Ede

Ede, Lisa. Situating Composition: Composition Studies and the Politics of Location. Carbondale:
Southern Illinois University Press, 2004.

Ede's book attempts to situate composition by tracing, briefly, its history and development as an academic discipline. For Ede, the professionalization of composition has had positive effects, of course, but also some negative ones that warrant reexamination. One of these negative consequences is the turn away from practice; we need to theorize practice because theory is a form of practice. She coins the phrase "practice makes practice" and she deploys it to demonstrate the need to use what we do in the classroom as a way to help us think through theoretical issues as well as to become more reflective about our own commitments. She responds to the charge that composition is "post-process" by examining major texts as well as her own experience, and she suggests that, in fact, process is indeed everywhere. Essentially, she wants her book to be a call for being more accountable for our own practices.

Key ideas: "practice makes practice" (16); others
"thinking through practice"-- "Such a thinking entails not only thinking about practice -- about teaching, writing program administration, research, and so on -- but also attempting to use practice as a means of thinking through complex scholarly and professional issues" (16).

"...I will argue that the nature and impact of the writing process movement are anything but obvious, and that there are a multiplicity of meanings that can be attributed to it. Some of these meanings are paradoxical. I will argue, as I noted earlier, that from one perspective nothing so unified and coherent as a writing proces movement ever existed, and that its nature and role in the 1970s and early 1980s were as much tropological as material. But I will also argue that, despite claims that composition is post-process, signs of an ongoing commitment to process are everywhere evident. I will argue, in other words, that depending on where and how you look, there both was and was not a writing process movement" (64).

While I see the value in engaging multiple perspectives, and while I do think that it's quite useful to locate oneself -- i.e. reveal biases, commitments, assumptions, etc -- at the same time I think that Ede does not make this claim well enough for me to buy her argument. She constantly repeats phrases, sentences, and even ideas; her writing is often poorly constructed, and I feel that too often, she does not quite develop ideas in as much depth as is needed. For example, in her discussion of Crowley's Composition in the University, (a work she cites as a major component of her argument), she discusses it for about three pages total. She fails to apply her own charges to Crowley (or Miller, on whom she spends even less time!) I think, overall, that Ede is way too self-centered; even statements that have nothing to do with her begin with "I believe" or "It seems to me..." We all need these from time to time, but not in every sentence or every other one.

For me, though, the biggest problem of this text is that it reads like a collection of unrelated essays that were forced together. I wanted Ede to stop explaining her own teaching practices so heavily (in fact, in almost every example, she returns to her own ideas/experiences/practices), and instead to look at how others are using reflection in their own work. She seems to operate from the assumption that just because beliefs, practices, commitments, etc aren't directly foregrounded, that they haven't been reflected upon or adequately situated. Finally, she also seems to rely on generalizations that don't get explained or really theorized.

A useful component: thinking through practice. I think that the value in this book is that it emphasizes the need to locate ourselves as practitioners, and specify our own locations. However, this seems to stand in direct tension with Ede's statement that she does not value personal narratives. Hmmm...