Things we know for sure - Hall response

8. Informal writing is an effective way to learn course content. Teachers need not

choose writing over content, or vice versa.

I completely agree with this concept. The more writing a person does in a classroom, formal or not, the better they become as writers, and the more informal writing a person does the more comfortable and confident they become in their own writing style and voice. Thus, using informal writing as a tool to learn/extend/appreciate course content does double duty of building writers up and teaching the information in a way that students can approach from a place of ease and understanding. Quick writes and free writing on topics can lead to discoveries and bursts of understanding in the same way that teaching math in a variety of methods can eventually connect with students of different learning styles, but has the added benefit of giving students space to be creative, opinionated and as verbose as they’re willing to be or feel like being in the moment without judging their use of words specifically.

Reflection on Lessons (1)

Last thursday, our group had the opportunity to teach a lesson about the book we've been reading for books club, A Note Slipped Under the Door. I really appreciated working in this group, because everyone was very professional and contributed to our discussion and planning both for the presentation and activity. That being said, i don't know for sure that we had an equal amount of contributions to the work. It's tough to say, especially when you consider that from the outside perspective it may look like the women in our group did much of the work, having lead the entire presentation prior to the activity. I did feel however that our activity was a success and that the other members of the class that participated got something out of it, which is a huge relief.
The second group to present was one of the Readicide groups (i believe the purple group). I felt like i got a lot of information about their book and had a firm grasp on what it was about, but that their activity was a bit lackluster. That may be a bit of bias showing though, because our prior activity was much more active and forced the class to engage. Comparatively, the second group's activity definitely required more communication between individuals to be able to discuss the differences between the 'one pager' review style and the use of multiple choice questions, which i do appreciate, because though out my primary and secondary school years, everything was multiple choice with the exception of GATE classes and honors courses, which feels really fortunate for me and unfortunate for students who didn't have the opportunity to take those courses.

Interviewing “The Writer”

Danielle Aylesworth

  

1) What writers have you read that you could say had an authentic voice?

Describe the qualities that made them unique.

Augusten burroughs, who writes memoirs. They were like real life, and he was just telling a story, as opposed to seeming like someone went through and proofread all his work. It was real life.

2) How would you describe your writing voice? How connected is it to the way

you think and talk?  It’s really weird, and has been since high school. I never right ‘straight formal’. I’ve always had a slight sarcastic tone. I still use proper grammar and all that. I use a lot of big words, but not words you wouldn’t expect. Certainly informal, but still academic. When I talk I use big words and it’s very informal but I still speak clearly and academically, except for when I’m hanging out with friends. I use proper English but informally. It’s very similar to my writing style. Big words make you seem smarter.

3) What theories about writing we’ve explored in class speak to your own

experience? Were there moments you felt challenged by an idea? Did

you encounter any new ideas that helped explain hunches you had about

literacy? No specific theories directly connect to my life, though genre theory… I felt similar to you in that I felt it over complicated the issue and makes a person studying it want to know less about it. The more research we did the more exhaustive the information became.

4) What is your earliest writing memory? How did it inform your attitudes

toward writing?

I remember writing in kindergartern, but that wasn’t really ‘writing’. I guess my first memory was writing a “book” in third grade. It was about two guys that opened a toy shop. It was our first time using complete, complex sentences and I still have the book. It made writing more fun. I still don’t love writing but it definitely helped at that age.

5) What role did the adults in your life play towards your literacy development?

My parents didn’t really care about my schooling because I was really smart, so they just focused on my brother. I just skated through school, even with honros and AP classes. None of my English teachers stand out to me. I don’t think I’ve ever had a ‘bad’ teacher because I’ve always been relatively smart.

6) What is your best & worst writing experience?

Third grade writing was fun. Haven’t had a worst, writing was easy.

7) Finish this metaphor: “For me, writing is like __________.”

8) Describe the scene you imagine when thinking about your future classroom.

How does it integrate literacy practices?

