We suggest that literacy narratives can be an important part of a curriculum designed to encourage students to understand themselves as developing learners and students. We know that there is great potential for literacy narratives—for narrativizing—when invited within a scaffolded curriculum of collaborative narrative inquiry. We place literacy narratives in the service of documenting learning—that is, within a pedagogical scaffolding designed to lead students through a series of moves that feature inquiry and discovery (about literacy). As such, the literacy narrative that emerges as most important is the final reflective narrative: the one we have spent all semester preparing students to write. That act of deferral creates an opportunity to put the literacy narrative (LN) assignment to different earlier use as a means for creating an ongoing, experiential literacy-learning narrative that will be realized as a reflective narrative: one we call the experiential-learning documentary (ELD).

We present an approach to operationalizing discovery in literacy research by describing a diagnostic, abductive methodology. This methodology treats products of videotaped interviews and participant-authored footage as narrative data produced in scenes of literacy sponsorship. In describing the operations of our diagnostic approach, we foreground our process of discovery via LiteracyCorps Michigan, our ongoing, long-term research project. We offer this methodology as a research practice that can bring new understandings of how literacy sponsorship operates.

This article examines the pervasive disciplinary commonplace that it's imperative to know students. Posing questions about what it means to know students, the essay recommends ways to acquire useful knowledge about students—typically a long-term process—under conditions of insufficient time.

Reviewed is An Open Language: Selected Writing on Literacy, Learning, and Opportunity, by Mike Rose.

The essay considers how teachers might perform emotional engagements that students find authentic and valuable within scenes of literacy instruction, suggesting that instructors’ “acting” of affect might be needed to forestall the tendency for instructors either to retain a position outside the affect generated in the classroom and merely “manage” the affective work done by students, or to impose their own affective commitments on students’ inquiry. Such a pedagogy might enable students, and particularly working-class students, to locate their own affectively structured experiences of class within more integrated understandings of social structures and identity formation.

Commentary| April 01 2004 The Work before Us: Attending to English Departments' Poor Relations Jennifer Beech; Jennifer Beech Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Julie Lindquist Julie Lindquist Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Pedagogy (2004) 4 (2): 171–190. https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-4-2-171 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Jennifer Beech, Julie Lindquist; The Work before Us: Attending to English Departments' Poor Relations. Pedagogy 1 April 2004; 4 (2): 171–190. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-4-2-171 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsPedagogy Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2004 Duke University Press2004 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

I want to suggest that an examination of rhetorical practices at the local bar is instructive for two reasons: (1) the barroom is predictably different from the university writing classroom; and (2) the barroom is surprisingly similar to the university writing classroom. A look at how neighborhood bars are qualitatively different from classrooms can teach us about our working-class students’ rhetorical motives, and a recognition of how they are functionally similar can teach us something about our own.