Writing Games: Multicultural Case Studies of Academic Literacy Practices in Higher Education

337 Pages·2002·22.76 MB·English

by  Christine Pears Casanave

Writing Games
Multicultural Case Studies of Academic
Literacy Practices in Higher Education
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Writing Games

Multicultural Case Studies of Academic
Literacy Practices in Higher Education
Christine Pearson Casanave
Keio University
WRENCE ERLBAUM ASSOCIATES, PUBLISHE
2002 Mahwah, New Jersey London
Copyright © 2002 by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.
All rights reserved. No part of the book may be reproduced in
any form, by photostat, microform, retrieval system, or any other
means, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., Publishers
10 Industrial Avenue
Mahwah, New Jersey 07430
Cover design by Kathryn Houghtaling Lacey
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Casanave, Christine Pearson, 1944­
Writing games: multicultural case studies of academic literacy practices in higher
education / Christine Pearson Casanave.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8058-3530-X (cloth : alk. paper) - ISBN 0-8058-3531-8 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. English language—Rhetoric—Study and teaching—Social aspects—Case studies. 2,
English language—Study and teaching (Higher)—Foreign speakers—Case studies. 3.
Academic writing—Study and teaching—Social aspects—Case studies. 4. Second language
Acquisition—Case studies. 5. Multicultural education—Case studies. 6. Educational
Games—Case studies. I. Title
PE1404 .C35 2002
808'.042'0711—dc21
2001055592
Books published by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates are printed on acid-free paper,
and their bindings are chosen for strength and durability.
Printed in the United States of America
1 0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents

Foreword vii
Paul Prior
Preface xiii
1 . GAMES AND FRAMES: WHEN WRITING IS MORE THAN 1
WRITING
A Word on Frames 1
Common Sense Beginnings 3
Framing in the Voices of Others 13
Assumptions: The End of the Beginning 29
Case Study Methodology 31
2 . THE BEGINNINGS OF CHANGE: LEARNING AND TEACHING 3 5
UNDERGRADUATE ACADEMIC LITERACY GAMES
Clueless 35
Published Studies 37
Case Study: Communities of Practice? Game Strategies
in Two Teachers' EAP Classes in a Japanese University 53
Chapter Reflections 78
3 . STEPPING INTO THE PROFESSION: WRITING GAMES 8 2
IN MASTERS PROGRAMS
From Observer to Participant 82
Published Studies 84
Case Study: Five Masters Students Step Into the Second
Language Education Profession 92
Chapter Reflections 128
v
VI CONTENTS
4 . REDEFINING THE SELF: THE UNSETTLING DOCTORAL 1 3 4
PROGRAM GAME
From Clarity to Confusion 134
Published Studies 136
Case Study: Virginia: Not Her Kind of Game 149
Chapter Reflections 176
5 . JUGGLING AND BALANCING GAMES OF BILINGUAL FACULTY 1 7 8
Personal Reflections on Multilingualism 178
Published Studies 181
Case Study: The Juggling Games of Bilingual Faculty 191
Chapter Reflections 216
6. BENDING THE RULES 220
Conforming and Resisting 220
Published Studies 225
Case Study: Author-Editor Games in the Construction
of Unconventional Textual Identities 233
The Authors 235
Issues 238
Chapter Reflections 254
7 . THE PARADOXICAL EFFORT AFTER COHERENCE IN 256
ACADEMIC WRITING GAMES
Games, Transitions, and Identity Revisited 260
Effort After Coherence 265
The End and the Continuation 279
Appendices 280
References 291
Author Index 307
Subject Index 313
Foreword

