Final Portfolio: A Book on a Writing Major’s Understanding of Theory on Language, Literacy, and Composition Studies
Introduction
This semester in Composition Theory class has been a fast-paced adventure into a land of mind-bending meta-cognition. Basically, everything has many levels of hows and whys and what ifs, you not only have to think of how you think about things but about why you think of how you think about things.
The sort of mental dexterity required for a theories of writing and literacy course can be challenging to achieve, but it is very much worth it for any serious intellectual. A significant part of the course focused on the learning of languages and how that functions, which is of course, quite important for people who intend to make a living off of working with language, also, it's important for anyone who uses language.
Composition theory is really about how different people think and communicate in different ways and why that is, and a large amount of human conflict in the world comes from ignorance, that is, people who can't, don't or won't understand each other. An understanding of literacy can help provide the foundations for a greater understanding of humanity.
For these chapters, I've elected to provide my understandings of several theories and concepts that were covered in this course; first, Deborah Brandt's idea of literacy sponsors, then, Walter Ong's writing is a technology that restructures thought, then Charles Bazerman's disciplinary cognition, Lev Vygotsky's social learning, and, finally, Dr. Shin'ichi Suzuki's mother-tongue approach, which wasn't covered in the course, but I felt it was extremely relevant as well and I covered it thoroughly in my ethnography.
The sort of mental dexterity required for a theories of writing and literacy course can be challenging to achieve, but it is very much worth it for any serious intellectual. A significant part of the course focused on the learning of languages and how that functions, which is of course, quite important for people who intend to make a living off of working with language, also, it's important for anyone who uses language.
Composition theory is really about how different people think and communicate in different ways and why that is, and a large amount of human conflict in the world comes from ignorance, that is, people who can't, don't or won't understand each other. An understanding of literacy can help provide the foundations for a greater understanding of humanity.
For these chapters, I've elected to provide my understandings of several theories and concepts that were covered in this course; first, Deborah Brandt's idea of literacy sponsors, then, Walter Ong's writing is a technology that restructures thought, then Charles Bazerman's disciplinary cognition, Lev Vygotsky's social learning, and, finally, Dr. Shin'ichi Suzuki's mother-tongue approach, which wasn't covered in the course, but I felt it was extremely relevant as well and I covered it thoroughly in my ethnography.
Chapter 1 - Literacy Sponsors
Brandt defines a sponsor of literacy as things that "enable, support, teach, model, as well as recruit, regulate, suppress, or withhold literacy - and gain advantage by it in some way." I had never thought of a "sponsor" being something that would work against what is being sponsored. Sounds like a sponsor is something with authoritative influence in a certain area.
A sponsor of literacy, according to Deborah Brandt, according to me, is an influencing factor, for better or worse, on a person's ability to read and write. These factors, for the most part, are individuals or organizations that have something to benefit from their influence. For example, teachers get a paycheck for teaching kids the alphabet. Libraries stay in existence by loaning out books. Schools need to prove their kids can read and write in order to get funding. Companies need to teach their employees their jargon and methods of communication so they can be efficient. Etc.
The example that I thought was most interesting was Dora Lopez, who had a ridiculously limited access to things in Spanish. Driving 70 miles for newspapers? I guess that's what happens when you live in the Midwest. It had never occurred to me that things are probably pretty hard if you don't know English in this country. We don't officially have a national language, but, practically, it's English.
I guess my sponsors of literacy would be my parents, the NYS public school system, and the local library. I got read to before bed, read a lot of the young adult section of the library, and obviously had to read and write all kinds of stuff in school (okay, that's a lie, I wrote the same academic, five paragraph, boring-as-boiled-chicken essay that everyone else did). I guess school also suppressed some literacy there, because I wish I had been given the chance to write something I was really invested in and that I, frankly, liked.
Another way, and perhaps the most important, that my parents have been literacy sponsors, is that they haven't given me an ounce of trouble about going off into the big bad world as a Writing Major with an English Minor. I'm not exactly the most sought-after type of employee, but they haven't tried to push me towards anything more financially profitable.
