Abstract
This essay asks how learning new genres form people as individuals. The idea of genres is taken from Paul Heilker’s essay which talks about how genres are used by individuals to interact with the world. The essay also quotes Paul Gee’s essay, which is about discourses and learning versus acquisition, to show how people learn new genres and illustrates that personal growth comes into context with the new genre and ones used in the past. This essay then provides a final illustration on personal growth being like adding furniture to a room; that personal growth does not do away with the past self.
Tags: genre, personal growth, writing, heilker, gee, discourse, learning
Essay
Everyone interacts with the world in different ways. These ways of interacting with the world range from the how someone would view the people around them and their actions to the way that someone might choose to react to an event. These ways of interaction are recurring, and are called genres. In his essay, “On Genres as Ways of Being”, Paul Heilker describes genres as the specific roles that people take on to interact and view the world. He also claims them to be necessary, saying that without these structured roles the individual loses focus and the ability to understand their surroundings in any meaningful way. Genres are not just for the individual either. When multiple people gather together, whether in a physical or online sense, and choose to embody a certain genre with each other in order to better understand a subject or the genre itself, they form what is called a discourse. James Paul Gee discusses discourses in his essay “What is Literacy?” where he classifies different kinds of discourses and their different aspects. Both of these men delve into what embodying a genre or discourse means for the individual, how it affects and shapes them. They also talk about people leaving these ways of being; joining new ones and what that new genre or discourse can signify and do to the individual. What I want to know is, how do the previous genres and discourses that people occupy or have occupied affect and change their new way of being?
First of all, I would claim that it is impossible for anyone to see or interact with the world in solely one way. Despite what people may think of themselves, no one actually has the ability to close off any other part of their lives to focus on another. It is impossible to truly let go of our past ways of being when people try to embody a new way. I cannot disconnect my life as a student from my life as a son. Heilker talks about how he had to painfully learn the fourth step of the twelve step program as one way of being. He also mentions that at first he was not able to learn this new genre. “I think we dwell in certain discourses, that we live there, that we inhabit them. But I simply was not capable of learning this rhetoric, of reading and writing and dwelling in these genres until I was truly desperate, until I had literally nowhere else to go.” (96-97). I believe that these difficulties in learning a new genre come from humanity’s inability to separate themselves from their previous genres, and how their previous genres affect the learning of their new genre. For example, attempting to learn a new culture after moving to Japan would be difficult if I had lived my entire life in America. I would be unable to separate myself from my American way of viewing and experiencing the world, or genre, while attempting to learn the Japanese cultural genre. Now I know previous genres can interfere in learning new genres, my question becomes where does this difficulty come from?
I believe this interruption stems from what genres require of people, and how requirements are sometimes at odds with newer genres. Heilker equates genres to technologies, saying they both assume things of their users and require other things as well. For an example, he uses a student’s desk by listing out what using that desk requires of the student. How that desk restricts the user from moving in certain directions so that other directions are relied upon more heavily (Heilker 97-99). All genres are like the student’s desk, asking things from the user so that when they use them they can gain other insights and tools. When I was tasked with writing a paper for my English 101 class I had to get used to, and still am by the way, of not writing how all my previous classes had taught me to write. In high school all my essays were either very dry straight forward topics or research papers. This form of writing is a genre, and it required that I have a very concrete understanding of what I’m writing about, knowing all or most of the side information that can justify what central claim I am trying to make. In return I gained a very rigid, focused writing style that would swiftly lead to answers. This paper that you are reading now is a different genre. As I expected from my first college paper, it does not ask me to know all the facts. Quite purposefully I am sent into the dark labyrinth of my question with only a ball of string to show where I have been, and asked to find my way to the center by feeling around the confusing turns and passageways. This new genre does not require me to be a master in this specific field, but to be an amateur. I have to learn how investigative writing works, asking myself questions I know I do not know the answers to. In return I gain a new possibilities and insights that never would have shown themselves before.
