CCR 735 Notes for 11/27

Belfiore, Mary Ellen, et al. Reading Work: Literacies in the New Workplace. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2004.

The authors of this book argue that literacies are context-bound; you cannot divorce the literacy practices from their situation without stripping away much of their meaning. The book contains four case studies of the literacy practices at four different work places: a textile factory, a food processing business, a tourist hotel, and a metals manufacturing company. The explain the theories they use to understand these four sites (new literacy studies, social practice theory, sociocultural theories) and discuss how the dynamics of workplaces are changing (push for more productivity with less – lean), resulting in even more interwoven and conflicting literacy practices.

Chapter 2 is about “Texco” and discusses how ISO documents become points of conflict between workers and management. The author has two goals: 1. to show how paperwork has become the lifeblood of new workplaces with international standards like ISO and 2. to show how these new literacy practices are interpreted differently by managers and workers. She looks specifically at non-conformance reports, research and development paperwork, production checklists, and organically-produced worker notebooks, where workers have documented specifications and procedures.

Quotable Quotes

“It follows that the most successful approaches to teaching or promoting literacies – for young or old, in school, work, family, or community – might not be to treat them as isolated generic, functional, and transferable skills. The alternative is to rethink the nature of literacy or literacies themselves, to see them not as discrete skills separate from or prerequisite to participation in social life, but as interegal parts of everyday cultural knowledge and action” (2).

“Documenting work has become nearly tantamount to doing it in the new data-driven business environment” (11).

“If quality is the lifeblood of the organization, then paperwork and documentation are the lifeblood of quality” (70).

Notable Notes

Throwback to Midstate – continuous improvement, quality assurance, standard operating procedures, quality audits (ISO certified), intensive data collection w/charts and checklists, product identification and traceability, nonconformance reports, corrective action, controlled documents

Tickets attached to each product! (70)

Statistical Product Control (SPC) data must be entered for production to make sure that the product is within specifications

No one on the floor writes up any new ideas on the new idea bulletin board…continuous improvement?

The workers don’t see paperwork as intregal to their work; it’s an add-on.

Writing up a non-conformance report is more than just writing up a report – it means dealing with issues of blame, power, and spending the time to do it in. – Is it good to have a lot (finding opportunity to improve quality?) or not?

Himley, Margaret and Patricia F. Carini. From Another Angle: Children’s Strengths and School Standards. The Prospect Center’s Descriptive Review of the Child. New York: Teachers College Press, 2000.

This book uses three case studies to illustrate how the Prospect school descriptive process operates. Some background on the Prospect school:

Prospect school opened in 1965 as a school for 23 5-7 year olds. It was ungraded, holistic learning environment that followed Dewey’s ideas and the staff was committed to documenting what was happening in that environment so that they could have an understanding of how the school was generating knowledge about the students, the curriculum, and of general learning and teaching. Each week the teachers wrote 4-5 descriptive (stay away from judgment) sentences about what each child did – what they played with, who they played with, etc.  And, every week, the staff would come together for an hour and a half to write a description of one particular child. “Descriptive” was the operative word at the Prospect School and the descriptive process of Prospect has been taken up at other schools.

The point is never to solve a child or fix the child’s problems or even to speculate on his family life. It is to describe the child, to use all available means (art work, play mates, classroom demeanor, physical presence, interaction with adults and peers) to understand the child more complexly.

CCR 735 Notes for 11/6 Continued

I was able to more closely read Anthony Cohen’s Symbolic Construction of Community (Chapter 4) and found many of his ideas very striking and good possible connections to my work with the distributists, who were so desparately trying to create an alternate community in early 20th century Britain. Good stuff for that future article.

 Cohen is describing the relationship between community and identity. Communities are so important because it is where we derive our self identity from. That’s why we so closely guard our boundaries.

In times of change, we turn to symbols, historically and mythologically created (language can be symbols) to build up the sense of community and combat the outside force that is threatening the community. Symbols are shorthand for the shared values of our communities – values that we might not agree upon in meaning, but the symbol’s form is generally accepted and regarded.

Symbols and rituals are the bridge between belief and actual reality.

There is no neutral culture, community, or perspective (98). No no man’s land.

We use our history selectively to shape and explain our present – “mythological distance” (99).

Ethinicity as a strategy to gain power, for self-identity (106).

It doesn’t matter that government is becoming bigger – that will not kill communities because communities are inherent parts of human existence, of human identity.

