CHI TIẾT NGHIÊN CỨU …
Tiêu đề
Literacy, identity and the "successful" student writer
Tác giả
Carpenter W.; Falbo B.
Năm xuất bản
2006
Source title
Identity Papers: Literacy and Power in Higher Education
Số trích dẫn
9
DOI
Liên kết
Tóm tắt
What would it mean for the field of composition to study the literacy habits of undergraduate students identified as talented, privileged, and academically successful? What new information can this group of writers tell us about the relationship between literacy development and education? How might our pedagogies and our theories benefit from examining the ways in which these students discuss their literacies? In this chapter, we investigate these questions by examining the written literacy narratives of students working as undergraduate Writing Associates at Lafayette College, our home institution. We seek to contribute a different perspective to current research in literacy studies, which, as the programs from the most recent Watson Conference and CCCC demonstrate, has come to focus almost exclusively on nontraditional students. Instead, we focus on the literacy habits of students who are reasonably well prepared to do academic writing, but whose (mostly successful) experiences with writing have not encouraged them to reflect on the different identities they construct (and have constructed) through literacy and at various literacy sites. Our aim, then, in looking at writing by "successful" students, is not to gather "tips" on good writing, but rather to think broadly about the means and ends of academic writing. Although we think our project offers a different perspective, we nonetheless see ourselves working in the tradition of scholars such as David Bartholomae (2001), Mariolina Salvatori (1988), and Min-Zhan Lu (1999), who have made powerful arguments about students' texts as complex cultural artifacts that invite and demand sustained critical interpretation. 1 Though our students differ, in particular, from the kinds of students Bartholomae and Lu write about, like them, and like Salvatori, we are similarly concerned with the ways in which our students negotiate academic discourse, and we try to situate that struggle with respect to the politics of speaking (or not) in the academy. In addition, there are a number of longitudinal studies that have been important precedents for ours, including Marilyn Sternglass' Time to Know Them: A Longitudinal Study of Writing and Learning at the College Level (1997), and, more recently Lee Ann Carroll's Rehearsing New Roles: How College Students Develop as Writers (2002) and Nancy Sommers' project on undergraduate writing at Harvard (2003). Though the discussion in this chapter is not the result of a longitudinal study, it does mark for us the beginning of a long-term project about the ways in which participation in our College Writing Program changes the Writing Associates' perceptions of themselves as readers and writers. Our reading of the narratives, so far, has been based on three questions: How do new Writing Associates describe themselves as readers and writers? How do returning Writing Associates describe themselves as readers and writers? To what do new Writing Associates attribute the changes they see? Like Sternglass, Carol, and Sommers, then, we are looking at how writers develop over time, but for the purposes of the present discussion, we focus exclusively on students' reflections on their writing. We are not interested in the quality of writing in the narratives, but rather in how our students write about writing. Briefly, then, here is some background about our institution and our program. Lafayette College is a private, highly selective, liberal arts college in Easton, Pennsylvania, with a student population of approximately 2,200. Lafayette has always been a competitive institution, but in recent years, the College has raised its admission standards, admitting students with higher GPAs and standardized test scores. Many of these students identify themselves and have been identified as highly literate, meaning that they have always been recognized for good critical thinking, reading and writing skills. Since 1985, the College Writing Program has recruited and trained 30 to 50 Writing Associates a year to work with professors teaching the College's first-year and sophomore seminars and other writing courses. Writing Associates come from all majors and generally have at least 3.0 GPAs. In addition, they have excellent communication skills, and they participate in a range of campus activities. Writing Associates occupy a unique position on campus, as they are simultaneously students, peer readers, and professional representatives of the CWP. They function not as editors or proofreaders, but as informed and intelligent readers who help students formulate tough questions about their own writing. Writing Associates also provide faculty with invaluable feedback on assignment design, student progress, and strategies for the evaluation of written work. (Writing Associates do not grade student work.) The College Writing Program sponsors a summer workshop each year as well as weekly staff meetings in which Writing Associates discuss the theory and practice of writing. In preparation for the summer workshop, new and returning Writing Associates alike compose literacy narratives-histories of their experiences as readers and writers. The work of reflecting on their literacy histories helps prepare Writing Associates to see their peers as individual writers who likewise have literacy histories of their own. Our chapter, a qualitative study of more than 130 literacy narratives written between 1999 and 2001, compares narratives by new and returning Writing Associates in order to show how participation in the College Writing Program shapes their identities as readers and writers. For most, working as a Writing Associate complicates what they previously assumed about the work of writing. New Writing Associates' narratives tend to be success stories about how they have always had a "natural" talent for writing, or how their perseverance in the face of a demanding teacher or assignment eventually paid off in the form of a good grade, an award, or a lesson about why writing is an important skill. Returning Writing Associates' narratives focus on students' revised assumptions about writing as a process over which they have varying degrees of control. Most returning Writing Associates attribute changes they see in their writing, or their thinking about writing, to interactions with their peers. As one returning Writing Associate wrote, "by examining others' writing, the Writing Associate also ends up examining his or her own written work. . . . I learned that writing is not an absolute process" (Menon 2001). © 2006 Utah State University Press. All rights reserved.
Từ khóa
Tài liệu tham khảo
Salvatori M., Toward a Hermeneutics of Difficulty, (1988); Lu M.-Z., Professing Multiculturalism: The Politics of Style in the Contact Zone, (1999)
Nơi xuất bản
Utah State University Press
Hình thức xuất bản
Book chapter
Open Access
Nguồn
Scopus