Week 11 Prompt: What's one thing
you've learned that connects to a learning objective and to your future job?
Over the course of the semester, the one learning objective
that I always return to is thinking about audience:
- Audience awareness. Students will analyze audience and purpose in
rhetorical situations and make appropriate choices. Measurement:
observation and analysis of artifacts produced, including active
participation in classroom discussion and blogs
As someone who's interested in community writing, audience analysis and its influence on the composing process has been a big focal point for me while doing the readings over the semester. Lisa Ede and Andrea Lunsford's "Audience Addressed/Invoked: The Role of Audience in Composition Theory and Pedagogy," is still a stand-out article for me, because it positions the student as both a composer and a member of their own audience.
It reminds me of the work Carolyn Miller did in her
article "The Polis as Rhetorical Community," which made a
differentiation between writing as an author to an audience, and writing as a
member of a community to members of your community. I think that's a
distinction I'm going to enjoy returning to throughout my PhD education. Audience
also interrelates to other concepts we've covered in class from a composition
instructor perspective, such as Elbow's mother tongues and Yancey's multi-modal
approaches (as it's been mentioned in-class, medium is the message). I also
think that looking at audience, and placing writers as members of audience, is
an important key for determining paradigm shifts as we discussed this week in
class. Writers who were responding to their audiences in the 1960s, for
instance, have different processes and strategies than writers of today.
I think technology has a strong effect on constituting
audience, and I think that we are moving to another paradigm shift:
Product-> Process -> Performance
As language becomes something more active, and able to
be edited and revised in a public sphere, in real time. As audience is
able to become more integrative into the composing process (here, I’m thinking
of Twitter and reblogging functions, or message boards or list-servs) and as
students have representations of themselves (or personas) that exist in public,
electronic spaces how writing connects to the public, to the audience, to the
community is an important factor to consider when establishing practices and
assessment for the composition process.
Additionally, thinking of audience has helped me in my own
work as I consider pursuing a career in academia. Our extended analysis of a
writing program helped me write a more focused philosophy of teaching by giving
me a university to hypothetically apply it to. Having the structure and
external application was a huge assist in forming my writing philosophy, as I
was able to take goals from the school and modify them to fit within my own
approach to pedagogy. It also made me consider how I would change my own
composition process if I’m considering a shift from presenting myself as a
student to the academic community (as I do now) to how I will present myself as
a professional (which I will hopefully be doing in five years). Connecting the
philosophy of teaching to our online presence is another factor I see being
important in the immediate future.
Product-> Process -> Performance
ReplyDeleteThat's such a cool way to look at it. I think performance is, in a way, the ultimate expression of post-process comp theory. Instead of working off of a single process, performance stresses knowing one's own process well enough to perform it confidently for a variety of audiences--sometimes on the spot (like improv).
I've been thinking a lot about the author-editor relationship this weekend, and I'm intrigued by this distinction between writing as author to audience and as community member to community member. This relationship could really be either scenario, depending on any number of factors.
So many good things to think about!
I'm with Bailey. The idea of product leading to process, which leads to performance, illustrates a good cycle that could easily be backed up with the right amount of articles and information. As a former theater minor, I can argue that writing is like acting, because both can be processed into performances that are targeted towards a basic audience. Plus, as Bailey said, the performance of a composition can be boiled down to improv.
ReplyDeleteI never thought that much of the integration of audiences into basic rhetoric, but thinking about stuff like Twitter helps me see the evolution that you're trying to argue. So yeah, I can see definitive legs on your argument on technology and its processing a product into an interactive performance. You could even say that blogs like this one are part of the equation.