Dear Class,
We'll use time at the end of our class today to revisit and reflect on the blog experience in our class. FIrst, revisit the first post about the aim of the blog, our conversation about the rhetoric of the blog, and browse the blog a bit. Please address the following two questions in a comment to this post.
1. What is your current understanding of the rhetoric of our blog (drawing on our early conversation about this topic and an analysis of the blog since then)?
2. How would you describe the nature of your contributions to the blog (as a poster and a commenter? Consider the rhetoric of the blog, the aim of the blog (see my first post), our discussions of rhetorical genre studies.
(1) As far as I understand it, the purpose of this blog is to encourage us to meld the theory we are reading with our own experiences-- to link together our theoretical knowledge with our practical classroom experience. The most successful bloggers over the course of the semester would cast the discussion of a particular book, article, or groups of articles in terms of their own classes.
ReplyDeleteAnother element of our blog rhetoric has been to relay our reservations about certain ideas in a communal space where we can parse them more thoroughly than in class. Initially, the expectation was that the blogs would be much shorter than they have proved to be-- I think this is symptomatic of how intent we as a class are on thoroughly thinking through the pedagogical practices we are learning about.
(2) I would say that as a blogger I really tried to isolate and develop a single idea from common readings. For example, for my first blog for this class (on ecocomposition) I emphasized the importance that Dobrin, Weisser, and Owens place upon encouraging critical thought through ecocompositon. I would also make an effort to bring in pertinent classroom experiences so that blog readers would have something they could possibly relate to.
In terms of rhetorical genre studies, I think that the blog was useful in creating clearly perceptible connections between seemingly disparate materials-- the great David Bartholomae and Peter Elbow debate, for example.
As a commentor, my writings were more meandering and questioning. I would respond to the thread that I had found the most compelling and try to make connections between the comments that would create new practical meanings from the reading. I felt less compelled to reach a conclusive understanding of the texts, and more free to end with a question.
1. Our blog is meant to merge our teaching experiences with current rhetorical theory. Although I do feel that we, as a group, have been successful with such aims, I also feel that we have strayed from the genre we identified as a class. That is to say, we have, at points, been able to have a variety of useful conversations. However, I would also suggest that posts/comments have not always fit together in the form of an ongoing conversation. Instead, a comment would sometimes only address the original post and not the comments following from it. (I think we may all be guilty of this). My current understanding of our blog is the same as it was after reviewing the genre of a blog in WRIT540. Despite our veering away from the identified genre, our intentions have remained the same.
ReplyDelete2. I feel that my posts were short and to the point. Although I feel like my posts were consistent with the aim of the blog, I also feel that I could have done a better job with them had I included a follow-up question or questions at the end. As for my comments, some were insightful whereas others may not have been. In all honesty, some readings struck me as very important while others did not. I always put in effort, but the nature of the readings had an affect on each comment.
1.) The rhetoric of our blog seems to be a student-centered space dedicated to the means of commiserating, discussing, critiquing and challenging the notions of what it means to be a composition instructor. Throughout the semester, we have been reading and discussing in-depth scholarly opinions, theories and articles centered on the ideas of how and why to teach writing. Our blog is space to further these ideas that offers an invitation to comment, play and digress into the academy’s prose on composition instruction. The way in which we present our own ideas that generally follow theories of teaching, is represented in a blog rhetoric of new, freshman teachers. We are a community of friends and graduate students and while we each may be here for differing reasons, in various disciplines, we share together a fresh sense of inquiry, discovery and truth about first-year teaching. Our rhetoric represents all of the trials, humor and tribulations of what it means to steer college freshman to college writing and the many steps it takes to do so. The blog – our collective space that is separate and away from our own professor’s commentary, student complaints and looming deadlines transforms into a rhetoric that both speaks to the incredible experience of first year teaching as well as a thirst to learn and do more. Our blog is a rhetoric of nervous first-semester teachers, but it’s also a rhetoric that seeks to offer and answer our own believes and questions.
