My Evolving Thought on Literacy, Education and Writing: Extensions of Prior Knowledge

Literacy, education and the writing itself: how have my thoughts changed? Well, I guess I am a sort of super-senior...I have been in the academic writing game on and off since 2006 and have been immersing myself very seriously in ideas about literacy, education, reading, and writing for the past year pretty much nonstop. So, I guess, I would say that this class hasn't drastically transformed how I conceptualize those things, but it has pressed me to extend my previous understandings and notions and to make new connections that I had never made before. I find myself drawing a lot on knowledge I have from the linguistics classes I took a year ago, especially English 404: Language, Power, and Identity. I don't feel like my ideas are changing as much as they are growing and evolving with new information and new connections I can make as I analyze the articles, discussing them with peers and writing about them in my papers.

Additionally, I feel the dialogue with other classmates has helped me learn more about group discussion and peer assessment in collaboration with my advanced writing workshop—figuring out how to give feedback that helps without hurting feelings, figuring out how to get the kind of feedback you want and/or need to proceed with your writing process. I thought the peer assessments in here might be easier since it is online and that people might feel more comfortable giving criticism with the buffer shield of the internet, but it seems to have unraveled the same way they tend to in any classroom community: the first time around everyone is wary and does not want to offend, the second time around people have voiced a desire for more pressing feedback...as the class becomes more of a community, students feel more comfortable giving and receiving feedback. Obviously, some people will always have difficulty taking criticism, and some will always struggle to be honest without being hurtful, but in our own ways I think our dialogue has evolved naturally, I can't say the peer assessment process in this class has gone much differently than in my other workshop class despite my other class being f2f.

I am not sure what I want to write my final paper on yet, however. I suppose Freire might give me some ideas...Freire always gives me ideas...something about education as a liberatory project, I am sure that will be the main idea of my paper as some variation of that is always the main idea of my papers. :)