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Recipes vs rethinking academic life
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Sun, 03/22/2009 - 20:00
Hi all! The question about critical thinking is inspiring, Olwyn. I´ll wait to tell you about my experience regarding that in a course I taught, until more people give their opinions so that we don´t pre-empt anything. However, it made me think of something: how far should we comply with students´ expectation that we will provide a number of recipes for success at academic life, e.g. how to cite, how to sound appropriately tentative through hedging, how to describe a graph well, how to write a good appendix and so on vs the more inspirational aim of learning EAP as an incremental active process of redefining academic life at each step?
I think Swales´ work is more than relevant in this respect. When he revisits the research article in Swales (2004), he shows us how dealing with models such as the CARSL model is not only a way of describing academic reality but also of rethinking it and reshaping it.
What do you people think about this? Shall we still provide "recipes"?
best
Andrea
* Swales (2004) Ressearch Genres: Explorations and Applications. Cambridge: C.U.P.
Sat, 04/11/2009 - 01:35
#2
Hi Olwyn. Yes, I couldn´t agree more. Probably the word "recipes" sounded too negative. I believe the best course of action would be to teach genres as such, as you propose, meaning not just a set of conventions apparently lacking a rationale, but a set of conventions with a reason. Knowing the rationale would empower students and prepare them to understand future changes in the conventions.
Best
Andrea
Sat, 04/11/2009 - 08:02
#3
Hi Andrea,
Just to add though, that I think not everyone shares this view and there is a strong movement for critical EAP (Benesch is usually the author associated with this) which advocates students critiquing the discourse practices of a discipline.
Personally I think this is not fair to students. It seems to me that the critical EAP people are forcing students to adopt the critical agenda without necessarily realising the consequences. It's not empowering as you suggest genre knowledge is; it's disempoering because it sets students against more powerful members of the discipline.
Perhaps I've represented critical EAP unfairly though and it would be good to hear other views of it.
Olwyn
Hi Andrea,
I could quote my friend and colleague Jenifer Spencer who says that until you know how to follow the conventions, of a sonnet or an introduction, it is not wise to experiment with them.
I do not really think we are providing recipes but showing students some of the conventional practices of disciplines. These are not unchanging as the word recipe would imply but they change very slowly and usually only senior members of a discourse community (or very clever junior members) are allowed to play around with them.
I think we have to remember that we are not teaching our students to write great literature. We want them to write clearly and plainly so that their message is not obscured by their writing. It's the ideas not the writing that the discipline values.
So we don't provide recipes but we do show students typical genres. However, as I wrote under the multidisciplines thread, then students have to cross disciplines they can sometimes suffer from 'genre shock' as Christine Feak called it because they do not know which set of conventions to follow.
Olwyn