Sewell - Literacies Fok - Final

USING FUNDS OF KNOWLEDGE TO SCAFFOLD FIRST-YEAR COLLEGE
WRITING

A Project

Presented to the faculty of the Department of English
California State University, Sacramento

Submitted in partial satisfaction of
the requirements for the degree of

MASTER OF ARTS

in

English
(Composition)

by

William Joseph Sewell

SUMMER
2013

ii

2013

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

iii

WRITING

A Project

by


Approved by:

__________________________________, Committee Chair
Daniel Melzer, Ph.D.

__________________________________, Second Reader
Amy Heckathorn, Ph.D.

____________________________
Date

iv

Student: William Joseph Sewell

I certify that this student has met the requirements for format contained in the University format
manual, and that this project is suitable for shelving in the Library and credit is to be awarded for
the project.

__________________________, Graduate Coordinator ___________________
David Toise, Ph.D. Date

Department of English

v

Abstract

of

WRITING
by


This project examines the effects of an assignment where students write about a
literacy of their choice. The assignment was constructed around James Paul Gees
concept of semiotic domains, an expansive theory that offers a wide definition literacies
and which allows students a breadth of writing topics. In response to the assignments
liberal parameters, students often choose literacies of deep knowledge and interest. The
study was conducted at California State University, Sacramento over two successive
semesters in English 1A (first-year composition), one class per semester. Forty-two
students completed the study, 22 for the first semester, 20 for the second. The
assignment, successful and popular with students, is essentially a funds of knowledge
assignment, where students outside-of-school knowledge skills are validated and then
employed to scaffold the learning of in-school knowledge and skills. The assignments
effectiveness was measured using a variety of research methods: grades, questionnaires,
discourse analysis of essays and reflective essays. Among the more interesting results are
students reports of writing fluency. These and other results suggest that using a funds of
knowledge approach at the outset of first-year college composition courses enables

vi

students to attend to the rhetorical qualities of their compositions sooner into the writing
process, thus facilitating the learning and development of college-level writing skills.

_______________________, Committee Chair
Daniel Melzer, Ph.D.

_______________________
Date

vii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Many individuals have contributed to my development as a writer and teacher. I
am especially grateful to the follow individuals. Professor Dan Melzer has been a patient
guide and sounding board throughout the thesis process, long before I even had a topic.
His encouragement helped me follow and develop ideas that I at times doubted, and his
masterful and exemplary feedback helped me grow as a writer. Professor Amy
Heckathorn has been a valued mentor and source of support. It was in her English 220C
class that I seriously encountered the concept of literacies. Not to be overlooked is her
keen editorial eye during the final stages of this project. Professor Fiona Glade has
provided solid advice at various times during my tenure as a graduate student. She has
pointed me in directions that I had not envisioned. It was during a conversation with her
that I first heard the term funds of knowledge, a concept that was highly relevant to my
research. Professor David Toise has been a constant source of inspiration and support. He
showed me how to teach the conflicts and yet still maintain a safe classroom. It is an
approach I have taken to heart and which guides my own teaching.
Finally, I would like to thank my wife, Carol, whose unending support and
enduring patience has made this journey much easier than it would have been otherwise.

viii

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page

Acknowledgements ................................................................................................................ vii
List of Tables ............................................................................................................................ x
Chapter
1. OVERVIEW ....................................1
Teaching Philosophy .............. ...................................................................................... 3
Annotated Bibliography ............................................................................................. 4
Journal Article and Analysis ......................................................................................... 5
Presentation Handout ................................................................................................. 10
Program Goals .......................................................................................................... 10
Discourse Communities ............................................................................................ 10
Praxis ..................................................................................................................... 12
Variety of Classroom Pedagogies ............................................................................. 14
Writing Process and Critical Self-Reflection ............................................................ 17
Teaching Various Populations .................................................................................. 18
Research Methods ..................................................................................................... 20
Professional Goals ..................................................................................................... 21
2. TEACHING PHILOSOPHY ............................................................................................ 23
3. ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY .................................................................................. 29
4. USING FUNDS OF KNOWLEDGE AND LITERACIES TO SCAFFOLD FIRST YEAR
COLLEGE WRITING ..................................................................................................... 46
Theoretical Frameworks: Funds of Knowledge and Semiotic Domains .................... 47

ix

Assignment and Project : A Unit on Literacies ......................................................... 51
Results: Students Writing and Scores ....................................................................... 54
Writing, Cognition, and Topic Knowledge ................................................................ 55
Agency and Authority ............................................................................................... 58
Identity ...................................................................................................................... 60
Discovery and Validation .......................................................................................... 64
Development and Organization ................................................................................. 66
Conclusion ................................................................................................................ 68
Appendix A. Conference Presentation Handout ................................................................... 70
Appendix B. End-of-Semester Questionnaire ...................................................................... 72
Appendix C. Literacies Assignment and Worksheets ............................................................ 73
Works Cited ........................................................................................................................... 76

x

LIST OF TABLES
Tables Page

1. Essay Scores & Results of Questionnaires ............... .. 54

1

Chapter 1
OVERVIEW

This project represents nearly five years of work and insight that started in the fall
of 2008, when I took English 220A. It was during that class that I first encountered the
Conference On College Composition and Communications resolution, Students Right
to Their Own Language (SRTOL). At that point, I had been long aware of the claims of
linguists regarding dialects and grammarsthat there were no superior dialects, that the
grammar of each dialect was complex and rule-driven. What I had not truly realized is
how much the privileging of dominant dialects contributes to the achievement gap. The
seventh paragraph has especially resonated with me over the years. That section discusses
how students are required to take English every year of school and how students of
different dialects are often required to take developmental English courses in college. The
authors conclude that
students who come from backgrounds where the prestigious variety of
English is the normal medium of communication have built-in advantages
that enable them to succeed, often in spite of and not because of, their
schoolroom training in "grammar." They sit at the head of the class, are
accepted at "exclusive" schools, and are later rewarded with positions in
the business and social world. Students whose nurture and experience give
them a different dialect are usually denied these rewards. (4)
2

The authors then go on to discuss how English educators are largely responsible for the
privileging of standardized English, and they suggest ways that we can start to change the
prevailing attitudes of English teachers, business leaders, and society at large.
As one who is driven by a concern for social justice, I found this passage to be a
major influence on my developing pedagogical theories. A concern for dialects soon
turned into a concern for literacies, then Critical Language Awareness, and finally funds
of knowledge. I do not remember why I first investigated funds of knowledge theory or
when I first heard of it. I do remember the first time I heard about a related topic,
teachers deficit attitudes. It was in a meeting with Professor Fiona Glade, and it is during
this discussion that she brought up funds of knowledge. As I discovered more about
funds of knowledge, I realized that it tied in well with how some of my students were
approaching their literacies assignment. Those who wrote about a literacy that they
practiced usually wrote the most effective essays. Their reflections also revealed comfort
with subjects they knew a lot about. This became the more intriguing part of the
projectstudents who write about a subject of deep interest and knowledge not only
write more effectively, but also enjoy the assignment. These results have significant
implications for classes of inexperienced and/or uninspired student writers. These
implications, I believe, give my project more weight than it might have had otherwise.
This research project is detailed in Chapter 4, which contains the journal article I
wrote about the project. The journal article is obviously the central document in this
research portfolio. Yet, the research project and my research on dialect, Discourses,
literacies, and funds of knowledge also inform the other documents in this portfolio.
3

These documents are overviewed in the sections immediately following this overview.
After that, several sections will discuss how these documents, and my research, teaching,
and education meet the Composition program requirements.
Teaching Philosophy
I targeted my statement of teaching philosophy for Sierra College. While Sierra
Colleges Human Resources does not require a philosophy statement, the application for
full time teachers asks applicants to answer the following questions:
A. Educational Methodology/Student and Faculty Interaction: Give specific
examples of teaching and learning techniques or methods that you will use in
the classroom.
B. Evaluation of Student Performance (as related to the position): In a
classroom situation how will you determine students are learning and
meeting the stated outcomes for the course.
C. Describe how your education, training, experience, and/or professional
activities enable you to do the job which you are applying. Please use
specific examples and do not refer to See attached resume."
D. Describe how your background and experiences have prepared you to work
in a diverse academic environment where the student body varies widely
with regard to socioeconomics, cultural/ethnic backgrounds, linguistics and
physical/developmental disabilities.
These questions, as they were apparently meant to do, direct applicants to discuss the
practical details of their pedagogies. In the past, I have not focused enough on the
4

practical, so it was a good guide for me. One thing I discovered writing the statement is
that it is difficult to provide details yet present ones entire pedagogy or beliefs in the
space allotted, no more than three pages. On another note, the statement of teaching
philosophy is the one document where the influence of the research project is not
obvious. In it, however, I discuss scaffolding through class activities and worksheets.
This approach to scaffolding was most fully realized with the literacies unit.
Annotated Bibliography
My journal article has two currents of theory running through it: literacies and
funds of knowledge. My interest in literacies theory first took root in English 220C,
where I created an annotated bibliography. The current bibliography sprung forth from
that one. Very little remains of the original, however, and what does remain has been
significantly expanded and revised. The other theory is funds of knowledge (FoK),
which I discovered after gathering my research data. FoK incorporates students out-of-
school knowledge into the curriculum in order to validate the personal knowledge and to
show how school knowledge is used in everyday applications by households and
communities. In light of what I was seeing from my students writing, I was intrigued by
FoK scholars claims that FoK can serve as scaffolding for learning: students use their
out-of-school knowledge to learn school knowledge. This was the very same thing my
students were doing in the literacies project. While they were told only to write about a
literacy of their choice, many chose to write about literacies they practiced and thus knew
deeply. They simply practiced a version of FoK, examining their out-of-school
5

knowledge in an academic light. This knowledge provided content with relatively little
effort from the students. The result was the most effective essays of the each class.
Journal Article and Analysis
Accompanying the journal article is a rhetorical analysis of TETYC, my articles
target journal. The analysis covers 4 articles, two each for 2011 and 2012. While I did
examine articles from several years, I chose the latest years in order to keep the articles
format well within the latest trends. The article follows the format of a typical TETYC
feature article: overview; discussion of pedagogical problem; discussion of theory; brief
review of literature; discussion of research, assignments, and student demographics;
results and analysis; implications and conclusion.
The research project arose out of my initial concerns about dialects and literacies
and in response to Adler-Kassners and Harringtons proposal to put literacy definitions
in the center of the curriculum (102). It was my idea of what a literacies paper might
look like in such a curriculum. The initial research started with a term paper I did in
Professor Amy Heckathorns English 220C, then evolved into a prospectus for her 220D
class, and, with some minor revision, became my actual prospectus. In 220D, I designed
a curriculum and added a Critical Language Awareness (CLA) component to it. After
collecting the final data for my project, I felt that I had not designed the CLA component
of the project well enough to obtain insightful data. Around that time, I came across FoK
theory and decided to incorporate it into the thesis. I did a lot of research on FoK and also
did more on literacies. In the latter stagesafter I had gotten down to extensive writing
on the journal article/thesisI also did research on cognition and the development of
6

writing skills. I still was not sure if I was going to do the journal article or a traditional
thesis, and thus my research continued and the drafts kept expanding until February 2013.
Early in the spring semester, I had a meeting with Professor Dan Melzer, my first
reader. After looking over the data and what I had written, he suggested doing a journal
article. Even though I had conducted a rhetorical analysis of TETYC a few months earlier,
I still had a lot to learn. With Professor Melzers guidance, I proceeded to streamline the
drafts to get the manuscript down to size. I still had too much of the original research in
my draft, and this meant reducing pages of the literature review down to two or three
paragraphs, completely removing sections on the history of literacy and on literacies
theory. Information I had added also had to be condensed. This meant reducing tables and
long discussions of quantitative data down to a single table and to two or three
paragraphs. The original document had a long introduction, which was scrapped but not
immediately replaced. The lack of an introduction eventually became a hang-up. Even
though I usually write introductions last, there finally came a point in the writing of the
article where I felt I could not continue on satisfactorily until I had written the new
introduction. That slowed my progress for a few days.
My process is truly one of composition, for when I write, I tend to write several
extended but different passages, arranging them, joining them together, and making them
as seamless as possible. This process was no different for the journal article. Throughout
the year, between the time I finished collecting the data and began working intensely on
the article, I wrote analyses of student writing and of FoK articles, discussing their
relevance and how they fit into the project. This resulted in collections of passages I had
7

written and saved in various programs and formats. These passages were in need of being
brought together and developed further. At this point, I started using Scrivener, a word
processing program designed especially for writers of long projects. I have always found
navigating long documents in Word and its tendency to crash a problem. Scrivener is
stable, has project folders that allow for breaking a document down into sections and
subsections, and has notes features that are contextual but not intrusive. I divided the
qualitative data into categories, and, using Scrivener, created sections in the document
that corresponded to these categories, dumping the student quotes and the analysis I
had so far into these sections. Classifying the qualitative data took some time, for a
student quote would often fit into several categories. Deciding what quote was most
representative, and thus what to include and what to cut, was a painstaking process. I kept
the ones that spoke to me the most, and they tended to fit three criteria: those that
exemplified points made by scholars, those that were emotionally poignant, and those
that displayed strong insight.
Around this time, I decided to act on a hunch. Students who wrote about literacies
which they practiced, described the development process as relatively easy, the thoughts
flowing and providing content. I had a theory that the personal knowledge reduced the
cognitive loads of these writers, allowing them to attend to the rhetorical features sooner
into the process. After an initial lack of success, I found research by Deborah McCutchen
and Ronald Kellogg, scholars who specialize in cognition and the development of writing
skills. Their research confirmed my theory, and I added several paragraphs about this to
the manuscript.
8

