You worked very hard in and out of class last week to establish a sense of our course methodologies; today in class we will try them on through a series of related activities that will center our discussion of historical theories of invention.
We'll begin by discussing the results of your warm-up assignment using David McGrath's 2002 article in the Chicago Tribune, deconstructing four of this week's readings in the process.
From there, we may (in pairs) do some definition work in this space, before completing a brief writing opportunity in response to one of the following synthesis questions:
- Across these various essays, "invention" is discussed as (a) prewriting, (b) heuristics, (c) a mode of associating and recombining language into discourse, and (d) a social act, among other things. Could you define/distinguish between these aspects of "invention" if you had to understand them as separate aspects, and do you see that any of these aspects incompatible? Why or why not?
- First, explain briefly Young, Becker, and Pike's tagmemic heuristics for initiating and exploring discourse (i.e., what are the strategies?). Then, discuss how these strategies implement "writing as inquiry."
We'll then consider Crick's article as either an evolution of these prior invention theories or a resolution (if you will) of the earlier perspectives we used to respond to McGrath.
Finally, we'll spend some time in class exploring our course resources and considering the usefulness of trying to stabilize -- thematically or chronologically -- our vast course of study this term.
Update on 9/7/17:
Folks, thanks for all your good, hard work in seminar this week. No, we did not reach the end of this ambitious agenda, but -- as promised -- in advance of our next class meeting, I have demonstrated how those two spaces can (ideally) work for us. I encourage you to browse them and then give me your thoughts on them next week.
I have also uploaded to Canvas a heuristics handout that might make a good case study for us in the near future. It reflects something like a "crib sheet" I used in various contexts when mentoring other instructors who were teaching first-year composition from an ethnographic approach. NB: had we had time to discuss this handout in class, I would have contextualized that discussion by describing how my thoughts on heuristics -- and their presentation in FYC -- have evolved over the years, as well as which heuristics I find too flat to be useful. If you're curious, ask me about this next week.
I am aware that you may have lingering questions about Young/Becker/Pike's challenging model of tagmemics, and I do hope you will voice those questions next class. We may also need to bring Crick back into the conversation in the near future, as we did not have sufficient time to consider how his argument was significant to this week's theoretical "turn."
Looking very much forward to it,
-Dr. Graban
