Welcome!

Welcome to our Eng 100 Blog “Conversations Beyond the Classroom”! The title of this blog refers to the community of active readers & collaborative learners we are creating by sharing our academic writing for Eng 100 with each other + a larger group of students, instructors, academics, and just about anybody who chooses to follow our blog! When you write and post your reader responses here (and, later, as you write your essays for the course), I encourage you to use this audience to conceptualize who you are writing for and, most important, how to communicate your ideas so that this group of academic readers and writers can easily follow your line of thinking. Think about it this way: What do you need to explain and articulate in order for the other bloggers to understand your response to the essays we’ve read in class? What does your audience need to know about those essays and the authors who wrote them? And how can you show your readers, in writing, which ideas you add to these “conversations” that take place in the texts we study?

As students of Eng 100, you will use this blog to begin conversations with other academic writers on campus (students and instructors alike). We become active readers of each other’s writing when we comment on posts here. And, best of all, we are using this space to share ideas! We encourage you to use this blog to further think through the topics and writing strategies you will be introduced to this quarter. As always, be sure to give credit to those people whose ideas you borrow for your own thinking and writing (you should do this in the blog by commenting on their post, but you will also be required to cite what you borrow from your peers/instructors if and when it winds up in your essays. More details on that later…).

Finally, keep in mind that writing to and for this audience is a good way to prepare for the panel of readers (faculty at WCC) who will be reading and assessing your writing portfolio at the end of the quarter. We hope that as a large group of active readers, we can better prepare each other for this experience. But, in the meantime, let’s have fun with it! I am really excited see how far we can take this together!

--Mary Hammerbeck, Instructor of Eng 100



Thursday, October 28, 2010

Lest we think the revolution is a revolution

The group I was in read the last parts of this paper from page 315 to 322. This section starts out on describing how the 90's gave Americans the role of seductress in advertising, like the view of a naked womans back as she lovingly holds a tv. But it goes on to say that technology can change roles that are usually determined by ones gender. Stereotypically men would be portrayed as the sex maniacs or bikers or nerds, while women would be the mother or wife or seductress. Later on the paper tells us how nobody truly lives up to their own stereotypes and how they can help be fabricated by the education system and advertisements.

A certain quote had a profound affect on my thinking on page 321 "Our work as teachers, the curricula we fashion, the corporate and public environments our students enter as professionals, the schools that make up the educational system-these social formations are also shaped by the same sets of culturally determined values, the same complexities, the same ambiguities, the same contexts for our imaginations." This is very interesting to me because as children are we being conditioned on how we act without knowing it?

No comments:

Post a Comment