it's all about the discourse communities, baby.

In her essay "Cognition, Convention, and Certainty: What We Need to Know About Writing," Bizzel argues, "...the problems of basic writers might be better understood in terms of their unfamiliarly with the academic discourse community, combined, perhaps, with such limited experience outside their native discourse communities that they are unaware that there is such a thing as a discourse community with conventions to be mastered. What is underdeveloped is their knowledge both of the ways experience is constituted and interpreted in the academic discourse community and of the fact that all discourse communities constitute and interpret experience "(230).

I love this insight by Bizzel, because it gets to the heart of what I'm thinking is an interesting dilemma with 110 (and something I've blogged about in the past): topic choice. This can be seen in the context of experience -- what constitutes experience worthy of interpretation? I'm running into this issue with my students beginning their I-Search papers. I told them that I'd prefer they pick topics relevant to a professional or (burning!) personal interest. The majority of my students have aligned themselves with topics meeting these guidelines; others, defying my advice and warnings, insist on writing papers that will be utterly useless to them later in their academic careers.

One of the greatest lessons I've learned as a graduate student is the importance of a "specialty," or topic of choice, around which to base as many papers, conference proposals, presentations, etc. as humanly possible. For me, this has been my passion for comic book scriptwriting, a passion born of a three year position at a publishing company writing/editing educational comic books. I used this example for my students, encouraging them to explore (if they haven't already found one) a topic, issue, concept, idea, etc. they could carry over into other areas of their academic experience and/or professional interests. I parallel this concept with my assignment (forgoing journaling) of the individual writing project, in which students find a text associated with their field of study and/or personal interest and use it as inspiration to write within that, as Bizzel calls it, discourse community.

I think it's important for students to realize there are discourse communities both inside and outside the academic arena and that, when possible, they should marry these two communities to best serve their own interests. If a student knows, for instance, he/she wishes to be a financial planner, it would be helpful for that student to not only learn the rules of the academic discourse community, but to carry over and apply those rules to the discourse community of the financial planning industry. I find that this approach makes written communication more relevant for students who can't escape the "english only in english class" mindset.

I think the I-Search is an important way to draw students' attention to these discourse communities. By directing their topic choices, we as teachers can expose them to the concepts, people, ideas and, perhaps most importantly, texts (discourse community!) associated with a relevant, meaningful subject. The I-Search also offers the unique opportunity to explore a more personal reflection about this journey, which I think is quite valuable for beginning writers and young people doing just that -- searching.