Brandt defines a sponsor of literacy as things that "enable, support, teach, model, as well as recruit, regulate, suppress, or withhold literacy - and gain advantage by it in some way." I had never thought of a "sponsor" being something that would work against what is being sponsored. Sounds like a sponsor is something with authoritative influence in a certain area.
A sponsor of literacy, according to Deborah Brandt, according to me, is an influencing factor, for better or worse, on a person's ability to read and write. These factors, for the most part, are individuals or organizations that have something to benefit from their influence. For example, teachers get a paycheck for teaching kids the alphabet. Libraries stay in existence by loaning out books. Schools need to prove their kids can read and write in order to get funding. Companies need to teach their employees their jargon and methods of communication so they can be efficient. Etc.
The example that I thought was most interesting was Dora Lopez, who had a ridiculously limited access to things in Spanish. Driving 70 miles for newspapers? I guess that's what happens when you live in the Midwest. It had never occurred to me that things are probably pretty hard if you don't know English in this country. We don't officially have a national language, but, practically, it's English.
I guess my sponsors of literacy would be my parents, the NYS public school system, and the local library. I got read to before bed, read a lot of the young adult section of the library, and obviously had to read and write all kinds of stuff in school (okay, that's a lie, I wrote the same academic, five paragraph, boring-as-boiled-chicken essay that everyone else did). I guess school also suppressed some literacy there, because I wish I had been given the chance to write something I was really invested in and that I, frankly, liked.
Another way, and perhaps the most important, that my parents have been literacy sponsors, is that they haven't given me an ounce of trouble about going off into the big bad world as a Writing Major with an English Minor. I'm not exactly the most sought-after type of employee, but they haven't tried to push me towards anything more financially profitable.
Chapter 2 - The Act of Writing
Writing is a Technology that Restructures Thought
Ong seems to be “right” by my reckoning. Granted, almost all of what he’s saying is at
least a little bit over my head since this convoluted form of thinking about
thinking about writing is new and challenging.
I’m liable to agree with most of what everyone else says since I lack
the authority. I can say with confidence
that Ong is not a man of concision.
“The term ‘illiterate’ itself suggests that persons
belonging to the class it designates are deviants, defined by something they
lack” p.19
I agree with this, Ong raises a good point about how people who
can read view those who cannot. Being
illiterate is like having a disease, there is something wrong with illiterate
people; they need to be helped so that they can be literate. Literacy is viewed as being unquestionably a
good thing by those who had assimilated it into their lives and thoughts.
“it is impossible to
‘pin down’ an event p.20
I definitely understand this – it’s the problem of every writer
and every artist; doesn’t matter if the event in questions is real or imagined
or some combination of both. It is truly
impossible to communicate exactly what we want to. The process of communicating from one mind to
another is almost always flawed and it’s the working with these flaws, learning
how to manipulate our mediums, that we spend our lives working on.
“writing destroys
memory. Those who use writing will
become forgetful, relying on an external source for what they lack in internal
resources. Writing weakens the mind.”
p.21
I wouldn’t be too surprised if this is the case, but if we’re
using less brainpower for memorization and things like that, we are logically
using of extra power and space for other things. Maybe it allows for a broader but less
in-depth knowledge base. Maybe it also
takes away some of our confidence in our memories which is why we write things
down and refer to them often, maybe that’s why the written word, in most cases,
holds more authority than the spoken word?
“a written text is
basically unresponsive” p.21
True. But this is why we
use texts as supplemental resources for education in addition to having
teachers/mentors/professors/experts who we can ask further questions of. If this isn’t done properly, then you wind up
with lots of confused and frustrated readers.
This also greatly increases the value of clear and understandable
writing and gives rise to the science and art that is interpreting texts.
“Whereas oral cultures
tend to merge interpretation of data with the data themselves, writing
separates interpretation from data.” p.25
This is why we have classes that teach how to write, and other
classes that teach how to read writing.
They are, in our minds, two different things. This is how poetry works, in a nutshell. It can sound pretty and be very enjoyable and
feel like it’s important, but no one
understands it. This is the
quintessential high school English question; “but what does it mean?”, which brings us back to the
previous quote.
