Discourse: Invention? Active Engagement? What? (David Bartholomae)
David Bartholomae, in "Inventing the University," uses freshman writing samples to explore the challenges students confront in trying to write themselves into the discourse of the academy. There are many ways into Bartholomae's text, and much we might draw from it. We will look at a few key moments in the text, and consider whether we find in our own students' texts some of the issues Bartholomae locates in his placement essays.
- "We do have the right to expect students to be active and engaged, but that is a matter of continually and stylistically working against the inevitable presence of conventional language; it is not a matter of inventing a language that is new" (Bartholomae 47). What is Bartholomae's point here? In what ways might it inform your approach to teaching writing, or to teaching reading for that matter?
- Locate at least one passage in Bartholomae that bothers you, or that you do not think you agree with. Why does that passage trouble you?
- Read the selected first day writing samples. Mark any places where you see students assume "the voice of a teacher giving a lesson or the voice of a parent lecturing at the dinner table" (41). Also, locate any places where you see students "place themselves both within and against a discourse, or within and against competing discourses, and working self-consciously to claim an interpretive project of their own" (60).
- Develop an in-class activity that uses your course readings to help students start to practice working within a discourse, and possibly between discourses. Begin to consider how you might help students locate their own interpretive project in their research.
- Optional: Locate passages that resonate with you. Why are you attracted to these points?
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