ReplyDelete2.) In all of my contributions to our blog, I have tried to connect the reading assignment to a tangible, real example in my own classroom. In doing so, I had hoped to offer a real connection to the study and examination of teaching writing to the act of teaching writing as well. As we are well aware, there is a great difference in reading and speaking about composition theories and trying to enact these theories in our classroom. In that vein, I had tried to pose a question that would either ask for thoughts, advice or other examples that would help me (and our peers) not feel alone in the classroom and alone in our efforts. For each post or comment, I asked how my fellow students were including the week’s respective reading into their own classrooms and weather they thought the week’s readings and ideas were challenging. I also had tried to use a bit of humor in my postings and comments, because if we can’t learn something from our mistakes or at least laugh at them, then how are we to grow?
The rhetoric used by the WRIT540 students on te blog this semester has been the Rhetoric of dialogue. As we engaged witht eh text and have communally and individually walked down this path of teaching WRIT101 together, the conversation on this blog is where Theory has met the Reflective expereince.
ReplyDeleteThe conversation has led to questions that challenge what we believe about teaching. They have challenged the readings and challenged each other's pedagogy in a way that brings the different parts of the whole experience into a conversation.
As a commenter I have tried to stay on point with the essays we have read for the week. In way, each blog posting I think I have done has touched upon questions generated by something recently in the classroom. The readings had an uncanny way of always remaining relevant to what I was doing.
One type of Rhetorical Grammar I seemed to naturally employ with these readings is "listening" for the language of the teachers that wrote them. Whether I found myself agreeing with the author or not, the authenticity of the language they used is something inherent to the expereinced teacher. As engaged readers we learn this language through the act of reading. We pick it up and apply it.
By absorbing this language and using I feel as though I became part of the conversation of the texts. the fact that this conversation was posted on a blog with other students doing the same thing made it a rewarding conversation that was in every way an authentic one.
Joel
Blog Rhetoric:
ReplyDeleteHere’s how I view the blog discourse: it is a community of thoughts. After reading each week’s texts, we each travel to the blog and interact with the others, sharing observations, experiences, ideas, and questions. The blog is a place where we wrestle with pedagogical theory and process what we are learning.
My Contributions:
I don’t hold a unique view of my blogging role. I see myself as part of the community, simply one more voice adding his personal observations and reflections. I have tried to engage with the readings and comment in a way that brings practical understanding, and that leads to application. I’ve tried to come to the blog honestly and openly, remaining alert to ideas that might improve my teaching.
It seems in our blog that we are particularly interested in grappling with theory—in pulling apart the readings and discussing how we do use or plan to use them in our classes. I think of our rhetoric as an active, transformative one; so much of what we discuss on this blog has its foundations in the present, the real, the readings a starting point from which we move into our current teaching experiences, philosophies and questions. Moreover, our blog rhetoric acknowledges a collaborative undercurrent; often, we post and comment with a request for advice and confirmation from our fellow teachers.
ReplyDeleteAs both a poster and commenter, I have been more concerned with moving out of the text and into my classroom experience, rather than providing an academic analysis of that week’s assigned reading. It’s more helpful for me (and all of you, I hope) to think about how the readings, in theory and reality, apply to our teaching—to, again, grapple with pedagogy in the present, as well as on the page. I think of the blog as an informal academic space, where there’s more permission to move between the academic and personal than in, say, a paper—just as there is in one of our classroom discussions—and so I tend to be interested in assessing the readings from a more conversational, what-do-you-think-here’s-what-I-think standpoint.
1. What is your current understanding of the rhetoric of our blog (drawing on our early conversation about this topic and an analysis of the blog since then)?
ReplyDeleteIn the first post on our blog, Kate wrote, “In the context of our class blog, your goal is to engage course readings and concepts in dialogue with your ongoing teaching experiences using theorizing. This theorizing is intended to be an empowering means for understanding and constructing your college composition teaching lives.”
In my first post, which occurred the week after Kate’s introduction, in an attempt to understand what was expected of us and to position my piece on ecocomposition within this genre, I remarked: “To theorize, to frame our experiences or conceptualize our teacher-learner world, as a means of fostering dialogue between dense readings … and our ongoing teaching experiences is at once a seemingly tall order and a crucial means of creating a more effective and aware environment for our students to compose and become active—and interactive—citizens and writers.”
