Cracking the Code Aaron Phillips, TYCA West 2009

1. Cracking the CodeAaron Phillips, TYCA West 2009 • Fugue: a “polyphonic composition. . . harmonized according to the laws of counterpoint” • Typical teacher-student feedback loop may not produce a harmonic fugue—not enough “voices”

2. Language=Power In its distribution, what it permits and what it prevents, [education] follows the well-trodden battle lines of social conflict. Every educational system is a political means of maintaining or of modifying the appropriation of discourse, with the knowledge and powers it carries with it. ~Michel Foucault, The Discourse on Language

3. Bartholomae’s “Inventing the University” • Argues that while basic writing students tend to recognize that language and its uses vary across discourse communities and genres, they nevertheless struggle to appropriate the “authoritative” register of the “privileged languages of public life.”

4. Continued relevance of Bartholomae’s concerns • We’re still trying to “demystify” academic discourse across the disciplines • WAC a response to this concern • See, e.g., texts like Gerald Graff and Kathy Birkenstein’s They Say/I say (2007) and Graff’s Clueless in Academe (2003)

5. People-focused research and disciplinary enculturation • In other words, students conduct an interview to augment textual research • Responses: the environmental ethicist, the would-be psychologist and the Middle East scholar • All affected significantly by the interview • Used interviewee as a mentor, point of reference in the field, another “voice” in the fugue

6. The notion of “privileged language(s)?” Students’ rights to own language, authentic voice, marginalized vernaculars? Will a private language signify in Burke’s parlor? Does generic agility solve the problem of private language versus “privileged” language? Discussion