I've been struggling this week to help my students understand how to arrive at a claim through synthesis of sources. Traditional composition classes have often involved writing assignments that allow ready-made opinion based claims. The model that I learned under years ago (I took only Comp 2, having tested out of Comp 1) involved getting students to argue about politics then turning this into writing. It was a model that was pedagogically vacuous for many reasons, but one of the most important was that it allowed us to make claims based on our own already held untested opinions. So, for the most part, we were simply regurgitating already held beliefs in terms of a three part thesis (Claim, evidence 1, evidence 2, evidence 3, transition).
Even the more sophisticated assignments I have given to students over the past several years have been confined enough that claims were limited to only a handful of possibilities. My auto-ethnography assignment tends to encourage claims about how the activities of a group are related to certain ethics of the group. My scholarly problem paper tells students to write about an important current conversation in the field, so this allows students to appropriate the claims of others. My other assignments re similarly constrained. Certainly, it's not possible (or less possible) to plug in the political opinions taught to them at home as claims, but the assignments still lead students to claims through the prompts. The assignment I'm starting with this semester, on the other hand, is much broader. It's based on synthesis of essays by four authors. The assignment doesn't, in and of itself, offer a research question that will lead more directly to a claim. For this reason, the possibilities are far less constrained, and the claims may be much more far flung. So long as the reading suggest these claims in an articulable way, the claim is appropriate.
The Need for a Heuristic:
What this means is that, perhaps for the first time, I'm faced with the task of helping students develop claims in the much more open ways that I am used to working in. My students struggle to come up with claims that they feel are appropriate to the conversation, a conversation that they are, after all, just entering. They are, like I was, used to using ready-made arguments, in which they simply plug new pieces of evidence into claims they already hold.
Thus, I have been struggling to think of a heuristic to help my students understand where ideas come from. How do academic writers develop claims? Though, as an academic writer, I am developing claims from research all the time, I have not really engaged in a meta-discursive analysis of how this happens. Thus, when students stay after class to ask what I mean when I tell them that they should develop a claim to base their papers on, the process is almost as mysterious to me as it is to them. To use language Doug Downs might, I have "process knowledge" regarding how to arrive at claims, but I don't have the "declarative knowledge" to help my students do the same. This means I am having difficulty arrived at a useful heuristic to give to students.
In lieu of a helpful, more comprehensive heuristic of where claims come from, I've decided here to at least trace my own process in order to provide an example for students of how a claim happens, what influences go into making a claim, and what I do with it after I've found it. I'm writing this with two audiences in mind: my students who have, no doubt, already gone through the first steps of this process but now must figure out what to do from here, and to fellow instructors who want to help students understand where ideas come from and who want to understand this ourselves. Thus, what follows is a narrative about how reading leads to particular claims.
Arriving at a Claim: A Process Approach:
In the first unit of this semester, students engaged in the Writing about Writing approach here at OU have read four essays, which they must synthesize into an essay centered around an argumentative claim. These essays, in the order we read them, are: John Swales "The Concept of Discourse Community," James Paul Gee "Literacy, Discourse, and Linguistics: Introduction," James Porter "Intertextuality and the Discourse Community," and Joseph Harris "The Idea of Community in the Study of Writing." All these essays, as suggested by their titles, involve the ongoing discussion of discourse community--what one is, how it works, and how folks get into one.
Swales offers a definition if discourse community, asserting that it's a concept that has been under discussion but which has not yet been carefully defined. In order to theorize a definition, he offers six criteria that any language community must meet in order to be called a discourse community. Important for this discussion is his final criteria that "a discourse community has a threshold level of members with a suitable degree of relevant content and discoursal expertise" (473). His explanation of this criteria explains that a community will have levels of membership. Some will be experienced, subject area experts, while others will be novice or apprentice members. Members will come and go so that there is a range of experience and expertise in any discourse community.