Some good quotes:

“Symbolism owes its versataility to the fact htat it does not carry meaning ihernetly. A corollary of this is that it can be highly responsive to change” (91).

“The form can persist while the content undergoes significant transformation. Frequently, the appearance of continuity is so compelling that it obscures people’s recognition that the form itself has changed” (91).

“The familiar, orderliness, is invoked to inject sense into the unfamiliar” (100). Good for distributism.

“So if the individuals refer to their cognitive maps to orient themselves in interaction, the same is also true of collectivities. The maps are part of their cultural store, accumulated over generations and, thus, heavily scented by the past” (101).

“A frequent and glib description of what is feared may be los tis ‘way of life’; part of what is meant is the sense of self” (109).

“Since the vitality of cultures lies in their juxtaposition, they exaggerate themselves and each other” (115).

Look up Durkheim!

“The boundaries consist essentially in hte contrivance of distinctive meanings within the community’s social discourse. They provide people with a referent for their personal identities. Having done so, they are then themselves expressed and reinforceed through the presentation of those identites in social life” (118).

CCR 735 Notes 11/6

Lindquist, Julie. A Place to Stand: Politics and Persuasion in a Working-Class Bar. Oxford UP, 2002. Chapters 1 and 5.

Lindquist performs what she calls an “ethnography of rhetoric” by investigating the rhetoric that determines the community and forms the identity of the people who are regulars at a south suburban Chicago bar, the Smokehouse. She claims that bars are understudied sites in academia and that deeper consideration of them will lend insights into how working class culture is formed and maintained. Using ethnographic methods like interviews, she looks to see how – in context – people from the Smokehouse deal with “dilemmas poseed by competiting forces of tradition and change.” In Chapter 5, “A Place to Tell It,” Lindquist deliniates the major topoi of the rhetoric of the Smokehouse: class, race, work, education, politics, and language, and argues that the discussion of these topics helps the people of the Smokehouse develop their identities as a community and form a common logic.

Quotable Quotes

“To understand the particulars of persuasion for a given culture is to understand how that culture establishes itself as culture – how it invents and sustains its mythologies and what circumstances must obtain in order for these mythologies to change – as well as to recognize that shifts in public belief are contingent upon their value in the local marketplace of ideas” (4).

Good question: “How do social structures produce the exigencies of, or conditions for, expressive practicies?” (5)

“Smokehousesrs narrate class metaphorically and metonymically through discussion of race, politics, education, language, and, above all, work. Ideologies of class are articulated not only through narratives elaborated in response to questions about class per se, but also between, through, and aroudn the edges of other themes. To draw a geography of themes in this way is to see what commonplaces Smokehousers have available to them in argument, to map the rhetorical gruodn on which Smokehousers find places to stand” (74).

 Notable Notes

She situates her study in context – with “specific communicative events” (3).

Interesting way to look at persuasion, not as a private matter, when you are trying to change someone’s own internal beliefs, but “a teleological process in which the ends are social as well as the means” (4).

Ethnographies cannot help to be in part about the ethnographer himself/herself.

Cohen, Anthony. Symbolic Construction of Community. Florence, Kentucky: Routledge, 1985. Chapter 1 & Chapter 4

Cohen’s study looks at the way in which symbols construct and define communities, especially in terms of the boundaries of communities. The boundary both defines the common features that are found within communities and point to what is distinctive in the community as compared to what is found outside the community. Symbols are general – individual people may disagree on their exact, specific description but they have a broad, common definition. Cohen debunks three myths about communities: that small face-to-face communities are more simple than larger urban ones; that communities are egalitarian; and that as communties become less isolated, they will lose their identifying characteristics and become part of the mass general culture. Cohen’s study is different from contemporary community studies because he aims to study community in context, not through theory alone.

Quotable Quotes

“Community studies were consigned for some time into an abyss of theoretical sterility by obsessive atempts to formulate precise analytic definitions…We are not concerned now with the positivisitic niceties of analytic taxonomies. We confront an empirical phenomenon: people’s attachment to community. We seek an understanding of it by trying to capture some sense of their experience and of the meanings they attach to community. Thus, moving away from the earlier emphasis our discipline placed on structure, we approach community as a phenomenon of culture: as one, therefore, which is meaningfully constructed by people through their symbolic prowess and resources” (38).

“This consciousness of community is, then, encapsulated in perception of its boundaries, boundaries which are themselves largely constituted by people in interaction” (13).

