Kevi Kevin Roozen: Emergent Properties

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Emergent properties is a principle in biology that describes when a property is present in a group, but not the components of the group. For example a shirt has properties that the individual threads that make it up don 't have. Literacies exhibit emergent properties as well when grouped and woven together. Separate literacies describe a discipline, how to act that discipline out, and what it entails. As quoted by Kevin Roozen in his paper Journalism, Poetry, Stand-up Comedy, and Academic Literacy: Mapping the Interplay of Curricular and Extracurricular Literate Activities, Soviet psychologist and founder of cultural-historical psychology Lev Vygotsky said, the strategy of the man who resorts to the decomposition of water into hydrogen and oxygen in his search for a scientific explanation of the characteristic of water, its capacity to extinguish fire . . . . This man will discover, to his chagrin, that hydrogen burns and oxygen sustains combustion. He will never succeed in explaining the characteristics of the whole by analyzing the characteristics of its elements (Rieber 45). When literacies are strung together to form a profile we begin to see their purposes and their personal flavours. A group of literacies forms a frame around themselves and the person which practises them. …show more content…

Charles was an African-American student who was trying to get into the college of journalism at his university in the late 90 's. He found himself struggling in his first journalism class. Despite having a background in writing he performed poorly on his first in-class

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