Santosh

Tech Camp 2010: My Experience using New Media in the classroom

2010-06-15T06:17:00.000-07:00

I use new media in my class. In addition to audio-visuals, computer and web technologies, I also use computer and online applications and programs like I-movie, Windows Movie Maker, blogs and wikis for various purposes. I have been using I-movie and Movie maker for the unit 3 of Writing 205 but I must confess that I have not done full justice to the unit. I am not a very good movie maker. But because I always find somebody expert in the class among students, I often collaborate with those experts. They help me with the technology part while I bring in the rhetorical skills/insights. The combination has always worked. For the first time tow years back, however, I had invited Rachel Shapiro as the guest lecturer.

I don't have a long history of using technology/media in the classroom. I did not use any while teaching back home in Nepal. Reflecting back on why I did not use any takes me directly into Wusocki's article about the materialities of technology and new media. I did not have access to new media and computer technology in many of the places I taught back home nor was I was prepared well to, for example, handle projector or operate I-movie. So, I think, Wysocki is right in saying that material conditions including access, infrastructures and literacy play a big role in whether we can use new media in writing class or not.

While using new media in the class, I was not aware that "new media texts do not have to be digital; instead any text that has been designed so that its materiality is not effaced can count as new media" (Wysocki 15) or "new media" are the texts "where we keep their materiality visible, both as we work to make them and as we hold before us" (Wysocki 19). This is something very new I got for her article.

Intellectual Property Right Holders and IP Users in Collision Course

2010-04-19T18:24:00.001-07:00

John Logie’s “Parsing Codes: Intellectual Property, Technical Communication and the World Wide Web” raises some salient issues about the conflict between intellectual property laws and public in general and IP holders and users in particular. He argues that with the revision of Copyright law and enactment of new IP Acts like The No Electronic Theft Act of 1997, The digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998, The Sony Bono Copyright Extension Act of 1998, and The TEACH Act, the IP laws have become more stricter and insular than ever before and general public’s access to artifacts of knowledge has become more and more limited. This has put the copyright holders and the general public in a collision course. The former is campaigning for more stricter laws for infringement cases while the latter is demanding for more flexible or ‘thin’ IP provisions.

Regarding the implication of new Acts to technical communicators, Logie says that “in the past decade, the penalties have grown exponentially, and technical communicators now face a creative landscape loaded with legal landmines” (232). In fact, anything creative under the sun is copyrighted now. So, for technical communicator who works often times with existent models, templates, images and other resources, the stakes are really high. Technical writers therefore should campaign for more porous and flexible IP laws that foster new creativity while also ensuring enough protection for the creators.

But current IP laws are more favorable to the copyright holders. Logie quotes Gurak in this regard who contends that “current trends in copyright legislation is very much out of balance, favoring the author or creator…over the public” (234). So general public including technical writer is deprived of the sources of information and education. This, for Logie, is a horrible state. Therefore, he calls on technical writers to use their rhetorical skills and technical expertise to fight for people’s access to artifacts of knowledge and information thereby ascertaining the formation of informed citizenry. Technical writers are in a better position to do that because, as Logie thinks, “With the advent of the Internet and the World Wide Web, the opportunities are manifold for communicative practices to move several steps ahead of the law of institutional policy” (240). Since IP laws always chase the technology, the Technical Communicators can reap the benefit of their skills to make the resources available to the public before the state enacts new law tp contain the loopholes at the least. Are we ready to fight what Andrea Lunsford calls ‘hyperprotectionism”?

Future Work Model: Distributed Work

2010-04-04T13:32:00.000-07:00

Reading Clay Spinuzzi’s “Guest Editor’s Introduction: Technical Communication in the Age of Distributed Work” and excerpts from Tapscott & Williams’ Wikinomics gives the sense that the workplace is seeing paradigm shift from modular work model towards distributed work model i.e. from “the stable, rationalized, modular work structures that characterized the Industrial Revolution’ (266) towards “coordinative, polycontextual, crossdisciplinary work that splices together divergent work activities (separated by time, space, organizations, and objectives) and that enables the transformations of information and texts that characterize such work” (266). The readings also present wonderful instances of distributed work model in action, such as in Geek Squad and Best Buy and few others where bottom-up and horizontal approach appears to be working more innovatively than conventional up-down or vertical approach. More interesting to see in these readings is the workers’ use of Web 2.0 technologies in the workplace and the administration’s exploitation of their rhetorical skills and analytical power for policy making and work execution as opposed to conventional up-down communication, executive and decision-making system.

Basically, the readings are highlighting the fact that the traditional hierarchical working system is collapsing and more egalitarian networked trend is emerging which has implications for both the industries/organizations and the workers including technical writers. A permanent staff, job and static/physical workplace is increasingly becoming the thing of the past and job switching, multiskilling/deskilling and virtual, collaborative work patterns are characterizing the workplaces and workers. Spinuzzi thus describes the emerging distributed work pattern in the workplaces:
Control over organizations is just as distributed as ownership is
in managerial capitalism; digital technologies play a vital role in
forming, interconnecting, and even dispersing nodes; consumption is
individuated,taking the form of the desire for unique identities and
unique experiences;relationships between customers and businesses
become more important,even as the distinctions between them become
unclear; and customers look for stable beneficial relationships among
consumers and producers that support these individual experiences (cf.
Sless, 1994). These needs are supplied not by large, vertically
integrated companies but by temporary federations of suppliers for
each individual transaction. These federations are endlessly
recombinant. Lifelong employment is replaced by what Zuboff and Maxmin
call “lifelong learning” —what Donna Haraway calls continual deskilling
and retraining, and Castells calls multiskilling—as workers cope with
continually changing arrangements" (271).

Similarly, Tapscott & Williams offering the case of Geek Squad whose employees use “blogs, wikis, and other new tools to collaborate and form ad hoc communities across departmental and organizational boundaries" (240) argue that “openness, peering, sharing, and acting globally [are the] fixtures of the future
workplace” (240). Another climactic moment for Robert Stephens, the CEO of Geek Squad that authors present here and that impressed me is his moment of epiphany at the discovery of the fact that his staff is not using Wiki that he set up as much as the Battlefield 2 Online game for sharing information and experiences in the workplaces: "Instead of trying to set an agenda," he said, "I'm now going to try and discover
their agenda, and serve it." (243). Stephens made Battlefield part of the Geek Sqaud.

No doubt that the work environment is in transformation and that integration of new technologies in the workplaces are indicating that distributed work model is sure to dominate the work places soon and TC needs to be ready to face the challenges but few questions are gripping my mind as I meditate over this transitional phase in the workplaces:

1. The authors have talked mostly about the service sector whose major target is customer satisfaction and profit-making and the distributed work model seems to fit them well. But I wonder if the same model works for military and similar cases where strong chain of command and physical presence of individuals in, for instance, camps/battlefield is required for the execution of their duties/work.

2. The authors project that the future workplace will see the increasing use of Web 2.0 technologies, workers’ rhetorical/analytical skills and interpersonal communication skills. I here wonder again how realistic is it to expect every worker to be technologically proficient and rhetorically savvy?

Annotated Bibliography: CCR 760 Technical Communication

2010-03-13T12:34:00.001-08:00

Santosh Khadka
CCR 760: Technical Communication in the Digital Age

Annotated Bibliography

1. Hunsinger, R Peter. “Culture and Cultural Identity in Intercultural Technical
Communication”. Technical Communication Quarterly 15.1(2006): 31-48. Print.

This article draws from the critical cultural theory of Arjun Appadurai and discusses how culture undergirds the intercultural technical communication research. Hunsinger argues that theoretical concepts of culture and cultural identity are yet to be fully explored for their implications for the study and research in technical communication. He observes that oversimplification, essentialism, or ethnocentrism and limited theoretical reflection on the concept of culture are the major stumbling blocks for the critical intercultural technical communication. He also critiques the predominant heuristic approach to researching and teaching intercultural technical communication that overlooks the crucial aspects of cross-cultural communication, and neatly explains how Appadurai's insights can enrich the theory, research, and pedagogy of intercultural technical communication.

2. Sam, Dragga. “Ethical intercultural technical communication: Looking through the
lens of Confucian ethics”. Technical Communication Quarterly 8.4 (19990): 365-81. Print.

Sam believes that understanding of differences in ethical behaviors across cultures is crucial for ethical intercultural technical communication. Since the ethics of Confucius (including the virtues of goodness, righteousness, wisdom, faithfulness, reverence, and courage) inform the communication patterns in China, the technical communicator must take that into consideration while communicating with Chinese individuals. Chinese culture, according to him, is indirect, high context, and collectivist but many fail to understand the ideals underpinning these manifestations. Unless the underpinnings are fully examined and understood, there is high possibility that intercultural technical communication with China fails. With the Chinese case, Sam believes that today’s technical communicator should learn to be multicultural, intercultural communicator and should also engage the issues of translation, interpretation, and localization. But he laments the fact that there is very little research to enable technical communicators to perform the changed role. Following an outlining Confucian thought and ethical behavior, Sam concludes his essay by analyzing a salient artifact of intercultural communication according to Confucian ethics thereby highlighting the ethical differences between China and America and implying that unless we develop a comprehensive understanding of such ethical differences, effective and ethical communication is unlikely to happen.

3. Barnum, Carol M, and Huilin Li. “Chinese and American Technical Communication:
A Cross- Cultural Comparison of Differences.” Technical Communication 53.2
(2006): 143-166. Print.

Barnum and Li compare the cultural values embedded in documents in China and the United States as well as the ways documents are viewed, created and used in Chinese and American cultures. They also observes how a variety of documents reflect those cultural differences and explain those differences in light of the historical, economic, and education influences that have shaped both countries' need for technical communication. Along the way, they also review the reasons for the need of technical communication in China and obstacles for integrating it in the academic system. They hope that their comparative approach can benefit ttechnical communicators in the United States and other Western cultures, technical and professional communication teachers of students from China as well as EFL (English as a Foreign Language) teachers in the U.S. and in China in various ways including getting the resources to explain and understand the differences in the composition and reception of technical and other writing genres in China as well as in the United States.
4. Mirshafiei, Mohsen. "Culture as an element in teaching technical writing.”
Technical Communication 41.2 (1994): 276. Platinum Periodicals, ProQuest. Web. 12 Mar. 2010.

Mirshafiei interviews non-native students in the upper-division technical writing courses asking whether their native cultures affect their technical communication ability and gets positive answers from almost all of them. He says that his research was inspired by his observation of cultural interferences in technical communication of his students. He therefore wanted to find where the problems his students confront in technical communication lie and what the solutions could be. In the process of research he studies, in addition to differences in style and tone, the problems that his students with different cultural backgrounds faced in technical communication. His major concentration, however, is on the impact of culture in technical communication. Finding the influence of culture in his students’ technical communication ability, he recommends that cultural problems be differentiated from those of language interference while teaching or training the non-native technical communicators and/or workers. In addition, he suggests instructors to make non-native students aware of the differences in cultural thought patterns between them and the native students and teach them to adapt their styles to intended audiences. Finally, he ends by mentioning directions for further research on the problem of cultural influence in technical communication.

5. Topf, Mel A. "Job application correspondence: integral to the technical
communication course." The Technical writing teacher 14(1987):114-17. Print.

Referring to many textbooks of technical communication as failing to treat job application letters as integral to technical communication and lamenting the fact that even ones that have discussions on them treat that genre as static form with definite rules and features, Topf calls for rhetorical approach to job application letters. “Missing in the texts are exercises in treatment of context—the nature of the audience, company, and position, through which students develop and apply substantive rhetorical strategies” (114), says Topf. According to him, the textbooks fail to point out the fact that job correspondence should address a special rhetorical situation and urgently require the deployment of rhetorical strategies. Given this vacuum, it falls on the shoulder of instructors to discuss the rhetoricity of job application letters. The courses should include discussion of strategies to deal with audience traits such as clarity and conciseness in style and format as rhetorical strategies to affect the audience; correctness to impress the audience; analysis of data to define audience; selection and inclusion of information from the writer’s background that is most pertinent to the job in question and strategic organization of the letter to the audience’s interests. Such discussion, claims Topf, will highlight the rhetorical nature of technical writing genres and therefore be instrumental in changing the current view of technical writing as a product of prescribed and inflexible rules.

6. Andrews, Deborah C, “Forum: Teaching international technical communication”.
Technical Communication Quarterly 7.3 (1998): 329-339. Print

In this article, in response to guest editor, Deborah C. Andrews’ request, three experienced teachers-Jan H. Spyridakis, Linda P. Driskill, and Nancy L. Hoft- describe how they integrate research on international technical communication into their classroom: a graduate seminar, a high-tech course in engineering communication, and an introductory course on creating world-ready information products. Their descriptions show that communicating internationally is complex and even frustrating but can be exciting in the sense that thinking internationally can transform a classroom, a discipline and/or a career.

7. Amant, Kirk St. “ When cultures and computers collide: Rethinking computer-
mediated communication according to international and intercultural
communication expectations”. Journal of Business and Technical Communication
16.2 (2002): 196-215. Print.
Advent of online communication technology has made globe even smaller and intercultural communication has been faster and direct than ever before, observes Amant in this article. While he claims that, he is also aware that with the greater facility of intercultural communication, the risk of cultural misunderstanding and communication breakdown has also increased. Therefore, the more investigation on the part of communication scholars on the potential areas of conflicts and misunderstandings in online communication is necessary to resolve complications if they were to arise. Amant also ask the scholars to compare the patterns in CMC (computermediated communication) and intercultural communication to see where these patterns collide.

8. Starke-Meyerring, Doreen, Ann Hill Duin, and Talene Palvetzian. “Global
Partnerships: Positioning Technical Communication Programs in the Context
of Globalization.” Technical Communication Quarterly 16.2 (2007): 139-175.
Print.

Given the fact that global partnerships in academic programs are in rise in this era of globalization, technical communication (TC) in both the workplace and higher education is undergoing powerful change as a result of globalization and TC programs now are finding themselves positioned in an altered environment, the authors, in this article, examine the changes in workplace and education brought about by the forces of globalization. They begin the article with the analysis of globalization trends and their influence on TC in the workplace, focusing on the type of literacies necessary for technical communicators for global work and citizenship and then highlight the need of program partnerships that facilitate the interaction of students with people and professionals from across cultures and places. The authors also examine a case study of Council for Programs in Technical and Scientific Communication (CPTSC)-supported study of program partnerships and explore how TC faculty and programs position themselves amid globalization. They end the article by providing insights for those interested in developing global partnerships of TC programs and offering directions for further research.

9. Andrews, Deborah C, “Guest editor's column: “Internationalizing”.” Technical
Communication Quarterly 7.3 (1998): 245-247. Print

This is an introduction from the guest editor Deborah C to an issue of Technical
Communication Quarterly where he highlights the issues raised by the contributing authors. Surprisingly, he finds that all the articles in that issue have a common point that “an increasingly global economy is changing how professionals in science and technology communicate” (245). According to him, six of the seven articles are about the study and work in the changed working environment. “Integrating”, he says, is the key word across articles which he interprets as calls for integrating international perspective into the technical communication classroom. Critiquing what he terms the international coating in technical communication classroom, he argues that international perspective should run deeper than that. Integrating international perspective should make students aware of the rhetorical situation of technical writing and the articles in the issue, he claims, have insights that foster such awareness.

10. Amant, Kirk St. “Online Education in an Age of Globalization: Foundational
Perspectives and Practices for Technical Communication Instructors and
Trainers.” Technical Communication Quarterly 16.1 (2007): 13-31. Print.

This article provides resources for online courses and instructors. Online instructors are now faced with the challenges of designing courses that can address the needs of the students located around the globe. Keeping in view the increasing access and interest in online technical communication courses across the globe, this article presents the information and approaches for designing the online courses for those students and preparing instructors both in US and elsewhere to teach courses in changed environment. In short, the article outlines the new developments particularly in internet technology that have facilitated the increasing interest in online courses across the globe and then presents the potential approaches to formulate effective online instruction for global students.

11. Paretti, Marie C, Lisa D McNair, and Lissa Holloway-Attaway. “ Teaching Technical
Communication in an Era of Distributed Work: A Case Study of Collaboration
Between U.S. and Swedish Students.” Technical Communication Quarterly 16.3
(2007): 327-353. Print.

This article discusses the need of new framework for the technical communication faculty to train students for new roles in the workplaces characterized by distributed work. The workplaces now are increasingly networked and globalized therefore global collaborative skills are prerequisite for the potential technical communicators. Therefore, faculty has to keep up with changes in the work places which means that they need to develop courses that addresses and corresponds to the complexities in the workplace. To that end, this article reviews current scholarship on collaborations as well as presents a case study of collaboration between U.S. and Swedish students as an example of how class should be taught and what kind of working condition students should be prepared to work in the era of distributed work.

12. Pascale, Richard Tanner. “Communication and Decision Making Across Cultures:
Japanese and American Comparisons.” Administrative Science Quarterly 23.1(1978): 91-110. Print.

This article observes the communications and decision-making practices of Japanese firms operating in Japan and the United States versus American firms operating in the United States. Contrary to popular conceptions that there are differences in Japanese and American management and decision making systems, the investigation finds more similarities than differences between the two. The implication of the finding is that some kind of universalistic organizational theory should precede the particularistic factors like culture while examining and analyzing the cross-cultural practices. This data-driven study reminds that sometimes hasty generalization, cultural essentialism and stereotying could be grossly wrong. It further implies that special care should be taken while talking about managerial characteristics both within and across cultures.

13. Ulijn, Jan M, and Kirk St. Amant. “A Mutual Intercultural Perception: How Does It
Affect Technical Communication? Some Data from China, the Netherlands,
Germany, France, and Italy. Technical Communication (2000): 220-237. Print.
IED RESEARCH
This paper examines the intercultural differences in the perception of questioning and pausing. Beginning with the premise that different cultural systems and practices get reflected in people’s writing and spoken style, the authors contend that for the effective intercultural communication to take place, an understanding of those cultural factors is imperative on the part of professional communicators. The paper then provides insight into these cultural communication factors by presenting the results of an experiment involving how individuals from China, the Netherlands, Germany, France, and Italy perceived a videotaped example of intercultural business negotiations. By comparing
cultural perceptions of the same event, the paper demonstrates that culture plays a big role in how different people perceive and interpret the same situation. The experiment, claim the authors, can have implication for the professional communicators. For instance, they argue, “[B]y realizing how different cultures might perceive and interpret the same nonverbal cues differently, professional communicators can begin to understand how intercultural confusion could occur, especially in the context of a business negotiation. And this increased understanding can help communicators anticipate and reduce the degree of confusion that could occur at such negotiations” (Ulijn and Amant 235).

14. Orlikowski, Wanda J, JoAnne Yates, Kazuo Okamura, and Masayo Fujimoto.
“Shaping Electronic Communication: The Metastructuring of Technology in the
Context of Use.” Organization Science 6.4 (1995):423-444. Print.

This article contends that adapting electronic communication technologies to the contexts of use is the way to facilitate ECT in changing organizational forms. As a case study, the article presents the findings of a case study of a computer conferencing system in Japanese R & D project group. Through what the writers call technology-use mediation, effective communication was achieved in new context of use. About the metastructuring process and its implications, the authors say: “This mediation serves as an organizational mechanism for facilitating the ongoing adaptation of technologies, their use, and organizational contexts to each other and to changing conditions. The identification and articulation of the metastructuring process and of technology-use mediation have a number of implications for research and practice” (Orlikowski et.al 440)

15.Varner, Iris, and Linda Beamer .Intercultural Communication in the Global
Workplace. Chicago: IRWIN, 1995.

A coauthored textbook Intercultural Communication in the Global Workplace includes chapters on culture and communication, business language, nonverbal language in intercultural communication, intercultural negotiation etc. and therefore can be a valuable resource for the technical and business communicators. Together, the chapters provide much needed insights and skills for successful intercultural technical and business communication. It is a blend of theoretical discussion and practical tips for approaching and interacting new cultures. A number of instances and cases of cultural values and their manifestations in or implications for technical/business communication abound the textbook. In short, this textbook suggests that the explanation for any behavior should be sought in particular cultural values and worldviews that the communicator holds. That’s why this resource is valuable for workers in today’s globalized workplace.

16. Amant, Kirk St. “Online Ethos and Intercultural Technical Communication: How to
Create Credible Messages for International Audiences.” Technical Communication and World Wide Web. Eds. Carol Lipson and Michael Day. New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2005. 133-166. Print.

