So This is What I'm Trying to Write About

We didn’t have a specific blog prompt for this week but rather, “Write what you want to write about, just write.” Well okay then. Y’all are about to be treated to quite a bit of rambling as I work through what I want the article-length (roughly at least 5,000 words) essay draft I have to turn in by midnight tonight to say.

 I wrote last week how I want to focus on audience awareness or, more accurately, the lack of it in the composition of grade school English/Language Arts curriculum. I found an article by Patricia McAlexander that discusses four subskills of audience awareness and the concept of “egocentric writing.” I can connect this to a quote from another of my sources (“It seems to be a part of human nature for us to think that everyone has had experiences similar to ours and that they share our perspective on things.”) by Donald Gallo. Of course, this isn’t true and Gallo goes on to make some wonderful points in ALL CAPS about how classic literature wasn’t written for teenage students to be dissected and analyzed and tested on but rather for educated adults who read the books because they were fun to read—points that I hope to then connect to Ede & Lunsford’s assertion that “it is only through the text, through language, that writers embody or give life to their conception of the reader.” (167). A conception that does not match the teenagers now trudging through page after page of beautifully written but completely uninteresting text to which they just cannot relate.

Carol Berkenkotter conducted a study entitled “Understanding a Writer’s Awareness of Audience” in which she focused on the “intellectual processes that writers engage in to attain what we commonly call “audience awareness.” What I got from her study was the audience awareness of the different writers she included in her study had a significant impact on how they approached the given prompt. Similarly, “classic” authors were heavily affected by their audience. Charles Dickens (3 of whose books I begrudgingly read in high school), for example, was not only paid by the word (the result of which was two whole pages describing a man walk up a single flight of steps) but was published in serials, a new chapter each week which was fine for his intended audience but does not, in any way, match up with what contemporary teenagers want out of a novel.

Contemporary students have grown up in the most technologically stimulating period of our world’s history. They have information at their fingertips that would have taken their parents a week of waiting for the book to be shipped to their local library to get. “Whatever the type of reading, almost all kids will be more attracted to a book that grabs their attention immediately—which right away leaves out most literature.” (Gallo, 35).

 I also want to include this deliciously accurate description: “Many teachers have come to acknowledge that the reality of teaching the classics is similar to the reality of trying to teach a pig to sing: It does not work and annoys the pig.” (Gibbons, Dail, & Stallworth, 53). I’m not sure where it will go but it is too vivid an image to ignore. Gibbons et al. go on to discuss the value of Young Adult Literature (which is personally one my favorite genres) in the classroom. Not only can YAL be just as literarily sophisticated and meritorious as classic novels, it has the added bonus of being something students actually want to read. When reading YAL, gone is the annoyed pig and instead is a student who actually takes pleasure in the act of reading.

 Going back to that thing I said about technology, I also found articles that discusses the incorporation of new technological literacies in the English curriculum. Curwood & Cowell conducted a study in which they incorporated various media technologies into a poetry curriculum, perfecting the curriculum over the course of three years and analyzing the importance of such incorporation and the effect it had on their students. Docket, Haug & Lewis in which they developed a curriculum that “focuses primarily on media analysis and documentary film production in an English/history block that meets state and district standards for both subjects and reflects a commitment to providing students with opportunities for complex intellectual engagement.” (418). I’m going to somehow connect these two studies to the fact that, although we’ve had this technology for a while, incorporating various media platforms into the curriculum is still a rare occurrence which just doesn’t make any sense. Students today are so much more technologically savvy than curriculum developers seem prepared to admit and yet “young people’s literacy skills are not keeping pace with societal demands of living in an information age that changes rapidly and shows no sign of slowing.” (Alvermann, 189). What’s more, with the current education model, the point of academics is to provide students with the opportunity to become productive members of society and get jobs (Robinson, Changing Education Paradigms). Jobs in which they are guaranteed to utilize ever-developing technology so why doesn’t the scholastic curriculum mirror this? Makes no sense to me.

Instead, education authorities are like the stereotypical principle I mentioned last week from Girl Meets World, completely egocentric and thoroughly convinced his way is the only right way. These people have forgotten what it was like to be a teenager. What’s worse, they’ve become so focused on making sure that students learn what they think is valuable they’ve completely forgotten one of the most important things that a student can become: a lifelong reader. Instead, teachers “have done what is expected of them (pass along a cultural/literary heritage), and making young people lifelong readers is not part of the plan.” (Bushman, 6). It’s a travesty. It is a travesty that results in declining literacy levels and America falling behind.

 All of this I will then somehow connect back to the necessity of increased audience awareness on the part of education curriculum and policy makers, and not just awareness of how students react to the literature they are presented but also how they take what they’ve learned and apply it to other areas of their lives. I’m going to try to incorporate the four subskills of audience awareness discussed by McAlexander and how policy makers should follow her advice on how to increase their audience awareness. There’s also the idea that “classic” novels don’t have these subskills in relation to contemporary teens.

 I also want to include somewhere in there the questions, “What are the goals of English as a core subject?” and “Why can these goals only be achieved by studying the classics?” I’m still figuring that out though.



