Week 6 Reading Response

This week’s readings offer a breadth of examples of how writing and literacy entangle in individuals economic lives and larger socio-political environments. Edwards’s piece, written largely in the form of a literature review, provides a thorough introduction to the ways in which literacy scholarship and economic scholarship have historically interacted. Lorimer Leonard tells the stories of two women with similar language literacy resources who find the economic valuing of their skills very different. Mao presents the potential of hybrid discourse to impower typically disempowered rhetors. Bawarshi’s text proposes an emphasis on genre and transfer in first year writing curriculums. Scott’s text focused on the similarities between quantification of market values and quantification, through assessment, of academic labor. Edwards’s text ends with the telling remark that in many ways computers have taken the place of land as sites of production. These last three mentioned points—Bawarshi’s, Scott’s, and Edwards’s—are those which I would like to place in conversation with each other and unpack. In regards to Scott’s point, I had never previously considered the providing of numerical grades as similar to the pricing of commodities in an economic market. I was left thinking: How does this business-like valuation affect the way we teach and what we teach? Bawarshi’s emphasis on emphasis on transfer and genre paired with Edwards’s assertion that computers are now the site of production helped me to consider and answer this self-posed question. As an educator, I feel I am constantly being pulled to teach transferable, computer-based skill sets, and in my case, I could substitute the term marketable for the terms transferable and computer-based. Not only do I ask myself: How can I construct assignments so that the work will benefit students outside of the classroom in the capitalist work environment? But also my students ask: How will this be applicable to my professional career? Students calculate economic relevance while I calculate a grade—an institutionally mandated critique of labor which mirrors/foreshadows the wages/salary that will be attached to students’ career labor. Through a text-informed reflection I am left answering my question—How does a business-like valuation affect the way we teach and what we teach?—with the answer that despite my own reservations—and resistant in the form of contract grading—capitalistic economies largely govern my classroom practices.