Dear Good Folks,
As promised, I offer some tentative resolution from today's [Oct. 10] seminar, as well as a look ahead to next week. As a way of connecting this week's and next week's readings, I have asked you to bring back Connors, and Elbow or Olson next class.
We had some great discussion today about where to position these theorists and their theories in relation to extant paradigms and to each other. I might position Flower and Hayes's sociocognitive theory of composition closer to Carter's notion of "finding common ground" between the cognitive (general) and the social (local) knowledge poles, even as I recognize that their models for composition are differently motivated. Perhaps it is because he builds on Bizzell's critique of Flower and Hayes, but Carter does help us to see potential weaknesses in the ways that cognition theories assume expertise on the level of general knowledge but not on the level of local knowledge. At the same time, Linda Flower's ongoing work -- beyond the "Cognitive Process Theory" article -- tries to clarify the role of expertise in sociocognitive theories by broadening the interactive element of the writing process to include collaborative talk between writers and others, and not merely between the writer and her task.
Today's discussion brought to light how even opposing process models such as these do signal the significance of discourse community to any theory of composition. Although our readings were not centered in agency, we may see movements towards agency in the way that Murray delineates responsibilities for teachers and students, and particularly in Murray's insistence that teachers "must publish and share criticism [with their students] from careful readers" (Murray 122). We certainly can question how to theorize agency in something like Flower and Hayes's cognitive process model, specifically in its construction of a network of goals (Flower & Hayes 192). And in advocating for a "pluralistic theory of expertise" [that synthesizes local and general knowledge], we can see how Carter poses the idea of a new writerly agent that operates between past and present sociocognitive paradigms in Rhetoric and Composition. After all, he argues, specialized social theories of rhetoric require a specially situated audience (Carter 277). Next week, we may want to talk about how to disrupt some of the processes and mechanisms by which audiences assume normalcy as a result of these sociocognitive approaches to writing. We may try to recover all of the agents in each writing system.
In the meantime, I invite you to consider the following questions as you read Logan, Smitherman, Cooper, Enoch and Flynn or Ritchie-Boardman:
- In each of their theories where is the writer's exigence located?
- How does each theorist build her theory? What is the logic -- or what are the logics -- underlying each notion of "agency," or the features of each "ecology"? What do they use as evidence?
- What seems to be their driving research question? Is it a claim against to which they respond, or against which they react?
- Whose voices are included -- implicitly or explicitly -- in their theorizing? Whose voices are excluded from their theorizing?
Next week, we will begin class with our case study, observing some Take 20 clips and the ideologies they may espouse. Then, we will navigate our definitions work space, and spend some time charting our theoretical turns to help us synthesize what we read, and to begin looking forward and back. Finally, I will answer your questions about the upcoming Critical Book Analysis Presentations (though you are welcome to ask them at any time and through any medium), and I'll demonstrate an assortment of learning tools that past presenters have constructed.
Nice work today, and very looking forward to next week,
-Dr. Graban