In this chapter, Amant provides technical communicators and instructors with resources to handle the misunderstanding or conflict, if any, during cross-cultural online communication. As such, the chapter is full of discussion about potential problem areas, solution and strategies and teaching tips concerning intercultural online communication. Amant believes that awareness of the potential conflict areas and strategies to resolve them can help technical communicators immensely as teaching tips do to the instructors. With the awareness, both the groups will attempt to develop international and/or cross-cultural perspective in the design of their materials or instructional activities. One thing to note here is that Amant employs ethos-based approach while discussing problem areas as well as offering solutions to resolve them. With a range of strategies, solutions, teaching tips and heuristics all across, Amant concludes the essay by recommending an array of online resources for TC, instructors and students to turn to as they design the materials for international audiences.

17. Thatcher, Barry. “Understanding Digital Literacy Across Cultures.” Digital Literacy
for Technical Communication: 21st Century Theory and Practice.New York and
London: Routledge, 2010. 169-198. Print.
In this chapter, Thatcher critiques the ethnocentrism characterizing U.S. digital media and communication and proposes what he calls a global or cross-cultural approach for understanding them across the globe. He maintains that we need four competencies in order to avoid ethnocentrism and adopt a global/cross-cultural approach such as understanding the rhetorical characteristics of the digital medium itself; adapting those characteristics to rhetorical situation of the culture in question; assessing cultural variation in target culture and finally appropriating rhetorical strategies to fit the expectations of the target culture (Thatcher 169). The chapter is divided into four parts. The essay begins with a case study highlighting the need of cross-cultural approach to digital media and communication. The following part discusses why a different approach is necessary to make sense of digital literacy in the U.S. and around the world. In the third section, Thatcher list five strategies of adapting digital media and communication for cross-cultural contexts and finally the essay ends with a case study of digital literacy adaptation to fit cross-cultural needs.

18. Sample Job applications from Nepal.
http://jobs.classifieds1000.com/Nepal/Resume/COMPUTER_RELATED_OR_FINANCE_AREAS_JOBS_NEEDED
A Nepali web site for posting job opening announcement by the employers and job application letters and resumes by the potential candidates from around the world, this site has a number of actual job applications letters and resumes of Nepali job candidates that can serve as samples for research projects in cross-cultural technical writing/communication practices.

19. Lannon, John M. Technical Communication. 11th Ed. NY: Pearson Longman, 2008.
This is a technical communication handbook designed for a class with students from across the disciplines, cultures and places. Rhetorical principles undergird the technical genres presented in the book. Published in the U.S. it could be a good source for sample job application letters and resumes for research projects in cross-cultural technical communication practices.

20. Heytze, Ingmar, and Rene Weijman. “Intercultural Technical Communication: No
Problems for Technical Writers?” Communicator 5.9 (1997): 18-19. Print.

The DOE-STIC evening held on 17 June 1996 in Utrecht, the Netherlands and devoted to intercultural communication discusses whether or not there should be different versions of documents in different cultures for one and the same machine. The questions like: Will Eskimo treat instructions for a video recorder differently from an Australian? How should a technical writer deal with differences in his products? Is the conversion of manuals for different cultures really the job of the technical writer? (19) were also considered. A number of technical communication experts expressed their views on these crucial questions. Carl Jansen (Professor of TC, Eindhoven U of Technology) deploys Hofstede (1984) and Hoft (1995) and demonstrates that the role of culture is very small while writing good technical pieces. For him, individual factors like age, sex, and education, have a greater influence. So he does not see any meaning in investment for document alteration to fit a different culture. But another expert, Gerry Gentle mentions that there are vast differences in the ways people use technical documents across cultures and languages. So employing experts from different cultures and languages for the design, composition and alteration of those documents to fit the cultural expectations could be a good idea.

Endangered Technical Writer

2010-03-01T20:38:00.001-08:00

Santosh Khadka

Endangered Technical Writer

Among other things, essays on the special issue of Technical Communication Quarterly on content management discuss the merits and limits of content management as a system. On the one hand, “Content management provides a process of answering for questions by encouraging you to categorize and organize information for future retrieval and development. Grounded on a vision of the user experience, content management focuses not only in keeping track of information assets and making them accessible to users, it also focuses on finding new ways to deliver information to customers, employees, and business partners who need it” (JoAnn Hackos qtd in Clark 38). On the other CMS also has serious limits and problems. “One common problem facing content management systems is the disproportionate ratio between cost and effectiveness….a large percentage of such systems fail to yield the kind of effectiveness that is even remotely acceptable by industry standards. As Stephen Jeffrey-Poulter (2003) has claimed, CMS implementations have rarely successful (p. 159)” (Pullman &Gu 2). The contributors seem to imply that given the current situation of CMS, problems outweigh the merits.
Another even more shocking fact that the contributors highlight is that “technical communicators, are “often the worst served by a new content management system” (Robertson, 2002)” (Pullman & Gu 3). Since content management is a big investment, usually the entrepreneurs and managers make decisions about CMS for their enterprises which put technical writers in a precarious position. They therefore are in a do-or-die battle now as Anderseen states:
Technical communicators, whose work is situated the intersection of technology and people, will experience profound changes and thus must be prepared to either help steer the future of the development and implementation of ECM solutions or be forced to work within the confines of these systems and their enterprise-wide content and metadata models that fail to address the unique needs of rhetorical work” (68).
Therefore it is imperative that technical writers should either carve out space for themselves in the changed workplace scenario or they will become irrelevant forever. Not to wonder that software engineers and programmers have already endangered their positions. That is the reason why technical writers should find ways to combat the threats including CM to their survival. I just wonder what could those ways be. This leads me to consider the pedagogical Question: How can we prepare our students to deal with content management in the workplace, a world apart from the academia? “What does all this discussion about content management issues mean, then, for our curriculum design?” (Pullman & Gu 7).

Scary Facebook

2010-02-13T21:33:00.001-08:00

Scary Facebook

I am getting more and more scared of Facebook as I know more about its internal workings and privacy policies. I would not have signed up had I known in advance that my postings and activities on this interface can be tracked and reproduced in the future even after I deactivate the account or delete the posts. Isn’t it scary to know that some potential employers in unknowable future will track what I do now or did 10 years back when I was a teenager and decide not to offer job because of my activities on some online interface of whose internal mechanism I was unaware of?

I now congratulate myself that I did not post anything stupid or crazy on the facebook, twitter, blog or other social networking sites. I could well have done that esp. on facebook under the illusion that my profile or account is accessible only to my trusted friends. But look at what Marshall Kirkpartick in “Facebook's Zuckerberg Says The Age of Privacy is Over,” Michael Zimmer in “ Zuckerberg’s Remarks Aren’t Surprising, Nor New, Nor True” and Phil Wong in “Conversations About the Internet #5: Anonymous Facebook Employee” say about facebook, its CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s statement on facebook’s changing stance on privacy and facebook’s increasing commercialization of personal data/information. They take issues with Zuckerberg’s statement that the age of privacy is over and that people have no problem sharing their personal information with the world. Kirpartick says that after facebook’s recent change in privacy policy, “Your name, profile picture, gender, current city, networks, Friends List, and all the pages you subscribe to are now publicly available information on Facebook. This means everyone on the web can see it; it is searchable.” This information comes to me as a shock not because I am afraid of people finding my personal information online but because it is dishonesty on part of the facebook to its millions of users. I know that anything put on the web is not private the instant it goes online. Anyone who wants can get my personal information even from my school page. It is searchable. My blog is being read and commented by unknown followers. I have no reservation on that because I post on them cautiously keeping in mind that anything posted there is available to all. But facebook’s case is different. It is claimed to be safest of all SNS with its privacy customizable. Many of its users are still unaware that their private information is accessible to everybody and that their activities can have effect in their careers.

I don’t agree with Zuckerman that the age of privacy is over. He must know that there still are private and public spheres, as well as private and public selves of man and these multiple selves are not always the same. These selves have their own spheres and sometimes can not be treated as same. So, facebook must clarify what kind of sphere it is and what self fits its sphere. Zuckerman and his team have to make everything including its privacy policy transparent to facebook users so that users can decide what is good or appropriate for them. I demand that facebook maintain consistency on its user policy and not deceive its users for making money overnight.

Dave Clark: “Shaped and shaping Tools: The Rhetorical Nature of Technical Communication Technologies”

2010-01-30T16:39:00.000-08:00

"We are Right but They are Not!

“We are right and they are wrong!” is the tendency prevalent in academia. This is true mostly in disciplinary conflicts. Each discipline tends to claim that its research outcomes and methodologies are superior and that its scope and scholarship is more comprehensive and inclusive than those of other disciplines. Similar tendency is manifest even in the old versus new scholars and their researches/scholarships within the same discipline. Some could interpret this tendency as the tension that keeps the scholarship and research alive or makes possible the evolution of knowledge and learning but I don’t know why I don’t see it that way.
I am raising this issue here for general discussion because I can see similar tendency even among some rhetoricians and technical communicators. While doing that, I am not passing any judgment but definitely saying that speaking only with and within the discipline might not change many of the things going on in the other corners of the academy. So, some kind of communication across disciplines for sharing the perspectives and approaches is indispensable if disciplinary misunderstanding and stereotypes are to be removed.
I am in fact talking about some of the rhetoricians and technical communicators I encountered recently. Look at I.A Richards’ definition of rhetoric. He defines rhetoric broadly as “the study of misunderstandings and their remedies.” (Qtd. in Wayne Booth’s Rhetoric of Rhetoric 7) or more specifically as “the art of removing misunderstanding” (Qtd. in Booth’s preface x). Similar strain is evident in Wayne Booth’s declaration that “Rhetoric is employed at every moment when one human being intends to produce, through the use of signs or symbols, some effect on another- by words, or facial expressions, or gestures, or any symbolic skill of any kind” (preface xi). He even celebrates “rhetoric as our primary alternative to violence” ( preface xi). In short, rhetoric, for him, is the “entire range of resources that human beings share for producing effects on one another: effects ethical…, practical…, emotional,…. and intellectual…” (preface xi-xii Italics original). Basically, Booth weds rhetoric with quality of life stressing the fact that the “the quality of our lives, especially the ethical and communal quality, depends to an astonishing degree on the quality of our rhetoric” (xii).
I am not being cynical here but just wondering what the folks in other disciplines might think of this characterization of rhetoric. Will they agree that the quality of our lives depend so much on the quality of our rhetoric? Do they even know that rhetoric has so immense a role and how?
Another significant point to note about Booth is that he sees rhetoric everywhere, across all disciplines. For him all the disciplines are rhetorical and knowledge production and dissemination no matter what is necessarily a rhetorical process. He argues that rhetoric is integral to all disciplines ranging from hard sciences to arts and philosophy but the question arises again whether scholars and general population in other disciplines think along the same lines?
Booth’s is the exact way Dave Clark argues about the epistemology and ontology of technical communication technologies in his essay “Shaped and shaping Tools: The Rhetorical Nature of Technical Communication Technologies” collected in Rachel Spilka’s collection Digital Literacy. He argues that technology is inherently rhetorical and “shows how understanding “the rhetoric of technology” can help us understand better the relationship of technology and our work in technical communication” (“Introduction”, Digital Literacy 12). While doing that Clark critiques many scientists and their scholarship both on science and technology as well as older technical communicators who assume technology as value-free or arhetorical/pragmatic mechanism instrumental in enhancing human life.

Calling such a view “instrumentalist” and maintaining that technology is essentially rhetorical, Clark does something unprecedented in the essay. He for the first time systematically divides technical communication theories and approaches into four categories: classical rhetorical approaches, technology transfer theories, genre theory, and activity theory and describes how they are useful in analyzing the rhetorical nature of technologies and tools being used in the workplaces.
I appreciate him for raising a number of questions including how the technical communicators learn about and assess the “broader implications” and “potential influence” of technology and what it means “to be rhetorically savvy user of technology, as opposed to uncritically allowing tools like word processors, social networking, and content management systems to structure our work?” (Clark 88) and trying to address them. But I still have the concerns expressed at the beginning. Do the folks in science believe that scientific knowledge is rhetorical? Do the innovators of technology acknowledge the rhetorical nature of their tools? If they do not, how can the rhetoricians and technical communicators communicate with them this paradoxical “truth”: there is no absolute truth, truth is provisional and knowledge is rhetorical but the knowledge that all the principles and theories including those of science and technology are rhetorical is absolutely true? How can cross-disciplinary/interdisciplinary communication be made possible and effective?

Iswari Pandey: “Researching (With) the Postnational “Other””

2009-12-02T11:13:00.001-08:00

Iswari Pandey’s chapter “Researching (With) the Postnational “Other”” reflects his interest and investment in transnational, global as well as literacy issues and concern with research ethics and methodologies. As a self-reflexive ethnographer, Pandey explores “the limits and possibilities of researching digital literacy practices through the lens of a postnational perspective” (107). Building on the theoretical framework of postnationality and postnational literacy practices occasioned by the transnational move of people, capital and cultures or phenomena of globalization, he further explores and illustrates the complexities-excitement and challenges- involved in researching with postnational subjects and their digital literacy practices.
As does he in his own digital literacy narrative elsewhere, he tracks ideological underpinnings in digital literacy practices of postnational subjects here too and also attests to what Cynthia Selfe and Richard Selfe have characterized digital spaces as being, apart from sites for literacy practices, also “sites where different forms of oppression are reproduced: sexism, racism, colonialism, and homophobia” (qtd in Pandey 113). He finds digital space/s highly contested as are they fraught with competing set of ideologies vying for manipulation and exploitation of the postnational subjects.
Though Pandey’s major aim here is to explore gamers’ literacy development in a cultural context, his self-reflexivity towards the end is very revealing and insightful. Spotlighting his research experience with the postnational subjects, the moments of conflicts of objectives and interests between him and his research participants despite their supposed common ground and his misreading of hybridized cultural and linguistic signs produced in them (postnational subjects) by the postnational condition/s, he confesses that researching postnational participants in digital environments is fraught with risks and challenges. Such stakes and challenges lie among others in attracting research participants, understanding and interpreting their responses and representing them in the final research product. He gains a lot of insights from this research experience such as the need of creating reciprocal and collaborative research relationships between the researcher and his/her researcher participants; being more aware of the possibility of conflicts of interests and objectives between and among them despite the shared identity; defining explicitly one’s location as a researcher and understanding the participant-researcher relationship based on a clear understanding and interrogation of location, which, he deems, are instrumental to “ethical inquiry in digital writing research” (124). Similarly, he realizes that the issues of inequity, positionality or cultural/national situatedness of the researcher and research participants are equally important to understand the postnational “Other” better. Thus, for him, constant interrogation and understanding of the location/positionality of the researcher is the most prominent ethical issue while researching the postnational “Other”.
I mostly agree with Pandey’s reflections on digital writing research. Since this chapter is based on his experience as an ethnographer, his ideas and reflections are/should be to a great extent true save the potentiality of spatio-temporal variations. Though I myself align with Pandey’s stand on (post)nationality/nationalism, there are number of ways to complicate his key concept: (post)nationalism. For the purpose of debate/discussion, and since I am reading them all for my final project, I am deliberately putting Pandey and Eileen Schell/ Wendy Hesford face to face. While doing that I am not implying that Schell and Hesford are the advocates of nationalism. Not in kind, but I see between them a difference of degree in their beliefs in nationalism/postnationalism.
I am talking about Wendy S. Hesford and Eileen E. Schell’s introduction to special issue of College English on feminist rhetorics and transnationalism where they argue that the discipline of rhetoric and composition, US-centric and built around the narratives of nation, nationalism, and citizenship, would
benefit from a more critical engagement with its use of transgeographical concepts (displacement, transculuration, translocality), transnational constructs such as Paul Gilroy’s “Black Atlantic” (Sandars 812), and transnational ethnic configurations (African, African-American, West Indian people; Chicano, Puerto Rican, and Latino/Latin American people; Native American and indigenous people; Asian, Asian American, and Pacific Islander people), and consideration of the epistemological and historical ties between disciplinary formations and U.S. imperialism. (463)
If I rightly discerned, Hesford and Schell’s call in this special issue is for expanding and opening the discipline’s hitherto closed borders to transnational phenomena and experiences, insights and knowledge systems and discourses thereby extending/expanding the range and scope of “Composition Studies…constructed, indeed disciplined, as a sovereign state” (464) and particularly the feminist rhetorics. Their move is towards incorporating in the curriculum of U.S-based composition programs the ideas and contents about “how composition instruction is taught and engaged across the globe” (464).
My initial impression is that Schell and Hesford stand opposed to Pandey in their views on nation states and their subjects. Pandey terms nations postnations and their subjects postnational/transnational throughout his essay. For him every individual no matter where and how s/he is, is already transnational/postnational given the context of the demise of nation-states as distinct political and cultural unit. Schell and Hesford, however, reject this kind of characterization of nations and their subjects as: “[A]lthough some scholars claim that we live in a psotnationalist state, we align ourselves with those who account for the global reach of nationlist discourses and, more specifically, the power of U.S. policy, media, and military” (463). It may be because Pandey and Schell/Hesford stand in different discourse locations. But questions still linger: what is the role of discourse locations or ideological baggages in research? Do they affect the research methods/methodologies, analytical approaches and outcomes?

CCR 691 Annotation: Horner, Bruce and John Trimbur. “English Only and U.S. College Composition.”

2009-12-01T02:50:00.000-08:00

Horner, Bruce and John Trimbur. “English Only and U.S. College Composition.” College Composition and Communication 53.4 (2002): 594-630.
Summary:
Bruce Horner and John Trimbur trace the pedagogical and cultural developments that have led to the conception of English writing in the United States as a unidirectional and monolingual acquisition of literate competence. While these assumptions have been motivated by the modernist ideology of "one language/one nation," the authors envision that postmodern globalization may require us to develop in our students a multilingual and polyliterate orientation to writing. They outline the shifts in curriculum, policy, and research that will promote such a broadened pedagogical orientation in the future.”

Some striking quotes:

“We argue that a tacit language policy of unidirectional English monolingualism has shaped the historical formation of U.S. writing instruction and continues to influence its theory and practice in shadowy, largely unexamined ways” (594-5)
“As we have argued, this tacit language policy weighs heavily on our work studying and teaching writing. This largely unexamined language policy has made it difficult to see that U.S. college composition, from its
formation to the present day, operates for the most part within national borders…The task…is to develop an internationalist perspective capable of understanding the study and teaching of written English in relation to other languages and to the dynamics of globalization”(623-4).

