Week of 3/31

Ong: “Writing is a Technology that Restructures Thought”

Summary:
Ong begins by claiming that viewing writing as a purely mechanical skill “distorts our understanding of what is human” (19). For Ong, writing is a technology we “interiorize” and whose influence on us is largely unconsciously experienced (19). Ong begins by comparing orality and literacy and the cultures that emerge from them, characterizing oral culture as primarily conservative and writing as an “intrusion” into the oral cultures that preceded it. He says that Plato’s criticisms of writing elide the fact that “his philosophically analytic thought . . . was possible only because of the effects writing was having on mental processes” (22).

For Ong, writing initiated more “drastic” changes in human consciousness than print and electronics. Ong next outlines two paradoxes of written text. First, although written text seems inert and lifeless, it may be resurrected and deployed in countless contexts. Second, the meaning of written text depends on the priority of spoken language. And, writing is, on Ong’s view, “completely artificial” in the sense that it must be learned (23). It is transformative in the sense that it can be used to express what could not otherwise be expressed.

Next, Ong says that one of the effects of writing is the way it divides many things in many ways. A significant effect is that it can separate the known from the knower, eventually leading to the idea that knowledge is an object that is separate from the knower, but it is not itself knowledge. Another characteristic is that writing requires interpretation. Writing changes the context of communication and requires a sort of “precision” that oral communication does not. It “separates the past from the present” (26), the writer from the reader, administration from other social practices, logic from rhetoric, academic learning from wisdom, grapholects from one another, “high” from “low” language, and being from time. Its divisive effects become more pronounced as “its form becomes more abstract” (28). Print and electronic forms intensify the transformative potentials of writing, and computers impose another consciousness—that of the programmer—between subjects and objects.

Finally, Ong asserts that the increasing distancing entailed by writing, print, and electronics enables recuperation of “empathetic identification . . . at the level of conscious reflectivity” (31).

Musings:
I love articles that send me to the dictionary. “Noetic: of or relating to mental activity or the intellect” (OAD). Yay! A new word!

While Ong is in a sense correct that orality is antecedent to literacy, things aren’t that simple (I’m not sure Ong would say they are either). I’ve been wondering how oral and literate discursive traditions exist alongside each other and interact within, between, and among cultures. I’m thinking about African American folk traditions and the consciousness-raising tradition of the early second-wave feminist movement. But I’m also thinking about songs, nursery rhymes, jump rope jingles, and modernist poetry, which absorbs and adapts transnational oral traditions to its own purposes.

Ong’s statement that “any understanding of a text involves interpretation” confirms a point I tried to make in class on Monday: that the text-based interactions between students and teachers involves interpretation on both parts, and thus composition theory would benefit from attention to the interpretive theories of literary criticism, rather than viewing itself as separate from them as I have gotten the impression it often does.

Grading and commenting always involve reading, and reading always involves interpretation. Reading instructor comments always involves interpretation. Acts of composition involve going back to what one has already written, and that involves reading and interpretation. In other words, writing always involves reading, and reading always involves interpretation

Instructors must understand what they are doing when they read/interpret student writing; they must understand the way(s) they construct meaning out of students’ texts. And students ought to have some inkling that part of what they’re doing as they write is going back to what they’ve written and interpreting it and hopefully revising it on the basis of those interpretive acts. And, Ong makes a really significant point on this issue when he says that “writing distances the source of the communication (the writer) from the recipient (the reader), both in time and in space” (26). This, of course, implies that writers are constructing more than one identity as they write: they construct themselves as writers, and they construct themselves as readers. I think that it’s only by constructing oneself as both that one can truly enter into language and construct oneself as a member of a particular discourse community. Thus, as we try to teach writing, we must consider the role(s) reading and interpretive practices play in composing and in grading.

Since I’ve already written so much, I’ll refrain from talking at length about my suspicions of oversimplification when one speaks of a separation between the knower and the known, the subject and the object. I’ll just say that subject/object is always a mediated (and mutually constitutive?) relationship and that separations between them strike me as illusions at best.

