Was that really I saying what I said about schools????
Well, they have a function, they help to prop up this world, and they can be
used to do so critically, though many forces are arrayed against it.
This is what I am still dull-wittedly wrestling with myself:
Representations and rules *may* be useful in the learning process
>without being sound theoretically or without totally accounting for the
>fully embodied practice. .... For
>example, the usual school definitions of paragraphs are fairly obviously
>wrong or useless, yet I can see that for students who bring the right
>literate experiences to those rules they can help with the writing of
>common school genres. On the other hand, they do nothing or worse for
>students who don't bring those experiences, and .... there's always the
question of how to balance
>immediate clarity with an eventual need for messy complexity, which is
>actually a key thread of Dias et al's argument. I guess the question then
>is how to determine the immediate and longer-term consequences of such
>representations and rules.
I'm not so sure that the rules are 'good' for those who know better, and NOT
good for those who don't know at all. There may be no answer to the dilemma.
Struggling readers/writers need scaffolds that no one yet has quite figured
out, since for most of the history of schooling, anyone IN school after 5th
grade didn't need them. There is the problem of signification -- the signs
aren't stable. If the out-group learns the rules that the in-group has
required, then the display of rules becomes a negative sign. Hyper-correct
English, a sign of lower status. I suppose that's just another way of saying
that it's not the rules that counts. Signaling membership means performing
in situ, as you and Gordon noted. Thus, the importance of Hillocks' matrix:
setting up the kinds of problems that engage the student in the critical
procedures that count as getting some kind of thing done.
SIGH.
Judy
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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