Annotated Bibliography Draft

After much agonizing, I decided to focus on social construction (a) because it peripherally relates to my dissertation topic in the rhetoric of science and (b) because the more I think about it, the more I realize that anti-foundationalist thinking has informed my thought and teaching since I was an anthropology grad student way back in the previous millennium.

Here are my first ten sources. Summaries and critiques should be complete by Monday.

Bizzell, Patricia. “Beyond Anti-Foundationalism to Rhetorical Authority: Problems Defining "Cultural Literacy".” College English. 52 (1990): 661-675.

Summary: Using the controversy surrounding Hirsch’s “cultural literacy” as a jumping-off point, Bizzell examines some shortcomings she finds in the anti-foundational approach to teaching composition. Specifically, she argues that most anti-foundationalists are stuck in what she calls the “philosophical” mode of thinking. They can point out the futility of seeking foundational truths, but beyond criticism, they can only recommend individual autonomy, or, at best, pluralism. Bizzell agrees that truths are socially constructed rather than foundational, but she thinks compositionists need not abandon their responsibility to help students learn how to participate consensually in building cultural literacy. As a more positive alternative, Bizzell suggests that composition instructors adopt a stance of “rhetorical authority” in which they take an ideological stand and force students to respond rhetorically in an attempt to build consensus around the proposed issues.

Critique: The strongest parts of this article are Bizzell’s rejection of the idea that there is a fixed notion of cultural literacy and her depiction of the shortcomings of the criticisms of Hirsch’s position posited by other anti-foundational critics. I found her proposed alternative thought-provoking, but she left me wanting more details. I agree that our ultimate goal is to help students be better citizens, but she needed to provide more information about how the consensus-building process would work, specifically dealing with issues of dissent, power, etc.

Bruffee, Kenneth A. “Social Construction, Language, and the Authority of Knowledge: A Bibliographical Essay.” College English. 48 (1986): 773-790.

Summary: In this article, Bruffee does a great job of tracing the roots of social construction, explaining its basic tenets, and then giving examples of how social construction has manifested itself in various disciplines. Bruffee focuses on the work of Kuhn and Rorty, who in turn were influenced by Dewey, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein. He offers reasons why compositionists should care about social construction: because they force us to examine our foundational presuppositions and beliefs, and consider the alternative explanation that all knowledge is socially constructed and provisional rather than cognitive and individual. He then explores various situational instances of social construction (he does not like pitting theory against practice): sociology, literary criticism, anthropology, and composition. In composition, the social constructionist views writing as primarily a social act. rejecting the notion that writing is primarily a cognitive process occurring in the individual mind.

Critique: As an overview and introduction, the article was easy to understand and thorough. I found the examples from disciplines other than composition especially helpful. Bruffee did a good job pointing out the kinds of problems that a non-foundationalist approach either solves or avoids (e.g., the “inner mirror” vs. the “real world”), but while he did acknowledge that social construction raises other types of problems, he avoided discussing them. I think the article would have been stronger if he had at least briefly considered a few of the principle criticisms of social construction. His Works Cited list is thorough and serves as an excellent starting point for a social construction reading list.

Cooper, Marilyn M. “The Ecology of Writing.” College English. 48 (1986): 364-375.

Summary: Cooper begins her article with a brief recap and criticism of the process-oriented approach to teaching writing, specifically the dominant individualist and cognitivist version of that approach. In place of this model, citing Bruffee, Bleich, and others, Cooper suggests that the components of the writing process are “essentially social activities, dependent on social structures and processes not only in their interpretive but also in their constructive phases” (366). Specifically, Cooper offers an ecological model, which describes the writing process as “an activity through which a person is continually engaged with a variety of socially constituted systems” (367).As an integral part of these systems, Cooper focuses on “real readers,” rejecting the notion that the writer must choose between an “audience addressed” or an “audience invoked.” Rather, the writer must strive to engage the real audience in dialog rather than simply treating the audience as a cognitive construct. Cooper recognizes that the ecological model she offers is an ideal model, but she cites its strength in allowing teachers to focus on the social situation as the locus of problems and challenges, rather than being forced to address the cognitive processes of the individual writer.

Critique: I found Cooper’s ideas thought-provoking. I admire the way she proposes a specific model for enacting social construction in the classroom. She discusses the types of questions such a model could address and provides examples of how students and teachers might go about addressing those questions in the classroom. Her discussion of audience is insightful, and I think she is right that removing the discussion of audience from the “cognitivist trap” makes a lot of problems disappear. However, while Cooper acknowledges that the “real audience” will not always be accessible, she doesn’t offer enough advice about how to handle those situations. Her Works Cited list is strong with regard to social construction and composition, but a bit weak in the ecology and systems theory area. I think she needs more discussion and more sources providing an overview of ecological models applied to non-biological systems before describing her own model. I have a pretty strong background in these areas, but I suspect most of her “real audience” does not.

