[un]awareness and the Rhetorical Stance of Noviceship

In an attempt to create some continuity between the previous post on perceived intellectual greenery, the focus of this post on Yancey, Robertson and Taczak's Writing Across Contexts will be the idea of the novice writer, or more specifically, the (un?)conscious choice writers make in assuming a "rhetorical stance of noviceship" when encountering alien writing territory (18). The funny thing is, noviceship is conducive to learning, and is actually a direct (if anything is direct in higher ed) pathway to expertise. In A Theory of Literate Action Bazerman talks about how writing allows us to construct "elaborate states of mind," mental structures whose complexity it is difficult or impossible to arrive at without writing. This idea is present in WAC:

"Second, the student cannot write from a position of expertise, but must write into such expertise: students need to immerse themselves in the material, get a sense of the parameters of their subjects, familiarize themselves with the kinds of questions asked of different sets of evidence , and have a stake in the answers before they can articulate analytical theses" (19). 

What sort of axiom are we working from here? Is it new? "Good writing is..."aware," immersed in conversations, social - this is definitely a social axiology yet is also quite formalistic and genre/convention based (what kind of questions are asked determines the questions I should ask).
(Also, see threshhold concepts 2.5, 3.0, 4.0)

Noviceship allows for a certain cognitive relaxation which enables students to cross boundaries and break apart what they already know in order to repurpose certain aspects of it. Students who are "boundary guarders" tend to be more certain and inflexible in their knowledge aquired. They are more likely to write from a position of expertise, yet are at risk for suffering from "unawareness" (18-19). While the expert/boundary guarders are "confident in their facility with certain genres...they had an essentially superficial understanding of genres...[and] underlying values and epistemologies that different genres, or even a particular genre, represented" (18).

"what might we do inside our curriculum to motivate those students exhibiting a boundary-guarding approach to take up a boundary-crossing one? And once students have boundary-crossed, what happens then? How can we support boundary-crossers and help them become more confident and competent composers?"(15).

How can noviceship, or at least the encouragement of the threshhold concept itself, be designed into a course? How have professors attempted to develop my own sense of noviceship in the past? How do I plan to incorporate this into the curriculum of my WI course, Tolstoy and the Victorians?

 -One way my own sense of noviceship has been cultivated is through structured self-reflection practices. By assigning a reflection letter after significant writing assignments, students are encouraged to see their writing as forming, not formed, and also work at refining their own process, identifying on paper what worked for them and what didn't. Reflection pieces would be the formative steps a student takes in beginning to theorize his or her own writing process.

-Writer's Personal Profile (WPP): In addition to reflective pieces/letters, self-assessment can be fostered through WPPs as well, in order to allow students another area to flesh out their own strengths and weaknesses, and predict the role of writing in their future careers. WPPs also create a space, pre-assignments, for students to set tailored goals, and then upon re-visitation later in the course, measure progress. I have never been asked to create a WPP but I think it is a great way to encourage student ownership of the course and active thinking about transfer, and also useful in identifying boundary guarders and crossers in the class.

-In a much more general way, many of my past professors who helped me improve my writing would often stress the importance of a conversational awareness. In contrast to the pitfalls of unawareness outlined in WAC, conversational awareness is a pedagogical strategy for presenting writing assignments as part of a larger activity system of intellectual exchange. Instructors who spoke of our writing as "entering into a conversation" elevated what we were doing out of the realm of the classroom and into the world. We now had "a stake in the answers" that might come out of this conversation (19). Specific practices that support this would be an analysis of an argument early on in the course in order to "get a sense of the parameters of their subjects, familiarize themselves with the kinds of questions asked of different sets of evidence" (19). 

A word on the name, or, appellation explanation

This blog is a resurrection. What was a failed attempt to record my furious but brief cooking phase will now serve as a space for literary things. The name originally referred to my desire to cook with the best ingredients on a limited budget ( I suppose I still have this desire but mainly focus on eating rather than cooking). I briefly thought of changing the name to something more literary but after some extremely cheesy allusions and one rhyming pun (see title of post), I ultimately realized TPC still captures the aim of the blog, in a way. Its referent has changed from cooking good food to producing "gourmet" analyses on a limited intellectual budget. And unlike food, knowledge doesn't have a shelf life, and I can continue to amass quality ingredients slowly but surely. It is a great example of the malleability and arbitrariness of words.

That being said, I am not unaware of the implications of coupling the word "poor" with bourgeois/leisure notions of the gourmet or connoisseur. I really did not mean to say that I am truly in poverty, a very serious and all-too-real situation in this country and one that I probably ought not to make light of. But again, the alternative was a rhyming pun/allusion, so I hope you will forgive my entirely irresponsible and unconscionable use of the word "poor" when I am in reality well-fed and somewhat paid-up.

Yet if I consider the name in connection with two of the three literary figures I invoke in my "about me" section, a surprising ideological picture emerges. Jude Fawley is the working class protagonist tragically denied entry into Oxford because of his class in Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure. In Evelyn Waugh's Decline and Fall, Paul Pennyfeather is expelled from Oxford after getting mixed up with the wrong crowd and ends up defaulting on his inheritance, forcing him to seek employment in a-gasp!-public school. I have always identified with these figures because I too carry deep anxieties about my worthiness in higher ed, have had to withdraw from a very good school after being my own bad crowd (although I did go back and finish), and am currently teaching ninth grade English. I can't help but feel like an outsider trying to break in again, trying to crack the code and secure the mythological creature known as the tenure-track position. I feel so much like Jude at times, so desperate to just learn, learn for the sake of learning, yet so much knowledge seems sequestered and out of my reach. The realization of everything that I have not read and do not know can be overwhelming, and I cannot help but think myself intellectually a little below the poverty line, (although I've become pretty good at managing my savings). In my world, knowledge is currency, and when one is trying to crack the code of higher ed, one cannot help but be a subconscious Marxist.

And apparently one cannot help but practice expressivism while blogging.

 "The Poor Connoisseur" it will remain. For now.