Flower and Hayes: “A Cognitive Process Theory of Writing”

Summary:
Flower and Hayes discuss some of the complications that arise when composing is characterized as a “series of decisions and choices” (273). They begin by articulating some of the questions this characterization raises, and they note that the answers to the questions change depending on other presuppositions. They opt to begin by examining the writing process to see what really happens when people write. They introduce a theory based on the cognitive processes involved in writing. This theory focuses on four “key points” (274). They next move to address each of these points in turn.

Flower and Hayes first address the idea that writing is “best understood as a set of distinctive thinking processes which writers orchestrate or organize during the act of composing” (275), an idea that they contrast with stage models of writing. They show that while the stage model focuses on the progress of the product, the process model focuses on the writer, thus enabling us to compare the practices and strategies of different writers by studying actual writers as they write using “thinking aloud protocols” (277). This model identifies three elements that correspond to three processes, yet unlike stage models, this model does not posit any particular order in which the processes are enacted. Processes can overlap and writers can return to any process at any time. They examine the ways each element contributes to the overall process of composition.

The authors next turn to the implications of their model as a tool for researchers. They say that writers “simply embed individual processes as needed . . . to help carry out the task at hand” (284). Writers often embed processes unconsciously. Nevertheless, Flower and Hayes say, merely identifying embedding practices does not explain “what guides the writers’ decisions and choices and gives an overall purposeful structure to composing” (286).

Turning to the third point, which focuses on writers’ networks of content goals, Flower and Hayes show how discovery and goal-directed writing are connected. They acknowledge that knowledge, text, and goals both compete and collaborate during the writing process. They demonstrate that their model is not incompatible with the idea of writing as a means to knowledge development by showing how “writers create their own goals” in part by revising their goals in light of what they have learned while writing (290). Finally, they discuss the three goal patterns they’ve identified —“Explore and Consolidate,” “State and Develop,” and “Write and Regenerate.”

Musings:
I continue to remain wary of models based on psychological universalism. Perhaps most importantly for me, this model does not accurately reflect how I write, so I wonder how many other students do not write this way either. And, if language constrains and shapes thought, I wonder whether reliance on this model might not introduce new difficulties to those who whose first language—the language in which they think—is neither SAE nor academic English. Do they write and then translate? I know that many of them do. I know that many students whose first language is English approach academic discourse as one might approach a foreign language in which one is not proficient. Well, if one must translate everything, one doesn’t really come to feel competent, does one? And I, for one, hate doing things at which I never come to feel more competent. So, it seems to me that this model might just encourage our students to fear and hate writing even more than they already do when they walk into the room.

Moreover, this model is hierarchical, so it seems to me that teaching practices based on it might encourage students to continue to view writing as a series of discrete steps that must be moved through linearly. Then, as I’ve said before, what we produce are writers who continue to view writing as a series of little sub-products, each of which must be completed (and might be graded) before they can move on to the next step. Even though they say that their model acknowledges writing’s recursiveness, I don’t think they really capture it.

In fact, I’m growing increasingly wary about having students hand in “drafts” because I’m concerned about fostering the idea of writing as a series of linear steps that culiminate in the “presentation copy.” I’ve started going back over my old essays to see how I wrote in 101 (I keep everything!). I don’t think I ever wrote this way, and because I knew I’d be handing drafts in, I think I spent an awful lot of time polishing early on in the writing process, time that might have been better spent on developing ideas.

Bizzell: “Cognition, Convention, Clarity: What We Need to Know about Writing”

Summary:
Bizzell notes that the ways we have come to see writing problems as thinking problems largely because we have tended to pay no attention to students’ thinking. Now, she says, for various reasons, we have come to recognize that we must attend in new ways to the relationship between thinking and writing. She says that while compositionists agree about some fundamentals about language and language acquisition, they disagree about which of them apply to composition. She divides compositionists into camps based on whether they see writing as fundamentally inner- or outer-directed.

Inner-directed theorists see writing as one possible end of a linear process, each stage of which depends on the “same basic logical structures” (389). Thus, this structuralist model presumes that if teachers guide students through the stages, students will arrive at a point where they internalize the patterns that will enable them to approach specific writing situations, with audience analysis playing a primary role in revising and shaping writing.

