Looking Backwards: The Continuous March of Meaning Making and the Continual Modification of Our Manner of Teaching It

Abstract

Looking Backwards:The Continuous March of Meaning Making and the Continual Modification of Our Manner of Teaching It Jeraldine R. Kraver Our "Looking Backwards" selection continues to honor a promise made in the 80th anniversary issue of The CEA Critic to reprint past matters from the journal—articles, essays, notices, photos—that speak to the themes or topics pursued in the issue at hand. Typically, determining the past selection involves starting with a present one and then searching through the journal's archives for something that offers an interesting comparison or sets up a conversation. With this issue, the process was at once fun and enlightening. For this installment of Looking Backwards, I want to focus on "meaning-making," my catchall term for how we engage with and create texts. What we used to call, simply, "reading and writing" falls short of the mark. In addressing the challenges posed by "new literacies," teacher-scholars have increasing voiced that we must prepare students to read, write, and think differently. For example, Edith Ackerman, speaking in 2008 at the Library of Congress about "The Anthropology of Digital Natives," emphasized that educators need to "rethink" their beliefs about teaching and learning. She described how "Students are no longer the people our educational system was designed to teach," adding that "They think and process information fundamentally differently" (qtd. in Allen).1 Something has to give way, and, too often, educators, content with the familiar, are hesitant to embrace the changes posed by the changing nature of what it means to be literate in our time. Enter our pairing of articles. In my preparation of this issue, Matt Seymour's "Rethinking Argumentative Writing: Moving Beyond Teaching Structure to Engage Students in Critical Conversations" prompted my reflection on the nature of how we prepare students to make meaning from the texts they encounter inside and outside the classroom. Seymour examines the limitations of writing instruction that focuses too much on structure. Sharing the results of a research study, he explains, the AWP found that English teachers' writing instruction tended to emphasize either writing structure, content and ideas, or argumentation's use to respond to social issues and problems, respectively. Of these three approaches, we found that an emphasis on teaching structure was the most prevalent approach but also the [End Page 164] least effective in bringing about more sophisticated and thoughtful argumentative writing (Newell et al.). Given the nature of writing at the post-secondary level, students often arrive to the composition classroom unprepared for the challenges they face when the focus shifts from the form to the function of writing. Seymour expands, "Argumentation and writing in this sense are no longer limited to producing standardized written products with set structures but rather are positioned as actions students can take to understand, engage with, and effect change in the world." As such, he furthers, we need to reconceptualize our approach: The change needs to occur at the conceptual level regarding our beliefs and how we define what writing and argumentation are, how we might use them, and why students would benefit from learning these practices in schools. Instead of defining argumentative writing as a written product with certain structural features—as most standardized tests do—teachers would do well to define argumentation as an act of inquiry that allows students to investigate topics together and to propose judgements and solutions for problems based on their analysis of evidence. Seymour's article then offers a path forward in terms of writing, investigation, judgment, and analysis. The same skills that Seymour identifies are those that June Chase Hankins addresses in her 1990 article "Making Use of the Literacy Debate: Literacy, Citizenship, and Brave New World." In the same way that Seymour challenges the methods for teaching writing, Hankins engages with the (then) current theories of literacy.2 During the brave new world of the 1990s, the lives of students were increasingly influenced by messages coming from "electronic media" (41). To be clear, the media Hankins addresses are "the television programs [students] typically watch, "and the focus of analysis includes "the impact of this phenomenon—television's apparent reality, combined with its actual contrivance and its power to affect...