Annotation workshop (Self-review)

 1)    my process for this… process was reading through the article at a pace that allowed me to best understand the author’s points, which at first seemed particularly dense and complex, but upon further reading made increasing sense (though I’m still confused about somethings). As far as paraphrasing/summarizing is concerned, my main technique is to try to draw one sentence worth of summarization from each of the paragraphs in the article, with further details for the larger paragraphs.

2)    I didn’t actively use any models or other resources to complete the task.

3)    This article gave me a more in depth understanding of rhetorical genre theory specifically but putting it into context that I hadn’t considered previously (language acquisition)

Annotation Rough Draft

 

Bawarshi, Anis; Response: Taking Up Language Differences in Composition

College English, Vol. 68, No. 6, Cross-Language Relations in Composition (Jul., 2006),pp. 652-656, National Council of Teachers of English, http://www.jstor.org/stable/25472181 .

            In this article, Anis Bawarshi reviews a number of essays on the topic of language differences amongst ESL learners and outlines the ‘call to action’ aspects of each essay, as well as factos that appear to discourage teachers from making good on that call. These essays references are, in the author’s opinion, extremely similar in scope and topic to recent determinations in the field of rhetorical genre theory. In this regard, the author spends a lot of time commenting on the concept of ‘uptakes’, a sort of reflexive, unconscious connection between implicit meaning in a genre and actions associated with, resulting from and related to that genre. “Within speech-act theory, uptake traditionally refers to how an illocutionary act (saying, for example, "It is hot in here") gets taken up as a perlocutionary effect (someone subsequently opening a window) under certain conditions.” (653) Taken out of the traditional context though, uptakes also exist among language learners that don’t necessarily correlate to a secondary or tertiary language that they are learning, and therefore it is up to their teachers to take these uptakes into account and to react accordingly in their instruction. Bawarshi outlines the concepts and ideas perpetuated in different essays. The first essay, “An Essay on the Work of Composition: Composing English against the Order of Fast Capitalism," by Min Zhan Lu, describes the idea of ‘soundbites’ which are effectively interpersonal uptakes that are unconsciously connected to regularly occurring reactions to different genres. Bawarshi interprets the concept of sound bites as an alternative interpretation of the uptake idea. The second essay discussed is Gail E. Hawisher and Cynthia L. Selfe's "Globalization and Agency: Designing and Redesigning the Literacies of Cyberspace", in which the authors described an indepth study of the influence of genres of a variety of different levels, from globalization to personal motivation, on Lu Liu and Yi-Huey Guo. In this same essay, Bawarshi also notes that the use of English in digital media and as a necessity for certain aspects of life are also identified, reconnecting back to the original idea of differences in language acquisition. The third essay Bawarshi examines is john Trimbur's "Linguistic Memory and the Politics of U.S. English", which, according to the author, delves into the  use of ‘uptakes’ in historical and cultural linguistics. In discussing this particular essay, the author comments on the negative implications of uptakes, specifically those associated with underlying assumptions that may not be obvious to instructors of language. This same commentary asserts that uptakes are connected directly to memory, and, in fact, in the process of acquiring and embedding specific uptakes, students actively forget or discontinue alternative uptakes. The fourth essay Bawarshi connects with, Min-Zhan Lu's essay "Living-English Work", draws on this idea of uptake memory, and, according to the author, outlines ways of making positive use of the ‘forgetting’ and ‘memorizing’ of specific and alternative uptakes. The fifth and sixth essays Bawarshi discusses, Paul Kei Matsuda's "The Myth of Linguistic Homogeneity in U.S. College Composition," and A. Suresh Canagarajah's "Toward a Writing Pedagogy of Shuttling between Languages: Learning from Multilingual Writers"  are both touched on only briefly and are used to further support the commentary Bawarshi makes about the previous four essays. The article in general was relatively easy to read, compared to similar articles, though I did find the uptake concept rather vaguely defined at first, and the more information the author provided, the less I felt I knew about the actual concept itself.