By “inventing the university", David Bartholomae suggests that a student has to appropriate, or be familiar with the specific conventions and discourse that is required of him/her within the specific context . Basically, he/she must be malleable. The student has to adopt the language required to successfully answer the question of the teacher (university). Although we can agree that without this talent, we would all be in trouble, and it is a wonderful way to obtain the life skills necessary to combat unexpected problems life unexpectedly presents us, conversely it diminishes the student’s sense of their own voice. They may feel that the pressures presented to them by the university are too conformist in nature to develop their own authority. They may lose interest and shut down to what is expected of them, leading to diminished effort caused by apathy. Apathy does not create good writing. In the study "Navigating the Psychosocial patterns of Adolescence: The Voices and Experiences of High School Youth", one student said, “I like writhing except that writing is fun until you have to do it for a grade. […] It’s fun to write, but I always worry that I’m going to get a bad grade when I do it for school. So it seems like for school you have to write the way a teacher wants you to write” (423). To summarize, the student feels that by adapting to so many different varieties of writing styles and teachers requirements, the fun, or importance of the text itself is compromised by the necessity of a good grade. This is problematic not for the university, but for the desire of students to write. All the energy that the student expels on molding his/her writing to the desired format is wasted in terms of producing personal style. This produces an abundance of robotic drone-like clones with only one voice;the voice of the university.
Matt's response--- The invention of the university that Bartholmae speaks of is no more than the dressing up of an argument in order to best relate with your audience. One of the skills for writing we try to instill within student’s is in getting away from the “I” perspective within academic papers and asserting their viewpoint with an informed tone and vocabulary. In layman’s terms we teach them to church up their sermons until the parishioners believe God spit-polished the words him (or her) self. The trick in this is informing the student on how to utilize the language, diction and conventions of any institution, without losing their own personal viewpoint or voice. For many students today the importance of a class is placed so highly upon the grade that this is a moot point. If you’re a history major but you have to write a paper for biology, you use all the phrases and vocabulary a biologist would to instill credibility within your argument and if you can’t figure out how to get a certain idea across using those conventions then it’s better left by the wayside. We tell students they never want to seem less than totally educated or sure of their viewpoint, for such a weakness is the eventual downfall of your argument but is there too much importance placed upon sounding smart rather than being smart? The whole time I read the Bartholmae article I kept envisioning our universities cranking out row after row of qualified vacuum cleaner salesmen who don’t know anything more than how to sell you something; regardless of whether they believe it or not, they sure sound like they do. I do agree that being able to tap dance in front of ANY crowd is an invaluable skill that has served me and a million other English majors more times than I’d care to count, but then I too must admit than there are many times that even though I may convince someone of my point, I wasn’t totally sure of what that point meant. It seems to me that in order to place the correct amount of importance around this skill and what it does is to bring rhetoric into the realm of the high school classroom. If we tell people that rhetoric is a powerful tool in any realm not just in sounding smart to your teachers it becomes less of a trick and more of a skill. My question is, if we started out with a constricting, 5-paragraph, mapped essay format and slowly we’ve expanded out to this idea of “inventing the university,” which is really no more than discovering what are the essay formats for a given mode of discourse, then have we really gone anywhere at all with this? Have we come out the other end only to find that the answer is still the same?
I support Bartholomae's theory of "inventing the university." Learning to write effectively according to proper conventions and within each specified discourse provides the students with an authoritative voice. It also teaches the student how to anticipate their audience. Without this knowledge the student may become ensnared in the confusion of the academic world. All first year students should be exposed to this institutional structure. If they are aware of the various discourses they can transform their writing into their own. Ownership and respect for one's work is what lacks in papers turned into the establishment. If the student is conscioous of every expectation the result may not merely be a regurgitation, but a poweerful piece imbued with personal style and recognition of one's own talent. During my early years of colege, one of my peers never turned his paper in for a grade. I never understood his rationale for this seemingly idiotic lack of concern. But in retrospect, I realize that he was fine-tuning his writing for himself, and without the worry of a bad grade, he became a true writer. An author for himself, not a writer for the university. He invented his own university.
