The Fourth Time is the Charm?

 

Conversations with colleagues, reading blogs, and my own experience it can be said Bartholomae’s article Inventing The University, is not an article that would be understood in the first read, but is worth the effort of the second or third time through; even a fourth, as in my case. In saying that, after wrestling with David Bartholomae, I was able to finally understand his need to have us recognize the differences between students coming into our specific Branches and their diverse skill levels in appropriating what is needed individually to move on to their next step. How the ones who already have been through the steps of becoming “Insiders” in the department have a responsibility to help the Newbie advance successfully. Bartholomae, also made a lot of suggestions in method and hidden meanings, in order for us to see how to help the Newbies and there were two that stood out to me.

• The title of the article’s meaning.
• The idea of how a student should look at their reader.

First the title itself was not clear to right away, but as I read on the ideas of and got into the areas of “Commonplace” and the “Discourse of our community” an idea came to mind to consider University not as the place of study (CSUChico), but the separate departments and people that make up the departments faculty, undergraduates, graduate, and even the newbies to the university. Each department is a community of its own and all of the people belonging to the community are expected to communicate and have an understanding of everything that happens within the “Branch.” Each “Branch” as Bartholomae referred to in the article, has its own “language” or terminology specific to each department; in other words, English dept. speaks Englishease, Philosophy speaks Philosophyease, Anthropology intern speak Anthhrpologiease. Inventing The University simply means the journey of each new individual member immersing themselves into the study of department culture or community of discourse, all while maintaining the appearance of having always being part of the community from the first day.

In the article Bartholomae gave examples of initial writings of certain students at their orientation. The first example is the one Bartholomae called “Clay Model.” Out of the three examples given, was the one person who recognized that his to charge ahead with writing in the style of what he had seen from the faculty he aspired to follow, even though he did not have the knowledge needed to fully express his thoughts, but he tried. In that expression of trying I found an approach to my future students. I do remember writing my first papers in or as close to the style of the Instructor, but Bartholomae’s lesson of the article is to understand my future students will be going through the same and in order to help them feel they belong to our community, I needed to recognize this in myself.

The second Bartholomae method, I can see easily taking right into practical application is “Describing a baseball to a Martian.” Not only do I want to put this into action with the tutoring students, but actually use this for myself. The suggestion was to take the pressure of writing to the Professor, relax and write “to his coy mistress, a senior in high school, or the Martian, ignorant of what is a baseball.” The method expresses “Exercises such as these allow students to imagine the needs and goals of the reader (Martian) and they bring the needs and goals up front as a dominant constraint in the construction of an essay.” Simply put, the instructor may have good knowledge of what a baseball and so the student writer scrambles to define the baseball as the instructor would. The Martian on the other hand, knows nothing about the ball or the game it is used in. The student writer can relax and teach the Martian from his knowledge of baseballs and the game.

Focusing on methods that advance the students like the Baseball/Martian or Inventing the University, help the student understand there are steps to be taken in order to communicate with your colleagues in your branch of study or arriving in the commonplace of the community.