Thursday, March 5, 2009

"Learning to Read Biology" by Christina Haas (Precis 3)

Why do colleges require students to take various courses that seem unrelated to their major? Why does it always feel like students must jump through unnecessary hoops to acquire a degree? Christina Haas’ investigation shows that different college courses benefit students by exposing them to multitudes of discourse training that cohesively develop college level rhetoric. Her longitudinal, in-depth research focusing on Eliza beginning at her freshmen year explains the gradual changes that ultimately suggest these unnecessary hoops are actual useful if not necessary for acquiring academic discourse.


In Eliza’s freshmen year, Haas discovers that Eliza’s reading of science courses is geared exclusively on preparing for tests. In English courses however, she read perceiving the text as a “source of information to extract and more of a place in which someone says something” (363). According to Haas, most incoming freshmen perceive text as autonomous—that is the belief “that academic texts [are] discrete, highly explicit, even “timeless” entities functioning without contextual support from author, reader, or culture” (589). There is no connection made between the author to the book, at times students will explain the ideas from their reading saying “the book says” rather than the “author says” (363). In her sophomore year her reading changed only in that she was aware of more points of view. She continued to see written works as autonomous texts and performed very well that year. Her reading improved significantly when she began a work study job growing protein mutants in a lab. She developed sophisticated reading techniques “skimming, reading selectively, moving back and forth through texts, reading for different purposes at different times” (366). Also, she had noticed that articles written from a particular time period were of no use to her for current scientific developments. In other words, she has identified a relationship between text and the time it was produced. By her senior year she gained greater awareness of the intertextual nature of discourse, she was able to draw connections that enhanced her understanding of the subject.


Most importantly, the changes in Eliza’s academic discourse reveal that she began to “see her own role as not simply learning the facts but of negotiating meaning” (371). Haas suspects the changes may have been influenced by the different kinds of texts that required different strategies, goals, and views of discourse (372). There are other variables in Eliza’s collegiate experience to suggest her rhetorical development was not a result of the courses required of her to take. It is undeniable however, certain tasks in English courses provided her opportunities to practice interpreting meaning. Rather than simply understanding what authors are saying, by her senior year was focused on extracting meaning and significance from text. The ability to apply different strategies and techniques to any task and see connections can certainly improve a student’s critical thinking skills—which is useful for any career.


MLA Citation

Haas, Christina. “Learning to Read Biology: One Student’s Rhetorical Development in College.”

Literacy a Critical Sourcebook. Ed. Ellen Cushman, Eugene R. Kintgen, Barry M. Kroll, Mike Rose. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2001. 358-375.

Wednesday, March 4, 2009

Lisa Delpit: The Politics of Teaching Literature Discourse. Literacy: A Critical Source Book. Cushman, Ellen. et al. New York: Bedford/St Martins, 2001



Lisa Delpit seems to agree with most of Gee’s theories. However, his notion of "people who have not been born into dominant discourses will find it exceedingly difficult, if not impossible, to acquire such a discourse...if you’re not already in, don’t expect go get in" (Delpit P546) is troublesome for her. This theory proves unethical because it permanently sets the present discourse of people within that realm throughout life. It sets a stage of impossibility and powerlessness to enhance change into a better lead life. Unlike Gee, Delpit believes this as quite the opposite. For Delpit, while she does feel that discourses may contain opposing values, there are people who overcome these obstacles. There is no door that separates discourses but there is a key to opening and obtaining others.

Delpit uses the examples of students that went beyond and excelled into other discourses through their teachers’ determinism to make them succeed, "They held visions for us that we could not imagine for ourselves...The world is tough out there and you have to be tougher" (Delpit P 549). More importantly, these teachers were not of elite, high power and dominant discourses and yet, they enabled these students to climb into another more dominant world (discourse). She makes the point that these teachers put in extra support to shape these students’ learning. Thus, illustrating that by bringing in different ideas and concepts that contribute to other races and cultures can , in fact, have a positive impact. As Delpit demonstrates with these teachers and their students, nothing is impossible. It is through the participants effort that shape and put forth the ultimate success of acquiring a more dominant discourse.

Tuesday, March 3, 2009

"Inventing the University" by David Bartholomae (Precis 2)

David Bartholomae offers a useful perspective on the challenge of students to write academic essays. Perhaps essay writing is challenging because they must invent the university. He says that the student “has to learn to speak our language, to speak as we do, to try on the peculiar ways of knowing, selecting, evaluating, reporting, concluding, and arguing that define the discourse of our community” (511). Furthermore, students must comfortably “find some compromise between idiosyncrasy, a personal history, and the requirements of convention, [and] the history of a discipline” to excel in at the university.

Using several high school student essays, he explores the ways in which the student attempts to invent the university. Generally, he discovers students must dare to speak scholarly in order to answer the imagined expectations of college professors. He is looking for the students ability to reference “commonplaces” which according to him are “controlling ideas of our composition” or “a culturally or instititutionally authorized concept or statement that carries with it its own necessary elaboration” (512). For example, a student describing a clay model attempts to use the terminology he presumes is suitable for his topic and for his readers to demonstrate his knowledgability of clay models. Problems arise when the student is caught in a tug-o-war between satisfying what he presumes his audience to know and the degree of authority he may assert as he explains his ideas. As Bartholomae says, the students must “try on a variety of voices and interpretive schemes” depending on the task at hand. Students must apply the discourse of a literary critic for one task and on another day the discourse of psychologist in another. How can we expect students to try on different discourses as if they were trying on different outfits for various occasions and expect them to find a strong original voice?

Perhaps, we can devise creative assignment tasks that condition the student to remain consciously aware of their audience. For example, we can ask the students to explain baseball to a Martian or explain the monomyth to a third grader. These creative tasks force the writer to tailor their discourse appropriately for their audience (515). The writer must employ an “imagination in which they consider themselves within the privileged discourse, on that already includes and excludes groups of readers, they must be either equal to or more powerful than those they would address” in order to “transform political and social relationships between basic writing students and their teachers” (516). Although creative assignments offer opportunity for students to improve their writing, it is impossible to eliminate the intimidation a student feels knowing their teachers are the experts on the subject. Bartholomae explains that “students have to assume privilege without having any” in order to speak effectively (516).

There seems to be magic scholarly code and somehow students must live and breathe this code to translate their ideas into acceptable university discourse. They must do this while simultaneous monitoring syntactical construction. According to Barholomae, it is a mistake to classify a writer’s level by number of syntactical errors. It is possible “students who can write reasonably correct narratives may fall to pieces when faced with more unfamiliar assignments” (522). What then can students do acquire this magic scholarly code?

Perhaps imitation is necessary like training wheels. In order to gain familiarity with scholarly discourse, imitation is possibly necessary for the unskilled or basic writer. In the struggle between establishing an authoritive voice and satisfying syntactical standards, Bartholomae seems to prefer papers with a stronger sense of voice than the syntactically coherent essays.