_As we draw this web-text to a close, we offer a set of provocations
meant to suggest ways we can continue to make graduate literacy
practices visible and circulating through continued scholarship,
continued narrative collection and archiving, and continued conversation
about how we do reading, writing, and professionalizing.
Within and across our institutions, we should continue to find ways to "do" talk about our literacy practices and struggles: While some attention to graduate literacies is already happening in scholarship and in programs (our programs, for example, regularly offer critical writing workshop courses, where the topic of the course is not content, but the acts and moves of critical writing), we still sense that much graduate education operates on the assumption that the literacy practices necessary to become initiated into these complex discourse communities do not need direct address. We first encourage grad students and grad faculty to help initiate this attention by hosting DALN collection days, by recording and sharing their own literacy narratives, by asking for courses in reading and writing practices, and by talking with their supervising faculty about how to approach projects and practices. We encourage grad faculty to make ways of writing and reading visible (rather than assumed, obscured) in the contexts of course instruction. As we've come to accept, literacy is a social process and thus students and faculty should engage in talk around practices to demystify and circulate the experiences associated with writing into our disciplines.
In the context of graduate school, literacy should be understood as affective ecology: The stories we've collected often reveal strong emotionality within the challenges and the inevitable failures of reading and writing in graduate school and in our professional lives. We believe these experiences to be common, among students and faculty alike. Indeed, we've noticed the full-bodied involvement with the work we attempt to do--the pains, the fullness, the joys, the struggles, the uncertainties experienced in tussling with a difficult reading, or with crafting a critical argument. Too often though we tend to cycle through these experiences in isolation. We insist on the power of opening communicative channels to allow these relations to our work to live and move, to circulate. Literacy happens in social relation; we become initiated by puzzling and struggling together.
To counter the isolation graduate students often experience, we encourage graduate faculty to build opportunities for collaboration into their seminars: Because graduate students are already in the habit of measuring themselves against their perceptions of others' reading and writing habits, we believe that much of the anxiety associated with expectations for graduate work can be mitigated by the opportunity to work closely with others. Not only will this increase transparency, but will help graduate students develop stronger working relationships with their peers, to learn from each other, and to test the waters of professional reading, writing, and publication with allies.
Archive 2.0 presents a meaningful paradigm for how literacy learning can happen across space and time: Literacy stories in this context aren't "still" as in books, but alive and in motion as they are composed, circulated, consumed, forwarded, and reconstituted. Archive 2.0 requires that we acknowledge and affirm the living identity work of literacy publicly in order to preserve the nuances of ad-hoc strategies for advanced literacy acquisition and to establish a communal repository of "knowledge from below."
Literacy in the raw is foremost a methodological orientation towards the study of literacy: As collaborators we have been on a quest in the past year to ask questions of our colleagues about what we do when we read and write and what that doing means. We've struggled to find meaningful ways to make these voiced practices visible and available for circulation. While conclusive grand narratives of literacy remain at bay, we argue that there is much worth saying about our practices, even if its not the final word. What we’ve found most compelling as we've asked for stories is the social dynamics that circulate around these discussions of what we do. In gathering narratives, in responding as audience to our colleagues' stories, we've noticed the impact that doing talk about our graduate literacies has had on both our participants and on ourselves as researchers and students. There is something fortifying, in other words, in just talking about what we all do when we read, write, and professionalize. And as we’ve said, the value we’ve come to discover in the talk captured in collecting literacy narratives for the DALN, some of which you’ve seen here and others which are available in the archive for listening and response, is a productive and satisfying means for thinking more about our communities’ literacies. But this argument doesn't hold within what we've done here; it ultimately rests in our audiences' continued uptake. We hope to meet you, share with you, respond to you in the hallways, at conferences, on listservs, and on the DALN.
Within and across our institutions, we should continue to find ways to "do" talk about our literacy practices and struggles: While some attention to graduate literacies is already happening in scholarship and in programs (our programs, for example, regularly offer critical writing workshop courses, where the topic of the course is not content, but the acts and moves of critical writing), we still sense that much graduate education operates on the assumption that the literacy practices necessary to become initiated into these complex discourse communities do not need direct address. We first encourage grad students and grad faculty to help initiate this attention by hosting DALN collection days, by recording and sharing their own literacy narratives, by asking for courses in reading and writing practices, and by talking with their supervising faculty about how to approach projects and practices. We encourage grad faculty to make ways of writing and reading visible (rather than assumed, obscured) in the contexts of course instruction. As we've come to accept, literacy is a social process and thus students and faculty should engage in talk around practices to demystify and circulate the experiences associated with writing into our disciplines.
In the context of graduate school, literacy should be understood as affective ecology: The stories we've collected often reveal strong emotionality within the challenges and the inevitable failures of reading and writing in graduate school and in our professional lives. We believe these experiences to be common, among students and faculty alike. Indeed, we've noticed the full-bodied involvement with the work we attempt to do--the pains, the fullness, the joys, the struggles, the uncertainties experienced in tussling with a difficult reading, or with crafting a critical argument. Too often though we tend to cycle through these experiences in isolation. We insist on the power of opening communicative channels to allow these relations to our work to live and move, to circulate. Literacy happens in social relation; we become initiated by puzzling and struggling together.
To counter the isolation graduate students often experience, we encourage graduate faculty to build opportunities for collaboration into their seminars: Because graduate students are already in the habit of measuring themselves against their perceptions of others' reading and writing habits, we believe that much of the anxiety associated with expectations for graduate work can be mitigated by the opportunity to work closely with others. Not only will this increase transparency, but will help graduate students develop stronger working relationships with their peers, to learn from each other, and to test the waters of professional reading, writing, and publication with allies.
Archive 2.0 presents a meaningful paradigm for how literacy learning can happen across space and time: Literacy stories in this context aren't "still" as in books, but alive and in motion as they are composed, circulated, consumed, forwarded, and reconstituted. Archive 2.0 requires that we acknowledge and affirm the living identity work of literacy publicly in order to preserve the nuances of ad-hoc strategies for advanced literacy acquisition and to establish a communal repository of "knowledge from below."
Literacy in the raw is foremost a methodological orientation towards the study of literacy: As collaborators we have been on a quest in the past year to ask questions of our colleagues about what we do when we read and write and what that doing means. We've struggled to find meaningful ways to make these voiced practices visible and available for circulation. While conclusive grand narratives of literacy remain at bay, we argue that there is much worth saying about our practices, even if its not the final word. What we’ve found most compelling as we've asked for stories is the social dynamics that circulate around these discussions of what we do. In gathering narratives, in responding as audience to our colleagues' stories, we've noticed the impact that doing talk about our graduate literacies has had on both our participants and on ourselves as researchers and students. There is something fortifying, in other words, in just talking about what we all do when we read, write, and professionalize. And as we’ve said, the value we’ve come to discover in the talk captured in collecting literacy narratives for the DALN, some of which you’ve seen here and others which are available in the archive for listening and response, is a productive and satisfying means for thinking more about our communities’ literacies. But this argument doesn't hold within what we've done here; it ultimately rests in our audiences' continued uptake. We hope to meet you, share with you, respond to you in the hallways, at conferences, on listservs, and on the DALN.
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