Paul Prior
Center for Writing Studies
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
A central challenge for researchers looking at academic writing and socialization
is to capture the relation between the situated personal, and very unsettled
experiences of people doing academic work and the seemingly tidy, settled, quite
ordered representations of that work that typically appear in books, journals, and
other formal settings. Consider, for example, the following two texts:
Writing Games offers a broad and It is a cool, cloudy June day. I am
complex exploration of academic writ­ sitting at Cafe Kopi, waiting for
ing, disciplinary socialization, and Nora to finish her piano lesson,
identity work. Drawing especially on drinking from a large glass of the
theories of practice (e.g., those of dark organic house coffee. I begin
Bourdieu, Lave, Wenger, Ortner), drafting thoughts for the foreword to
Casanave links a series of qualitative Chris' book—a task I need to finish
case studies, some fairly longitudinal, over the next week before the family
to create a rich cross-sectional view of leaves for 3 weeks of kayaking, hik­
trajectories of participation in academic ing, and birding in northern Mich­
disciplines ranging from early under­ igan. The loose pages of her 2-inch
graduate classes through professorial thick manuscript sit on the heavily
work. In an area of research still scored wooden table. I am writing
dominated by decontextualized analyses on one of the pages, at first blank
of texts and case studies focused on except for the following inscription:
single classrooms or organized around "Foreword, Paul Prior (to be add­
the production of single texts, the ed)." As I write, I am flipping
developmental depth of Casanave's through the pages, reading marginal
research is striking, as is her strong notes I wrote, looking at passages I
orientation to questions of diversity underlined. And I am struggling
and power, to the stories of inter­ with questions: What is a foreword
national students and scholars, women, supposed to accomplish? Am I sup­
and U.S. minorities. Casanave's case posed to sell the value of the book
VII
VIII FOREWORD
studies are less concerned with how to potential buyers, position it in
people learn to make academic texts some scholarly frame, or both?
than how people struggle with writing Even trivially, I wonder, as I do
and its contexts, and ultimately with when writing letters of recommend-
how such writing makes people. ation, whether to refer to Chris as
Writing Games should be of great Chris, Christine, or Casanave? And
interest to students learning new I worry as well. Will I find a way
games as well as to scholars already to write this foreword that satisfies
deeply involved in the varied over- Chris and me? Looking at my
lapping fields interested in academic watch, I see it's time to go. I gath-
writing and socialization (e.g., Applied er the pages of the manuscript, cap
Linguistics, Writing Studies, English my red pen, and drain the cup.
for Academic Purposes, Rhetoric, or
Higher Education).
The text at left is conventional, author-evacuated, academic prose. The rep­
resentational focus is on the content of the book and its intertextual relationships
to other work in the field. "I" am absent from the text and the subjects of the
sentences are objects like Writing Games, "Casanave," "Casanave's case stud­
ies," and "the developmental depth of Casanave's research." The practice theorists
cited are all well known, located particularly in anthropology and balanced in
gender. Interpersonally, there are few signs of my relationship to the author,
who is named in the same manner as other figures in the text like Bourdieu. The
text at right, on the other hand, is descriptive, narrative, autobiographical. It
represents a time, a place, certain events. The content is hybrid, with the
academic work of a foreword mixed in with the coffee I am drinking, the kind of
table I am sitting at, and references to my daughter's piano lessons. "I" am the
subject of almost every clause and Writing Games is less a reference to a book
than to a messy physical object—loose pages, marked up in pen and pencil,
lying on a wooden table in the coffee shop. I am not only represented as an
academic struggling cognitively with an intellectual problem, but as a person
experiencing emotions and juggling family schedules. Finally, the text on the
right suggests some interpersonal context between Chris and me, although it
doesn't point with any specificity to the 10 years or so of attending each other's
conference sessions (at TESOL, CCCC, AERA, the 1996 Uni-versity of Hong
Kong Conference on Knowledge and Discourse), to our meetings—sometimes
over coffee or a meal, to periodic e-mail exchanges, or to our readings of each
other's publications.
Together, these two very divergent representations are relevant to this
foreword, not only because of their content, but because in this book Christine
Pearson Casanave is working to bridge the many gaps between the two columns.
FOREWORD i X
She is working to write a text that is oriented to, and grounded in, the field and
its theories yet is also readable, personal, situated. She is working to produce an
account of academic writing and life that acknowledges the value of disciplinary
representations in building theory, but that also honors the situated practices and
complexly laminated identities out of which such representations are forged. At
the center of this effort is her organizing metaphor of games and a multivoiced
approach to the writing.
Playing games with texts (cf. Austin, 1962) may not at first seem to
capture our sense of the serious and sincere nature of disciplinarity. In Chapter 1
and throughout Writing Games, Chris develops the metaphor of academic
writing games, making clear that it is intended to invoke neither some idyllic,
idealized world of innocent fun nor a world of cynical scheming. Her notion of
games draws on Ortner's (1996) accounts of gender identity formation as learning
the rules of serious social games, echoes Wittgenstein's (1953) discussions of
language games within forms of life, and links up with Bourdieu's (1990) notion
that the mark of fluid sophisticated practice in a field is a "feel for the game" (p.
66). Of course, this metaphor also fits well with many students' and scholars'
own descriptions of learning to play the games of the academy, being willing (or
unwilling) to play along, and sometimes of changing the rules in midstream. In
short, it is a serious and powerful metaphor here, as long as it is not read in
limiting ways (like games as fun).
One way to read her metaphor is through the everyday prototype of games
like chess. This reading highlights the interactive, dialogic nature of games and
the idea that years of study and practice are needed for players to develop
expertise. Within the rules of chess, there is also considerable room for
innovation and personal style. However, we usually think of the rules of such
games as fully explicit and fixed, characteristics that few academic games
display. Therefore, another valuable prototype would be the games children
play, where rules and roles are somewhat negotiable, settled in that gray space
defined by power, tradition, liking, affiliation, desire, and interest, often on a
thin edge between rigid ritualization and outright revolt ("I quit!"). Chris'
accounts of academic writing and disciplinary socialization are not only accounts
of learning to play games or of games played, but also very much accounts of
games with some play (some degrees of freedom) within them. As you read the
literature on academic writing that has emerged since the early 1980s, you can
see that it is easy to produce either a top-down vision in which people appear to
be automatons assimilated into some disciplinary discourse collective or an
asocial, individualistic account of rhetorical free agents who seem to be making
everything up as they go. A strength of the game metaphor as Chris deploys it
is that it nicely skates the line between the sense of rules as determining the
game and the sense of players as agents; It is an account that balances social