But I still had to cut the manuscript down by several pages. Upon Professor
Melzers advice, I cut the paragraphs about cognition and writing, as well as several other
passages. While the research on cognition and writing was fascinating, it took away the
immediate focus of the article, and would have led to a lot more time spent working on
the article. Word-length, time constraints, and the advice of a trusted mentor made the
decision to cut this section painful but easy. Throughout the article, I found a lot of
redundancy, which led to a lot of cutting. If two quotes from students covered nearly the
same area, I cut the one that was least profound or representative. With Professor
Melzers feedback, I finally trimmed the article down to an acceptable length. And, as
usual, I went through every sentence several times, revising and editing for concision,
clarity, simplicity, and rhythm. When I have the opportunity to let a piece of writing rest
for a few days, I find not only repetition of words but also of sentence structure, and thus
do a lot of editing near the end of the writing process to establish flow, which means,
among other things, smoothing out the rhythm, cutting deadwood, and fixing awkward
constructions. It pains me to know that if I read this document in the future, I will be
horrified by passages that used too many words and were otherwise awkward.
Ronald Kellogg mentions that a difference between professional writers and
others is that professionals can maintain the idea of the audience in their working
memories while in the act of writing. I feel that I took a step in that direction with the
writing of the journal article. I had to write for a new discourse community, and I had to
think about the needs of that community. In some ways, students acquire their rhetorical
skills for college writing. They become part of the community, and instructors set the
9

expectations. After a few classes of similar rhetorical expectations, students become
apprenticed, picking up many of their rhetorical skills in the process of meeting writing
demands for the course. Writing an article the first time is different. The author, an
unproven member of the journals discourse community, has to learn the rhetorical skills
necessary for publishing in the journal, for establishing herself or himself as a credible
member of the discourse community. This learning, a more proactive process than
acquisition, requires genre and rhetorical analysis and the seeking out of advice from
experienced writers of journal articles. If there is an apprenticeship, I imagine it coming
in the form of advice from colleagues or from editors who provide feedback as they
either accept or reject a manuscript.
The writing of this article presented much growth. Besides everything mentioned
in this section, just the dedication and discipline in themselves represent growth. Night
after night and hour after hour were spent on this project, especially on the journal article.
I have written for many years, but most of this writing is by way of journal entries, term
papers, responses, and class materials. This is the most sustained and focused writing I
have ever done. Sustained writing requires much revision, much research, much thinking
about the project, much reflection upon the writing itself. The twenty-some pages of the
article represent many hours of research, many hours of writing and planning, and
hundreds of pages of writing. But to be honest, much of it was actually pleasurable. There
is a lot of in-the-moment with writing, the writer completely absorbed by the process.
There is probably a lot of synapsis building going on too. The time spent on the project
and article feels like an accomplishment. In ways it feels like a rite of passage, and it
10

most likely is. I fully intend to continue writing, especially of the type demanding such
full and extended writing.
Presentation Handout
In the appendix is a copy of the handout that I used for the mini conference that
took place in Professor Melzers English 220D class in May of 2012. By the time I
participated in the mini conference, I had honed my thesis down to literacies and funds of
knowledge. During the talk, I discussed the implications of using students personal
literacies as a fund of knowledge.
Program Goals
Students of the California State University, Sacramento (CSUS) English
Composition program must demonstrate that they have reached several program
objectives upon graduation. In the following sections, I discuss the specific goals and
how the project, as well as my pedagogies, meet these goals.
Discourse Communities
One goal that graduates of the program must demonstrate is an ethically-driven
understanding of the ways in which all language is meaning making, especially within the
contexts of academic discourse communities. I interpret ethically to mean in
accordance with the standards of a profession, and I believe this goal is demonstrated
primarily through the rhetorical analysis and the journal article. The very act of
conducting a rhetorical analysis of a journal in which one wants to publish demonstrates
an understanding of discourse communities. It suggests, for instance that the writer is
well aware that articles which appear in TETYC are going to differ from those that appear
11

in CCC. Even though these journals have the same publisher and share a lot in common,
they nevertheless have different readers, with different goals. The focus on goals is
important because, as John Swales point out, goals are a distinguishing characteristic of
discourse communities. The rhetorical analysis underscored for me the practical nature of
TETYC. The audience are those who teach the first two years of college English and
related disciplines. Such instructors, while quite possibly interested in theory, are going
to be more focused on what works in the classroom. While they should be informed of
the latest theory, they do not have to approve theses and dissertations and thus do not
have to know theory as deeply as a professor might. Instructors of lower division English
do not want to wade through exhaustive literature reviews or a lot of statistics in their
articles, not even in the feature ones; they want to get to the results and implications as
quickly as possible.
My article reflects this. With Professor Melzers feedback, I trimmed my
discussions of literacies and funds of knowledge theory extensively, to just a few
paragraphs. I did the same for the literature review, touching upon only the most relevant
articles and information. As I mentioned earlier, I cut out much of the quantitative data,
which is informative but taxing to read and comprehend. The article focuses mostly on
the qualitative data because it is the most intriguing, revealing how students feel about
the project and what goes on during their writing. I have seen articles in TETYC where
students were quoted at length, so I knew this was acceptable. While I have read
countless journal articles, I had never written one before. The process was in many ways
12

an apprenticeship monitored by an experienced mentor. I experienced a lot of writing
growth during the revision of this article.
Strangely enough, writing the bibliography also presented a lot of growth. To get
a better feel for annotated bibliographies, I studied and consulted James Harners On
Compiling an Annotated Bibliography. What I discovered is that writing annotated
bibliographies is an art in summary writing. One constantly struggles to keep the
annotations around a paragraph long while presenting only the most relevant and
characteristic information without compromising the works character. As I composed
the bibliography, I revised extensively, cutting the information down to its most essential.
A lot of work went into phrasing, in order to eliminate repetition in structure and wording
(avoiding too much the author claims or the author states) and to improve flow. I felt
as if I were learning the skills of a professional.
Praxis
Another goal that graduates of the composition program must demonstrate is A
working knowledge of praxis, the ways Rhetoric and Composition theory and practice
inform one another. My research project in itself demonstrates how my approach
combines theory and practice, each informing the other. My research into literacies
exposed me to several theories and practices, showing me how several practitioners are
using literacies in their classrooms and their theories and rationale for doing so. Based
upon these articles, I had a several theories and claims I wanted to incorporate into a
curriculum and research project. Two theories, especially, intrigued me. One was a claim
made by several scholars that students need to be made aware of literacies for many
13

reasons, one of them political. The other claim was that students write better when the
topic is about something in which they are interested. This second claim seemed
commonsensical enough. But, refusing to accept a claim on its apparent merits, I decided
to test the idea out anyway. My resultant data does suggest that students are more
engaged when they write about things they are interested in; however, they truly write
better when they write about what they know. Further research led me to funds of
knowledge theory, which posits that writing about what students know and value can
serve as scaffolding. As I will explain shortly, these results do not mean that first-year
composition students should never be exposed to challenging readings and ideas.
Finally, as I stated previously, I came across articles by Ronald T. Kellogg and
Deborah McCutchen. Both claim that allowing students to write about what they know
reduces the load on working memory and aides in the development of writing skills. This
research, combined with my own findings, informs me that the best way to scaffold
student writingand by this I mean to enable the development of writers rhetorical
skills and strategiesis to reduce the cognitive loads of students at crucial moments in
their development. For many students, this will be at the beginning of their first semester
of college composition. And for me, this means cutting back on (but not necessarily
eliminating) reading and complex ideas until students have developed their rhetorical
skills and strategies. This conclusion was reached through research, data collection, and
analysis, followed by more literature research; and it demonstrates how my pedagogy is
truly one where practice and theory interact and inform one another.
14

This is a formal way of achieving praxis, but everyday preparation and practice
also form praxis. For instance, I may read several articles that recommend a certain
approach or activity. I will then adapt the activity to my own classroom and try it out.
The results will then lead me to further adapt the approach, read more literature on it, or
abandon it altogether. Additionally, I might witness a problem in the classroom or in
student writing. I will analyze the problem and theorize ways to address it, or I might
read some literature to discover the source of the problem and some potential remedies. I
will then adapt these approaches to my own class, try them out, analyze the results, and
let the analysis direct me to revision. I tend to monitor every moment of class,
determining my effectiveness in a number of ways, including presentation of material,
success of class activities, my interaction with students, and the effectiveness of my
teaching.
Variety of Classroom Pedagogies
My preference for varying my classroom approaches meets another program goal:
An ability to theorize and practice a variety of writing classroom pedagogies. One
reason this goal is important is that I do not want my teaching to become too routine and
unimaginative. I like to keep students alert and engaged, and sometimes too much routine
makes them lose focus. Another reason I mix methods is that different students learn in
different ways, and thus using a variety of approaches increases the chances that every
student will be exposed to an optimal form of learning. This applies even to entire
classes. As I stated in my teaching philosophy, there is no single way of dealing with all
students, and this is just as true of classes. For instance, while most of my classes love
15

forming a big circle and having class discussions, occasionally a class does not respond
well to this approach. And here, the self-assessment and reflection that I also mention in
my philosophy are vital. One must establish and maintain mindfulness and sometimes
admit that beloved methods that have been successful in the past and which have
contributed to some wonderful teaching and classroom moments are simply not going to
work for a class or for several classes. The teacher must be willing to try something else,
to give the new method a full tryout, to assess the method, to find what works best for the
students. While a strong classroom community may feel good, there are many ways to
build community. And what feels even better than community is the knowledge that
ones students are learning.
As I state in the overview, my teaching of the literacies assignment demonstrates
a variety of teaching approaches. I start off the unit with a slide show and lecture (one of
the few times I lecture and the only time I use PowerPoint in composition classes). From
there, I have students freewrite about what they thought of the literacies theory presented
in the slide show. I then answer any questions the students may have. Next, the students
brainstorm as to the types of literacies they may want to write about. After that, the
students break up into small groups, and I hand each group an image and have them
discuss the literacy taking place, the encoding/decoding skills taking place, or the
meaning they get from the image. I monitor their discussions, problem-pose, and clear up
confusion. The students then share their information with the class. After this the students
complete a series of worksheets, one where they describe the literacy, one discussing the
encoding/decoding activities and exchange of meaning that takes place in the literacy,
16

one describing a scenario where the students show the literacy in action. The students are
then exposed to Behrens and Rosens concept of analytical tool. After this, I show the
students a Budweiser commercial a couple of times and send them home with Robert
Scholess Video as Text, a first-rate analysis of the Budweiser commercial. We then
discuss the content of Scholess article and his analytical tools, narrativity and cultural
reinforcement. At this point, we go back through article, and I ask the class to determine
the strategies Scholes uses in each paragraph. After some discussion, the students see that
his article follows a scheme: introduction, discussion of analytical tools, summary of the
advertisement, analysis of the advertisement through application of his analytical tools,
and the conclusion. The students thus have a model of both analysis and organization. We
also discuss their analytical tool: literacies. After this the students revise their papers and
participate in a series of peer reviews. I also provide facilitative feedback. It is at this
point in the semester that I schedule student conferences and provide students verbal
feedback on their papers. As a result of all of these activities, the literacies assignment
alone employs several pedagogical approaches, which include lecturing, whole class
discussions, small group discussions, small group presentations, teacher visual
presentations through PowerPoint and video, reading for content and rhetorical strategies,
scaffolding through class activities and worksheets, applying concepts of literacies and
analytical tools, peer reviews, written feedback through Word or Adobe comment
features, and student conferences.

