Mike and everybody,
I think it's an important point that communication technology can make a
difference in the rhetorical situation, because it can afford a new
audience. The default position in school is pre-printing-press, a single
handwritten copy of a document, and it's hard to get kids' writing out to a
real audience under those circumstances. This is economic, of course, since
how's a school going to afford machines that all students have constant
access to? But it also creates a speech community that mirrors the most
repressive regimes - only a powerful minority having access to document
reproduction and thus dissemination. In trying to deal with the problem,
writing teachers recapitulate the phylogeny of print technologies, having
things read aloud, having kids recopy in black ink for photocopying,
retyping kids' work into computers, running off transparencies to enlarge
the print. Intra- and inter-networked computers offer perhaps the best
solution available, but even that use of machinery involves a lot of human
beings dancing around the needs of machines. (The computer lab is down the
hall from the classroom, and for the whole class to be there together
requires elaborate arrangements and pre-planning, since the same group of
machines are being shared by large numbers of communities and agendas.)
Also, in what you describe, Mike, there are shifts in what is valued as
knowledge. If someone in Portland is going to have need of what you write
in San Diego, it must be that local knowledge - something close at hand and
directly investigable - is taken as the object of study. That topic choice
also creates inquiry procedures that are different from, say, looking it up
in the encyclopedia. The knowledge is less authorized and more
negotiable/dialogic for the knower. (This can be seen as a conflict with
established curriculum guidelines if, say, the Kansas board of education
wants fourth graders studying Egypt and whales in social studies and
science. So good teachers have to be outlaws.)
Anyway, I think the work you are describing is powerful in the number of
conditions it can transform. It reminds me of one of the findings of the
Heath/McLaughlin studies of urban youth organizations, that external
evaluators, real outside audiences, were what changed the relations between
adults and kids ("come on, guys, we have to get ready, THEY"RE coming") and
allowed the teachers to ask/demand much more of the learners.
Randy Bomer
Indiana University
Mike wrote:
> Randy-- We are working on a variety of ways to shift the rhetorical
> situation in higher ed (and I heard an interesting presentation
> yesterday of similar efforts-in-spirit at high school level) that
> seek to make school reports "real." One way is to create activities
> that require communication at a distance, so there is really something
> to tell that is not previously known but is potentially locally valuable.
> Not fool proof (what is?) but it can work.
> mike
>
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