Discusses an attempt to work both narratively and critically, recognizing that the narratives of experience first constructed (spoken and written) represent a necessary convergence of history, tradition, politics, and interpretation, which represents sites of contest and conflict. Discusses the willingness to allow expression of cultural attitudes within the classroom while openly acknowledging the simultaneous constraints produced when such attitudes conflict.

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When I speak about the move from expressive to academic discourse, I realize I am perpetuating a notion which may interfere with the proper understanding of either of these modes.That is, my statement implies that there's a one-directional movement, that academic discourse is somehow higher up on a hierarchical scale.I do not, in fact, believe that to be the case."Academic Discourse" as it occurs in practice in many undergraduate courses, may be among the least useful, least authentic forms of language use.Required term papers or critical papers often function as tests rather than as explorations.They are performances of certain required skills: use of sources, correct documentation, proper formulation of someone else's ideas.Writers are often actively discouraged from expressing their own points of view, from participating in their own reading, or indeed, from "appearing" in the paper at all.Yet if the expressive mode is truly the matrix from which other forms of discourse evolve as James Britton has claimed, then writers, in order to work successfully in academic modes, must move back and forth on the continuum from one form to the other, keeping the self always at the center.The "will to learn" which Jerome Bruner asserts is an intrinsic motive in all of us, may be stifled when rigid and formal demands prevent students from engaging in more tentative, exploratory prose."What the school imposes," say Bruner, "often fails to enlist the natural energies that sustain spontaneous learning -curiosity, a desire for competence, aspiration to emulate a model, and a deep-sensed commitment to the web of social reciprocity" (127).In the Writing Lab at the University of Iowa we try very hard to engage -or perhaps to rekindle that will to learn in our students.