The first point to prick me in Thomas’s presentation of Bruffee was Bruffee’s assertion of an influx of nontraditional students in the 70’s and 80’s. Other articles have made that same observation of a university overwhelmed by students who weren’t prepared for academic work—but those articles put a different date to this event which signals a need for a different type of pedagogy. Some of the articles we’ve read for this class locate the event in the late teens and twenties after WWI, some in the late forties after WWII, others now identifying the shift from tradition to the advent of modern information systems. If I couple these observations with one from the other class I’m taking (research methods and theories)—that the designation of scholarship as “recent” now means that which is less than five years old—I’m stuck with trying to define exactly what this “tradition” is that each pedagogical theory is rebelling against.
In one sense, this changing notion of tradition might prove Bruffee’s point that knowledge is part of a social context—each generation defines itself in opposition to the one that preceded it. But from my perspective, the hypothetical time span between knowledge and its decay into irrelevance is showing an ever decreasing half-life. It begs a question to Bruffee’s assertion that knowledge is “common property” within the social context—common to whom? I might ask.
Feminists posit a gendered tradition, ethnology defines a multitude of cultural traditions, Marxists have a conception of tradition as the hegemonic power of economic control. For Bruffee, rewriting and interpreting the past into the present is a function of some larger process than is modeled on the interaction of peers within a tutorial, a social transaction that is as much a generation as it is an analysis of traditional knowledge and means of expression.
But I would just like to have a little more perspective on what exactly Bruffee meant by “tradition.” Maybe some elaboration on “ontogenic cognitive development” might have helped—but probably not.
Monday, March 23, 2009
Saturday, March 21, 2009
essay question--pedagogical influences
Several years ago, I started writing again. I had written stories throughout a couple decades following my undergraduate degree, but without the kind of success that felt satisfying. When I moved to Pueblo in ’96, I just wanted to start a carpentry business and lead a simple life free from the issues I’d wrestled with a writer. For awhile, I worked hard and kept things simple. But no matter how simple and unidirectional life appears on the surface, there is a level to it in which time is not linear. Events occurred which demonstrated its circular nature and I was back in that state of mind where I had to write.
After a year of writing, I found that the time off hadn’t helped. Although school hadn’t taught me to write the first time around, I decided to take a class if only because I wanted someone to read what I’d written. If I had to pay them to do it, so be it. Chas Clifton encouraged me and I took more classes. I enrolled in the graduate program only because I had to in order to get into the writing workshops. I took the required theory course thinking that that might help with an overall structure for what I was writing and because I felt that a philosophical perspective, whether overt or not, is a part of any writing. And now, I find myself in this pedagogy course . . .
Initially, I was attracted to the expressivism of Elbow and Murray. Critics have often linked their work more to creative writing than academic. Another coincidence was that both had trouble with school. I don’t know if it’s a statement about the educational system in the “old days” or just similar temperaments, but I identified with their trouble. Elbow wrote the notes for his first book on writing as he was doing his doctoral thesis concerning double and triple irony in Chaucer’s work. He was writing what amounted to autobiography alongside his scholarly work. Going back and forth between the two, he was attempting to write himself into the university. It was a sort of dialectical process: school, me, school, me—ultimately aimed at a synthesis of the two. In one way, it happened. Elbow did become a recognized figure in composition. But in another way, it didn’t. Elbow never lost the feeling that a great divide existed between the academic world and “true” writing.
I liked their acknowledgement of a “resistance” factor when it came to the process of writing. I liked their theories of freewriting and focused writing followed by periods of critique and looking for what was really being said, of multiple drafts and being open to surprise and changes of direction. I liked their concern with voice and students as individuals. Although that latter point has drawn some criticism for its sentimentally romantic and isolationist connotations, I don’t think those critics fully acknowledge what Elbow and Murray were really proposing.
Murray especially desired passionate writing. Love, hate, joy, fear—emotion is often seen as private to an individual. But I think writing that has those qualities is aimed at more than individual expression. The aim of an emotion is to connect with others in some fundamental understanding. The individual that loves and the individual that fears are the same individual. Elbow has written that though he is concerned with the individual, that individual in neither unitary nor unchanging. Writing in the expressivist vein is an attempt to integrate to those disparate selves, to achieve some sort of wholeness.
Which brings me to one of my own divisions. On the one hand, I am a student of writing. But on the other, I am learning to be a teacher. I suspect that not all the students who would attend a class I might teach would have 54 years of experience in need of consolidation. If fact, their needs might be just that opposite. In light of that consideration, I would try to incorporate something from the guy who opposed Elbow so often.
