Week 7, Post: B&P, Chap. 5: Where Does "Significance" in the Reading Come From?

Blog 1: Summarize the key ideas in your assigned chapter.  What's important for the class to know?  How does it connect with the ideas in chapters 1, 2, and 3?  How does it connect with "Discovery of Competence"? How does it connect with the SFSU IRW course?  How might these ideas inform your own teaching unit?


The thrust of Chapter Five, "The Dialogical Nature of Basic Reading and Writing," comes, I believe, on p. 142.  According to B&P,  students aren't "getting" the reading until this "light bulb" moment, when they see a text's "events, characters, experiences do not possess significance or insignificance, but that the student's act of reflexivity confers those attributes."  This is not merely re-inventing the wheel in terms of students' reading concepts.  In my opinion, it's frankly revolutionary for many teachers.  After all, we, too, went to schools and universities and were commanded to "find the main idea" in a passage or "the key theme" in a chapter.  And, as writers, don't we saddle ourselves with "providing" information?  It's not the simplest philosophical re-tooling, then, for our students, either.

In the B&P course, it's the writing of their autobiographies that establishes students to this commandeering of significance in reading.  This is in keeping with the general plan for the course, established in Chapters 1-3 of the book.  In Chapter 2, p. 37, the authors explain their vision:  "The point of the final set of assignments is to place students' work in the context of professionals."  By the introduction of the autobiography project, the students in a B&P course have, already read several major works and studied their methods of analysis.  Integrating those ways of thinking into their own autobiographies, "they are in a position to see how the words of another can function in their own arguments..." (38).

If writing their autobiographies gives them the opportunity to further apply techniques of writing and analysis already learned, seeing their work in a professionally bound presentation, encourages them to re-imagine themselves as joining in the academic conversation on a truly scholarly level.  Beginning with bolstering his own confidence, this new self-concept offers the student, it could be argued, a virtual psychological re-birth.

Personally, I'm inclined to steal wholesale from B&P all that will fit into my thief's satchel.  I can hardly imagine a more fulfilling event than to be involved in nudging students toward this virtual awakening.  The implementation of the autobiography as a centerpiece, alone, stands as a master stroke.  Of course, two instructors team-teaching this rigorous curriculum makes sense; indeed, for now, I can't quite get my head around how a single teacher on his own can pull it off.   But I'm excited by the challenge.