17

Writing Process and Critical Self-Reflection
Another objective of the CSUS Composition program is the ability to engage in
writing as a process, which includes critical self-reflection. Process has been a big focus
in my growth as a writer. In my early years of college I struggled with essay writing.
These were the pre-process days where, even in composition, a student turned in one
draft, the final, and received some evaluative remarks that concentrated on the product.
My biggest problem is that my paragraphs were underdeveloped. For several years, I did
a lot of journal writing, and a lot of reading about writing. My own writing experiences
and the reading of author interviews informed me that much of writing is about
discovery. The whole time I apprenticed myself, I wrote about my progress and the
strategies that I would try out. Self-reflection has thus always been part of my conduct as
a writer.
Composing the bibliography and journal article demonstrate my knowledge of
process, revision, and critical self-reflection. The kernel of each document began in
English 220C. Each grew as my research and knowledge deepened and expanded. Each,
however, resembles little the document it sprung from, as the focus of the journal article
moved from literacies, then to literacies and critical language awareness, then to literacies
and funds of knowledge, to finally a strong focus on funds of knowledge. During the
entire writing of these documents, as is the case with all of my academic writing, I wrote
notes and journal entries focusing on my process and where the journal article was
headed. These notes and reflections are spread everywhere, from legal pads, to ring-
bound notebooks, to Word documents, OneNote entries, and now notecards in Scrivener.
18

Even during the composition of this cover essay I have engaged in critical self-reflection.
Critical self-reflection is also an inherent part of my classroom pedagogy. My students
have to do freewrites throughout the semester, reflecting on the progress of their essays.
For each essay, they have to turn in a reflection paper discussing the writing of the essay,
what they liked, and where they need to take their writing. As part of their portfolios,
they have to include a self-reflective cover letter.
Teaching Various Populations
Another program objective is An understanding of appropriate teaching
strategies for students who speak and write a variety of English languages and dialects.
As I stated at the beginning of this essay with my reference to Students Right to Their
Own Language, teaching students of various dialects is a big concern of mine. This
concern was underscored with my research into literacies, where I discovered that essay-
text literacy is just one form of literacy, and often a form employed to marginalize
students not skillful with it, no matter how accomplished they may be in other literacies.
As far as teaching students of non-dominant dialects is concerned, the first approach is
not to colonize students with references to correct or proper grammar. Discourse
theory posits that language and dialect are strongly connected to identity. Invalidating
ones dialect thus invalidates ones identity. Thus when I find non-academic
constructions in my students papers, I might offer preferable choices for an academic
audience, emphasizing the contextual nature of dialects. Another thing I do is list in
hierarchical order the elements of an essay, such as ideas, focus, development
19

organization, grammar, spelling, etc., labeling them as high order concerns and low order
concerns. I show students that spelling is dead last on my list, preceded by grammar.
Consistent with my hierarchy, I tend to give feedback on grammar and spelling
only in the latter stages of a students writing. If structural issues continually get in the
way of meaning, then I might intervene much sooner into the process. In such cases, I
may offer a suggested correction. Most of the time, however, I do not mention grammar
until I give feedback on the next to last draft. At this point, if there are a number of
grammar problems throughout an essay, I may edit the first paragraph or two, instructing
the student to edit the rest. Normally, I will simply highlight the grammar problems in the
first paragraph or two and tell the student that there are a number of grammar problems
and that it is time to edit the paper. I also discourage students from editing each others
papers, unless I am teaching a class designed especially for multilingual students.
Multilingual classes complete error logs and do edit each others papers.
My original intention for creating the literacies assignment is liberatory. Making
students aware of literacies is meant to make them aware of the political nature of
standardized literacy, so that they may defend themselves against the stigmatizing
effects that come with being labeled basic. As I mentioned earlier, Adler-Kassner,
Harrington, and Carter advocate the teaching of traveling literacy skills or rhetorical
dexterity, the ability to negotiate a variety of literacies and produce acceptable
documents for each. While I have not gone this far in my curriculum, it may be the next
step. Students can examine the meaning-making activities for various literacies and the
protocols for those literacies. The class can then examine how all literacies have
20

conventions, how grammar and usage, for instance, are similar in some ways to the
coding and syntax in computer programming. To be successful, a programmer must know
the conventions; one error in syntax might crash an entire program, making it unusable.
Similarly, a few grammar errors in a piece of writing might have a similar effect, earning
a rejection from the audience, thus making the piece unusable. I am still hesitant about
going in this direction because I am not so sure that the problem and the solution are that
easy. And I wonder if this approach will result in the glossing over of a serious social
problemthat students with non dominant dialects face challenges and hardships merely
because of their dialect.
Research Methods
A final outcome objective of the CSUS Composition program is the ability to
conduct research in Rhetoric and Composition using appropriate methods and
methodological frameworks. My project represents several research methods. The
literature I relied upon represents the investigation of problems I found resonant
(literacies theory and problems with basic writing). Along the way, I added some
literature (funds of knowledge) and removed others (basic writing, Critical Language
Awareness). I triangulated my own data, using several methods of data gathering and
analysis, both quantitative (essay scores, questionnaire responses) and qualitative (essay
scores, essay writing, reflection writing, questionnaire responses). I used statistical
analysis on the essay scores and questionnaire responses and conducted discourse
analyses on the questionnaire responses, essay writing, and reflections. As far as
21

theoretical frameworks are concerned, I combined literacies theory and funds of
knowledge pedagogy to create the literacies unit and to conduct the research project.
Professional Goals
I have always found writing hard work and, perhaps largely due to the hard work
involved, extremely satisfying. It gives me a sense of accomplishment like no other
activity other than, perhaps, teaching. The written component of this project is no
exception. It was a lot of hard work, frustration, and now a sense of accomplishment. I
will continue to write. I do not know in exactly what capacity. Now that I have begun to
do research, I would like to continue doing it. To that end, I have some collaborative
projects and conference presentations in the works. And this does not even include some
of the ideas I have gained from doing this project. For instance, the research about
working memory and the development of writing skills inspires me to conduct some
control group research in this area. And, as I suggest in the research article, I think there
is more research to be done with the literacies assignment, moving it to the beginning of
the semester in order to see how much it can truly serve as scaffolding.
Presently, I am working at the CSUS English Language Institute (ELI), teaching
English to international students. I enjoy it very much. Years ago, I came to the
conclusion that I am more of a world citizen than an American citizen. The sooner people
come to this realization, I believe, the sooner we can resolve many problems that face the
world today. For this reason and others, teaching international students is a good fit for
me. The curriculum gives me opportunity to practice critical awareness. I, for instance,
will show students Writing Across Borders and Dont Insist on English and lead
22

discussions where I problematize the learning of Western writing styles and the
dominance of English as a world language. I am happy working at the ELI. I feel that I
have already become an integral part of the program, and I see myself staying here and
becoming even more integral: teaching, developing courses, developing curricula,
strengthening the ties between ELI and Sac State, and contributing in as many ways as I
can to the success of the program. If things change, I imagine myself being satisfied with
my original intentionsteaching composition at a community college or university. I
have long fancied the idea of being a teacher. I had a few diversions along the way. Now
that I am a teacher and now that my Masters is nearly complete, I can live a dream of
over twenty years in the making.
23

Chapter 2
TEACHING PHILOSOPHY
It is difficult to present my entire teaching philosophy or my approaches in a short
amount of space, so I will touch upon those practices that are most representative of my
classroom and the rationale for doing them. Finding these skills especially useful in
college and in life, I assign topics that require analysis, critical thinking, and critical
awareness. As suggested by DErrico and Griffin, I like to teach thinking and writing
skills through scaffolding and staging, breaking down writing tasks into a series of
discrete, manageable steps which enable students to manage complex writing tasks more
effectively. One way I scaffold assignments is through worksheets. For a rhetorical
analysis, one worksheet may require students to summarize an advertisement or a
document. Subsequent worksheets may require the students to find examples of ethos,
pathos, and logos, explaining why the student has identified them as such. Other
worksheets might help students determine purpose, message, audience, hidden appeals,
and social messages. To get students to focus on the heart of the writing process, I may
have them complete several worksheets before they see the official prompt. Once
students do see the prompt, they realize that they have written a first draft. For other
assignments, I have designed inductive worksheets where students gather evidence first,
then make generalizations based upon that evidence. The generalizations can serve as the
topics of paragraphs and the evidence as support, thus remedying a common problem
with student writing: lack of support and development.
24

My classrooms are process based. Students do a fair amount of low stakes writing
(freewrites, journal entries, and responses) designed to make their writing more
automatic, to inspire them to think through writing and about their writing. For formal
assignments, students complete several drafts per essay, participate in peer reviews, and
receive feedback from me. My feedback approach is heavily influenced by Knoblauch
and Brannon, who advocate facilitation. This means asking questions and making
statements in order to elicit thought from the writer, instead of taking over the writing or
directing the writer. I concentrate on keeping a positive tone with my feedback. As one
who was stung and baffled by negative and ambiguous written feedback in my early
college years, I know the importance of positive tone and specificity.
My classrooms are active and communal. While there is a place for sitting and
listening in education, I believe that students learn best when active. My methods are
strongly influenced by Paulo Freire. This means that there is little sitting and listening to
the teacher lecture. I incorporate as many topics as I can where I do not have the answers,
and we do a lot of student-teacher co-investigation. Students knowledge is highly
valued, and students are valuable members of the classroom, their perspectives and
insight encouraged and appreciated. I do a lot of problem-posing in an attempt to get my
students to think through problems and to consider the implications of issues they write
about. An active classroom tends to be more communal. Students do a lot of small group
work, such as peer reviews and small group discussions, reporting back to the entire class
their findings or opinions. Sometimes this is done verbally, sometimes by going up to the
board and listing their findings. I find that the small group work breeds confidence and
25

allows the shyer members of the class to participate more. The communal atmosphere of
the entire class leads not only to a sense of belonging but also to accountability. Students
take an active role in their education, and I believe that the community atmosphere
encourages them to attend class and complete their work.
Because they are performance classes, writing classes naturally have assessment
built into them. For every essay, I look at most student drafts. This observation allows me
to see how students are progressing and where they need help. Sometimes I conduct
conferences to better gauge students understanding and problems and to reduce any
ambiguity in my own feedback. Upon submitting the third draft, students receive a
pencil grade. This helps them gauge how much revision they need to do for the
portfolio. To assist me with assessment and to make assignment goals clear to students, I
have an overall course rubric which is then tailored for each assignment and handed out
with the writing prompt. Having an overall course rubric provides consistency, while
revising it allows it to address the specific characteristics of each assignment. I also use
student conferences and mid semester questionnaires to gauge student understanding and
to elicit feedback about their needs. Part of any assessment in my classes includes self-
assessmentmy own and the students. I constantly write reflections about my own
teaching and feedback; and students write reflections about their drafts, assessing what is
going well and what needs work, discussing their frustrations and their strategies for
future drafts.
As far as my experience and educational background are concerned, I have a
Masters Degree in English (with a composition emphasis), and I was a Teaching
26

Associate at CSU, Sacramento during which time I taught three first-year composition
courses and one basic writing course. Being a TA meant I was the teacher of record,
designed the course curriculum, administered the course, graded papers, etc. One thing
TAs have is mentorship. Each semester, I had a highly experienced professor overseeing
me, willing to provide support and advice. During my time as a graduate student, I also
worked as a tutor in the university writing center and led group tutorials. Finally, I am
currently a teacher with the CSUS English Language Institute (ELI), where I teach a full
load of ESL classes for international students. Among the classes I teach are reading,
grammar, and composition.
During my time at CSUS, I sought out internships, serving as either interns or
assistants for six different instructors. This exposed me to the pedagogies of respected,
experienced teachers. As part of my degree requirements, I completed several pedagogy
courses in the teaching of college composition. In addition to my teaching experience, I
was a technical writer, which required me to use my writing for practical, market-based
purposes. Such experience, combined with my coursework, informs me that writing is
context driven, the product depending upon the needs of the audience.
I have a lot of experience with diverse populations. I was once a community
college vocational student and am thus familiar with the needs and attitudes of a
substantial percentage of the community college population. Currently, my work at the
ELI exposes me to a wide variety of world cultures and multilingual students of various
English dialects and skills. My experiences in the University Reading and Writing
Center, my TESOL classes, and my teaching experiences simply tell me that, as Ferris
27

and Hedgcock note, there is no single way of dealing with all students. Different students
need different types of teaching, including feedback on their writing. For instance, I
normally do not comment on grammar and usage in early drafts, but I may intervene
sooner if a number of grammar problems interferes with meaning. On another note, I
employ various strategies for encouraging shyer students to speak up in class, a
population which often includes multilingual students self-conscious about their dialect.
I have also had students with physical and processing disabilities and have adapted my
teaching methods to accommodate them.
My approach to writers of nonstandard dialects is informed by Students Right to
Their Own Language (SRTOL) and by scholars such as James Paul Gee. Gee and the
authors of SRTOL point out the disadvantages faced by students of non standard dialects
and the close relationship between dialect and identity; because of this relationship, the
teachers approach is vital in that invalidating students grammar invalidates not only
individual students but their entire communities. For such students, I take my usual
approach of providing feedback on ideas, development, and structure, refraining from
commenting on grammar and usage until later drafts. If I feel a student needs some
intervention, I may provide specific advice but do it in such a way as to avoid
invalidating the students home dialect, using instead a term such as academic usage
instead of correct or proper grammar. My classroom assignments always include a
component on language/dialect and identity, as well as one on discourse communities.
Informed by scholars such as Gee and Swales, I frame language and usage in terms of
28

discourse communities and the most effective way to communicate for various
communities.
My strong interests and goals in working with populations traditionally
marginalized by higher education reflect my overall values. I want to help empower
individuals and I want to increase awareness in my students that we are world citizens
and thus have a vested interest in the affairs of the world. I still believe that, despite the
cuts in funding, education is the surest means of reducing achievement gaps and of
opening the minds of world citizens. It is a great honor to be part of such a profession.