America has a long history of pragmatic thinking which runs something like ‘society is a collection of people pursuing their own self interest and, in line with the laws of evolution, the most energetic in that pursuit are justly deserving of their rewards.’ I agree with Bartholomae in his suspicion of this philosophy. Bartholomae’s concern was to educated students into how their culture had sought to define them in ways which upheld that status quo. He did it through reading difficult academic texts in class.
Lindsay Aegerter describes teaching Jamaican born, English educated Michelle Cliff’s novels in her class. Cliff’s novels are filled with rage at now only how the colonial system has ravaged her country, but rage at herself for how she has incorporated the language and ways of thinking that colonialism inspired. Aegerter talks about her student’s resistance to identifying with Cliff’s sentiments because they resist looking at people and issues which have those same implications in our own country.
Although this is a comp theory class, I think this is getting a little too theoretical. These are my major influences to this point, but they influence me as much towards hermitage in a cave as they do towards teaching a classroom full of students. I need an influence that can synthesize the social and the individual perspectives, theory with practice. Bizzell comes to mind.
Bizzell writes about the inner and outer approaches to pedagogy in terms of home culture and academic culture. She finds that the two have come to be regarded more as concepts in an argument rather than as useful descriptions of a changing world. She also says that the two are not as mutually exclusive as would appear from the debate. She calls for more research into the “world view” of students entering the university, a broader understanding of rhetoric as a way to bridge the gap in the classroom between the individual student and the academic world, and a move from “cognitive models to discouse communities”—all things which I recognize as things as theoretically important to me as I approach a classroom. Exactly how to implement those theoretical influences in actual pedagogical practices remains the question, though.
After a year of writing, I found that the time off hadn’t helped. Although school hadn’t taught me to write the first time around, I decided to take a class if only because I wanted someone to read what I’d written. If I had to pay them to do it, so be it. Chas Clifton encouraged me and I took more classes. I enrolled in the graduate program only because I had to in order to get into the writing workshops. I took the required theory course thinking that that might help with an overall structure for what I was writing and because I felt that a philosophical perspective, whether overt or not, is a part of any writing. And now, I find myself in this pedagogy course . . .
Initially, I was attracted to the expressivism of Elbow and Murray. Critics have often linked their work more to creative writing than academic. Another coincidence was that both had trouble with school. I don’t know if it’s a statement about the educational system in the “old days” or just similar temperaments, but I identified with their trouble. Elbow wrote the notes for his first book on writing as he was doing his doctoral thesis concerning double and triple irony in Chaucer’s work. He was writing what amounted to autobiography alongside his scholarly work. Going back and forth between the two, he was attempting to write himself into the university. It was a sort of dialectical process: school, me, school, me—ultimately aimed at a synthesis of the two. In one way, it happened. Elbow did become a recognized figure in composition. But in another way, it didn’t. Elbow never lost the feeling that a great divide existed between the academic world and “true” writing.
I liked their acknowledgement of a “resistance” factor when it came to the process of writing. I liked their theories of freewriting and focused writing followed by periods of critique and looking for what was really being said, of multiple drafts and being open to surprise and changes of direction. I liked their concern with voice and students as individuals. Although that latter point has drawn some criticism for its sentimentally romantic and isolationist connotations, I don’t think those critics fully acknowledge what Elbow and Murray were really proposing.
Murray especially desired passionate writing. Love, hate, joy, fear—emotion is often seen as private to an individual. But I think writing that has those qualities is aimed at more than individual expression. The aim of an emotion is to connect with others in some fundamental understanding. The individual that loves and the individual that fears are the same individual. Elbow has written that though he is concerned with the individual, that individual in neither unitary nor unchanging. Writing in the expressivist vein is an attempt to integrate to those disparate selves, to achieve some sort of wholeness.
Which brings me to one of my own divisions. On the one hand, I am a student of writing. But on the other, I am learning to be a teacher. I suspect that not all the students who would attend a class I might teach would have 54 years of experience in need of consolidation. If fact, their needs might be just that opposite. In light of that consideration, I would try to incorporate something from the guy who opposed Elbow so often.
America has a long history of pragmatic thinking which runs something like ‘society is a collection of people pursuing their own self interest and, in line with the laws of evolution, the most energetic in that pursuit are justly deserving of their rewards.’ I agree with Bartholomae in his suspicion of this philosophy. Bartholomae’s concern was to educated students into how their culture had sought to define them in ways which upheld that status quo. He did it through reading difficult academic texts in class.
Lindsay Aegerter describes teaching Jamaican born, English educated Michelle Cliff’s novels in her class. Cliff’s novels are filled with rage at now only how the colonial system has ravaged her country, but rage at herself for how she has incorporated the language and ways of thinking that colonialism inspired. Aegerter talks about her student’s resistance to identifying with Cliff’s sentiments because they resist looking at people and issues which have those same implications in our own country.
