Concept 2

While TC 1 enables us to consider writing as part of ongoing activity that involves varying audience, purpose, and interaction with others and their own composed knowledges and dispositions, TC 2 presses us to question the role of recognition, identification, and motivation with writing in activity as manifest in situation, or the framing that influences our actions and informs effective choice-making. Bazerman (2015) posits that "the situation frames our understanding of the communicative action of others and gives us the urgency and motive to respond because somehow we sense our words will satisfy our needs in the situation or otherwise make the situation better for us ... Through long practical experience we learn to recognize spontaneously what appears to be going on around us and how it affects us. Our impulses to act communicatively emerge as doable actions in the situation, in forms recognizable to others" (p. 35). Acting to make the situation better for us requires acting on value judgments, as does our very recognition of elements and interactions in situation as we interpret and transform the forms available to us.

Hence writing is an inherently ethical practice of negotiating, enacting, creating composed knowledges, and why a first-year composition/writing class is an important stage for learners to experience ethical uses of writing. As a prospective English writing educator at the community college level, I'm very concerned with habituating students in ethical writing practices, especially since the present is such a critical juncture in American culture. I think it starts very much with the curricular design of FY writing, in how students engage in writing activities and really start to develop their personal theories of writing.

From the very beginning of my experience in the MA English program, I was able to see writing in a different way by way of the curriculum; what I was "writing" for a grade quickly became, thanks to Dr. Blalock's practicum, the CBWP SI, and Dr. Garza's class, what I was using writing to do. When I interviewed a former professor I had as an undergraduate at the University of Houston-Victoria, who lived in El Paso for most of his life, as well as another interview with a fellow graduate student from Mexico, I transcribed and then used writing to explore different meaning-making frameworks involving life at the border and what the border means as a framing element itself. Upon reading Gries's (2016) text, Still life with rhetoric, in which the New Materialist Rhetorical (NMR) approach is applied to investigate the transformative power of the Obama hope image across time and space, I was able to develop my personal theories of writing, displacing my previously reductive conceptions of writing as, predictably, defined by acontextual mode and product. In addition to the central texts surrounding writing studies and learning theory, Dr. Blalock's practicum also encouraged me to redevelop my personal theories of writing through the curriculum itself. I did not "write a term paper," but instead engaged in continued reflective writing, heuristics, varying writing situations requiring different forms, the arrangement and remix of writing to best accomplish purpose, and a portfolio itself that allowed me to engage in crucial metacognition and thus take charge of my learning and investigate the reasons for the choices I made, as well as what I could've done better. In light of the aforementioned quote from Bazerman (2015), it was the continued practical experience and expansion of writing to different situations that changed my personal theories of writing in ways that also habituate ethical writing practice, since reflection also means evaluating and negotiating the value judgments upon which decisions in activity were made.

Other courses in my graduate program, including those beyond writing studies and rhetoric, helped me to apply and continue to develop these evolving theories of writing. Bazerman (2015) also writes that "awareness of rhetorical situation is the beginning of reflection on how we perceive the situation, what more we can understand about it, how we can formulate our goals, and what strategies we may take in our utterances ... But this awareness also puts a reflective distance between our perception of the situation and our responses, which may disrupt spontaneous impulses and our sense of being in the moment. This disruption can thus be troublesome and require a fundamental reorientation toward our experiences, which we may at first resist" (p. 36). And too often, Bazerman also suggests, we becoming entrenched and resist deference and difference upon meeting new writing situations in favor of generalization; we fall back on what has worked before, in habituated niche practices. This can be said of my undergraduate experiences with literature, creative writing, and linguistic courses. Because I had not experienced a curriculum informed by writing studies theory, my writing interactions with composed knowledges in these courses was valuable but limited, and reliant on passive learning consumption practices to which I had been accustomed.

Dr. Sorensen's feminist theory class, as well as Dr. Salter's American literature course, involved projects that transcended "the literary analysis" archetype curriculum. I engaged with theorists in fictional dialogue, using writing to negotiate a triadic conception of feminism, calling upon previous contributing scholarly voices and material framings, such as Anzaldua, Peirce, and Bakhtin. I used writing in the multimodal transformation of literary scenes/situations into modern forms to relate predatory male acts in Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth to similar acts today, using a series of text messages to depict a still recurring issue that most people can identify with in the advent of phones and social media. As informed by writing studies theory, I was able further to develop my personal theories of writing by way of entering new writing situations. As Bazerman (2015) notes, "what we can share with each other through writing is limited by our ability to represent the world through language and the ability of our readers to make sense of our representations in ways congruent to our intentions ... Recognizing the limitations of our representations can lead us to appropriate modesty and caution about what we and others write and about decisions and calculations made on the basis of the representations" (p. 38). As I reflected upon my uses of writing in these activities, even in literature classes, I noted both failures and successes, and I was indeed humbled by the different creative applications of my fellow classmates, which oftentimes were much more identifiable and better captured the issues under study. And in reflecting upon the curricula themselves for the courses, and my experiences with them as a student, I was able to consider what I might or might not incorporate into my own teaching practices in the future, all the while keeping in mind my position as a graduate student, and not a FY student. Also, as Lerner (2015) points out, "the relationship between disciplinary knowledge making and the ways writing and other communicative practices create and communicate that knowledge are at the heart of what defines particular disciplines" (p. 40). Entering different discourse communities in particular disciplines, while also contributing to and thus changing them, I as user of writing in courses of "literature" or "creative writing" could also reflect on the ways in which I engaged with the knowledge practices of certain groups of writing-users, focused on particular purposes, and affect said purposes, practices, and dispositions through my role in activity. Surely as a writing studies scholar and prospective educator of FY writing I would be doing this in writing courses I'd teach, but the "teaching," when aware of its using writing in ways to enact disciplinarity at both the level of "teacher" and "students," in the ecology of the classroom, involves continual realignment and openness. If, according to TC 2, "writing speaks," then we ought to make an effort to listen, or else we fail to recognize the changing forms in activity.

In all courses during my MA English degree, I've also become increasingly aware of the choices I make as a user of writing, and how these choices affect who I am, how I am, my relationships with others, and how my uses of writing in ongoing activity shape other situations. TC 3 stresses this, that "writing enacts and creates identities and ideologies," and you can continue to read my interactions with this TC here, or click from the drop-down menu above.