Week 11: The Discovery of Competence, Chapters 1-5 Comments

What I like:

I like the authors’ goal of drawing students “into the academic community and helping them to discover their existing competence as thinkers and writers and the relationship between what they know and what and how they will come to know” (3). This focus on the competence and literacy that students already bring to the classroom is an important part of creating curriculum that helps students become authentic members of the academic community.

I like the advice that “as teachers, we have to be willing to set aside, for a time, the ‘stuff’ we are carrying and take these students up where they are, as individuals … without becoming shattered by multiple failures” (5). Too often, instructors let their own agendas and expectations dictate what occurs in the classroom, when in fact just letting go of an agenda, and relating to students based on who they are as people, and how they are feeling at a particular moment, can lead to improved student progress and a more dynamic and enjoyable classroom atmosphere.

I like the suggestion that teachers must overcome their view of students as “outsiders” whose worldview threatens the world we know (5), but I wonder how exactly this new perspective might be achieved?

I like the recognition that acquiring academic language is intricately tied to the cultural perspective represented in academic discourses (8). To provide a more welcoming environment, instructors must “alter” the academic context by providing more responsive (multicultural) curriculum (12). 

I like the emphasis on both teachers and students developing “dynamic, reciprocal processes of teaching and learning” (14), which shifts power away from the teacher and toward a more student-centered classroom. 

I like the metacognitive focus on having “both students and teachers … discover their competence as learners who know what they know, know that they know, and know how they know,” and the link between academic knowledge and prior knowledge: “these new kinds of knowledge have a direct relationship to the knowledge they already possess” (15).

I really like the emphasis on drawing upon students’ prior personal experiences, and treating these experiences as a foundation for academic discourse (17). Along with this, the authors recognize that students come to learning as members of other communities, and that these communities have already imparted significant kinds of knowledge that they can utilize in the classroom. This calls for creating a classroom that contextualizes their prior knowledge.

I like that the authors advocate transferring the knowledge attained in the classroom to real-world contexts. 

I like the authors’ rejection of the “drill and kill” approach to language instruction, and their recognition that becoming overly conscious of errors can harm the process of language acquisition (25). By contrast, the authors suggest creating an “acquisition-oriented classroom” in which students become active learners by formulating hypotheses about written discourse (31), which reminds me of IRW’s KWL+ approach. 

I like the suggestion that teachers need to see their students’ writing differently, as not possessing deficits or gaps, but as already competent (and with the potential to improve). This is something I need to cultivate as an instructor with my own classes.

I like the authors’ view that writing is a means, not an end in itself, since the “end” lies in the questions and interpretations that writing can produce (so less emphasis in placed on writing itself as the final product) (83). 

I like the focus on developing interdisciplinary courses that draw upon a variety of media and activities, including lectures, debates, films, books, etc. (85)

What is problematic:

I was uncertain about the analogy used in Chapter Four, which compares the instructor’s position with that of an anthropological field worker (57). This seems to presuppose that the instructor is from an entirely separate culture than that of the students, standing alone outside of this culture. This analogy seems flawed because the teacher-student relationship is more blurry and complex than this, and often less distant. 

The authors very clearly state which teaching approaches they reject, but are less clear about how the approach they are advocating could be implemented through specific assignments and activities. They do note that they assign portfolios, process journals, and other exploratory modes of writing, but the book lacks descriptions of these assignments (82). I found myself longing for something like Bartholomae and Petrosky’s specific and clearly scaffolded discussion of their BRW course.

What I have questions about:

I like the discussion of “interlanguage,” features that do not occur either in the students’ spoken language or in the target language of academic discourse (32), and wish more explanation would have been provided on how instructors can work with examples of interlanguage when discussing the writing process. 

How can the dichotomy between the abstract thinking that is traditionally privileged in the academic world and the embedded, situated thinking often valued in other contexts and cultures (50), be overturned in the classroom? Which specific activities and assignments would overcome this dichotomy?

How, precisely, can we move students toward “dialectical” and “metaphorical” levels of thinking, while at the same time integrating “analytical and logical approaches” (51)? Which particular assignments and lessons would facilitate this new kind of thinking?

How can we “create writing courses that would provide opportunities for inquiry and discovery … and take into account both the contexts our students came from and the new contexts they were entering” (73)? How can we make the writing classroom a more “natural” and less “artificial” space? It would be great to see specific assignments that focus on this.

I’m not sure what the authors mean by “systematicity in the acquisition of new discourse structures appropriate to written academic discourse” (63) and would like more explanation of “systematicity”.

What I will include in my own unit design: 

I will include assignments that draw on students’ own competence, by assigning personal narratives and asking students to connect their personal experiences to the texts we read.

I will encourage students to participate in dialectical and metaphorical kinds of thinking by assigning a dialectical journal which asks them to directly respond to (and provide compelling interpretations of) key passages in the assigned texts.

I will encourage multiple perspectives and validate multicultural experiences by assigning multicultural readings and asking students to explore how their diverse individual experiences relate to the topic being discussed. 

I will try to have students discuss topics that they care about and can become invested in, so that my instruction will “foster both engagement and responsibility” (81).

How this approach fits in with the principles and strategies we’ve been discussing this semester:

Like Bartholomae and Petrosky, the authors advocate “an authentic immersion [of developmental writers] in the [academic] community” (7), rather than remedial courses that would “quarantine,” or isolate them from it. They offer much less specific information on how this might be accomplished, though. 

Like McCormick, the authors draw upon prior knowledge/schema, to establish what students already know, and which particular ideologies inform students’ thinking (15).

The focus on what the writer brings to the task from their individual background is very “expressivist.”

The discussion of how speakers of Black English are often viewed as not understanding proper English (and therefore as weak thinkers) reminds me of our discussions of AAVE and Chicano English in English 704 class (78).