Brandt, D. (1998). Sponsors of literacy. College
Composition and Communication, 49(2), 165-185.
Author:
Deborah Brandt – see essays “Remembering Reading” and “Accumulating Literacy”
and books Literacy in American Lives
(2001) and Literacy and Learning:
Reflections on Writing, Reading, and Society (2009) a collection of essays
and talks; Professor Emerita of English at UWisc-Madison. Focused research on
literacy learning and the social contexts of mass literacy, primarily in
relationship to economic change. dlbrandt@wisc.edu
Date:
In 1998, the Internet was just getting useful and accessible for me. This study
could be done again with people born since 1980 – social networking sites
became popular when I was ending college, and people younger than me are sure
to have different literacy sponsors from childhood beyond my Texas Instruments –
Speak and Spell or Teddy Ruxspin.
Research Questions:
To where does the tracing of sponsors of literacy in the 20th centuries
through accounts of “ordinary Americans recalling how they learned to write and
read” lead (p. 167)?
Thesis – “The concept of sponsorship
is so richly suggestive for exploring economies of literacy and their effects”
(p. 167).
Context (need for
study): “The field of writing studies has had
much to say about individual literacy development. Especially in the last
quarter of the 20th century, we have theorized, researched, critiqued,
debated, and sometimes even managed to enhance the literate potentials of
ordinary citizens as they have tried to cope with life as they find it….But
rarely are they systematically related to the local conditions and embodied
moments of literacy learning that occupy so many of us on a daily basis” (166).
This essay begins to make the connection of connecting literacy to economic
development since ca 1910.
Methods:
100+ interviews of people born between 1900 and 1980 (surely there were children who could have been a great help that were
born after 1980, but where would you stop?) where they recounted memories
of people and motivations involved in their learning processes. Recognizing
patterns lead to tracking cultural attitudes and
Findings:
169 – “(1)…Despite ostensible democracy in educational chances, stratification
of opportunity continues to organize access and reward in literacy learning;
(2)…sponsors contribute to what is called ‘the literacy crisis,’ that is, the perceived
gap between rising standards for
achievement and people’s ability to meet hem; and (3)…encounters with
literacy sponsors, especially as they are configured at the end of the 20th
century, can be sites for the innovative rerouting of resources into projects
of self-development and social change.”
Institutional competition creates forms
of literacy. After World War II, the economy went “from a thing-making,
thing-swapping society to an information-making, service-swapping society”
(173). Sponsors “raise literacy stakes in struggles for competitive advantage”
(178). They also can create new literacy requirements and make old ones
obsolete or inadequate.
Multiple identities and sheer access
to literacy events and literate people creates a hybrid of literacy formations.
When people are in ideological environments where they are comforted, pleased, or even threatened, they are sanctioned into certain literacies as well
as reinforcing that ideology. Brandt points to conservative forces,
specifically “Christian conversions and civic participation” (182).
Discussion (my
connection): The sponsors, the agents of literacy,
are motivated by interest convergence. The sponsor provides or withholds literacy
in order to gain some advantage. Isn’t it Jesse Jackson who coined the phrase
(if that doesn’t scream literacy = money!) “cash language”? Once companies or
governments hired lawyers to deliberate with union leaders, it caused major
need for (at least some of) the workers to labor over paperwork and go to
conferences about union practice and learn legalese – rough way of pushing down
on the lower caste.
Brandt positions teachers as the
brokers, the middlemen between the buyers and sellers of literacy. I know enough
to learn to play by the rules, but I believe that talk about the inequities and
how the system of sponsors has shaped the practices of many can turn the tide,
even a bit.
Near the end, Brandt calls not only
for the study of how individuals pursue literacy, but also how literacy pursues
them – this is exciting, to think of literacy as a beast lurking in the woods,
oozing through pipes, or engulfing cities. Literacy is on the move, but it has
masters who train it to feed and indulge only in certain places…
Emig, J. (1971). The Composing Process of
Twelfth Graders. National Council of Teachers of English: Urbana, IL.
