​1. New Materialism is a rhetorical field of theory that had emerged around the same time Reither wrote Writing and Knowing: Redefining the Writing Process. Among many things, New Materialism argues for the materiality of language to affect change in the world. It questions the long-standing acceptance of the duality of the subject/object relationship in Western thought. Instead, much of New Materialist theory emphasizes a world where all objects act upon each other without any of these objects being subordinated. Language acts upon the speaker, and the speaker acts upon language with neither superseding the other. 

Reither argues that writing pedagogy often ignores the “profound relationship between writers and their world” and that we should “redefine the writing process so that substantive social knowing is given due.” He criticizes research into the writing process as being too focused on “cognitive processes,” and that writing actually “cannot be artificially separated from the social-rhetorical situations in which writing gets done, from the conditions that enable writers to do what they do, and from the motives writers have for what they do… writing is, in fact, one of those processes which, in its use, creates and constitutes its own contexts.” Especially keeping in mind the fact that writing “creates and constitutes its own contexts,” what does Reither suggest about the long subordination in pedagogy of writing itself as being but a product of the writer? How else should we conceptualize the duality of the writing/writer relationship if not with the traditional duality of the subject/object? How might we teach writing if writing is in itself a force that acts upon the writer, and also as something the writer uses? How does the idea of a “discourse community” relate to the New Materialist idea of the material--the material in this case being writing--affecting change on and producing the world?


2. Perl proposes the notion of “felt sense,” which I attempt to describe as the wordless, pre-language thoughts in “our mind” we tap while writing. While writing, one can “attend” to “felt sense” to try to discover the feeling(s) one attempts to convey. In “Contemporary Composition: The Major Pedagogical Theories” Berlin describes New Rhetoric as denying “that truth is discoverable in sense impression since this data must always be interpreted-structured and organized-in order to have meaning. The perceiver is of course the interpreter, but she is likewise unable by herself to provide truth since meaning cannot be made apart from the data of experience.” How might Perl’s concept of “felt sense” be related to Berlin’s description of New Criticism as being dependent upon “the data of experience” or knowledge internalized through experience? How might a writer’s experience influence their “felt sense”?

​Mary Elizabeth Smith

Hairston states that Thomas Kuhn’s idea of a paradigm shift applies not only to the sciences, but also to the humanities and especially to the field of composition. Hairston believes that, at the time, the teaching of writing was just beginning to experience a paradigm shift due to various external forces. Now, thirty-three years later, is American composition teaching today experiencing another paradigm shift (or still in the throes of the one Hairston witnesses in the 70s and 80s) because of new external forces such as Common Core, influx of international or older students, increased diversity, rapid changes in technology, and changing cultural/educational values? What is the field of composition doing to deal with the paradigm shift today? 


Along the lines of the Hairston reading and the issues/questions we face today, Faigley also addresses the issue by calling for a synthesis of the expressive, cognitive, and social views of teaching composition. Faigley states that the preoccupation with theories of writing process has made scholars forget to address the major issues plaguing composition studies. Why are those questions Faigley asks on page 663 still bombarding us even today? Why haven’t they been resolved?


One of the ideas that struck a chord with me in the Reither text is offering a course that is, as Reither’s colleague described in a course description, “organized as a collaborative investigation of a scholarly field rather than the delivery of body of knowledge” and Reither’s statement that these courses are most effective when executed in a workshop format. The idea of getting students to read and write for themselves and their peers and not just for the teacher is one I think is becoming more popular in today’s undergraduate classrooms. This reading made me realize that some of the best English courses I took as an undergraduate (including both first-year composition courses as well as creative writing courses) were ones in which my classmates and I workshopped each other’s writing. I am curious - what is everyone’s experience with a workshop type of classroom, either as a student participating in it or as the teacher running the workshop course? How did your professor (or, as the teacher, how did you) facilitate/encourage the reflective inquiry Reither calls for in the classroom? ​Was it as effective as Reither says it is?

