Week 3 response

As with anything else in this world, I am weary of choosing one or the other, in this debate between outer-directed theorists, and inner-directed theorists. It makes sense to me, that the answer lies somewhere in the middle. During class on Thursday, our group discussed how we felt that box 1 and box 2 on the Flower and Hayes model, needed to be less boxy, and dropped into the second model, and then maybe we have something we can all work with. Each discourse community comes with its own set of distinct conceptual structures, and its own language, so it would make sense that much of what we learn, and how we learn, has to come from external factors. Yet, in terms of teaching composition, we have to be aware that our students are visiting different discourse communities, and it is virtually impossible for us, as instructors to get our students well-versed in every single one, so we do need to be able to teach the students how to spot the intricacies of discourse communities, and doing so involves a heuristic approach. If not a literal checklist, at least a set of tools the students can use to identify within their internal processes, to move from discourse community to discourse community without feeling lost. One of the concepts in the Bizzell article that stands out to me is that the writer must be able to define goals in terms of the interpretive conventions of that specific community. I think, then, the aim of teaching a composition course, should be to give students the tools to be able to identify conventions when they find themselves in a new discourse community. I am not as interested in the deeply theoretical, as I am in how to make the theoretical applicable in the classroom. As a side note, I always assumed composition courses were all about essay writing, so the Bean has opened up so much more to me.