Topic: What are the three most important concepts in composition would you say? These concepts might play a role in your teaching philosophy, so you might think of this question as what are the three most important beliefs about your own teaching do you have?
I've been struggling with this question all week, and it's not getting any easier to answer. I've been teaching Freshman Comp for four years now, which is just long enough for me to realize that I have many more questions than answers regarding what works and what doesn't. That said, regardless of what experiments I have tried (for example, focusing more on grammar or more on style, incorporating more peer reviewing or more freewriting), I find that certain things remain constant: critical reading/critical thinking, the rhetorical situation, and community. I believe these three things are related, but for the sake of convenience, I will try to discuss them separately.
I am not even sure if we can teach critical thinking, and if we can, I am even more skeptical about our ability to measure success. However, I am fairly certain that we can't expect our students to be critical thinkers unless we can help them become critical readers (and here I include critical viewers, listeners, etc.). I think that by the time we reach college age, we have all developed critical skills, but in many cases we haven't learned to apply them in a wide variety of contexts, and perhaps we haven't learned to apply them self-reflexively and systematically. I spend some time in almost every class helping students develop these skills. These activities provide the opportunity to consider topics such as organization, coherence, evidence, and logic, which I hope (though success is certainly not guaranteed!) that students will begin to model in their own writing. Assuming critical reading can ultimately lead to critical thinking, why do I think it's important? Just take a look at the level of public discourse surrounding any number of topics (global warming, Iraq, abortion, the PATRIOT act, just to name a few). I have to believe (Yes, I am still an idealist.) that if more people had better critical thinking skills, we would demand and receive a higher level of public discourse and would be better able to participate in democratic decision-making.
I can't privilege any one component of the rhetorical situation. The writer, purpose, message, and audience form a dynamic system that must be considered as a whole. In conjunction with the critical reading assignments described above, I help students learn how to identify the components of the rhetorical situation. The emphasis here is to help them see the dynamic nature of this balance of forces, so they are not tempted to rely solely on formulas (like the five-paragraph essay) when faced with a particular writing situation.
Before I discuss community, I have to confess that I consider writing a very private act. This may have something to do with my personality, but I have always found the idea of the writer holed up in a garret hammering away at a typewriter very appealing. I certainly have never felt comfortable in "writer's circles" or other peer reviewing sessions. Nonetheless, I believe that emphasizing community and collaboration is very important. Years of working on collaborative technical writing teams have helped dispel my romantic notion of the "lone writer" somewhat. I recognize that much of the writing that my students will do will be as part of some sort of community. And in spite of the resistance I often get from students when I assign collaborative work or peer reviewing, I think that most of my students are actually ahead of me in this area. Partially because of new communication technology (text messaging, cell phones, etc.) they are often much more comfortable sharing their work at all phases of the writing process. In addition to emphasizing community discussion of critical reading assignments, I am working to incorporate more (and more meaningful) peer review into my syllabus.
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3 comments:
You're in a good place, Marc. That is, it's good to be stepping into this field theoretically now after working practically in it for a while. I suspect you'll find some of our readings will reinforce what you've been doing. Error, for instance, and how to deal with it, is an ongoing discussion that has some very interesting history.
Defining what critical thinking is, alone, is very difficult. Then, to know that you've taught it... yikes. Might be interested in the concept of "transfer." Looking forward, too, to your take on writing as an individual act. That is something central to the 80s in composition theory, but not so much so in the 90s and in the last few years. You might look up Stephen North's The Making of Knowledge from around 1970, for instance.
I am very intrigued, Marc, by the incredibly romantic ideal of "the writer in his or her tower," plugging away in isolation. I wouldn't go so far as to say that is a contradiction, but it is certainly an intriguing juxtaposition when it comes to thinking about how that meshes with the classroom and learning writing in a community setting. It isn't something that I had ever articulated for myself or my classes, but now you have me second guessing myself...or at least questioning what I had previously just accepted -- that the writer in isolation doesn't necessarily contradict our current classroom structures. I think that, with technology, you can accomplish both even moreso (and that's why I look forward to next week's readings & posts).
Hey Marc,
Your post gets me thinking. I am with you on the importance of critical thinking, but I have tended to take (what I see now) a "growth" approach to writing that has priveledged a sequence of expressive to analytic writing. I only now am seeing the roots of that in Britton and Moffet. Thus, I have tended to have students write with their experience as the "text" to read to begin with--then move them to more analytic writing based on readings. I know the read-write connection is important, but I shy away from having my class become a reading class (especially if it is literature). So I will make the main text of my Fresh Comp I class other student writing (with some other supplementary texts and some research), but my 1302 text will be more directly based on reading and critical analysis of reading. I know it may be off base, but that is how I have approached comp.
I'm really interested in the notion of phronesis as a word for critical thinking.
Good stuff.
~L
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