who am i... writer teacher thinker

definately critical cultural reading closely the texts surrounding bring yourself into the poem into the text become surrounded by the text and then see what it is saying understand where you are related within the text how you are related to the text. i stand back, i observe, i evaluate and analyze. i interact with the text and let it speak to me. break it down, interpret, discover, read word by word, think it through, pull out the parts, and then put it all together understand that there may never be a complete understanding. observe that there may not be particular answers. come to the conclusion that there may be many more questions to ask and keep reading...the printed text the visual media the sounds in every part of our environment surrounding.
does the train roaring by while i try to fall asleep at 11pm change who i am as a person? does delving into a deep and close reading of a shakespeare sonnet change my initial emotional response? (it had better or the new critics will be after me in a second...) what happend when i write myself through a series of LANGUAGE poems vs a series of short prose narratives?

how are we what we write, or are we?

Peer Review Instructions--By Jill and Kim

Here is our appropriation of the Sommers article as we have interpreted it for use in a peer-review assignment in a writing course. These are general, we might tailor them to specifically suit particular assignments/contexts/etc...

The idea is that students will exchange the drafts of their papers with others in the class. The instructions are as follows:

Writer: before handing your paper to a reader, tell her/him--or write on your paper--any concerns or issues that you would like the reader to address, help you with, or give you feedback on. Specifically tell the reader what you would like her/him to look for in order to help you make your paper stronger.

Exchange papers

Reader:
-Focus on the text. Ask the writer what s/he wants to say, what the paper is trying to accomplish, and then read to see if the paper is doing what the writer intends for it to do.
-After reading through the text, be constructive in your comments and suggestions. Mark places that need development, ask specific questions and offer specific suggestions that will help to develop the paper effectively. Remember to offer thoughtful commentary of the type that you would like to receive on your draft.

Writers: When you get your paper back, read through the comments and ask the reader to clarify any comments that you don't understand or want to talk about further. Then, think about how best to revise your paper using the suggestions given, and your own ideas for 'discovering' the next draft of this paper. To revise is to RE-SEE the writing.

From Sharon-on critical pedagogy

I wanted to start copying some thoughtful insights here, to organize and keep them together and then to respond and keep thinking about some of these things. If you are on the listserve, than you've probably read these already. I'll create some new posts of my own later.

Date: Mon, 19 Sep 2005 02:06:23 -0400
From: Sharon Schnurr
Subject: pedagogy, critical and otherwise
To: 6010@LISTS.WAYNE.EDU

No, no!' said the Queen. `Sentence first--verdict

afterwards.'

`Stuff and nonsense!' said Alice loudly. `The idea of having

the sentence first!'

`Hold your tongue!' said the Queen, turning purple.

`I won't!' said Alice.

In response to what other people are saying about resisting

the temptation of framing their teaching in the form of one

of these “pedagogical boxes,” I can say that I tend to think

about critical pedagogy and all of the other pedagogical

approaches presented in A Guide to Composition Pedagogies as

practices that can inform teaching, not as prescriptive

approaches that provide the last word on how teaching gets

done in the classroom.   So I am more interested (for now)

in finding what is useful to me in an approach than in

finding fault with it.

        A useful goal of critical pedagogy is to provide

students with an opportunity to think about the effect of

institutional power on individual lives and human

relationships. Ann George writes that “critical pedagogy

engages students in analyses of unequal power relations that

produce and are produced by cultural practices and

institutions” (92).  The approach does more than provide

content for student essays; it makes available a time and

place for students to bring to a conscious level the

everyday social practices that they tend to accept as

normative and to question them.  George quotes from Kozol

who contends that one of the effects of mass education is

that it trains students to passively comply with authority

figures (94).  That is, students become so used to equating

being good students and good citizens with “following the

rules” that there is always the possibility that they may

adopt an unconscious habit of compliance, conforming with

the practices that are put forward by anyone or any group

that they perceive as an authority figure--even when such

practice is nonsensical or unjust.  It seems that when

people are in the practice of taking orders, when they

seldom have the opportunity to think in ways that may be

oppositional to the status quo or to make decisions for

themselves, they can become habituated to feeling that being

powerless is normal.  Falling into a habit of non-critical

engagement with the world in this way may make people feel

powerless, even if only on an unconscious level, or it may

lead them to believe that the only way to have power is to

comply with those who are already in power.  Critical

pedagogy can give students an opportunity to participate in

and practice a discourse of resistance (to unjust or

unethical social norms) that can be useful to them in their

everyday lives.  This is not to say that educational systems

are inherently bad or corrupt.  Giroux claims that it might

be more productive to think of schools as “arenas

characterized by struggle between competing ideologies,

discourses and behaviors” [. . .] “which include spaces of

resistance and agency,” so that “cultural institutions

produce varying degrees of accommodation and resistance”

(96). So we don’t all have to be “dupes of ideology” (Shor),

but we can be “people fighting for humanity” (96).

