“Bakhtinian Reading” – Using Multiple Modes of Discourse

The first thing that stuck out to me when I read the students’ paper, aside from the obviously taboo nature of the topic, was lack of information about Sigmund Freud. The student who wrote this needed to include more evidence from Freud to support her claims: “The student needs to acknowledge a tension between those competing sets of boundaries, to place them in a dialogic relation with each other so that she can clarify her own position, recognize its strengths, and ultimately subordinate Freud’s discourse for her own purpose (Recchio 452). I see this problem in writing at the secondary level as well. Students tend have a hard time using evidence to support or as Recchio implies here, challenge their assertions. What I typically see my students do it take a quote or something, plop it into the middle of their writing with minimal transitions and continue to tell their own story. Typically, especially with my ninth grade students, the evidence they decide to marshal looks like a stranger in a strange land. As Recchio suggests “[p]lacing the passage from Frued into the student paper does not demand that the student surrender to Freud’s view. It isolates the basic dissonance between paper and Freud, which establishes an area of argument or negotiation wherein the student’s voice can find direction and be heard more strongly” (453). To simplify this point, Recchio appears to be talking about a counter-claim. To get my students more comfortable with this concept, I use basic examples such as: “Although you paper was good, you neglected to use enough evidence to support your claims”. Obviously this is a sarcastic example but you get the idea. Including another mode of discourse and asking that mode to mingle with their own words is a difficult task. In some cases, as we see in the example that Recchio provides for his commentary, students at times let their personal experiences dominate the writing, but on the other hand students will let the evidence they use to support their position to become overly dominant as well. The balance between evidence and voice is a difficult balance for students to achieve because they can be conflicting modes of discourse, however, as their writing further develops; they become more comfortable navigating multiple modes of discourse.