Discovery of Competence - Blog 4/Chapter 4

Summarize the key ideas in your assigned blogging group chapter.  What important ideas will you want to convey to the class when we do the jigsaw? What ideas do you agree/disagree with? How might these ideas inform your own teaching unit?

Chapter 4, “Teaching as Inquiry,” asks teachers to reposition themselves as researchers rather than instructors or gatekeepers of academic fluency. The authors want teachers to move from seeing error and deficiencies in student writing to noticing student learning and seeing possibilities in student texts. The chapter gives several examples of student work that, though riddled with surface errors, are in fact indicative of language acquisition (again, “literacy is mastered through acquisition, not learning” (61)).

If teachers position themselves as researchers, as inquiring into students’ potential as writers, they will notice evidence of 

1. systematic acquisition of new discourse structures, 
2. evidence of new conceptual structures—analytical, dialectical and metaphorical, and 
3. development of new evaluative structures (how students place themselves in the world).

The authors frame their pedagogy as the discourse of possibilities vs the discourse of error. One of their examples (Vito, 66-67) falls flat, however, because they give a lofty description of a student as “striking systematicity in one orthographic feature: the capitalization of the first word of each line,” believing that this student uses capital letters at the beginning of each line of his essay because he has absorbed this as a rule from seeing and reading English poetry. It’s clear to me, however, that the student is probably unfamiliar with the way MS Word automatically capitalizes a word when you hit “enter” and begin a new line. Every semester, I see students with capital letters at the beginning of each line, and when I ask it always comes down to them believing they had to hit enter in order to start the next line of typing (I'm not sure why 18 year olds who have never used a typewriter come to believe this, but it’s true of old and young alike). In any case, I don’t think Vito was being nearly as astute as they give him credit for. His writing and thinking were quite developed, but I am not convinced that systematicity of any kind was present.

That criticism aside, I find the authors' positioning of themselves not as error-finders but as cognitive process recognizers as refreshing. It must make for better understanding between instructor and student and a less antagonistic relationship in the classroom or in conferencing. Perhaps some of my fellow Chapter 4 readers will have a concrete idea for implementing this pedagogically, but I see it not in terms of its application in specific lesson plans and more about my own tone as instructor—the way that I approach and view student work can either dig up competencies and potential or knock down messes and error on the page.