Elbow, Peter. “Reflections on Academic Discourse: How It Relates to Freshmen and Colleagues.” College English. 53 (1991): 135-155.

Summary: Always the expressionist (!), Elbow offers his musings on the necessity of teaching academic discourse in Freshman Comp. Going beyond the arguments for and against such activity, Elbow demonstrates what a slippery fish the term “academic discourse” can be, depending on who is doing the defining. He considers definitions addressing both substantive and stylistic features of academic discourse, and ultimately settles on the importance of teaching substantive features (good reasons, critical inquiry, problem solving, etc.) over stylistic features. He provides specific examples of classroom activities designed to “teach” these aspects of academic discourse.

Critique: How does this fit into social construction, you might ask? Well, Elbow’s attempt to define academic discourse highlights the important role that discourse communities play in defining terms. It turns out there is no “foundational” definition of academic discourse. The whole concept is a social construct. Although we only have Elbow’s individual version of this concept, it is pretty clear that his relationship with and reaction to various discourse communities (students, composition colleagues, colleagues in other disciplines, etc.) have “defined” his various conceptions of academic discourse. The article itself is an excellent “deconstruction” of academic discourse: it has some of the hallmarks of academic discourse (headings, appears in a journal, citations, etc.) but is written in an almost informal, conversational style. It also successfully blends theory with suggestions for classroom practice. While many of the activities focus on the individual writer, the overall strategy is an ethnographic one, recognizing the social nature of “defining” academic discourse for the Freshman Comp community.

Freed, Richard C. and Glenn J Broadhead. “Discourse Communities, Sacred Texts, and Institutional Norms.” College Composition and Communication. 38 (1987): 154-165.

Summary: Freed and Broadhead look at discourse communities as a means of addressing some things overlooked by the “process” focus of composition studies. The authors use a case study of two corporate discourse communities to draw some conclusions that can be applied to teaching composition. Of particular importance is the way rhetoric is shaped by and helps shape the discourse community. Both the writer and reader are parts of the community and are guided by cultural, institutional, generic, and situational norms, which are in turn further shaped by their discourse. The authors recommend that the students take an ethnographic approach to understanding the ways these norms affect (and are affected by) their discourse in the classroom and in other discourse communities. Further, they recommend that teachers look at the way norms have shaped their choice of texts, pedagogical models, etc.

Critique: I thought the corporate example used by the authors to show discourse communities in action was easy to understand and fairly effective. I think most readers would be able to draw parallels between what occurs in the workplace and what could occur in the classroom. Further, it certainly can’t hurt to provide teachers with a view of the types of discourse communities students might expect to encounter after college. The weakest part of the article was the literature review. While the works cited were adequate, the theoretical introduction to social construction was too brief, and there was no real theoretical precedent cited for the validity of applying a case study from the corporate world to an academic context.

Killingsworth, M. Jimmie. “Product and Process, Literacy and Orality: An Essay on Composition and Culture.” College Composition and Communication. 44 (1993): 26-39.

Summary: In this article, Killingsworth tries to relate four key terms in composition research—product, process, literacy, and orality—in a new and more productive way. Rather than simply pitting these seemingly opposing terms against each other, he suggests a ratio to describe their relationship: product is to literacy as process is to orality. Killingsworth then uses this ratio to describe the evolution of composition studies over the past 50 years. In short, he sees the move to process pedagogy as a response to the emergence of secondary orality, which was spurred by mass media and the cultural revolution of the 60s. He then examines several trends in process pedagogy, including group writing, talk-aloud protocol, etc. In his concluding section, he examines the relationships among the cognitivists, romantic individualists, and social constructionists. He claims that the romantics and social constructionists have much in common with each other, focusing primarily on secondary orality, while the cognitivists are largely attempting to restore focus to literacy while recognizing how secondary orality has altered the definition of literacy. For this reason, Killingsworth departs from other scholars who place social construction at the end of the evolutionary scale. For him, recent forms of cognitivism that respond to social changes resulting from secondary orality represent the most recently evolved developments in composition theory. In addition to focusing on social construction as subject matter, Killingsworth’s article is grounded in the view that composition research is socially constructed, as can be seen in his concluding sentence: “If our rhetorical theories and empirical evidence fail to account for this popular interest, then we should look to ideology and the cultural context, in which a wistful longing for community and trustful dialogue contends with the tough-minded preference for accountability, productivity, and technocratic management” (38).

