Facts, Artifacts, Counterfacts - Blog 1

Summarize the key ideas in your assigned chapter.  What's important for the class to know?  How does it connect with the ideas in chapters 1, 2, and 3?  How does it connect with "Discovery of Competence"? How does it connect with the SFSU IRW course?  How might these ideas inform your own teaching unit?

Chapter 5:  The Dialogical Nature of Basic Reading and Writing

This chapter extends the information in Chapters 1, 2 and 3 by further explaining some of the reasoning behind class discussions and the progression of writing assignments. It furthermore explores the pattern of class discussions, providing some interesting analysis of student discussion and the cognitive growth taking place over the course of the semester. The greatest divergence between this chapter and Discovery of Competence, I belivee, is that it’s more concrete in revealing what actual classroom participation and assignments look like. The focus on the reflexivity of reading and writing, and the way both reading and writing are really being used to promote a self-inquiry in the students, is very much in line with SFSU IRW.

As for ways to use this chapter in my own teaching, I like the idea of building toward student-led discussion. I’ve never done this, and the classes I’m teaching now aren’t conducive to this, but I can see how I could reframe the semester (by providing a thematic framework for the semester) to make this practice feasible. I also want to integrate the 1) understand, 2) interpret, 3) apply model of writing practice to an assignment to see how that might play out in a prompt.

Summary/Overview

This chapter, as its title predicts, discusses and describes the way that BRW is presented to students as a dialogue between students and texts. Students respond to and interpret texts through their own experiences and are also asked to reflect on the nature of their textual understanding. For instance, students list what they remember from a book they’ve read and then explain how they remembered and why those details stood out enough to remember. In this way, students are shown how to interpret not just a text but their reactions to and understandings of the text.

The chapter begins by telling us that “our first pedagogical move is to demonstrate that [students] know more than they think they know.” There is a caveat. BRW students, according to the author, have a “willed obliviousness to both intellectual and social conventions.” Showing students that they do know a lot and are expected to use and expand that knowledge will not be easy and is met with resistance.  Overwhelmed by what’s asked of them, BRW students will either be mute and see assignments as punishments they must get through or act out in class. Both strategies interrupt the student’s learning (and in the later case, attempts to disrupt the class’s learning).

This pedagogy asks students “to assume responsibility for what they say, and to become reflexive about why they say what they say.” Writing assignments (of which there are 24-26) have three parts or phases:  to understand, to interpret and to apply knowledge gained through reflexivity both to the subject matter and life experience (139). The complexity of the mental (reflexive) tasks students must perform in their writing grows through the semester. At first, responses are very much guided by the instructors. Early assignments explore significance. Then, students make connections. By the time students write their autobiographies, they are asked to see their written selves as a character, which introduces the idea of a writer’s distance from the text and subject matter (enables talking about and revising their stories as well as further reflexivity).

Class Discussion

Class discussion is where a lot of the practice of reflexivity (I might call this metacognition) first takes place. Questions and counter-questions are relaxed but persistent…students are not permitted to be silent and one-word answers are probed for more. Students turn in a dialectic journal after reading a book and before class discussion so that they already have something to say. Then, class discussion begins with pre-discussion questions answered in groups. Later in the semester, two students at a time are assigned to lead the class discussion. This type of reading process further enforces the three elements present in writing:  to understand, to interpret and apply.