How Much Structure?

Today I am thinking about structure.
Specifically, I am thinking about structuring a classroom and lesson plans and my interactions with students: Here is the problem. The theories of Composition I am currently following grow out of a post structuralist idea of Composition; yet undeniably, formal education must be tightly structured to some degree.
Let's put it this way. If I generalize the structuralist "old school" of Composition pedagogy as the "back-to-basics" approach, you can expect a classroom that focuses on grammar rules as being solid inviolable truths. This is the system I was taught as a part-time college student at PSU Berks in 1999. I learned about different writing products--different kinds of writing that were separate and unequal. There was "academic writing," "creative writing," "persuasive writing," or "business writing." Each had a different hierarchical value, and each could be exemplified by a singular product. These modes never crossed paths. Rules about modes of expression in each medium were clear and solid (if a bit arbitrary at times): "You never use a contraction in an academic paper." It never occurred to me to ask why?
Now I subscribe to a belief that writing should be taught as a process that does not follow a singular linear structure with arbitrary rules. However, I am still stuck with the need to build a lesson plan that conveys this without leaving students lost in a directionless fog or producing writing that fails to communicate with its readers. In my own work with students at the Writing Center, I often make a partial return to the strictures of Intro. to Comp. Some assignments have a definite audience with definite expectations, that are best met with specific choices about grammar and voice. For example, one can't expect a Media and Communications scholar to clearly comprehend a discussion of the social implications of, say, the increased output of teenage television dramas about spoiled rich kids in the same voice I use to talk to my friends at the bar about the new Family Guy:

Mike: You see last night's episode?
Behn: Yeah. those guys are freakin' hilarious
Mike: I love how they don't get up their own ass with trying to make a moral, ya know. It's just random fun.
Behn: Yeah.
Mike: It's like those "'actually' people:" Actually...
Behn: Yeah, they're always raining one someone's parade because they gotta look smart.

Behn and I just conveyed what could be liberally considered as a perfectly valid, socially-relevant critical analysis of the show , including a consideration of the social phenomenon we have privately named "'actually' people." (see the post Actually People) However, a paper written in this style would most likely fail to impress a professor and would not exhibit an understanding of how to effectively convey intended ideas through writing, so there must be some standards to apply to the task at hand in order to provide guidance.
It is fairly easy in the Writing Center to work without a rigid structure. I get a sense of the assignment and the individual writer and suggest that thewriter, for example, might try to move away from using verbal constructs that draw their meaning from audible inflection and think about more specific terms to engage in an analysis. Conversely, I might also suggest a student distance themselves from what we know as the traditional "academic voice," as it is something that is generally quite foreign to the way real people talk to one another regularly and can therefore lead to some long and confusing sentences where a multitude of ideas are expressed simultaneously and incompletely. (What an ironically long sentence) In this case, I ask that the writer first explain to me verbally, in their own words, what they are attempting to convey. Then we use that language to make clearer the words on the page, creating a a hybrid of sorts. As I said--fairly simple.
In you average Intro to Comp. classroom, however, it is considerably harder, as we are talking about dealing with thirty students at once. The classroom practice has to give them a fairly good understanding of expectations. Furthermore, they should be aware of the justifications for these expectations if we expect to create thinking learners. However, a teacher cannot just go out and play it by ear. Neither can the teacher spend the entire semester moving from individual to individual. How then does she or he create a lesson plan for a particular assignment that provides a structure that can stand up to critical questioning?
To clarify, students must learn that writing is not about idealized products that can be judged by constants. Each act of writing is a socially-situated act of making meaning. Therefore, unless students are forced to all write on the exact same topic from the exact same point of view, and subsequently manage to do the impossible and forget their own identities, each written piece would have to be judged by a different standard. More precisely, there is no structure to judge or assess any piece at all. This brings us around to Stanley Fish and community interpretations. An interesting study, but one whose line of thinking has an endless capacity to destabilize meaning and could very well leave us in that foggy area without a compass.
In any case, what I am left with are thoughts about how to facilitate discussions around multiple grammars for multiple purposes without creating the impression that there are distinct differences in modes of writing relating to writing as a product. Meanwhile, I need to prepare students to meet some of the expectations of writing in Academia and beyond. What is really required is the poets sensability of "negative capability," which was concieved of by John Keats. Essentially, it is the ability to exist within an enigma without needing to reach for explanations or absolutes. Here is the first step to a dynamic structure.
Back in the realm of practical application, I believe I am starting to see some of the structure take shape in The New London Group's concept of Design elements, but I'll not venture to wrestle with that just now. Rather, I will close this meditation, as it is already quite lengthy.
At this point I'd love some input from whoever is reading. (Boy, I hope someone is reading) As you can see, I have alot more thinking to do to begin to iron this out.

Free Write--Introductory Ideas: Academia and Beyond

My interest in composition has its origin in my interest in my own individual future. That is, this project stems from a need and desire to make meaning of my own pedagogical philosophies with the mind that I intend to spend my life teaching writing as both a source of income, as well as a means to do something meaningful and important with my life: coaching young college students in a field of critical inquiry and meaning-making. More simply stated: I have a desire to help students fulfill their potential as creators and consumers of meaning in Academia and beyond. The following is a study of preexisting debate on the future of literacy pedagogy, which questions how the world has changed in light of technological advances and constantly colliding cultures, and observations I have personally made of current teaching practices aimed at building my own lesson plans for the Introduction to Composition classroom. That makes this a far from ambitious project in the big picture, but a necessary one for me, and one that hopfully others can use to fuel their own debates between theory and practice.
What I am seeing take shape from my research puts a large focus on the New London group, as they seem to be a well-organized group asking all the right questions. Thus, my project takes shape around their ideas in many ways. Conceptually, the paper I am creating starts with the ideas coming out of poststructuralism and follows those ideas into the New London Group. After exploring their theories, my study follows the most recent debates and ideas in the field through recent discussions in Computers and Composition and professional blogs. The study concludes with my own observations and assesments of assignments and syllabi from Composition courses I have observed in my time at the Kutztown University Writing Center. Ultimately, I hope to be able to suggest a set of lesson plans for my own Composition courses.
To give an example of what I am talking about--I have observed quite a few students working on an assignment that calls for them to analyze and assess the rhetoric of magazine advertisements for various popular products. The students must interpret textual and visual rhetoric in these ads and discuss the implications of this rhetoric in a social context. This relates to the New Lond Group's ideas on the Design elements of linguistic, visual, spatial, and gestural design. Students are therefore challenged with digesting multimodal media and using critical thinking skills to assess the negative or positive social implications. Of course, students must then interpret their findings for the reading audience of thier paper, honing their own meaning-making skills. This takes students a step beyond what could be considered traditional analysis of pure text. This is not to say that textual analysis is outdated--far from it. These same courses that call for analysis of multimodal design elements also include straight-up literary analysis. If anything, working on multimodal analysis helps students to look that much deeper into textual analysis and take it beyond words on a page, perhaps creating an ability to read the social contexts of writers whom might otherwise be though of as simply "dead writers that write good old stories."