CCR 691: Annotation: Canagarajah: Geopolitics of Academic Writing

2009-12-01T02:06:00.000-08:00

Geopolitics of Academic Writing is A. Suresh Canagarajah’s ambitious work, where he critiques the western academic journals’ insularity to non-western scholars, knowledge and/or scholarship. The non-western scholars are usually rejected on grounds of deviant discourse conventions such as awkward constructions or personal style. Canagarajah connects this gesture of western journals and publications to larger issues like west’s hegemony over and domination of east in knowledge construction, production and distribution as well as long-standing economic, social, cultural or political inequalities between the “center” west and “periphery” east. His critique of western publishing conventions, gate keeping practices and tendency to marginalize the “periphery” scholars and their knowledge/scholarship is grounded on his own experience as a Third-world scholar (at U of Jaffna, Sri Lanka) struggling to get published and recognized from the “center”. Now, a canon in ESL, Linguistics and Rhet. Comp. in US (“center”), Canagarajah, here, meticulously recounts how he managed to negotiate differing discourse conventions of his own (periphery) and the west (center) and get access into western media and thus get published from the “center”. In the text, he encourages his fellow scholars from “periphery” to implement similar coping strategies (negotiation) to get access to knowledge making process in the “center” partly because of his conviction that "it is a necessary evil that periphery scholars should use center publications even to resist their domination" (Canagarajah 12).
Canagarajah views the academic journals (primarily at the “center”) as “contact zones” in the era of globalization, where different discourse conventions from both “center” and “periphery” encounter and grapple with one another. But he is dismayed to find that unlike in other “contact zones,” grapple at the academic “contact zones” is far from fair as publishers in center have intervened and gate kept by imposing discourse conventions blind to periphery differences. He tracks a lot of economic, political and other vested interests behind the “center’s” imposing arbitrary publishing requirements and discriminatory practices of excluding, disciplining, appropriating or exploiting periphery scholarship. He then quickly links all these practices with center’s academic imperialism or domination and deems some kind of actions urgent or interactions, at the least, between scholars in the “center” and “periphery” to take stock of the existing situation. Such an interaction could be mutually beneficial. He claims that periphery scholars can benefit largely from critical engagement with center knowledge and center too can not be representative or inclusive of the global knowledge without insights or critiques from the periphery.
In a nutshell, as Canagarajah himself puts it, his argument in this book is:
academic writing holds a central place in the process of constructing, disseminating, and legitimating knowledge; however, for discursive and material reasons, Third World scholars experience exclusion from academic publishing and communication; therefore the knowledge of Third World communities is marginalized or appropriated by the West, while knowledge of Western communities is legitimated and reproduced; and as part of this process, academic writing/publishing plays a role in the material and ideological hegemony of the West. (6)
This being the overarching argument, the text, however, is divided into eight chapters. In the first chapter “Contextualizing Academic Writing,” Canagarajah prepares the context for his inquiry by highlighting center-periphery inequality of research articles and connecting it with center’s hegemony or domination over periphery knowledge and scholarship. In the second, “Communities of Knowledge Construction,” he analyses the discourse communities in the center and periphery through historical-materialist framework and maintains that “knowledge… [is] interested and, therefore, ideological" (57). He finds conflicting discourses and disciplines or discourse communities in the center too but negotiated for the purpose of benefit, power and influence. In the third chapter, “Conventions in Knowledge Construction,” he explores how knowledge is constructed in the center by enacting academic gate keeping conventions which are politically and economically motivated. In short, chapter two and three “introduce the theoretical constructs that help conduct the inquiry” (Canagarajah 4). Canagrajah discusses the differences in textual conventions in the writings of center and periphery scholars in chapter four, “Textual Conventions in Conflict”. As opposed to general tendency of associating center-periphery disparity in conventions and styles of writing with cultural or linguistic differences, he analyses the differences along the lines of material disparities. With material, he also couples ideological underpinning behind adopting certain kind of rhetorical convention or style as, for instance, in the center’s case, says Canagarajah, “there are profound ideological implications in adopting a rhetoric that is detached, neutral, and uninvolved" (153).
Similarly, in chapter five, “Publishing Requirements and Material Constraints,” Canagrajah “explores the publishing conventions established by center editorial circles and the ways in which periphery scholars attempt to meet such requirements in the context of limited resources” (4). Recounting and based on his own experience as a periphery scholar hard faced with poverty and material constraints and yet struggling to meet the publishing requirements set by the center, he infers that western publishing requirements choke the periphery scholars and their scholarship as majority of them lack enough material resources to meet the publishing requirements. Chapter six, “Literacy Practices and Academic Culture,” presents the political economy of literacy in periphery. As an insider, Canagarajah here presents the academic culture of periphery scholars shedding light on how it functions as the cause and consequence of their exclusion from the mainstream publications at the center. Chapter seven, “Poverty and Power in Knowledge Production,” deals with the center-periphery inequalities as is reflected in publishing practices and knowledge construction. This chapter also demonstrates how production inequality translates into power inequality between the center and periphery. Finally, in chapter eight, “Reform, Resistance, Reconstruction,” Canagarajah declares his goal in writing this volume. He maintains that his attempt is to” deconstruct the bases of “excellence” in published scholarship and knowledge construction. This is an argument for changing the relationships in the publication networks so that we can reconstruct knowledge- and presumably conduct international relations-in more egalitarian and enriching terms” (305). He therefore calls for some visible changes in publishing world and practices in order to "democratize participation" (276) of scholars from both the center and periphery. This, according to him, can be ascertained by forging a relationship between the center and periphery academic communities, “based on respect for the local knowledge of each community,” which “would serve to democratize academic communication and knowledge production” (4) as well as by accommodating multiple modes of literacy and textual practices.

Though his ambitious attempt to deconstruct the existing academic and publishing conditions and create “relatively more democratic fora of scholarly interaction,” (305) or “reconstitute discourses and structures in progressively more inclusive, ethical, and democratic terms,” (30) is far from realistic, his suggestions for periphery scholars to use coping strategies to get access into mainstream academic journals and thereby knowledge construction process are worth emulating. He suggests them to choose hybrid textuality as he does in this book: “[t]he periodic narrative sections, the self-reflective commentary, and the unabashed personal voice are interspersed with documented detached analysis to achieve hybrid textuality in this book” (Canagarajah 30). Similarly significant is his call on periphery scholars to continue interrogating knowledge produced by the center and proposal for the mainstream journals to democratize the scholarly participation if they wish to go global. He, in connection with center’s desirable gesture, says,” reforming publishing conventions to accommodate the work of periphery academics might well function as a humble beginning toward democratic processes in knowledge production and, by extension, geopolitical relations” (305). Thus, his call for some degree of compromise or negotiation from both the parties in question is timely and is much needed gesture to reduce, even if not to end, the existing disparities between them. One more thing that is of paramount importance is his speculation that “[T]hrough such processes of mediation, negotiation, and even argument, center and periphery scholars may establish mutually enriching scholarly discourses and more ethical knowledge-construction practices” (31).

Shirley Logan: “Private Learners: Self-Education in Rhetoric”

2009-11-11T23:46:00.001-08:00

Shirley Logan: “Private Learners: Self-Education in Rhetoric”

In the second chapter of Liberating Language, Logan examines closely five private learners of “some form of self-education” (29)—Charlotte Forten Grimke, Frances Anne Rollin Whipper, Ida B. Wells Barnett, Mary Virginia Montgomery, and Charles W. Chestnut—who “spent a good deal of time on self-improvement, especially in reading, writing, speaking, and critiquing the rhetorical performances of others, and who all recorded various aspects of their private learning in diaries” (30). Through archival research and rhetorical analysis of their published diary entries and unpublished manuscripts, she presents diary keeping as a site of rhetorical acts and claims that diary-keeping also serves rhetorical education. In addition to regarding their diary keeping as literacy practices for self-education/improvement, she further argues that their diaries “provide additional insight into the complex intellectual lives of blacks in the mid-and late nineteenth century” (32). According to her, these diarists turned to different available resources from self-help manuals to local libraries; attended public speeches and meetings and undertook various literate/literacy activities from writing letters to biographies to newspaper articles in order to self-educate. The driving force behind their pursuit was their quest for respectability, independence, racial equality, rhetorical/oratorical skills, and/or “race improvement through self-improvement” (55).

Her archival and analytical work being worth emulating and her treatment of diary-keeping as a site of rhetorical action/education being innovative, I can however see few problematic issues in this chapter.

First, she makes big claims based on just five diarists though she confesses that “these five diarists are not representative of the majority of nineteenth-century African Americans” (31). When she knows that these cases neither represent majority of nineteenth century diarists/diaries nor AA people, how could or on what ground could she draw so many generalizations?

Next, her use of the term self-education seems equally problematic. None of the diarists she discusses is solely self-educated. In contrast, all of them have different degree of formal schooling/academic training. Since nowhere does she discuss these diarists’ academic courses and course components, it is really hard to determine what rhetorical/literate skills they learned from school/training and what from “self-study/ies”. It is apparent from the text that these diarists’ learning/education is occurring simultaneously at the formal and informal settings. For instance, “[m]ost of… (Grimke’s) rhetorical work took place in her writing and in her classrooms” (39). Similarly, Rollin collaborated with Richard Greener, a Harvard scholar. Rollin also “had an impressive array of associates reading and critiquing her work” (41). Almost similar is Chestnut’s case. “His own self-education project supplied much of his education, but he also had the benefit of sound training at the postbellum Howard school” (49). Moreover, she herself at one point says: “Even though they functioned singly as individuals pursuing various kinds of knowledge, these pursuits inevitably led them to external audiences and collective engagements” (56). That is why, I am hesitating to call their pursuits self-education. I would rather be content to call their endeavors something like self-initiated learning. In fact, they don’t educate themselves rather their learning is facilitated by a number of factors—internal and external—their strong motivation, their exposure to a number of rhetorical acts like public speech, public reading, writing as well as their own involvement into various rhetorical situations/actions. Once into interactions/discussions, it is actually difficult to say for sure who teaches whom and when. And it is not necessary that teaching happens only in the formal settings. At times we learn from mentors, peers and even juniors unconsciously. Even being influenced or moved or shaped by people, ideas and actions unaware is possible.

Project Proposal (Research Area in the Field Assignment)

2009-11-10T08:49:00.001-08:00

Santosh Khadka
Eileen Schell
691. Comparative Processes and Premises of Research
Project Proposal (Research Area in the Field Assignment)
As part of some of my ongoing projects, I have been researching and exploring the global/transnational, cross-cultural and cross-linguistic cross-currents increasingly informing the hitherto US-centric discipline of rhetoric and composition in general and the rhetoric of World Englishes and its implication to composing practices in the US and beyond in particular. Scanning the textbooks, book chapters, journal articles and other writings pertaining to the topics of my inquiry, my general observation so far is that a number of patterns and trends in composition have emerged over the years and a lot of shifts, moves and developments have taken place.
Some such patterns, trends, shifts, moves and developments in global, transnational
and cross-cultural as well as linguistic aspects/ dimensions of/in composition studies/classroom over the years are:
1. From ESL towards World Englishes
2. From English Only towards Multilingual Composition (Classroom)
3. From nationalistic framework towards global/transnational framework in Composition curricula and classroom
4. From writing as expression tool towards writing as resistance tool (in oppressive composition classroom esp. for students from minority groups as well as against forces of oppressive globalization)
6. From Cross-cultural towards intercultural pedagogy

7. From Print literacy towards Multiliteracies in composition (classroom)

Similarly, my inference after reading the theorists, scholars and/or inquirers/researchers who thus trace and indicate the changing landscape of composition patterns, classrooms or practices over time is that they are advocating for an inclusive pedagogy, the pluralization of academic writing and treatment of transnational or cross-cultural difference as resource in composition (classroom) to incorporate, address or at least acknowledge the transitions taking place in the discipline or classroom which is to say that they are vehemently critiquing the existing composition curricula, patterns or classroom/s.
With this being my larger project in progress, I am at the moment working on a paper for a panel in CCCC next year named “Remixing National/International Academic Boundaries: International Students in Rhetoric and Writing Studies”. My accepted proposal for the panel reads as:

I will discuss the ways in which World Englishes can broaden the curriculum of graduate programs by creating space for different varieties of English that students from across cultures and nations bring to the increasingly globalized classroom. Only a curriculum informed by transnational and cross-cultural perspectives on language may begin to help the field recognize/legitimize different discourse conventions and expression patterns, as well as composition styles that international students draw from in their composition practices. Such an approach is important to develop a transnational perspective “capable of understanding the study and teaching of written English in relation to other languages and to the dynamics of globalization” (Bruce and Horner 623). Finally, I contend that since existing graduate programs do not place adequate emphases on global and cross-linguistic issues of composition, it is imperative that their curricular and programmatic priorities be required to make them relevant to the times and also bring about changes in undergraduate composition pedagogy since graduate programs are the ones that ultimately shape undergraduate composition pedagogy.

Along side these projects, I now plan to read some major texts and journal articles dealing with the changing landscape of composition (classroom) from method/methodological point of view for RAF assignment. For keeping the project manageable, I will focus particularly on the composing strategies or research methods/methodologies/approaches of the scholars/researchers/inquirers/theorists declaring or calling for the hitherto nationalistic framework of composition classroom and curricula going/to go increasingly transnational or global in terms of pedagogy, curricula and media of instruction. As the bibliography below shows, I have chosen few major textbooks and articles from variety of journals including College English and College Composition and Communication. Since my choice is guided by whether articles touch upon the global/transnational dimension/s of rhetoric, composition and language, I want to particularly focus on the issue of College English on transnational feminist rhetoric/s edited by Eileen Schell and Wendy Hesford.
To be precise, I attempt to trace how scholars/researchers/inquirers of my choosing approach their topics and what their takes are on methodological disparities across spaces and cultures. Special focus will be on how and why their methods (qualitative, quantitative) vary depending on who their intended audience is and disciplines they come from. Similarly, I am also nterested in seeing whether these people uphold the so-called East-West stylistic and methodological binaries of indirect/direct, subjective/objective, qualitative/quantitative etc. or take some other positions and directions.

Working Bibliography

Text books
1. Canagarajah, Suresh A. Critical Academic Writing and Multilingual Students. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2005.
2. ---.Geopolitics of Academic Writing. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2002.
4. Pennycook, Alastair. Global Englishes and Transcultural Flows. London and
New York: Rutledge, 2007.
5. Kachru, Yamuna. Cultures, Contexts and World Englishes.

Articles and Book Chapters
Bhatt, Rakesh M. “World Englishes.” Annual Review of Anthropology. 30 (2001).
18 Oct. 08 . 527-550.
Cliett, Victoria. “The Expanding Frontiers of World Englishes: A New Perspectives for Teachers of English”. Eds. Geneva Smitherman and Victor Villanueva. Language Diversity in the classroom: From Intention to Practice. Carbondale: SIU Press, 2003. 67-75.
Horner, Bruce and John Trimbur. “English Only and U.S. College Composition”.
College Composition and Communication. 53. 4 (Jun., 2002). 18 Oct. 08 . 594-630.
Kachru, Yamuna. “Culture, Style, and Discourse: Expanding Noetics of English.” The Other Tongue: English Across Cultures. Ed. Braj B. Kachru.2nd ed. Urbana and Chicago:
U of Illinois Press, 1992. 340-354.
Severino, Carol. “English Contact Languages and Rhetorics: Implications for U.S.
English Composition.” College Composition and Communication. 59.1(2007): 128-138.
Canagarajah, Suresh A. “The Place of World Englishes in Composition:
Pluralization Continued.” College Composition and Communication. 57.4
(2006): 586-619.
Canagarajah, Suresh A. “Toward a Writing Pedagogy of Shuttling between Languages:
Learning from Multilingual Writers.” College English. 68.6 (2006): 589-604.
Mastuda, Paul K. “The Myth of Linguistic Homogeneity in U.S. College Composition.”
College English. 68 (2006): 637-651.
Himley, Margaret. “Writing Programs and Pedagogies in a Globalized Landscape.”
WPA: Writing Program Administration 26 (2003): 49-66.

Schau, Mark. “Beyond These Shores: An Argument for Internationalizing
Composition.” Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature,
Language, Composition, and Culture 3 ( 2003): 85-98.
L’Eplattenier, Barbara E. “Opinion: An Argument for Archival Research Methods”
College English, Volume 72, Number 1, September 2009.
Schell, Eileen and Wendy S Hesford. “INTRODUCTION: Configurations of Transnationality:
Locating Feminist Rhetorics”.College English; May 2008.
Dingo, Rebecca. “Linking Transnational Logics: A Feminist Rhetorical Analysis of Public
Policy”. College English; May 2008.
Kulbaga, Theresa A. “Pleasurable Pedagogies: Reading Lolita in Tehran and the Rhetoric of
Empathy”. College English; May 2008.
Eck, Eck. “Thinking Globally, Teaching Locally: The "Nervous Conditions" of Cross-Culture”.
College English; Jul 2008.
Queen, Mary. “Transnational Feminist Rhetorics in a Digital World”. College English; May
2008.
Schaub, Mark. “Beyond These Shores: An Argument for Internationalizing
Composition”. Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language,
Composition, and Culture. Volume 3, Number 1, © 2003 Duke University Press
Lu, Min-Zhan and Bruce Horner. "Composing in a Global-Local Context:
Careers, Mobility, Skills". College English, Volume 72, Number 2, November 2009

Ethical Dilemmas in Feminist Research

2009-10-29T07:30:00.001-07:00

Ethical Dilemmas in Feminist Research: The Politics of Location, Interpretation and Publication

In chapter 2 of her book Ethical Dilemmas in Feminist Research: The Politics of Location, Interpretation and Publication, Gesa E. Kirsch examines the moments and instances of ethical dilemmas in researcher-participants relations and offers some suggestions to resolve or reduce them. She discusses the complexities and stakes involved in the interpretation and representation of research data (primarily the interview responses) in chapter 3.

Some such dilemmas that arise as a result of treating research participants as collaborators/co-researchers are:
The feminist research methodology encourages researchers to maintain a close relation with research participants but at the same time also demands critical scrutiny of participants’ interviews. Sometimes, researcher’s offering of critique and reflection might turn the existing intimacy and collaboration into “disappointment, alienation, and exploitation of participants” (26).

Ethical dilemma also arises when the participants reveal confidential information but do not want the researchers to publicize it. It could be hard for the researchers to decide whether to respect the participants’ request or break the trust and be loyal to the research project by covering the crucial information thus disclosed.

At times, researchers might realize that the participants are not being honest and providing correct information. Dilemma in such cases is whether to stick to participants’ views or act otherwise.

The feeling of being manipulated or exploited might come to researchers as well when they are dealing with the participants from culturally/economically privileged positions. In such a situation, the researcher might not feel the obligation of treating the participants ethically, rather might want to critique them.

Similar dilemma plagues researchers when they find the participants engaged in some problematic behaviors.

Kirsch also brings forth strategies to come to terms with such ethical dilemmas. First in order is to develop realistic and perhaps limited expectations about collaborating with participants while designing qualitative research (36). Readiness on both participants and researchers’ ends to critical feedback; granting participants the right to co-interpretation; simultaneous presentation of participants’ interpretation’; researcher bearing the responsibility of interpretation could be other ways of handling dilemmas. Yet another could be renegotiating the consent of participants in case the research focus or direction changes.

In chapter 3, Kirsch mostly discusses the interpretive conflicts between the researcher and participants which “range from disagreements between researchers and participants about the meaning of research data, such as interview, narratives and observations, to conflict in values and ideology” (45). She elaborates on the complexity involved in making participants the co-interpreters of research data.

Since the participants and researchers come up with different interpretive frameworks while analyzing data, the resulting conflict could have serious consequences. Deciding whose interpretation is valid could be tougher. Representation through researchers’ interpretations alone could be misrepresentation and their empowering intentions could have silencing effects on the participants.

Kirsch sees no way but negotiation, dialogue and granting participants the space in research report to reduce dilemmas or conflicts. But I have some questions and concerns with her recommendation too.

Regarding the suggestion to put participants’ interpretation side by side with researchers’, or produce “multi-vocal” research reports, my concern is that not all research participants would be capable of interpreting their experiences/stories or information. Depending on who the participants and where they are from, at times their interpretations might appear politically naïve and even ignorant. Putting their interpretation side by side with researchers’ could have ironic effect.

Kirsch is constantly emphasizing on researchers’ ethical obligations to participants, research communities, institutions and/or other stakeholders. But my sense is that at times, researchers confront hostilities or threats. My take is that researchers should choose to encounter whatever comes on the way be it hostility or threat. Some of the sensational researchers have been threatened or shot dead for their disclosure of all wrongdoings of oppressive institutions like military or totalitarian government.

The Means of Production: Literacy and Stratification at the Twenty-First Century

2009-10-14T16:08:00.000-07:00

Santosh Khadka

The Means of Production: Literacy and Stratification at the Twenty-First Century
-Deborah Brandt

As Brandt mentions, she “explore[s] the issues of access, proficiency and reward of literacy learning” in relation to larger historical and socio-economic conditions in this particular chapter. To that end, she begins the chapter with the general observation that there is a correlation between socio-economic status of individuals and their literacy achievements by which she means to say that literacy and material/political privilege are very closely connected. She then argues that individuals from relatively well-off families have access to resources/means to gain literacy more easily and quickly compared to many other less fortunate folks. Thus, the inequitable distribution of resources/means of production and power across people, families, regions and nations, she implies, is the reason why different individuals gain different types and degrees of literacy/ies which, in turn, help/s to maintain the status quo of social, economic and literacy inequities.

Interestingly, Brandt discusses literacy in this chapter in very materialistic terms. She regards literacy in post-capitalist and information age as labor power, an input, output, a tool, an instrument and means of production, a raw material as well as energy supply of the Information Age. By doing so, she however undermines the fact that there are at least few people in the world who think that literacy is its end.

Brandt backs up her view that class stratification and literacy are closely connected as are resources of an individual’s literacy achievement and nation’s economic system with the findings from two case studies. Her first case study recounts the digital literacy narrative of a male, white American guy named Raymond Branch who hails from a relatively well-off family while the second one presents the Spanish language learning experience of a female, Mexican American lady, Dora Lopez from economically not so-sound family. Through these studies, she shows that because of their differential socio-economic/material conditions, their access to and achievement of types and degrees of literacy varied making a great difference in what they could or not achieve in job market. Raymond had access to computer technology resources at an elite school and its rich surrounding by virtue of his father being a professor. He reaped the full advantage of those available resources and developed expertise in computer programming which he could easily cash in the market. But Dora could not be in the same position because her father was migrant worker and her socio-economic situation did not let her get into a better school and gain a saleable literacy skill. With Raymond and Dora’s literacy narratives, Brandt maintains that inequitable distribution of resources across individuals, families and regions is the root cause of literacy differentials between/among them which, in turn, is responsible for continuing the existing racial, class and sexual and regional disparities /differences.

