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Spivak: Loosely Defined Ideas Left for Interrogation
Spivak’s discourse in itself, regardless of meaning, seems to be a rebellion against phallocentric language. Her ideas lack rigid definitions and are transcribed in a nonlinear way. Unfortunately, though I try to be as aware as possible to the systems shaping my ideas and discourse, reading Spivak’s interview brought to my attention the phallocentric... »
Question #3– Spivak Yes, I agree with Spivak. I think that over time, if one learns to write well in a normal context, then that same person will have the ability to write for an audience. In a sense, they are already writing for an audience of 1 being their teacher. Others usually read the... »
MaryAnn’s Proposal
MaryAnn Macedo DeVries ENGL 5001 4/22/2010 Paper Proposal For my term paper this semester, I’d like to explore the rhetoric of video game heroines. Women have long gotten the short end of the stick in the video game and comic universe—typically they are overly sexualized with little to no power to speak of, wearing next to nothing while supposedly... »
Decolonization Dilemma
bell hook’s “Rebel’s Dilemma” at first confused me. I didn’t know what decolonization really was, and she kept repeating the term as if repeating it would actually make such a thing possible. Now, finally knowing what it is, I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s an impossible goal, for Ms. hooks or anyone else. Decolonization,... »
ESL Post
The main idea that I got from the first reading of this week is that 2nd language learners have a history of not being represented well in the college English classroom. In the beginning, it was deemed that anyone who spoke English was qualified to teach it to 2nd language learners. No matter how... »
Learning TESOL by Doing
In Spring 2009 I volunteered to teach a conversational ESL class without any formal training. My class consisted of 10 students from 7 different countries. All of them tested at the basic level, but their speaking abilities ranged from an Uzbekistan woman who could barely understand “How are you?” to a Chinese man who... »
US vs. Everyone Else: Where Do We Fall?
This week’s articles have given me a lot to think on, specifically about how America’s way of teaching writing relates to that of other countries. I have long been aware that our system is considerably different from that of others (I have a few British friends who are completely boggled by our setup), but... »
fox and li
Nothing is “basic” about Tom Fox’s article on basic writing. While initiation theory attempts to bring students of all kinds into one homogenous group, it ignores the cultural differences of students and promotes a single-minded approach towards writing. This rings of the ethnocentrism attitudes that Xing Lu described where the dominant group (in this... »
The Right Way to Teach Write
The readings of this week highlight the difficulty of teaching writing within a culturally diverse world and the problems students face transitioning from their secondary education to the university. In Foster and Russell’s text “Rearticulating Articulation”, the authors create a “cross-national dialogue” regarding “articulating secondary/higher education writing” (3). Looking at writing cross-nationally, Russell and... »
BURKE BABY!
Burke really felt that rhetoric happened from action. Rhetoric occurs when a person is in the moment a “dramatistic” approach to creating and defining what it is. I take from this that rhetoric never dies but is a type of organism, always changing and evolving. This seems true when you think about how many... »