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Casey R. McArdle

Bizzell: While Elbow and his conference buddies focused on pedagogy (and “well done” says Bizzell), it does not address the nature of English Studies. Still stuck in the old way of thinking did not allow them the chance to “rethink” literature and composition. This is problematic because we all might stay “stuck” as well (481).

Bizzell believes if we respond to teaching the “contact zone” we can duplicate Pratt’s experience: “All the students in the class… [heard] their culture discussed and objectified in ways that horrified them; all the students saw their roots traced back to legacies of both glory and shame;… [but] kinds of marginalization once taken for granted were gone. Virtually every student was having the experience of seeing the world described with him or her in it” (483).

Trimbur: Susan Wells discusses a technical manual on computer design that focuses on 3 audiences: 1) systems programmers, 2) applications programmers, and 3) audience of users (471).

Hierarchy of collaborative creation from Apple II to the iPhone.

Trimbur: “The aim of collaborative learning, its advocates hold, is to reach consensus through an expanding conversation. This conversation takes place at a number of levels—first in small discussion groups, next among the groups in a class, then between the class and the teacher, and finally among the class, the teacher, and the wider community of knowledge” (461).

How do you deal with consensus in your class?

Ellen Cushman asks “students to understand how the language and place and layout of the university relate to making knowledge” (358-359). She also asks them “to locate themselves within this place” and demystify the structures: disciplines, schools, colleges, departments, and fields (359).

Recognizing that many first-year students experience dislocation – Cushman tries to create assignments that “build upon their primary discourses while demystifying the secondary discourses of academe” (359)

What assignments do you use?

Power Geometries taken from Doreen Massey: a phrase used to “explore the different ways in which groups and individuals are inserted into time and space, helped or hurt by the ways it is constantly being reconfigured” (Mahala and Swilky 292).

Gerald Graf: “Teaching the conflicts promised to make the university more truly representative as an institution, turning curriculum into ‘a prominent arena of cultural conflict[,] … a microcosm, as it should be of the clash of cultures and values in America as a while’” (M&S 307).

“Our commitment as teachers is to ‘make our classrooms vital places where students learn not only the various conventions of academic writing, but also the power of communication to change things, to transform’” (Fleckenstein 328). [Quoting Lillian Bridwell-Bowles]

Fleckenstein looks to “biorhetoric” – a discourse of bodysigns.

“A biorhetoric provides a double perspective from which to recognize the semiotic-material nature of the status quo and of change” (Fleckenstein 329).

Johndan Johnson-Eiola: Datacloud: Toward a New Theory of Online Work – He notes that knowledge work is typically concerned with the production of information, as distinct from the production of material goods, and he also points out that many of us don’t just work with information, we inhabit it (3-4).

Greg Myers: argues against Leonard, Elbow, and Bruffe who like to teach writing through groups.

Myers sees this as “an appeal to the authority of consensus, and an appeal to the authority of reality” (439).

Myers: for Bruffee, “writing is a communal activity” (451). However, he believes that his system of peer criticism “will enable students to ‘gain a stronger sense of the degree to which knowledge, like writing itself, is a social phenomenon, and the degree to which the social context in which we learn permeates what we know and how we know it.’ In his view of knowledge, the group is there from the beginning, defining the terms of thought” and does not come in at the as an audience (451).

Myers promotes “an awareness that one’s course is part of an ideological structure that keeps people from thinking about their situation, but also a belief that one can resist this structure and help students criticize it” (454).

Outside Works Cited

Johnson-Eilola, J.. Datacloud: Toward a New Theory of Online Work.New Jersey: Hampton Press, 2005.

Videos

1- http://www.theonion.com/content/video/warcraft_sequel_lets_gamers_play2- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGCJ46vyR9o&feature=channel3- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y54ABqSOScQ4- http://www.apple.com/trailers/wb/wherethewildthingsare/