I seem to have opened a kettle of fish with the set of words I've been
using, "authenticity" and "pretend," especially. I don't think there's so
much disagreement at the foundations of what we are saying as much as a
question of what cultural history these words import to the conversation.
For me, "authenticity" doesn't describe anything romantically naturalistic
about the child's/writer' being. Following Edelsky, I was just using it to
describe a feature of a language situation - that the writer makes
rhetorical choices based on social action, out of intentions to affect an
audience reading in good faith. That means the writer isn't only
"practicing" writing, isn't only proving s/he can write, isn't only
preparing for some postponed future social action, isn't only complying with
instructions, isn't only fulfilling the requirements of some rubric. My
original point was that this difference might be more useful than the
explicit/implicit difference in comparing school writing to work writing.
School and testing situations are unusual in that they sponsor speech acts
wherein the only illocutionary and perlocutionary forces of an utterance is
to present itself for judgment as language, though that can never be the
locutionary act. That's the social feature that gives rise to the
appearance of explicitness in instruction, though what's going on is rarely
intersubjectively explicit because of the twistedness of the language
activity.* It's not the only kind of writing that happens in school, but
when it does happen, that's probably the biggest difference between school
and the rest of the world. As Nate points out, sometimes the rest of the
world does school in its reception to children's writing, but it's still a
school feature.
*A recent example. In an urban elementary school that has gotten low test
scores and has a high percentage of African American students, the principal
wanted to get the teachers to have children write everyday. She began
assigning, over the morning announcements on the PA, a schoolwide topic -
you know, "the best day of my life," "America is a free country," "the frost
is on the pumpkin," "the day I was a pencil." The second grade teachers,
convinced that their kids didn't "have the language" to write about such
topics, started the writing time by brainstorming with the kids words and
phrases they should use to write about the topic. The kids, concentrating
obediently on stitching these together, wrote little textoids of three
sentences or so. The district, the principal, and the teachers all agree
that the kids can't write, probably because of some kind of language
deficit. What they see in the writing is that the kids don't make any
sense. They use the words, but the texts don't mean anything. Sure, you
can say analytically that what the kids are doing is authentic, is real, is
social action, is language, is doing things with words. But surely
something's different about what they are doing from what I'm doing right
now? How can I describe that difference to teachers and administrators?
This is what Judy meant (as I understood her) in saying that some of these
binaries really form continua or axes along which practitioners make
decisions.
In Marxist theory, is there a word for the opposite of, or a corrective for,
alienation? Could such a word be useful to replace "authenticity" here? If
a worker's labor is meaningful and directly related to his own well-being
and productive engagement with others, what's that called?
About pretending. It's interesting to raise the example of simulations, as
Paul and Kevin both did. (I'm assuming Kevin is referring to the value of
pretending in play or in drama.) I agree that this is a different order of
pretending than the pretending to write in my example. So the word
pretending might be ill-advised. I'm not, though, familiar with the
simulations Paul pointed out and would be interested in hearing more. It
seems to me that the language in simulations is still socially accurate -
doing what it says it's doing - even if the whole situation doesn't "refer"
to "reality." But I bet it would be interesting to study closely the
language in these simulations alongside the language in whatever you call
what's not a simulation.
Randy Bomer
Indiana University
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