Get your magnifying glass ready because I revised this response into a fancy graph that is apparently rather small. I pulled out almost everything I'd uderlined while reading this section and tried to fit them in various categories as Ong expounded on his various points. Some of the most "quotable" bits I made a larger font so they'd stand out more from the more verbacious paragraphs.
Chapter 3 - Writing about Writing & Writing about Thinking about Writing
Speaking of literacy, look what I can do with this nifty online tool called Coggle! Using this mind map style organizer, I thought much more about how the articles I read tied together, as opposed to paraphrasing the things and pulling out quotes here and there to show that I've actually read this thing. It may seem blatantly obvious, but Coggle is a fantastic tool for seeing the connections within a single piece of writing, that at least, is what I've been using it for.
In this Coggle, I looked at a selected chapter or section from "Genre and Cognitive Development", the title of this section I studied was entitled "Development of Disciplinary Cognition" which was, in a nutshell, about how people learn to think in certain ways based upon the disciplines to which they are most often exposed. The example that Bazerman uses for his article is taxonomy.
It's interesting, his ideas about genre and how it affects the way you think about things - it's a similar idea to Ong's "Writing is a Technology that Restructures Thought" in that the tools you use in the outside world affects your inner, mental world. I think this is pretty true, I know for this class I have been thinking about things in terms of this theory or that theory and that's a pretty weird, meta sort of experience. But it's happened in other classes too, I'd catch myself thinking about how Jung's ideas about alchemy and the Self that I learned about in Religion & Depth Psychology fit right alongside the Monomyth I was learning about in Classical Mythology and then both of those into my lit studies class, Metamorphoses. I got an A on that paper.
Speaking of literacy, look what I can do with this nifty online tool called Coggle! Using this mind map style organizer, I thought much more about how the articles I read tied together, as opposed to paraphrasing the things and pulling out quotes here and there to show that I've actually read this thing. It may seem blatantly obvious, but Coggle is a fantastic tool for seeing the connections within a single piece of writing, that at least, is what I've been using it for.
In this Coggle, I looked at a selected chapter or section from "Genre and Cognitive Development", the title of this section I studied was entitled "Development of Disciplinary Cognition" which was, in a nutshell, about how people learn to think in certain ways based upon the disciplines to which they are most often exposed. The example that Bazerman uses for his article is taxonomy.
Chapter 4 - Writing & Culture
Queer Turn in Composition Studies
Abstract:
“This article surveys and analyzes
nearly fifteen years of scholarship situating itself at the intersection of
LGBT/queer studies and composition/rhetoric studies. The authors argue that
paying attention to queerness provides unique opportunities to engage with students
in challenging discussions about how the most seemingly personal parts of our
lives are densely and intimately wrapped up in larger sociocultural and
political narratives that organize desire and condition how we think of
ourselves. Three moves in queer composition scholarship are
identified—confronting homophobia, becoming inclusive, and queering the
homo/hetero binary—and implications of these moves for composition are
discussed.”
So, discussing a marginalized part
of society in classrooms—specifically composition classes—will create greater visibility
and tolerance of these individuals. It’s
important to recognize that sexual and gender identities are not, in fact,
binary and do exist on a spectrum. That
is, I think, what they mean by “queer”; that it’s a mixing of things, not just
plain straight or plain gay or plain cisgender.
It’s the recognition that human beings aren’t cookie-cutter versions of
the same few templates.
The take-away message of this
article is that an education that recognizes the great varieties of individuals
and cultures will invariably be a better education than one that prefers to ignore
and marginalize these subcultures.
I was pretty familiar with most of
the terms that they used in this article, but there was one that I didn’t know;
heterosexism. It is, apparently,
the subtle micro-aggressions that enforce heteronormativity. Unconsciously labelling LGBTQ individuals and
tendencies as other, as abnormal.
Chapter 5 - Exploring Music Literacy through the Suzuki Method
Around the end of the semester, we had to create a literacy ethnography, which would mean studying the development of a certain type of aspect of literacy within a certain context. I was thinking, probably while on the toilet, as I am oft to be doing when suddenly I am struck with a great idea (not sure why), about how I had trouble reading music after having been taught it by ear and how that was extrememly similar to how immigrants who learn to speak English have trouble reading and writing it. This led me to the conclusion that music and language funciton very similarly.
