Lives on file: a critical assessment of the career portfolio genre

Reading Research Quarterly

2013

Self Cite

This article revisits Goody's arguments about literacy's influence on social arrangements, culture, cognition, economics, and other domains of existence. Whereas some of his arguments tend toward technological determinism (i.e., literacy causes change in the world), other of his arguments construe literacy as a force that shapes and is shaped by disparate social processes. This article also reviews the critiques of Goody's work developed in the subfield of sociocultural literacy studies. Although the critics are right to object to the elements of technological determinism in his work, their rejection of his larger project leads them to miss ideas that can help clarify literacy's role in the transformation of society. Moreover, their misreading of Goody's work contributes to the field's underestimation of the distinct force of literacy and overestimation of the force of local cultures. In other words, how they misread Goody's work limits the depth of the answers that they provide to questions about literacy and its relations to culture, economics, politics, and other social spheres. These relations can be better understood when Goody's work is reread with an interaction model of literacy that figures changes in literacy as conditions of and conditional upon changes in other domains. Equipped with this model, researchers may rectify the supposed technological determinism of Goody's approach and the cultural determinism of some sociocultural accounts of literacy. Researchers may then synthesize these ideas to develop approaches that clarify literacy's evolving relations with other aspects of the world. This article concludes by explaining how a revised understanding of genre may bring into view the interplay between literacy and different social processes.

Section: Against Great Divides: Reactions To Autonomous Theories Of Lmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: A New Direction For Literacy Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

Revisiting Jack Goody to Rethink Determinisms in Literacy Studies

Reading Research Quarterly

2013

Self Cite

“…Imagine, for example, a progressive educator who sees her students as individual entrepreneurs shaping their own trajectories into the future. When this teacher builds lessons that offer entrepreneurial identities, she works to link the classroom situation into a late capitalist mode of production driven by self-forming and self-motivating individuals (Apple 2006;Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2002;Collin 2011;Gee 2004). Her students, however, may resist her efforts and may struggle to build the lesson as a situation linked into a different mode of production that presumes different identities for students and workers (e.g.…”

mentioning

confidence: 98%

Mapping the future, mapping education: an analysis of the 2011 State of the Union Address

Journal of Education Policy

2012

Self Cite

This article presents a discourse analysis of President Barack Obama's 2011 State of the Union Address. Fredric Jameson's concepts of cognitive mapping, cultural revolution, and the unconscious are employed to examine the president's vision of educational and economic transformation. Ultimately, it is argued this vision evokes a world in which individual citizens direct their deepest aspirations into channels of capitalist development. Prominent among these channels are reconfigured structures of education.

“…The genre evolved in this way in part because it is used within institutions (i.e., public schools) dominated by middle-class actors and middle-class beliefs in self-cultivation and self-promotion (see Gee, 2004;Lareau, 2003). Middle-class students engaging this genre may therefore be more apt than their less affluent peers to demonstrate a feel for producing the "right" kinds of reflections and performing student Discourse in the "right" way (see Collin, 2011;Michelson & Mandell, 2004).…”

Section: Groups' Efforts To Change Genres and Discoursesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…To cite five examples, researchers have developed rhetorical approaches to genre by importing ideas from Soviet activity theory (Russell, 1997), creativity studies (Devitt, 2004), Bakhtinian speech theory (Schryer, 2002), curriculum theory (Collin, 2011), and organizational studies (Yates & Orlikowski, 1992).…”

Section: Declaration Of Conflicting Interestsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Genre in Discourse, Discourse in Genre

Journal of Literacy Research

2012

Self Cite

Focusing on matters of power and difference, this article examines rhetorical theories of genre and James Gee's theory of Discourse. Although both theories offer productive ways of understanding literate practice, it is argued, they are limited in crucial respects. Genre theory offers few ways of understanding how and why some social actors have an easier time than others in producing generic texts and getting their texts deemed "legitimate" by recognized authorities. Gee's theory, meanwhile, does not explain precisely how and where (i.e., at which conceptual level) communicants come to match Discourse to situation. This article contends that these limitations may be surpassed if the two theories are brought together in a particular way. In this new approach, genres and Discourses are viewed as mutually constitutive forms: Genres exist within Discourses and Discourses exist within genres. In adopting this approach, it is argued, researchers may study how particular genres are made to elicit performances of Discourses connected to particular social groups. Keywords genre, discourse (oral or written), critical theory, poststructuralism, postmodernism, sociolinguistics, writing, composition Recently, when analyzing student portfolios, I ran up against certain limits of rhetorical theories of genre and James Gee's theory of big-D Discourse (explained below). At the time, I was studying two high schools' career portfolio programs. Collin 77Students at these schools are required to build portfolios out of artifacts from classes, extracurricular activities, and outside endeavors. In personal essays, students explain how these artifacts plot out their trajectories into paid work. At the end of the school year, seniors present their portfolios to exit interview panels composed of educators and businesspeople. My intention was to study career portfolios from two angles: as compositional forms and as the creations of differently positioned actors. To study the portfolio as a compositional form, I drew from rhetorical theories of genre. To understand how students from different backgrounds use linguistic resources to compose themselves as different kinds of people, I employed Gee's theory of Discourse. As I pursued my analysis, however, I discovered these two theories were limited in crucial respects.In contemporary theories of rhetoric, genres are often defined as "typified rhetorical actions based in recurrent situations" (Miller, 1984, p. 159; see also Bawarshi, 2003;Bazerman, 1988;Berkenkotter & Huckin, 1995; Campbell & Jamieson, 1978;Devitt, 2004;Freadman, 1994;Freedman & Medway, 1994;Russell, 1997;Schryer, 1994;Yates & Orlikowski, 1992). These theories offer productive ways of seeing how genres position individuals to recognize and build certain kinds of situations, take on identities appropriate to those situations, and act in accordance with those identities. Additionally, rhetorical theories of genre provide ways of understanding how actors adapt genres to suit unique conjunctures of space and time. Howeve...