I agree with Brandt’s argument but with few reservations. Firstly, I have reservation with her methodology which is the kind of reservation people usually have with qualitative research methods. It occurs to me that just two samples/cases might not be enough to make so many generalizations about the relationship between material forces at work and literacy achievement. Granted, the argument and interpretive leaps could be made based on those cases but the question arises whether or not the cases are representative or reflective of the complexity of the issue at hand. For instance, in Dora’s case, it might not be the material forces but flaw in her individual preference/choice of Spanish language literacy over many others which could sell in the market like Branch’s computer programming that she did not succeed economically. As such nowhere does Dora say with Brandt that she regrets her choice or she thinks that she failed.

Secondly, Brandt’s take that Branch’s access to material resources made possible by his father’s education and employment is the sole cause of his success as a computer programmer/professional could also be mistaken in that it discounts Branch’s individual motivation/interest, his diligence and labor or, in short, his agency. Similarly, Brandt’s accusation on Lopez’s socio-economic status as solely responsible factor for her relatively less success as economical agent or instrument could also be flawed. This line of argument again shuts the possibility of an individual transcending or overcoming the economic barriers/hurdles.

But I agree with what she states in the later part of the essay that “access to computers and control over them is unequally distributed in the same ways that traditional literacy has been unequally distributed: by income, race, region and occupation”. While I agree with geo-political disparity in access to technology, I still can’t deny the possibility of an individual crossing the so-called digital divide. Similarly, I challenge the idea that access alone guarantees the success. It could well be the case that many with access do not master the machine while many without access manage to get and gain mastery. This is the case with countries like India which despite its late/difficult access to information technology has already managed to be one of the leading countries in that sector.

Santosh Khadka: Research Profile

2009-09-10T18:16:00.000-07:00

I do not have a long research history or experience. My schooling until undergraduate degree being from state funded institutions of a developing country with education system heavily influenced by traditional British lecture method, the pedagogy until then did not include much of research components and therefore did not provide me with the opportunity for research of virtually no kind. Almost all the courses were content-based and the kind/s of writing I produced were the responses to quizzes and sit-in exams which is to say that those writing products were not original ones but the regurgitation of what was read or recited as part of preparation for the periodical or annual exams. Couple of courses however were on research methods, taxonomy and techniques which acquainted me with some quantitative and qualitative research samples and also prepared me to go for my own research projects. As part of requirements for those courses, I conducted a couple of mini research projects too though those projects can not be called professional. Though not research-based my education until undergraduate had strong content focus and provided me, I should say, with preliminary research insights, as well as equipped me with necessary know-how of research processes and nuances to go forward for my own research projects.
Thus, my research practices began with masters degree for which I went to a US-model private university. Though degree was labeled as Masters in English, the courses offered were mostly interdisciplinary. I confronted the courses like Issues of globalization, Disability Studies, Spiritual Quest, Communicating Across Cultures, Discourses in Disciplines, Human Rights and Law together with score of others on literary genres. And important feature of these courses in the program from research point of view was that each course required the weekly production of term papers on various disciplinary and other related topics/issues culminating into seminar papers as well as final university sit-in exams. Here begins my research practices. Even for producing the term papers of moderate length, depending on the nature and emphasis of courses, I had to either conduct library research, scanning, skimming and exploring databases or indexes for articles or library stacks for pertinent textbooks or had to make field visit with set of questionnaires for interview or survey forms for data collection or making observations or doing scores of other things depending on what kind of information was required to make the research worthwhile or complete. These are, I know now are just prewriting steps. Drafting and editing would again take time and labor and often the stages overlapped. For instance, sometimes I had to go for field visit or locate new relevant sources in the midst of revision process. In short, even a short paper demanded a lot of research works on my part.
This is the story behind short research papers. The seminars papers and culminating Independent Study and Thesis are the places where I got involved into serious research works bringing to them the resources, skills, techniques and knowledge I had previously garnered from undergraduate research courses as well as other reference (research) guides. Again depending on the emphasis of the course, I had to resort to different research methods and methodologies to produce the seminar papers. Not all courses required seminar papers though. I now recall writing a research proposal for grant collaboratively (with a classmate) and conducting an empirical research for a collaborative seminar paper for a course in linguistics. It was a study into the language of an endangered tribe in eastern Nepal. We struggled a lot to prepare the proposal. There was no published literature on the topic of our selection. What we located in the libraries in Nepal and online are few passing references to that language and that too wrongly grouped, assigned or misrepresented. We could however track an unpublished dissertation on the socio-historical aspects of the tribe. That source served as the starting point for our research proposal. We began with the fact that there was not much literature and that ours was going to be the first study of its kind in the country. We won the grant from University grant commission. But the research part of it proved a real ordeal. We had to go to the community, interview people, record their responses to our set questionnaires though conversation was not predictable while also taking visuals. Data/information somehow ready, the hardest part of the project was to develop theoretical framework to analyze and interpret the data/information and thus develop a cohernet theory. We had visit the site number of times, had some educated members of the tribe come to the city and work with us. We treated those members respectfully in fact as co-authors of our research project as they were the major sources of information/data we used to make the research a success. Of even more importance were their stories and experiences and since there was no preceding study in that sense any data available on the topic of our inquiry, we had no choice but to rely fully on them for the raw materials. Since the project was titled as “Socio-linguistic” study of the tribe, we had later to go to disciplinary literature published in sociology, anthropology, linguistics, demography, geography, music and culture for theoretical insights to back up and validate our research findings. Here at this point for the first time I realized that research today is totally interdisciplinary no matter what the topic is. I also understood that empirical data-driven research has more stakes and pitfalls than a library research.
I had similar experience conducting a research on the literacy of visually challenged women. These doubly marginalized section of the society had many interesting and revealing stories to tell me and later the class and professor . But research did not end there. The blind by birth, blinded accidentally and partially blind had different stories of literacy to tell which complicated the research topic and made the easy conclusion really difficult. The collection of case studies was the easiest part in this research too. What was frustrating was again the theorizing part: making sense of and drawing generalized inferences from them. The risk involved is the fear of unsubstantiated findings or drawing forced conclusion. That is the reason I began and ended the research writing with limitation and the scope of the research at hand where I openly stated what the research covers and what it does not.
These are just some snapshots of my struggle with this enigmatic process called research. To be honest, I never know in advance my research methods and methodologies which is why I never write the methodology section in advance though research proposal requires of us to tentatively state the methods and methodologies even before the project starts.
My major research works (if they can be called) in Masters were in addition to ones discussed above the Independent Study and culminating thesis. But these both projects were not empirical or data-driven. Since I come from English background, the disciplinary fashion in Nepal was to blend the theory and textual/discourse analysis in such projects. English studies in Nepal being heavily informed and influenced by literary, linguistic and cultural theories, my works were also not exceptions. I had to dig the theoretical stuffs of postcolonial, postmodern, and cultural theories even before I was allowed to write the proposal. Only after my theoretical plane was all set did I write the proposal and conducted the research. I didn’t find that approach very rewarding though. What I did was to discuss and explore the major relevant theoretical insights from some pertinent theoretical schools and reflected, analysed and proved how those insights/concepts/trends operated in the text of my choice which is to say that my projects were thoroughly descriptive and analytical.
I should say it frankly that I learned very little from research practices in the school. My four years of professional life after graduation in Nepal and coming to US remained productive from research point of view. I got involved into an NGO, Human Rights protection/promotion and a dictionary project as well as part-time teaching job immediately after my graduation. Each of them provided me opportunity to research distinctly different field and areas. Given the length of the paper, what I can put here is that researching academically in the school and outside in the real life situations are two very different phenomena. Real life researches are more challenging, adventurous and rewarding too in the sense that we get the result or return of our work immediately. I have bitter experience of not being able to write a grant proposal with a university degree at my hand while working in the NGO. I have similar experience of government official being indifferent, cold and rather hostile to release information about human rights violations and impunity at the time of civil war in Nepal. Better not go to this part of the painful story.
Let me end with a positive note here. I had a very exciting and rewarding research and writing experience with a dictionary project funded by a publication in Nepal. I was appointed as an assistant editor among many others who worked collaboratively with senior professors and lexicographers of Nepal to prepare bilingual dictionaries. I worked in Nepali-English dictionary for two years with the duties of collecting and compiling Nepali / English words from various sources including the authentic Nepali/English dictionaries published thus far, research, field visit, newspapers, journals and other media publications and transmissions. Then translating those Nepali/ English words, phrases, idioms, proverbs and sayings into equivalent English/ Nepali words, phrases, idioms and proverbs. The translation could be literal, literary or figurative depending on the situation and sense. The effort however was to translate the Nepali /English into English/Nepali without the loss of the Nepali /English flavor. Then followed editing of the written content giving the translation precision and exactness and finally publishing the bilingual dictionaries. The productive and fun part of the project was that we had to go to the field: market places, schools, meeting points like restaurants, café or parks and records covertly whatever people spoke. This was all for the collection of new words coming into circulation. We similarly scanned daily newspapers, TV broadcasts and recently published books and articles in order to see the frequency of new words if any. We even visited some remote parts of the country where different variants/dialects of Nepali were spoken and collected hundreds of words. The experience was very enriching and enlightening. Fun part used to be over however when making those words dictionary entries with all the features and right translation. Fun part at the end is that the project is still in progress and first edition of text is being released next month.

Personal Essay

2009-09-07T15:57:00.000-07:00

I am not a creative writer. My writing process is markedly different from those of the creative writers. I cannot and have not produced any writing spontaneously except the responses in quizzes and sit-in exams. Even those answers are not the original and creative ones but the reflection of what is read or consulted as a part of preparation.
I had also not heard much about writing theories before joining UL though had some preliminary ideas of effective writing, writing modes, discourses in disciplines, communicating across cultures, and aspects of rhetoric and style. My writing is, thus, not much informed by writing theories. However, I instinctively follow different stages of writing activities, that too, depending on the types of writing. Writings that require fieldwork, journalistic writing, writing in profession or work place writing and academic writing involve different stages of writing in different degree. Though they all follow almost same phases, there is considerable difference in the labor and time invested in each of these stages. For example, some of these writings require higher degree of research, observation and planning while some others demand much labor in drafting and still other types need much refinement therefore more revision and editing. But after all, all of them involve prewriting, drafting and editing stages.
Which stage requires much labor and time in my writing process mostly depends on the type of writing undertaken. If the writing in question is one of technical and professional, it involves more time in the drafting stage for the format or model of such writing is always available and what I need to do is to draft the matter in such a format. Thus drafting takes more time than either of prewriting or revision. But, for instance, if the writing demands profound research including the identification of the topic to devising the methodology to analysis of the data collected from the field visit and interviews or other medium, in such cases, prewriting stage requires maximum labor and time. Similarly, some kinds of writing need relatively more time in the revision/editing stage. The example of such writings can be personal narratives and essays, which do not require the background work but may need polish and refinement including the organization and coherence.
Whatever the types of writing, I tentatively follow the stages of prewriting, drafting and revision/editing though not in strict linear order. Most of the times, these stages overlap each other. What I generally do is collect the background information from the relevant sources such as library, online or field visit before venturing the writing activities. This stage may also include the identification of topic, audience, methodology or purpose, which largely determine the tone and language of writing. In short, I gather relevant information and data necessary to begin drafting in this stage.
In the drafting stage, I try to put the information, ideas and data in a certain order and coherence so that writing reads well and makes sense. I also determine what data or information go where and the thesis and supporting evidences in this stage. Thus, I select the pertinent info and data and organize them in certain order so that the writing makes point.
The next stage is one of editing and revision. This stage involves adding, deleting and moving the words and sentences to make the writing sensible and refined. This is also an attempt to make the writing more scholarly, coherent, organized and effective. So I do editing at the level of diction, sentence and paragraph and sometimes the entire writing.
Though prewriting, drafting and editing are the tentative stages of my writing, I, however, do not follow them in a linear order. They overlap and criss-cross one another. Sometimes, I do editing while drafting if I feel that the word or the sentence I produce does not make the right or good sense. Similarly, I go to the sources to verify or look for more info while editing the written text if I feel doubt on them.
Thus my writing process is haphazard though it involves usual stages of invention/discovery, background study, drafting and revision.

Annotation CCR 611 Feb 11

2009-02-11T07:50:00.001-08:00

Mastuda, Paul Kei. “Composition Studies and ESL Writing: A Disciplinary Division of Labor.” CCC 50.4 (1999): 699-721.
Summary: Mastuda examines how the division between composition studies and Teaching of English as Second Language emerged specifically over the period of 1941 to 1966 due to the professionalization of TESL just when composition studies was also undergoing a revision of its own disciplinary identity that, according to him, inadvertently contributed to the creation of the disciplinary division of labor influencing the institutional practices in composition programs across the nation even today. Towards the end, he points out the need of some form of interdisciplinary collaboration between the Composition Studies and TESL to address the issue of writing in ESL since it falls under the ken of both the disciplines.

Most Valuable Citation: Allen, Bloomfield, Connor, Kaplan, Zamel.
Area Cluster: 107 Institutional and Professional
Methodology: Literature Review,
Provocative Quotes:
“Before the Michigan ELI (English Language Institute) was established in 1941, it was commonly believed that anyone whose native language was English was qualified to teach English to nonnative speakers-much as some thought any literate person could teach writing” (703).
“The creation of a professional organization (TESOL) that devoted itself entirely to ESL issues and the decline of interest in those issues among composition specialists led to the separation of writing issues into first-language and second-language components. The disciplinary division of labor was thus institutionalized” (713).

“…second-language writing should be seen as an integral part of both composition studies and second-language studies, and specialists in both professions should try to transform their institutional practices in ways that reflect the needs and characteristics of second-language writers in their own institutional contexts” (715).

Tags: Allen, Bloomfield, Connor, Kaplan, Zamel, TESL, professionalization, disciplinary identity, ESL Writing, interdisciplinary relationship, Disciplinary Division of Labor

Daniell, Beth. “Narratives of Literacy: Connecting Composition to Culture.” College Composition and Communication 50 (1999): 393-410.
Summary: Beth contends that various narratives of literacy-grand narratives, ethnographic, little narratives-over the years have influenced and continue to shape the images we in composition studies have of who we are, what we do, and how we do it. Using Lyotard as a terministic screen to examine these narratives she brings to light a number of issues: the conflicted politics of composition studies over the last two or three decades, the relationship of theory and ideology, the ethical questions of research, the problematics of separating the spiritual from academic study. And she finally maintains that literacy is a term that now "illuminates the ways that individual acts of writing are connected to larger cultural, historical, and social and political systems" (408).
Methodology: Archival, Bibliographic
Most Valuable Citation: Havelock, Ong, Berlin, Freire, Lyotard
Area Cluster: 112 Community, Civic & Public
Provocative quotes:
“Indeed the move in composition studies away from the individualistic and cognitive perspectives of the seventies and early eighties toward the social theories and political consciousness that prevail today was encouraged, pushed along, impelled by competing narratives of literacy. These days, literacy- the term and concept-connects composition, with its emphasis on students and classrooms, to the social, political, economic, historical, and cultural” (393).
“To see reading and writing as social practice mediated and regulated by institutions instead of as a free-standing, individual mental operation supplied composition with a different lens to use in looking at our students, their texts, and our own work. The idea that writing and writing instruction were deeply connected with power became, with Berlin's histories, a mainstream idea” (399).
“The problem with grand narratives is the unfortunate human tendency to overgeneralize from them: The Freire narrative has been used to support a discourse that sometimes seems to assume that all our students are oppressed” (400).
“Freire has shown that a "banking" pedagogy can support oppressive structures elsewhere in society and that literacy and literacy learning can be liberatory in some situations. But we have learned from experience that neither Freire's methods nor his critique will automatically bring critical consciousness to North America” (401).
“literacy is multiple, contextual, and ideological” (403).
Taken as a whole, the little narratives argue as well that the relationship between literacy and oppression or freedom is rarely as simple as we have thought” (403).
“…literacy, including instruction in writing, is woven into a society's structures of power” (405).

“As the little narratives make clear, literacy can oppress or resist or liberate, and the best of these studies present the simultaneity of these ideological contradictions” (406)

Tags: Havelock, Ong, Berlin, Freire, Lyotard, little narratives, grand narratives, oppression, literacy, liberatory, orality

Willians, Bronwyn T. “Speak for Yourself? Power and Hybridity in the Cross-Cultural Classroom.” College Composition and Communication 54.4 (2003):586-609.
Summary: “In this article I use the lens of postcolonial theory to reflect on my uses of a varied series of writing pedagogies in cross-cultural classrooms at an international college. Such reflection helps reveal how relations of power between teacher and students and underlying ideological assumptions about knowledge and discourse often resulted in hybrid responses of mimicry, frustration, incomprehension, and resistance. A pedagogy constructed against the backdrop of postcolonial theory might provide both students and their teacher in such a cross-cultural setting with a more complex and useful way of understanding issues of power, discourse, identity, and the role of writing” (586).
Research Methodology: sampling, interviews
Most Valuable Citation: Bhabha, Appadurai, Spivak, Pratt, Newkirk
Area Cluster: 103 Theory
Provocative Quotes:
“Though the pursuit of writing as a fundamental part of the liberal education was the goal of the course, the underlying ideological assumptions about knowledge and discourse often led to mutual frustration, resistance, incomprehension, and aporia” (587).

“To teach in a cross-cultural classroom with such terms as originality and analysis as an unexamined foundation perpetuates a disruptive epistemic violence for the students trying to come to terms with these unstated assumptions of power and the dominant culture” (589).

“Any writing about experiences that the student in a cross-cultural classroom might do is necessarily done in ways that serve the interpolation of that student into the dominant culture no less than the overt assimilation attempted through the current-traditional assignments” (594).

“For postcolonial students in a Western classroom, this presence of the Other in the dominant culture as "somewhere between the too visible and the not visible enough," (Bhabha, "Culture's" 56, author's emphasis) is a site of ambivalence and resistance to the attempts of the dominant culture's inscription and control” (603).
“Rather than either trying to assimilate students into the dominant culture's discourse or helping them seek an ahistorical, apolitical synthesis from cultural differences, we should instead engage with them in an exploration of the cultural conflicts and power struggles often hidden in a cross-cultural writing classroom” (607).
Tags: Bhabha, Appadurai, Spivak, Pratt, Newkirk , Postcolonial, Hybridity, Resistance, mimicry, assimilation, dominant discourse, gaze, contact zone, multicultural, ideology, power, fractals

Horner, Bruce and John Trimbur. “English Only and U.S. College Composition.” College Composition and Communication 53.4 (2002): 594-630.
Summary:
Bruce Horner and John Trimbur trace the pedagogical and cultural developments that have led to the conception of English writing in the United States as a unidirectional and monolingual acquisition of literate competence. While these assumptions have been motivated by the modernist ideology of "one language/one nation," the authors envision that postmodern globalization may require us to develop in our students a multilingual and polyliterate orientation to writing. They outline the shifts in curriculum, policy, and research that will promote such a broadened pedagogical orientation in the future.”
Most Valuable Citation: Canagarajah, Crawford, Lu, Kachru, Zamel
Area Cluster: 108 Language
Provocative Quotes:
“We argue that a tacit language policy of unidirectional English monolingualism has shaped the historical formation of U.S. writing instruction and continues to influence its theory and practice in shadowy, largely unexamined ways” (594-5)
“As we have argued, this tacit language policy weighs heavily on our work studying and teaching writing. This largely unexamined language policy has made it difficult to see that U.S. college composition, from its
formation to the present day, operates for the most part within national borders…The task…is to develop an internationalist perspective capable of understanding the study and teaching of written English in relation to other languages and to the dynamics of globalization”(623-4).

