Patricia Bizzel: E Unum Pluribus?

I enjoyed learning about Patricia Bizzel's work and found many aspects of the presentation fascinating.  The idea that most appealed to me was Bizzel's blunt statement that students have to be taught how to think.  it is assumed that they have something to say, that they know how to think about literature to generate a response, that the problem is teaching them to formulate the response in the desired written form, not teaching them how to think.

Bizzel's boldfaced statement that we must teach students how to think belies the teacher's perception that student's don't answer because they are apathetic.  Instead, following this format, the students literally have nothing to say because they don't know how to think about literature so as to generate a response of the type the teacher is looking for.  

My question then is how do we teach them to think?  What is the practical how to approach to this aspect of pedagogy?  I'm sure if I puzzle through I could come up with some answer of my own, but what does Bizzel, who points out this failing, have to say about addressing it?  

The point that struck me most in my small contact with Patricia Bizzel was a side remark made during this week's presentation.  Shaynee indicated that Bizzel believes that once students leave the academic environment they will abandon the skills/methods of the academic discourse community to return to their native discourse community.

I find this disheartening.  As Graff indicates, I believe that the academic discourse community is foreign to all of our students at one point or another, and as such is a learned discourse one of the outer circles of other, nonnative discourse communities that we enter throughout our lives.  However, because all of the children in this nation are brought into this discourse community, might we not attempt something more than giving them a tool to use for college that they will then set aside?  Couldn't this academic discourse community be privileged in that it becomes a unifying point for Americans?

If it needs work (and it has needed work and continues to need work in order to avoid being exclusionary) than let's fix it and use it as a starting point for a discourse community in which we can all participate with ease, thus facilitating the kind of critical thinking and debate that are so integral to our public lives inside and outside of academe.  Or, if it is so rotten as to be unsalvageable as the source for a unifying discourse community, can we find another?

I think that at times in our haste to acknowledge each other's individuality we sacrifice the chance to communicate as effectively as we might be able to.  I find it saddening that we will have this chance to produce a more unifying discourse community and that after the time requried we'll all separate and go off back to our own private clubs.