writing (Gee 95)?

The reason these questions came up is that, while I hope to someday teach at an urban community college, I’m currently working with many students who fit the aforementioned persona. Looking at their formulaic, template-style papers, I’m led to believe that they’ve probably been rewarded for their “notions of what’s real, normal, natural, good, and true” (Hybrid 9) because not only do their ideas reinforce conventional worldviews, but their style also fits into traditional definitions of “good academic writing.” And, given what Bizzell says about power structures and access to discourse communities, why would “community insiders” want to change up their writing style if they’ve received nothing but hearty pats on the back?

When I turn to Bizzell yet again, I learn that certain pedagogical strategies might urge students out of their safety zones and into the realm of risk-taking and exploration. I highlight her advice to choose a “cultural crux of our day” (Hybrid 17), which could spark students to bust out of their stale stylistic shell. I take note of her suggestion to introduce students to contact zones.

“These are the kinds of complexities that will stimulate students to experiment, as they may well feel that the charged material cannot be adequately addressed in traditional academic forms” (Hybrid 18-19). I sure hope she’s right. I think it’d be exciting to see students stretch themselves in this way.

In her second piece, Basic Writing and the Issue of Correctness, Bizzell tries to convince me that these new forms of discourse are being used by everyone, not only by those from under-represented social groups (10). While I’d love to believe this, I haven’t seen much of it happening in my class.

Maybe I should show students some writing samples (like Victor’s Bootstraps) that reveal signs of experimentation and exploration. Maybe I should model and show it in my own writing. Maybe I should frame it in terms of Gee’s “playing to learn” concept (101). And maybe, after all is said and done, most students will still choose the status quo… who knows?

In the end, I think I’d like to frame these discussions of mixed discourses and new literacies in terms of human inequalities and social change. For example, I'd ask which students suffer because of institutional power structures and enforcement of traditional language usage? Who has been alienated and ignored? That way, even if I’m not successful at selling the “writing as experimentation” concept to students who equate such risk-taking practices to a shark attack, I can at least pose questions of access, privilege, and language by putting a human face on them.

second grader pedagogy

I'm pretty sure I giggled and pointed a finger at Alexis Olson when I saw what she was up to that day.

I knew it wasn't the kindest reaction, but hey, I was a second grade girl, and that's what second grade girls do -- point and giggle. It's not a skill that's learned by instruction, but rather it's one we picked up through the unspoken, common culture of "second grade girldom."

So, what was Alexis doing that had me so amused that day? Well, much like Gee's "Jennie" (24), Alexis was performing a fake reading to a fake audience. There she sat, on our classroom reading rug, mimicking all the things Mrs. Thorvilson, our teacher, did during real reading time: her legs were crossed, her face was animated, and she licked the tip of her finger ever-so-lightly before turning each page. She was a mini Mrs. Thorvilson, and she was also the daughter of a school teacher. According to Gee, she was "learning and practicing non-vernacular forms of language associated with school and schooling" (23). Additionally, she was creating associations between school and home identities. She was making meaning about language in a natural, playful, non-traditional way. And I -- shame on me -- had the nerve to laugh at her, when I could've given her plenty of reasons to laugh at me (like, for example, by admitting my ardent belief that I had an otherworldly connection with monkeys, which was the inspiration for Muhlhauser's poem).

"Deep learning works better as a cultural process than it does as an instructed process" (13), which is exactly what Alexis, and "Jennie," were doing. They were practicing, experimenting, playing in a contextualized and relevant manner. They were not simply "doing school" or "getting the grade," but rather were making deeper discoveries of identity by exploring how it felt to be a reader, a teacher, and a storyteller in the very way they had seen modeled.

So, if Alexis had an advantage by coming from a middle-class home where "certain values, attitudes, motivations, ways of interacting, and perspectives" (28) encouraged such exploratory learning, how can teachers work with the language varieties that students from lower socioeconomic realities bring with them? To me, it feels like Gee scratches the surface of this question, but stops short of fully analyzing it. I want more. I want the how.

I'm also, or course, trying to apply Gee's chapters to my own teaching of 101, and I can't help but "out" myself for teaching a decontextualized, detached, skill-and-drill sort of lesson this week. You see, I was being observed (by someone in our class who will remain nameless), and I guess I had formed some preconceived notions about what my adviser would be looking for. I had it in my head that a formal, organized, content-based lesson would be appropriate, so that's precisely what I delivered. Of course, it absolutely bombed. It was dull, it wasn't in my natural style, nor was it the engaging, interactive kind of lesson students appreciate and respond to.

In hindsight, I should have asked, "'What experiences do I want the learners to have?'" (118) before creating the lesson rather than "cut[ting] up the world the way Aristotle did in terms of our traditional academic disciplines seen as bodies of facts and information" (118). I should have read Gee a few days earlier. I should have dropped the "should haves" and taken notes from Alexis and her playful second grader pedagogy. Not only would students have absorbed more of the lesson that day, but everyone would have also, I'm sure, had much more fun.