Mar 04
Charles BivonaTeaching Writing/Writing Teaching Composition Pedagogy, John Trimbur, Richard Rorty
John Trimbur expresses his distaste for Richard Rorty’s concept of the Abnormal Discourse with this bear of a sentence:
At just the point where we could name the conversation and its underlying consensus as a technology of power and ask how its practices enable and constrain the production of knowledge, privilege and exclude forms of discourse, set its agenda by ignoring or suppressing others, Rorty builds a self-correcting mechanism into the conversation, an invisible hand to keep the discourse circulating and things from going stale.
This is the role of the professional rabble rouser. I know. I am one. I follow Buddha, Socrates, Nietzsche. This world is starving for polemics! There are too many sacred cows. The human conversation is dying. Someone needs to stand up and raise arguments, question self appointed authority, start some controversy.
I’ll start one. I think the attempt to formulate writing instruction is woefully misguided. I believe that truly effective writing instruction—whatever that is—can only be done in a one on one conversation. I believe this is a necessary first step to an eventual writing community.
Thrusting unsure writers into a peer group is traumatizing. At best this “throwing them into the pool” theory of writing instruction doesn’t work, and, at worst, it leads to these obsessive attempts at codifying and leveling. Human life is unfair and imbalanced. How can a classroom not be?
For example, Trimbur’s argument:
Rorty’s view of abnormal discourse is, I think, a problematical one. On one hand, it identifies abnormal discourse with a romantic realm of thinking the unthinkable, of solitary voices calling out, of the imagination cutting against the grain. In keeping with this romantic figure of thought, Rorty makes abnormal discourse the activity par excellence not of the group but of the individual-the genius, the rebel, the fool, “someone . . . who is ignorant of … conventions or sets them aside.” This side of abnormal discourse, moreover, resists formulation. There is, Rorty says, “no discipline which describes it, any more than there is a discipline devoted to a study of the unpredictable, or of ‘creativity’” (Philosophy 320). It is simply “generated by free and leisured conversation . . . as the sparks fly up” (321).
Did you miss that very important point? Here it is: “This side of abnormal discourse resists formulation.”
Trimbur accuses Rorty of “keeping with [a] Romantic Discourse,” yet he clings to a scientific discourse that insists on formulating everything. Maybe some things are just ineffable.
[Great! See, now I'm stuck in the Romantic Discourse. Just lovely.]
But I digress. My questions:
- Isn’t Trimbur trying to impose his discourse on Rorty by insisting that writing pedagogy be precisely formulizable so it can be packaged and delivered to classrooms across the world?
- Have we really lost this much respect for individual writing processes?
- Are we truly unable to give beginning writers one on one instruction, or is it simply too expensive?
- If it is about money, shouldn’t we be writing and complaining about that?
Just my humble thoughts as a burgeoning scholar.
Citation
“Consensus and Difference in Collaborative Learning”
Author(s): John Trimbur
Source: College English, Vol. 51, No. 6 (Oct., 1989), pp. 602-616
Published by: National Council of Teachers of English
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/377955
Accessed: 30/01/2010 14:33
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Mar 04
Charles BivonaTeaching Writing/Writing Teaching John Trimbur, Kenneth Bruffee
How we teach, Bruffee suggests, is what we teach.
For Bruffee, pedagogy is not a neutral practice of transmitting knowledge from one place to another, from the teacher’s head to the students’.
The pedagogical project that Bruffee initiated in the early seventies calls into question the dynamics of cultural reproduction in the classroom, a process that normally operates, as it were, behind our backs.
What before had seemed commonsensical became in Bruffee’s reading of the classroom as a social text a set of historically derived practices-an atomized and authoritarian culture that mystifies the production of knowledge and reproduces hierarchical relations of power and domination.
Bruffee’s formulation of collaborative learning in the early seventies offers an implicit critique of the culture of the classroom, the sovereignty of the teacher, the reification of knowledge, the atomized authority-dependence of students, and the competitiveness and intellectual hoarding encouraged by the traditional reward system and the wider meritocratic order in higher education.
In his early work, Bruffee sees collaborative learning as part of a wider movement for participatory democracy, shared decision-making, and nonauthoritarian styles of leadership and group life.
“In the world which surrounds the classroom,” Bruffee says in 1973, “people today are challenging and revising many social and political traditions which have heretofore gone unquestioned”; if education has been resistant to collaboration, “[e]lsewhere, everywhere, collaborative action increasingly pervades our society” (“Collaborative Learning” 634).
In Bruffee’s account, collaborative learning occurs–along with free universities, grass-roots organizing, the consciousness-raising groups of women’s liberation, the anti-war movement, and so on-as a moment in the cultural history of the sixties, the name we now give to signify delegitimation of power and the search for alternative forms of social and political life.
I think it is not accidental that collaborative learning emerged initially within open admissions programs, as part of a wider response to political pressures from below to extend literacy and access to higher education to black, Hispanic, and working- class people who had formerly been excluded.
From the late seventies to the present, Bruffee has asked what it means to reorganize the social relations in the classroom and how the decentering of authority that takes place in collaborative learning might change the way we talk about the nature of liberal education and the authority of knowledge and its institutions.
Citation
“Consensus and Difference in Collaborative Learning”
Author(s): John Trimbur
Source: College English, Vol. 51, No. 6 (Oct., 1989), pp. 602-616
Published by: National Council of Teachers of English
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/377955
Accessed: 30/01/2010 14:33
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Feb 10
Charles BivonaTeaching Writing/Writing Teaching
Charles Bivona: Here are some of my thoughts. The Buddhist composition instructor strives to develop pedagogical compassion and empathy. Compassion for what these struggling novice writers are enduring, and sincere empathy born from sharing in that struggle.
Yes, if one wants to teach writing, one must always be writing. One can not sell a practice, a state of mind, without believing in it. A writing instructor who doesn’t write every day is tantamount to a proselytizing Catholic who never goes to church, a dancing instructor who never dances, a chef who avoids the stove.
Am I wrong?
Erec Smith: No, you are not wrong, but your simile toward the end proves that “practicing what you preach” isn’t just a Buddhist moral. The way you begin this, with Buddhist composition instructor’s compassion and empathy to help struggling writers, is indicative of the role of a bodhisattva, that spiritually endowed person who puts his or her own spiritual enlightenment on hold in order to help others. What can you do with that?
Charles Bivona: What the bodhisattva metaphor leads to is the argument that only world class writers should teach writing, no? The bodhisattva postpones his own enlightenment, stops short of moving into complete Buddha consciousness. The bodhisattva postpones Buddhahood out of sheer compassion for others. I assume it has something to do with the human capacity for socialization. I mean, if I discovered the method to instant enlightenment, Erec, I would at least have to dash you off some email instructions before my consciousness became one with everything. So my question is this: what “enlightenment” are we, as writing instructors/bodhisattvas, putting on hold in order to help our students? The answer, to me, seems to be, we are postponing being professional writers. So, writing instructors should at least have the potential to be a professional writer, but at best be someone who is trying to write professionally on a part-time basis. Does that sound right?
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