Literate acts - Constructing negotiated meaning - Construction as a metaphor for meaning making - Construction sites : observations of meaning making in learning, development, and literacy - Collaborative planning : an educator's account of a constructive process - Welcome to college : construction and negotiation in a freshman class - Strategic knowledge and the logic of a learner - Metacognition : a strategic response to thinking - Reflection and the reconstruction of a literate practice.
Flowers describes how writers construct meaning and examines "negotiation" as an alternative to the metaphors of "reproduction" and "conversation" in describing the writing process. She supports her argument by reviewing an emerging body of social and cognitive research in the area. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Bringing together the voices of a diverse group of scholars and language professionals, this edited collection, concerned with the cultivation of plurilingualism in multilingual educational settings, builds on the theory and practice of linguistic and cultural mediation both as curricular content and social practice. The chapters view mediation as an important aspect of communication which involves dynamic, purposeful interactivity, implicating social agents in the negotiation and construction of socially situated meanings across different languages and within the same language. Theoretically informed chapters present views on mediation as well as contributors’ research and project outcomes in educational interventions. They also describe how mediation has been incorporated in educational practices and how it materialises in social contexts. Ultimately, this book makes the case for why mediation constitutes a key competence to be developed for active global and local citizenry in today’s societies where there is an increased rate of knowledge acquisition and exchange. Presenting research from classrooms and other multilingual environments, this book offers concrete suggestions for the development of language users/learners’ ability to mediate within and across languages. It will appeal to scholars, researchers and postgraduate students in the fields of language and education, education policy and politics, bilingualism and plurilingualism more generally. Curriculum designers may also find the volume of use.
In a time of declining resources in institutions of higher education, we grapple with how priorities are to be set for the limited resources available. Most vulnerable are those students labeled underprepared by colleges and universities. Should we argue that the limited resources available ought to be used to support these students through their undergraduate years? And, if we decide that we want to do that, what evidence of their potential for success can we provide that will justify the use of these resources? Through longitudinal research that follows students who have been so labeled over all their college years, we can begin to find answers to these questions. Time to Know Them is the first book that follows the experiences of a group of students over their entire academic experience. No previous studies have brought together the factors incorporated in this study: *examining writing and learning on a true longitudinal basis; *studying a multicultural urban population; *investigating the relationship between writing and learning by examining papers written over time for regularly assigned academic courses across a range of disciplines; and *taking into consideration non-academic factors that influence academic performance such as race, gender, socio-economic status, and ideological orientation. Through interviews twice a semester over six years, the collection of papers written for all courses, observations of instructional settings, and analysis of required institutional tests of writing, the author has been able to pull together a more complete picture of writing and intellectual development over the college years than has previously been available in any study. Students are seen to acquire the ability to handle more complex reasoning tasks as they find themselves in more challenging intellectual settings and where risk-taking and exploration of new ideas are valued. The integration of students' previous life experiences into their academic studies allows them to analyze, critique, modify, and apply their previously held world views to their new learning. These changes are seen to occur over time with instructional settings and support providing key roles in writing development. Personal factors in students' lives present difficulties that require persistence and dedication to overcome. Never before have the complexities of real individual lives as they affect academic performance been so clearly presented.
Invention in Rhetoric and Composition examines issues that have surrounded historical and contemporary theories and pedagogies of rhetorical invention, citing a wide array of positions on these issues in both primary rhetorical texts and secondary interpretations. It presents theoretical disagreements over the nature, purpose, and epistemology of invention and pedagogical debates over such issues as the relative importance of art, talent, imitation, and practice in teaching discourse.
