I remember that story about the letter and the editor, and I remember
thinking he was a scoundrel. It was probably a mistake for the teacher not
to edit the letter for a larger audience. Maybe s/he wanted people to see
that these were "real" kids or maybe there were just so many kids doing so
many things that the one teacher decided not to bottleneck the process by
editing everything that went out. But the editor's decision was ideological
and not a necessary feature of a tertiary artifact. S/he applied different
practices to young people than to adults, to schoolchildren than to
journalists. That's unjust.
The fact that school is a tertiary artifact of our culture doesn't, to me,
mean that it has to be reified. Its very tertiary-ness might make its
boundaries and definitions more subject to negotiation and change. If not,
a lot of us are wasting a lot of time.
Still, you're right about schools being real. The words "real" and
"authentic" are, to me, useful in describing relations between language
users on the generative and receiving ends of a transaction. It doesn't
mean school-as-usual doesn't really occur in the three dimensional world; it
just means that much of the language use in school (at least that which is
valued and evaluated as "work") is pretend. That can be otherwise - and
sometimes is.
I guess the hope for changing the wider public's attitudes about writing and
"writing" is that now more people are growing up in school where they have
some experience with writing rather than "writing." Those people and their
parents know that something else is possible. And so maybe the cultural
definitions of school and its work might slowly multiply, if not change.
After all, the editors notion that young children's writing should be
grammatically and orthographically correct was something s/he learned in
school, right?
Randy Bomer
Indiana University
----------
>From: "Nate Schmolze" <schmolze@students.wisc.edu>
>To: <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
>Subject: RE: Pedagogical genres -- the what & the how....
>Date: Thu, Feb 3, 2000, 8:15 AM
>
> What has caught my attention especially Randy's message is that a "real"
> audience can address or be more sensitive to "writing" as apposed to writing
> (technical). One example, awhile ago on this thread there was a posting
> about students sending social action letters to a newspaper and an editorial
> ocurred in which the students, teachers, and school were verbally assulted
> for the writing not "writing". While the activity may have been writing
> from the teacher or student perspective it was simply "writing" and nothing
> more from the editor's perspective. This of course made national attention
> and being pushed the editor acknowedged the student's writing was not much
> different from other writing he received. When he received letters from
> other writers it was the "writing" that was the main focus, but since these
> were students it was the writing that came to the forefront. This was
> expressed very clearly in that the editor published the articles "as is"
> rather than edit them as he did for all the other letters he received. He
> argued this on ethical grounds in that it would be unethical to edit their
> writings and cover up the incompentency of teachers, students, and schools.
>
> I guess my point is the discussion has primarily been at the context and
> teacher-student level where it seems these issues go a lot farther. Can we
> really make literacy practices in school like work or any other context,
> there are different objects and histories involved. I guess this is my
> frustration with concepts like "authentic" and "real" in the first place
> because it positions literacy outside of school as the "authentic" or
> "real". I think Paul P. is right when he refers to school as a tertiary
> artifact. As a tertiary artifact it is often the writing not the "writing"
> that is more "authentic" or "real". Don't take this as argueing that since
> writing is more authentic it should be the primary focus, but rather like it
> or not students, teachers, and schools are positioned in particular ways
> that make it an "authentic" reality. If one is a student, teacher, or school
> your writing is judged, positioned, and normalized in ways that do not occur
> in contexts such as work. If a student or teacher writes something for a
> larger audience it is not and never can be the same context as someone
> outside of that tertiary artifact.
>
> Nate
>
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