People in a community have a range of meanings attached to a commonly held symbol – “Community is just such a boundary-expressing symbol. As a symbol, it is held in common by its members; but its meaning varies with its members’ unique orientations to it. In the face of this variability of meaning, the consciousness of community has to be kept alive through manipulation of its symbols. The reality and efficacy of the community’s boundary – and, therefore, of the community itself – depends upon its symbolic construction and embellishment. This essay discusses some of the features most commonly associated with this process” (15).

“Community is that entity to which one belongs, greater than kinship but more immediately than the abstraction we call ’society’…It is where one acquires ‘culture’” (15).

“Symbols are effective because they are imprecise” (21).

Notable Notes

Culture is formed through community.

His debunking of the “inevitable conformity” myth has some play today in the bigbox store hysteria – is it true? I don’t know if Cohen’s right about this one…is it just because we like one mass media outlet (Target) more than another (Walmart?)

Communites can adopt external symbols and then place on those symbols meanings of their own (37).

Communities have a commonality of form often, but not of content (or meaning.) The symbol is the same, but not the meaning (20).

CCR 691 Notes for 11/5

Berkenkotter. “Rethinking Genre from a Sociocognitive Perspective.”

 Genres, Berkenkotter argues, are situated constructs that develop dynamically over time specific to time and circumstance. Genres are learned inductively through apprenticeship; they are not explicitly taught. In this chapter, Berkenkotter explains the theoretical framework through which he analyzes genre. His perspective is colored by eight years of research of individual writers (language in use) and several crossdisciplinary theories. His theorietical framework has five principles: dynamism (genres develop is response to the users’ needs, which change over time); situatedness (genre knowledge is inherent in daily communicative decisions and life and is picked up “on the go,” not taught); form and content (genres are both and someone with a handle on a genre can determine the appropriate situation to vary form and content); duality of structure (genres both inform and form social structures and relationships); community ownership (genres signal a community’s values and norms.) Berkenkotter argues that community-based knowledge is built on genres - there would be no common pool of knowledge, no way to talk and extend thought without genres to do it in. We recognize knowledge because of genres.

Quotable Quotes

“Genres are the intellectual scaffolds on which community-based knowledge is constructed. To be fully effective in this role, genres must be flexible and dynamic, capable of modification according to the rhetorical exigencies of the situation. At the same time, though, they must be stable enough to capture those aspects of situations that tend to recur” (24).

“Communicators engage in (and their texts reveal) various degrees of generic activity. No act of communication springs out of nothing. In one way or antoher, all acts of communication build on prior texts and text elements, elemetns that exist on different levels, including words, phrases, discourse patterns, illustrations, and so on” (17). All communication is rooted in genre.

“Genres, therefore, are always sites of contention between stability and change” (6). Reference to Bakhtin’s two opposing forces.

“Genre knowledge of academic discourse entails an understanding of both oral and written forms of appropriate communicative behaviors. This knowledge, rather than being explicitly taught, is transmitted through enculturation as apprentices become socialized to the ways of speaking in particular disciplinary communities” (7).

“Genres are the media through which schoars and scientists communicate with their peers. Genres are intimately linked to a discipline’s methodolog, and they package information in ways that conform to a discipline’s norms, values, and ideology. Understanding the genres of written communication in one’s field is, therefore, essential to professional success” (1).

Notable Notes

Interesting discussion on how new journals that balk at the constaining genres of established journals become professionalized and like those established journals over time (22-23)

Kairos – rhetorical timing, appropriate timing. Someone with nuanced genre knowledge has kairos (16).

How do you teach students academic discourse when it can only be acquired over time (a semester isn’t enough.) Undergraduate education cannot require undergraduate students to successfully acquire professional disciplinary discourse. Instead, as Berkenkotter suggests, WAC programs should emphasize the “genres of the undergraduate curricula,” like decontextualized problems, test, reading, experimentation, and writing. The undergraduate experience is classroom-based, not based in the real world (13).

Coherence is achieved through commonly held assumptions that change over time (15).

Berkenkotter. “Gatekeeping at an Academic Convention.”

