Consider This Other

In David Bartholomae's seminal article in writing studies, 'Inventing the University,' he argues that students should enter the University with an understanding of academic discourse, which is presented through the genre of the timed-essay. The timed-essay supposes the ability to synthesize personal opinion with academic discourse. Bartholomae studied writing-entrance exams of what he calls basic writers, or (in my words built on his argument) writers who are not yet able to harness the language of academic writing to satisfy teachers they've never met. In his words, basic writers are marked by their inability to 'take on the role of privilege...or establish authority' (2005: 83) in their writing. In studying those exams, he determined that

What our beginning students need to learn is to extend themselves, by successive approximations, into the commonplaces, set phrases, rituals and gestures, habits of mind, tricks of persuasion, obligatory conclusions and necessary connections that determine the 'what might be said' and constitute knowledge within the various branches of our academic community. (Bartholomae, 2005: 69).

In other words, Bartholomae wants students to learn to write like us, like academics, like professionals in the field. His "commonplace" here is that the writing of academe is the best writing style to teach students in order for them to succeed in school and in life (63). But I disagree. And others, including Geoffrey Sirc agree. Sirc invokes Bartholomae more than any other author or artist in English Composition as a Happening (2001), and nearly every reference signals his disagreement with Bartholomae's notion of academic literacy being the commonplace of writing instruction. For instance, Sirc makes his stance against Bartholomae quite clear from the beginning. It's worth quoting at length:

The architectural design of the conventional classroom has become soberly monumental, charged with the heavy burden of preserving the discursive tradition of 'our language...the peculiar ways of knowing, selecting, evaluating, reporting, concluding, and arguing that define the discourse of our community' (Barthomolae, 'Inventing' 134). We erect temples to language, in which we are the priests among initiates (of varying degrees of enthusiasm), where we relive the rites of text-production for the n th time, despite the sad truth that the gods have fled so long ago that no one is even sure that they were ever there in the first place (in Composition, the gods are called, variously, power, authentic voice, discourse, critical consciousness, versatility, style, disciplinarity, purpose, etc.). (Sirc, 2001: 2).

Obviously, Sirc disagrees with the god-term commonplaces of composition that interest Bartholomae. So our purpose (lol) here is to figure out who the new writing gods are and how to get them to stick around awhile so that students have more than atheism--or, more simply, a disbelief in academic writing as a way of learning--to choose from.

In the same year as Sirc's book (and published, not coincidentally I'm sure, by the same cutting-edge, composition-focused, university press), Christopher Schroeder writes in Reinventing the University that Bartholomae wants students to assimilate into the cultural discourse of the academy, and in doing so, ignore their own literacies and discourses (2001: 18). Schroeder argues that 'the contemporary crisis in literacy is more a crisis of sanctioned literac(ies), and of the ways that these standards for literate performance endorse an increasingly specialized and irrelevant version of cultural capital' (2001: 174). Schroeder works against the sanctioned literacies of academic writing by valuing the literacies that students bring to the classroom, including showing his value of their literacies in assignment and grading policies. In class, Schroeder discusses with students their experiences with academic literacy, from which he compared the commonplace of Academic Literacy against the students' commonplaces of their own academic literac(ies) (see Table A).

Table A. A comparison of institutional versus student-perceived academic literacies (emphasis in original, Schroeder, 2001: 135-136) .

	Academic Literacy (textbooks, theory, etc.)	Academic Literac(ies) (students' experiences, etc.)
Practices	Universal ways of writing, reading, and thinking for everyone in every situation (e.g., critical reading or five-paragraph essay)	Specific ways of writing, reading, and thinking that are different depending upon the teacher, the course, or the assignment
Who to be	Rational minds communicating to other rational minds (e.g., the critical thinker)	Generally passive participants who allow education to be done to them in spite of the expectations to use the languages of the academy
How to see the world	Objective reality based upon Truth, Knowledge, and Meaning (e.g., the answer, right and wrong, etc.)	Contingent reality based upon versions of truth, knowledge, and meaning that are different for different classrooms and specific teachers

The comments in the right column, under students experiences of academic literac(ies) came from their in-class discussions and writings. Throughout his book, Schroeder narrates instances where Academic Literacy fails students, which returns me to the hasty claim I made in the introduction: academic literacy is a specialized knowledge of the academic elite. It's a fallacy to suggest that teaching students to write like academics, through genres like the research paper, will serve every one of them well in the real world. Bartholomae seemed to agree with this idea when he wrote about some students 'getting it right' in regards to academic literacy and performance on the entrance exams: 'on the one hand there is tradition and, on the other, individual talent' (2005: 75).

Our claim here is not about why we should change academic literacies. Sirc and Schroeder have already suggested why. Our point is to show that the why is a good reason to follow up with how. Consider how this article started—with two texts merged into one, sharing the same space but also not—meant to be read as a whole but made up of discreet parts, there and not there, a hologram of sorts, like Phillip Roe's idea of that-which-new-media-will-become: a 'partial actualization' of what new media could look like (Roe, 2003: np). We suggest, however, that holograms themselves are not easy to teach given the prosumer applications that most students and teachers have access to (sadly, diode lasers are in less supply around schools than computers, in our experience, especially in English departments, which is our focus here).

Instead of focusing on how teaching students to compose holograms as a representation of that-which-new-media-will-become, we have elected to discuss two kinds of new media texts—static, graphic-based and video-based texts—to show what students can compose/produce in English classrooms in a move away from academic letteracy (Papert, 1993: np) toward new media literacy.

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