29

Chapter 3
ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY
This collection contains entries from three areas: literacies, funds of knowledge
and cognitive science. Despite the differences in the fields, these articles share a common
concern: validating students outside-of-school knowledge and using this validation to
change pedagogical practices. Literacies theory argues that all literacies are contextual,
none necessarily superior to another, and that a literacys value itself depends upon
context. Literacies scholars advocate incorporating various literacies into the classroom.
Funds of knowledge scholars argue that the knowledge students gain from their personal
lives can be used as a way to connect students out-of-school knowledge to school
knowledge, as well as bridge their personal and school lives. Recent studies about writing
and cognition strongly suggest that inexperienced writers be allowed to write about what
they know in order to reduce their cognitive loads and to facilitate writing development.
With this central concern for incorporating students practices and knowledge into the
classroom, the works cited here support one another and imply that some reasonably
simple changes to our pedagogy might have far-reaching benefits for our students.

Adler-Kassner, Linda and Susanmarie Harrington. Basic Writing as a Political
Act: Public Conversations about Writing and Literacies. Research in the Teaching of
Rhetoric and Composition. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton, 2006. Print. Adler-Kassner and
Harrington investigate how basic writing and literacy are perceived by the media, the
university, and students. A central concern of the book is how the autonomous model of
30

literacy plays out in the public sphere and contributes to the political nature of basic
writing. The authors argue that basic writing is already political because of its negative
reputation and because it marginalizes and stigmatizes students. The authors propose
making it a political act by empowering students through increasing their awareness of
various literacies and the issues of power and hegemony in dominant literacies. While
they refrain from offering a specific curriculum, stating that to do so would be against the
spirit of their book, the authors do offer advice as to how one can make basic writing a
political act: by Putting literacy definitions in the center of the curriculum (102). They
propose the development of students traveling literacy skills, the ability to produce
appropriate texts under a variety of contexts. Resonant chapters include the final one,
which suggests ways to make basic writing a political act, and two central ones that
examine students perceptions of academic writing and reading versus the writing and
reading they do for themselves.
Alexander, Jonathon. Gaming, Student Literacies, and the Composition
Classroom: Some Possibilities for Transformation. College Composition and
Communication. 61.1 (2009): 35-63. Print. According to the author, the world of video
and computer games demands a variety of literacy strategies from its adherents. For
instance, during the playing of games, single gamers must often deal with text,
determining which text is most relevant; online gamers use instant messages and other
textual means to plan attacks, often writing 1,000 word essays justifying certain
strategies. Websites devoted to gamers often demand that their members make weekly
contributions to community forums as well as follow standards of grammar and behavior.
31

According to Alexander, gamers also develop trans-literacies, literacy and rhetorical
skills [that] might transfer to other writing environments. The authors proposal to
center a composition class around gaming and gaming literacies might seem a superficial
approach and certainly would not appeal to everyone. Alexander, however, claims that
his assignments closely parallel traditional composition assignments, making use of
research, interviews, scholarly sources, and critical literacy. He does not offer a
satisfactory answer as to the weaknesses of the approach, such as what students would be
missing with his curriculum. Teachers unfamiliar with gaming might actually be at an
advantage, according to Alexander, for they could learn along with the students, showing
the students how a master learner approaches new literacies, while sharing their
knowledge of rhetorical strategies. While he never refers to Paulo Freire or his
terminology, Alexander presents a good example of teacher-student co-investigation.
Barton, Angela Calabrese, and Edna Tan. Funds of Knowledge and Discourses
and Hybrid Space. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 46 (2009): 50 73. Web.
27 April 2012. The authors rely extensively on Gees Discourse theory and their take on
Moje at als Hybrid/3rd Space theory (itself a combination of Discourse theory and funds
of knowledge) to conduct a study of 6th grade science students in a Title 1 school. The
authors claim that, because science is such a different Discourse for minorities, many
students find the science classroom is as much about crossing borders as it is about
learning content. According to the authors, valuing students funds of knowledge can be
a way of transitioning them into the classroom. The authors were particularly interested
in the effects of certain pedagogical strategies, which they never identify, on female
32

students. Thus, they and one teacher met with 5 students, four of them female, to come up
with experimentation questions that tapped into students funds of knowledge. The
students and teacher designed a multifaceted unit on nutrition, where students, among
other things, interviewed family members about food and cooking, prepared food for
their classmates, went to fast food restaurants and convenience stores to purchase meals
for under $5.00, comparing their purchases for nutritional value. The experience was
empowering for students, motivating even the most reluctant, and at times resulting in
100% discussion participation instead of the usual 50%. Despite the successes, the
teacher and the authors acknowledge that it just is not feasible or practical to run these
types of units throughout a semester. They conclude that we need to find additional ways
of incorporating funds of knowledge into the classroom.
Carter, Shannon. Redefining Literacy as a Social Practice. Journal of Basic
Writing. 25.2 (2006): 94 125. Web. 16 September 2011. This article is a distillation of
Carters book, The Way Literacy Lives. It presents the essence of her curriculum and her
theory of rhetorical dexteritythe ability to take the skills of one literacy and apply them
to others. The article details how students analyze and write about the literacy practices
they use at their workplaces. Through a series of assignments, they come to realize that
all communities of practice have rules about appropriate and inappropriate behaviors and
practices. The students then write a culminating essay where they compare their
workplace literacies to academic ones. In providing ideas for a literacies curriculum,
Carter demonstrates how Gees concept of semiotic domains (or what Carter prefers to
call communities of practice) can be extended for practical writing purposes.
33

Daley, Elizabeth. Expanding the Concept of Literacy. Educause Review. 38.2
(2003): 3340. Web. 2 March 2013. In making the case that the screen is the common
vernacular and the dominant literacy of the early 21st century, Daley argues that the
academy needs to take multimedia more seriously and institute it as an inherent part of
the curriculum. She notes that professors often make use of visual media to enhance their
curricula but are ignorant to the ways that it constructs meaning. Many universities still
require students to learn print literature and its forms, but do not require media literacy
which, Daley argues, students need more. In stating that students may never need the
knowledge and skills they gain from analyzing literature, Daley seems to overlook to the
fact that many literary analytical skills can be transferred to an analysis of the screen;
nevertheless, she makes a good case that students and faculty need a command of both
text and multimedia. She provides details of rigorous multimodal composition courses
and examples of multimedia projects that have been created through her institution. One
of her most compelling arguments (echoing Kress) is that print, while good for linear
thought, does not represent other forms of human thought as well as the screen can. She
argues that multimedia is just the latest evolution in communication and that eventually
students will need to compose for the screen the way they are now required to compose
for print.
De la Piedra, Maria Teresa. Adolescent Worlds and Literacy Practices in the
United States-Mexico Border. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy. 53.7(2010): 575
584. Web. 22 March 2013. The author, viewing the construction of a third space (see
Moje et al.) as a combination of cross-cultural literacy practices, discusses a funds of
34

knowledge approach that values students vernacular literacies. Taking issue with the
belief that Mexican-American students dont read and write, she conducted research in a
primarily Spanish-speaking middle school in El Paso, Texas, and discovered that students
practice many vernacular literacies (often invisible to or marginalized by educators).
De La Piedra contends that those teachers who recognize vernacular literacies and who
widen the ways literacy can be practiced (such as allowing students to code-switch or
speak in Spanish) tend to get good results. Students are motivated, she concludes, by
literacy activities that have meaning and a clear purpose. She also states that teachers can
use vernacular literacies to enhance literacy development, but first teachers must
familiarize themselves with literacies theory.
Gee, James Paul. Semiotic Domains. What Video Games Have to Teach Us
about Learning and Literacy. Rev Ed. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 2007. 17 43
Print. In this chapter, Gee defines literacies in terms of semiotic domains, social realms
where signs take on meanings determined by members of the domain. Discussing literacy
as the encoding and decoding of signs, whose meanings are arbitrary, the author
essentially expands Saussurean theory into wider realms, where he includes various
modes such as sound and even the sense of taste. Identifying practices such as wine
connoisseurship, midwifery, video games, fashion, etc. as semiotic domains and
literacies, Gee extends the semiotic domains discussion into learning, context, affinity
groups, and design grammars. While some of these claims might challenge the readers
notions of literacy and literacies, Gee nevertheless offers fascinating and enlightening
35

ideas. Semiotic Domains is an idea in which many literacies scholars often couch their
own research.
Kellogg, Ronald T. Training Writing Skills: A Cognitive Developmental
Perspective. Journal of Writing Research. 1.1 (2008): 1-26. Web. 26 March 2013. In
this article, Kellogg discusses the stages of writing development, the effects of writing on
cognitive processesespecially working memoryand the pedagogical implications of
this information. He details the three major stages of writing developmentknowledge-
telling, knowledge-transforming, and knowledge-craftingnoting that each requires
about 10 years of development. Kellogg connects these stages to the cognitive functions,
especially the maturity of working memory and its ability to handle various writing skills.
It is during the final stage, the author contends, that writers are able to imagine the reader
as someone who will interpret the text. And it is at this point that writers can
simultaneously hold the following in working memory: the authors ideas, what the text
actually says, and the audiences interpretation of the text. The key to writing
effectiveness and development, according to Kellogg, is how much working memory is
taxed. Professional writers tend to be able to simultaneously attend to qualities like
audience and content, for several reasons: the brain's executive functions have matured,
requiring less taxation on the brain; writing strategies and processes themselves, while
never fully automated, have become more so; and much writing and content information
is stored in long term memory, requiring less processing from working memory. Kellogg
makes two points that should resonate with writing teachers: working memory has
limited capacity and can be easily overtaxed; and overtaxing working memory delays a
36

writers development. Among the practices he recommends for improving writing
development are modeling various parts of the process to students (essentially
apprenticing them) and allowing students to write about topics familiar to them. For this
reason, he supports writing across the curriculum in that it allows student writers to
utilize long-term memory and long-term working memory for content. He explains that
expertise in any domain leads to the development of long-term working memory
essentially a retrieval system for accessing content in long-term memory, thus reducing
demands on short-term working memory. This article contains a lot of fascinating
information about the interaction of writing and cognition and the implications on the
teaching of writing.
Kirkland, David E. The Skin We Ink: Tattoos, Literacy, and a New English
Education. English Education. 41.4 (2009): 375 395. Web. 18 March 2012.
Responding to claims about the low literacy rates of African-American males, Kirkland
examines how this population exercises literacy through tattoos. Kirkland notes that his
case study, Derrick, gets tattoos to represent significantand traumaticevents in his
life, such as the deaths of loved ones. According to Kirkland, Derrick and others turn to
tattoos the way others might turn to journaling or the writing of poetry to record intimate
and deep thoughts. For Derrick, tattooing is a means of establishing himself as an agent,
capable of shaping his lifes circumstances, and not simply as a victim, being shaped by
them (386). Kirkland calls for English teachers to do the following: to broaden their
scope of literacy and the lenses through which they view literacies, to investigate
practices that they may not see as literate, and to open a new connection with students
37

around unexplored writings that make all of our lives more visible (391). This article
offers a moving portrait of Derick, who uses tattoos as a way of responding to tragedy.
Kress, Gunther. The Futures of Literacy: Modes, Logics and Affordances.
Literacy in the New Media Age. London: Routledge, 2003. 1 8, Kindle Edition. Kress
starts off noting two changes in the nature of literacy. One is the change from print to
image as the dominant mode of communication; the other is the move from the book to
the screen as the dominant medium. According to the author, these changes will have
significant effects on, among other things, human cognition, power, relationships, and
citizens relationships with the world. Kress discusses major differences between text and
image. For instance, text is linear, especially effective for producing causal and temporal
relationships. Image is spatial, effective for showing prominence and other spatial
relationships. Kress also discusses three characteristics of new media. It is multimodal,
allowing various modes to communicate meaning. It is bidirectional, allowing a two-way
flow between author and reader, and thus leveling the power relationship between the
two, as authorship becomes more common. It is hypertextual, a trait that readily reveals
the intertextual nature of a work. Kresss ideas resonate with many new media scholars.
McCutchen, Deborah. From Novice to Expert: Implications of Language Skills
and Writing-Relevant Knowledge for Memory during the Development of Writing Skill.
Journal of Writing Research. 3.1 (2011): 51-68. Web. 26 March 2013. The author
presents a theory of how skilled writers develop, essentially identifying experience and
content knowledge as the keys. Throughout the article, she focuses on how certain
aspects of writing affect working memory. For instance, she notes that while "text
38

generation processestranscription fluency (spelling and handwriting) and text
generation fluency (mental production of a linguistic message)require working
memory in even the most skilled writers, they nevertheless take up much more of the
working memory of unskilled writers. She also summarizes research that suggests that
teachers literacy-relevant linguistic knowledge plays a significant part in students own
linguistic knowledge. The development from a novice to an expert, she argues, relies
upon working memory. She explains how various cognitive areas (short-term working
memory, long-term working memory, and long-term memory) function together and how
their working together can reduce the demands on working memory, a crucial factor in
the development of writing skills. The conclusions and implications for writing are the
following: extensive writing experience/practice so that the writing processes become
more automated; reducing the cognitive demands by letting students write about what
they know.
Moje, Elizabeth Birr, et al. "Working toward Third Space in Content Area
Literacy: An Examination of Everyday Funds of Knowledge and Discourse." Reading
Research Quarterly, 39.1(2004): 38 - 70. Web. 4 April 2012. Concerned about content
area literacy in science and calling for the strategic integration of various knowledges,
Discourses, and literacies the authors theorize that students vernacular literacies can
inform classroom practices and make them more effective. They frame their theory
through scholars like Gee (Discourse) and Bhabha (Third Space), referring to the
integration of knowledges and Discourses as spaces, the first space being home, the
second being formal institutions (like schools), and the third a combination of the two.
39

