Pedagogical genres -- the what & the how....

From: Judy Diamondstone (diamonju@rci.rutgers.edu)
Date: Wed Feb 02 2000 - 13:06:56 PST


Paul, My reading of Freedman is apparently not quite yours -- Her
representation of the "Sydney School" version of genre pedagogy is indeed as
you described her view of classroom teaching in general -- explicit, "do as
I say", ungrounded in practice. But my reading derives from her sometimes
expressed sometimes implied preferred classroom instruction -- that it
should be much more like work settings, that genres are acquired, like
language, from immersion in practice, etc. My point re: schools admits more
of a role for explicit guidance. I should say that I appreciate your
rejection of the binarisms (?) -- explicit/implicit; declarative/procedural
-- in favor of a more complex mix of what any teaching/mentoring; any
learning is about.

Nevertheless, I think a continuum of polar values is useful for teachers
developing a pedagogy. Pedagogically, don't we have to continually answer
for ourselves the question of what activity context to set up, what to say,
what experience to build in to tie abstractions to, when to talk/how/to whom
-- when to use students' peer talk; when to direct their attention to
critical issues, etc. I'm extremely conscious this year when I'm teaching
all undergraduate courses how different they are from graduate seminars and
how the pedagogical genres (if you wilL) for the 2 types of courses changes
me/ the way I think/ what I think about... But that's getting onto another
tangent.

Re: declarative/procedural knowledge of substance and form.... I'm more
sanguine than Freedman and Mike C. about the function of schools, at least
in the modern world they're part of. In a world underpinned by critical
abstractions, how can the cognitive development over generations of practice
be communicated? In the span of one generation, the logic must be learned
through a highly truncated and fundamentally different form of practice. I
think of genre as a practical logic -- knowing the sort of thing that needs
to be accomplished in a kind of situation, knowing how to go about it. I
can't think of a more powerful rubric for teachers/ prospective teachers
than one that directs their attention to the substantial and formal
requirements of getting a kind of thing done, enabling them to build
appropriate scaffolds.

I agree with Paul Dillon that identities are at stake; however, like Paul
Prior?, I think of genres and identities as "out there", available for
mixing and matching, malleable (necessarily malleable, as Gordon so clearly
indicated) in the instance. We choose our affiliations to a great degree; we
talk the kind of talk we want to talk; we perform as good or bad cops or
smart or helpless students or caring or competitive co-participants....

I didn't mean this to be such a hodge podge. I'd like to think more about
the power relations embedded in our discursive practices & the role of
schools & classroom teachers -- the possibilities and limitations of
critical pedagogy; the goodness and danger of the romance of progress -- but
I'm in the middle of preparing a simulation for an undergrad course. Bye now
- Judy

