Peeking out of lurkerdom...as we intermittent delurkers always seem to
emphasize.
I would like to pick up on Paul P.'s and then Judy's points that the
implicit/explicit binary may not be the difference that makes a difference
between the practices of school and work (or the rest of the world). What
is more crucial is the rhetorical situation, the relationship between writer
and reader and the purposes between them. In the work world, if someone
writes a report, the rhetorical situation involves informing an audience of
something the writer knows (has found out) that the audience wants to learn
about. In school, a report is taken to be proof that one did the required
work and gained some kind of understanding. The language is really directed
at no one, with the reader/teacher (the writer knows) being an authority
figure who is not trying to learn from the report itself but only trying to
monitor compliance. The world of work doesn't usually have time for this
kind of thing. It comes out as the difference Carole Edelsky draws between
writing and "writing," with "writing" referring to using the technology only
to prove one knows how to use the technology, not to achieve something
authentic.
In classrooms committed to having kids write instead of "write," kids put
pen to paper in order to do something, whether it be an aesthetic purpose,
such as moving readers with a poem, or an instrumental, social-action
purpose, such as getting the playground cleaned up or getting legislation
enacted. The relationship between writer and readers is completely
different from that which exists in current-traditional classrooms or in the
"Sydney School." In these latter, the absence of an authentic rhetorical
situation requires the teacher to prescribe formal elements that, when
there's really a reader, are more fluid and strategic. The formal elements
are based on synoptic analyses of texts that occur in authentic rhetorical
situations and are then imported to replace situated rhetorical action with
procedural rules. As is often the case, the school denatures and strips
social meaning and then tries to replace its external features with
confusing orders that must be followed, in the process completely deforming
the social relationships that gave birth to the formal features. This
problem is exacerbated by standardized testing of writing at all levels,
which necessarily and by definition creates artificial rhetorical situations
with real consequences.
Anyone who's ever helped a student with school writing has had to face this.
All your attention goes to "what the teacher means by..." or "whether you're
allowed to..." and not to the kind of purposeful, strategic thinking that
you could really help with.
This difference is especially important in literacy education, such as
writing workshops in elementary schools, English classes in secondary
schools, and composition classes in college. As Paul Prior and Gordon have
at different times pointed out, the distinction is less clear and maybe less
important in curricular areas where the mediational means is not itself the
focus of inquiry, such as graduate seminars or elementary science
instruction. One of the reasons many writing process/whole language
classrooms in North America focus so much on literary genres is because kids
can have real readers of their poems, memoirs, and short stories, whereas
they may not have the expert status that would make a real reader come to
their texts to find out about sharks, the French Revolution, or the workings
of a piston engine. (Again, when the classroom is inquiring into science or
some other area of content/concept, the writing may be authentically a
thinking device for the larger community. Gordon writes about this wisely
in _Dialogic Inquiry_. But local communities do create their own genres for
their own relationships and interactions, so this is not an answer to
teaching genre, in the usual literary sense of the word. That is, it
doesn't necessarily "prepare" students for future use of standard forms, if
such really exist.)
When students have an audience that is waiting to
hear what they come up with, the rhetorical situation and the
teacher/student transaction are more analogous to those that occur in
workplace settings, as Freedman describes them.
Of course, this raises the question of whether it's even possible to teach a
genre when the writer is not in the rhetorical situation that gives rise to
its features. For me, the answer is, probably not. I think we can,
however, construct activity settings that engage the habits of mind and
tool-use that might make learners flexible for future discourse communities.
Randy Bomer
Indiana University
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