My Important Daniell Paragraph

I found the Daniell article both very informative and very interesting but a couple of the paragraphs seemed to stick out to me. I had known a small amount of background on Freire, but I had never read him or really read much criticism on his work. I usually, whether through my own personal background or perhaps the schooling I had as an undergrad, seem to be drawn to the economic, power and just generally Marxist elements of a text, and I had yet to really give extensive thought to those same elements applied to both teaching students in the classroom and the concept of literacy. Freire, who I admit I should have probably read at some point in the past, works through these ideas and I find the work interesting to say the least. I do like how Daniell brings me back down to Earth in this respect by pointing out the obvious that on the general scale of things, American students attending a college are hardly heavily "oppressed", but the information in the text is still interesting.



Even though the Freire section was the first one to catch my eye, I find another paragraph the most important in the essay in reference to Teaching College Writing. On pg. 404 Daniell states;



"As the little narratives proliferate the grand narratives seem to lose their power. The little narratives offer other images of what it means to be or to become literate in this culture ands its various subcultures. They show people reading and writing for specific purposes: for entertainment, for personal growth, for identity formation, for community, for privacy, as well as for problem solving, for receiving and transmitting information, for economic advancement, or for political empowerment of oneself or of one's group."



This concerns every person teaching in any classroom setting, not simply within the English department where we may be teaching "literary texts" but any class that involves student reading and student writing.



When looking at these little narratives in relationship to our classrooms in the spring, we all need to understand what purposes our students will or have entered the into reading and writing. In our classrooms, where we will likely have a diversity of majors, reading experiences, writing experiences and in some cases a variety of literacy, whether oral communication or written communication. Once we have established student background in reading or writing and subsequently had a "quantifiable" way of seeing their backgrounds, we then have to think about the context in which they have become able to read or write. I had never thought about the agendas of reading and writing.

Perhaps naively or perhaps simply overlooking it, I had always, in a way, just seen reading and writing as what it was; reading and writing. I hadn't thought about the ways in which people acquire these reading and writing skills. In the classroom we could have students reading and writing simply for the grades, for the advancement (whether cultural or economic) within society, we may have students writing with the objective of improving those skills for further use, or we may have students taking the course (maybe not in College Writing I or the required courses) who are taking a class simply for the entertainment of reading or writing. If a student enters the class room with any of these particular intentions in mind they will take the courses differently than other students. For example, I would imagine if I had any English majors in my course, that they may be more interested in the personal growth, or educational aspects of reading and writing than would a person from another major. I took a Great Books II course as an undergrad for entertainment purposes, I had always enjoyed reading for leisure and thought the course would be a nice break from my Pre-Med courses at the time. I enjoyed the class so much that I switched my major after the semester, but I also know that when I entered that classroom I expected something different from entering classrooms as an English major. I think that is an important distinction to realize about the students in our classrooms.