Narrowing the focus

I like the direction that I'm seeing in Kamberelis 1999 and Wollman-Bonilla 2000 with regards to learning to write genre-specific texts to gain access to discourses of power. I'm interested in extending that thinking to video production.

For this lit review, I may turn my focus more toward this. Maybe my question should be limited to the relationship between genre in children's literature and genre within writing instruction. I'd like to relate it to genre in film, but that may be too ambitious for this semester.

I think for the outline that is due next week, I will try this narrower focus and then see how the semester progresses. This may end up being part of a lit review for another paper.

Okay... one more thing: The Wollman-Bonilla 2000 article relates to the Radio Lab episodes "Tell Me A Story" from 7/29/08 and "Making the Hippo Dance" from 9/9/08. In Wollman-Bonilla, they are teaching kids to approximate scientific discourse (objective tone, present tense verbs, precise language). In Radio Lab, they are talking to scientists about the need to make science accessible to the general public by making it more personal, less cold and removed, more subjective, more story-like. In both cases, the authors are advocating the importance of code-switching. Scientists need to able to relate stories to non-scientists. Non-scientists need to be able to adopt a scientific tone to gain access to science.

Still, Wollman-Bonilla is talking about adopting more than just the trappings of the genre; she talks about the inter-related nature of scientific writing and scientific thinking. Radio Lab isn't advocating an abandonment of orderly, systematic, scientific thinking; they are talking about relating scientific knowledge to non-scientists.