Composition, Discourse and Technology

Composition theory and practice Has taken different directions in the last 40 years, with a shifting focus on  Writers/learners  Texts  Contexts

Focus on Writers/Learners  Pedagogies: Expressivist Constructivist Progressivist  Emphasis on the writing process

Learner/writer-focused practices  emphasizing informal writing; generating ideas before worrying about final form;  paying attention to the composing process--to the idea that writers move through cycles of inventing ideas, planning, drafting, and revision, that the process isn't linear, that new discoveries may be made at any moments in this process, even during revision, and that editing is a separate process that should not be confused with composing;  working in writing groups with readers who can respond to the ideas a writer is expressing and the ways in which the writer is expressing them  suggesting teacher response that focuses first on helping students extend and elaborate on their ideas and become more fluent writers

Focus on texts  Pedagogies: formalist rhetorical modes current-traditional genre  Emphasis on form (the 5 paragraph essay); modes (persuasion, argument); recently, how genres develop from purpose and setting

Recent text-focused practices  looking at classroom and community genres and identifying some of their key features;  seeing how such features arise from the shared purposes and assumptions of particular communities of people;  focusing students' attention not only on what is being said, but on why and how in the texts they read and the texts they write;  developing rubrics and templates that represent the shared purposes and assumptions of members of the classroom community about classroom genres while discovering and naming the assumptions behind the genres that predominate in various academic discourse communities;  using such rubrics in writing response groups as well as for teacher response

Focus on Contexts  Pedagogies: social-constructionist; social-epistemic (seeing knowing as social) critical pedagogy (changing existing social relations) cultural studies (seeing meaning in all cultural practices, in everyday life)  Focus on social contexts for writing and knowledge

Context-focused practices  emphasizing the notion of discourse communities and inviting students to look at the shared ways of talking, thinking and valuing in these communities;  considering the different ways in which writing is used and shaped in different academic communities across the disciplines;  paying attention to the sort of community that is created within the writing classroom itself;  responding to student writing in terms of questions and choices related to the writer's goals and purposes within a particular community, rather than with directives about what to do.

Discourse and Discourse Communities  “Discourse” refers to language in context  We all acquire the discourses—the ways of using language—of the communities in which we’re insiders (in homes or workplaces, among friends).  A discourse community-focused pedagogy combines attention to key aspects of meaning-making and communication within a context.

Discourses and Functions of Language  Discourses are always context-specific, but they all accomplish several functions of language necessary to meaning-making and communication (Halliday): the ideational function of naming the world and making statements and propositions about it (what); the interpersonal function of maintaining a connection to listeners/readers (why); and the textual function of creating an evolving text, spoken or written, that’s appropriate to the purposes and setting (how).  All effective communication requires that insiders to a setting develop shared understandings for each of these functions—to create shared knowledge, to negotiate shared purposes, and to do so in shared ways within a context.

Discourses and Technologies With new technological resources for communication, we develop new expectations, within newly constituted (online) communities, for  What can be talked about (a new lexicon, a range of new understandings)  Why (the purposes of exchanges of different types)  How (the shapes and forms and genres of exchanges within new multi-media)

Teaching Writing in the Present Technological Moment  Technology is changing people’s shared knowledge, their shared purposes, and their shared ways of communicating  As writing teachers, we can both guide our students as they engage in new forms of meaning-making and invite our students to study how the shared knowledge, purposes, and ways of their communities are being reshaped with technology See Corrente, “Dragon Court World,” on electronic reserves