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​1. James Reither suggests a workshop model of "immersion" in which students read about, write about, and research chosen topics and teachers act as "co-investigators" in an ongoing process of academic inquiry (625). ​​My question about this method of instruction has to do with the scaffolding involved in such an endeavor. Reither offers ideas of possible activities such as reading "bibliographies" and "books" as well as the writing down of "call numbers" and the crafting of "formal articles of the sorts they are reading" (625). As an instructor, how might you implement such a workshop in your classroom? What types of strategies might you use to support student learning in such a course?

2. Lester Faigley believes that process theory should be expanded to include more of a focus on how historical processes influence the act of writing. Faigley explains that writing has historically been used as an act of power, and that the social view theorists' interest in discourse communities leaves out the idea that sometimes participation in a discourse community can lead to negative consequences, such as oppression (662-663). In your opinion, how or in what ways is the historical process view important in composition courses?

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1.) In “Cognition, Context, and Theory Building,” Flower attempts to build from her earlier work, “A Cognitive Process Theory of Writing,” and break down the limiting dichotomy between cognition and context by producing the outline of “an interactive theory” (291) that takes seriously both the cognitive and the contextual influences in the writing process. In other words, she wants to establish a “grounded theory” (283) (which, to Flowers, seems to mean a theory that focuses on writers writing instead of writers talking/thinking about writing) that addresses how the writer and the environment (including social/cultural forces) work together to create meaning.

Although I am totally onboard with the idea that context and cognition work together to inform written texts, I find some of the assumptions driving her particular argument troubling. First, the idea that theory and practice are fundamentally separate things kind of reiterates the problem created by opposing cognition and context that she’s attempting to intervene upon. Basically, the article presents theory as a way to talk about and analyze action or “real” practice, effectively drawing clear lines between the two supposed spheres. I get that cognition/context and theory/practice are not the same, but doesn’t the relationship between the two function similarly? How is the dichotomy this article creates between theory and practice all that different than the cognition/context dichotomy that she attempts to question? I think theory and practice, like cognition and context, are much more “interactive” (283) than this article seems to suggest.

Second, I’m having a hard time with how this study focuses everything around the individual writer’s subjectivity, or “individual cognition” (289). Although the article attempts to problematize the individual by claiming that context influences how a writer perceives his or her world, it still asserts that everything is always “mediated” (294) by a “thinking, acting, self-aware writer” (295). In like of the argument that personhood is arguably produced rather than naturally given or essential, the focus on individual subjectivity as the intervening force between context and cognition potentially creates many problems when attempting to perform empirical-like research, right? To me, in regard to research with the aim to gain empirical-like evidence, this focus on the individual writer brings up the question, “which writer?” I understand that she plans to consider the processes of many writers, but even many can’t account for all, which is what an empirical study arguably aims to do. Flowers is not unaware of this problem and attempts to address it throughout the article (the bit with the girl at Purdue stand outs), but such attempts don’t quite satisfy me – using empirical methods to learn about something that is (if based on the individual writer) non-empirical seems counterproductive, at least on the surface.

Side note: the point of this question is not to argue that writers are not individual and self-aware; I think that writers are individual, just not in an “essence of the self” kind of way.

2.) This thought leads to my other question (or set of questions) that have to do more with this week’s reading as whole rather than one text specifically. A common thread among these articles is how their authors focus on the writer’s consciousness (or thought processes) and attempt to place it within a theory or pedagogy. Although the focus on the writer has been prominent in the majority of the articles we’ve read so far, this week’s collection seems to be considering the cognitive component of the writing process in more apparent and self-conscious ways. Bizzell’s article points out the problems with assuming that there are “universal, fundamental structures of thought and language” (481), but the “discourse community” (497) model that she posits potentially carries the very same issues that it attempts to avoid (as she acknowledges in her “Afterthought” essay). Human cognition, it seems, is a tricky monster, especially when trying to generalize it enough to be plugged in to any writing theory or pedagogy. If thinking and thus writing processes are so very different—and so dependent on many, many variables—for each writer, how can a generalized pedagogy of writing ever be the ‘correct’ or ‘right’ one in which all students will fit? And is it (or should it) be the goal of composition studies to discover such a pedagogy, anyway?  

