- Gee and Newstok both address an idea of apprenticeship and imitation in their pieces, and Newstok’s ideas are complimentary to Gee’s. In Newstok’s article “How to Read Like Shakespeare” he explains his reserves with modern schooling and eventually explains what he thinks is lacking. One of those concepts is apprenticeship which he explains requires “an exacting, collaborative environment, with guidance from people who knew more than you did.” (Newstok). To me, this is the same idea that Gee has when explaining how to learn a discourse. Gee states that one can become part of a Discourse through, “enculturation… into social practices through scaffolded and supported interaction with people who have already mastered the Discourse” (Gee 7). These two ideas are extremely similar but I’m not too sure about the ‘so what’ portion of this essay or where to go after this.
- I already wrote this paragraph in a previous reading journal but I really liked the quotes I used so I wanted to use it for this, everything I added for the essay approach will be in bold 🙂 Both Fortin and Gee’s writing examines school Discourses and Fortin’s report seems to show what Gee talks about in theory. Gee explains his ideas on ‘gates’ and how they are used to deter people from entering discourses. In Fortin’s “Access to Literacy is Not a Constitutional Right” she reports on a recent court case involving severely neglected schools in Detroit. In it, she quotes an attorney saying that “’Historically, access to literacy has been a tool to subordinate certain groups and certain communities and to keep those communities down,’” (Fortin 2). This quote is explaining how the neglected schools are a civil rights violation and why the neglect is a problem. It also starts to explore an idea that the dilapidated schools have an impact on these children’s futures. In Gee’s essay “Literacy, Discourse and Linguistics: Introduction” he explains that upper-class discourses focus on superficial features of language because they, “are the best test as to whether one was apprenticed in the ‘right’ place, at the ‘right’ time, with the ‘right’ people” (Gee 11). Fortin is giving an example of students that won’t be allowed into certain Discourses because they weren’t taught and prepared for what those Discourses want. When Fortin quotes the attorney she is saying something very similar to Gee’s point that Discourses can bar the ‘wrong’ people from entering their Discourse by not giving them the tools to access it. The neglected schools act as a ‘gate’ (then I could quote Gee’s gate quote and explain how that relates to Fortin’s article), as Gee would call it, and helps to filter people into discourses. Gee and Fortin both address civil rights and social structure and maybe this essay topic could explore that too.
One thought on “Essay 2 Possible Approaches”
Keagan,
You’re further along with the second option and have a clearer sense of how to move forward, including why it might be significant. There’s a way in which you might borrow from your first, however, to develop strands of the second. For example, there are linguistic tools the lack of which prevents “non-natives” from entering a Discourse, but you might also consider the value of apprenticeship and how those opportunities are lacking, too. Gee would also enable us to think about the secondary Discourses or groups to which students do or will belong. Of course, they have them, and they may even involve imitation, but they aren’t the dominant ones.
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