Critique: I found Killingsworth’s article useful in that it forces us to look at the ideological divides within composition from a different perspective. In terms of response to secondary orality, I think his alignment of romantics and social constructionists is probably accurate. Although I don’t think he intends to imply this, his article makes it seem like social constructionists have stopped evolving and that cognitivists have been forced to pick up the ball. This is similar to the criticism Bizzell levies against many social constructivists. However, I think some “radical” social constructivists (Myers, for example, as well as Bizzell, herself) have refocused on literacy. I think the article is a good starting point; what is needed now is a model that addresses the product/process, foundationalist/anti-foundationalist, and orality/literacy axes in a more thorough way, also providing real-life examples showing how these theoretical stances affect classroom practice.

McLeod, Susan H. “Cultural Literacy, Curricular Reform, and Freshman Composition.” Rhetoric Review. 8 (1990): 270-278.

Summary: Like Bizzell, McLeod uses the controversy surrounding Hirsch’s “cultural literacy” as a starting point for her examination of how composition teachers should teach literacy and what they should teach. In her consideration of Hirsch’s critics, she raises the issue of the function of education. What is the purpose of education in a free society? In one camp are those who hold to the liberal arts ideal of transmitting cultural values in order to create responsible citizens. In the other camp are those who advocate a “search for truth.” McLeod claims we need to combine the best of the philosophical and rhetorical traditions. She cites examples from Bruffee, Brazerman and others in the social construction and intertextuality camps to show the importance not only of teaching writing skills, but of teaching writing within a particular knowledge context: in relation to other texts, other people, etc. She ends her article with a few examples of how such learning could take place, either within the composition classroom or in conjunction with other classes and other departments. By immersing students in real writing experiences, in which they both receive and create knowledge, McLeod hopes that cultural literacy that goes beyond Hirsch’s “list” might be achievable.

Critique: Like several of the articles I have examined, this article places the act of teaching composition within a specific social, political, and historical context. In my opinion, this strengthens the argument for social construction, demonstrating that not only what and how we teach our students, but the very notion of what education is for (and how composition fits within that conception) is socially constructed. While not privileging any particular “brand” of social construction, intertextuality, or interdisciplinarity, McLeod illustrates how we can combine some of the best practices already in use to achieve a post-modern (in a good sense) form of literacy. What is missing from McLeod’s analysis (perhaps intentionally) is any sense of the radical criticism of cultural and educational institutions that social construction implies. She clearly want to use these methods to maintain structures and bring students into the established order rather than prepare students to tear down outworn structures and build new ones. As such, McLeod’s source list is somewhat over-selective, handpicked to prove her point that compositionists working from different theoretical and philosophical perspectives can live and work together to achieve cultural literacy. The dissenting voices are eerily absent.

Myers, Greg. “Reality, Consensus, and Reform in the Rhetoric of Composition Teaching.” College English. 48 (1986): 154-174.

Summary: Myers grounds his discussion in two types of assignments he uses in his composition classes: small group collaboration and critique and case studies based on actual writing situations. Although his current interest in the questions raised by these types of assignments can be traced to Elbow and Bruffee, Myers revisits a long-forgotten Dewey-inspired scholar, Sterling Leonard. His point in going back to Leonard’s work is to show that disputes over ideas such as consensus and reality are not new to composition; rather they can be traced back at least to Dewey. Although many of Leonard’s ideas seem progressive even today, Myers characterizes Leonard as a conformist-consensualist, an individualist, a foundationalist, and a top-down reformer. Myers then jumps ahead to Elbow and Bruffee to see how they stack up with Leonard. Myers claims that Elbow is like Leonard in his emphasis on the individual as the unit of analysis. Even though Elbow admits that the individual exists in a social world, the power of writing lies in the expressive power of the individual to reveal and define the real world. Myers’s chief criticism of Elbow is that Elbow, while recognizing the existence of different conceptions of reality, ignores the importance that all writing occurs within and is shaped by social discourse; it is the group, not the individual, that defines reality. In contrast to Leonard and Elbow, Bruffee recognizes that writing is essentially a social act. Where Bruffee falls short is in his inability or unwillingness to provide a means to criticize the consensus reached by the discourse community. To Myers, the power of social construction lies in its ability to criticize and ultimately change the status quo, to not only allow room for dissent, but to keep consensus and dissent in constant dialectic tension. His advice for composition teachers is summed up in the following quote: “...what I have to suggest is not a method but a stance towards one's teaching. This stance requires a sort of doubleness: an awareness that one's course is part of an ideological structure that keeps people from thinking about their situation, but also a belief that one can resist this structure and help students to criticize it” (169).