Tags: Canagarajah, Crawford, Lu, Kachru, Zame, English Only, Global English, Monolingualism, Internationalist perspective, bilingualism, language policy, multilingualism, nationhood, ESL

Plato Vs Gorgias' Rhetoric

2009-01-31T23:48:00.000-08:00

Upon finishing the reading of Gorgias’s “Encomium of Helen” and Plato’s Phaedrus and Gorgias, I was tempted to conclude that there are major disagreements and differences between these scholars particularly with regard to what rhetoric is and what its function or role is or should be. But upon much reflection and analysis of what they have spoken in the texts, my sense now is that there are not fundamental differences in what they believe or think about the role or scope of rhetoric. The area of conflict between them is not in what rhetoric is or what it does but in their philosophy of what truth, reality or moral values are.
As such both Plato and Gorgias acknowledge the power of rhetoric to sway opinion and persuade people and therefore the possibility of it being misused by orators to fulfill some ulterior motives. In this connection, Plato distinguishes between false and true rhetoric to account for the one employed misleadingly and the other used for genuine purposes i.e. for the quest of truth or leading the soul. His view, however, is informed by his firm belief in the existence of ultimate Truth and transcendental ideas whose duplicates the human beings and material existence as they are are. Gorgias too is aware of the right and wrong use of rhetoric and no doubts advocates for its ethical use. Thus, there appears no essential difference in their views on rhetoric and its ideal function. But the major difference, as also stated above, lies in their views on reality, truth and moral values and rhetoric’s relation to them all.
Based on reading of “Encomium of Helen,” it becomes apparent that Gorgias (like other sophists) believes in the provisional nature of truth and power of words (or discourse for that matter) to construct such truth or reality. When he concludes “Encomuim of Helen” with the line, “I wished to write a speech which would be a praise of Helen and a diversion to myself,” he is implying that speech and writing are both rhetorical and performative. This statement also works as testimony of his belief that there exists no absolute forms of excellence, virtue or truth, but these are relative concepts governed by contextual factors. He actually argues that morality or immorality of any action can not be judged outside of the cultural context within which it occurs. Thus, “Encomium of Helen” seems to be just an example of Gorgias displaying how words can be used to construct and deconstruct provisional truth/s. For example, he at one point claims that since speech (words) persuaded Helen to flee with Paris, she can be easily cleared of blame by employing the same means. In fact, his version of truth or reality has gotten currency in postmodern time while Plato’s version is heavily critiqued as naïve and traditional. Therefore, though Plato’s characterization of sophists including Gorgias is as low as falsifiers and tricksters, Gorgias’s playful approach to truth and employment of rhetoric for its construction and deconstruction shows how rhetoric functions in real life situations.
The whole debate between Socrates and Gorgias shows the disparity between ideal uses of rhetoric and its actual uses and misuses. Ideally, rhetoric should be used for good ends pref. for the quest of truth and deliberation of justice as Socrates speaks of in his dialogues. In Phaedrus, Socrates (Plato) states that orator who does not know bad from good will harvest "a crop of really poor quality” and that “there is no genuine art of speaking without a grasp of the truth, and there never will be". He believes that rhetoric is an art of persuasion but for mastering that one must know the truth. For him, rhetoric must determine the nature of the soul to be an art, just as medicine must determine the nature of the body; it must know the different types of souls and how they are moved. Therefore, a true rhetorician must know the truth of what he is speaking or writing on and how to define and divide it until reaching something indivisible.
Plato's condemnation of rhetoric is clear in the Gorgias. In the Phaedrus, however, he seems to suggest the possibility of a true art of rhetoric based upon the knowledge produced by dialectic. We can spot inconsistency in Plato’s views of rhetoric in these two dialogues. In the Gorgias, Socrates calls rhetoric a form of flattery, or "pandering", and compares it to plastry baking and "beautification" but in Phaedrus, he implies that the true rhetoric is philosophy and a true rhetorician a philosopher who knows the types of souls and sorts of speeches fitting them. He calls the true art of rhetoric the art of dialectic thereby implying that all types of discourses are rhetorical, even when the speaker is simply trying to communicate the truth.
Plato’s this version of rhetoric as dialectics and all discourses rhetorical is not much different from Gorgias’s (and sophists’ for that matter) version. Only difference between them is that the former openly admits the relativity of truth/s constructed by discourses while the later completely denies such version and stands firm on absolutes and ultimates. Thus, Gorgias is much more realistic and frank in his depiction of rhetoric and its uses and misuses in real life situations whereas Plato abhors its wrong use and approves its use only for philosophical inquiry and quest of truth which, however, is subject to scrutiny.

Reflection on my MEcology over this Semester

2008-12-12T15:31:00.000-08:00

Reflection on my MEcology over this Semester
In hindsight of the course, what I realize now is that CCR 720 worked as a catalyst to bring about a change in my personality, attitude towards technology and day-to-day activities/ecology. It is, in fact, hard to believe that someone as good as me who had limited computer technology to typing and printing, email exchanges and basic internet search for years now uses different online tools, platforms and fora for social networking, multimedia exchanges and expressing private thoughts and ideas in addition to conducting various transactions/activities online . Similarly unbelievable thing that has happened over the semester is that my teaching approaches limited earlier to traditional print literacy are being increasingly informed by new media/digital technology. It is a miracle in fact that has happened. I now can recall how ignorant and dumb I was at the beginning of 720 class. I could hardly figure out what was going on in the class because everything was so new to me (Collin uses the term “brand new”). That’s the reason why I could not actively take part in the class discussion (for which I regret now) though I gradually got hang of the things. To my own surprise, I now know how to make IMovie, webpage (beyond my imagination earlier), use Photoshop, Flash and Power point which can come handy for so many purposes from pedagogical to professional, personal to institutional. I am now a technoman; this is CCR 720’s (Collin’s) gift.
I know I am supposed to talk here how my adoption of new media, digital platforms or fora this semester changed my day-to-day activities. I am sorry though I could not suppress my feel that I learned a lot from this course and my day-to-day professional and personal activities have been influenced greatly by my new understanding and knowledge of computer technology and their increasing use in composing practices. It seems that my digital literacy that spreads across divides makes a fascinating story. Before beginning this course I had virtually no idea of what blog was or Facebook, Twitter or Tagged accounts were let alone personal webpage and maintaining them was out of question. But now I have all of them and navigate, visit, update or use them regularly/periodically for various purposes. They have already been integral parts of my life.
I have maintained a personal blog. But unlike its typical use for commenting or describing events, uploading/sharing videos/audios or expressing personal ideas or feelings in the forms of poems or short narratives, I have used the space to store my notes and completed projects. In fact, since I was also required to maintain a blog with periodical entries of notes for Iswari’s class, I am now using the same blog to put notes for all the courses as well as store all my finished projects. This has totally changed my earlier habit of jotting notes on notebook and storing my completed projects in folders in my PC. Now I have also my webpage to store the finished projects though. But the advantage of storing them in blog is that they are ever available online and anybody can just access and use them. I am also thinking of using blog to compose poems or short stories or record my thoughts on just anything but I have yet to make that move.
My God!! Facebooking!! It has totally altered my ecology. Someone like me whose digital narrative spreads across divide and who was totally unaware that social networking sites like Facebook did exist few months back now spends hours facebooking—exchanging messages, photos and videos; commenting on status update, taking quizzes and doing so many other stuffs difficult even to name. After being in Facebook, I am using other media of communication like email, messenger and cell phone increasingly less on the one hand but on the other, and sadly, I feel that I am killing my invaluable time. The problem I am facing is that I just can’t restrain myself from checking who uploaded photos; what is going with whom; what comments someone passed on my stuffs and who added me as a friend. It is frustrating at times to know that my valuable time is being wasted for “academically less significant activities” but the moment of joy quickly returns when the thought that I am just a click away from hundreds of friends, that I can communicate with all of them at once and that I can exchange and store stuffs, and of course chat and do score of other things in one platform possesses me. Since it is an integration of multiple applications and programs, I console myself saying that I am performing multiple digital/online activities from one site and my time typically spent on messengers, email and other multimedia exchanges is being saved. Upon reflection, I also find that my feel that I am wasting time has root in my changed MEcology. New media was not a part of my life until fairly recently. May be they will start becoming integral to my life as my other cherished activities once I assimilate them and make them part of regular activities.
I am also regularly updating my status in Twitter and using Tagged for exchanging messages, photos, journals and videos. But I am yet to figure out the fundamental differences in social networking sites like Tagged, hi 5 and Facebook. Facebook seems to have combined all the features of Twitter, Tagged, hi5 and such other sites though there are some surface differences like in Twitter there are people following and being followed by one another. And status updates are immediately delivered to the other users who have signed up to receive them which does not happen in Facebook. But my perception now is that it is wise and time saving to use only one or two of such platforms regularly than to maintain a number of them spending a lot of time.
My final thoughts on these platforms: because blog is interactive and also because people can comment and share ideas, it has professional, scholarly or pedagogical potential. My professors at U of Louisiana and some even here required us to post on blogs regularly. They obviously saw and there obviously is pedagogical implication of this online forum. It can undoubtedly be used for scholarly exchanges of thoughts and ideas. This is the reason why there are types of blogs ranging from professional to corporate to personal. Likewise, Facebook, Twitter, Tagged and hi5 can be used for group activities and exchanges thus can be fora for networking, relation-building and information sharing. Since these activities are central to so many organizational and personal undertakings, they also have professional and corporate implications. I can see that our students can benefit by using these sites and platforms and I plan to encourage them towards that direction. At this point, I must also confess that I am still novice and have not yet reached the stage to be able to see for the unconventional use of these media and sites. But one thing now is uncontested: Santosh now is different Santosh few months back. Santosh is new media man, a techno friendly guy who successfully crossed and is on the other side of digital divide now.

Reflection: “What I learned in CCR 601 this fall”

2008-12-12T15:29:00.001-08:00

Reflection: “What I learned in CCR 601 this fall”
Looking back at CCR 601, what flashes in my mind is Margaret’s ever smiling face and her brilliant moderation of class discussion. On top of that liveliness of the class, critical engagement with the “polemical” (Margaret’s word) texts carefully culled from the store of Rhet. Comp and thought sharing and interactions (though I was not as interactive as others in the class) are, I think, some of the things that have left indelible imprints in my mind. May be largely because this is the first time I had a full-fledged course on various issues of composition studies, I benefitted the most from this course. I had almost no idea of what composition or rhetoric was until I landed in US. First semester at U of Louisiana got spent on figuring out what rhetoric or composition as an area of study was. I got oriented towards the disciple nevertheless there. CCR 601 was thus the first course that truly introduced me to the key issues, debates, tenets and tropes of composition (studies). I must acknowledge that I learned whole bunch of things from this course. I also stole some of the teaching techniques from Margaret—particularly her way of initiating and sustaining class discussion. Similarly, I got struck by the fact that text selection makes a great difference in class activities and interactions. I obviously can not tell everything that I learned from CCR 601 here. Nevertheless I am attempting to articulate to the extent possible.
The best way to begin is to have a look at Margaret’s course plans, required readings and assignments for the course. Her plans and assignments were instituted around few distinct stages and there lay what she expected her students (us) learn from the course. She had two mappings, one each of interviewing, tracing and gesturing/locating in the disciplinary conversation, reviewing and final reflection as the activities as well as assignments for the course. I think these were also the skills she wanted us to learn. These activities and assignments accompanied by thought-provoking and controversial texts like The University in Ruins by Bill Readings, Rhetorics, Poetics, Cultures by James Berlin, Composition in the University: Historical and Polemical Essays by Sharon Crowley, Language Diversity in the Classroom: From Intention to Practice ed by Geneva Smitherman and Victor Villanueva, The End of Composition Studies by David W. Smit and couple of other contemporary and most cited articles from the field of composition not only made the class exciting but also made me aware of the ongoing debates and discussions in the discipline. They also taught me a number of skills as Margaret had ingeniously imagined her students learning from the course.
Course readings introduced and familiarized me with the key issues and debates in the field. I learned that freshman composition as required course is highly contested and that Rhetoric and Composition as an emerging discipline is defined by the centripetal and centrifugal forces. These ones are also the ones prompting the disciplinary and interdisciplinary moves in the field. For instance, Sharon Crowley’s call to abolish the freshman comp and develop a solid disciplinary composition program is undercut by David W. Smit’s call to eradicate the generic freshman comp and spread writing across disciplines as writing across curriculum or writing in disciplines. I understood that though these calls seem antithetical they are but the realities in Rhet. Comp. Bill Readings’ The University in Ruins compelled me to see how not only rhetoric or composition as a discipline but whole academia is increasingly becoming disconnected from the notion of nations and nationalism as the waves of globalization are rendering the traditional political, cultural, economic and other borders irrelevant. Thus, with the demise of nation states as the sovereign entities, Readings brought me home the state of “ruins” the postmodern universities are in. They have now been the bureaucratic corporations driven by capitalism and attendant ideologies and hardly ever concerned about the traditionally cherished ideals and values. His ideas on how we can rebuild productive academic culture even out of “ruins” if we just cast away our alibis and come to the class with open mind and heart for negotiation clicked my head. I was similarly awe-struck by Smitherman and Villanueva’s edited collection Language Diversity. I was shocked to know how complicated the issue of language diversity in composition classroom is and how something acknowledged and sanctioned as necessary and inevitable half a century ago is yet to be implemented due to the complicated nature of case at hand. I got totally divided over the issue (in fact I was divided over almost all the issues that came up in the class). At first, I was driven by the idea that students should have rights to their languages. They are to be given the liberty to use their languages (even mother tongues or English variants) in composition classroom and practices if they choose to do so. This is what democracy or equality is. This continued to be my conviction until I thought really hard the issue putting myself at times in the place of a teacher who is to handle the classroom situations with students who speak and compose in nobody knows how many languages. I could then see that the issue at hand is not as simple as thought and needs a lot of debate, discussion, exploration and research before any policy can be formulated.
Now again I am realizing that I won’t be able to tell everything I learned from this course here. Many of the things I learned are the things internalized, conceptualized or even assimilated and are therefore inarticulate. Still I can confidently say that skills I learned through activities, discussion and assignments have been invaluable. My interviewing of Iswari and reading of his scholarly projects and later reporting coupled with reading of other faculty works proved to me the most fruitful thing in this semester. I could learn from him how people pursue scholarly work/s and how much labor, devotion and perseverance such work/s demand/s from us. I also got inspired by his ongoing project of globalizing composition and composing globalisms. I could see some potential openings for my future projects in the areas he was exploring. I don’t mean that only Iswari’s projects triggered my interest. All CCR faculty’s projects provided greater insights and helped me see the range of areas they are involved in from computer technology to transnational feminism to federal coding. It was the time well spent, to be precise. Next, book review, in addition to providing me the opportunity to learn the genre, helped me see how scholars like A. Suresh Canagarajah are theorizing academic writing and composition in the context of globalization and plural Englishes. Here is where my interest to explore the issues at a little greater length was aroused which resulted into my writing a seminar paper on the same issues for Iswari’s course. In the same vein, with mapping essays, though I was little confused at the outset, I learned to look at the overarching argument/s or trope/s in the texts. These essays required of me a lot of readings and close attention to the texts. I nevertheless could produce good essays at the end.
I have not yet confessed that with Collin’s archival work and our reading of citation politics and top ten most cited articles from CCC plus one essay on discourse conventions, I learned how challenging it is to gesture to a discipline and get published in scholarly journals of our field. I also understood how important publication is to our career as writing professionals and how those most cited articles are most cited because majority of them added new dimensions to our disciple.
Thus, with all the activities, assignments, readings, research and discussions in and out of the class, I learned a lot of skills and ideas. Learned again to be patient, take challenge and see that way ahead is thorny but not depressing. Hopefully I can use these skills in my future endeavors or transfer them to my teaching career or professional life. My overall impression of the class: Margaret’s class was awesome!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Book Review: Writing New Media

2008-12-12T15:27:00.001-08:00

Writing New Media: Theory and Applications for Expanding the Teaching of Composition, by Anne Frances Wysocki, Johndan Johnson-Eilola, Cynthia L. Selfe, and Geoffrey Sirc. Logan: Utah State University Press, 2004. 276 pages

Four veteran computer and composition teachers as well as advocates of new media—Anne Frances Wysocki, Johndan Johnson-Eilola, Cynthia L. Selfe, and Geoffrey Sirc—bring together their well-tested theories of composing and composing using new media in Writing New Media: Theory and Applications for Expanding the Teaching of Composition, a collection of six essays, and attempt to expand the traditional boundaries of composition pedagogies and practices hitherto dominated and driven by the print culture. Citing existing composition practices and pedagogies as parochial and limiting, all these authors forcefully present new and innovative ones informed by computer, information and web technologies. Hallmark as these technologies and media have already become of everyday life and activities in 21st century, these authors call on all composition teachers to incorporate or introduce these new “materialities” into composition pedagogies and classrooms as well as into the composing practices of their students and themselves both in and out of classroom situations.
The collection has six essays: “Opening New Media to Writing: Openings and Justifications” and “The Sticky Embrace of Beauty: On Some Formal Problems in Teaching about the Visual Aspects of Texts” by Wysocki; “Students Who Teach Us: A Case Study of A New Media Text Designer” and “Toward New Media Texts: Taking Up the Challenges of Visual Literacy” by Selfe; “Box-logic” by Sirc and “The Database and the Essay: Understanding Composition as Articulation” by Johnson-Eilola. The essays are loosely connected with one another though all of them endeavor to offer new “openings” from or into new media and composing practices.
In “Opening New Media to Writing,” Wysocki “describes through considering… five possible openings for how what we know about writing can usefully affect how we approach new media” (5). She argues that new media needs to be opened to writing and that writing about new media needs to be informed by writing teachers’ awareness of how situated people use texts to make things happen as well as by their capacity to bring a “humane and thoughtful attention to materiality, production, and consumption,” (7) to new media texts. She also expresses the need to critique new media in the essay. In her second essay in the collection, “The Sticky Embrace of Beauty”, she, through examples, analysis of design principles, activities and discussion of Kantian understanding of beauty and judgment, discusses “how visual arrangements both carry values and shape our relations with texts and each other” (9). As had she pointed out the need of critiquing new media texts in her first essay, she here critiques many existing approaches to teach visual aspects of the texts by saying that most of them are incomplete and counterproductive as well as they, in fact, are working against helping students acquire critical agency with the visual by unnecessarily emphasizing the form over content. She then invokes eighteen century definitions of beauty and aesthetic judgment to set the “ground for shaping how we teach visual composition” (149). She also tells her students how they can strike a balance between tradition and innovation; why they should follow the principles and where they can push against them to make “reciprocal communications, shaping both composer and reader and establishing relationships among them” (173). She finally asks her students to see visual composition as rhetorical and encourages them to compose effectively with the visual elements for various rhetorical circumstances and make changes and create a different relation between themselves and their audiences.
After Wysocki, in “Students Who Teach Us,” Selfe, through a case study of a student, David Damon, a young black man from Detroit, who makes his way into the world of technology desite his failure in academia, argues that composition teachers should use new media in the classroom to teach new literacies or multiliteracies and thereby change the concept of literacy in the twenty first century partly because comp teachers now have access to these media and students as well are increasingly using them in their day-to-day lives/activities. For Selfe, David’s case suggests “about the changing nature of literacy and about what this means for composition pedagogy” (45) as it also teaches some lessons about literacy in postmodern world, when “new media literacies may play an important role in identity formation, the exercise of power, and the negotiation of new social codes” (46). In this changed landscape of literacy, she calls on English composition teachers to expand their own understanding of composing beyond conventional bounds of the alphabetic in order to avoid composition studies from the risk of becoming “increasingly irrelevant” (46).
Selfe’s other essay, “Toward New Media Texts,” claims that understanding visual literacy is route to understanding new media. Her again, she emphasizes that comp teachers need to be aware of the new technologies and media largely because they have already become integral parts of students’ ecologies. As she neatly states her plan at the beginning of the essay that her “chapter…seeks to provide a brief rationale and several specific strategies for integrating visual literacy into composition classrooms—both in terms of composition and production” (68), her achieves what she had planned for by the end of the essay. She becomes successful to communicate that by adding a focus on visual literacy to existing one on alphabetic literacy, we become able to know how our students are making sense of the world through the use of visual images as well as increase the relevance of composition in a changing world.
Geoffrey Sirc, in another essay in the collection, “Box-logic”, defines comp teachers’ new roles as curators in academia, who can “exploit possibilities of …[their] status, exposing students to a range of culturally valid forms as well as non-mainstream content; in so doing, ……[they] can provide……[their] audience with a host of possibilities for worlds and forms to inhabit” (126-7). Citing three historical figures who collected things in boxes, Sirc imagines students as collectors and texts as boxes filled with selected objects structured through some kind of loose association. That’s why he calls his students designers, “free associational drifts” trying to capture a mood or vision and their texts as collection of “retrojective, idiosyncratic dream-moments, now electronically gathered, framed, and exhibited” (11). His primarily goal as composition teacher, he maintains, is to encourage his students to take art stance to the everyday thereby giving it an aesthetic touch. Bringing the reference of box-theorists thus, he conceptualizes composition as an interactive amalgam of video, graphic, and audio, a medium to express students’ desire as well as publish their passionate writing in their social reality. For him a model of college writing becomes the DVD—“a compendium of “finished” text, commentary, selected features, interviews, alternative versions, sections initially deleted (but now appended) from the main text, amusing bits, and other selected assorted items of interest, clickable as desired, rather than the traditional scholarly essay” (146).
Finally, Johnson-Eilola’s “The Database and the Essay: Understanding Composition as Articulation” offers two ways to understand textuality in a changing world: symbolic-analytic work and articulation theory. While symbolic-analytic values manipulation of information, articulation theory allows us to figure out the meaning by looking at the ways how information is arranged and connected. He claims it “can offer us a way to understand the “mere” uncreative act of selection and connection as very active and creative” (226). Discussing some recent court decisions which show the increasing trend of valuing arranged collection of information fragments over creativity and intellectual property law, Johnson-Eilola emphasizes that writing is always already connected to economics. One remarkable thing he does in the essay is defining writing in a totally different way as a collection of information fragments which is broad enough to bring even search engines and weblogs under the categories of writings.
Thus, all the chapters in this collection explore new media and their implications to composing practices. The book makes a serious appeal to everybody that since there is a possibility of having or creating texts that look different than what we are accustomed to, “we approach different-looking texts with the assumption not that mistakes were made but that choices were made and are being tried out and on” (23).Most wonderful thing about this book is that each of the chapters includes some well-tested new media classroom activities, accompanied by teacher’s notes, objectives, targeted level and so on which are easily adaptable in our own classrooms. Therefore, the book is invaluable for everybody wanting to make an entry into the world of new media or for teachers who are looking for “openings” out of or into new media and composition. I highly recommend this text; its worth spending at.