Outer-directed theorists hold that the universal structures of language and thought cannot be taught and that the structures are always embedded in a social context that “conditions them” (390). One is always already embedded in at least one discourse community, and one cannot think what one has no word for. For these theorists, the primary goal is to teach students the conventions of academic discourse, to “ease” them into the academic discourse community by illuminating conventions and patterns that it has in common with discourse communities of which students are already members.

According to Bizzell, we need to consider the insights of both inner- and outer-directed theories. She provides an example of how inner-directed models can be enriched by outer-directed critique. She begins by summarizing Flower and Hayes’ model. Then she analyzes its shortcomings by turning to Vygotsky and sociolinguistics to fill in the gaps in the “translating box” (396). She shows that meaning is partly established by the conventions of discourse and thus the phrase “putting meaning into words” cannot adequately describe what occurs when we write and for the situatedness of writing. For Bizzell, discourse communities are akin to Fish’s interpretive communities.

Bizzell offers a nuanced understanding of writing as problem-solving that accounts for its situatedness and its function of “doing (intellectual) work in the world” (403). Bizzell also incorporates an interrogation of the quest for certainty that the use of a scientific model of writing evokes, pointing out the shortcomings with the protocol method and the underlying (and problematic) presupposition that certainty is achievable through the scientific method

Musings:
Well, I hadn’t read this when I wrote about Flower and Hayes. Since I made some of her criticisms myself, it should be clear that I think this model has lots more to offer. And thank goodness someone has finally said that we can have ideas for which we don’t have words! Those are, I think, the most creative, risky, and interesting ideas we have.

Her idea that students can “go native” in academic discourse communities and still maintain other aspects of their identities is one that I share, as is the notion that academic discourse communities can never be free of ideology. Brava! I’ll almost certainly be using this for my paper.

“Distributed Cognition at Work”

Summary:
Distributed cognition is the idea that intellectual interactions with others are not merely guides and stimulants, but “actually vehicles of thought” (136). It is dynamic “cognitive partnership” (136).

The author prefaces his/her account of distributed cognition at work in the BOC by discussing how it applies to a university setting in order to compare the university and the workplace as sites of writing. S/he distinguishes between distributed cognition and socially shared knowledge. The former takes place in the classroom and the latter in the overall institution.

Moving to the BOC, the author makes use of Hutchins’ ship analogy to explain distributed cognition in the workplace. S/he shows the ways that a ship is organized as the workplace is and some ways in which it differs. The main idea here is that the activities of an organization are “shaped by” their “primary goals” (140).

Decision-making at BOC is a complicated process, dependent on conventional genres, conventional lexicons, conventional approaches to data, conventional experiential categories, conventional logical warrants, and a standardized analytical instrument. The model generated by the interactions of these component parts is monitored and revised depending of changes in circumstances. Each genre entails its own characteristic narrative style, level of generalization, and goals. Policy decisions are based on analysis and interpretation of the input from different levels. Additionally, public and institutionally private genres play a part in the framing of problems and solutions.

Finally, the author notes that there are significant differences between the interactions of workers “in even hierarchical structures” and the interactions between teachers and students, because “until the highest levels of schooling, and in most classes, there is little expectation that students will contribute to the ongoing activity of the classroom in the way that fellow workers do” (148-149).

Musings:
While I think that the notion of “distributed cognition” is an interesting one, it seems odd to think about either academic or workplace writing and reasoning as universalizable situations. For instance, not all workplaces (in fact most peoples’ workplaces) are not corporations whose activities have national and/or international ramifications, nor are they all ordered as vertically as is BOC. Nor are all postsecondary academic settings organized as major research universities are. I’m not convinced that these two forms of social organization are analogous enough for a comparison of them to offer the insights that the author thinks s/he has established. For one thing, the author equivocates between the university and the classroom when s/he talks about educational activity. More importantly, the author focuses on the goals and activities of the overall institution when talking about BOC and those of the classroom when discussing education. This shifting focus undermines the analogy, even for comparative purposes. Most importantly, classrooms and corporate workplaces are not hierarchical in the same ways, and the author needs that for the analogy to hold in the way that s/he needs it to.

