List 5 terms you don't quite know yet how to define from our final keywords list. Next identify three in other students' blog you do know how to define, and comment on them there in those blogs.
Here are five terms I could use help defining, especially within the number of characters given us for the exam. I understand some of them in a nebulous way, but putting down their exact definition is another matter. Thanks in advance to those who comment.
1) Discipline
2) Making of Knowledge
3) Power
4) Style
5) Social construction
Not sure about discipline's precise definition in reference to composition studies, but I think that discipline would be categorized as the rules and regulations that suppress composition from being unprofessional and more basic. Composition disciplines are the restrictions placed on composition writing so that compositions follow distinct rules or guidelines. An example of which would include the disciplines of our freshman English courses, which are more generalized and follow the restrictions of essays having basic things like theses or supported evidence. It's not a perfect description, but the right definition would probably be along those lines.
ReplyDelete2) Making of Knowledge
ReplyDeleteThis is related to your last term, "social construction," I think-- the idea now is that knowledge is not some neutral bank of information just waiting to be accessed. Knowledge is actively contested and constantly evolving out of social relations.
3) Power
This one I'm kind of fuzzy on, too. I think this is referring to negotiating the student-teacher dynamic in an ethical manner, though it could also refer to using language in an effective way.
5) Social construction
Generally, this could refer to the ways in which identity categories like gender and ethnicity are historically made, rather than naturally occurring phenomena. In the writing classroom, I think this refers to the way meaning arises from a whole host of interactions between authors, contexts, and audiences.
As far as composition goes, wouldn't discipline have to do with the idea that composition itself is a discipline as much as any other discipline? We often hear the phrase: Writing in the disciplines, meaning that we are teaching our students to write in their disparate disciplines, but we don't always talk about writing itself as a discipline.
ReplyDeleteTo add to Chen's definition here, I think knowledge is also made on top of other knowledge, that we build relationships between what we already know and what we are currently learning. I think there's a biological basis to this, as well, as our brains actively form (and conversely, destroy or let atrophy) synaptic connections throughout our entire lives, and the more we make these mental connections -- as we construct knowledge -- the more we form synaptic connections. I love the idea of knowledge as being actively contested; this strikes me as a positivist (? I hope I'm using that term correctly) stance, as we're actively testing what we know against the material evidence we encounter.
ReplyDelete