What struck me in reading Bartholomae's article is the piece on career. He spoke about the fact that GTA's were now teaching introductory English courses and tenured faculty were not. In fact, quite a few colleges have gone to this model. Is this a fad because high school teachers have to abide by core curriculum and students are learning the basics? Is it because our incoming freshmen use emojis and acronyms instead of full sentences? How has social media influenced the written word and composition?
In Fulkerson's article the word "audience" is mentioned. I wouldn't think while writing I'd be thinking about audience, unless your writing specifically in terms of film or television or novel. Yet, scholars have an audience of academics. It begs the question how we can write for anyone but ourselves. Is it not authentic if we write for other people?
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ReplyDeleteFarrah I also found the section of Bartholomae's essay where he discussed the role of graduate teaching assistants in composition programs interesting. It reminded me of what our department chair Prof. Taylor said in his introduction to our incoming class TAs this afternoon: graduate students teach more sections of classes in the department than tenure track professors do. This is now how most universities structure their departments, for better or for worse, and I think it has to do more with the financial pressures put on departments to both produce research, teach graduate and undergraduate courses, and teach a large number of undergraduate composition courses for students who will never go on to take another English class. I don't think it is related to what students are or are not learning about composition in high school. As far as social media, I think the fact that our students are active in social media and texting as a primary form of communication means that they do a lot of reading and writing every day, even though they may not realize it and that communication doesn't fit the conventions of what we consider academic writing. I think the fact that our students have multiple literacies over diverse platforms is to their benefit and when opportunities arise to allow them to think critically about communication and composition through these platforms, as well as within academia they can more deeply reflect about their writing and critical thinking processes.
I deleted my first comment because I had a typo and didn't see an option to edit the post, so I deleted and reposted with it edited, since the typo affected the clarity of the sentence.
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