I feel as if this is still a pretty accurate understanding of the rhetoric of our blog, although there have been some elements of change. More humor and informality have thankfully made their way into the rhetoric. And, not surprisingly, more questions and ideas concerning how we have been and/or could be applying various pedagogical theories in our classrooms have made their way into the blog posts and comments. This slight shift toward more attention to our own teaching experiences, I think, was needed and has found quite a bit of support among us blogger-instructors. It pins down readings to real experiences so that we can discuss them more easily and it makes the theories more applicable – what could be an abstract concept discussed solely theoretically, we approach in practice as well. The amount of questions that are bounced back and forth between posters and commenters, and commenters and commenters, has risen. We ask each other things we really want to know and give honest answers, taking into account the two strings of our blog rhetoric that has never left us: a dialogue between readings and teaching experiences.
2. How would you describe the nature of your contributions to the blog (as a poster and a commenter? Consider the rhetoric of the blog, the aim of the blog (see my first post), our discussions of rhetorical genre studies.
I would describe the nature of my contributions to the blog to be fruitful and fitting, whether they were posts that summarized several readings for a more focused electronic discussion that or comments that connected a poster’s question and reflections on the week’s reading with my own experiences and interests. They developed as the rhetoric of the blog developed and shifted with poster/commenter/instructor focus, which is fitting, because the blog is all about dialogue, so it is important to connect on a level that is current with the rhetoric of the other contributors. There is always room for improvement, and I can see areas were my comments could remain more on task or share more new information along the lines of questions that other commenters were following. Just as the nature blog rhetoric moved with time and the need of us-writer instructors, so did my contributions. I was learning what it meant to be writing within this genre and among the other contributors and as I began to get a better understand of what that was, the nature of my contributions changed slightly, discursively. I think Ballenger would approve.
Initially I viewed the blog as a way to demonstrate my understanding of key course texts & concepts; however, as the semester has gone on I’ve evolved my understanding of the blog. Now it’s so much more than an assignment to be completed for credit—I see the blog as an arena for collaborative conversations; for sharing teaching moments, giving tips, venting frustrations, and asking more questions; in summation, it’s a safe digital space for group theorizing, in which we as Writ 101 instructors “try to figure out answers for, develop explanations about, and organize what is happening in their worlds” (Foss, Foss, and Griffin 8, qtd. in Kate’s blog introduction post). Our class discussion of the blog rhetoric helped me see this—we determined that we should “use posts to initiate conversation, not just show reading comprehension” (citation: my notes from September 27, 2010)—but I’ve also realized the theoretical function of the blog through contributing my own comments and posts. Overall, then, I feel that the rhetoric of our blog is geared toward collaborative exploration combined with textual comprehension and analysis; the most successful, engaging posts combine relevant course examples, deft synthesis of texts, and inclusive theorizing—questions posed to readers, designed to draw them into the conversation.
ReplyDeleteOn the whole, I feel I’ve brought my preconceived notions of blogging and its larger cultural rhetoric or framework into my work on the blog. In my own posts, I tried to engage readers with eye-catching but meaningful titles and humorous pictures (see: Justin Timberlake http://writ540monday2010.blogspot.com/2010/10/bringing-sexy-back-addressing-grammar.html). As an avid blogger/blog reader, I’ve tried to let my blog background inform my work in 540 without being distracting. In my comments, I follow the usual rhetoric of blogging in general (as well as our course-specific desire to synthesize responses) by responding not only to the original post, but by addressing new points or observations made by commenters and drawing parallels between other relevant posts (see this comment on Lauren’s post “Knowing and Naming Rhetoric”—I call upon Noel’s and Michelle’s commentaries and Jayme’s separate post: http://writ540monday2010.blogspot.com/2010/09/knowing-and-naming-rhetoric.html). I’ve also strived to link my posts and comments to past readings we’ve completed, constantly referring back to old posts on the blog.