Although this is a comp theory class, I think this is getting a little too theoretical. These are my major influences to this point, but they influence me as much towards hermitage in a cave as they do towards teaching a classroom full of students. I need an influence that can synthesize the social and the individual perspectives, theory with practice. Bizzell comes to mind.
Bizzell writes about the inner and outer approaches to pedagogy in terms of home culture and academic culture. She finds that the two have come to be regarded more as concepts in an argument rather than as useful descriptions of a changing world. She also says that the two are not as mutually exclusive as would appear from the debate. She calls for more research into the “world view” of students entering the university, a broader understanding of rhetoric as a way to bridge the gap in the classroom between the individual student and the academic world, and a move from “cognitive models to discouse communities”—all things which I recognize as things as theoretically important to me as I approach a classroom. Exactly how to implement those theoretical influences in actual pedagogical practices remains the question, though.
Monday, March 9, 2009
Nick on Lanham
The part of Nick’s presentation on Lanham that stuck with me the most is the diagram that he used to demonstrate a theory of reader attention in relation to style. The reader’s attention is described by a line that hits the horizontal line of stylistic surface at an angle. At the point of intersection, the attention line is refracted into two—one line bounces off the horizontal line at an angle equal to the one that the attention approached and the other continuing through the point of intersection without any degree of deflection. The diagram reminds me of one of those diagrams that describe the process of subatomic particle formation. I like it because it seems to render an invisible, baffling, complex process in a simple way to my grasping mind.
I liked the diagram for what it implied more than the lesson I was supposed to derive from it, though. When the reader’s attention struck the stylistic surface, we were supposed to pay attention to the line that deflected off the surface. That line held the significance of style, the “how” of writing rather than the “what.” That line runs parallel to other lines we’ve studied like “the medium is the message” or “discourse is socially constructed.” Of course, in order for that attention line in the diagram to truly be representative, it should have bounced back to the reader. As it is diagrammed, the attention line just shoots off into empty space. Unless the reader’s attention to style line is returned to him somehow . . .
I know any diagram is a representation and simplification of reality and I shouldn’t be so picky. If the reader had squarely faced his text, the “at” line would have returned at a ninety degree angle and would have been indistinguishable from the “reader” line and Lanham’s point would have been lost. But I’m not really bothered by that—at least, not too much.
The thing that I really like about the diagram was that the reader’s attention line passed through the stylistic surface at all. That language can pass “through” at all that it has a referential function seemed the major point. To me, the world of theory is one where the influence of postmodernism is so strong that any theorist who even hints at a shared world instantly becomes a hero—just implying an “objective” reality made me more comfortable with his focus on style.
Much of Lanham’s work seems to fall under the social constructivist rubric. Like postmodernists, the social constructivists says that language is a series of signs. Meaning is constructed of language so that so that discourse communities are ones that share understanding by agreeing on the meaning of certain words. But where the social contructivists differ from the postmodernists is in the real of referentiality. Beyond that system of signs, the social constructivist assumes an objective world we all share. It is an assumption that isn’t always apparent in the complexity of their focus on the constructed nature of humans and reality, but it is there, thank goodness.
I liked the diagram for what it implied more than the lesson I was supposed to derive from it, though. When the reader’s attention struck the stylistic surface, we were supposed to pay attention to the line that deflected off the surface. That line held the significance of style, the “how” of writing rather than the “what.” That line runs parallel to other lines we’ve studied like “the medium is the message” or “discourse is socially constructed.” Of course, in order for that attention line in the diagram to truly be representative, it should have bounced back to the reader. As it is diagrammed, the attention line just shoots off into empty space. Unless the reader’s attention to style line is returned to him somehow . . .
I know any diagram is a representation and simplification of reality and I shouldn’t be so picky. If the reader had squarely faced his text, the “at” line would have returned at a ninety degree angle and would have been indistinguishable from the “reader” line and Lanham’s point would have been lost. But I’m not really bothered by that—at least, not too much.
The thing that I really like about the diagram was that the reader’s attention line passed through the stylistic surface at all. That language can pass “through” at all that it has a referential function seemed the major point. To me, the world of theory is one where the influence of postmodernism is so strong that any theorist who even hints at a shared world instantly becomes a hero—just implying an “objective” reality made me more comfortable with his focus on style.
Much of Lanham’s work seems to fall under the social constructivist rubric. Like postmodernists, the social constructivists says that language is a series of signs. Meaning is constructed of language so that so that discourse communities are ones that share understanding by agreeing on the meaning of certain words. But where the social contructivists differ from the postmodernists is in the real of referentiality. Beyond that system of signs, the social constructivist assumes an objective world we all share. It is an assumption that isn’t always apparent in the complexity of their focus on the constructed nature of humans and reality, but it is there, thank goodness.
