In my first-year writing courses this fall, I’ve asked my students to explore James Gee’s concept of Discourse as a means of interpreting their previous literacy experiences. A common theme in their first essays is a sense that prior schooling often suffocated their voices, leaving them with little interest or personal investment in classroom writing. They “know” they shouldn’t write in the first person or use textisms, emoji, contractions, or “I think” statements.
For their course projects, students select and explore one of the Bad Ideas about Writing—some of which are written in first person. They seek out blogs, TED talks, newspaper articles, peer-reviewed journal articles, and a range of other online and print sources related to their chosen “bad idea”—and to their own experiences, majors, and career choices. As they work with sources, I ask them to consider how the various writers represent themselves in the texts. Do the students hear a voice there? Where? What gives the readers a sense of that voice?
To help students recognize multiple ways of expressing voice within academic contexts, I have them read Ken Hyland’s “Disciplinary Voices: Interactions in Research Writing,” which approaches voice from a disciplinary perspective. Hyland says,
“Writers have to display a competence as disciplinary insiders to be persuasive and this is, at least in part, achieved through a writer-reader dialogue which situates both their research and themselves. This means adopting a disciplinary voice; using language which establishes relationships between people, and between people and ideas…. All this is done within the broad constraints of disciplinary discourses” (7).
Specifically, writers position themselves using “stance” markers, and they connect with readers using “engagement” strategies. My students look for ways their source texts demonstrate both stance and engagement, noting how these concepts are instantiated differently according to the context and purpose of the piece.
The course project builds throughout the semester; shortly after mid-term, students have found, evaluated, and summarized four sources, and they have matched quotes or paraphrases to show how sources confirm, expand, complicate, or contradict each other (and their own experiences). As we move into the home stretch of the project, students need at least one additional text or audio source, as well as an interview. But many of the students hit a snag at this point: they struggle to find an additional source that fits smoothly into the conversation that is taking shape among themselves and their sources.
To address their concerns on a practical level and to reiterate our on-going discussion of voice, during one recent session I asked students to think about hashtags in social media contexts. What is the purpose of hashtagging a post on Twitter or on other social media platforms? How do hashtags express stance? Engagement?
I have just over 40 students in two sections, all of whom are working on the Bad Ideas about Writing project. After our hashtag discussion, students posted the citations for their first four sources on a shared Google doc, and for each one, they added four to eight hashtags to represent both their reaction to the source and the shared purposes of the classroom. Their hashtags thus demonstrate both stance and engagement, as these examples from our document suggest: #scholarly, #wedontalllearnthesame, #lengthy, #Teachersneedbettertraining #Easyread, #longggggggg, #getadreamjournal, #goodread, #notaboutwritingbutstillgood, #literacyinstruction, #realworldexamples, #teacherPOV, #findyourvoice, #videoincluded, #fingeredspeech, #conventionalphrases, #howto, #followthesteps, #don’tbesohardonyoself, #followurownrules,
#researchbased, #textingislikeasecondlanguage, #shortandsweet, #thanksPerelman, #downwiththeessay, #outdated, #PurposeOfRevision.
The shared Google Doc, when complete, contained nearly 150 citations and accompanying hashtags, giving students a number of choices (vetted by classmates) for their fifth source. First drafts of annotated bibliography entries for these sources came in last week, and many students commented on the value of “shared legwork” on their research, while others noted how helpful the information packed into the hashtags was.
Do you use hashtags in your classrooms? Do you teach voice, stance, or engagement? I would love to hear what is working for you.