Digital Bibliography

At tomorrow’s pedagogy workshop here on campus (2.17.10), we’ll be reading and discussing Mariolina Salvatori’s College English article “Conversations with Texts: Reading in the Teaching of Composition” (1996). While acknowledging that I’m oversimplifying, I want to mention four important points in the article, and think through them (now, 14 years later) in terms of pedagogy inflected by digital writing tools. Salvatori herself describes the project of her article as “an argument on behalf of the theoretical and practical appropriateness of using ‘reading’ as a means of teaching ‘writing’” (441). Within this frame, she works through several related ideas; I’d like to think though the following four:

1. One of the activities she often asks students to work through is to reflect on their own mark-making practices as active readers of a text, and then to consider what those marks – the nature of the marks, what gets marked, what doesn’t–might reveal about knowledge-making practices, reading, and writing.

2. Another activity she asks her students to engage in is to describe and analyze the difficulty that certain texts present in reading. What moves are difficult to engage, what types of knowledge or warrants are challenging, etc. Then students can reflect on their process by sharing it with other students/teacher and offer a more concrete, specific strategy for reflecting on reading and writing practices. Read the rest of this entry »