ABSTRACT
David Bleich, in Know and Tell: A Writing Pedagogy of Disclosure, Genre, and Memher ship, argues for the value of recognizing and making use of the multiple genres that traverse both written and oral language use in the classroom. He writes,
The materiality of language also pertains to the value of disclosure […] which urges us to recognize that different genres […] of talk, language use, and writing emerge from all of us at different times and situations, and that these genres are welcomed in the writing classroom. (xvi)
Bleich puts great emphasis on the writing classroom as providing the time, space, and means for students and instructor to generate new genres, not simply to try to imitate the conventions of more familiar, seemingly static genres. In this way, new knowledge may emerge, and students become active participants in the making of such knowledge. It’s not as if students aren’t already using diverse genres, Bleich notes, but that the classroom has typically not been a place in which students are encouraged to extend what they already know and use into less familiar forms. Instead, they are treated
more as tabulas rasas, empty slates waiting to be filled with the knowledge necessary for their “progress.”