Author:
Janet Emig - Teacher in high schools and colleges, doctorate at Harvard
but couldn’t find someone to chair her dissertation. ’64, but had difficulty
publishing Composing Processes of 12th Graders (not published until
1971 by NCTE) – looked down on her as a woman and in the study of school
children as womanly; other writing was essayistic, often for writing across the
curriculum (reason not necessarily research).
Date:
Early 1970s growing interest in composing processes, beginning movement –
following Braddock, Lloyd-Jones, and Schoerr’s call for more rigorous and
scientific numbers on composition research.
Research Questions:
What can be learned from investigating the writing processes of 8 12th
graders? Do these 8 students share dimensions of process? How much is unique?
Context (need for
study): Little exists in researching the
composing processes of youths.
Methods:
8 diverse (16 and 17-year-olds) representatives of six different types of high
schools in Chicago area used for case studies. Looked at school records of 5
participants. Students were characterized by teachers, and each met with the
researcher 4 times: 1) conversation and recorded composing aloud, given the
writing prompt for the next week; 2) recall prewriting between sessions, told
that the next week would be asked to recall all writing ever done with writing
samples; 3) gave a writing autobiography including reading experiences, write
and bring back all pieces of an imaginative piece; 4) recall the planning and
recount all of the process experiences in creation. All sessions were recorded
and transcripts made.
Findings:
54 – “For Lynn, starting to write presents a paradox. Her decision to begin is a swift, and seemingly painless, one. Her enactment of a first sentence, however,
is an arduous, even tortuous, matter.” Lynn behaves and wants to please adults,
and writing is done on THEIR time. Lynn does not use the term “revise,” opting,
instead, for “rewrite”.
Lynn and the others seemed more at
ease with extensive rather than reflective modes, apparently for personal likely
for curricular reasons and (lack of) experiences.
Two boys would write out career
plans or autobiographies for college applications but no other self-sponsored
writing; four girls are more self-sponsored writers. None have had a male
teacher of English. Bradford is the only boy who seems comfortable writing
poetry; he is also the only participant who regularly and voluntarily outlines
his work during composition.
78 – None of the students encounter
peer writing relationships in school, but peers are the primary motivation for
self-sponsored writing.
91 – Reflexive writing takes
students longer, often as poetry, with self as the main audience. Extensive
writing is seen as school-based, where the teacher is usually the audience, and
“the attitude toward the field of discourse is often detached and reportorial.”
School-sponsored writing evaluation seems
to focus on “the accidents rather than the essences of discourse” (p 93). What a failure!
Discussion (my
connection): Chapter 3, “The Composing Process:
Mode of Analysis” is an interesting conceptualization of the environment and decisions
that one must make in composing, including behaviors and hesitations, moments
and motivators. Emig claims “almost every sentence [of the chapter’s
theoretical sketch] contains of implies hypotheses upon which one could spend a
lifetime in empirical research” (44).
In looking at
Lynn’s case study, I see some of my regular school practices, especially the
general lack of prewriting. I am also an oral composer, thinking things over in
my head so much before I start. When work is timed, this is done with scenes of
me looking up, away from the work as if I were speaking to someone or a group
of people. To me, so much of language is oral, that the writing feels like an
extra step. I have experienced, recently, though, in my creative processes a resurgence
of feeling and thinking through writing in a notebook. There were multiple “highly
intelligent” students in the study, and I think that writing practices, often
dictated by schools (where they see themselves as valuable) do not place much
emphasis on the process of writing, but rather the final product, but if you
look at the outline and read through Chapter 3, there is MUCH more to writing
than the final output, but standardized tests don’t measure them – and it would
prove inefficient – uneconomical as Brandt might suggest.
Avoiding the
term “revision” and much of the comparison with adult writers (the response of
Jerome Bruner on page 56) is reminiscent of Sommers, N. (1980). Revision strategies of student writers
and experienced adult writers. I had to change some of my wording in the
findings, having written with more “confidence” than Emig, who wrote “assigning
causality is especially hazardous in matters of teaching and learning” (p. 73) –
there are too many factors in a person’s unique life to narrow one cause effect
relationship down to the final answer.
Perl, S. (1979). The composing processes of
unskilled college writers. Research in the Teaching of English,13(4), 317-336.
