Blog #11: The LAST Blog

Well, I promised a last blog. The problem is that we haven't read anything, so there's not really anything to respond to, and as I'm sitting here thinking about "the last blog," all I think of is Donna Summer's "Last Dance."

The song is ancient, but DJs at weddings play it all the time as the last dance of the evening, so you may have heard it before. It sort of signals that the wedding reception is over.

Oddly enough, when I went on YouTube to find a link, I also found other songs that are recommended to use as last dance songs.

And that still doesn't give me anything to ask you to write about in this blog.

So . . .

Write about the favorite genre you have used this semester and why you liked this genre.  Or write about the least favorite genre and why it was your least favorite genre. 

OR -- Write about the process of writing your first resume.  What prompted you to write it? What job were you applying for? What were your greatest challenges?  Did you get the job? Was it because of the resume? 

And that's it. I'm out for the semester.

Blog #10: So we have a research paper. Where are YOU headed?

So . . .  I'm back from Seaport Village. We got lots of amazing cheeses at Venessimo and also some chocolates from some amazing chocolate place. I don't know what that's called, but the chocolates were amazing.

There are only a few more blogs.
You might have done ENOUGH blogs, but a few extra points never hurt anyone, right? And this one could be useful.

This blog isn't based on a reading. Think about your research paper.

What discourse community/community of practice do you want to research?
Why? What is it about this community that interests you?
What do you already know about this community?

Where are you headed? What will you research?
Remember, this isn't about how great the community is or what this community does. This research paper is about the community's communicative practices.

How do you want to approach this paper? What do you want to learn about the communicative practice?

How are these communicative practices acquired? (Swales, Johns, Gee, Wardle)
What does it take for members to enculturate themselves? (Johns, Gee, Wardle, Mirabelli)
What literacies to members need to acquire? (Mirabelli)
What is this community's "way of being" (Johns, Gee, Wardle)
What does it cost to take on this community? (Wardle, Johns)
What values are reinforced by this community? (Devitt, Wardle, Johns)
How do readers need to see themselves? How do they need to consider authorities? How do they need to align themselves? (Wardle)

There are other questions you could ask based on the readings, but I'll leave it for you to come up with those. 

Who will you interview? What can you observe? What genres does this community have?

And so on. And so on. Begin imagining this paper.  And brainstorm.

Blog #9: Wardle and Work (Who Are You?)

NOTE:  Write Blog #8 or Blog #9 or both for extra points.

All semester we've been talking about identity kits and figuring out how to adapt to audiences and genres. Why?

Because when you leave SDSU, you will have to create an identity kit suitable for whatever job or role you play in your next life. 

And you have to figure out how to new audiences and write new ways and use new genres. 

In a way, all our experiments with op/eds and narratives and blogs and journals and reflections is about looking what other people do, feeling uncomfortable, and trying something new. Because that is what you will do when you leave this wonderful place. (Yes, I really do think it's wonderful. That's why I'm still here.)


When you leave here, you'll go to grad school or you'll get a job, hopefully in your desired career field, and you will have to figure out what it is that you need to be and how you need to be that. 

I can't teach you that. But I can ask you to think critically about what it takes to learn to do that. 

That's what Elizabeth Wardle talks about in "Identity, Authority, and Learning to Write in New Workplaces."

Like Mirabelli, Wardle asserts that learning to communicate in new situations and new communities of practice is complex. It requires learning and conforming to "conventions, codes, and genres" (521). It requires a new way of being which can challenge your sense of identity as well as your values. It asks you to take on a way of being.  And that can cost you.

And if that sounds a lot like Gee and Devitt and Johns, well, that was on purpose. 

Take a look at what Wardle says about identity and authority and learning how to adapt in a new workplace. Talk about what you will have to do in your desired career or talk about the challenges of learning how to adapt in your internship or talk about what it will cost you. Or synthesize some of the ideas we've been working on.

Or something.

Blog #8: What are YOU Learning to Read?

