Gillam rethinks Syverson’s attributes of ecologies; he “associate[s] students’ writing environments with Syverson’s ‘distribution,’ the authorial personality with ‘embodiment,’ elements of the writing process with ‘emergence,’ and the ‘final’ product submitted for evaluation with ‘enaction’” (49). He expands on each of these in the following ways:
- Distribution: “[I]n her study of a student collaborative writing project, Syverson divides ‘distribution’ to include three additional components: the physical environment in which her chosen study group composes (in this case a dorm room, described down to its decorations); their social preferences (here, for face-to-face groupwork rather than meeting over the telephone); and the decisions to compose on a computer. When I advise my students to be cognizant of their ‘distributed’ realities, I add to this list other circumstances that may surround their writing or revising, especially the presence of anything that might direct their attention away from the project: television, music, other people’s presence” (49). “In part, distribution refers to the way that knowledge is constructed from shared reality, so in some small way any pedagogy that emphasizes groupwork already participates in the distributed environment” (56-7).
- Embodiment: “Psychological embodiment may also be interconnected with the other ecological categories - for instance, distributed environmental elements may differently affect introverts, who are more internally-focused, than extraverts, whose energy is more comfortably focused on the exterior world. Differences in concentration, cognition, susceptibility to physical stimuli may all directly affect a student’s writing comfort or success… Students’ awareness of their bodies’ participation in the writing process can in fact authorize and encourage them to control what factors they may to improve their writing experience” (50).
- Enaction: “Our valuation of these types of ‘enaction’ must address the ecologies of the written utterances themselves and of the evaluation system; student writing products, especially within an academic setting, are complex cooperative systems that must cohere in an ecological fashion to meet with our (complex, cooperative) ideas of end-product quality and what constitutes ‘successful’ writing behavior. To see both writing and process as ‘enacted’ knowledges, and to see them within an ecological framework, contributes concretely to a different (nonlinear, interconnected, holistic) picture of revision than we may be accustomed to. If an essay is a constructed utterance representative of and participating in an ecological macrocosm, it is also its own kind of microcosm, and its various elements work together as a kind of ecosystem” (51).
- Emergence: “essentially the processes of students’ making their own ideas and utterances conform to the communication expectations of their environments” (52). “[T]he writing environment, both tangible and intangible, wields power over the writing process and product, but that the role(s) and definition(s) of ‘quality’ in ecologies of writing may go understated or unspoken entirely, despite their obvious centrality to any pedagogy of writing.…The ‘quality toward which a teacher pushes, nudges, or leads his or her students arises from its own ‘complex system’: the teacher’s previous experience, reading, his or her own writing process, the objectives embedded in day-to-day lesson plans, and the expectations for the lesson plans’ ability to realize those objectives. Then, it becomes an inextricable part of the classroom and institutional ecologies that dictate student writing” (53). “In order to encourage students to achieve ‘emergent’ knowledge that transcends the individual writing group and writing classroom and ‘adapts’ to the demands of the communication macrocosm in which we participate beyond freshman composition, I utilize various emergent models of quality - sample essays, the rubric, graded writing and teacher comments, and professional texts - and we discuss the similarities, the rhetorical effects, and the apparent community constructed by this wide variety of ‘good’ texts” (56).
He ends by describing a research project he utilizes in his classroom.
Other Key Words
- Post-Process: “the theoretical turn out scholarship has taken toward issues of power and society” (43).
- Discourse communities: “a ‘group of individuals bound by a common interest who communicate through approved channels and whose discourse is regulated’” (quoting Porter 54).
- Contact zones: “social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other; often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power” (quoting Pratt 54).
- Nomoi: “a ‘collection of continuously renegotiated agreements for the making of meaning that makes discourse work in any particular community’… - or systems of meaning making within discourse communities…Lindbolm argues that communication is cooperative, first, between the speaker and his or her understanding of a nomos and, second, between the audience and a closely compatible nomos” (55).