Gee, "Introduction" from Literacy, Discourse, and Linguistics

(Context: the day before this reading came up, the Teaching Writing class had a fairly heated argument about the role, if any, grammar plays or should play in the teaching of writing.)

Today's readings—Gee and Shuy—are tremendously enlightening in terms of the previous class discussion/argument about the role of grammar in writing instruction. It is such a clearly important and controversial issue at once, and there are pressure and contractions from so many places—tests, administrators, other teachers, etc. Everyone in the room clearly wants to help students become better writers, but we also know that there are administrative hoops to jump through. I think if any of us had the time and the right (small) number of students, and were freed of the outside pressures I've mentioned—nearly all of us would end up modeling Gee's notion of teaching writing/literacy through apprenticeship. We all seem to agree that writing without meaning does very little other than help people pass test and seem to understand a language. Clearly, this apprentice model is similar to Shuy's notion of holism in his text. I think if the scenario were ideal, again, we would probably all agree. But it isn't, and we don't. Here comes real life, as it must. What do you do when the “tip of the iceberg” elements of writing are so very poor that you simply can't get past them as a reader in order to get to that meaning? Add to that the very real notion that after a mere 15 weeks of your class, the university—the world—will expect that these students now know how to write—and unfortunately, what it means to “write” seems to be very different from a popular stance than from what we in composition understand. So the question remains, given all these less-than-ideal circumstances, what must we actually, literally do in a classroom when teaching writing over a three-month period? I don't know...

But I think that some of Gee's more political framework speaks strongly to the idea that we must just 'suck it up' and 'teach grammar'. Aside from the, well fact, that teaching grammar does nearly nothing to improve students use of grammar, some points that Gee makes paint this instruction in an even darker light. (I can't tell if I like or hate that phrase...) Gee's notion of dominant Discourses is of great importance. Every person masters many Discourses—which consist not only of saying the right thing, but of playing the right social role as you say that thing, which entails embodying the right values and beliefs, etc. Our society has perhaps an endless number of Discourses, but some—such as school Discourse—lead to the 'goods' of society. If you master those, you are and will be better off; those are dominant Discourses. They are dominant for no inherent reason; it's more a matter of the people who are already in power already have those ones mastered, so that is what they know and expect. But, as with any type of power structure, everyone cannot be on top; some must be on the bottom. Here is where this view of grammar gets dark. Gee remarks that Discourses are constantly changing, and that you cannot be “sort of” fluent in a Discourse: you are either an insider or an outsider. If you are not born intro a Discourse very similar to the dominant one, it can be very hard, if even possible, to ever acquire that Discourse. But it gets even trickier when the rules are subject to constant change. Gee compares this endless list of endlessly changing rules to a “gate” meant to keep out outsiders. Viewed in this way, the stringent (yet random?) rules of Standard English grammar can be seen as a way to let the right people in to the Dominant Discourse, while keeping the wrong people out. The only difference between this and a gated community might be that you can't see the gates. Again, I don't claim to have an answer to the issues surrounding the teaching of grammar in the light of these ideas, but I know there is something tremendously meaningful here. There is something afoot. Is it too extreme to say that setting up our school system to require the de-contextualized memorization of these rules is akin to forcing non-mainstream students to build and maintain the very gates that keep the mainstream students safe from the former's possible entry? Is it very different from forcing them to build the very fences that keep them out of the places of opportunity? I don't know, but I am sure that this idea merits more thought before we just go with a system that might be harming the very students it is pretending to help. Because remember, the students already inside this metaphorical gate—they don't really need the help with their language and grammar; the dominant Discourse is so similar to their primary Discourses that they have essentially been learning it since birth. So all this drilling is meant not for them, but as an act of charity for the students who are in danger of being left behind. Here's a hammer, kid, get to work.

Mayher, J. "Reading II"

I often tell my students at the very beginning of the semester that we are going to be readings essays, but that we will be reading them more like poems. I ask them when they consider a poem to be read. If their eyes go over every word in the poem one time, have they read it? They usually say that if it's a poem, it has to be read several times and that some type of meaning has to be found it in. I use this idea of poetic reading to talk about the texts we'll read during the semester. I don't tend to give them a lot of readings, either by page length or by number, but we do tend to read them very, very closely, and when they use them in the essays they write, I expect a level of familiarity with the texts that only comes with multiple readings and conversations, that is, with multiple attempts to create meaning. This has just become something I like to tell them, and there are many times in the semester when a student might be struggling to make connections in an essay, and I might ask how many times he or she has read the text he or she is trying to use. Very often, the difficulty comes from a reversion to the type of reading they are most familiar with: get your eyes over the page, close the book, homework's done.

