Phillips: 540 Week 15 Blog Post

Pedagogical Tactics for Increasing Inclusion: Johns, Lovejoy, and Delpit 

Lovejoy

“I want my students to learn to make thoughtful decisions in their writing, decisions that are based on purpose and audience and context. I want them to see how some pieces can be written appropriately in the students’ own language while other pieces are more appropriate in EAE. An even within EAE, there is room for variation. That is the direction I am taking in my own introductory writing classes—getting students to fit their writing to the situation for which it is intended and helping them to make careful decisions about their writing on that basis” (106).

Delpit

“Despite good intentions, constant correction seldom has the desired effect. Such correction increases cognitive monitoring of speech, thereby making talking difficult” (94).

“iz” example asks students to explain something in a halting way by incorporating extra syllables. For example, <maybe> becomes [miz-ay-biz-ee] <apple> becomes [iz-ap-piz-le]. The idea is to simulate what it would feel like to be an AAV speaker (or other varietial speaker) who is made to revise her/his speech incessantly.

Johns

“Critical thinking is cultural thinking” (142).

“…[W]hich kinds of assignments should be graded for error and which should not?” (143)

“We also need to design assignments that are clear, explicit, and well modeled, so that all students, second language or not, understand what they are to do and what a successful paper (or other assignment) might look like” (143).

Assessment Recommendations: Page 144

•Assessment connected to learner’s world and frame of reference--i.e. to do well students need to care about the topic

•Offer students multiple ways to demonstrate/represent knowledge and learning--e.g. poster sessions, visual representations, oral presentations, formal and informal out-of-class activities

•Self-assessment is essential to the overall assessment process--e.g. reflection, pointed feedback Q&A Note: not all students will be comfortable with self-disclosure, so offer options

Group-Work Recommendations: Page 147

•Teacher should set-up "ideal" groups

•Rotate group roles between projects

•Provide projects appropriate for a diverse audience

•Draw upon student-to-student exchange so they can teach each other

•Structure group activities wherein problem-solving creates cohesion

•Build interdependence into group activities

•Individual accountability must be included as well as peer-to-peer assessment

Counter Point to Johns

For this post, I have highlighted some of the things I found most useful with one exception. Johns notes that we should design projects that are explicit in content and demonstrate "what a successful paper" might look like. I don't believe the "real" world works that way. On some level, I worry that it is disingenuous to say that a paper is a "success" when mastery is not a realistic goal in a short-term course. Aren't students better served if assignments focus on beneficial research skill-sets rather than what John's seems to imply here, which is a de facto "success" scenario? Put differently, is John's too out of sync with the more chaotic environments people face in the workplace and elsewhere? Adaptive skills seem more important to me than what Johns suggests. Of course, this is a matter of opinion and open to debate.

Phillips: 540 Week 14 Post

What's Love Got to Do with WWW?

Shirley Brice Heath's "The Madness(es) of Reading and Writing Ethnography" outlines the coulda-shouda-woulda revisionist rhetoric of the author's project in Ways with Words. While I appreciate her reflexive approaches to her critics, I am surprised that Heath leaves out something that seems obvious to me. She did a lot of this work out of love, and, yes curiosity. Even the way the book was constructed over a long timespan in a "schizophrenic existence" imposed by state requirements is a nod to love. Why refer to "madness" instead of "love"?

Clearly, WWW was a labor of love for Heath. Her communities, her extended family, her husband, her daughter all played a significant part in this work. Does the word "love" come with too much baggage for a female researcher writing in the time that Heath does? I wonder. Yet, we know emotional attachment and intrinsic motivation as well as the ability to proceed under duress collude in our brain. 

Katherine Hayles writes: "an observer makes a cut . . . to tame the noise of the world by introducing a distinction, which can be understood in its elemental sense as a form, as a boundary between inside and outside" (Hayles 137). Heath made cuts, which all of us must do to get things accomplished as the NPR story I linked to above corroborates. How we mark the boundary between inside and outside as writers and observers is going to vary contingent with the bodies involved.

In a different book, Feminist Pedagogy, two people (one a junior female literature professor and one a more senior male literature professor) discussed their approaches to teaching Virginia Woolfe's A Room of One's Own. In the article, a retrospective of a conference presentation, the female prof. analyzed her and her co-presenter's discourse. She did not refer to the emotional engagement she had with her student, but the male professor did. She asked herself why that happened. Her answer? She felt uncomfortable expressing emotion lest she be perceived "too soft." I wonder if Heath's omission of love from her article or book indicated a similar insecurity.

References:  Hayles, N. Katherine.“Making the Cut: The Interplay of Narrative and System, or What Systems Theory Can’t See.” Observing Complexity: Systems Theory and Postmodernity. Eds. William Rausch and Cary Wolfe. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. 137-62. Print.

NPR Radio Lab - Choice (see link above)

Phillips: 540 Week 13 Blog Post

Now, here’s an ethnography! Heath spent ten years completing her ethnographic research as a participant observer. Heath explains in the prologue that her book is unique because of her access to, and understanding of, the communities she investigates (Roadville and Trackton) and because of the research circumstances at the time.

Shirley Brice Heath’s Ways with Words documents the ways in which black and white working class children from the Piedmont region of South Carolina were apprenticed into language and learning. Heath demonstrates through thick description, long-term field research, and discourse analysis just how those apprenticeships are enmeshed in a complex process of socialization and tacit rules that govern in-group communication strategies.

The first six chapters of the book contrasted the two communities’ child-rearing habits, adult patterns of communication, consumption practices, and ideological stances. On the one hand, the linguistic and cultural practices of the two communities did share some continuity in that the Christian church and biblical literature played a direct role in each community—although that appeared to be undergoing a shift in an increasingly secular Roadville. On the other hand, language acquisition and practice, community participation, and gender roles in each community were strikingly different. For example, Trackton families were more communal, matrifocal, and babies were held much more than in Roadville. Roadville families had male “providers” and female “nurturers,” but held babies less. Roadville babies were addressed directly. Male children and female children were given vastly different toys and engaged in separate activities at a much earlier age than Trackton children.

Heath’s ethnography also revealed different patterns of story narration between the two communities, which foreshadows the ways in which educators may work with students’ strengths once they enter the formal school setting.

Roadville (white) children were taught facts, names of things, and moral lessons based in biblical parable structures. The children were encouraged to tell factual stories in "proper" start to finish sequence. The children were not encouraged to speak-up or out to elders and were not encouraged to be creative problem solvers. Obedience was encouraged, as was deference to adult authority figures.

Trackton (black) children weren’t taught facts or a linear style of narrative in story-telling. Instead, the kids, especially boys, were encouraged to “take the stage” and engage in a kind of competitive conversation, one in which creativity and problem solving through a narrative was rewarded and lauded by members of the community. Taking turns in talking was not taught or admired. Telling a "tall" tale was fine as long as it was interesting. Rhythmic speech patterns were often incorporated into story-telling methods. Middle-school girls engaged in different kinds of rhythmic speech games that also involved body movement like, double-dutch (skipping rope games) and hand-clap games.

Although I haven’t read the second-half of the book yet, I see clear parallels to Susan Philip’s work in Invisible Culture. Philip’s study wasn’t quite as long (1968-73) and she wasn’t a member of the Warm Springs community in the way that Heath was in both the Roadville and Trackton communities.