Critique: I liked Myers’s technique of connecting the past with the present. Like McLeod, Bizzell and others, he demonstrates how the social and political environment can affect practice and theory within a discipline. His unpacking of the term “progressive” also shows that conceptions of progress can actually serve to preserve the status quo rather than challenge it. I think his overall characterization of Elbow and Bruffee is fair, and he is quick to recognize the valuable contributions they have made to pedagogy. Regarding his own advice to composition teachers, I am reminded of a line from the song “Where’s Me Jumper?” from the Irish band Sultans of Ping FC: “I like your manifesto; put it to the test-o.”

Trimbur, John. “Consensus and Difference in Collaborative Learning.” College English. 51 (1989), pp. 602-616.

Summary: Beginning where Myers leaves off, Trimbur further unpacks the idea of consensus as expressed by Bruffee, Wiener, and other social constructivists. He analyzes two criticisms of the politics of collaborative learning: those who think that collaborative learning is “dangerous” in its totalitarian repression of individual expression; and those, like Myers, who think that Bruffee’s constructivist pedagogy, while recognizing the importance of discourse communities, does not go far enough. After dismissing the fears expressed by the first group of critics, Trimbur begins to extend the criticism started by Myers and other left-wing constructivists. Focusing on Rorty’s metaphor of “continual conversation” as the goal of non-foundationalist consensus building, Trimbur rejects Rorty’s (and Bruffee’s) view of abnormal discourse as a homeostatic mechanism that allows consensus to be maintained. Rather, he sees abnormal discourse as the necessary voice of dissent that must be held in dialectic relationship with the voices of consensus. Working with Habermas’s idea of consensus as a type of utopian “ideal speech situation,” Trimbur sees consensus not as a normal or desirable state, but as an unreachable goal that writers should nonetheless struggle for: “Replacing the "real world" authority of consensus with a rhetoric of dissensus can lead students to demystify the normal workings of discourse communities” (615).

Critique: Well, I think Trimbur’s ideas would certainly frighten foundationalists, especially those who believe it is the job of compositionists to prepare students to first join the academic discourse community and then the “real world.” His ideas would probably not sit well with many social constructivists either, especially those who view consensus in terms of agreement rather than struggle and tension between agreement and dissent. Trimbur’s ideas go right to the heart of the question, “What is education for?” His answer is not hard to ascertain: to enable students to demystify discourse communities (including the classroom), challenge the status quo, and struggle to change unjust power relationships. I think his depiction of the view of consensus held by Bruffee and Rorty is accurate (as of 1989, anyway), and I found his notion that consensus should remain “utopian” intriguing. He gives a couple of examples of how this type of pedagogy might work in the classroom, but I would like to see some case studies.

Trimbur, John. “Review: Taking the Social Turn: Teaching Writing Post-Process.” College Composition and Communication. 45 (1994): 108-118.

Summary: Trimbur reviews three recent (as of 1994) composition theory books by Bizzell, Knoblauch and Brannon, and Spellmeyer, in an effort to depict the “crisis” in composition and offer some insights into which of the three paths has the most to offer. While all three books purportedly respond to the “literacy crisis” brought to the forefront by Hirsch and others, all three actually arise from internal inadequacies of the “process” paradigm then-current in composition studies. Of the three, Knoblauch and Brannon remain most beholden to process pedagogy. Although they recognize that writing (and pedagogy) are in many ways socially determined, they want to retain the process model, for example, by making expressivist pedagogy serve the goals of critical teaching. Like Trimbur, Spellmeyer defines the problem faced by the student writer as a social problem rather than an individual problem. Trimbur is less enthusiastic about Spellmeyer’s proposed solution: having students focus on the essay, a form which Spellmeyer claims transcends boundaries defined by specific discourse communities. Trimbur sees this is as a copout: He insists on the need for students to negotiate discourse “where they live” rather than in some rhetorical safe haven. Trimbur seems most impressed with Bizzell’s almost confessional collection of essays in which she explains how she came to realize that process methodologies had failed her and that she could not be rescued by focusing on any particular type of discourse or even anti-foundationalist theory itself. Rather, Bizzell realizes that she must face the pedagogical crisis head on, claiming that a “teacher committed to social justice and democratic values is a rhetor attempting to persuade her students to a vision of social reconstruction” (118). Not surprisingly, these sentiments in many ways echo Trimbur’s own sentiments as well as those expressed by Myers.

Critique: Not having read the books in question, I am in no position to criticize Trimbur’s interpretation of them. However, I like the way he uses the opportunity of a book review to explore larger issues in composition. Having read Bizzell’s 1990 article, I think Trimbur characterizes her “jeremiad zeal” fairly accurately.