There has been much positive response among the class to the Kaufman and Torda's article on book clubs, "On Not Being Only One Thing." If you haven't yet, read Kylie's response on her blog in which she shares her illuminating experience doing books clubs with her 114 class.
While I find their work beneficial in thinking about engaging students with their reading and understanding metacognitively the processes that they employ while reading and writing, Kaufman and Torda frame their coursework largely in expressivist theory which has its limitations. Expressivists privilege the reader, encouraging personal and subjective responses to the reading. In addition, there are no universal truths; the reader is free to make personal meaning out the text. I can agree with much that expressivists believe, but I think we can go farther and dig deeper.
I am interested in expanding an expressivist perspective into more of the work done in cultural studies. The reader is still an agent but has a socio-historical context within which to inquiry and challenge ideas. There are still no universal truths, but instead of the individual creating truth, we discuss how truth is agreed upon socially, a socio-epistemic perspective on meaning.
I may be adrift at sea here, but having taught at community college for the past three years, I think first-year composition classes are hungry for this cultural and historical contextualization. Students would embrace being an agent with a real context to challenge and question. The common research papers they currently write about Obamacare or immigration give them the space to comment, but they are largely unfulfilled, still hungry for the work they do in class to matter. And they are right. Students spend hours looking for research articles on EBSCO because we tell them that databases contain academic sources, and only academic sources have the authority to discuss important issues. Well then, that statement completely undermines why they would write a research paper!
This idea aligns with the inquiry discussion we had in class on Monday, and why we design inquiry-based courses. Students must use MLA citations in their papers. Therefore, we teach them how it's done, but what if they want to know why MLA works that way; why it's the standard?; who decides?; where did it come from? Without inquiry, our course has no purpose. But to expand that purpose so students finish our courses with knowledge they can transfer to any cultural situation: that is the philosophical engine that drives our purpose.
Now all I need is the pedagogy to make it happen. I'll be in the library ...
Aaron, I'm just now getting around to reading and commenting on blogs. First of all, thanks for the shout out (tune in tomorrow for a quick de-briefing on another book club I've got going...). I think your point about how we stress the need to use the authoritative voices out there--wherever that is--to support students' ideas helps to complicate what we're doing here. (In a valuable way, not a "gee, thanks Aaron," way.) Something that I hope will be successful for my students is to talk about credible sources instead of only purely "the authorities" or "the experts" in any field. Being able to decipher who is credible and who is not, regardless of the medium in which we find the information, is huge. Also, I'm going to have my students share what they've learned in a genre that makes sense based off of their purpose and what audience would be most effective. In that way, I want them to take back control and--never mind the people who have published work on the subject--exhibit how they have become experts on their topic.
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