FYC and reading

 Gee's definition of literacy as "mastery of a secondary Discourse."

My reading of Gee: Essay-text literacy is dominant to the point that it seems "natural"/"superior" as a way of encountering texts, producing text, and "reporting" information. I both agree and recognize that this assumption then drives a shitload of how we teach "good" writing, what readings we select, how we talk about logic, why we are skeptical of multimedia, etc....

IF I believe that essay-text literacy predominates academic disciplines (do I really believe this? in terms of formal texts, yes, but I wonder what readings I might find that reveal how much disciplinary literacy rests instead/also on other types of texts and interactions that do not rely on essay-texts. Lab notebooks, for example.) ... then I think I still feel a pretty high obligation to teach and assess students' ability to produce essay-text performances, in the way of a research-based, thesis- and topic-sentence-driven, logos-prioritizing material. 

Gee's reminder about 'apprenticeship' makes me think about how to make performances feel more embedded within a Discourse that aligns with but is not only "doing school." I think WaW feels like a space that gets the idea of "Discourse" and "apprenticeship," and I do think that "studying" writing could be really fun and illuminating for students.


But back to reading. Looking at 2005 students' notes on the critical AI related readings so far, I'm dismayed at how unsystematic they seem to be. Part of this is on me, for not setting an adequately clear purpose/goal for the unit, I think. And part of this is maybe on the lower priority for 2005 than major classes, too, I suspect. But I think also that students are not understanding relationships among pieces of text--the notes are often so atomic as to demonstrate nothing of bigger connections and thus bigger claims made in the readings (and podcasts/videos). 

What I'm thinking about still/again is the job of "directing attention." Does this need to be a 2-stage reading process -- read for detail, then read/discuss for "meaning" at some bigger level? Even in my 5000 class I detect maybe some sense that students feel like they're "getting" the reading at the sentence/paragraph level but not at the section/chapter/book level. (Which is fair! The book is certainly connected but doesn't always provide full reviews that draw all of the language together to overtly/explicitly articulate the parts.)

2005 students are sometimes aware, when they're using AI to help generate summaries/notes, that AI is not doing a well-balanced and/or accurate job. But I am terrified that many of them are not reading closely enough even to notice/detect that the summary is wrong, added things, or leaving out some pretty big key ideas. 

AND, also, this is not right now an AI problem. Leaning into AI summaries will worsen the problem (in that students will get even less good at closely), but my sense, looking at students' notes, is that they already don't know how to direct their attention to identify (or at least, notate) more essential ideas. 

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