Community Literacy and the Rhetoric of Public Engagement explores the critical practice of intercultural inquiry and rhetorical problem-solving that encourages urban writers and college mentors alike to take literate action. Author Linda Flower documents an innovative experiment in community literacy, the Community Literacy Center in Pittsburgh, and posits a powerful and distinctively rhetorical model of community engagement and pedagogy for both marginalized and privileged writers and speakers. In addition, she articulates a theory of local publics and explores the transformative potential of alternative discourses and counter-public performances. In presenting a comprehensive pedagogy for literate action, the volume offers strategies for talking and collaborating across difference, forconducting an intercultural inquiry that draws out situated knowledge and rival interpretations of shared problems, and for writing and speaking to advocate for personal and public transformation. Flower describes the competing scripts for social engagement, empowerment, public deliberation, and agency that characterize the interdisciplinary debate over models of social engagement. Extending the Community Literacy Center’s initial vision of community literacy first published a decade ago, Community Literacy and the Rhetoric of Public Engagement makes an important contribution to theoretical conversations about the nature of the public sphere while providing practical instruction in how all people can speak publicly for values and visions of change. Winner, 2009 Rhetoric Society of America Book Award
Learning to Rival tells the inside story of college and high school writers learning to "rival"--to actively seek rival hypotheses and negotiate alternative perspectives on charged questions. It shows how this interdisciplinary literate practice alters with the context of use and how, in learning to rival in school and out, students must often negotiate conflicts not apparent to instructors. This study of the rival hypothesis stance--a powerful literate practice claimed by both humanities and science--initially posed two questions: * how does the rival hypothesis stance define itself as a literate practice as we move across the boundaries of disciplines and genres, of school and community? * how do learners crossing these boundaries interpret and use the family of literate practices, especially in situations that pose problems of intercultural understanding? Over the course of this project with urban teenagers and minority college students, the rival hypothesis stance emerged as a generative and powerful tool for intercultural inquiry, posing in turn a new question: how can the practice of rivaling support the difficult and essential art of intercultural interpretation in education? The authors present the story of a literate practice that moves across communities, as well as the stories of students who are learning to rival across the curriculum. Learning to Rival offers an active, strategic approach to multiculturalism, addressing how people negotiate and use difference to solve problems. In the spirit of John Dewey's experimental way of knowing, it presents a multifaceted approach to literacy research, combining contemporary research methods to show the complexity of rivaling as a literate practice and the way it is understood and used by a variety of writers. As a resource for scholars, teachers, and administrators in writing across the curriculum studies, writing program administration, service learning, and community based projects, as well as literacy, rhetoric, and composition, this volume reveals how learning a new literate practice can force students to encounter and negotiate conflicts. It also provides a model of an intercultural inquiry that uses difference to understand a shared problem.
When the stakes of public words and actions are global and permanent, and especially when they involve war and peace, can we afford not to seek their meaning? For three decades, Francis Beer has pioneered the effort to discover, describe, and connect pieces of the complex puzzle of war, peace, their interrelationship, and their causes. In this volume, Beer (joined by colleagues as co-authors of some chapters) examines the cognitive, behavioral, and linguistic dimensions of war and peace. Language, he shows, is important because it mediates between thought and action. It expresses beliefs about war and peace and affects the perceptions of potential adversaries about one's own intentions. Using multiple perspectives and methods, he explores the uses of communication in international relations and the development of "meaning" for war and peace. In this unique and innovative post-realist analysis, Beer examines how language transmits and creates meaning through interaction with specific audiences. His case studies include the Somalian intervention, Sarajevo and the Balkan conflict, and the Gulf War. Moving beyond the discrete words of war, the book takes a broader view of how political participants interact in war and peace through continuous streams of communication that reflect and construct worlds of meaning. This stimulating and challenging volume brings together insights and evidence from political science, cognitive psychology, linguistics, history, and rhetorical studies and applies them in a focused way to the problem of war and peace.
Who's cheating whom in college writing instruction? This book argues that through binary privileging of the real author (the inspired, autonomous genius) over the transgressive writer (the collaborator or the plagiarist), composition pedagogy deprives students of important opportunities to join in scholarly discourse and assume authorial roles. From Plato's paradoxical dependence on and rejection of Homer, to Jerome McGann's dismissal of copyright as the hand of the dead, Standing in the Shadow of Giants surveys changes and conflicts in Western theories of authorship. From this survey emerges an account of how and why plagiarism became important to academic culture; how and why current pedagogical representations of plagiarism contradict contemporary theory of authorship; why the natural, necessary textual strategy of patchwriting is mis-classified as academic dishonesty; and how teachers might craft pedagogy that authorizes student writing instead of criminalizing it.
