Clueless in Academe. How Schooling Obscures the Life of the Mind<\/b>
\nBy Gerald Graff<\/p>\n
Students are clueless, asserts Gerald Graff – professor of English and education at the University of Illinois – because professors don’t try very hard to make ideas clear and accessible. They rarely acknowledge that academic discourse can be a foreign language: opaque, specialized, and jargonized. Convinced that to simplify is to vulgarize or distort, professors do not connect the texts they assign to the “home language” of students. And they treat anyone who asks, “Why is this important?” as a philistine.
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\nSome quotes<\/b> from this eye-opening book by Gerald Graff which is a source of great inspiration for the theoretical framework of my research:<\/p>\n
Graff (2003) quotes Meier in which the community is being compared to a club.<\/p>\n
\u00e2\u20ac\u0153Meier argues that, at its deepest level, being well educated means \u00e2\u20ac\u0153getting in the habit of developing theories that can be articulated clearly and checked out in a thoughtful way.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Meier goes on to stress that such habits of mind entail a change in the students\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 social allegiances comparable to joining a new club. As Meier puts it, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Somehow, somewhere, young people need to join, if only part-time, the club we belong to. That\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s more important than the particulars of what they learn.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n
This brings Graff to the conclusion that:
\n\u00e2\u20ac\u009dLike Rose and Meier, I see my goal as a teacher, and the bottom-line goal of education, as that of demystifying the \u00e2\u20ac\u0153club we belong to\u00e2\u20ac\u009d and breaking up its exclusivity. I want to help students enter this club, which often involves flushing out and engaging their resistance to entering, addressing questions about why as well as how. Demystifying the club, furthermore, means changing the club itself as much as it means changing students. It means widening our notion of who qualifies as \u00e2\u20ac\u0153intellectual\u00e2\u20ac\u009d and building on the argumentative talents students already possess\u00e2\u20ac\u009d. <\/p>\n
Geral Graff: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153The keys to understanding how to conceive, conduct, and report research are found by investigating and learning the important “conversations” that move the community forward. Although it’s also important to learn the stylistic and organizational features of research writing, Charles Bazerman notes that “understanding the appropriate linguistic and rhetorical conventions is only a part of the difficulty that students entering an academic discipline confront. They must also become aware of the conversations of the discipline” (Berkenkotter & Huckin, 1995, p. 118). <\/p>\n
\u00e2\u20ac\u0153To take just one example, students are far from clueless about how to argue about the arts, engaging as they do in lively critical discussions about films, music, concerts, and TV shows that overlap at many points with those of published reviewers and critics. Arts education, however, instead of taking advantage of this convergence in order to draw students into adult forms of critical discourse, tends to keep critical discourse of any kind out of sight in order to focus exclusively on primary texts or on exercises that have no relation to the ways critics talk about the arts. Bridging the gap between the discourse of students and teachers starts with the recognition that there is a continuum between the adolescent\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s declaration that a book or film \u00e2\u20ac\u0153sucks\u00e2\u20ac\u009d and the published reviewer\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s critique of it. Arts education in the schools tends to be poor preparation for college (though so does a lot of college arts education) since art students are not asked to read criticism. In effect, students are expected to produce a kind of critical discourse that is withheld from them and then are graded down when they hand in a poor version of it.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n
Graff uses the word \u00e2\u20ac\u0153arguspeak\u00e2\u20ac\u009d, refering to more than a set of skills but to a form of socialization in \u00e2\u20ac\u0153a way of life\u00e2\u20ac\u009d (cfr Graff) or a \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcway with words\u00e2\u20ac\u009d (cfr. Heath). <\/p>\n
A \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcway of life\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 also points out that it has to do with a way of being: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153When people learn they don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t take on new knowledge so much as a new identity.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d (as Julie Lindquist observes in \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Hoods in the Polis\u00e2\u20ac\u009d (Pedagogy, Spring 2001) \u00e2\u20ac\u201c cited in Graff 2003: ). <\/p>\n
What does this imply?<\/p>\n
Meier argues that, at its deepest level, being well educated means \u00e2\u20ac\u0153getting in the habit of developing theories that can be articulated clearly and checked out in a thoughtful way.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Meier goes on to stress that such habits of mind entail a change in the students\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 social allegiances comparable to joining a new club. As Meier puts it, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Somehow, somewhere, young people need to join, if only part-time, the club we belong to. That\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s more important than the particulars of what they learn.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n
At any rate, one important characteristic of educational or ‘educated’ discourse (Mercer, 1995: 82) is that students ‘must make their ideas accountable to specified bodies of knowledge [part of which is the teacher] and do so by following “ground rules” which are different from those of most casual, everyday conversations\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6’ (ibid.). Nothing in the schoolroom is haphazard. Let us now content ourselves with yet another sequence, discussing some of the most common ‘techniques of power’ inherent in teacher talk.<\/p>\n
Graff: <\/p>\n
One way we do so is by obscuring the convergence between academia and the popular media. Too often schools and colleges take intellectual conversations that resemble the ones students engage in or encounter in the popular media and make them seem unrecognizable, as well as no fun. To put it another way, schooling takes students who are perfectly street-smart and exposes them to the life of the mind in ways that make them feel dumb. Why is this? Why in many cases do street smarts not only fail to evolve naturally into academic smarts, but end up seeming opposed to academic smarts, as if the two can’t coexist inside the same head? Part of the reason has to do with the legacy of American anti-intellectualism, which elevates hardheaded common sense over supposedly impractical academic navel gazing. But educational institutions themselves contribute to the problem by making the culture of ideas and arguments look opaque and therefore more remote than it actually is from the wisdom of the street.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Clueless in Academe. How Schooling Obscures the Life of the Mind By Gerald Graff Students are clueless, asserts Gerald Graff – professor of English and education at the University of Illinois – because professors don’t try very hard to make ideas clear and accessible. They rarely acknowledge that academic discourse can be a foreign language: […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[5],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kris.constantvzw.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kris.constantvzw.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kris.constantvzw.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kris.constantvzw.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kris.constantvzw.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=86"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/kris.constantvzw.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kris.constantvzw.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=86"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kris.constantvzw.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=86"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kris.constantvzw.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=86"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}