A Teaching Subject Joseph Harris Analysis

How can you nurture and support the confidence of all students and help them forge unique writing identities? Through writing, people can understand themselves and other people better. We are all constantly reviewing and assigning meaning to our life experiences and putting those experiences into words—whether through self-talk or telling stories to other people. This ‘language’ is a way ‘we’ understand, organize, and relate to, making the chaos of our communities and lives coherent. In a writing environment that is loose and for the most part free we can slow down this articulation process in order to become increasingly and critically conscious of the meanings we assign to our experiences and communities in which we belong. It makes people think more about what they want to say and how they are saying it.

When one engages in writing they are able to look upon their lives in a new perspective. One separates from roles and statuses of daily life, community’s, and experiences at particular time and place. This idea of stepping outside or beyond ones recognized community and structure of life presents the opportunity to recreate and voice identity and stories in new ways. In Joseph Harris’ Book A Teaching Subject there is a chapter on this idea of community and composition. Basically, Harris argues against the idea of a coherent, unified academic discourse community. He expresses the difference between the ‘language’ of the university and ‘language’ of students/individuals. This disconnect between them presents difficulty in figuring out and understanding why people would move in between the two. People are members of many communities in their daily lives and this means have many discourse communities. Adding additional ones does n...

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...e term “empty and sentimental…and the extraordinary power one can gain through speaking/writing in an actual community is ignored” (Harris 134-135). He brings up Bartholomae, as his work shows that universities have many communities that “shift subtly” and are always changing. Bartholomae says universities are along the lines of Harris’ discussion of public. Lastly, Harris worries in teaching students in a particular common way, as it will lead to agreeing with everything their professors tell them, which he argues against. Students should be working toward some well-defined version of composition. He doesn’t want students to stop being who they are. To Harris, community does not mean consensus. He offers the metaphor of a city, allowing for consensus and conflict, rather than the idea of one utopian community because he doesn’t want no Jesuses in his Promise Land.