Date: Mon, 19 Sep 2005 14:29:11 -0400
From: Sharon Schnurr
Subject: Re: Critical Theory Meets Rhetoric
To: 6010@LISTS.WAYNE.EDU

In fairness to Ben, he does point out that to pose the

question this way--transformative intellectuals or exegetes--

really sets up a false dichotomy.

He points out that every reading of a theorist retheorizes.

He says that this is a meager payoff,though, compared to

what could be learned and said.

But what is the goal? The transformation of the current

social conditions into a new order. Agger writes that "This

type of political education differs from earlier forms in

that it relates lifeworld struggle to the evident prospect

of a qualitatively different society.  Who has tried to put

this into action?  I can think of several intellectuals who

really tried to put these ideas into play in the world--

Jesus, Ghandi, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Tupac Shakur--

it's interesting that all of these people suffered a similar

fate.

One thing that is interesting about these individuals is

that all of them employed a rhetoric as a vehicle through

which they endeavored to produce social change. Terry

Eagleton's account of rhetoric seems applicable here:

Rhetoric saw speaking and writing not merely as textual

objects, to be aesthetically contemplated or endlessly

deconstructed, butu as forms of activity inseparable from

the wider social relations between writers and readers,

orators and audiences, and as largely unintelligible outside

the social purposes in which they were embedded.

of a sunday

I'm thinking about pedagogy I'm thinking about writing, I'm thinking about reading about writing and teaching. It's a lot to process and swish around in a brain. To me, there are many different types of writing (obviously) and ways to go about doing the different writings. I don't usually write on-line, except for email. So this is a good brain activity, to think about writing in all its forms and write about it. But right now I am thinking about writing in a writing or composition classroom, which is very different from a poetry or a fiction writing classroom. Yes, there may be similarities, but for now I will assume the differences, which I'm not going to go into anyhow, maybe in the future...

Anyhow, in composition, or essay writing, I am reading about expressivist process pedagogy which is something I thought I had mostly stayed away from. I don't entirely understand all of the ins and outs of the theory, but the personal expression writing which seems to be at the heart of it makes me nervous. As a teacher of writing I am interested in getting students motivated to write and be invested in their writing. And in order to get them to do that, having them writing about their personal experiences seems like a great idea. But I don't want to spend all semester reading amateur personal narratives...not to put down amateur writers, but you have to be one heck of a teacher to get students to transcend the banal personal experience story and present something that then becomes more universal, that reaches out into the world and tells some larger story. In the world of Creative Non Fiction for example, personal essays begin with personal experience, but then they go somewhere, they diverge and become something grand or larger than the initial experience. This is not to say that all of these essays solve world problems but, even in the essays that focus on more mundane events and ideas, there is something more at state, there is some insight offered, there is something to hold onto as a reader learning and becoming invested...

So how then to bring more personal writing, student-centered writing into the classroom? I'll think about that more and keep reading.

on writing

One of the things often forgotten in English is not just that we are always teaching writing, but that we, too, write. A weblog is one place to work with one's own writing - since it is immediate publication it is also a place for quick reception and ease in terms of revision. Overall, you must write to teach writing. This leads to a more meta-level question: what is your methodology for writing?
--J. Rice

methodology, system of methods, analysis of the methods used, how do I know what I know about writing and how do I do the writing that I do?

a weblog is a place to write but it is in between free writing and 'polished' or finished writing.

a weblog goes out to the public, in this case a real and particular public, in other cases potentially the same, or potentially it goes out to no one or to an audience that is totally unknown.

I write. I write myself my world my others. I do this daily sometimes, weekly sometimes. Lately I read too much to write. I keep a notebook on the table and sometimes I open it while eating cereal. Sometimes I push it around the table b/c there's not enough space for the books and the old mail and the dishes left uncarried to the sink.

I write on the computer. recently broke the habit of typing 500 words a day. but this is not that. that is unread by anyone else. some of that turns into poems, into essays, into nothing and more. 500 words a day of anything. that is a good habit, if it is not broken.

sometimes I write letters by hand.

once I wrote a story about a terrible crush. ok, more than once.

often i do not capitalize or use punctuation. for better or for worse.

by training i am an experimental poet. so i can write whatever and however i want. [sic]

but poetry is not academic essay writing is not magazine writing is not something for the sciences (but for the scientists maybe). these are different and sometimes the same. i have to sit down think about it put it down on the paper.

these are different because poetry is much more fun to write than a precis.

uh...first-time blogger

this is my first blog ever...more later...find something to write for the internet world....