The authors claim that creating a third space that combines the first space of home and
the second space of school has three positive effects: it can create a bridge between the
two, a scaffolding that helps students learn school knowledges and Discourses; it can help
students learn how to navigate and succeed in different discourse communities; and it
brings competing knowledges and Discourses into contact with one another, resulting in
the integration of academic and students knowledges and Discourses. The authors claim
that the integration of various knowledges and Discourses is vital for student success in
school and in life. This article is particularly notable for its recognition not only of home
but also community, peers, and popular media as funds of knowledge sources.
Moll, Luis C. et al. Funds of Knowledge for Teaching: Using a Qualitative
Approach to Connect Homes and Classrooms. Theory into Practice, 31.2 (1992): 132
141. Web. 8 August 2012. The researchers, a combination of Tucson anthropologists and
teachers, conducted ethnographic and other qualitative research in the homes of the
teachers students, all of them Mexican-American households. The intention was, first, to
find connections between these households and school and, second, to use this knowledge
to foster instruction. Among the things the researchers discovered is that the parents have
a lot of workplace knowledge and that children, while passive students in school, were
active learners and contributors to their households. The authors found that the
knowledge of these communities promised great, potential utility for classroom
instruction. Upon discovering that some Mexican-American households make and sell
candy, one class made use of the students and parents funds of knowledge by
conducting a research project on candy, eventually inviting one of the mothers into the
40

classroom to demonstrate the making of it, as well as her vast knowledge of the
ingredients and nutritional values of Mexican and American candy. This project
combined funds of knowledge with various academic subjects like math, science, and
health science.
Oughton, Helen. "Funds Of Knowledge -- A Conceptual Critique." Studies In The
Education Of Adults. 42.1 (2010): 63-78.Academic Search Premier. Web. 26 Mar. 2013
Proceeding from her distaste of policymakers comparisons of adult learners academic
skills to those of children, Oughton sees funds of knowledge as a "disruption" to deficit
models that are still too common in education. She traces the general evolution of funds
of knowledge, from it being viewed as household or community knowledge to eventually
individual knowledge, a trend which she approves of in that adults gain knowledge
throughout their lives. She also notes that funds of knowledge has widened its scope to
include the interpersonal and metacognitive skills of adults, another development she
views as relevant and useful in the teaching of adults. Maintaining a healthy skepticism,
Oughton does question where the boundaries should lie, i.e., what should be included
under the funds of knowledge umbrella. She also questions any official acceptance of
funds of knowledge from academic institutions, in that funds of knowledge at that point
risks being hijacked by administrators, resulting in the sanctioning and marginalizing of
various knowledges. She discusses Bourdieu's concept of cultural capital, and finds
similarities between it and funds of knowledge, but also poignant differences. For
instance, literacy and numeracy in the household, while extremely useful, is not highly
valued by the elite; on the other hand, literacy and numeracy in the academy, while not
41

extremely useful, is valued by the elite. She problematizes funds of knowledge further,
showing how using funds of knowledge in order to teach knowledge valued by the elite
deconstructs the entire idea of funds of knowledge. She also takes up Hughes idea that
some households might have greater funds than others, a situation that could actually
contribute to a deficit model. She also warns against using funds of knowledge in several
ways: it could be used to stereotype groups rather than seeing culture as a process;
teachers could arbitrarily determine what counts as a fund, thus privileging some funds
while marginalizing others. And she questions the appropriateness of the funds metaphor,
in that education should be viewed as "participation" rather than as "acquisition."
Towards the end of the article, she returns to the deconstructed idea, in bringing up
Knijniks point that, since funds of knowledge has low exchange value, we should be
focusing instead on teaching students knowledge that has high-exchange value. Ougton's
pedagogical solution is essentially Moje et als concept of third spaceusing funds of
knowledge to scaffold learning.
Selfe, Cynthia L. "Students Who Teach Us: A Case Study of a New Media Text
Designer." Writing New Media: Theory and Applications for Expanding the Teaching of
Composition. Eds. Anne Wysocki, et al. Logan, UT: Utah State UP, 2004. 43 - 66. Kindle
File. In this chapter, the author declares that composition instructors should be providing
a more prominent place for new media texts in the classroom. Specifically, she contends,
teachers should be learning new literacies and teaching them to their students. To do
otherwise, she states, not only risks making the class irrelevant, but leads to an abdication
of teachers professional responsibility. Selfe claims that while students are enthusiastic
42

about new media texts, they often find conventional literacy practices irrelevant. One
reason for this is that they use one extensively in their daily lives and the other mostly for
school. Selfe also contends that when societies undergo rapid change, so do literacies,
resulting in the rapid accumulation of literacies, and the need for citizens to practice
several at once. She also discusses how new literacies, with their influence in an unstable,
postmodern world, contribute to identity. These literacies, she notes, also make it possible
to link up with members from various world cultures, creating new group identities.
Because composing in various media is a necessary skill in todays world, to Selfe,
teaching multimodal composition and other new literacies becomes a moral and ethical
issue.
Singer, Jessie and Ruth Shagoury Hubbard. "Teaching from the Heart: Guiding
Adolescent Writers to Literate Lives." Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy. 46.4
(2002): 326 - 336. Web. 4 Jan. 2013. Hubbard conducted an ethnographic research
project in Singer's classroom. Concerned about her high school seniors losing interest in
school during their final semester, Singer created what she calls a "passion project,"
where students write about a passion, whether it be poetry, illegal drag racing, shoes, etc.
As part of the project, students had to read a book about their topic and conduct a 25-
minute lesson on it. Feedback from the students was overwhelmingly positive. Besides its
intention to gain their attention and focus, the project was designed to make students
passionate, life-long learners. Part of what makes life-long learners, the authors claim, is
knowing that ones passions contain value. The authors state that they "witnessed young
adults act as real readers and writers in pursuit of learning and sharing their knowledge"
43

(328).While the students enjoyed extensive autonomy, Singer monitored them throughout
the two months of the project, providing feedback and giving mini lessons.
Steinkuehler, Constance. Massively Multiplayer Online Gaming as a
Constellation of Literacy Practices. The Design and Use of Simulation Computer Games
in Education. Eds. Brett E. Shelton & David A. Wiley. Rotterdam, Netherlands: Sense,
2007. 187-212. Print. The author takes issue with common definitions of literacy and the
claims that video games are contributing to a literacy crisis. She conducted a two-year
study of students who participate in Massively Multiplayer Online Gaming (MMOG) and
found that those who play MMOGs participate in a variety of literacy activities. First, the
game interface, with its avatars, menu bars, graphs, and assortment of other sign systems,
is a complex semiotic domain in itself. To appease those who might not accept the
premises of semiotic domains, however, Steinkuehler discusses other literacy activities
that happen during and in addition to game play: text messages, letters, poetry, chat
rooms, discussion boards, annotated screenshots, fan fiction. In the end, video games are
not replacing literacy activities, the author contendsthey are literacy activities.
Steinkuehler speculates that contempt towards video games is due to a long standing
fear of technology and parents disapproval of practices they haven not sanctioned. The
author examines many MMOG literacy activities in detail.
Thomson, Pat and Christine Hall. Opportunities Missed and/or Thwarted?
Funds of Knowledge Meet the English National Curriculum. The Curriculum Journal.
19.2 (2008): 97 103. Web. 18 Nov 2012. The authors discuss funds of knowledge and
its relationship to the English National Curriculum. This curriculum, established in 1988,
44

unified the nations curricula, took authority and autonomy away from teachers, and
placed more accountability on them. It also relied extensively on standardized testing.
The curriculum also denigrated process-based approaches to education, a move the
authors see as also dealing a massive blow to funds of knowledge approaches. The reason
for this, they claim, is that process-based approaches also value childrens experiences.
The authors examine four cases where fifth grade classes completed art assignments
(visual self portraits or writing) that made use of the students life experiences. Ironically,
in three of these, childrens funds of knowledge were repressed. The article offers a
fascinating glance at how childrens own knowledge, even when a project specifies using
it, is routinely marginalized or stifled in favor of sanctioned, school knowledge.
Yancey, Kathleen Blake. "Made Not Only in Words: Composition in a New
Key." College Composition and Communication. 56.2 (2004): 297 - 328. Web. As
revolutionary in form as it is in theme, this textual reproduction of Yanceys Chair
Address at the 2004 CCCC Convention advocates the de-privileging of print literacy to
make room for multimedia in composition. The author relies upon notable media and
literacy scholars like Kress, Selfe, Hawisher, and Blake to provide evidence as to how
multimedianamely, the screenis more dominant today than print. Composition, she
asserts, needs to embrace the technologies that students and teachers are already learning
on their own in order to remain relevant to students. Not teaching students how to
communicate more effectively using these technologies does them a great disservice. To
keep composition relevant, Yancey advocates the creation of a composition curriculum,
an undergraduate major that embraces digital literacies and teaches multimodal
45

composition. If composition does not move in this direction, she states, another discipline
will. It is at points like these that her warning comes off as political, as a proposition to
make composition a larger and stronger discipline. Nevertheless, she makes interesting
arguments. The article itself is a tour de force of techniquefascinating reading, both for
its content and its format. While it is intriguing that the President of the CCCC would
advocate for the de-privileging of print on paper, a medium that has been compositions
staple, the manner in which she presents her ideas are just as intriguing. The text is a
reproduction/approximation of her speech, her way of representing multimedia strictly in
print form. It combines palimpsests, callouts, and images to
support/enhance/interact/compete with the body text. These combined qualities and
effects demand different reading skills, which is exactly Yanceys point.
46

Chapter 4
USING FUNDS OF KNOWLEDGE AND LITERACIES TO SCAFFOLD FIRST
COLLEGE YEAR WRITING
One of my greatest challenges as a freshman writer was development. For years, I
attributed my problem to being a high school dropout, to missing two and a half years of
high school English. Now, as one who teaches freshman composition, I find that my
problems were not necessarily due to the lack of high school English. Many college
students struggle with development. As a result, I find that my main dutyand
challengeas a facilitator of students writing is teasing out thoughts; getting students to
explain and support their ideas.
This lack of development is likely due to a greater problem. When students
struggle with college writing, it is possible that they are overwhelmed. Many are
struggling with several new thingsor at least slightly familiar subjects at a more
demanding level. For instance, when I conduct informal polls of my students, I discover
that 75% of them have never ventured beyond the five-paragraph essay. For this and
other reasons, they discover that the rhetorical demands of college are much greater than
those they are accustomed to in high school. In addition, they frequently find themselves
reading articles that place new demands on their reading skills, often having to read and
to negotiate several of these articles per writing assignment. These readings are meant to
challenge students thinking, and for that reason place new demands on their cognitive
skills. It is not unusual for students to face this trio of new demandsideational,
47

readerly, rhetoricalimmediately in the first semester of college composition. While
some students survive and even thrive in this environment, many struggle.
One solution is to scaffold students entry into college-level writing, and one way
to do this is to encourage students to write about what they know, what many scholars
term as funds of knowledge. Noting several other scholars calls for bringing more
literacies into the composition classroom, I have developed a writing assignment where
students write about a personal literacy, the definition of literacy based upon James Paul
Gees concept of semiotic domains. Because semiotic domains offers an expansive
definition of literacies, the assignment offers students plenty of latitude to write about a
topic of deep interest and knowledge, allowing them to use their funds of knowledge for
content generation.
Theoretical Frameworks: Funds of Knowledge and Semiotic Domains
Funds of Knowledge (FoK), a pedagogical approach developed by Tucson
scholars to link the school and the home lives of Mexican-American students near the
U.S.-Mexico border, is commonly defined as historically accumulated and culturally
developed bodies of knowledge and skills essential for household functioning and well
being (Moll et al. 72). The Tucson scholars developed FoK for several reasons. One
was to counter deficit models, where educators tend to view students by the skills that
they lack rather than by ones that they possess. For instance, while students may seem to
be lacking in literacy skills, they may be actually highly literate in Spanish (de la Piedra
578), or students who are passive in the classroom may actually be quite active in the
running of their families (Moll et al. 74). Linking students home lives with their school
48