Berkenkotter investigates, by looking at a sample of 96 CCCC abstract proposals, the genre of the CCCC abstract proposal in order to understand what separates highly rated proposals from lower rated ones, a distinction that points to what the organization of CCCC and the field of rhetoric and composition in general finds to be valuable knowledge. He notices that highly rated proposals are more likely to have a topic that is of current interest in the field and reflects the chair’s call, have an extended description of the problem being tackled, and approach the problem in a novel way. They also emote an insider ethos: they use specific terminology that positions themselves as an active insider member of the field and cite scholarship in the field and scholarship outside the field that has been recently influential to the discipline. They had impressions from first looking at their pool of data and then developed an analysis technique to confirm their hypotheses.

Fahnestock, Jeanne and Marie Secor. “The Rhetoric of Literary Criticism.”

Fahnestock and Secor analyzed a small set of literary criticism scholarly articles published between 1978 and 1982 to determine what the rhetoric and genre of literary criticism entails. Using analytical frameworks explained by Aristotle, Cicero, Toulmin, and Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca, the authors categorize the stases and topoi most frequently deployed by literary critics in developing their arguments. The stases used are arguing for the existence of something, characterizing it, explaining its cause, and evaluating its quality and value. There were five major topoi used throughout the articles: 1. reality/appearance (what we see on the surface isn’t what is really happening); 2. ubiqutousness (this pattern or thing I found is everywhere!); paradox (collapsing the binary); contemptus mundi (despair in the current state of the world); and paradigm (applying an idea or a concept to a work, like the Oedipus psychoanalysis.) The authors also discuss how literary critics develop their own ethos – through casually referencing other scholarship relating to their own, using elaborate language and metaphor that reflects the complexity of the literature they are discussing, and by promoting the discipline-held value of complexity. They place literary criticism in the epideitic catergory of rhetoric because it promotes cultural values and norms.

Quotable Quotes

“To convince another reader that a work is a ‘classic,’ or simply worth the time it takes to read it, requires appealing to shared criteria of what has value in literature. These criteria certainly change over time, and writers are promoted or demoted from the canon of major works” (83). How canons get formed.

“What is the appeal of the paradox? Why does this violation of Aristotle’s first law of thought surprise and delight us with the impression of discovery and insight that accompanies its formulation? One answer may be that the precise verbal form is itself the attraction, making it seem possible to impose an apparent unity on disparate elements and thus provoke wonder” (88).

“Ultimately all the topoi we have discussed reduce to one fundamental assumption behind critical inquiry: that literature is complex and that to understand it requires patient unraveling, translating, decoding, interpreting, and analyzing” (89).

 Notable Notes

Is literature complex because of literary critics or are literary critics needed because literature is complex? The question to ask! What is the value in seeing literature simply? Does the text take on an authority that the author did not intend? Is it fair to read into a text something that wasn’t intended?

Interesting comparison between literary criticism and religion (94).

Wilder, Laura. “‘The Rhetoric of Literary Criticism’ Revisited: Mistaken Critics, Complex Contexts, and Social Justice.”

Wilder repeats Fahnestock and Secor’s study by investigating the states and topoi used in 28 literary criticism scholarly articles published between 1999 and 2001 from 12 different journals (including the 10 that Fahnestock and Secor used.) She wants to find out how the conventions have changed in twenty years in order both to better understand this discourse community and where it’s going and to assist those who are designing curriculum for introductory courses in literary studies. She finds that the claims in the articles stem from all five of Cicero’s states (F & S saw that most dealt with the first two, existence and definition) and adds three new topoi that the literary critics’ arguments follow: social justice, context, and mistaken critic (hence the title.) The mistaken critic points to an aspect of a text that a previous critic overlooked or interpreted incorrectly, context draws on the sociohistorical situation when the text was written to problematize the text, and social justice finds an aspect of the text that speaks to the current world situation and calls for social action for change (the opposite of the confundus mundi topoi.)

Quotable Quotes

Social justice topoi: “The assumption in this topos is that literature and life are connected – that literature, regardless of when it was written, speaks to our present condition” (98).

Again, social justice topoi: “The rise of the social justice topos may have tipped the balance on which literary critics’ views of history rest: What was once portrayed as modernity fallen from a glorious past is now portaryed as a past and present riddled with problems but reaching toward an improved future” (100).

Notable Notes

Discussion of the influence of cultural studies on literary criticism and the blurry line between literary criticism and theory (88).

This article follows the mistaken critic topos?

Complexity is still the key…How much resolution do we allow now? “But because simple, straightforward explanations of a text are always considered suspect, an interesting tension emerges concerning just how much resolution a critic can provide to a reading of a text” (106). Even goes so far as a celebration of the lack of resolution in the articles.