I’m even less convinced of the characterization of postsecondary education offered in this article than I am of the aptness of the analogy. I don’t think of “the university’s primary purpose as to accredit or to rank students” (136). If that’s the primary purpose of the university, why do we bother to offer classes? This reminds me of Linda Howard’s (one of the Regents) statement during a forum at CSN, when she said that “The only job of teachers is to boost students’ self-esteem.” I asked why schools didn’t, if that was the case, give us all A’s and send us home with degrees. I’ll ask the same question here. Can’t schools just charge a fee, rank students, and send us off? Why don’t schools just test us and issue degrees? Why don’t they just sell degrees? (I know, some do.) It may seem strange to others, but I no more think of the primary business of postsecondary education as issuing degrees than I think of students as customers.

Assessment and number of degrees granted might be administrators’ primary concern, but they aren’t mine. As both a student and as an instructor, I think of assessment as an onerous distraction from the things we’re trying to do together in the classroom. As both a student and as an instructor, I think of those who join me in the classroom as fellow workers in the activity of trying to make sense of the world and to construct new spaces within it for ourselves and for the activities we find worthwhile and engaging. In a very important sense, that means that we are fellow travelers. That is, what students need largely conditions my activity.

I do understand that hierarchy is built in to the classroom in ways that cannot be eradicated, but by making the constraints upon our activities as transparent as I can, I acknowledge the power relations inherent in the organization of the classroom. And, I try to engage student input into both content and process in every way I can think of. Students have a voice in what we read and in what topics we cover, and they have an opportunity at the end of every class to talk about the process of that particular class and how it went so that we can work together to improve our collective experience in future classes. Furthermore, for students afraid to voice their concerns in a face-to-face setting, I provide two other mechanisms for students to evaluate classes and our collective performance: They can drop a note into an envelope left in my mailbox for that purpose, or they can use an email account I have set up with a free service to send me a note. I will provide both the login and the password to every student in the class so that it can be easily accessed and feedback can remain anonymous. The only constraint I insist upon in feedback is that it may not involve ad hominem attacks.

Strangely, I think that the primary concern of the university is learning (notice I didn’t say “teaching”). I think that every other activity that goes on at a university ought to facilitate learning on some level and about some aspect of the experience of being human. Even research. Students are the most important people at the institution, and their needs ought to guide the rest of the activity tat takes place there.

Furthermore, the conception of education endorsed in this article presupposes that students are all the same, that they all learn in the same way, that they all have the same goals in mind, and that understanding knowledge as an object doesn’t involve reification. As far as I’m concerned, this is all crazy talk! Not really an expression usually associated with academic discourse, but this is, after all, a web log, which is a form of journal, and journals are, at least sometimes, free of the constraints of more formal academic writing. Perhaps it’s too emotional of me, but I’m finding it very difficult to think in any color other than red. In fact, I found it very difficult to keep reading through the scarlet veil that dropped over that sentence.

Here’s another one that really set me off: “A student who does not hand in his [sic] work does not impede the operation of the university. (In fact, he [sic] eases the instructor’s task of grading.) (148). Now that could only have been written by someone who has tenure, by someone whose job and/or funding is not in some way contingent upon good retention figures. Because for those of us who face pressure (implicit or explicit) to ensure that students neither drop nor fail our classes, students who do not hand in work DO impede our abilities to do our jobs. And that, my friends, impedes the operation of the university, however it is conceived. Grading is more difficult, not easier, if one knows that too many low grades or withdrawals can mean the loss of a job or of funding to continue with one’s own education. I know of at least one instructor who never gives students less than a C if they finish the semester; no matter what kind of or how much work a particular student has done, s/he will receive a C if s/he remains enrolled in this instructor’s class until the end of the semester. Appalling, don’t you think? And, if the university is conceived as primarily a degree-granting (ranking) business, undermining ranking, as this instructor’s practice does, impedes the primary activity of the institution. There’s no way around that.

This article’s idea of what goes on in the classroom is so much like what Freire calls the “banking concept of education,” what I call the “scarf and barf” method of education, that I cannot see what premises its author and I could possibly have in common regarding what goes on in educational settings. Since it is a commonplace in logic that if participants in a conversation share no premises, the conversation cannot continue in any meaningful way, I guess I’ll close here.

Peace all around.