I am thinking about this in terms of some of the concepts Mayher has been laying out in this second reading. There is the notion of co-construction of meaning between speaker/writer and listener/reader. He complicates the notion that “message sent=message received,” and he—rightly, I think—calls out schooling for relying on the false idea that this is or should be possible or desirable. So much of his distinctions between common and uncommonsense notions of communication remind me of Freire's banking vs. problem-posing educations, respectively. One thing Freire, a huge influence on me personally, warns us against is the notion that teaching involves the transmission of block of information from Teacher to student, that these “deposits” are to remain whole, not to be torn apart, and that the more fully the students accept them whole and then give them back to the teacher, the better the student and the better the teacher. I say Freire warns us because behind this idea lie all types of power and oppression issues: if you can convince students that this deposit is Truth, and that it is to be left unquestioned, then you can really make them believe anything, and you can exploit them endlessly.

The counter-pedagogy is what Freire calls problem-posing, and as the name suggests, it begins with the posing of problems to people, but more specifically, the problems that they encounter in their actual worlds. This clearly reflects relevance theory to some degree, if in name only. The idea is that education, or any form of communication, is only authentic if it is meaningful in the actual lives of the students. There is a whole subtext behind what we teach spoken in the way we teach. (Here is what I am adding sort of.) If our method of teaching denies true communication, then we are subtly teaching them that communication is bad, recalcitrant, punishable. Those deposits are sacred because we said so, and any attempt to subvert their authority is treasonous. For Freire, if you take away people's ability to communicate authentically, you take away their humanity. Clearly, he has much more of a political bend than Mayher, but the concepts seem so deeply interconnected, that I can't help but think of Freire frequently as I read. True communication entails what Mayher might call transaction, as opposed to interaction. If I read him right, he says that the former allows for both parties to be transformed in the communication process, whereas the latter only allows for the receiver to change. Again, for Freire, the notion of transformation is the key concept to education, to life and liberation. Mayher shows us that communication is essentially an organic process, never a static one, that both parties have a vested interest, without which, no real communication takes place.

This is why I started with my classroom. I think now that I am doing a good thing by talking to my students about reading in this way. I now have better language and theory to understand what I'm really saying though. I want them to understand that reading is an interactive process, that the goal is not just to get through it and internalize the author's main points. There is no main point on a certain level. All is interpretations. What is meaningful for them this semester is meaningful because of all types of factors going on their lives. If they read a piece again as seniors, it would have a very different effect, just as Mayher's relationship to Huck Finn changed as he read it over time. These thoughts may seems a bit rambling, but I think they point to the same idea, a main idea in Mayher's piece, which rejects the banking notion of communications and embraces an idea that interpretation is always part of communicating and that to deny this to students is to rob them of what an education is really supposed to do; it sets up a completely artificial learning environment and puts them in a world not reflective of the world we aim to equip them for.

(I will end this posting on a preposition, just for those teachers who told me not to. Fight the power.)

Bruner, J. Acts of Meaning, chapters 3 & 4

I'm going to start off on the idea of positivism again. I realize that Bruner's work is about meaning-making, not research methods per se, but I might argue that these are the same thing. What is research if not a way to make meaning out of the world we see? I keep arguing that we live in a culture that is so positivistic, it becomes unconscious and we just believe it to be the way to know things. The classic example may be medical treatments. Would you take a medicine without knowing that there had be reliable research about its effects and side-effects? Most people wouldn't. They way to be sure that only .5% of people suffered from _____. But the other side of this idea is actually important. I do in fact want to talk to some people who have tried the medicine first hand. I want to talk to a friend I trust. How bad was the dizziness? Did it go away? You know me, will I mind it? Things like that. Those are not positivistic questions; they don't rely upon certainty. They rely more upon experience, or really what Bruner might call narrative. I wonder how much more we might actually be inclined toward this more phenomenological research. How much is my claim about positivism actually untrue? Toward the end of the book, Bruner says that cultural psychology “insists that the 'methodology' of causation (read, positivism) can neither capture nor begin to plum [a culture's] historical depth. It is only through the application of interpretation that we... can do justice to the world of culture” (p. 137, my emphasis). Here we see Bruner weighing in on what positivism misses: culture. You can't test for it, weigh it, measure it. You can control for it. You can put one group in one room and give them culture, another group in another room without culture... you know, unless you're testing yogurt. This is where the Skinnerians fall short, where they paved the way for the cognitive revolution.