I agree that students have to write to their specific teacher, simply because I've had to do it throughout my highschool and college education. In my Native American studies class I quickly learned that the teacher would give out better grades if we did nothing but talk about the plight of Native Americans, and how bad they had it. While I agree with that, I’m more interested into talking about how to fix things, but to get the grade I did what I had to. I think that a bit of the creativity is lost when students feel they are forced to write under these circumstances, but on the other hand it is hard for teachers to let go of their personal biases, just like it is for the rest of us. On a lighter note, maybe it will teach students more writing techniques.
Maybe I approach university education with a bit of a dried up and pragmatic point of view, but hey—as students, we signed up for this game. By now, we should all know what the rules are. As much as I would like to convince myself that I am in the university to explore and enjoy intellectual freedom, time and time again, my experiences have shown me that, most of the time, I adopt a different voice in my writing to please someone else. We jump through hoops, check off the boxes, and as Matt said “tap dance” in order to finish the race. This is what the system is about, because it is designed to train workers. To a certain degree, I am okay with this, because I am aware of my personal voice, and therefore know when I have to damper it down in order to produce a product for a teacher. This is part of the discipline required to get the grade and move on. As someone who laments the loss of personal voice in writing, however, I a feel it is important for young writers to familiarize themselves with their personal voice initially, so that later (when they are expected to adopt the language of the university), they can feel confident and anchored in their own writing style.
Although I understand the reasons behind a need for academic discourse, I still don't believe that it is necessary. Just because a person sounds knowledgeable, doesn't mean they are, and I think that part of the problem that comes along with academic discourse is that more people are able to fake this knowledge because they know the right lingo. Also, I was talking with a friend the other day and she was saying that as a student about to graduate, she knows how to write an essay, no problem, but it's not that rewarding of a feeling. Oh and hey! Nice Blog!
7 comments:
By “inventing the university", David Bartholomae suggests that a student has to appropriate, or be familiar with the specific conventions and discourse that is required of him/her within the specific context . Basically, he/she must be malleable. The student has to adopt the language required to successfully answer the question of the teacher (university). Although we can agree that without this talent, we would all be in trouble, and it is a wonderful way to obtain the life skills necessary to combat unexpected problems life unexpectedly presents us, conversely it diminishes the student’s sense of their own voice. They may feel that the pressures presented to them by the university are too conformist in nature to develop their own authority. They may lose interest and shut down to what is expected of them, leading to diminished effort caused by apathy.
Apathy does not create good writing. In the study "Navigating the Psychosocial patterns of Adolescence: The Voices and Experiences of High School Youth", one student said, “I like writhing except that writing is fun until you have to do it for a grade. […] It’s fun to write, but I always worry that I’m going to get a bad grade when I do it for school. So it seems like for school you have to write the way a teacher wants you to write” (423). To summarize, the student feels that by adapting to so many different varieties of writing styles and teachers requirements, the fun, or importance of the text itself is compromised by the necessity of a good grade. This is problematic not for the university, but for the desire of students to write. All the energy that the student expels on molding his/her writing to the desired format is wasted in terms of producing personal style. This produces an abundance of robotic drone-like clones with only one voice;the voice of the university.
Matt's response---
The invention of the university that Bartholmae speaks of is no more than the dressing up of an argument in order to best relate with your audience. One of the skills for writing we try to instill within student’s is in getting away from the “I” perspective within academic papers and asserting their viewpoint with an informed tone and vocabulary. In layman’s terms we teach them to church up their sermons until the parishioners believe God spit-polished the words him (or her) self. The trick in this is informing the student on how to utilize the language, diction and conventions of any institution, without losing their own personal viewpoint or voice. For many students today the importance of a class is placed so highly upon the grade that this is a moot point. If you’re a history major but you have to write a paper for biology, you use all the phrases and vocabulary a biologist would to instill credibility within your argument and if you can’t figure out how to get a certain idea across using those conventions then it’s better left by the wayside. We tell students they never want to seem less than totally educated or sure of their viewpoint, for such a weakness is the eventual downfall of your argument but is there too much importance placed upon sounding smart rather than being smart?