Do the citation for Cross-Talk in Comp Theory
Author:
Sondra Perl – English Department at Lehman College. She lists academic
interests in writing, teaching, creative
nonfiction, ethnography, women's studies, holocaust studies, cross-cultural
dialogue, urban education, collaborative projects, writing across the
curriculum (ought to be similar or informative for Nancy Sommers’ book about
the Harvard students). http://www.lehman.edu/academics/arts-humanities/english/faculty-perl.php
She looks at attitudes, processes, and teaching of writing.
Date:
Early 1970s growing interest in composing processes, following in the lines of
Britton, 1975; Burton, 1973; Cooper, 1974; Emig, 1967,1971).
Research Questions:
“(1) How do unskilled writers write? (2) Can their writing processes be
analyzed in a systematic, replicable manner? and (3) What does an increased
understanding of their processes suggest about the nature o composing in
general and the manner in which writing is taught in the schools?”
Context (need for study):
Early 1970s growing interest in composing process. Response to 1963, Braddock,
Lloyd-Jones, and Schoer calling for direct observation and case studies. Need
for non-narrative descriptions of composing processes for graphic evidence that
describes patterns and move from experimental research into controlled
experimental studies. No study has focused primarily on unskilled writers.
Methods:
Fall semester of 1975-76 school year at a CUNY community college. Students
selected from writing samples indicating “unskilled” proficiency. Each met for
five 90-minute sessions with researchers. Four sessions focused on writing with
students (composing aloud). One session allowed for talking through individual writing
profile. Three kinds of data: written product, composing recordings, responses
in interview. Processes were coded.
Findings:
One of the participants, Tony, would stop and reread all or part of almost
every sentence he wrote – indicated an overall rhythm of composition. Tony
showed a repeatable and suitable way of organizing and breaking down the
writing task. His writing, however, was generalized and when ideas were more
distant from his personal experience, the task became more difficult. He
regularly voiced and read through in complete ideas and thoughts, but he would
only partially transcribe the full sentence. When finished, Tony would distance
himself from the writing; he did not even want to comment on it.
Labeling of “remedial” implies
something is wrong and a remedy is necessary. Because so much emphasis is
placed on the writing fitting rules of standard code, students begin to see
writing as “cosmetic” and “concern for correct form supersedes development of
ideas” (book p 38).
Teachers should look more to
identifying beneficial and oppositional student processes in their writing
rather than jamming another message of writing instruction to “fix” a problem.
Composing is a mixture of “construction
and discovery” (book p 35). Even though there is significant attention paid to
editing during the writing processes, “serious syntactic and stylistic problems
remained in their finished drafts” (book p 35) – stopping the work flow and
more concerned with finding errors rather than idea generating: “What they seem
to lack as much as any rule is a conception of editing that includes
flexibility, suspended judgment, the weighing of possibilities, and the
reworking of ideas” (book p 38)..
Discussion (my
connection): “The conclusion here is not that Tony
can’t write, or that Tony doesn’t know how to write, or that Tony needs to
learn more rules: Tony is a writer with a highly consistent and deeply embedded
recursive process. What he needs are teachers who can interpret that process
for him, who can see through the tangles in the process just as he sees meaning
beneath the tangles in his prose, and who can intervene in such a way that
untangling his composing process leads him to create better prose” (book p.
31). – This is what everyone needs, right? Tony has been so beat down with “school
way of writing,” struggling to employ methods he partially remembers, and his
consistent mistakes that he reads over are common for students in classrooms. I
can see this continued
I have a visual lesson in which I
use videos to talk about the difference between revising and editing, but I had
only really thought of it as an activity near the “end”. I obviously edit and
revise along the way, and to think about
students who have an even cloudier vision of their own processes, it pushes me
to be that teacher who exposes and names processes rather than tries to get
something new from my students or even to pretty it up.
http://youtu.be/D1ZYhVpdXbQ - Gene Kelly
http://youtu.be/rJBOZqZGNhk - Edit,
Usher
http://youtu.be/ZAW3-F8oOdU - Revision,
BMW
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