Randy wrote:
>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.
But a lot of what gets done at work is pretend too. Think about all the
complex hypotheticals and simulations that governments and businesses deal
with, as well as the activity that is not actually productive--making
documents that no one is ever likely to read, responding to internal
institutional dynamics that are tangential from "the work," people writing
to fulfill role expectations or just to finish a job that a boss gave them.
The first time I read about electronically mediated communication in the
classroom was in a book called Richness in Writing, circa 1989, Duane Roen
was one of the editors. They were talking about those kinds of
connections, like kids in New York writing to kids in Puerto Rico. But I
have also found work like Nancie Atwell's (In the Middle, 1987) quite
interesting. She really works to proleptically propel students into the
position of being authors who come up with ideas for writing out of their
lives (of course, she is in multiple ways drawing on and promoting a
certain kind of authorship). Her focus on having students take over
identifying and initiating as well as enacting communicative uses of
writing is quite interesting. In this model, kids locate audiences in
their lives, audiences often are quite local but not always. George
Kamberelis has reported in several pieces (Language Arts, Linguistics and
Education) on adaptations of this approach in an inner city school.
Actually, there are a lot of reports of this kind of pedagogy in schools.
Another fascinating picture of literate communication inside the classroom
(sort of) can be in Anne Dyson's work (e.g., Writing Superheroes).
I think a larger point here, the problem with calling school artificial and
work real, is that identifying a place as workplace or classroom does not
determine the kinds of acts, motives, affects, and social relations that
obtain there. I agree that much of the literacy instruction done in
schools is problematic and needs reform, but I'm concerned about how we
conceptualize what the problems are and what the solutions are.
Paul Prior
p-prior@uiuc.edu
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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