lives has two primary benefits: it shows school validation for the knowledge students
possess, and it provides scaffolding, a means of using students knowledge to teach
academic content (Gonzalez 43). A classroom, for instance, might use FoK to show the
practical extensions of math; how it is used in everyday practices such as carpentry and
sewing.
FoK has been expanded from its original uses. It initially focused on knowledge
used in the household, but the concept was eventually expanded to include knowledge
gained from three additional areas: community, peers, and popular culture. Initially, FoK
was used in K-6 and then K-12. Now scholars are finding it useful for educating adults.
At this point, as Larrotta and Serrano note, there is very little literature to document
FoKs use in adult education (318). There is even less on its uses in higher education.
British scholars, such as Helen Oughton, advocate the use of FoK in adult education.
While Oughton demonstrates a healthy skepticism for many claims and aspects of FoK,
she nevertheless argues that adults individual experiencesin addition to the knowledge
they gain from households, community, peers, and popular cultureare valid forms of
FoK (pars. 3 13).
By its nature, FoK is hybrid, and this hybridity presents opportunities for teaching
literacies. Barton and Tan, for instance, see FoK as a way of connecting traditionally
marginalized funds of knowledge and Discourses to academic funds and Discourses
(52). Similarly, de la Piedra, who conducted a study where she applied FoK to literacy
learning, concludes that teachers can incorporate students vernacular literacies through
FoK and that this can enhance literacy development (582). Others see FoK as a way of
49

teaching students to navigate and succeed in various discourse communities (Moje et al.
44). This concept of navigational space strongly resembles approaches advocated by
various composition scholars, such as Alexanders trans-literacy, Carters rhetorical
dexterity, or Adler-Kassners and Harringtons traveling literacy skills. What all of
these have in common is that students learn to take the literacies skills they possess and
use them to adapt to various literacies contexts. Students can adapt to various writing
demands across the curriculum.
Along with seeing a need to scaffold the writing assignments of first-year
students, I see a need to incorporate literacies into the composition classroom. A
classroom focus on literacies in their various forms is advocated by many scholars.
Linda-Adler Kassner and Susanmarie Harrington, for instance, claim that teaching
students the ability to compose under a variety of contexts will empower them,
counteracting the negative political effects of basic writing and standardized literacies.
Shannon Carter has developed an entire curriculum meant to develop students rhetorical
dexterity. (One assignment in her curriculum, where students write about a vernacular
literacy, shares many traits with my own unit.) Other scholars claim that it is becoming
increasingly important to teach our students how to compose in ways other than print on
paper. Gunther Kress and Elizabeth Daley, for instance, claim that our culture has gone
from text and book to image and screen dominated. Noting this trend, composition
scholars such as Kathleen Blake Yancey and Cynthia Selfe argue that composition must
embrace multimodal composition in order to remain relevant. In these and other ways,
focusing the composition classroom on literacies is beneficial, if not vital.
50

In response to scholars concerns, I developed a unit where students would write
about a literacy of their choice. The idea was to create an assignment that would both
familiarize students with the concept of literacies and provide a curricular base which
could be extended in a number of directions. To introduce the students to the idea of
literacies, I expose them to James Paul Gees theory of semiotic domains, what Gee
defines as any set of practices that recruit one or more modalities to communicate
distinctive types of meanings (18). According to Gee, how literate one is in any domain
depends upon understanding and mastery of a domains system of signs. As he explains,
If we think first in terms of semiotic domains and not in terms of reading
and writing as traditionally conceived . . . we can say that people are (or
are not) literate (partially or fully) in a domain if they can recognize (the
equivalent of reading) and/or produce (the equivalent of writing)
meanings in the domain. (20)
While we typically think of signs as operating in the visual realm, this is not necessarily
so. A sign can be in any mode, oral or written language, images, equations, symbols,
sounds, gestures, graphs artifacts, etc. (19). Examples of literacies, according to Gee,
include cellular biology, postmodern literacy criticism, first-person shooter games, high
fashion advertisements, Roman Catholic theology (19). The range is expansive and
intriguing, allowing for a wide variety of literacies, many not traditionally viewed as
such. The concept of semiotic domains, besides helping us understand human activities
more fully, helps explain why scholars often refer to using a computer or surfing the web
as a literacy.
51

Various scholars frame their own discussions of literacies in terms of semiotic
domains. Constance Steinkuehler, for instance, uses it when discussing the Massively
Multiple Online Player Game (MMOG) as a complex semiotic domain (6) and the
game interface as a completely transparent (albeit dense) semiotic system (5). Shannon
Carter recognizes semiotic domains when she discusses students reflections on football
and soccer literacies, describing how during play football and soccer players read their
opponents formations and, in response, change their own formations, thus writing new
ones (117 18). Because of its breadth, semiotic domains theory is especially useful
when prompting students to write about their own literacies, giving them a wide choice of
topics. This breadth makes it ultimately useful when students consider their own
literacies as a fund of knowledge.
Assignment and Project: A Unit on Literacies
My dual concerns of transitioning students into college-level writing and of
preparing them for various writing situations led to a literacies unit where students would
write about a literacy of strong interest and/or deep knowledge. While designing this unit,
I relied extensively on the concept of semiotic domains, feeling that it offered the widest
latitude for literacy definitions and an expanded chance of students writing about their
own knowledge. This latitude gives students more choice; more of a chance that they will
choose a writing topic personally meaningful. In addition, recognizing activities not
traditionally thought of as literacies is in the spirit of FoK pedagogy in that it validates
activities typically outside of school.

52

Once exposed to the theory of semiotic domains, students choose a literacy to
analyze and write about. For this unit, I tell them to find one of strong interest and/or
deep knowledge, hoping that they will choose one that fits both criteria. As part of the
assignment, students have to discuss the encoding and decoding activities of the literacy
and describe a scenario of that literacy. This presents opportunities to analyze the literacy
and to show it in action. The literacies paper is the second of three formal essays, the first
a rhetorical analysis, the third an argument about dialect and Students Rights to Their
Own Language. I see the dialect essay as a natural extension of the literacies paper in
that both share not only similar attributes but also the same concern with the privileging
of dominant Discourses and the subsequent marginalization of others. When I designed
the study, I thought that a rhetorical analysis would help students learn the types of
strategies that academic writers and other skilled rhetoricians use to move their
audiences.
When I designed this unit, I had several questions: First of all, would students
accept the idea of literacies? Would the writing assignment resonate with students?
Would writing about topics of extensive knowledge and/or strong interest lead to more
effective writing? Would the writing be more developed? Another concern I had is
whether students would become overwhelmed with the flow of ideas to the point that
they would have difficulty limiting and organizing the information. I was of the opinion
that the students, being of the digital age, would not find the concept of literacies new. I
also believed that they would like the project in that they could write about a topic of
their choosing. I had really no hypotheses about the other questions.
53

The project took place over two consecutive semesters, in two first-year
composition classesone per semester. The first semester was in the spring, the second
in the fall. The institution at which I was teaching is a state university with about 24,000
undergraduate and 3,000 graduate students. Both of my classes started out with 25
students, but because attrition a total of 42 students participated in the study, 22 the first
semester, 20 the second. The population is diverse, the major ethnic populations breaking
into the following approximate percentages for first-year students: 8% African American,
25% Asian, 1% Pacific Islander, 26% Latino, 29% Caucasion, and 6% multiracial. About
64% of the first-year population was listed as minority, 37% of the total population listed
as underrepresented. Each of my classes had one junior; all of the other students were in
their first year.
I employed several methods to determine the literacies units effectives. The first
method was gradeshow they would compare to those of the other two formal essays of
the semester. I also relied on feedback from students in the form of reflection papers,
which they did after their final draft but before receiving a grade. At the end of the
semester, I also administered a questionnaire that asked students such things as their
favorite writing assignment and the one that they felt they did their best writing on. I felt
that four methodsgrades, students essay writing, reflections, and questionnaire
responseswould provide a good indication of how much the assignment resonates with
the students and encourages effective writing.

54

Results: Students Writing and Scores
The first indication of success is grades. As can be seen from Table 1, the
students scores were consistent across both semesters. For both classes, the average
score jumped four points from the first to the second essay. From the second to third
essay, the third essay the average score dropped slightly the first semester but stayed the
same for the second semester. As can be seen from the next row, 59% of the first
semester and 30% of the second semester students achieved their highest essay score on
the literacies assignment. While the literacies essay was by far the most successful essay
of the first semester, it was perhaps more successful as scaffolding for the second
semester, in that students maintained their level of performance for the essay following it.
While these results do suggest that the literacies essay elicits good results, the rise in
scores from the first to the second essay could also be due to factors such as students
increased writing experience and adapting to the writing environment, namely, to my
expectations.
Table 1: Essay Scores & Results of Questionnaires
Semester 1 (Spring) Semester 2 (Fall)
Essay 1
st
2
nd
3
rd
1
st
2
nd
3
rd

Avg. Score (out of 100 points) 85 89 88 86 90 90
Best Score 18% 59% 23% 25% 30% 50%
Perceived Best Writing 23% 45% 32% 29% 43% 29%
Favorite Essay 23% 55% 23% 33% 57% 10%
55

The final two rows contain results from the end-of-semester questionnaire and
provide some intriguing insight. No matter how well students performed on the literacies
essay, around 45% perceived it their best writing and around 55% identified it as their
favorite essay. It is intriguing that these results are so consistent across both semesters
when only 30% of the second semester students received their highest score on the
literacies essay. The discrepancy may lie in the fact that for 60% of the second semester
students, the difference in grades between essays 2 and 3 was three points or less, a
negligible difference. The grade statistics and the responses do show two trends. Student
performance noticeably improves from the first essay to the literacies essay, and no
matter how successful the students were or thought they were on it, the literacies essay is
popular.
Writing, Cognition, and Topic Knowledge
Students responses and reflections reveal as much about the assignments effects
as the quantitative data does. While literacies was a new concept for most students, and
while many found it initially challenging in that they had to think outside the box, they
nevertheless found it a relatively easy topic to write about. Their reflections and
questionnaire responses typically cite interest and ease for preferring the literacies
assignment over the others. Occasionally a student would use stronger terms to describe
his or her topic: My favorite part about writing this essay was that the topic is something
Im very passionate about, therefore writing about it came with much ease. This student,
Francine (all student names are pseudonyms), chose painting as her literacy. What is not
mentioned in this passage is that it is a hobby of hers. Students often pick a hobby such as
56

painting, video games, or sports. Like Francine, they often mention love of or
passion for the specific literacy as their reason for liking the assignment. When
students use strong terms like passion, it is likely that they are referring to a subject that
they find more than interesting; it is likely an activity in which they participate to some
degree. Those who participate in an activity usually have more knowledge about the
subject than those who are merely interested in it.
The ease that Francine and other students mention in their reflections and
questionnaire responses is often expressed by others. These students, while not
mentioning ease, use terms that express fluency of thought. For instance, one student
states, ideas were just coming left to right for me. Another states, When I started
writing the paper, it was as if my paper flowed so well. I knew exactly what I was going
to talk about. The following responses, from two other students, indicate reasons for the
fluency. The first student, Lisa, states,
I believe this was my best because I wrote on a topic I knew a lot about
and the topic kept me interested. It was fun to write a paper about
something I love to do. I write about [better?] when I feel more
comfortable about a topic I know.
Similarly, Leo, the second student, states,
I think I did best on the literacy paper. I used this chance to write
something I was very knowledgeable in. When I am confident in what I am
writing, I will write very well.
57

Like most students, Lisa and Leo wrote about a subject of strong interest. Lisa wrote
about soccer and Leo about strategic video games. Unlike some students, however, they
both also wrote about activities in which they participate, subjects about which they were
intimately familiar.
With their FoK providing content and facilitating development, some students
were apparently able to attend to the other demands of college writing much sooner into
the process. While this was not expressed by many students, a few did mention it.
Francine, for instance, concerned that her organization and transitions were up to par
and that her enthusiasm may have led her to cram too much irrelevant information into
the essay, nevertheless states, Overall, I think that the essay on Literacies has
tremendously improved my sense of organization and ability to come up with rich
content. Similarly, Leo states that once he chose his subject,
the only problem I faced was narrowing down my topic and preparing to
organize my paper in a manner that could be easily explained as to avoid
too much writing on the subject rather than how it is a literacy. . . .
I believe that my analysis came out very well because of the
organization that was eventually used. I used the thesis to separate my
essay into a few main ideas about what it means for a game to be a
literacy. This made it easy for me to make topic sentences and separate
paragraphs according to what I wanted to talk about and why.
Both writers express concern for having too much irrelevant content, and both express the
luxury of attending to the rhetorical strategies of their papers. With ideas coming at them
58

with relative ease, the main challenge for these students is eliminating irrelevant
information and attending to rhetorical features like organization and topic sentences.
Here the bridging of FoK and school activities seems to provide the scaffolding that
many first-year college writers need in order to most effectively learn the rhetorical
strategies they need for college writing. Rather than dealing with demanding readings and
ideas throughout the writing process, their out-of-school knowledge provides easily
accessible content that they can then shape while practicing new rhetorical skills and
strategies. Once they gain some experience and skill at college writing, they can move on
to more demanding assignments, ones with topics outside of their immediate realm of
knowledge.
Agency and Authority
In their reflections, students often demonstrate an authority that is a direct result
of using their own knowledge. A good example of this is Katherine, a student who
struggled with the first essay. In the literacies essay, she came off as much more of an
expert on her topic, video games. Her reflection reveals her comfort with and love of the
subject, describing the assignment and her choice as the chance to actually talk about
something I knew about:
I personally liked [the] literacies essay because I could show off how
nerdy I actually am. Being a girl, most people think Im not into video
games & all the nerdy things the come with it. Plus I actually like to
critique video games, which I got to do in this essay.
59

