The Trialectics of Public Writing on the Street, on Campus, and in Third Space

PublicandPrivate The Trialectics of Public Writing on the Street, on Campus, and in Third Space.pdf

-"public writing must identify the actual places and material practices where boththe public and the private are experienced physically and spatially, not just socially and rhetorically, if public writing is to have an embodied effect on everyday life. Public writing expresses the idea that composition teachers and students have an obligation to engage with conversations in the public sphere in order to address other readers, writers, and participants in everyday life." (He then gives examples of "public writing," and I wonder why they have to be so separate from "private" writing)
-"Part of public writing is to help writers and readers to construct and identify certain notions of the public and the public sphere through social and discursive practices that extend past the closed bubble of the process classroom into more pragmatic and civic areas of shared inquiry and involvement (Wells 335)." (yes!)
-"Hegemonic power is implicit in the construction of the 'public,' and cannot be removed from public spaces or discussions of the public. Because of this relationship, certain people and groups in society are included or excluded from these spaces and debates." (agreed, although I think many Americans would not agree with this characterization)
-"Because of this lack of a universal, stable site for public engagement, elements of risk, transgression, and confrontation are often elements of public writing. Public writing texts need to address real problems through using a variety of discourses that both include and critique, simultaneously working with and against an amalgam of local and global publics." (This is a particularly difficult struggle for U of M students)
-"Where do students locate themselves in public spaces in order to write themselves into or against the public? Where do notions of public and private act reciprocally on each other to aid students in the tasks of public writing?"
-"These investigations of how public spaces are influenced by private interests and how private spaces are shaped by public experiences are intrinsically important to locating the where and why of writing."
-"assignments need to focus on the actual lived connections between the public and the personal as ways of understanding how th espatial, the social, and the discursive produce the practices of public writing, teaching, and civic participation." (But how do we get beyond the individual, personal experiences? In a sense, according to the philosophy of this article, we are all always writing at least a bit of our personal selves.)
-I'm not sure I understand how his definition of streetwork is different from participant observation. This is what we ask our students to do, and it still doesn't bridge the private/public gap. Also, how do we make this mesh with traditional "academic" research?
-How do we make students realize that "public writing is not only rhetorical and social, but also material, "real," a crucial part of the actual conditions of public life writ large on the spaces that people inhabit and dwell in throughout the course of everyday life" ?
-"private people need to get together to form neighborhood publics in order to solve the problems of their communities." (Can the university be a site of the formation of neighborhood publics?)
-"Public writing projects need to suggest private reflection and personal investment in the spaces, people, and discourses affected as a shared physical, social, and textual experience."