My first thoughts--sketchy, essai-ish, making strong claims (as I claim essays do), inviting disagreement (as I claim essays do), making me anxious that I'll be found dumb, wrong or worse (as I claim essays do).
And a lot more....
• Essays; a set of Robin-claims, in no particular order:
--Essay does not refer to a singular entity. When we talk about 'essays,' we're pretty much assured that we aren't talking about the same things. We need to tease out the many things operating when we say 'I think they need to learn to write an adult, professional essay.'
--Essays (and all discursive forms or genres) have a history, and that history is encoded in the ways they structure information and set relations among users. They encode a worldview. They are particular and 'local' (Clifford Geertz). Because of this, there's always an occulted politics in any discursive form. Scollon and Scollan's notion of 'essay / text literacy' is a reminder of the particularity (and costliness) of the ways of talking, reading and writing that we find so natural (and our students often find so foreign and hard). I'm writing this on the computer, one draft. I'll go back and mess around a little, but basically I can make an essay dead drunk having just rolled out of bed at 3:00 AM if I need to. And it won't be too bad. (And I have never rolled out of bed dead drunk; in fact, never been -- but the metaphor holds; I inhabit an essay-structured body and mind. And it's a good body and mind to have if you work in a university.) Here's a good summary from Paul Gee's great overview article (731), where he traces essay structure to Enlightenment thinkers who were:
among the first to exploit writing for the purpose
of formulating original theoretical knowledge. . . . Knowledge was taken to be
the product of an extended logical essay—the output of the repeated application
in a single coherent text of the technique of examining an assertion to determine
all of its implications. (pp. 268-269)
This form of literacy is the basis, ideologically, if not always in
practice, of our schools and universities. Claims for literacy per se
are often in fact tacit claims for essay-text literacy, a form of literacy
that is neither natural nor universal, but one cultural way of making
sense among many others. Of course, this way of making sense is
associated with mainstream middle-class and upper middle-class
groups and is, in fact, best represented by the ideology and
sometimes the practice of academics, the people who most often
make claims for it.
Not a 'bad' form or history; not 'bad' ideologically; not set in opposition to some neutral or better form (ain't none). But structuring, political, value-setting, class-dividing and very, very local and particular. And hard to master, unless you grew up in the right place. Athabascan Indians really don't. But I'm guessing you don't need to go to Lake Athabaska to find students pretty alienated from this way with words.
--We confuse essays (or school essays, or academic essays) with a set of skills or discourse competences that may well be useful, highly-valued and politically important (Freire's basic claim). Things like: ability to sustain a long argument (or read one); syntactic ability necessary to encode complex arguments (like dialectic, say); love of intellectual debate; ability to present and defend ideas (and dominate); vocabulary; ability to fit words to worlds (audiences); ability to sort and order data; range of 'rhetic' or 'genre' competences (can make different kinds of structures). And, and, and. Got to tease these out, name 'em, and figure out how to help students get them--and not necessarily by writing a lot of bad essays at which they fail over and over.
--Essays--and all discourse--are enacted / performed. The SAT's (which determine lives) are overwhelmingly (4/5) focused on matters of form. Writing ability, according to their rubrics, is a matter of being able to make a 'thing' with a particular shape. Syntax, vocabulary, format / surface grammar, paragraph and text cohesion--and then, oh yeah, I almost forgot: 'creative original ideas.' If the SAT wants focus on form, education will focus on form. And it isn't like they just woke up with a bad idea and imposed it; the formalist preoccupation is meme-etic, everywhere. But writing enacts, whether we're conscious of it or not. Essays enact a power relationship (I dominate by my 'logos / pathos / ethos; I get my opponent to agree. I win.) They're agonistic. Competitive. Apparently Athabaskans don't like this at all. Neither do a lot of Minnesotans.
But politics aside, a pedagogy focused on how to 'do things with words' goes a lot better. A 'pragmatics' not a mere syntax. A theory of actions, not language objects (there Maria, I told you I'd dump a lot of linguistic theory in). What are you DOING in saying this? I think blogs work (fewer cliches, fewer ossified forms, less of that parody we saw last week: 'Opening sentence with some metaphor that you idiot teachers will like because it makes me look smart when in reality I found it on Spark-notes.') because (1) real classmates will see them, and (2) they are--or can be--a real communication to a real audience.
So yes, faking 'Every Essay I Have Ever Written' is also a 'performance,' but it performs making / faking a formal object for a teacher. It performs 'school.' We need to re-form 'school.' So it won't be as grimly Dickensian as reform school.
--(School) Essays have auras. The 'school essay' is not what we think of as an essay; it's like fire drills or assembly or uniforms or any other coerced behavior with no connection to anything in students' lives beyond 'doing school.' This is why the Manoa Writing Project folks found that students will almost always try something that worked before rather than risk something new. And--'Bueller? Bueller? Anyone?'--what 'worked before' was faking an essay. Look HERE for Manoa's nice 2-page guide to thinking about writing assignments. Think about ways to strip off that ugly aura.
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