But I now have a different understand of that revolution and more questions as well. Yesterday I think I claimed that Bruner and Chomsky were allies in this revolution; but I now believe they are not. Yes, they both reject behaviorism strict empiricist tenets, Chomsky being much more of a rationalist. Yet, I think that Chomsky, forgive me if I'm wrong, is as much of a positivist as the behaviorists. This extends from a realization I recently had that rationalists were indeed positivist, but just got their raw material from a different place than the empiricists. I came to believe that R and E were not the major counterparts of epistemology, but that what really divided the major ways of knowing was positivism—including both R and E—and constructivism, a belief that knowledge is not a fixed commodity that exists out there but rather that it is created through the human mind and its interaction with the world and with society. This is where Bruner clearly fits in—I believe he says it himself. And this is where—again, unless I'm just wrong—Chomsky and Bruner are split. For Bruner is after meaning and Skinner and Chomsky have pretty much the same use for the concept of meaningfulness, none. Meaning, it would seem, has no place in a purely positivistic world; meaning is constructed.

I think it gets more interesting from that split. Is there a difference between truth and meaning? Because truth is the golden calf of positivism. Bruner, I think, argues that the two are the same. Narrative is a form of meaning, it reflects meaning, sure; but it creates meaning as it goes too. In this way, narrative truth is a concept that can be seen as just as valuable for understanding the world—made up of cultures, as it is—as the idea of proof. The positivists would scoff at this. If you want to understand something, you need the facts; you don't want fiction. Those are lies. But if you think about it, about stories—they don't need to be true on the level of detail to reflect great truths on the larger level. That is the whole point of fiction. We all find ourselves in situations just like this or that character in this or that story—the human element is true.

But to side with Bruner and his elevation of narrative, a constructionist would need to come back at the positivists with the idea that positivism in itself, as a way of knowing the world for sure, is a narrative. The doctor in the white coat performing CRT on two groups of subjects, looking to objectively find out which treatment works better. That is a narrative. If we want subplots, how about his funding? How about the pen in his hand which reads Welbutrin? The myth of objectivity seems almost funny when you view it as a narrative. From this perspective, from what I am calling a constructivist perspective, the most fantastic vision in the world of truth-seeking might have to be this pure positivist, for he alone is fantasizing that he is unbiased, objective, in pure contact with what is real in the world.

Mayher, J. "Language I" in Uncommon Sense

Mayher 1:

Starting from the end, my immediate thought is that I'm struck by how capitalistic our schooling is. I'm thinking of two passages near the end of Mayher's piece, about some pressure I have received from my chair to keep my grades down—or in fact to lower them, and from Mike's comment about a notion that I have always felt must be true: that if you design and teach a writing course well, there is no reason that anyone who chooses to engage should not be able to succeed well, earning at least a B or an A. (Deep breath.) At the end of Mayher's piece, he talks about the creation of standardized testing and how the answers that every gets right are thrown out; this is the best way for the tests to do their job, to show the differences between the students. Slightly earlier, he mentions that the 'uncommonsense' view of education is similar to what Mike had said, and that, “if all students are taught how to learn, there will be fewer differences among them in terms of their capacity to do so” (p. 133, his emphasis). This clearly demonstrates the democratic principles of education. And yet, it seems that schools right this principle tooth and nail. The don't want similarities; they want differences. How else will they know who is on top and who is on bottom? This is similar to how we assess academic rigor at least at my college. They want tougher grading. I am choosing to call this capitalistic because there seems to be a notion here that learning operates like capital, that it is a zero sum game: all students cannot learn well, it says. If some are rich, others must by definition be poor. I have never realized before how truly American our school system is. This to me is the very worst notion of capitalism, the underbelly of the American dream—those poor people who have to build your white picket fence.

I see no actual, logical reason that indicates that learning is capital. I can only imagine that the notion of capital is so structured into nearly everything we do in our society that it bleeds into our schooling as well. Why would it be the case that, if the course is taught well and if the students try, that all students can't do well? I now recall my first semester in grad school at BU when I was a TA for a 400 student first year undergraduate class. There were 20 TA, with 20 students each in a course co-taught by the two deans. One thing they told us up front was, the average grade in the class would be a B-. This was before even meeting a single student. This was very offensive to me. I can see the ways in which it does make sense; they are talking about the average, not predicting any one student's abilities. But still, this notion of capitalism remains. Somehow, if the students' average was too high, the teachers weren't doing there jobs. How backwards is that? I mean, a teacher's job, one would think, is to help students learn, and the better they do it, the better the students should perform; yet, if that happens and the students do perform well, now the teacher has done a bad job... What would it mean in this scenario for a teacher to have done a good job? It is ironic that this philosophy reflects what Mayher calls the “commonsense” view. Granted, there is more than a touch of irony in his naming, but the very Catch-22 notion of this idea makes it even better. Why, I wonder, do we need to view knowledge and learning as if there is a limited number in the room and that if some students have more, others must have less—I wonder if other, less capitalistic cultures have the same notions, or if it is a product of our deeper mind set. In my gut I imagine that this notion hold true in nearly all formal schooling, so my whole premise here is probably deeply flawed. If, of course, deeply interestingly fascinating...