My understanding of the blog and its rhetorical aims has evolved over the semester. I feel that the conversation within the blog has deepened as we progressed through the semester and had more insights from our personal teaching experiences to share with the class. Towards the beginning of the blog it was harder to root our understandings and reflections that we formed out of the readings to anything concrete because we had not yet gained enough classroom experience to offer as much insight as we have been able to towards the end of the class.
ReplyDeleteI did not post a blog until late November and I think my blogs were able to benefit from the insights of others because of this. I was able to see the types of posts other students did and see how they were able to generate meaningful conversation through their personal insights. I feel like this helped set the bar for my posts. I also knew as a commenter what kinds of questions would facilitate the kind of rhetorical analysis I was hoping to generate from my peers. The one thing I failed to take into account in my first post was that too many questions can foster several lines of conversation from the readers rather than one succinct one. I feel like this takes away from the original aim of the blog to engage the readings in a way that will benefit the blog as a whole because it causes too many disjunctive responses, not that this is always the case but the probability of it is increased by the number of questions asked.
I noticed this when I commented on others blogs and felt that I could not answer all of the questions, so I would pick one even if it did not advance the conversation already in progress between the other commenters. In my second post I feel I was able to remedy this problem by focusing my questions on one line of reasoning.
(1) Our blog offers a constantly changing forum because posters tend to bring a variety of different interests into the reading. This is something I’ve thought about with the posters—they have the ability and control to find meaning in a passage that is personally relevant to themselves and their classroom, and it then becomes the commenters’ job to relate their personal view of the subject in relation to the post. So it’s interesting how manipulation tends to dictate the rhetoric of the blog: the text is manipulated by the poster, the poster’s text is then manipulated by the commenter, and often times the commenter’s text is manipulated by several more commenters. And not that manipulation is a malevolent tool here, but instead these manipulations create a unique milieu where the thought processes are both individual and communal. I’m interested in the blogs rhetoric because, though the poster is the “leader,” anything presented on the blog is up for debate, challenge, support, or criticism. It’s healthy. And I think it creates a free environment; we make progress with our thoughts and ideas, but we’re also granted freedom to write about whatever is interesting to us personally.
ReplyDelete(2) Similar to the milieu of manipulation and personal interest I mentioned earlier, I think my role to the blog has been one where I am acting on behalf of my thoughts about the text (before any blog) and also on behalf of my thoughts about the blog itself. So when I read a text (and I’m not blogging) I have to maintain my ideas, storing them up for later, and then I read what the blog post is and I see if any of my stored up ideas from the original text have anything to offer in comments to the blog. I see this exercise as healthy because I’m acting within the lens dictated by the blogger, while also holding the ability to introduce my personal thoughts to the blog. Likewise, when I write a blog, I’m interested in how the commenters use my text as a lens. If my text is a filter, what different way can they think about the text in combination with their original ideas? This process creates hybrid thoughts, mutant “theory” where there is no core set of laws or right answers, but instead we work communally and individually to create a community.
Also, this recursive process also works in the way we incorporate teaching experience, especially when we base anecdotal evidence in the text of that week. Here too, the blogger dictates the realm of information and the boundaries of the playing field, and then the commenter is able to relate personal experience in to a communal discussion. We filter through the text and blog to find what experience is applicable to our learning.
1. From what I understand, the rhetoric of the blog entails how we engage the concepts we read within the context of our classrooms. We siphon the most paramount theories from texts we feel inform our teaching practices, and allow our teaching practices to speak back to the texts. This allows learning to be somewhat of a recursive and communal process, as all of us detailed how the readings either empowered our teaching or perhaps complicated the process all together. I feel the most essential facet concerning the rhetoric of the blog was the notion of difficulty. From the majority of posts, it appeared that everyone expressed some kind of difficulty within the reading, the classroom, or both. This was “a way of framing an experience or event—an effort to understand and account for something and the way it functions in the world” (Foss, Griffin), allowing us to ground theory in reality. In many ways, the blog represented a form of praxis in asking us to reflect on our actions in the classroom through theorization. Many of us allowed our “lived realities” in the classroom to act as knowledge, speaking back to theory through reading, reflecting, questioning, and redefining what it means to teach, and teach effectively.