The essay gives her an opportunity not only to show off how much she knows but also to
defy stereotypes. While several students wrote about video games, she was the only
female to do so (a trend that perhaps supports her point about females not being into
video games). In her reflection, she shows a feistiness; she is outspoken and likes to
challenge conventions. But her essay turns into more than just stating opinions; it
becomes a mission, as she notes in her questionnaire response: I could prove that my
topic was something that can be looked at in a good way instead of the stereotypical
video games melt your brain way. The literacies paper presented the opportunity to
defend her controversial hobby, and she likely jumped at the chance. She even gets in a
couple of digs at those critical of video games. Her use of the term stereotypical
suggests that video game critics lack imagination and insight, while the use of scare
quotes distances her from and perhaps ridicules the detractors.
Leo also asserts his authority in his reflection. He states, videogames are
something Im very familiar with, and in his paper he demonstrates his knowledge by a
discussion of strategic video games, boldly proclaiming them a superior literacy to first-
person shooter games (and perhaps not fully getting the lesson of literacies theorythat
one literacy is not necessarily superior to another). In his reflection, he continues to argue
that in strategic games, literacy plays more of a role, claiming that first-person shooter
games as more physical and less of a literacy. Near the end, he takes his authority to a
new level:
Since the topic was something I knew the class or yourself might have
little to no knowledge about, it was easy to prove that you were illiterate in
60

the subject by throwing in specific examples and then later give a brief
explanation to show that I am literate in the subject. This turned out to be
the basis of my argument.
What is especially noteworthy about Leos reflection is that he directly addresses
me. He takes the opportunity to turn the tables, telling me (the traditional literacy expert
in the classroom) that he (the traditional literacy learner) is in this case the literacy expert
and that I am illiterate. While the authority is not quite so frank in his essay, it is here,
in this direct address to me. In other contexts, his frankness and the position he takes
would be stunning, but here it is not completely unexpected. It is in moments like these
that a key goal of FoK pedagogy is achieved. Because the students outside-of-school
knowledge is validated, Leo freely expresses value for it as well. And seeing himself as a
possessor of valid knowledge, he proclaims his expertise in it to the novice, here the
teacher. The literacies/FoK pedagogy allows, even invites, Leo to take a position of true
authority. Such authority enables the student to present his knowledge without
reservation.
Identity
In many students reflections, their expressions of love and passion for the
subject go deeper than just attraction; they go to the essence of their identities. For
instance, Jessica describes the literacies essay as her favorite in that it allowed [her] to
talk/write about something personal and passionate. She attributes her personal
connection to the subject as the reason for her good grade:
61

My grade on this essay really reflected my interest in it. . . . I felt that I did
my best writing on the second essay. I believe this was my best written
paper because it was on a personal topic, I tend to do better on those rather
then [sic] analyzing an article.
Whereas other students might describe the topic as interesting, a love, or a passion,
Jessica describes it as personal. The difference between these adjectives is distance.
Personal suggests a closer relationship, a contiguous relationship, one that is part of the
body, and for good reasonher subject was tattoos. Similar to the young, African-
American males in David Kirklands The Skin We Ink, who use tattooing as a form of
journaling, as a way of signifying important and resonant events in their lives, Jessica
uses tattooing to signify identity, important bonds, and perhaps trauma. In her essay, she
describes getting her first tattoo, having the phrase
seulement les forts survivra(only the strong survive) inscribed on her hip. This
French phrase is a nod to her French heritage and a motto that serves as an inspiration to
keep going, while hinting at a troubled past.
Jessica discusses another tattoo, an infinity sign, which she received when she and
her four best friends from middle school went to a tattoo parlor together:
This tattoo is special to me because it reminds me of happy and hard times
that they have all been there for throughout my life. After nine years, I
know that like the tattoo, our friendships will never fade. My quote for the
symbol is, The infinity sign has no end, thats how long I want to be your
friend. For my friend Kayla, it reminds her of our support through her
62

mom fighting breast cancer. For my friend Jamie, it reminds her of who
was there to comfort her during her parents divorce. For my friend Mary,
its a reminder of her best friends even though were separated by 2 states.
The symbol all has the same meaning of friendship to us, but in a sense it
is deeper and different for each one of us. This shows that just because the
symbol is the same for us, doesnt mean that the personal meaning or
story is.
For Jessica, tattooing is a literacy of deep, personal meaning, one of inspiration and of
love. The tattoo will likely remain a lifelong symbol of her friendship and a reminder of a
moment they had together. Writing about it becomes a meaningful experience as she
explains in the questionnaire: I think I did my best writing on the second essay. Mainly
because it was one that I really wanted to go into depth with. A personally meaningful
subject transforms into personally meaningful writing, one on which the writer wants to
spend time. Sharing her personal literacy and experiences brings out Jessicas most
effective and passionate writing of the semester. In FoK fashion, her personal literacy and
experiences are academically validated, and she freely shares them. Here, one outcome of
the literacies assignment is similar to outcomes of other FoK approaches. One goal of
FoK pedagogy is for teachers to know their students as whole people, not just by their
performance in the classroom (Moll et al. 74). While the literacies assignment does not
go to the extents that K-12 FoK pedagogy might (teacher visitations to and ethnographic
research in students homes), it does offer opportunities for students to share personal
knowledge and thus for us to know them better. This does matter. I am frequently told by
63

my students that they expected to hate composition but found it their favorite class,
largely because of the communal aspects. They tend to love the small group and whole
class discussions, and they often remark that I am the only teacher who knows their
names. Feeling part of a community does motivate students. They want to attend class
and they want to engage.
Another student, James, also expresses close identification with his subject,
soccer. In his reflection, he states,
I felt like I really got a chance to express myself because my choice of
topic really says a lot about me. Ive been playing soccer my whole life
and its played a big role in my life. This essay opened up a really big door
for my creativeness and I just feel really proud of my work on it.
He had reasons to be proud of the essay. While he struggled with the first essay, requiring
a lot of prompting and facilitation from me, he immediately seemed more fluent in the
literacies essay. His final score reflected the connection to the topic: while receiving a
high B on the first essay, he received a high A on the second. It was a remarkable
turnaround, one enabled by authority and passion. For James, soccer is not a mere interest
or sport; it is a lifelong love that has played a big role in his life. The expressions he
choosesexpress myself and my choice of topic really says a lot about mereveal
that his connection to soccer is deep and personal. Similar to the role tattoos play in
Jessicas life, soccer plays a part in James identitya significant part. Both have
dedicated their bodies to their literacy, Jessica turning parts of her body into a canvass,
James devoting his body to hundreds of hours of hard work and practice. Like
64

knowledges identified by FoK scholars, soccer is a skill and knowledge that James has
likely learned from peers, community, and popular culture. Jessicas is one she values
and shares with peers. Both students find their literacies and FoK a catalyst for
creativity. And both write their best essays of the semester; James writes an essay he
identifies as earning the highest grade I have ever received on an essay.
Discovery and Validation
Another characteristic of this assignment is how the familiar nevertheless leads to
discovery. Looking at a familiar subject under a new, academic lens enables students to
discover new qualities about their knowledge/literacies. A good example of this is offered
by Sam in his reflection:
When deciding what topic to choose to do . . . I was first considering
doing music or even paintings as a literacy. But I decided on videogames
because I thought that it would be more fun and I had a what the heck
attitude towards the subject, I wanted to see if I could prove that
videogames could be perceived as something useful. In the beginning
stages I had a defensive attitude towards videogames, I felt that I had to
disprove what most people believed videogames were. As I went on I
realized that videogames have a great amount of potential. I started to see
that videogames were really a mixture of literacies in itself and that you
needed to not only be familiar with all these literacies such as
communication with people online, working a controller to make your
avatar do what you want, and so on. I noticed that there are other literacies
65

in videogames such as reading, music, and even art, many videogames
contract professional artists and even orchestras for their game. I began to
see videogames as not just another literacy but perhaps the next evolution
of literacies.
Sams reflection shows an initial skepticism followed by a developing awareness. He
starts off lackadaisical (what the heck attitude), as if choosing the topic of video games
can be a way to defend them against critics. At first, he does not seem entirely convinced
himself that video games are a literacy or even a worthwhile activity. I wanted to see if
I could prove that videogames could be perceived as something useful, he states, the
passive, agentless could be perceived distancing him from a pronouncement and,
importantly, from the idea of usefulness. His initial doubt and increasing awareness are
underscored by his statement, As I went on I realized that videogames have a great
amount of potential. In other words, it is not until he spends some time thinking about
video games as literacy that he realizes their potential benefits outside of entertainment.
Elsewhere in in his reflection, he comes to understand and describe video games as a
new breed of literacies, a new way of communication, and perhaps of understanding
the world. Like other students, he took on the challenge of defending an activity of deep,
personal interesta skill developed outside of and unsanctioned by school. In the
process, he seems to discover the many benefits of video games. He discovers that the
skills and knowledge that he has developed out of school have value, that they just may
be the next evolution of literacies. And in identifying his unsanctioned literacy as such,
66

he hints that it may be even more important that the dominant literacy sanctioned by the
university.
Development and Organization
In my classes, I provide feedback on the second and third drafts of essays, and on
subsequent drafts if students choose to revise further. By the time they have completed a
third draft and received feedback from their peers and me, most students are ready to
revise for the portfolio. Comparing these third drafts tends to confirm students
comments about fluency. While many were still struggling with ideas and content in the
third draft of essay one, they were much more ready to attend to wording at the same
point in essay two. Similarly, on the first essay my comments often display a concern
with content while on essay two they tend to focus more on wording and other surface
features. Students were simply further ahead in the writing process for essay two.
A good case in point is Bridget. On her first essay, she had turned in very good
first draft, one that I used in class activities as a good example of a first draft. But the
essay never improved significantly after that. On her third draft, I prompted her several
times for more development. In the end comments, I mention that, even though she has a
great introduction and makes some great points throughout, she could develop her
thoughts more. In contrast, at the same point in her literacies essay, she had written a
nearly flawless paper full of detailed passages describing and explaining visual literacy.
In the comment I offer suggestions on rewording but not on content. She knew enough of
her subject to write a well-developed and organized essay, to the point that she could
67

attend to the rhetorical details; any further revision would be to tighten up the wording
and to reduce clutter.
Most of the students mentioned earlier had similar experiences. Jessica, for
instance, still needed plenty of development on the third draft of essay one. Several
passages lacked examples and explanation. In my end commentary, I note her need to
spend more time developing and revising her ideas. Conversely, the third draft of the
literacies essay has about the same number of comments, but my comments focus on
wording and other strategies. In my end comment, I advise her to tighten up the
language and to give a more explicit definition of literacies. Other students, like
Katherine, Leo, and James produced better organized papers for the literacies essay. For
her first essay and against my advice, Katherine chose to analyze two ads, which resulted
in underdevelopment, lack of analysis, and confusing arrangement. Similarly, the overall
scheme of Leos first essay was good, but the organization within the paragraphs was at
times loose. James, at times overly enthusiastic about the subject of the PETA ad he was
analyzing, Pamela Anderson, devoted two paragraphs to her background and her affect
on culture. Diversions and organizational problems such as these were nonexistent in the
literacies essay, the students much more successful at staying on topic. Some of this has
to do with the structure of the assignments. Rhetorical analysis is an unfamiliar and
uncomfortable activity for students. It is likely that when faced with the uncomfortable,
they rely on what they know and thus find themselves discussing arguments and other
features of the works they analyze. In contrast, because it draws from students
knowledge and experience, the literacies essay presents no such difficulties.
68

