Blog Post #5 (Ian)

This week's reading offered a welcome challenge to my thinking about the intersection of writing and culture. As I mentioned in a previous blog post, I like the idea of culturally-informed tutoring: I think that getting students to understand that writing conventions are themselves culturally constructed is both useful to the writing process and a productive way of developing critical thinking skills. At the same time, as the reading notes, culture is more "fluid [than it is] stable." It is one thing, in other words, to note that cultural norms influence our writing, and quite another to say that these forces are somehow inflexible or in any way constant. Though the reading seems to hedge about what to take from all this - acknowledging, in the end, that "teachers... may be disappointed that clearer conclusions did not result from the discussions in this chapter" - my ultimate feeling is that we should not be wary of "contrastive" or "intercultural rhetoric" so much as any pedagogical approach built on determinism. Since our job is to help students grow, I think we necessarily need to resist the idea that any single factor - culture, language, education, personality - defines their potential as a writer. Instead, I think it's far more important for us to clarify (to the best of our abilities) the academic culture in which they are operating, so that they can choose to rise to the occasion on their own terms.