NOTE:  Respond to Blog #8 or Blog #9 or both, for extra points.

My friends took me out to dinner to celebrate after I finished grad school. The server asked us what we were celebrating, and after I told her, she said that she finished grad school a year ago and was still looking for other work. I felt sorry for and afraid for me.

It's not that I thought the server was stupid or anything, but a service job was NOT what I went to grad school for. I guess I just wanted something better than that.

Am I a snob? I'm not sure. Do I dismiss the skills of servers? No. Honestly, I see this as very hard work. I've worked in service industry jobs before, and I don't want to work in those jobs again. But it does sort of seems like going backward, away from what I wanted to do. 

Do I see the service industry as less prestigious than working for a university? Maybe. I'm not sure. Now that I work at SDSU, I don't see my job as prestigious in any way. And I do know servers in high-end restaurants who make more money than I do. 

But I digress, as I often do.  In "Learning to Serve," Tony Mirabelli rejects the common assumption that service worker jobs are low-skilled professions that contribute very little to society and sets out to show that while the language used in a diner is DIFFERENT than language used in a classroom or one of Swales' fancy discourse communities, that doesn't mean that it is less complex. And like Gee, who talks about identity kits, he shows that language isn't just limited to words, either written or spoken. He illustrates these ideas by describing how he had to learn to read menus AND people in his work as a server at Lou's Italian Restaurant while he worked on his own grad school degree.

In this blog, you can respond to Peter Drucker's assertion that "interactive service workers lack the necessary education to be 'knowledge workers'" (145) or to others who consider service work to be "'mindless,' involving routine and repetitive tasks that require little education" (145) because these jobs don't require identification of problems, ability to solve those problems, or other complex abilities.  In fact, the National Skills Standards Board has determined that it only takes a ninth grade education to be a server (Mirabelli 145). 

Or you can compare Mirabelli's ideas about literacy to something you have experienced in your own life. 

Blog #7: My Identity Kit (Real or Mushfake?)

I am an introvert. I'm incredibly nervous in large crowds. I don't adapt well to new social situations--or job situations. I feel awkward. Like I don't know how to fit in. Because I don't know how to fit in. Like I don't know how to behave. Because I don't know how to behave. 

So I sit back and observe: What are the existing power structures? When do people talk? When don't they talk? What kinds of things do people say? What kind of vocabulary do they use? How loudly do they speak? How do they dress? How do they walk? 

And then, gradually, I venture into conversations, a few people at a time. 
By the time people actually notice me, I have mastered some things, and I seem like I know what I am doing, so people have no idea how awkward I actually feel. That's good. 

I was terrified my first day as an instructor of RWS100 at SDSU. I was a grad student, and I felt like I had no idea what I was doing. Because I literally had no idea what I was doing. But I knew I needed to look what I was doing. 

I hadn't had a chance to observe other professors teach RWS 100, so I had no idea what identity I should adopt. I had observed what other professors wear, so I picked out an outfit accordingly. I wanted to appear smart and professional. Current but not too young. Or too old. 

I wanted to project a knowledgeable yet approachable tone. But I wasn't sure exactly how to do that. I didn't want any of my students to know this was my first day in the classroom, and so I had to pretend like I knew what I was doing. I didn't lie, but I did try to project a note of confidence, as if I belonged in the classroom. I was pretty sure it was obvious that I didn't feel that way, but maybe not. My students were all freshmen who had no idea who they needed to be either. 

And then gradually I figured out who I needed to be by conferring with other professors, by finding mentors, by reading pedagogical theories and stories about teaching, by experimenting in the classroom, by actually interacting with students and colleagues. 

There's a point to this story. In order to seem like a teacher, I needed to create what James Paul Gee identifies as "sort of an 'identity kit' which comes complete with appropriate costume and instructions on how to act, talk, an often write, so as to take on a particular role that others will recognize" (119). Until I know how to do that, I need to pretend, to engage in what Gee calls "mushfake discourse."