Conclusion
As I stated earlier, when designing the literacies unit and the project, I had two
expectations. I suspected that the students would like it. They did. I also thought that
they, as part of the digital generation, would accept the premise of literacies theory. On
this, I am not certain. Whether or not students accept the premise, they understand it and
use it to analyze their own literacies. The project has also answered my other questions.
The students writing tends to be more engaged and more effective. And while the
occasional student does express a concern for coherence due to the flow of ideas, they do
not become overwhelmed. The assignments success does seem to confirm FoK scholars
claims: creating a hybrid space where students combine their in-school with their out-of-
school knowledge does provide a scaffolding that allows students to ease gradually into
the demands of college writing while gaining some authority in their writing.
In calling for more research, I must acknowledge where my own could be
extended. First of all, in order to fully show how well the literacies assignment or other
FoK assignments can serve as a bridge into college-level writing, I need to make it the
first unit of the semester. A rhetorical analysis and many other assignments seem to
present too many difficulties for students, too many new skills and too much new
knowledge to deal with at the outset. And while semiotic domains does seem relatively
easier for students to grapple with than many other ideas, it is nevertheless a heavy
concept with which to begin a semester. Here, it is beneficial to mention Shannon
Carters curriculum. My literacies assignment strongly resembles her second assignment.
(I had already designed mine before coming across her work, but seeing hers and some of
69

the literacies that students wrote about gave me confidence in my own.) The point is,
before having students analyze their literacies, she has them write a literacy narrative, a
personal essay about an early experience involving reading or writing. I am considering
adopting some of Jessie Singers Passion Project, a unit she designed to keep
graduating high school seniors engaged during their final semester. For Singers unit,
students investigate and write about a subject of deep interest. In my class, having
students write about a favorite activity, then having them compare their activity to
reading and writing may give them time to absorb the concept before being exposed to
what, for many, may be a strange and new idea. Moving the literacies/FoK assignment
around should also provide a clearer indication of how much it affects students grades.
In my suggestion to bring in students funds of knowledge, I do not advocate
turning an entire curriculum over to it. Scaffolding one assignment with funds of
knowledge does not mean that all assignments have to be similarly handled. The
remaining assignments could and should expose students to information that does place
higher demands on their thinking. What I am suggesting here is one way that writing
could be scaffolded early in students academic careers. To be honest, I would rather
focus more exclusively on rhetoric, social issues, critical thinking, critical awareness, and
complex ideas. Students need these. But we should focus first on what students need
most, and for many it means being able to rely on their own knowledge as they navigate
the sometimes overwhelming demands of first-year composition.
70

APPENDIX A
CONFERENCE PRESENTATION HANDOUT
Rationale
Get student accustomed to the idea of literaciesmore prepared for 21
st
century.
Political implications of privileging certain literacies.
Rhetorical dexterity (Shannon Carter).
Increase student interest in assignment.
Make use of students funds of knowledgetheir expertise. Students in turn
investigate this interest through an academic lens.
Funds of Knowledge
Term coined by anthropologist Eric Wolf, Peasants (1966)
Knowledge obtained outside of school.
o Household (Wolf; Moll et al.)
o Household, community, peers, popular culture (Barton & Tan; Moje et al.)
Literacies
Encoding and decoding of symbols whose meaning is socially determined.
Semiotic domainsa set of practices that recruits one or more modalities (e.g.,
oral or written language, images, equations, symbols, sounds gestures, graphs,
artifacts, etc.) to communicate distinctive types of meanings (Gee 19).
Examples of literacies (Gee):
cellular biology postmodern literary
criticism
first-person-shooter video
games
rap music Roman Catholic theology modernist painting
midwifery wine connoisseurship high-fashion advertisements

If we think first in terms of semiotic domains and not in terms of reading and
writing as traditionally conceived, we can say that people are (or are not) literate
(partially or fully) in a domain if they can recognize(the equivalent of reading) and/or
produce (the equivalent of writing) meanings in the domain. We can reserve the term
print literate for talking about people who can read and/or write a language like
English or Russian, though here, still we will want to insist that there are different ways
to read and write connected to different social practices. Thus the rap artist who can
understand and compose rap songs but not read print or musical notation is literate (can
give and take meanings) in the semiotic domain of rap music, but not print or music
notation literate in that domain. (Gee 20)

71

Results
Essay Grades
Spring 2011 Essay Scores Fall 2011 Essay Scores
Assignment Essay 1 Essay 2 Essay 3 Essay 1 Essay 2 Essay 3
Avg. Score 85 89 88 86 90 90

Essay 1: Rhetorical Analysis of Advertisement or Essay
Essay 2: Literacies Essay
Essay 3: Dialect and SRTOL

72

APPENDIX B
END-OF-SEMESTER QUESTIONNAIRE
1. Of the formal writing assignments (the 3 major essays), which was your favorite?
Why?
2. Regardless of the final grade on the assignment, on which assignment do you feel
that you did your best writing? Please explain why. (If it was not the paper that
received the best grade, I invite you to make argument as to why it was, in many
ways at least, your best writing.)
3. Do you feel that there is a relationship between language use and power? Please
explain your answer.
4. What parts of the class do you think contributed most to your development as a
writer and thinker? Why?
5. What parts of the class did you find least useful? Why?
6. Finally, what did you like most about this class? What did you like the least?

73

APPENDIX C
LITERACIES ASSIGNMENT AND WORKSHEETS
Literacies Assignment
For this essay you will explore and discuss a literacy of your choosing and analyze it.
You will do the following:
1. Identify and/or describe your literacy.
2) Define literacies. I encourage you to use a definition from one of the articles
posted on SacCT (under Readings> Unit 2 Literacies) or, if you prefer, to
find your own source. But do not describe literacies as simply reading and
writing!
3) Discuss why it is a literacy
a) Describe how it has characteristics similar to reading (decoding) and writing
(encoding).
b) Describe how it is socially determined. (Optional)
4) Discuss what is at stake. In other words, what are the ramifications/implications
of recognizing or not recognizing literacies, for not recognizing literacies other
than the so-called standard literacy?
Your paper should also discuss at least some of the following topics:
2. How your literacy compares to academic or standard literacies.
3. Where it might be more useful or appropriate than academic literacies
4. What other literacies it might be similar to.
5. Describe additional literacy activities members do while pursuing this literacy.
Gamers, for instance, devote websites to gaming and within these websites they post
instruction manuals, blogs, forums, reviews, etc.
6. How does the topic of contact zones come into play? In other words, are there areas
where certain literacies are privileged over other literacies? What does this mean for a
privileged/dominant literacy? What does it mean for the subordinate literacy?
You may also want to discuss the discourse community surrounding that literacy. Here
are some suggestions for doing so:
1. Define discourse communities in general, including what determines a discourse
community.
2. Describe the discourse community of your chosen literacy.
3. Quote a passage from a conversation between members of this discourse
community and analyze and explicate (explain/interpret) the discourse.
4. Speculate on the power and social relationships in that discourse community. In
other words, how do members of that community use language to establish
themselves in that community?
74

5. Speculate as to why members of a discourse community use a specialized
language. What is at stake for establishing or not establishing specialized
language? What is at stake for those who do not use the specialized language.
List of Assignments & Activities for Unit 2, Literacies
1. Semiotic Domains Presentation & Discussion
2. Freewrite about literacies topic
3. Small group discussions on literacies depicted in images
Teacher breaks class up into small groups and hands out a series of images (tattoos,
ballet dancers, manga, sports action) to groups and has them analyze the meaning of
the images. Groups then report their findings to class.
4. Worksheet 1: Encoding & Decoding Activities of chosen literacy
5. Worksheet 2: Describe a scenario in the chosen literacy
6. First draft of paper peer review
7. Read Analysis chapter in A Sequence for Academic Writing.
This chapter presents the concept of analytical tool, the narrow perspective or lens
that writers use when conducting analysis
8. Show Budweiser commercial, read Robert Scholes essay, and discuss analytical
tool and Scholess organization of essay.
Besides showing students how Scholes applies his analytical tool (video as text) to
analyze a commercial, this essay also presents a wonderful rhetorical structure for an
analytical paper.
9. Draft 2 of essay peer review
10. Draft 3
11. Reflection.

75

Literacies Worksheet 1
Literacy you are writing about: ____________________________________________
Encoding Activities Decoding Activities

For the following activity, you will describe a scenario of your literacy and describe how
it involves encoding and decoding.
Scenario Description:

1. What is your chosen literacy (i.e., what literacy have you chosen to discuss and
analyze)?
2. Why did you choose it?
3. How do participants in that literacy decode?
4. How do participants encode? How does it compare/contrast with traditional
literacies?
Similar to essay/text literacy Different from essay/text literacy

5. How is it socially constructed?

76

Works Cited
Adler-Kassner, Linda and Susanmarie Harrington. Basic Writing as a Political Act:
Public Conversations about Writing and Literacies. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton,
2006. Print.
Alexander, Jonathon. Gaming, Student Literacies, and the Composition Classroom:
Some Possibilities for Transformation. College Composition and
Communication. 61.1 (2009): 35 63. Print.
Bartholomae, David. Inventing the University. When a Writer Cant Write: Studies in
Writers Block and Other Composing-Process Problems. Ed Mike Rose. New
Your: Guilford, 1985. 134 65. Rpt. in Cross-Talk in Comp Theory, 2
nd
ed. Ed
Victor Villanueva. Urbana: NCTE, 2003. 623 53. Print.
Barton, Angela Calabrese, and Edna Tan. Funds of Knowledge and Discourses and
Hybrid Space. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 46 (2009): 50 73.
Web. 27 April 2012.
Behrens, Laurence and Leonard J. Rosen. A Sequence for Academic Writing, 5
th
ed.
Boston: Pearson, 2012. Print.
Carter. Shannon. Redefining Literacy as a Social Practice. Journal of Basic Writing.
25.2 (2006): 94 125. Web. 16 March 2011.
Daley, Elizabeth. Expanding the Concept of Literacy. Educause Review. 38.2 (2003):
3340. Web. 2 March 2013.
77

de la Piedra, Maria Teresa. Adolescent Worlds and Literacy Practices in the United
States-Mexico Border. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy. 53.7(2010): 575
84. Web. 22 March 2013.
---. Semiotic Domains. What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and
Literacy. Rev ed. NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. 17 43. Print.
Gonzlez, Norma. Beyond Culture: The Hybridity of Funds of Knowledge. Funds of
Knowledge: Theorizing Practices in Households, Communities, and Classrooms.
Ed. Norma Gonzlez, et al. New York: Routledge, 2005. 29 - 46. Print.
Kirkland, David E. The Skin We Ink: Tattoos, Literacy, and a New English Education.
English Education. 41.4 (2009): 375 95. Print.
Kress, Gunther. The Futures of Literacy: Modes, Logics and Affordances. Literacy in
the New Media Age. London: Routledge, 2003. 1 8. Kindle File.
Moje, Elizabeth Birr, et al. Working Toward Third Space in Content Area Literacy: An
Examination of Everyday Funds of Knowledge and Discourse. Reading
Research Quarterly. 39.1 (2004): 38 70. Web. 27 April 2012.
Moll, Luis C., et al. Funds of Knowledge for Teaching: Using a Qualitative Approach to
Connect Homes and Classrooms. Theory into Practice. 21.2 (1992): Web. 8
August 2012.
Oughton, Helen. "Funds Of Knowledge -- A Conceptual Critique." Studies In The
Education Of Adults. 42.1 (2010): 63-78. Academic Search Premier. Web. 26
March 2013
78

Scholes, Robert. On Reading a Video Text. From Inquiry to Academic Writing: A Text
and Reader. Eds. Stuart Greene and April Lidinsky. Boston: Bedford/St. Martins,
2008. 371 375. Print.
Selfe, Cynthia L. "Students Who Teach Us: A Case Study of a New Media Text
Designer." Writing New Media: Theory and Applications for Expanding the
Teaching of Composition. Eds. Anne Wysocki, et al. Logan, UT: Utah State UP,
2004. 43 - 66. Kindle File.
. Toward New Media Texts: Taking Up the Challenges of Visual Literacy. Writing
New Media: Theory and Applications for Expanding the Teaching of
Composition. Eds. Anne Wysocki, et al. Logan, UT: Utah State UP, 2004. 67
110. Kindle File.
Singer, Jessie and Ruth Shagoury Hubbard. "Teaching from the Heart: Guiding
Adolescent Writers to Literate Lives." Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy.
46.4 (2002): 326 - 36. Web. 4 January 2013.
Steinkuehler, C. Massively Multiplayer Online Gaming as a Constellation of Literacy
Practices." The Design and Use of Simulation Computer Games in Education.
Eds. Brett. E. Shelton and David Wiley. Rotterdam, The Netherlands: Sense
Publishers, 2007. 187-212. Print.
Thomson, Pat and Christine Hall. Opportunities Missed and/or Thwarted? Funds of
Knowledge Meet the English National Curriculum. The Curriculum Journal.
19.2 (2008): 97 103. Web. 18 Nov 2012.

79

Vlez-Ibz, Carlos, and James Greenberg. Formation and Transformation of Funds of
Knowledge. Anthropology and Education Quarterly. 23. (1992): 313 - 335. Rpt.
in Funds of Knowledge: Theorizing Practices in Households, Communities, and
Classrooms. Ed. Norma Gonzlez, et al. New York: Routledge, 2005. 47 - 69.
Print.
Yancey, Kathleen Blake. "Made Not Only in Words: Composition in a New Key."
College Composition and Communication. 56.2 (2004): 297 - 328. Web. 10 Oct.
2009.

Sewell - Literacies Fok - Final

Загружено:

Сведения о документе

Оригинальное название

Авторское право

Доступные форматы

Поделиться этим документом

Поделиться или встроить документ

Параметры публикации

Этот документ был вам полезен?

Это неприемлемый материал?

Авторское право:

Доступные форматы

Sewell - Literacies Fok - Final

Загружено:

Авторское право:

Доступные форматы

USING FUNDS OF KNOWLEDGE TO SCAFFOLD FIRST-YEAR COLLEGE

Вам также может понравиться