Thursday, November 6, 2014

The Inherent Intertextuality of Terms: Making Sense of (Multi-)Layered Conversations

      Similarly to Julianna and Mandy's full-text archive, Erik and I looked to construct a hypertextual map that would serve users of our tool to first provide access into a broad conversation about terms used to theorize about genre by limiting the scope of the discourse to solely our theorists for Week 11, then work as a critical glossary of those terms as they are used by our theorists in order to highlight the fluidity and ever-changing conceptualization of those terms. Our tool by no means exists to provide users with a closed and definitive contextual apparatus that highlights and synthesizes all conversations and discourses held about both genre theory and those terms used in those negotiations, but does offer a small corpus of text that offers an inlet into those discourses and is constructed to invite users into explore the broader community as a whole. In order to direct students in their usage of this tool as we have intended it, our online tool begins with a blurb detailing its nature, suggesting that students view the tool  as their entryway into a larger discourse community that exists outside of the corpus of theorists included, making illicit that it is from that discourse community that we have extracted the theorists and the theories they offer. Because the content of our tool as it currently exists only offers users a small glimpse into the conversations at large, we offer users to use the tool to not only teach themselves, but as a text to which they can contribute in order to teach others. What we mean by this is that the tool serves the function of both a site for learning and as a site for further exploration, addition, and reconfiguration. Like Julianna mentions in her post, the terms included in the readings for Week 11 are not static, in that they used and defined in many different ways dependent upon the theorists using them, so we do not wish for our tool to remain static in its functionality. Be inviting users to contribute to the tool, working in the same way a wiki space would, the tool is able to accurately represent the discourse being held, or was once held, about genre and the theorizing about genre.

Because of the nature of discourse communities located in the discipline of composition studies, our tool looks to follow the same pathways of those members of the community. Several of our key terms brought forth by our limited corpus of texts do not have settled and agreed upon definitions or parameters for usage. Our tool looks to mimic these ongoing (re)conceptualizations, offering to users a critical glossary of the terms as they are used in context by one or several authors, while at the same time inviting them to add to these definitions as they seem them used by other theorists that they have encountered in their address of the same subject of genre. By conceiving our tool in this way, we were able to examine how our theorists used these terms a bit more in depth. For example, while John Trimbur sees collaborative learning as a form of group work in the composition classroom that organizes students in order to not just have them work together, but to foster between students a process of intellectual negotiation and collective-decision making, he also outlines other theorists concepts that they have either terms collaborative learning or have used similar terminologies that still represent or allude to collaborative learning (604). Trimbur outlines for his readers a history of the conception and reconception of the term and practice of collaborative learning, an outline that would be included under Trimbur's link under the term "COLLABORATIVE LEARNING." In his outline, he notes that collaborative learning has been in discussion amongst many circles dating back much further than the 1980s, when American college teachers joined the conversation. Trimbur asserts that those conversations were first introduced in the 1950s and 60s in Britain in the field of medical education. Trimbur highlights the work done and theories posited by the like of M. L. J. Abercrombie in her suggestion that diagnosis, in medical studies, not explicitly in composition studies, "is better learned in small groups of students arriving at diagnoses collaboratively than it is learned by students working individually" (636). Trimbur goes on to assert that American colleges arrival upon the use of collaborative learning was a response to the pressing need of easing incoming college students' entrance into academic studies in the 1970s. He continues his description by shedding light on the influence of theorists such as John Bremer and Michael von Moschzisker and their work on the social organization of learning. It is through these multiple conversations that ultimately influence all later theories about collaborative learning. Our tool looks to highlight and encompass these types of influences on the defining of our terms. However, we recognize that these conversations stem from such a wide breadth of other discourses and would need further research that can be done in collaboration with all users of the tool.

I hope that in the above example it can be perceived not only how the tool would function for our users, but how the construction or planning of the tool lent to our reading of our theorists and providing insight into how they define these critical terms and the influence behind those measures. Just as we could not read our critical terms singularly, knowing how packed and contextually dependent they are, we could not construct a tool that suggested that our users read them singularly or without consideration of the discourse community at large. The critical terms and constantly in flux, similarly to how theories of genre are. We look to have our tool serve as a metaphor for our own purposes in navigating theories of genre and the critical terms associated, and as a field of representation and site for both discovery and teaching anew for our users.


Works Cited:

Trimbur, John. “Consensus and Difference in Collaborative Learning.” College English 51.6 (Oct. 
1989):602-16.

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