When I read the statement, “it’s about the pedagogy,” with respect to technology and school, I think (sympathetically) OK, but how does that translate in practice? Chris has a list, and he asked if anyone cared to add to it. This is my elaboration on the translation.

I noted several months ago that most examples of blogs in education come from secondary and university-level classrooms. I wondered what blogging with younger students might look like, and speculated that something like a developmental continuum might be useful.

James Moffett’s, Teaching the Universe of Discourse (1968), gave me some ideas.

Previously, when I was thinking about development of voice in student writing, I quoted Moffett:

By discussing his productions in a workshop class, he could profit from other points of view, discover what part of his abstracting is peculiar to him and what he shares with a public, and see how the worth of his higher abstractions is determined by the worth of his lower ones. Generally, a student should learn to play the whole symbolic scale, and to know where he is on it at a given moment. (p.28)

What does this have to do with weblogs? The social nature of the read/write web allows for interactions that mimic conversation. I believe many teachers recognize the potential for technology to supply an authentic context for writing instruction, hoping it will enhance students’ engagement and awareness by providing a real audience for their written messages. Audience has always been the missing discourse element in classrooms.

Discourse is the word that Moffett used to frame the context for all social interactions, essentially a triadic relationship between speaker, listener, and subject. Moffett’s theory of discourse outlines a rationale and a framework for a learner-centered pedagogy, which seems central to 21st century renaissance visions.

Moffett recognized that studying English is much like the study of a foreign language, or mathematics. He believed that students should learn to use the symbolic system to “think and talk about things” by operating it “at all levels of abstraction,” which he defined as a “cycle of sensations, memories, generalizations, and theories.” He theorized that:

…speaking, writing, and reading in forms of discourse that are successively more abstract makes it possible for the learner to understand better what is entailed at each stage of the hierarchy, to relate one stage to another, and thus to become aware of how he and others create information and ideas….Increasingly, in the future, people will need to know, not how to store and retrieve information, which can be done by machines, but what the nature of information is and how it can be abstracted (p. 25).

Moffett’s schema for teaching the Universe of Discourse

Maltese, D. (2006)

With the understanding that we relate to an audience through various modes of discourse, and that we represent subject matter at various levels of abstraction, we can help students become conscious of their own cognitive processes, to become meta-cognitive, when they read and write.

To be the master, and not the dupe, of symbols, the symbol-maker must understand the nature and value of his abstractions. This takes consciousness and an integrated view of the hierarchical, inner processing (p. 25).

So what would the student’s writing look like when played upon the “whole symbolic scale?” According to this schema, younger students, less inclined to generalize and theorize - since cognitive development generally proceeds from the concrete to the abstract - should be encouraged to exploit all of the discourse modes and to produce texts at the lower end of the abstraction scale - texts that tell

  • what is happening (recording),
  • what happened (narratives, reporting)
  • and, to some extent, what happens (generalizing).
  • As students mature, they would presumably be more able to create meaning across all levels, including what may happen (theorizing).

Rather than focusing on subject-oriented genre writing, as in conventional curricula, teachers might consider using this schema with student bloggers since technology capitalizes on the relatedness of writer, audience, and subject matter. A writing curriculum that foregrounds the writer ahead of subject matter is in fact, student-centered, and has never before been so possible.

References:
Maltese, D. (2006) Out of the Narrow Tunnel and into the Universe of Discourse. Voices from the Middle, 14(2), 47-56

Moffett, James. Teaching the Universe of Discourse. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1968.