Adaptaion of Freewriting Heuristic in the ESL Classroom

2008-12-12T15:25:00.000-08:00

Adaptaion of Freewriting Heuristic in the ESL Classroom
Overview of Freewriting
An informal expressive mode of writing, freewriting is a catchword for the expressivists and a technique as well as an invention strategy for the process theorists of writing used in and during composing process. Said to be a private form of writing, it is also used as a preliminary to more formal writing. Freewriting is also equated with stream of consciousness writing, invisible writing, automatic writing, desperation writing, impromptu writing, and personal journal writing and so on, the major characteristic defining it being non-sop, continuous writing for some predetermined period of time without any regard to spelling, grammar or correctness.
Defining freewriting, Peter Elbow and co-editors in the introduction to their book, Nothing Begins With N: New Investigations of Freewriting, write, “freewriting is what you get when you remove almost all of the normal constraints involved in writing” (xiii) such as order, coherence, accuracy; spelling, grammar, and mechanics; focus, quality, excellence etc. Free writing for them is liberation in writing since a freewriter has the concession of writing anything in any order from garbage to chaos to poetry in stream of consciousness fashion only condition being that s/he should not stop while composing. Joy Marsella and Thomas L. Hilgers also talk of freewriting in similar terms in their essay “Exploring the Potential of Freewriting” as, “nonstop writing in which writers follow ideas wherever they lead them; freewriting performed as timed exercise; focused freewriting; and any one of these combined in a series of systematic operations that acts as heuristic” (105). They use Freewriting as a generic term for a number of activities such as unfocused, timed or focused writing activities.
Many researchers and scholars of freewriting agree that it has oral quality. “Freewriting usually moves …toward the condition of putting down language without thinking about it, toward that “transparency” of language production that is characteristic of speech” (Introduction, Nothing Begins With “N” xv-vi), claim Elbow and co-editors implying the oral quality of freewriting. Elbow, following this spirit, instructs his students to “‘utter’ words onto paper with a kind of intensity” (“Toward a Phenomenology of Freewriting 190). For that matter, he calls freewriting “automatic writing or simply jabbering” (Elbow, Writing Without Teachers 1) and encourages people to generate words as is done while speaking, “put words on paper and indeed to put them down without stopping” (Elbow and co-editors, Introduction xiii) and continue “nonstop, non-censored writing” (Introduction, Writing Without Teachers xvi). In almost all of his writings on freewriting, Elbow thus is found to be describing freewriting in terms of the epithets of speech. His constant reference to voice in writing also indicates his emphasis on oral quality in freewriting. He claims that freewriting is a natural way of producing words in which “there is a sound, a texture, a rhythm- a voice- which is the main source of power in your writing” (Writing Without Teachers 7).
Some other scholars have equated freewriting with interior monologue or inner speech also highlighting the oral quality of freewriting. They argue that the properties of interior monologue or inner speech such as non-stop, private, flow without regard to syntax or semantics are also the properties of freewriting. “It is possible to understand freewriting as intimate conversation with oneself. As such, its syntax would resemble the syntax of inner speech” (21), writes Sheryl I. Fontaine in her essay “Recording and Transforming: The Mystery of the Ten-Minute Freewrite” emphasizing on the oral quality of freewriting. Association of interior monologue with freewriting implies its chaotic nature. Like psychological flow of thoughts in inner speech, freewriting may take any direction from one extreme to the other.
Generally, the technique of freewriting involves writing non-stop for few minutes whatever comes to mind concerning a subject. Elbow’s instructions for freewriting adequately explains its technique when he says, “simply write as quickly as you can, as though you were talking to someone” or when he suggests, “don’t plan, don’t stop, trust that something will come-all in the interest of getting oneself “rolling” or “steaming along” into a more intense state of perception and language production” (“Toward a Phenomenology of Freewriting” 190). He asks to simply follow the train of thought and “just babble onto paper” (“Toward a Phenomenology of Freewriting” 207).
Sheridan Blau, on the other hand, equates freewriting with invisible writing: “an experimental…writing (in which) the writer writes with an empty ballpoint pen on a blank piece of paper backed by a piece of carbon paper and a bottom blank sheet...the writer can’t see what he is writing as he writes but still produces a carbon copy of everything he has written” (283-84). Blau argues that since writers cannot see and reread what they have written and are required to write non-stop in invisible writing, their writings are almost like freewritings.
Elbow and Ken Macrorie are often associated with freewriting as the founding figures. Many credit Elbow but Elbow himself regards Macrorie as the father of this genre. Macrorie, in turn, credits Dorothea Brandea for inventing this technique citing her call for freewriting sometimes in 1940s as, “write anything that comes into your head: last night’s dream, if you are able to remember…write any sort of early morning reverie, rapidly and uncritically” (quoted by Macrorie in “The Freewriting Relationship” 72). Macrorie confesses that he is following Brandea’s footprint and calls any writing that appeals to unconscious, freewriting as, “Under the name of freewriting all sorts of writing may be done... it taps the unconscious language power in all of us. We locate that best by trying for some kind of truth, whether in fantasy, fiction, or non-fiction” (188). Then onwards, freewriting is being used as a heuristic or as a pre-writing technique of writing process. Many composition textbooks are recommending freewriting in chapters on “getting started” or “prewriting (Marsella and Hilgers 93-4).
Thus, it can be said that any writing that is lively, voiced, alive, or even authentic done without any plan, goal or aim is termed as freewriting. Freewriting is as at the heart of expressionistic theory of writing and is also being used as a tool for generating ideas or as a component writing process, a form of prewriting.
Freewriting as Invention Technique
Freewriting is being used primarily a technique for exploring and generating the ideas pertaining to a chosen topic. Quoting Elbow’s notion of freewriting as uncensored, generative writing form intended to stimulate writing skills, creativity, and new perspectives (Elbow 1986), Jame W. Pennbaker writes that freewriting, by virtue of being a kind of self-expressive writing, “strongly encourages the expression of individuals’ very deepest emotions and thoughts about personal and, oftentimes, traumatic events and issues” (158) . For him, freewriting is the only such technique that helps to express the ideas dormant in the deepest recess of mind or unconscious. As such, freewriting has proved to be a method of self-exploration and is instrumental in probing into one’s own reservoir of thoughts or ideas as it is for finding ideas to write a paper. Jeanne A. Simpson also expresses the similar opinion that, “Freewriting is an important method …for helping you to discover what you think about events around you and what your values, ideas, and problems really are.” (21). In this sense, freewriting can be a best resort for those facing a writer’s block or feeling stuck during composing process as it helps to warm up or activate the mind triggering it to probe into the heart of the matter thereby helping to discover unforeseen shades of meanings. That is why it is regarded as one of the major techniques of invention in writing.
Freewriting is a technique of invention also because invention itself is a preliminary form of formal writing. During invention, one does not have to worry about commas and spelling or even complete sentences. The aim is just to dump the ideas down however possible keeping in mind that they can be cleaned up later. Arrows, abbreviations, shorthand, fragments, lists, circles, and underlining are all perfectly acceptable. Invention is for one to begin to work from. It is not a perfect outline of your paper. (Simpson 2). Freewriting like invention exactly does the same thing. It can also be a preliminary to formal writing. It simply encourages generation of ideas by encouraging free association. It is generative for the writer who has trouble getting words on paper because it pushes the writer to begin and continue (Marsella and Hilgers 109). Freewriting is said to be much more easier to practice compared to other techniques of invention in writing process. The feature that distinguishes freewriting from other types of writings or invention strategies and therefore makes it easy to practice is its freedom from all worries and anxieties because it keeps the generating activities separate from the analytical or editorial. In this sense, it reduces the burden of editing or critical thinking while composing. All it requires is the ability to transcribe the ideas on paper or translate somehow the ideas or thoughts into some form of writing on paper. This is the only stake (if it is a stake at all) of freewriting that freewriter needs to be able to put the ideas non-stop on words. Elbow and co-editors also consent this aspect of freewriitng as they write, “freewriting asks us to do the most frightening thing of all-write nonstop” (xiii). This is what Marsella and Hilgers also imply when they say, “To learn how to use the freewriting heuristic, students must first experience themselves as capable of sustained, uncensored writing” (99). In this light, freewriting seems to require a certain level of linguistic command or resources in writers which may, therefore, may render this heuristic not equally feasible for all types of writers.
Implying freewriting as an invention technique, people like Marsella and Hilgers describe Freewriting as heuristic for invention, i.e. as an instrument that facilitates the discovery of ideas and thoughts on topic under consideration. Their view is that freewriting heuristic-three-step process of writing, reflecting and asserting- can be used to generate the making of full-fledged piece of finished prose. Ruth Spack also believes that invention strategies like freewriting can be employed to narrow down a topic, generate content, discover a form and create a thesis for an assigned essay (649). This way, freewriting has proved to be a popularly known technique of invention in writing process.
Freewriting for ESL Students: Prospects and Stakes
While Freewriting is such a widely used heuristic or technique of invention in writing, none of its founding figures or exponents of seem to talk of it with reference to ESL students. Therefore, there is dearth of literature on freewriting heuristics/exercises for ESL students, hardly any regarding its feasibility in the writing class. Only of late, some of the ESL teachers are trying to extrapolate this technique in the ESL classrooms. All who have researched and experimented with freewriting in the ESL classroom have found that this invention strategy is feasible but requires adaptation or modification of certain kind and degree as the realities, stakes and concerns of ESL students are different from those of the native students.
They have also mentioned that, after practicing freewriting technique, ESL students also feel that freewriting is a significant tool that inspires or provokes ideas or thoughts on topics under consideration. Freewriting practice also make the ESL students realize that since it forces their minds to generate or produce something on paper, it can be a tool for discovery or invention. For instance, Spack in her essay, “Invention Strategies and the ESL College Composition Student” states that when ESL students practice freewriting and other invention techniques “they can learn that writing, in addition to being a powerful tool for communicating ideas, is an intellectual thinking process, a creative craft, a way to use language to discover meaning, and a mode of learning.” (64). Her point is that the students understand freewriting and other attendant techniques to be helpful for the discovery of ideas and meaning after practicing freewriting.
Heekeyeong Lee is another researcher who investigates freewriting activities in a Canadian university and finds that it being adapted quite differently in ESL writing classrooms. Opposed to Elbow’s original notion of allowing students/writers to write anything off the heads about any topic of their choice, Lee observes that “the ESL program encouraged the writing teachers to stimulate students’ interests in writing topics by using a variety of prompts, such as writing down some words or phrases and showing pictures, pieces of music, or cartoons, while still allowing students to write whatever they want (Donaldson, 1990)” (60-61). During his study, he interviewed some of the ESL students and from their responses, came to realize that adaptation done so far was still not optimum. He feels the necessity of adaptation in allotted time of 10-15 minutes for the freewriting assignment too. He then confirms that “For some students, especially for those who had little experience in English composition previously, the time limit may be too short to respond to a given topic in written form” (71).He reached to this conclusion after many interviewees complained him about the inadequacy of allotted time for completing the assigned task. For instance, one of the interviewees answered him that he “felt that it was hard to get to used to writing quickly in 15 minutes” (72). Another responded similarly that time limit of 15-20 minutes was “too short, almost every time. I need 25 to 30 minutes…I am slow at writing down…I am not used to writing drafts or whatever writing… so I need more time than other people…” (72).
Lee, however, does not bother to find the answer to the question as to why all ESL students cannot complete their task within the given time frame which their native counterparts or relatively skilled colleagues can and thus leaves this question unaddressed. The answer to this question may lie on the fact that ESL students herald from different cultural, linguistic and topographical backgrounds and do have specific stakes, concerns and realities. The first among them is the obvious fact that unlike the native speakers of English, they do not have the intuitive sense of English and that most of them are still struggling with grammar, spelling or are at the phase of language acquisition and are therefore not in a position to be able to express themselves fluently and comfortably. Some of them may even be below the level of basic writers in terms of linguistic felicity though sophisticated in thinking level or idea generation. The language factor may have certain bearing on the feasibility of freewriting heuristic in the ESL classroom.
Even Elbow seems to have been aware of the role of language factor in freewriting exercises. “Peter Elbow claims, in fact, that skilled, experienced writers, rather than basic writers, are the ones who find freewriting most satisfying and profitable” (Blau 295). Elbow also, however, does not specify what level of linguistic competence and writing performance is desirable for the effective freewriting practices. He simply declares that everyone can benefit from freewriting. But the language factor can be a major consideration with ESL freewriting as freewriting places so much importance in fluency in writing. Those who are not fluent in generating sentences or putting ideas in words or simply in writing have little disadvantage compared to those who are fluent as Marsella and Hilgers also feel, “to learn how to use the freewriting heuristic, students must first experience themselves as capable of sustained, uncensored writing” (99). While even natives who have intuition and speech fluency have hard time freewriting, we can just imagine the situation of ESL students from varied backgrounds and realities for many of whom English is second, third or even foreign language and are venturing freewriting exercises. The stake is high and many of them get crippled and clogged or incapacitated by inadequacy of vocabulary or linguistic resources for unblocked expression.
Elbow vaguely refers to such writers when he describes an extreme situation of freewriitng:
a bunch of people … who all make lots of grammatical mistakes. Perhaps they speak some other language and know English partly, or perhaps they speak some “non-standard” dialect of English-or perhaps both…When they want to write for an audience that insists on Standard English, they must get someone to help them make the appropriate adjustments...” (Writing Without Teachers 138)
He, however, fails to propose those adjustments. But the condition of many ESL students is similar to what he says. These students make lots of grammatical mistakes, speak some other language, know English partly and are writing for some native teacher who insists on Standard English. Therefore, these students often undergo pain freewriting. Their major stake is the translation- translation of their thoughts or ideas or consciousness into words on paper. It is again Elbow who realizes that translation is the major issue in freewriting:
I sometimes think of it as a matter of translation. That is, it feels to me as though the “contents of mind” or “what I am trying to say” won’t run naturally onto paper- as though what’s “in mind” is unformed, incoherent, indeed much of it not even verbal, consisting rather of images, feelings, kinesthetic sensations... it often feels…writing requires some act of translation to get what’s in mind into freewriting”. (“Toward a Phenomenology of Freewriting” 20)
The above description is Elbow’s experience, of the one well known for writing, a native with years of scholarship and mastery, himself a founder of freewriting technique. What may be the predicament of ESL students particularly those at the initial phase of learning of English? Will they be able to translate their thoughts or perceptions into English? These questions also need further exploration to be able to assess the feasibility of freewriting in ESL classroom.
Due to language inadequacy to fluent writing, ESL student are found to require rereading and pauses to continue writing or make a move in writing. But freewriting does not allow the writers the opportunity to reread or go back see what they have written. Blau, with reference to invisible writing, a variant of freewriting, says, “Deprived of the ability to reread what they have just written, basic writers engaged in invisible writing may feel they can find nothing to connect their thinking to and therefore seem to have no resources for forging ahead in coherent continuous discourse” ( 294). He also reports that these writings are particularly difficult for basic writers because they disallow or discourage the “what next” strategy by making it difficult for a writer to use each written sentence as a cue for the next one. The ESL writers being somewhat like basic writers also get stuck or muddled when forced to write non-stop as freewriting forces the writers to concentrate on the emerging idea rather than on the surface features of language. Therefore, the ESL cannot generate as many sentences as is needed to express ideas pertaining to given topic.
With some limitations and adaptations notwithstanding, researchers, scholars and teachers, however, agree on the point of the potential of freewriting being a powerful tool of invention for ESL writers/students too.
Lee, for example, mentions a number of benefits of freewriting as, “Selecting a topic which relates to personal experience and stimulates specific ideas is very important for the students to increase writing fluency and to develop generation through freewriting activities…producing a longer composition within a limited time leads the student to feel confident in their English writing” (94). He also finds freewriting having a sequential relationship with the other academic activities and a hierarchical relationship with the overall process writing class (95). He even does not fail to declare that “freewriting activity…contributes to the overall success of the writing class” (119-20) and that “students build confidence and writing fluency through regular repetition of writing” (120). Similarly, Zamel in her essay, “The Composing Processes of Advanced ESL Students: Six Case Studies” discovers that ESL writers like their native counterparts experience writing as a process. From her observation of the ESL writers composing, she confirms that “certain composing problems transcend language factors and are shared by both native and non-native speakers of English” (168) and that “ESL and native English-speaking writers may experience similar difficulties with the composing process” (168). She observes the whole composing process (prewriting, writing and revising activities) of both less skilled and more skilled ESL writers. Her study, however, does not talk about freewriting directly. Even so, some of her observations and findings say something about difficulties encountered by both the skilled and unskilled ESL writers and the strategies devised by them to tackle such difficulties. For example, she saw that:
the more skilled writers devised strategies that allowed them to pursue the development of their ideas without being sidetracked by lexical and syntactic difficulties. These strategies included writing down the English word in question and circling it, leaving a blank space for a word or phrase, or using their own native language when the word(s) in English failed them. (175)
She observes that more skilled ESL writers devised strategies to tackle their blocks and continued their writing activity. Based on her observation, it seems that more skilled ESL writers/students are capable of freewriting exercises as they could devise the strategies to break the block and continue writing any way. In contrast, the least skilled ones, she found, failed to devise such ways and “talked about being anxious about vocabulary and grammar” (178). Even though more skilled handled the writing situation, her interviewees, both skilled and unskilled, responded her that they did not find freewriting comfortable. The responses of many of the students were like:
“If I have an idea, but I don’t have the words. I write in Chinese so I don’t lose it” (179).
“My big problem is spelling. I may have no idea how to put it down. I even sometimes cannot reread what I have written” (179).
“I don’t like some of my expressions because they are too weak. I feel angry because when I say something, it’s said a simple way. I don’t have the words that are adequate to explain my ideas” (179).
All of her interviewees stressed on the inadequacy of language resources in second language for fluent expression. Despite these interview responses, after extensive observation, interviews and analysis, Zamel makes the concluding remarks that, “while there is some concern with language-related difficulties, these difficulties do not seem to interrupt the ongoing process, but rather are addressed in the context of making and communicating meaning” (180).
As mentioned earlier, Zamel’s but was not specifically a study of freewriting process of the ESL students. She observed the whole process of pre-writing, writing and revision, and ultimately reached the above conclusion. But her conclusion may not say much about freewriting as a long process like hers allows writers time to think, reread, consult the sources and pause which freewriting does not.
Responding to Zamel’s finding, Joy Reid blames Zamel of treating ESL writers as native and failing to take into account the rhetorical differences across languages and cultures as, “their (ESL writers) approaches to rhetorical forms differ from the approaches of native speakers.” (151). Similar voice that the ESL students should not be treated the way the native students are is being heard for long. The implication of the voice is that ESL writers/students do have different concerns, stakes and realities, cultural or otherwise and therefore need special adjustment, which is, in case of freewriting exercise, adaptation, modification or methodical revision based on contexts is desirable.
As such, there are obvious differences in native and ESL students. They hail from different cultural, linguistic, topographical, religious and socio-economic backgrounds. The variation is evident even among the ESL students. Many scholars, researchers and teachers of ESL literacy firmly hold that these differences are to be taken into account while formulating curricula or approaching any academic activity for the ESL students. Even CCCC’s Position Statement reflects this spirit as it reads:
Second-language writers -- who have come from a wide variety of linguistic, cultural, and educational backgrounds -- may have special needs because the nature and functions of discourse, audience, and persuasive appeals often differ across linguistic, cultural and educational contexts. Furthermore, most second-language writers are still in the process of acquiring syntactic and lexical competence -- a process that will take a lifetime. These differences are often a matter of degree, and not all second-language writers face the same set of difficulties.
This extract implies that every ESL student is different in terms of capacity, background, and linguistic competence and therefore needs a special care and attention. An adoption of same set of techniques and approaches in all situations is doomed to fail and therefore the choice of pedagogical approach should be contingent upon the contexts, requirement or other ground realities of the students. In this sense, CCCC’s call “to include second-language perspectives in developing theories, designing studies, analyzing data, and discussing implications” holds special meaning.
Robert B. Kaplan also explores the cultural and rhetorical differences characteristic of the ESL students in his essay, ““Contrastive Grammar: Teaching Composition to the Chinese Student” and mentions the fact that ESL students have to struggle a lot before being able to write as fluently as native speakers such as “ the Chinese student- even one who has mastered English syntax to a relatively high degree of proficiency- may still not generate English paragraphs because he does not possess in his linguistic inventory the materials generating links between individual syntactic units and links between larger units of discourse” (13). In the similar vein, Florence Baskoff argues that the students’ native languages constrain over their writings in second language to some extent. She labels such a phenomenon as ‘cultural interference’ which is, she says, is due to the difference in the style of literary and rhetorical patterns of expression in their native language and English (84).
Keeping in view all these cultural and linguistic diversities, Bela H. Banathy forwards a distinct view about literacy for ESL students and says that native tongue of the students should be made a starting point because most of ESL students feel comfortable writing and reading in their native languages. He says, “The base from which to proceed in specifying the learning task in the acquisition of a foreign language is the native language of a learner. It is this base to which the foreign language is compared and contrasted in order to establish similarities and differences…” (78). Similarly, referring to the process turn in ESL writing instruction, Ann Rhimes objects the use of invention strategies like freewriting in the ESL classroom saying, “We should not… swing too far in the direction of treating students like native speakers of the language…” (232) because, according to her “the process of writing in a L2 is startlingly different from writing in our L1” (232). Like Banathy, she also suggests that resorting to L1 can be helpful at the time of crisis such as not finding words in L2 or feeling stuck due to the lack of linguistic resources in L2. She reports many her students confessing that they “sometimes turned to their L1 to help them out....” (238). Similarly, she observes the ESL students pausing, rereading, editing and letting the idea gel and find its form and voice while composing and then doubts, “Are we perhaps doing our ESL writers a disservice if we ask them to do a rapid free writing, if we try to cut down on those pauses and backtracking, all in the name of “fluent writing”?”(247). She points to the possible reality that ESL writers may need time and recursiveness to generate ideas as well as L2 with which to express the idea. After such an observation, she recommends ESL teachers that “we need to give our students what is always in short supply in the writing classroom-time…” (248) and assess the level of linguistic competence before assigning fluent writing because, “To generate, develop, and present ideas, our students need an adequate vocabulary” (248). She underscores the point that before assigning any freewriting exercises, ESL teachers make sure that the students possess certain level of linguistic resources and have adequate time required to complete the task.
Similarly, scholars Ilona Leki and Joan Carson report that their students complained against being asked to write off the top of their head in limited time. According to them, their students’ complaints was that “time limits prevented them from finding ideas they felt satisfied with and accessing appropriate vocabulary to express those ideas (49).”
Mauris Harris and Tony Silva, on the other hand, speak about the absence of intuitive capacity of English in ESL students. They request all the concerned to keep in mind the fact that non-native speakers of a language (especially ones with lower levels of second language proficiency) simply don’t have the intuitions about the language that native speakers do. They suggest that it is better to “tell ESL writers that it is unrealistic for them to expect to be able to write like native speakers of English” (531). This way, the issue of linguistic resource is raised time and again when it comes to talking about ESL literacy. Lisa Winer too, in her essay, “Spinach to Chocolate”: Changing Awareness and Attitudes in ESL Writing Teachers” writes that the non-native speakers of English often “express anxiety and frustration at lack of specific linguistic knowledge of English” (62) when asked to write.
As also stated above notwithstanding all these constraints, concerns, stakes and differences, scholars, researchers and ESL teachers like Spack believe that if invention strategies like freewriting if adapted and used appropriately, even the ESL students benefit a lot from them. She says, “Although ESL students may experience invention differently from their native English-speaking counterparts, they can benefit from instruction in invention which is adapted to meet their needs” (649). But she regrets to state that many of the composition textbooks have failed to delineate the complexity of composing process of ESL students and says, “These texts have not shown students how meticulous and even painful writing can be, especially for non-native speakers” (649). Realizing the complexities of ESL composing process, she says that she institutes freewriting heuristic with little modification. In her assignment, “students are encouraged to use their native language or to coin a vocabulary word in English does not immediately come to mind so that they can keep their pens moving” (656). She thus grants the students liberty to use their mother tongues or coin the words in case they feel blocked. Also she asks the students to practice freewriting and other invention strategies only after assessing their linguistic capacity because she deems it necessary to determine when “ESL students are ready to be taught and to use the art of invention” (663) and also believes that to make sure they perform excellently, “students should not give up on invention techniques too early” (657). Along with linguistic consideration, she also suggests to take into account the cultural and attendant aspects of the students to ensure the better performance in freewriting heuristic. To support her statement, she cites the resistance of some Japanese students to practice freewriting at the beginning of the semester as, “they have been trained to believe it is wrong to write whatever comes to mind without regard to error” (663).
She then lists some preconditions for assigning freewriting in the ESL classroom. The first is that students need to have rich vocabulary and sufficient language resource. Secondly, if assigned prior to students’ gaining command of English language, the students are be allowed to use their native vocabularies citing Lay’s finding from his investigation of four Chinese college students that “recourse to the native language is both helpful and effective” (664).
Thus, from the discussion, analysis, scrutiny and assessment of findings, observations and experiences of so many ESL scholars, researchers, teachers and students, some generalization about the freewriting heuristics in ESL classroom can be made such that freewriting heuristic is feasible in ESL classroom but requires adaptation or modification based on a number of situational variables such as linguistic ability, cultural background, social values, rhetorical patterns etc. of the students. Before instituting freewriting heuristic teachers need to assess the linguistic resources or competence as well as ESL writing performance of the students. They should allocate relatively more time for the ESL students and also allow the students use mother tongue in case blocked or stuck. Moreover, freewriting should not be assigned at the beginning of the semester or the course. Since there is the possibility of cultural interference, the students are to be oriented towards and trained in freewriting or other modes of writing gradually over a semester or two. In short, what is required is the situational and delicate adaptation and handling of freewriting exercise. It is entirely the matter of teacher’s discretion but an ESL teacher should be the one well read in ESL stakes, concerns, differences and literacy. S/he should anchor the class activities including freewriting delicately and sensitively. Only then ESL students will be able to make most of freewriting heuristic by doing excellently what Elbow terms as “the most frightening thing of all-write nonstop”.