This attempt at learning the inquisitive writing genre has been worthwhile, but also an experiment in learning a contradictory genre. It will take time for me to become more comfortable at writing in unknown territory, since all genres come with a learning curve. This learning curve grows when the requirements of that new genre go against the requirements of a previous genre. Opposing genres are like an old school beam scale, where weights are attached to either side of a beam that is balanced on a pivot. The heavier side is the one to go down, the side that one is more comfortable with. But now the weights are the requirements of each genre, with each side representing one of the genres. It becomes harder to be in the lighter side, the more alien genre. Learning one genre can make it harder to learn an opposing genre, this difficulty stemming from the difference in what these genres require of their users and what they give them. But, how does the multitude of genres that someone exists within, including the opposing ones, connect to each other?
It is possible that the multitude of genres, every genre a person has learned, comes into relation when trying to define what makes a person who they are. What part of themselves and their lives shape who they are. I believe it possible that the multitude of genres and discourses someone has learned to be the very thing that forms them. Since genres are the very way we interact with our surroundings and environment, then how these genres play together inside of us would be the very definition of us. Heilker says, “… all genres we attempt, especially all new genres, … they may all have the potential to invite us and require us and compel us to come up and out of our previous ways of being in the world, to become something new, something more” (102). This shows that Heilker believes genres form their user into something more when they embody them. He does not go far enough with this claim. I think that genres are not something people inhabit or use alone. Instead, they are something that people bring into themselves and begin to shape themselves or parts of themselves in new ways because of that genre. They do not become they only way people view the world, but instead come into and affect how people view the world in addition to our previous ways of thought and being. It is because of this that using new genres is so important, they change people in new ways that their previous genres could not. New genres allow for more personal growth than simply becoming more experienced in a previous genre could ever offer. It is because of this that these genres that Heilker sometimes so fearfully describes should be embraced. To learn new ways of inhabiting and interacting with the world is the only true way for anyone to become more than they were before.
No one exists in just one genre, and the multiple genres that someone inhabits can make learning a newer genre difficult due to the dissonance between their requirements. This difficulty is worth overcoming however since learning new genres are the best way of growing as an individual. Now how do people learn new genres? James Paul Gee would claim that to learn a genre is done by joining a discourse and having time to practice and interact with this discourse. “… developed in association with and by having access to and practice with these secondary institutions.” (Gee 77). In this sentence “secondary institutions” are places and locations of discourses that one is not naturally familiar with. So joining a new genre or discourse requires constant interaction with a discourse, and the learning of the genre comes from the interaction with the members of the discourse. It would then make sense that one cannot just learn a genre, at least not to any effective degree. Instead, genres are both learned and acquired. They are gained and joined by a process of absorption. To fully become a member of a genre, one must first slowly join the surrounding discourse, and both absorb the practices through participation and are directly taught certain aspects of that genre as well.
Everyone exists in multiple genres and those genres they inhabit can make learning new genres harder due to the difference between them. This difficulty is still worth going through though in order to become more than what they were previously. To learn new genres it is necessary to first join the respective discourse surrounding them. How do the accumulated genres that one comes to encompass or previously encompass define that individual? These numerous genres that all people come to live by and through are not concrete spaces in which we dwell. Rather they are more like the different kinds of furniture in a single room each adding something different, serving different purposes, and used in different ways all the while playing into each other to form a single cohesive space. It is because people hold the ability to add new furniture to an ever increasing room that they also possess the ability to grow as people. Any room in a house is always defined more by the furniture inside of it rather than the size and shape of the room itself. A room that could be used as a small office space is also capable of becoming a classroom simply by changing the furniture. In this same way people are defined more by what they do with themselves rather than their initial capabilities. In order to change themselves someone can change the genres they use and inhabit to fit a different purpose. It is in this way that genres define people.
Works Cited
Gee, James Paul. “What is Literacy?” Participating in Cultures of Writing and Reading. Ed. Donna Qualley. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2015. 73-81. Print.
Heilker, Paul. “On Genres as Ways of Being.” Participating in Cultures of Writing and Reading. Ed. Donna Qualley. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2015. 93-103. Print.