I want to investigate how constructs of language such as grammar and punctuation translate into the “language” of music and how they are learned and taught. In both languages, learning is almost exclusively oral, with words being spoken aloud and notes being played by ear and not by reading them off a page, and both “languages” social learning reigns supreme.
Mostly, Suzuki programs are based in the public school systems, or less frequently, there are independent schools of music that offer this training. It is common for children to start learning music very young, although this is not always necessary. This program was first designed for violinists, but has since been expanded to many instruments, although Suzuki has its heart in the string family.
Much of the Suzuki method is seemingly inspired by, or at the least, similar to the theories of the psychologist Lev Vygotsky. Although Suzuki’s quest was to create generations of people that were, ultimately, better people, with “noble hearts”, in practice, his teachings were very grounded in the socio-cultural theories of the Soviet psychologist. If we take away the moral philosophies, Suzuki’s work amounts to a new and effective, scientifically grounded way to teach music.
Around the end of the semester, we had to create a literacy ethnography, which would mean studying the development of a certain type of aspect of literacy within a certain context. I was thinking, probably while on the toilet, as I am oft to be doing when suddenly I am struck with a great idea (not sure why), about how I had trouble reading music after having been taught it by ear and how that was extrememly similar to how immigrants who learn to speak English have trouble reading and writing it. This led me to the conclusion that music and language funciton very similarly.
I’m interested in
exploring how the process of learning to speak is analogous to the process of
learning to play music and how that is shown in the Suzuki Method’s mother
tongue approach to teaching. In the mid
1900’s, Japanese violinist, Shin’ichi Suzuki realized that if young children
could so easily learn even the most challenging of languages, then they also
have the ability to become talented musicians.
He created a theory of teaching instrumental music that was based off of
the process of children learning their native language.
My research was a
combination of remembering my childhood and Googling the Suzuki method. Firstly I got a brief overview of the method
from the Suzuki Association’s website, then I watched a ten minute documentary
on YouTube. I remained on YouTube,
watching videos of five year olds playing the violin at their recitals and
being taught in lessons. Eventually, I
got bored of that and started looking up pictures on Google Images that best
represented the Suzuki method. I chose
the internet as my main source since it is so easily accessible in comparison
to almost anything else. There was no
real need to track people down and interview them, or to try and sit in on a
class.
I also did a lot of thinking about my own experience in
my school’s Suzuki Strings program that I was a part of from the third grade
until I graduated. I remembered some
things I had forgotten and tried not to be too nostalgic about it.
This “mother-tongue approach” is two-fold, first, it is strongly grounded in full immersion in music, and secondly, it is very concerned with creating a community of musicians. This is taken undoubtedly from Vygotsky’s theory of social learning.
I want to investigate how constructs of language such as grammar and punctuation translate into the “language” of music and how they are learned and taught. In both languages, learning is almost exclusively oral, with words being spoken aloud and notes being played by ear and not by reading them off a page, and both “languages” social learning reigns supreme.
Mostly, Suzuki programs are based in the public school systems, or less frequently, there are independent schools of music that offer this training. It is common for children to start learning music very young, although this is not always necessary. This program was first designed for violinists, but has since been expanded to many instruments, although Suzuki has its heart in the string family.
Much of the Suzuki method is seemingly inspired by, or at the least, similar to the theories of the psychologist Lev Vygotsky. Although Suzuki’s quest was to create generations of people that were, ultimately, better people, with “noble hearts”, in practice, his teachings were very grounded in the socio-cultural theories of the Soviet psychologist. If we take away the moral philosophies, Suzuki’s work amounts to a new and effective, scientifically grounded way to teach music.
Rationale for Organization
I tried to organize my chapters by selecting specific texts that formed the base of the course, texts which other texts seemed to be drawing the most from. It was important to use these texts instead of some of the others because the others were expanding on the ideas espoused in these texts, and it would be foolish to talk about the higher-level stuff without having first covered the basics.
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