As a parting idea, I will note that Mayher's uncommonsense view is clearly and deeply reflective of Vygotsky's zone of proximal development and of Freire's notion of resolving the student-teacher contradiction, and in those ways follows a much more socialist/neo-Marxist perspective. This is what I noticed first. It wasn't until later that I realized that what we tend to do is treat education like capital. I think this is an important insight, at least for me and my work and interests.

Bruner, J. Acts of Meaning, chapters 1&2

Wow, there is so much in here that I could respond to, I'm not sure how this will turn out. I may just jump from point to point and make very little overall sense, or I might just zero in on one idea and forget all the others. We'll all know in about five minutes. I have recently become interested in the notion that positivism is one type of epistemology, that it is the dominant epistemology of our society but by all means not the only way of knowing something. This was starting to become clear to me this spring in a course I took at Boston College on teacher research. The very notion of teacher research equally rejects and is rejected by those looking for 'the answers' in a positivistic sense. It took months, I must confess, to begin seeing the value in this type of research. But it was when I realized—no, I was told, I'll admit—that the goal of teacher research was “insight, not proof,” that I started to see the type of hold a positivistic mindset had had on me—and I considered myself to be pretty contrarian. Guess not. In light of this type of reconsidering of how we know what we know (aka epistemology) over the past few months, it is interesting to read more about the “cognitive revolution” in Bruner's book. I had known some of the pieces and major players, but I don't think I ever realized the historical context. Last semester, I had been pontificating about how the ten psychology experiments we read about in Opening Skinner's Box had reflected a notion that our 1960's collective ethic was essentially utilitarian—in that it seemed much more tolerable then for the few to suffer if it could benefit the many—whereas since then, it seems that we have taken a much more phenomenological or humanistic turn—we generally consider the individual's experience much more in deciding what is right and wrong, and we tend to think that no human suffering is permissible no matter who benefits from the outcome. I call this pontificating, but I still think it's true. After reading more specifically about the cognitive revolution, this idea makes more sense to me. I had used the language that the 'revolutions' of the sixties had paved the way for this new communal ethics, but I had been thinking of the social revolutions, not a scientific one. But it makes more sense now, and it is interesting to think about how such abstract, esoteric branches of knowledge can indeed have major societal impacts, even if unconscious ones.

I also appreciate how Bruner rejects the claim that this post-revolution way of thinking—this phenomenology as I call it—is overly relativistic. I too think that this is a deeply troubling claim. The idea of pure relativism opens the door for brutal dehumanization—the very opposite of what the phenomenologists wants. But how do you know 'when to say when'? Bruner takes this question head-on, and if I could only remember what he said, this would be a great response! Hold on... Okay, he talks about how, first, this notion of relativism—that anything goes if you believe it—is probably not a notion that anyone seriously holds, but that it is more of a criticism made from the more positivist camp toward the more constructivist camp. He points out that the construtivist/pragmatics/phenomenological camp simply asks the question, “How does this view affect my view of the world or my commitments to it” and that that questions does not need to lead to an anything-goes type of mentality. (I realize that I have yet to make sense...). What it does lead to is an “unpacking of assumptions,” and this is where I think Bruner does a nice job of countering the accusation of relativism. Along with the notion positivism, as with any blanket epistemological claim, comes a whole knapsack full of assumptions. And part of breaking free from this mindset entails tirelessly examining these assumptions... and the ones left over after that examination... and the ones left over after that examination, etc. So what I see Bruner doing here is countering this claim of relativism with the insight that all the constructivst camp does is ask questions about the certainty of positivism, of itself, etc., but it does not simply accept any notion of truth as just as valid as any other (say, Caligula's notion of truth compared to Gandhi's). That would be relativism.

So an important theme that I see emerging so far is this idea that in the post-cognitive-revolution, there has been a backlash against the more constructivist perspective that it is too easy on any old system of truth, but that this is merely an accusations. There deeper theme seems to be this last notion of unpacking assumptions as the true answer to blind positivism, no matter what you call it. When you proceed with unquestioned assumptions, you are bound to find the answers laced with bias and prejudice, no matter how pure you deem your process to be, no matter how lily white the lab coat. Only by a rigor process of unpacking assumptions can any genuine type of reality be reveal that is not a pure reflections of the very hypothesis you had hoped to find in the first place.