Works Cited
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Sheryl I. Fontaine. Carbodale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois, 1991. 283-303
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Larland Dupre Lib., U of Louisiana at Lafayette. 15 April 2008
Elbow, Peter. “Towards a Phenomenology of Freewriting”. Nothing Begins With N. Ed.
Belanoff, Pat, Peter Elbow, and Sheryl I. Fontaine. Carbodale and Edwardsville:
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Louisiana at Lafayette. 15 April 2008

Towards Building Student Agency

2008-10-26T02:28:00.000-07:00

Towards Building Critiquing Student Agency
Various attempts and advocacy of educationists, literacy theorists, pedagogists, compositionists and concerned others are underway towards building, developing, consolidating and reinforcing different kinds and degree of agency in students. Their student agency debate is connected to the goal of education or pedagogy vis-à-vis students and zeitgeist. For instance, the critical literacy theorists contend that the goal of education is and should be developing critical thinking skills in students so that they become able to diagnose, assess and respond to the cases and conditions of exploitation, manipulation or interpellation by any set of ideologies and work towards social change and democratic society. I align myself with critical pedagogists and argue in this paper that the goal of education and pedagogy should be building critiquing agency in students which is to say that their academic and professional training should be geared towards orienting and equipping them with skill, power, capacity, attitude and tendency to analyse, assess, criticize or inquire into the state of affairs of things thereby enabling them to act responsibly for social change or make choices and decisions judiciously to promote democratic social values.
I will build my argument based on my reading of James Berlin’s Rhetorics, Poetics and Cultures, Sharon Crowley’s Composition in the University: Historical and Polemical Essays, Bill Reading’s The University in Ruins and Jane Danielewicz’s essay “Personal Genres, Public Voices”. Needless to say, these scholars are composing in different times and from diverse locations and characterizing and imagining students as potential of having or achieving as different capabilities as voices, selfs or subject positions and forward or advocate directly or indirectly a number of pedagogical approaches and theoretical frameworks. Flowing like an undercurrent in all of them, however, is the image of a critiquing student who is capable of critically viewing and assessing the scenario, situations, activities; voicing the opinion from differing and conflicting subject positions and acting thoughtfully or openly even in an increasingly fluid and complex postmodern world to effect change of affirmative kind. Since critiquing student agency should be accompanied by voice and subjectivity though diffused and fragmented to be able to articulate thoughts aimed at the formation of just and democratic society, taking together Berlin, Crowley, Readings and Danielewicz makes a strong case for critiquing student agency as the goal of pedagogy in general and composition pedagogy in particular.
Briefly saying, Danielewicz believes that students have voice and are capable of acting as agents for change. Berlin sees student agency but constructed through discourse and ideology. Readings and Crowley also realize that students have agency but contingent and dynamic. All the four scholars firmly hold, though in different degree, that students have agency but their views, however, conflict when it comes to the agenda of critiquing student agency. For instance, Danielewicz and Berlin are affirmative about students having critiquing agency and making a difference in the society. Crowley and Reading, on the other hand, though believe that students have agency are nonetheless suspicious of them being able to actually work towards the direction of change in the current state of affairs given the corporatized, bureaucratic and ideologically loaded globalized world.
As also mentioned above, Danielewicz professes that students (can) have agency since they have voice. Rising above the process idea of authentic voice, she explores how by practicing personal genres such as autobiography and autoethnography students gain public voice deemed necessary to make a difference in the world. She notes at one point, “By producing texts in genres with recognizable social functions, student writers gain agency” (1), and implies that for the student writers to gain agency, they need to learn to produce texts in genres. The personal genres, she believes, can be the point of entry into the public world. The reason why personal genres scaffold public voice, she says, is that “personal forms, as genres, depend for their coherence on the connection between the personal and the public” (2). Her perception of voice is also different from process people in the sense that she is aware of “its shaky foundations, its ideological baggage, and its annoying elusiveness as a concept” (5) as well as many rhetorical factors/aspects which work together to create voice in the text and that the voice results from the writer’s engagement and position in the world.
In connection with students’ public voice and its potential function, Danielewicz even refers to Randall Freisinger who in his pedagogy of resistance “believes that voice in writing, because it is connected to human agency, may be one possibility for counteracting pessimism and cynicism, two dominating moods of postmodern life” (qtd in Danielewicz 9). Though she does not completely buy Freisinger’s idea of pedagogy acting as resistance, she nevertheless is sure that students can generate authority, a voice and particular subject position by practicing genres. Such “element of agency- that writing is action and that voice increases its power-” says she, “is what makes voice such a crucial quality of written texts” (11). For her, an individual agency is the result of interactive relations; the self in dialogue with others, the world, and its own past which is capable of voice against ideological interpellation even if not of resistance as such.
Even from this brief discussion of her essay, I can see that Danielewicz is talking of the possibility of building critiquing student agency- the capacity to articulate voice publicly- and adopting personal genres as heuristics to prompt discovery of such voice which can be a medium to express subjectivity and desire as well as the instrument for change.
Berlin is little more direct and vocal about students’ critiquing agency than Danielewicz and I want to put myself along the line of his argument. His stance is that critiquing agency in students can be developed, honed and reinforced through proper training and education. For that purpose, he advocates for such an educational, literacy and pedagogical approaches “that prepares [students] to be critical citizens…that students also be prepared to become active and critical agents in shaping the economic, social, political, and cultural conditions of their historical being” (54-5). He calls such a literacy approach ‘critical’ whose sole purpose would be to “provide intelligent, articulate, and responsible citizens who understand their obligation and their right to insist that economic, social, and political power be exerted in the best interests of the community…”(55) . With this pedagogy into action, Berlin envisions students equipped with critiquing and critical skills capable of acting responsibly for the social good although he is aware that postmodern student self is diffused and fragmented, a product of signifying practices, “finally conflicted, incoherent, amorphous, protean, and irrational in our very constitution” (66). He has optimistic note about student critiquing agency which becomes apparent when he claims that each subject/agent (also student) has the possibility of actively changing the conditions of historical experience though each subject in the postmodern age is a dialectical process of subject positions within specific as well as larger social history. He firmly buys the idea that the critical literacy prepares the students capable of critiquing the contesting/dominant ideologies and fight for the just and democratic society and says, “acting is always circumscribed by material and discursive constraints, but acting against these conditions is feasible” (74) .This confidence in Berlin stems from the fact that students have so diverse and varied subject positions as is the case with every other postmodern agent which allow for “the greater possibilities for action” (74) .
Like Berlin, Crowley is also concerned with ideology and its critique and, by extension, building in students critiquing and critical agency. She spots ideology right in Freshman Composition course and notes: “The course is meant to shape students to behave, think, write and speak as students rather than as people they are, people who have differing histories and traditions and languages and ideologies” (8-9). For her, the present form of freshman composition does nothing other than rendering the bourgeois subject/s (students) docile and humble. That’s why she labels the present comp approach humanist and then attacks it in many grounds such as being bourgeois and status quoist. She at once realizes the limitation of contemporary composition pedagogy and reinforces Berlin’s call for extending the range of composition pedagogy citing him that “compositionists are not interested in limiting writing pedagogy to instruction in reflexive self-examination (Berlin 1982)” (14). According to Crowley, neither composition nor literature in its present form “offers much hope to those who would like to change the world” (78) as comp is bent towards instilling ideology and literature rendering students sensitive, creative or imaginative. Neither of them is therefore committed to producing the critical and critiquing student agency. Rather they render students blunt and flighty therefore indifferent to the ground reality. This is the prelude why she deems a change in the orientation of both courses urgent.
Though I don’t want to put myself into any camps-rightist, leftist or any other- of composition teachers and theorists, I can still sense that aiming to build critiquing agency in students involves some degree of leftist orientation. Both Berlin and Crowley have leftist inclination as both of them talk of critiquing ideology and its hegemonic role. Crowley explicitly puts herself in leftist camp of composition teachers and believes that their composition philosophy and pedagogy could be instrumental in changing the orientation of the course. She declares, “I share the goals adumbrated within the camp of leftist composition teachers” (235), who, according to her, “desire that their students be altered to the oppressive and debilitating means by which their culture defines them and their relations…as well that students be empowered by their awareness of oppression to change the means by which it is maintained” (235). For her, the goal and function of pedagogy should be to empower students so that they become able to critique and act to alter the oppressive mechanisms maintained by ideologies of various kinds. This way, while she realizes that immediate change in composition courses including freshman is wanted, she is, but, apprehensive of “the possibility of turning Freshman English to radical purposes” (235), given the “oppressive institutional history and a repressive intellectual tradition” (235) in the universities.
Readings, on the other hand, highlights the demise of nation-state and the emergence of global or ethnic identity as the postmodern phenomena. He sounds a little different from both Berlin and Crowley in his argument that the contemporary subject “is no longer a political entity, is not a subject of the nation-state” (48), but when he blames consumerism and other attendant ideologies such as globalization for this phenomenon because they have hollowed out the political subjectivity in subjects/students, he reminds us of Berlin. At other point, Reading declares that “contemporary students are consumers” (53) and thereby implies that contemporary students are the victims of consumerism and other ideologies and are hardly concerned or capable of/about critiquing interpellation or similar phenomena brought about by competing set of ideologies.
Like Berlin and Crowley, Readings also rejects the possibility of unified, coherent subject/s and instead talks of “singularities…variously occupy[ing] the positions of speaker and listener” (185). For him, “the singularity of the “I” or the “you” is caught up in a network of obligations that the individual cannot master” (185). Finally, he ends up forwarding the pedagogy of difference or dissensus in the classroom of highly bureaucratic and corporatized university- the university in ruins. Since the student agent is divided and incomplete as a result of globalization process and demise of the nation states, the only way of generating knowledge or knowing is “dissensual process… dialogism rather than dialogue” (192); only through dissensus is “thinking together” (192) possible in the University in ruins where student body is made up of singularities. For this to happen in the classroom, Readings suggests working under the rubric of thought as for him "education is this drawing out of the otherness of thought that undoes the pretension to self-presence that always demands further study" (162). Openness on the part of students/teachers and classroom as the sites of inquiry and contemplation where contradictions, conflicts and tensions prevail without any definitive resolution is Reading’s underlying idea of student agency. Reading’s imagined students though not as active and critical as Berlin’s are nevertheless as Crowley’s and Danielewicz’s capable of voices of dissensus, inquiry and self-reflection meaning some form of critique and alternative perspective.
Arriving at this point, after analyzing the major pedagogical thrusts of the four scholars in question, their views on the role of pedagogy in general and composition pedagogy in particular and their stance on goal of pedagogical approaches as building critiquing student agency, I am still unsure of how goal set as building, developing, honing and reinforcing critical and critiquing agency in students can be realized by employing what set of pedagogical approaches and who are accountable for this. I believe like Berlin and Danieliwitcz that critiquing agency in students is necessary and can be built up or developed by adopting appropriate pedagogical approaches but at the same time not sure like Reading and Crowley whether students will want or be actually able to exercise critiquing agency in the increasingly fluid, complex, globalized and corporatized postmodern world. There are numbers of barriers for the students to raise voice or actually act for change and democratic values or society such as media being controlled by capitalists, and academics being made ideologically loaded and prominently technical. But still, as all the four scholars agree, that the change in current state of affairs of things is necessary and somebody has to take the initiative towards that direction. There are not and cannot be any other people than the academicians and scholars who can take that initiative and there can be no other appropriate site other than academy for beginning that initiative. And finally there are no other agents than the hugely potential students who can herald change and this all can be achieved by no other approach than building, developing and reinforcing the critiquing student agency.

Works Cited
Berlin, James. Rhetorics, Poetics and Cultures: Refiguring College Studies English. West
Lafayette, Indiana: Parlor Press, 2003.
Crowley, Sharon. Composition in the University: Historical and Polemical Essays.
Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh Press, 1998.
Jane Danielewicz. “Personal Genres, Public Voices”. College Composition and
Communication. Urbana: Feb 2008. Vol. 59, Issue. 3. 420-450
Readings, Bill. University in Ruins. Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: Harvard U
Press, 1996.

Review: Reclaiming the Local

2008-10-25T18:50:00.000-07:00

Reclaiming the Local in Language Policy and Practice. Ed. A. Suresh Canagarajah. Mahwah, New Jersey and London: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers, 2005. 297 pp.

