#practical pedagogy

[compmachines]

"Activity Theory and Process Approaches" Post-Process Theory

I like that he starts by saying that he tried to get NCTE to change their language from "the writing process" to "writing processes" (though it didn't work). Yeah, Russell! Yeah!

  "In this exploratory essay, I want to ask how we can understand the relation between school writing (processes) and the writing processes beyond school and perhaps the relations between them" (81).

  Term: activity system "collectives (often organizations) of people who, over an indefinite period of time, share common purposes (objects and motives) and certain tools used in certain ways--among these tools-in-use certain kinds of writing done in certain ways or processes" (81).

Genres create networks between these activity systems.

This line could be good to integrate into the 4Cs talk: 'To understand students' writing, we need to trace its comings and goings, its circulation in social networks (activity systems), in and out of, around and through schools." (84).

The problem with process writing, according to Russell, is that it tends to commodify writing without installing it within a network. ...but writing is always a commodity within the networks in which is circulates. It's a constantly traded, constantly reappropriated and remixed commodity.

No, actually, Russell agrees with that. He wants post-process pedagogy to commodify writing, and to do it in the various networks and discourse communities (or activity systems) in which writing is always embedded. He wants, essentially, more focus on the ways in which writing is exchanged and networked. This whole article is essentially arguing for a move from the definite article ("the writing process") to the indefinite ("a writing process"). Though Russell would prefer the plural: "("writing processes").

Russell concludes with the basic idea that we're already firmly in the post-process period by using examples of writing classrooms around the world that are working within post-process assumptions.

[compmachines]

"Writing as a Mode of Learning"

"Writing serves learning uniquely because writing as process-and-product possesses a cluster of attributes that correspond uniquely to certain powerful learning strategies" (7). 

Emig, in this article, seems to be doing what I encourage my students to do--don't assume that your audience knows everything already. You can tell them basic stuff, because sometimes, that basic stuff needs to be said. This needs to be said, even though it eventually gets folded into a kind of compositional common-sense.

Emig names four "languaging processes": "listening, talking, reading, and writing" (8). You could set up a diagram establishing what these processes do: They're all creative, but half originate new verbal constructs (talking and writing), while half involve graphic recording (reading and writing). So listening creates meaning without originating a new verbal construct or involving graphic recording. Writing creates meaning and does both of those things. Etc. etc. Fun, but limited applicability.

Writing, of course, isn't just "talk recorded, an inaccuracy appearing in far too many composition texts" (9).

She lists a number of more-or-less obvious features of writing vs. talking, which Ong covers better in O&L, but here's the last one: "Because writing is often our representation of the world made visible, embodying both process and product, writing is more readily a form and source of learning than talking" (10). I feel like that's a wasp's nest of a claim, though I haven't thought enough about it to say why.

Emig uses Jerome Bruner's categories of learning: enactive (the hand), iconic (the eye), and representative/symbolic (the brain). Writing, she says, works on all three of these levels.

Some of this is just wrong. She says that blind sculptors can't move beyond a purely physical transcription of their world. Just wrong.

So writing is: 

Fully engaged (e.g. it uses the whole brain)

Immediate feedback between process and product

"engaged, committed, personal learning" (12)

Flexible, allowing for self-pacing

[compmachines]

Composition in the University

"Composition in the University"

"Freshman English is supposed to 'fix' students' supposed lack of literate mastery once and for all, so that teachers of more advanced courses do not have to bother with such things. The problem is that this desire simply cannot be enacted within a universal requirement that is not intellectually connected to any other feature of the curriculum" (8).

"Anyone who has taught the first-year composition course, or who has even cursorily read its professional literature, knows that its central challenge is to provide students with occasions and contexts for writing that are sufficiently specific and interesting to engage them with the process" (8).

Crowley's point is that such writing, without a clear and motivating rhetorical situation, is always artificial and so must fail to stick with students in the rest of their college career. So, this leads her to suggest that "the time has come to reflect seriously on the worth of the universal requirement" (10).

Crowley is acutely aware of comp's position as the perennial under-class, always subject to and holding up high-culture literary studies.

"A fundamental assumption in this book is that the humanist approach to the first-year course is not the best approach to teaching composition" (13)

Crowley is going to be really useful when she writes about pragmatism, a trend that occurred after Berlin publishedRhetoric and Reality(though as Emig points out, it was started by Dewey in the 40s).

[compmachines]

Web writing is everywhere

so we may as well take advantage of it.  If incorporating Facebook allows students to think productively about written identity or collaboration, why not use it?

[compmachines]

"Grammar, Grammars, and the Teaching of Grammar"

1985: Patrick Hartwell has an elementary-but-crucial point: teaching grammar doesn't help anything.  He breaks the notion of "grammar" down into five categories, and claims that the one we try to teach (number two, if you're counting) is the least helpful to students.  According to Hartwell, most grammar rules are "incantations," ideas incomprehensible to all except those who already know them.

High Point: "At no point in the English curriculum is the question of power more blatantly posed than in the issue of formal grammar instruction" (228).

[compmachines]

"Collaborative Learning and the 'Conversation of Mankind'"

1984: Kenneth Bruffee has an elementary point to make: collaborative learning works, and you should try it.  His reasoning for this is a bit deeper, having to do with discourse communities (quite the hot theoretical item in the mid-to-late-80s) and overlapping knowledge fields.

High Point: "Teachers are defined in this instance as those members of a knowledge community who accept the responsibility for inducting new members into the community" (431).

[compmachines]

"Is Teaching Still Possible? Writing, Meaning, and Higher Order Reasoning"

1984: Ann Berthoff is skeptical.  She's skeptical of applying Piagetian developmental psych to composition students; she's skeptical of "a pedagogy of exhortation," and she's skeptical (to the point of vicious) of empirical research.  Among all this skepticism lies an important claim about the importance of Berthoff's "pedagogy of knowing" and, again, that all-important awareness of one's pedagogical/theoretical stance.

High Point: "What we do have to do is show students how to reclaim their imaginations" (337).

[compmachines]

"William Perry and Liberal Education"

1984: Patricia Bizzell thinks that William Perry (60s Harvard developmental psychologist) was a pretty cool guy.  He thought that a college liberal education should lead students through three important stages: Dualism, Relativism, and end in Commitment in Relativism.  But slow down, you overenthusiastic composition person you, says Bizzell, what Perry considers desirable and what we want to teach our students aren't necessarily the same thing.  It's enough for her article that Perry raises interesting points.

High Point: "Perry provides us with a useful picture of the kind of 'cultural literacy' required in a liberal arts college" (326).