Gee, on the other hand, has a much different idea about Discourse membership (by the way, his use of "Discourse" rather than "discourse community" is notable, as it projects certain attitudes toward the idea of "community"). For Gee, one is either in the Discourse or one isn't. There is no provisional membership. As he says it, "one cannot engage in a Discourse in a less than fully fluent manner" (487). For Gee, one is apprenticed into a Discourse but is not fully a member until the group itself accepts the new member, which involves vesting the member with "social goods" (487).Thus, the salient difference between Swales and Gee is their understanding of how one gets into a community. For Swales, there is a process of enculturation where membership is, for a while at least, provisional and partial. For Gee, one is "mushfaking" (490) until one is admitted. Gee goes on to suggest that we should teach our students to engage in mushfake until one is accepted. At this time, the student can decide whether or not to fully engage as a full member or to subvert the discourse and rebel against it.
In reading this last part of Gee's argument, I notice that this seems to suggest a certain attitude toward Discourse. Why would we want to teach our students to subvert the Discourses they have worked hard to enter? The logical assumption here is that Gee doesn't think much of Discourses. Gee's argument about how one gets into a Discourse, which is that one must be admitted by the group, suggests that, to Gee, a Discourse is a good old boys' club--a hierarchal structure designed to let some in and keep others out. Gee seems to hold a psuedo-Marxist attitude toward Discourses as oppressive structures, otherwise, it makes no sense to want to empower students to overthrow it.
I want to take the time here to point out that my interpretation of Gee's attitude toward Discourse is necessarily influenced by my own perspectives and experiences. I notice these things and develop these interpretations because I have been exposed to Marxist critical theory, and critical pedagogy which stresses the importance of a de-centered classroom. So, my own views of the world and background in rhetorical and educational theory has caused me to notice certain things and interpret them in particular ways. And this is okay, because my interpretation, although personal, is nevertheless plausible. I can show that it is a reasonable interpretation and argue effectively for it. Thus, I am beginning to formulate a claim centered around Gee's ideas about Discourse membership and the possibly oppressive nature of Discourse.
This early claim is bolstered when we get to Porter's essay, which I am now reading with my early claim at least rattling around in the back of my mind. Porter, which is talking primarily about intertextuality as definitive of a discourse community (we're not communities in the traditional sense of shared space, language, etc, but in terms of shared textual practices, canonical texts, etc), claims that "our goal should be to help students learn to write for the discourse communities they choose to join" (94). He goes on to say that "our immediate goal is to produce 'socialized' writers who are full-fledged members of their discourse community, producing competent, useful discourse within that community" (95, emphasis added).
Here, I notice that Porter's goal of helping students enter their discourse communities is altogether different than Gee's goal to help students subvert them. Seeing other scholars suggest that we should help students join (which suggests that a discourse community is a good thing) bolsters my claim that Gee thinks Discourses are perhaps bad.
So now I have a solid claim that I can run with. Of course, my goal is not just to talk about Gee, but to synthesize all these essays. For this reason, I find that I need to broaden this claim in order to account for the other authors. So I expand my claim in order to come to a tentative claim that will include these other authors.
So my claim becomes something like this: These authors' views of discourse community membership, especially regarding the ways in which people join them, are connected to their attitudes about discourse communities.
Now I have a guiding idea that I can use to approach a paper. This acts as my thesis statement. My process now becomes using the texts to test this claim. As I write and revise a paper, I revisit the texts looking for evidence that these authors' understanding of membership might be guided by their attitudes toward communities, that is, whether they think these communities are good and that we ought to help students get in, or that they are bad and we ought to help students navigate them well enough that they can change them. This evidence becomes the body of my paper.
Conclusion:
This is the process I have undergone in formulating a claim based on these readings. As a student searching for a claim, the trick is to pay attention to the things you are noticing as you read. These things will be based on context. This is to say that you will notice different things based on your own views of the world, education, and pure chance. This is fine. Be comfortable with this, as it is part of the intertextuality Porter talks about.
When you notice things in a text, begin asking questions about these things. These are often referred to as the "so what" or "why" questions. What might these things you've noticed say about what you are reading? Why are these authors talking about things in these ways? The answers to these questions become early claims which guide the rest of your reading. If these early claims remain plausible or if they are in fact bolstered by further reading, you've developed a thesis for your paper. If not, you will begin noticing other things as you read further, and one of these will develop into a claim.
I have no doubt that there are other processes at work in developing claims, and other ways to come to them. But hopefully this will be helpful in helping us understand how claims come to be. Hopefully, by "watching" as I develop a claim, the reader will see these processes at work in himself or herself and will know how to turn these into workable claims.
No comments:
Post a Comment