At 08:24 PM 2/1/00 -0500, you wrote:
>Gordon, Judy, Mike, Leigh, and others,
>
>> One
>>important continuum concerns the extent to which a text in a genre is
>>co-produced (e.g. face-to-face interaction, published interview, etc.),
>>but also important is the number and status of the participants. As I
>>understand Bakhtin's use of the term 'speech genres', it also includes
>>these distinctions but perhaps not so explicitly.
>
>Bakhtin's definition of utterance/speech genre is very explicit about
>including addressivity, the management of social relations, and certain
>features of co-production (like the ways others' words are taken up, his
>distinction between primay and secondary speech genres). He lacked any
>detailed knowledge of conversation analysis (it not yet being a field of
>inquiry when he wrote about speech genres) or process studies of writing
>(another non-field at the time), so he doesn't address the kind of detailed
>variations in co-production and participation that people have recently.
>However, he also makes the particular content itself central to
>utterance/genre, as central to the spheres of activity within which genres
>coalesce.
>
>In reading and listening to Freedman's work, as Judy also suggested, the
>accounts of school and work do seem starkly different, as the title of the
>Dias, Freedman, Medway, and Pare book, _Worlds Apart: Acting and Writing in
>Workplace Contexts_ (Erlbaum, 1999), suggests. Typical of this view is the
>following quote:
>
>"...in one case, that of school-situated facilitated performance, the goal
>of the activity itself is learning; in the workplace, through processes of
>attenuated authentic participation, the learning is incidental, and occurs
>as an integral but tacit part of participation in COP, whose activities are
>oriented toward practical or material outcomes." (p. 199)
>
>I think their research program is quite fascinating and includes a lot of
>rich stories, but it does repeatedly represent writing in school as
>explicit, clear, evaluated, motivated by student learning, and
>individualistic and writing in the workplace as tacit, messy, unevaluated,
>motivated by practical production, and collaborative. Their use of
>different terms for learning in school and work is an indication of this
>difference. An, I assume, unintended consequence of this is to write
>school as pretty much an irrational dysfunctional social formation and work
>as a rational functional social formation. I see schools and workplaces as
>more alike than that, more mixed. Certainly my own studies of graduate
>seminars (e.g., in _Writing/Disciplinarity_, Erlbaum, 1998) found a lot of
>tacitness and messiness and that students' writing in school and
>instructors' reading is multimotivational, an expression of complexly
>laminated social identities and practices.
>
>(An interesting link here to the Leontev discussions might be the
>difference between his Problems of the Development of Mind representations
>of activity as having *a* motive, school is for learning, work is for
>production, and his later Activity Consciousness and Personality argument
>that all activity is multimotivational.)
>
>I'd certainly concur with your description, Gordon, of texts (written and
>spoken) as tools for mediating activity. From a Bakhtinian perspective,
>I'm a little concerned about the possible implications of calling genres
>tools: as practices or ways of orienting to discursive worlds rather than
>set text types; genres certainly are mediating activity, genring to play on
>Alton Becker, but tool could have that thing-y ring to it.
>
>I'm still struggling with the question of what to make of explicit
>representations of texts, genres, norms, etc. I'm uncomfortable, Judy,
>with declarative vs. procedural knowledge, though I see that it names
>something of interest, for much the same reason that I'm uncomfortable with
>an explicit-implicit binary. What about knowing how to declare knowledge
>and procedures mediated by verbal regulation. I am hearing though that you
>see these "mixtures" too when you stress the need for BOTH BOTH. And then
>there is Vygotsky's argument for the value of grammar instruction. What if
>we applied the same logic to rhetoric?
>
>On Hanks's publications, I haven't seen anything really recent except a
>collection of older work, Intertexts (Rowman & Littlefield, 2000). He had a
>flurry of pubs in 96. His Language and Communicative Practices (Westview,
>1996) seems quite useful. And he had an interesting chapter in Silverberg
>and Urban's Natural Histories of Discourse (Chicago, 1996). There's also a
>chapter in Gumperz and Levinson's Rethinking Lingistic Relativity
>(Cambridge, 1996).
>
>And thanks Leigh for the citations for Yates' work!
>
>
>>I was surprised by what you wrote about Aviva Freedman's work: [she seems]
>>>to deny for example that
>>>workplaces engage in any direct instruction of writing or even in
>>>intentional structuring of worker's literacy enculturation. I certainly
>>>see most of genre development as tacit and don't think rules really can
>>>describe genres (if describing involves the way content and social
>>>relations are handled and the possibility of quite flexible,
>>>non-canonical,
>>>sometimes transformative performances); however, I think we should see
>>>direct instruction, rules of thumb, explicitly stated guidance, and
>>>especially provided models *as* elements of situated learning, part of the
>>>process, even if analysis makes clear that the rules and models are
>>>insufficient or even inaccurate.
>
>>My reading was that she contrasted workplace and [university] classrooms
>>in terms of the amount of on-the-job guidance that is experienced in the
>>workplace, as novices work with more experienced staff in preparing texts
>>that "act into the world." In this latter context, the models and rules
>>of thumb were provided in relation to the purpose of the text to be
>>produced rather than in the form of abstract 'rules'. So I wouldn't
>>disagree with your statement:
>>>As Hanks and others have suggested, our everyday
>>>metadiscursive ideologies and notions form part of what we employ to
>>>produce and co-ordinate our discourse practices.
>>
>>My main point (not made sufficiently explicit) is that texts, spoken and
>>written, are tools for mediating ongoing activity. The genre forms (the
>>synoptic 'rules') are functional with respect to commonly occurring
>>rhetorical situations, where the goal extends beyond the production of the
>>texts themselves. Like all tools, therefore, they need to be adapted to
>>the task in hand, which may involve substantial transformation of the
>>cultural norms. Teaching text construction as following norms rather than
>>achieving effects with respect to the specific situated activity that the
>>texts are intended to mediate does not seem to me to be very useful. That
>>being said, it can certainly be useful in the classroom to deconstruct
>>existing 'model' texts to explore how they function in context. This
>>obviously occurs most frequently with respect to written texts, but
>>teachers I know have found it helpful occasionally to record and
>>transcribe classroom discussions in order to enable students to explore
>>the spoken texts they co-construct. For an example, see Hume (in press,
>>http://www.oise.utoronto.ca/~ctd/networks/journal/Vol%201(1).1998sept/arti
cle3.
>>html).
>>
>>Gordon Wells
>>OISE/University of Toronto
>
>
>Paul Prior
>p-prior@uiuc.edu
>University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
>
>
>

Judith Diamondstone (732) 932-7496 Ext. 352
Graduate School of Education
Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey
10 Seminary Place
New Brunswick, NJ 08901-1183



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