The whole time I read the Bartholmae article I kept envisioning our universities cranking out row after row of qualified vacuum cleaner salesmen who don’t know anything more than how to sell you something; regardless of whether they believe it or not, they sure sound like they do. I do agree that being able to tap dance in front of ANY crowd is an invaluable skill that has served me and a million other English majors more times than I’d care to count, but then I too must admit than there are many times that even though I may convince someone of my point, I wasn’t totally sure of what that point meant. It seems to me that in order to place the correct amount of importance around this skill and what it does is to bring rhetoric into the realm of the high school classroom. If we tell people that rhetoric is a powerful tool in any realm not just in sounding smart to your teachers it becomes less of a trick and more of a skill.
My question is, if we started out with a constricting, 5-paragraph, mapped essay format and slowly we’ve expanded out to this idea of “inventing the university,” which is really no more than discovering what are the essay formats for a given mode of discourse, then have we really gone anywhere at all with this? Have we come out the other end only to find that the answer is still the same?
I support Bartholomae's theory of "inventing the university." Learning to write effectively according to proper conventions and within each specified discourse provides the students with an authoritative voice. It also teaches the student how to anticipate their audience. Without this knowledge the student may become ensnared in the confusion of the academic world. All first year students should be exposed to this institutional structure. If they are aware of the various discourses they can transform their writing into their own. Ownership and respect for one's work is what lacks in papers turned into the establishment. If the student is conscioous of every expectation the result may not merely be a regurgitation, but a poweerful piece imbued with personal style and recognition of one's own talent. During my early years of colege, one of my peers never turned his paper in for a grade. I never understood his rationale for this seemingly idiotic lack of concern. But in retrospect, I realize that he was fine-tuning his writing for himself, and without the worry of a bad grade, he became a true writer. An author for himself, not a writer for the university. He invented his own university.
I agree that students have to write to their specific teacher, simply because I've had to do it throughout my highschool and college education. In my Native American studies class I quickly learned that the teacher would give out better grades if we did nothing but talk about the plight of Native Americans, and how bad they had it. While I agree with that, I’m more interested into talking about how to fix things, but to get the grade I did what I had to. I think that a bit of the creativity is lost when students feel they are forced to write under these circumstances, but on the other hand it is hard for teachers to let go of their personal biases, just like it is for the rest of us. On a lighter note, maybe it will teach students more writing techniques.
Maybe I approach university education with a bit of a dried up and pragmatic point of view, but hey—as students, we signed up for this game. By now, we should all know what the rules are. As much as I would like to convince myself that I am in the university to explore and enjoy intellectual freedom, time and time again, my experiences have shown me that, most of the time, I adopt a different voice in my writing to please someone else. We jump through hoops, check off the boxes, and as Matt said “tap dance” in order to finish the race. This is what the system is about, because it is designed to train workers. To a certain degree, I am okay with this, because I am aware of my personal voice, and therefore know when I have to damper it down in order to produce a product for a teacher. This is part of the discipline required to get the grade and move on. As someone who laments the loss of personal voice in writing, however, I a feel it is important for young writers to familiarize themselves with their personal voice initially, so that later (when they are expected to adopt the language of the university), they can feel confident and anchored in their own writing style.
Although I understand the reasons behind a need for academic discourse, I still don't believe that it is necessary. Just because a person sounds knowledgeable, doesn't mean they are, and I think that part of the problem that comes along with academic discourse is that more people are able to fake this knowledge because they know the right lingo.
Also, I was talking with a friend the other day and she was saying that as a student about to graduate, she knows how to write an essay, no problem, but it's not that rewarding of a feeling.
Oh and hey! Nice Blog!
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