In their introduction to The Globalization Reader, Frank J. Lechner and John Boli raise a number of questions like “what does globalization involve?”, “Is globalization driven by expanding market?”, “Does globalization make the world more homogenous?”, “Does globalization determine local events?”, “Is globalization harmful” and engage the scholars and readers though into open discussion and debate indicating that there is and can be no definite answers to these contentious questions about as contentious and slippery concept and phenomenon as globalization. The scholars and thinkers across the disciplines included in the edited volume attempt to delineate and analyze the implications of political, economic and cultural globalization for peoples, cultures, values, practices, nations and ethnicities across the world.
Though the experts debate, discuss and try to figure out globalization as a phenomenon, they, however, do not and can not reach at the point of agreement. Some of them advocate for; others deprecate and yet others express mixed reactions. Those who stand opposed to see “globalization as a juggernaut of untrammeled capitalism.”(7) and as a process “lopsided because it imposes the political and cultural standards of one region of the world, namely the west, on the other regions” (7). For them, “Globalization is westernization by another name…[which] undermines the cultural integrity of other cultures and is therefore repressive, exploitative, and harmful to most people in most places” (7). The critics’ major point of attack is globalization’s homogenizing tendency which its advocates defend but Lechner and Boli, the editors gesturing to act neutral believe that the tension between advocates and critics, homogeneity and heterogeneity is integral to globalization. The editors don’t buy the idea that globalization homogenizes the world nor do they are convinced the world can remain essentially fragmented in the postmodern time. Rather, they argue that the forces of homogeneity and heterogeneity often collide and grapple in contact zones thereby making prediction of consequences impossible. They say, “We agree that some things become more similar around the world as globalization proceeds…But we do not think this leads to a homogenous world, for three reasons” (2). The reasons they provide are firstly “general rules and models must be interpreted in light of local circumstance” 92); secondly, “growing similarity provokes reactions” (2) and thirdly, “cultural and political differences themselves become globally valid” (2). This way, they continue, the homogenizing and heterogenizing currents grapple and collide ceaselessly; local and global events become more and more intertwined as the local feeds into the global and global also to a certain extent determines the local. But for me the problem with globalization is that it has differing implication for the winner and loser in the collision course. If the global emerges victorious, it benefits certain countries, peoples and cultures hugely and is consequently “harmful to the well-being of individuals, countries, and cultures” (Lechner and Boli 3) of other parts (local) as the global tends to create the local in its own image thereby erasing its existence. That’s why the fear that “ if globalization makes the world more homogenous… many cultures are in trouble” ( 3) becomes so real and alarming to many that as provokes certain kind of reaction from the part of the local. I found Reclaiming the Local in Language Policy and Practice a specimen of similar reaction. It advances the global-local and homogeneity – heterogeneity debate further from Lechner and Boli’s academic and conceptual level into the level of concrete action and policy formation pertaining to the issues of local language, writing and teaching practices in the context of them all being threatened to extermination by increasing encroachment of global forces. All the scholars/researchers/authors in the book discuss, endeavor and present the result of their studies and research on how to give voice to the local and ensure their presence in language policy which has immediate implication to language, writing and other cultural practices in the classroom or society in general. The voice or presence of local, they argue, can be ascertained either by strategic resistance or tactful appropriation of the global as and when necessary. The book is divided into four parts the first part “Redefining Disciplinary Constructs” having four chapters, the second “Interrogating Language Policies” three, third “Reframing Professional Lives” two and fourth “Imagining Classroom possibilities” three making it a edited collection of twelve well-researched academic essays. As also referred earlier, though the chapters are primarily focused on the place of local in theorizing language policies and practices, they also handle as various topics as local social practices, communicative conventions, linguistic realities and knowledge system and their incorporation in language policies and practices for classrooms and communities in local contexts. Scholars from as diverse communities and places as Brazil, Hong Kong, Iran, India, and Malaysia express their realization of the limitations of dominant applied linguistic constructs and argue for the promotion of local knowledge, practices and perspectives.
Eli Hinkel, the editor of ESL& Applied Linguistics Professional series, the publisher makes comment on this book and its editor A. Suresh Canagarajah as: “unique…focuses specifically in the outcomes of globalization in and among the communities impacted by these changes... Canagarajah focuses on the great risk that local language practices, discourses, and values will be engulfed by the sweeping economic and political forces brought about by globalization” (ix). According to him, Reclaiming the Local portrays the local perspectives and gives voice to the communities, groups, and individuals hitherto and otherwise unheard and neglected. The book highlights the enormous forces of global wave and importance of preserving the local in case of language hybridity, loss and discoursal multimodality as well as identifies the urgent local concerns caused my overwhelming “linguistic homogeneity in the representations of literacy and expertise” (x). The chapters of the book thus shed light on the cost of globalization and “task of reclaiming the local my means of negotiating with the present and the global to make space for the local” (x).
In the same vein, Canagarajah in his introduction to the collection states that all the authors included in the volume “point to ways in which the negotiation of the global can be conducted by taking greater account of the local and respecting its value and validity” (xiv). Their common topoi, says Canagarajah, is that local as subsidiary to or component of global is not adequate to make a space for the local rather space can be ensured by “radically reexamining our disciplines to orientate to language, identity, knowledge, and social relations from a totally different perspective” (ix). They all firmly hold the idea that “local grounding should become the primary and critical force in the construction of contextually relevant knowledge …to develop more plural discourses” (xiv).
The effort of all these scholars is therefore to reclaim the local often ignored, neglected and overlooked for the standard, global and mainstream. That is the reason why all the chapters propose the strategic modes of intervention for the local in language policies and practices, argue for “a space for the local in knowledge construction activities” (xvi) and articulate “the case of the local before it gets silenced, distorted, or reproduced by the global” (xvi).
Even a cursory look at the twelve chapters is more than enough to notice the predominant current of reclaiming the local in language, writing and other cultural/social practices. In the first chapter of first part, Canagarajah provides a historical and theoretical notion of local knowledge and illustrates how understanding of local linguists can be instrumental in redefining the familiar constructs to suit the local contexts. His objective is to demonstrate how the local knowledge and values suppressed so far challenge and help reconstruct dominant paradigms. In the second Chapter, Rakesh Bhatt argues for the appropriation and pluralization of English to accommodate local practices. In the third, Dominique Ryon, raises the serious issue of the extinction of local language due to assimilation into the dominant national language and in the fourth, Lynn Mario de Souza deconstructs grapho-centric model of literacy and proposes multimodal literacy as practiced by the Kashinawa in Brazil whose texts feature the complex integration of diverse symbol system.
Second part “Interrogating Language Policies” has the essays on issues of Language policy and planning. Kanavilli Rajagopalan in chapter five discusses the local resistance in Brazil of the global English while in chapter six Maya david and Subra Govindasamy discuss the need of reaccomodating English in Malaysia now which was excluded earlier in national policy in favor of the indigenous language. Chapter seven by Sharon Utakis and Marianne Pita discusses the transnational policy formation in education for the Dominican community in New York going beyond the assimilationist assumptions motivating even well-intentioned bilingual programs for immigrants in the United States.
In the third part “Reframing Professional Lives” deals with the challenges facing the local and transnational professionals. David Block in chapter eight discusses the possibility of the teachers from France in England making critical contribution if they bring their teaher-fronted and form-focused learning local values in a context of task-based learning in England. Similarly, chapter nine by Angel Lin, Wendy Wang, Nobuhiko Akamastu, and Mehdi Riazi analyzes the ways in which their language learning experience may serve to reconceive English as pluralized global language informed by local norms, functions, and pedagogies. Both of these chapters emphasize on the point that in order to let the marginalized voices speak in the profession, new modes of writing and research is inevitable.
Part four “Imagining Classroom Possibilities” explores classroom contexts of language teaching. The chapters in this part conclude that classroom is an important site of policymaking at the mocrosocial level. The classroom values and practices have the power to reconfigure language relations in the wider society. Both in Chapters 10 &11, Peter Martin and Jasmine Luk complicate the dominant teaching methodologies to show the need and place of local discourses and identities to render teaching productive. Chapter twelve by Elizabeth Mermann-Zozwiak and Nancy Sullivan talk of borderland classroom composed of Mexican American and Anglo American students, “a contact zone” of the global and local.
Since all the contributors in this collection handle gracefully the issues of globalization and its implication for the local, brainstorm and devise the ways or strategies to give voice to the local penetrating the overwhelming global and bring to the fore the concept of globalization from below in order to formulate inclusive and effective language policies and practices, the collection is invaluable for anybody who has interest in current socio-political, cultural, economic or linguistic phenomena and movements including globalization, neocolonialism, multilingualism, ethnic identities, feminism, race, class, gender, interpellation, stereotyping, transnationalism, global structures and so on. The issues and cases discussed in this book have relevance and implication also to the multilingual, bilingual, ethnic and transnational writers who have what Homi K. Bhava calls “double-vision” or are situated “in-betweenness”. Similarly, multilingual writing pedagogists and theorists can gain insights from this book which is what appealed me most in this book. Therefore, this book deserves to be in the bookshelves of every scholar particularly the writing and language experts as well as learners..

Works Cited
The Globalization Reader. Ed. Frank J. Lechner and John Boli. Malden, Massachusetts:
Blackwell Publishers, 200.

Composition in the University

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Santosh Khadka

Composition in the University

Chapter 6
Terms of Employment: Rhetoric Slaves and Lesser Men

This chapter has a tone of resistance and anger. A post-structuralist approach is evident with discussion of striking binary between English and comp and discrimination, domination, exploitation and colonization of comp and comp teachers by the English folks, administrators and institutions.

Some of the major points of this chapter are:

-First year comp is taught by grad assistants and parttimers for economic reasons- “the argument from size” – the university does have no resource to hire the full timers.

-Until 1940s comps were taught by the full timers though newest in the profession. This trend changed when disciplinary specialization began to affect staffing in the undergraduate curriculum.

-The low status of comp teaching in the university accrues, in part, from its association with English Departments.

-Literary studies faculty regarded an assignment in composition as a professional disaster.

-The teachers of the universally required courses are underpaid, overworked, and treated with disdain. There is literal invisibility of composition teachers within English Department.

- Literature-composition dichotomy- binaries. Composition is inferior “Other”, a matter of contempt.

-The root of all these problems is that first-year comp has always been staffed by people identified as teachers rather than scholars.

-The identification of composition with teaching rather than scholarship, and its abandonment by “men of ability” insured that, increasingly, teachers of composition would be denied access to professional status.

-Discriminatory employment pattern is visible with comp people.

- This state of affair sees no chance of improvement because the “ultimate administrators do not regard the course as important.”

- Double bind for the comp teachers- the amount of work necessary to teach Freshman English prevented its teachers from doing advanced study in literature, which failure, in turn, committed them to careers in Freshman English. So they are always in trap.

-For many instructors, the assignment to composition is a holding tank. They feel they are destined to teach comp before promoted to teach lit courses.
- Therefore, a freshman teacher faces a very serious professional peril.

There are a number of causes of disaster for people teaching first year comp such as: research focus for promotion, higher status of literary studies and the senior faculty’s resolute inattention to comp theory or pedagogy

Thus, Composition instruction can be linked to slavery and serfdom. There is no future in the profession. Comp teachers as poverty stricken. Teaching of composition is drudgery is paid badly and offers little opportunity for advancement in rank. Many see comp assignment as punishment. SO, Comp is often taught by slaves-grad students and serfs- untenured and untenurable instructors.

Therefore , it is obvious that Eng Dept has colonized composition.

As is evident the chapter is highly political and polemic. Nevertheless, it can be seen as a curtain off the reality.

Agency in Berlin's Rhetorics, Poetics and Cultures

2008-09-20T10:37:00.000-07:00

Agency in Berlin's Rhetorics, Poetics and Cultures

Some quotes: from Postmodernism, the College Curriculum, and English Studies
" Students deserve an education that prepares them to be critical citizens of the nation that now stands as one of the oldest democracies in history. The United States has seldom considered it sufficient to educate students exclusively for work. The insistence that students also be prepared to become active and critical agents in shaping the economic, social, political, and cultural conditions of their historical moment has been a valuable commonplace in this nation’s educational discussions.” (54_55)

“education exists to provide intelligent, articulate, and responsible citizens who understand their obligation and their right to insist that economic, social, and political power be exerted in the best interests of the community… the work of education in a democratic society is to provide “critical literacy”.” (55)

“the new economic democracy would require consumers whose buying habits are intelligent responses to the needs of the community, not simply an extension of personal interest.” (56)

Chapter 4
Postmodernism in the Academy

Postmodern Theory
“Language is no longer a set of transparent signifiers that records an externally present thing-in-itself, a simple signaling device that stands for and corresponds to the separate realities that lend it meaning. Language is instead a pluralistic and complex system of signification that constructs realities rather than simply presenting or reflecting them. Our conceptions of material and social phenomena, then, are fabrications of signification, the products of culturally coded signs”. (61)

“We are thus all spoken by language as much as language is spoken by us” (64)

Berlin writes,
“ The structuralist and poststructuralist conceptions of signification have dramatic consequences for our understanding of the self and its formation. The unified, coherent, autonomous, self-present subject of the Enlightenment has been the centerpiece of liberal humanism. From this perspective, the subject is a transcendent consciousness that functions unencumbered by the social and material conditions of experience, acting as free and rational agent that adjudicates competing claims for action” (65)

“The speaking, acting subject is no longer considered unified, rational, autonomous, or self-present. Instead, each person is regarded as the construction of the various signifying practices, the uses of language and cultural codes, of a given historical moment. In other words, the subject is not the source and origin of these practices but is finally their product. This means that each of us is formed by the various discourses and sign systems that surround us. These include not only everyday uses of language (discursive formations) in home, school, the media, and other institutions, but the material conditions (nondiscursive formations) that are arranged in the manner of languages- that is, semiotically- including such things as the clothes we wear, the way we carry our bodies, and the way our school and home environments are arranged. These signifying practices are languages that tell us who we are and how we should behave in terms of such categories as gender, race, class, age, ethnicity, and the like. The result is that each of us is the heterogeneously made up of various competing discourses, conflicted and contradictory scripts, that make our consciousness anything but unified, coherent, and autonomous….In short, we are constituted by subject formations and subject positions that do not always square with each other. To state the case in its most extreme form, each of us is finally conflicted, incoherent, amorphous, protean, and irrational in our very constitution” (66)

“Foucault depicts individuals as the instruments of impersonal institutions, structures designed to serve their own interests, not the interest of those who pass through them. Human subjects are thus products of power-knowledge formations” (67).

“the loss of the unified subject, stable signifiers, and reliable truths is celebrated as a triumph of contemporary civilations” (71)

“ since each agent enjoys a unique set of interacting formations, each of us has a “specific history”. In other words, we are indeed different from each other, although never completely unique” (74).

“Our specific history is thus situated within a larger social history-the economic, political, and cultural conditions of the time. This concept of the subject as a dialectical process of subject positions within a specific social history as well as within broader shared social history accounts for the possibilities of agents actively changing the conditions of historical experience.” (74) .

But “acting is always circumscribed by material and discursive constraints, but acting against these conditions is feasible. The important implication of this scheme is that the diverse and varied the subject positions of any agent and the more free and open the political environment, the greater the possibilities for action” (74) .

“Both the subject who experiences and the material and social conditions experienced are products of discursively constituted and historically specific negotiations with genuine material constraints” (76).

2008-09-18T18:48:00.003-07:00

James Berlin's Social-Epistemic Rhetoric, Ideology, and English Studies

Berlin defines social-epistemic rhetoric as "the study and citique of signifying practices in their relation to subject formation within the framework of economic, social, and political conditions." (83)

Ideology in Rhetoric

Berlin suggests us to examine the ideological predisposition while considering any rhetoric. His starting point is that "no set of signifying practices can lay claim to a disinterested pursuit of transcendental truth; all are engaged in the play of power and politics, regardless of their intentions." (83)

"Ideology interpellates subjects-that is, addresses and shapes them - through discourses that offer directives about three important domains of experience: what exists, what is good, and what is possible." (84)

"Ideology always brings with it strong social and cultural reinforcement, so that what we take to exist, to have value, to be possible seems necessary, normal, and inevitable- in the nature of things." (84)

Berlin finally claims that, "Ideology is minutely inscribed in the discourse of daily practice, where it emerges as pluralistic and conflicted. A given historical moment displays a wide variety of competing ideologies, and each subject displays permutations of these conflicts, although the overall effect is to support the hegemony of dominant group" (84)

An individual in such a situation is a site of a variety of significations, an intersection and influence of various conflicted discourses- discourses about class, race, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, age, religion and the like.

An individual in addition to being a location is also "an agent of change, not simply an unwitting product of external discursive and material forces. The subject negotiates and resists codes rather than simply accomodating them" (85).

Social Constructionist Rhetoric

Social Constructionist Rhetoric position acknowledges the "influences of social forces in the formation of the individual" (85). This rhetoric sees the "critical examiation of the subtle effects of signifying practices as key to egalitarian decision making." (86)
example: communiction course after World War II, Rhetoric of public discourse during 1960s and 70s.

Social Constructionist Rhetoric is flawed if viewed from the postmodern perspective. "While this rhetorical approach emphasizes the communal and social constitution of subjectivity, it never abandons the notion of the individual as finally a sovereign free agent, capable of transcending material and social conditions." (Berlin 86).

In short the major flaw of this rhetoric is that "it is incapable of examining its own ideological commitments mistaking them for accurate reflections of eternal truths. It accepts its own signifying practices as finally indisputably representative if things-in-themselves." (86-7)

Social-Epistemic Rhetoric

Social-epistemic retains alot from earlier social rhetorics but its departures are not less significant.
The first is that it revived the process rhetoric that "writing is... discovery and invention, not mere reproduction and transmission" (87). The second departure is that this rhetoric used the postmodern critique of Enlightenment conceptions of signification, the subject, and foundational narratives. Poststructuralism provided a way to more adequately discuss fully the operative elements of social-epistemic rhetoric. In other words, social-epistemic rhetoric informs and is informed by the poststructuralism.

Another most important point about this rhetoric is that it is self-reflexive. It acknowledges "its own rhetoricity, its own discursive constitution and limitations. This means that it does not deny its inescapable ideological predispositions, its politicality and situated condition" (88). While it contains a "utopian moment, a conception of the good democratic society and good life for all of its members.. it is (also) aware of historical contingency, of its limitations adn incompleteness, remaining open to change and revision." (88)

This rhetoric does not hold as many other rhetorics do that "the subject of the rhetorical act is no the unified,coherent, autonomous, transcendent subject of liberal humanism. Instead for this rhetoric, the subject is "multiple and conflicted, composed of numerous subject formations and positions" (88). Similarly, a subject of a discourse is " a construction, a fabrication, established through the practices. This means that all of us have multiple selves as Berlin says, "Each of us has available a multiplicity of selves we might call on, but not all of which are appropriate for every discourse situation" (88). The point here is that we can have multiple positions and personas depending on situations and contigencies. "Each of us displays a measure of singualrity"(88), claims Berlin adding that "our own separate position in networks of intersecting discourses makes for differences among us as well as possibilities for political agency, for resistance and negotiation in responding to discursive appeals" (88). Thus "the subject is a construct of signifying practices, so are the material conditions to which the subject responds". (88). Since the reality as well as the self ar constructed in and through language, "the subject that experieces and the material and social conditions experienced are discursively constituted in historically specific terms" (89).

For social-epistemic rhetoric, language is the site of conflict and contention where different groups struggle to make certain meanings and certain ideological formulations.

so critique of ideology is at the center of this rhetoric.

Audiences are also discursive formations- formations that include race, class, gender, ethnic, sexual orientation and age designations belonging to different discourse communities. Thus, members of an audience are both members of communities and separate subject formations. That's why their responses are never predictable.

Berlin finally briefly summarizes the function of social-epistemic rhetoric as:
"The work of social-epistemic rhetoric, then, is to study the production and reception of these historically specific signifying practices to arrive at a rich formulation of the rhetorical context in any given discourse situation through an analysis of the signifying practices operating within it. Thus, in composing or in interpreting a text, a person engages in an analysis of the cultural codes operating in defining his or her subject position, the positions of the audience, and the constructions of the matter ti be considered." (90).

writing and reading, for social-epistemic rhetoric, are both acts of textual interpretation and construction, and both are central to social-epistemic rhetoric.

literary/rhetorcal binary

literary- imaginative, aesthetic, creation, indeterminate, open, sacred, priestly, beauty and truth

rhetorical- scientific, objective, practical, political, representation, determinate, profane, utiliarian, commonplace

"Language is a social construction that shapes us as much as we shape it".( 92)

Berlin blurs the rhetoric/poetic binary by saying that, "the signifying practices of a poetic or rhetoric are always historically conditioned, always responses to the material and social formations of a particular moment." (93) Berlin believes that there are no disinterested use of language as all signifying practices both reading and writing are imbricated in ideological predispositions.

2008-09-18T18:48:00.002-07:00

This is our first post!

2008-09-18T18:48:00.001-07:00

Yay this blog is all set up... awesome!