Sources
“Ideas in Practice: Audience Awareness and Developmental Composition” by Patricia McAlexander
“How Classics Create an Aliterate Society” by Donald R. Gallo
“Audience Addressed/audience Invoked: The Role of Audience in Composition Theory and Pedagogy” by Lisa Ede & Andrea Lunsford
“Understanding a Writer's Awareness of Audience” by Carol Berkenkotter
“Young Adult Literature in the English Curriculum Today: Classroom Teachers Speak Out” by Louel C. Gibbons, Jennifer S. Dail, & B. Joyce Stallworth
“iPoetry: Creating Space for New Literacies in the English Curriculum” by Jen Scott Curwood & Lora Lee H. Cowell
“Redefining Rigor: Critical Engagement, Digital Media, and the New English/Language Arts” by Jessica Dockter, Delainia Haug & Cynthia Lewis
“Effective Literacy Instruction for Adolescents” by Donna E. Alvermann
“Changing Education Paradigms.” By Sir Ken Robinson
“Young Adult Literature in the Classroom—Or Is It?” by John H. Bushman

My Thesis? Um...

I honestly have no idea what my thesis for the article-length essay due at midnight this Sunday will be. I’m struggling to formulate a thesis that incorporates audience awareness and how literature classes at the high school and middle school levels do not have audience awareness. How am I supposed to write that? How am I supposed to support that? This is going to be a nightmare.

I was recently sucked into the black hole that is Girl Meets World, a Disney Channel sequel to the ever-popular Boy Meets World. GMW focuses on the adventures and coming of age story of Corey and Topanga’s (the stars of Boy Meets World) middle school aged daughter Riley Matthews. It’s a little silly, a lot of fun, and deals with many of the issues young teens face but the episode that really caught my attention was “Girl Meets the New Teacher.” This episode focuses on the conflict between Riley’s new English teacher and the school’s principal. The new English teacher, named Harper Lee (I’m sure you can guess the literary reference), wants to use comic books as part of her syllabus, specifically The Dark Knight, and the principal is having none of it. (Spoiler Alert) In the end Harper wins the debate when she proves that The Dark Knight has valid life lessons that can be applied to everyday life—and that connect to To Kill a Mockingbird, the book the principal wanted her to teach in the first place.

 In this example, the teacher understood her audience. When told to read a comic book everyone in the class, even Maya, Riley’s academically lazy and uninterested best friend, jumps to complete the assignment. Of course, this is a fictional scenario invented by script writers for a TV show that always has a happy ending—or is it? Audience Awareness is an important part of composition, of anything really. Knowing who your audience is and what they want is a crucial part of effectively reaching them so you can make your point or persuade them to do something. I mentioned in last week’s blog post that video game developers don’t know their audience. If I can somehow figure out what my thesis is I intend to include references to "UK Games: More Women Play Games Than Men, Report Finds" and "Video Games Need More Women - And Asking For That Won't End the World". Both of these articles discuss the disparity between what video game designers develop and what the majority of their customers actually want and how that is hurting them in the long run. I hope to somehow connect this to Ross Collin’s “How Rhetorical Theories of Genre Address Common Core Writing Standards” and Carol Berkenkotter’s “Understanding a Writer's Awareness of Audience.” 

I’m not sure if this is what Dr. Rice intended when he assigned us to “Compose an article-length essay with at least 10 sources on a composition teaching and/or research topic” but this is what I have and this is what interests me. The best teachers I had were the ones who could make the subject relatable and interesting which, in my English classes, was exceptionally hard to do, restricted as those teachers were by syllabi that permitted them to only teach the classics.

Audience Awareness In My Dream Job

This week’s blog prompt asked that, with the learning objectives for this course in mind, what have I learned to is applicable to my future dream job. Well, it didn’t say “dream job” but I’m paraphrasing. 

My future dream job is to be an editor at one of the big four publishing houses in New York, City, or an assistant editor, or something in an editorial position. I’m not greedy, I just really want to help shape the future of literature. I want to see a more diverse selection of literary characters, especially in the science fiction and fantasy genre. With these dream goals in mind I think Audience Awareness is one of the most important things I’ve learned in the completion of this course.

 There is a serious debate going on in the video game community regarding equal representation and the over sexualization of female characters in video games. Game creators are coming under heavy fire for not having Audience Awareness in the fact that at least half of all game players are women and are feeling unsatisfied with female representation. Similarly, the science fiction and fantasy genres fail to be more inclusive in their representation of minority and disabled characters.

The number of minority character in the science fiction and fantasy genre is growing but it’s still not enough. The science fiction genre itself was created by a woman and most of its first contributors are women (ex: Mary Shelley). Even the first full-length novel is credited to a woman, Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu, and yet female heroines are sorely lacking in numbers especially considering the power female fans have in making or breaking a book’s success. Just look at the Twilight Saga. I, personally, despise that series. It has so many interesting and unique elements and they were executed so poorly that my hands shake with rage at the mere thought and yet the saga’s popularity is undeniable. All because of its female fans. Go figure.

 Appealing to the female demographic was an imperative part of Twilight’s success. What’s more, the ratio of men to women in the world favors women so why doesn’t the science fiction and fantasy genre mirror this by publishing books that appeal to the demographic more likely to make books popular? Personally, it makes no sense to me. The only reason I even want to work in the publishing business, the only reason I even pursued a Bachelor’s in Creative Writing and then a Master’s, was because I had the good fortune of picking up a medieval fantasy book with a strong, female heroine I could identify with by Tamora Pierce in the sixth grade. I went on to consume every Tamora Pierce book I could find because, while her heroines dealt with epic struggles and had mighty battles against bad guys, they also dealt with the things every girl coming into her own deals with. They dealt with puberty, misogyny, racism, discovering their sexuality. That’s the kind or representation that is missing from the science fiction and fantasy genres in a broad scale.

As a fan of science fiction and fantasy I am connected to the community in a way that allows me to speak with and understand what they, as an audience and consumer, want to see more of and it is this Audience Awareness I want to bring to my future dream job.