Reflection: Genre Pedagogy

Genre pedagogy will play a big part in my teaching portfolio primary because of the "genre awareness" approach. As a future teacher of composition, and being aware of the WAC conversation, I think it is important to provide student with tools and strategies for appropriating genres rather than teaching a specific genre outside of its natural environment. Our students need to learn from us a tool (writing) that will be used in any discipline they pursue. This is a vastly different dynamic than other disciplines have with English...other disciplines aren't really teaching things that the English-focused student needs to know. That isn't to say it isn't fair, rather that a teacher needs to be aware of what he or she is being asked to accomplish.

Using genre awareness, the class can focus on making a student's transition from the FYC classroom into their discipline of a choice a little easier. By providing tools and strategies, we are giving them more than just tips and tricks to get by; we are giving them confidence in their ability to analyze, participate, critique and transform the genre(s) they will be operating in both inside and outside of the university.

Reading Response: Genre Pedagogy

Genre pedagogy is a very influential method of teaching that influences a lot of composition classrooms, and for good reason. When you consider genres the way Carolyn Miller does (Genre as Social Action, 1984), that is, writers in recurrent situations taking similar rhetorical actions and creating typified expectations, you begin to see genres in everything from "grocery lists to hypertexts" (Devitt, 146). However, there isn't just one approach to teaching a genre pedagogy. Devitt outlines three unique approaches:

• teaching particular genres
• give students access to and control of particular genres
• teaching genre awareness
• help students learn how to learn unfamiliar genres regardless of medium or context
• teaching genre critique
• help students see the cultural and ideological nature of genres to make their own choices and gain critical understanding

While Devitt describes each of these approaches as having "value and limitations for different students," she concludes that combining the three approaches will "help students act rhetorically and consciously within and beyond the situations they will encounter throughout their lives" (147).

That brings us to the pedagogy itself and the choice between teaching individual genres versus teaching genre awareness. The difference is one of distance, that is, interacting with tools versus just knowing about them. Both angles have pros and cons depending on who you ask. When it comes to teaching individual genres, one group may say that doing so provides students with explicit rules and tricks that will be useful during writing while another group may say that a genre is too complex to be learned outside of where it naturally occurs.

When it comes to teaching genre awareness, it is no longer about interacting with a genre but rather about gaining tools and strategies for appropriating a genre when the need arises. As with teaching individual genres, there are pros and cons to teaching genre awareness. While it does teach meta-cognitive reflection (thinking about your thinking) and discourages formulaic writing, there is a lack of control when it comes to source material since teachers will often give students control over their genre of choice. This means students are gathering their own samples and, in some cases, the samples aren't very good.

Reflection: Process Pedagogy

I really like process theory, at least at first glance. I think the shift in focus from end product to the process of production is what sells the theory so well. It meshes very well with my core belief that the unique voice of the writer must be preserved above all else. If the end product is all that matters, students may be tempted to regurgitate that which has worked in the past instead of trying to fit themselves into the discourse. My opinion is that if you are not presenting yourself as a unique capsule of experience with an authentic view and important contribution, you are only learning how to follow, how to remain silent. Standing on theories and pedagogies that draw on one's unique background and focus on one's development is a key part of my philosophy.

Reading Response: Process Pedagogy and Assessment Practices

In the article "Process Pedagogy and Its Legacy" in A Guide to Composition Pedagogies, Chris Anson offers a comparison between pre-process and process pedagogy (216). He points to the change of focus from product to process, from text to learner, from teacher-centered to student-centered, and from individual effort to social dynamics. This change of focus from product to process necessarily puts the student and his development at the center of the classroom because it shifts the focus from what the student produces to how the student produces. This requires the instructor to put more attention on the student; how does the student think?; what interests the student?; what motivates the student?; what informs the student?

In a sense, this moves the academic setting in a direction of improving the basic writer as opposed to merely fostering the advanced writer. If an institution only focuses on honing the product, it is assuming that the content is already of high quality. If, however, an institution focuses on improving the writer, both the content and the product will improve as well as the student.

Concerning assessment, the two points that Yancey brings up about reliability and validity in assessment plans seems so obvious that one might forget about them. Validity means you measure what you intend to measure and reliability means you can do so consistently. If either of these measures are not present within a plan, you can neither be confident that what you measured is answering the questions you are asking nor that you have taken your measurements adequately.

Reflection: Collaborative Writing

My primary concern with this reading really started on the first page with Bruffee's three principles of collaboration. I can't get over the feeling that thought and conversation don't accomplish the same goals and thus do not operate in the same way. Thought allows clarification within the scope of knowledge or experience that is unique to the thinker, whereas conversation allows clarification among the pool of knowledge collective among those conversing. Thought is collaborative, but thinking is confined to that which is remembered by an individual...conversation has the advantage of several memories. Perhaps, then, what is meant is that both are a form of conversation, but not the same thing. One is a conversation with one's own memory while the other is a conversation between memories.

Reading Response: Collaborative Writing

Bruffee's three principles for collaborative learning:

1. Because thought is internalized conversation, thought and conversation tend to work largely in the same way
2. If thought is internalized public and social talk, then writing of all kinds is internalized talk made public and social again. If thought is internalized conversation, then writing is internalized conversation re-externalized.
3. To learn is to work collaboratively to establish and maintain knowledge among a community of knowledgeable peers the process that Richard Rorty calls ‘“socially justifying belief.”’ (37)

The core of this rests on our belief that thought and conversation operate "largely in the same way." I may need to do further readings to understand what is meant by this, but it doesn't intrinsically strike me that thought and conversation serve the same purpose. Further, I would suggest that there is a difference between a conversation in which one person functions as "both parties" conversing and a conversation where two discrete minds (which cannot know thoughts of the other) function as separate parties.

Still, perhaps the point is not so much the outcome of thought and conversation but merely the act itself. That is, they operate "largely in the same way" only in that a conversation occurs. From this, I suppose there can be some usefulness in mapping similarities between thought and conversation as a way of bridging a gap between those who work alone and those who work together such that we can make the two feel similar and thus help students take advantage or either mode of collaboration (assuming we call thought collaboration...which I suppose we do given our social nature). If we can make them FEEL the same while acknowledging advantages of either mode, we can help students comfortably switch between modes depending on their needs.