Kevin wrote:
>In this sense of meaningfulness,
>whether or not the work is "pretend" (part of an imagined world, imaginary
>geography, tertiarty artifact, etc.) is not necessarily a point of division
>in meaningful/not meaningful for the person doing the work, is it? In my
>experience, written or other work taking place within a "pretend" world,
>and/or constructing that world, may be one of the most meaningful types of
>work.
Nate wrote:
>not all audiences would necessarily be supportive of the learning process and
>>an "as if" might be more supportive to learning in the long run.
I like the points Kevin and Nate make. I think "authentic" is a
problematic term, minimally for the associations people are likely to make.
"Meaningfulness" I like better. I'd probably vote for "engagement." What's
nice about "engagement" or "meaningfulness" is that it is easier to see as
engaged and meaningful imaginary activities, writing done for oneself
(without any other audience or any other direct social application),
possibly even writing to practice and learn. It is also easier to see that
the "same task" will lead to a variety of different kinds and levels of
engagement.
Randy--I'd guess that you're right that the disagreements here are more
about theory than practice, that we'd agree on many (but not all) of the
practices that are problematic and literacy practices that would be better.
But I do think the theory is important to pursue because pedagogies need
always need to be adpated, monitored, and revised in practice and it is
understanding the theory that supports that kind of adaptation. On the
other hand, if you are working from the assumption that play and schooling
are not--by their nature-- social activities on a par with journalism or
making shoes, then we may have some real areas of difference about what
kinds of activities make sense for development.
I do think that people often write in workplaces with extremely limited
kinds of engagement, not really different from the kinds of things students
often struggle with in school. I'm also concerned about using speech act
analysis. The problem there, as Cicourel, Pratt, and others have pointed
out, is that it privileges one, usually the dominant, definition of the
situation, of what's going on. One of the things I'm interested in is the
way that students often rn into problems with texts they're writing because
they *are* engaging meaningfully and with considerable affective investment
of their identities in tasks that teachers imagined as simply formal (or
perhaps simply didn't imagine). I think we need to constantly work to
recognize the pervasive heterogeneity and complexity of classrooms (and
other settings)?
>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.
Paul Prior
p-prior@uiuc.edu
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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