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.