Writing as Repositioning

Writing as Repositioning.pdf

-"see writing as a process in which the writer positions, or rather, repositions herself in relation not to a single, monolithic discourse but to a range of competing discourses. [...] while teaching students to think and write in ways privileged in academic culture, we should encourage them to examine the dissonance within and between their academic life and their family, gender, work, religious, and recreational life. [...] It can motivate them not only to reproduce but also to contest and change the academic ways of thinking and using language which we teach." (I think this last part is crucial. If teaching the discourse does nothing but reproduce existing power structures, then what's the point? Learning to write within the Ivory Tower allows one to challenge the ways in which the Ivory Tower works. Does this help with challenging hegemony in other publics as well?
-"because we assume such students to be perfectly 'at home' with academic discourse, we often overlook experiences of cultural dissonance in their writing. [...] Signs of cultural dissonance are seen as the cause of the student's inability or unwillingness to try out academic ways of thinking and writing. [...] Both resolutions reaffirm the myth that in order to write within the academy, one must be fully at home with academic discourse and must invalidate any experience and history which might cause dissonance with academic discourse." (Even this argument says that one must reject outside perspectives or choose to live "biculturally." There isn't room for one to inform the other.
-"we remind ourselves and our students that there are both personal and social reasons for contesting and changing the very discourse they are learning to master. [...] we would counter the way dominant culture convinces them that it is to their social, economic, and emotional benefit to believe and act as if their educational life or, by extension, their future professional life, is the only life which is worth living and which they live. Such a classroom would replace the myth of writers necessarily writing either comfortably inside or powerlessly outside the academy with a vision of writers writing at sites of conflict, at borders which divide academic and other discourses but which are contested and constructed anew each time one writes."
-a key question: "how we can acknowledge dissonance in and between discourses without finally treating such dissonance as either a problem to be eliminated or a harmonious polyphony to be accepted but rater as a means to problematize the dominance of the hegemonic."