Monday, March 2, 2009
the rhetoric of computers and all
The part of Mr. Burns discussion I enjoyed most was his retelling of his discovery of Aristotle’s Rhetoric. He had left the Air Force, gone to college, taught for awhile. He looked at his student’s papers and didn’t feel like they were any better at the end of class than they were at the beginning. He was having his doubts about what composition was, what he was trying to teach. I felt some real sympathy for his position at that point—confusion about where one fits between theory and practice, an existential moment between one’s personal past and future. It was like we were both sitting on the same branch in the tree of knowledge—high enough up that a fall was going to be painful, but absolutely no confidence about how to proceed through the tangle of branches overhead.
And then somebody gave him Aristotle and it was a revelation, everything was made clear. The roots of the educational system with its division between arts and sciences had been growing in Greece and they still supported the tree of knowledge. Aristotle’s Rhetoric broke down language into its component parts and that analysis was still valid. The world was arranged in words and those words were arranged by logic. All the disparate facts of the world, all the disparate facts of Burn's life began to make sense. The world was an atomistic arrangement of meme’s that were held together by logic. The memes were like brain cells in the universal mind of man that was still thinking the world into being.
Of course, what I heard Burns say and what Mr. Burns thought he was saying are almost assuredly two different things. But in that moment, sitting on the same branch with him looking down, I did share his assurance that the tree wasn’t simply a trunk balancing on the hard ground. That it did have roots and that it had organically developed to this height. It was “of a piece” with the past.
But then Mr. Burns extrapolated that past into the future and computers and I was suddenly on the branch alone. The rest of the lecture, he was like a squirrel rustling in the leaves, jumping from branch to branch, teasing the old dog I’d become, suddenly wondering all over again what the hell I was doing sitting in a tree.
Okay, time to abandon this metaphor. They say confession is good for the soul, so here goes: I have an old dude’s fear of computers. No matter how many times I hear that hear that computers are simply a tool to dig through a pile of facts, I always feel like I’m digging with an ice pick instead of a shovel.
Okay, back to the tree metaphor. I don’t want to encourage this steak of self pity. In fairness, I did catch a few phrases from those rustling leaves that did orient me a bit to my place in the tree. It was reassuring to listen to someone who understood the relationship of people to computers. I was reassured to learn that a human being (who seemed like a nice guy) was actually doing the programming, telling the computer how to behave. I also like the thought that the reasoning he used to tell this computer how to think was in some fundamental of a piece with the reasoning that Aristotle used.
I’m sorry I missed you all at the restaurant. I walked through at about eight thirty and the place was so crowded I thought you’d probably gone somewhere else. I should have known they’d stick English majors in back room, I guess. I would definitely have liked to put an even more human face on these machines.
And then somebody gave him Aristotle and it was a revelation, everything was made clear. The roots of the educational system with its division between arts and sciences had been growing in Greece and they still supported the tree of knowledge. Aristotle’s Rhetoric broke down language into its component parts and that analysis was still valid. The world was arranged in words and those words were arranged by logic. All the disparate facts of the world, all the disparate facts of Burn's life began to make sense. The world was an atomistic arrangement of meme’s that were held together by logic. The memes were like brain cells in the universal mind of man that was still thinking the world into being.
Of course, what I heard Burns say and what Mr. Burns thought he was saying are almost assuredly two different things. But in that moment, sitting on the same branch with him looking down, I did share his assurance that the tree wasn’t simply a trunk balancing on the hard ground. That it did have roots and that it had organically developed to this height. It was “of a piece” with the past.
But then Mr. Burns extrapolated that past into the future and computers and I was suddenly on the branch alone. The rest of the lecture, he was like a squirrel rustling in the leaves, jumping from branch to branch, teasing the old dog I’d become, suddenly wondering all over again what the hell I was doing sitting in a tree.
Okay, time to abandon this metaphor. They say confession is good for the soul, so here goes: I have an old dude’s fear of computers. No matter how many times I hear that hear that computers are simply a tool to dig through a pile of facts, I always feel like I’m digging with an ice pick instead of a shovel.
Okay, back to the tree metaphor. I don’t want to encourage this steak of self pity. In fairness, I did catch a few phrases from those rustling leaves that did orient me a bit to my place in the tree. It was reassuring to listen to someone who understood the relationship of people to computers. I was reassured to learn that a human being (who seemed like a nice guy) was actually doing the programming, telling the computer how to behave. I also like the thought that the reasoning he used to tell this computer how to think was in some fundamental of a piece with the reasoning that Aristotle used.
I’m sorry I missed you all at the restaurant. I walked through at about eight thirty and the place was so crowded I thought you’d probably gone somewhere else. I should have known they’d stick English majors in back room, I guess. I would definitely have liked to put an even more human face on these machines.
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