Flower and Hayes’ cognitive process theory is heavily criticized by both Bizzell and Broadkey for its inattention to how social contexts influence the composing process. While Bizzell finds Flower and Hayes’ lack of acknowledgement of  the role of discourse communities on the writing process problematic, Broadkey claims that Flower and Hayes’ model constructs writing as an isolated activity in which the composer becomes a “writing machine” detached from social reality (412). Regardless of whether or not you agree with Bizzell and Broadkey, are there elements from Flower and Hayes that are potentially useful for the teaching of writing? If so, what are they and how might they be useful? If not, why not?

Bizzell states: “Through discourse analysis we might offer [students] an understanding of their school difficulties as the problems of a traveler to an unfamiliar country- yet a country in which it is possible to learn the language and the manners and even ‘go native’ while still remembering the land from which one has come” (496).  What is your reaction to this statement (in regard to, for example, your own praxis, the NCTE statement on “Students’ Right to Their Own Language” or Shaughnessy’s research on Basic Writing, or to your own experiences as a student of writing)?

 

Compare cognitive theory and its pedagogy as you understand them presented by our readings to previous theories. How are the views of student, teacher, student/teacher relationship different, similar, and/or in reaction to previous theories? 

Place cognitive theory in social or historical context, and how does it reflect the views of society at the time?

As you figure out your own pedagogy of writing, how do you find process versus recursive elements playing a part in how you write as well as how you would teach or explain writing to a novice, let’s say, in the Writing Center? What are some benefits or drawbacks to writing as a process or writing as recursive?
-Kelly Wheeler

1. In “Students’ Right to Their Own Language,” Larson offers what many of us would probably agree is not an unreasonable critique of “courses which limit themselves to a narrow view of language.” However, he also makes claims throughout that language is a form of communication, which implies that it is both capable of and invested in communicating. As philosophers such as Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze have explored, this is not necessarily the case, and we could make the argument that not only is Larson being just as limited as those he critiques, but his perpetuation of the “understanding” of language as somehow inherently linked with communication re-solidifies that very limitedness.

My question is: how might we approach language and teaching writing to a room of students, all who have different dialects, in a way that not only doesn’t favor one dialect over the other, but also does not favor communication over other rhetorical aspects of writing and language (for example, persuasion). That is, how do we address the multiplicity of dialects in a way that does not judge a language based on whether or not it “communicates” an understanding (because it will always fail at this, no matter what dialect).

2. In Geneva Smitherman’s retrospective to “Students’ Right to Their Own Language,” she makes understandable claims that the previous “Right to Their Own Language” campaign encountered problems because it tried to create change without changing the system; that is, “The Enlightened were, after all, attempting to effectuate change WITHIN THE SYSTEM. And even those of us who were more revolutionarily inclined recognized the folly of doing nothing while waiting for the Revolution to come.” However, she also makes claims such as: “CCCC leadership acknowledged that there was a need for more explicit teaching materials, sample lesson plans, and a more specific pedagogy,” and specifically advocates for a National Language Policy.

My question is: How are standardized, “explicit” (which I also find problematic: how can something be standardized AND explicit?) lesson plans and teaching materials are not working within and perpetuating the system – or, moreover, how is a National Language Policy not simply a reinvention or reinstantiation of this system? If “working within the system” wasn’t working, how will this be any different?

1) Perl writes in Composing Processes of Unskilled Writers (1979) that, “Editing is primarily an exercise in error-hunting. The students are pre-maturely concerned with the 'look' of their writing; thus, as soon as a few words are written on the paper, detection and correction of errors replaces writing and revising.” Drawing on your experiences as both students and teachers, do you agree?


2) Taking into consideration Shaughnessy's study in New York, can writing ever be "too bad" to be fixed?

3) Berkenkotter and Murray refer to external and internal revisions as part of the writing process. In your opinion, is one set more important that the other or does "good" writing rely on both?

- Lily Howard-Hill