ReplyDelete2. I am wary to admit that my contributions as a poster and a commenter were exemplary in regards to the genre and rhetoric of the blog. I have never liked blogs due to their nature of being inherently impersonal. I tried very hard to give honest and insightful feedback and responses to posts, but found it difficult at times to avoid being repetitive or tangential. One thing I didn’t want to do was to derail the rhetorical direction of posts through an alternative take or difficulty on a reading. In regards to my posts , one in particular stands out. My post on Bell Hooks was very difficult for me in light of what I chose to post on. In retrospect, I can see now that it detracted from the standard rhetoric I had seen in previous blogs and lacked a very universal or tangible appeal. This I think, along with the difficulty and vague nature of the topic I was trying to cover, prevented people from commenting on it. I can’t say I blame them.
1)As I browsed through our blog, and remembered our conversation about the rhetoric of our blog, I thought of the blogger’s role as a distiller of concepts and ideas from the readings for the rest of the class, to pick and choose what seemed most significant and relate it to WRIT 101. Commenters then follow the stream which the posters began, and respond or initiate a new thread of conversation. I like this sense of “theorizing” as an ongoing activity, as this fits very well with how we have spent our semesters – discovering through trial and error what works in our classrooms and what doesn’t. Often these discoveries are made over time and discussions with our fellow WRIT 101 instructors as we get and share ideas, which happens in and out of the classroom, as well as virtually via the blog.
ReplyDelete2)Jenny and Jayme and I were talking a bit today about how each of us use different voices as we comment and post. Jenny thought that I use a fairly formal voice or tone, while she uses a much more informal voice in her comments. I think that this reflects my attempts to respond to these often very academic writings which were sometimes difficult to relate to or engage with: I felt that I needed to utilize a more formal tone in response, whereas perhaps Jenny and other more informal posters were rewording the concepts in their own voices. This blog reflect our different means of engaging with these texts, and perhaps this is a useful way of learning communally, collaboratively: I read others’ posts and comments and understand the texts through their lens and experience and tone and voice, and they do the same with mine. The blog is also another arena wherein we share our ongoing struggles and triumphs in the classroom, and connect with each other.
1. What is your current understanding of the rhetoric of our blog (drawing on our early conversation about this topic and an analysis of the blog since then)?
ReplyDeleteThe blog space for 540 presents both requirement and permission: it serves the function of giving us all accountability to our learning and the readings we have been expected to engage with, and it also gives us permission to share a more-than-casual response to those readings (that is, the thinking and planning required for written response is more formal than the conversational responses we might provide in a class discussion). I have enjoyed the authentic-academic hybrid genre of the blog as a rhetorical opportunity. We have invented the blog together and created a space where we are able to quote authors with MLA citations guidelines but still be playful and personal and real with each other. I love that it’s just as acceptable on the blog for us to use the kind of analytical language we might use in our I-Search papers as it is for us to post a picture of Justin Timberlake as a grammar marm: that is neat.
2. How would you describe the nature of your contributions to the blog (as a poster and a commenter? Consider the rhetoric of the blog, the aim of the blog (see my first post), our discussions of rhetorical genre studies.
When I reconsider my contributions as a lead poster, I remember that I felt slightly nervous about my extra responsibility as an initial commentator. As one of the first to write, I was concerned with several initial preoccupations: 1) that my interpretation of the texts be reasonable, fair, and thoughtful and 2) that my comment be fresh enough to catalyze response but open-ended enough to invite comments on related, but different, topics.
When I reflect upon the nature of my contributions as a commenter on the blog, I realize that I have often responded with two goals: 1) to offer a meaningful contribution appropriate to the context of the lead poster and commenters, if any, who have preceded me and 2) to reflect upon excerpts or ideas from our class readings that had particular resonance for me. It was sometimes hard for me to find a way to present my favorite take-away from the reading in response to others’ posts or comments; at other times, however, other people’s posts or comments are what I needed to tease out an articulation of the meaning I found in the texts.