In this blog, talk about your experience in acquiring a new discourse or develop a new identity kit, how you pretended, how you felt, what you did. Or how someone helped you.  Talk about mushfaking and how mushfaking turned into the real deal. Or how you are still mushfaking. I am an introvert. I'm incredibly nervous in large crowds. I don't adapt well to new social situations--or job situations. I feel awkward. Like I don't know how to fit in. Because I don't know how to fit in. Like I don't know how to behave. Because I don't know how to behave.

Blog #6: Discourse Communities and the Cost of Affiliation

Steve Jobs didn't finish college. Neither did Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg or John Glenn or Robert Frost. These fabulously successful individuals didn't need it. And yet, statistically, most successful people have complete college. Of course a college degree has no guarantees, but in the last recession, people with college degrees didn't suffer nearly as much as people without them. And most people agree that education plays a significant role in moving up the success ladder--even if what the end up doing has nothing to do with their college degree. (There are many ways to define success, but for the purposes of this discussion, I'm saying enough money to live comfortably and meaningful work.)

The thing is, the people at who most need to move up the success ladder often don't finish college. That has led a lot of scholars to ask why and to create initiatives to improve graduation rates for at-risk students, those kids from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, kids who are the first in their families to go to college.  

I didn't come from a rich background, but my family just assumed that I would go to college. High school graduation was no big deal in my house; it was what you had to do to get to college. And I wasn't done with school until I had a bachelor's degree. That kind of mindset keeps kids like me in school even when they encounter challenges that might keep them from finishing. College is just what you do.

Every day I encounter students who don't have that kind of background; their parents don't understand what they need to do to finish, so they pressure them to attend multiple family gatherings that keep them from studying or to work more hours. Without family support, either financial or emotional, they falter, and many of them just give up, believing college isn't for them.

In "Why Poor Students Struggle," published in the New York Times, New York city high school teacher and educational coach Vicki Madden reviews completion rate statistics and suggests that the biggest challenge to finishing school may be that "students have to come to terms with the unspoken transaction: exchanging your old world for a new world, one that doesn't seem to value where you came from." 

This article reminded me of SDSU professor Ann Johns' discussion in "Discourse Communities and Communities of Practice." She argues that when students become "active participants" in a discourse community, they often must make sacrifices that "can create personal and social distance between them and their families and communities" (511). To fit into a new discourse community, they have to take on the "values, language, and genres" of that community. This claim is similar to Devitt's claim that when writers take up a genre, they also take up the ideologies, values, and norms of that genre (339). 

So--in this week's blog post, you can discuss the ideas Johns and Madden toss out, or you can take a minutes to consider your process of immersion in an academic discourse community or your adjustment to university life or how you navigate between the way you need to be in your family and the way you need to be while you are here at SDSU.

Blog #5: A Discourse Community? What's that?

So, we've been reading op-eds and JSTOR Daily articles. What a breath of fresh air. They're written to make you want to read them, complete with pictures. 

Now I want you to take a look at something that is pretty much the opposite of creative: John Swales and the Discourse Community, available on Bb.

Yes, despite the fact that Swales got his own postage stamp (I don't know if that's real or not), this is not riveting reading. 

That's why we're going to talk about it in class first. To try to make it less painful. Or less boring or something.

I personally think Swales, a linguist who studies patterns of writing, is a genius, but I also personally think that his writing, especially this article, is pretty stiff. (If you REALLY want it, I can find it, and we can discuss it at length. That is, if you REALLY want it.) 

The thing is, everything we read about the concept ofdiscourse community is going to go right back to what Swales described in this excerpt, so if we want to have a meaningful conversation about discourse community, we have to start here.

At any rate, in your blog, I want you to take some time to define the concept of discourse community based on reading Swales. Keep in mind that the concept of discourse communityis NOT the same thing as the concept of primary audience. 

 

 

And then I want you to identify a group which might qualify as a discourse community based on Swales' six characteristics and analyze it based on those characteristics, just as he does for his After your analysis, do you still think this is a discourse community?  

And yeah. That's about it for now.