More Slacking... and Keywords

I've been on a blogging (but not reading) hiatus, due to teaching and my stint reading AP exams in FL. Now that I have some time, the blogging resumes with a book I read about 3 weeks ago... and have yet to post about.

Since the last post, I've read:
Writing/Teaching Paul Kameen
Kitchen Cooks, Plate Twirlers, and Troubadours ed Diana George
The Making of Knowledge in Composition Stephen North
Sidney Dobrin's book
Balancing Acts eds Anderson, Buley-Meissner, Chappell

Now for the Keywords:

Heilker, Paul, and Peter Vandenberg, eds. Keywords in Composition Studies. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton-Cook. 1996.

This book is a collection of short essays on keywords in composition studies. However, as the editors declare, the essays explore the multiple valences and definitions of each word to resist consensus. In essence, the book tries simultaneously to record and resist meaning.

Instead of talking about important quotations/key terms as is my m.o, I'm going to list the key quotations under the word they describe. I have selected terms which I found most useful for my exams/projects; these selections do not represent the breadth of the book or the overall usefullness of the book in general.

Composing/Writing:
"This idea, that writing is not the transcribing of thought but rather the process of creating insight itself, sets the stage for the next major construction of writing and composing in composition studies, the one epitomized in the 1981 work of Linda Flower and John R. Hayes: writing as thinking, as a recursive cognitive activity, as problem-solving; composing as the goal-directed orchestration of a set of distinctive, hierarchical, highly-embedded thinking processes" (41).

"It should be noted that writing as learning is the strand of meaning from which the often-invoked images of writing as exploration and discovery arise" (41-2).

Essay:
"One thing many of the above have in common is their assumption that the essay-- whether interpreted as an aesthetic of the personal, a search for ontological truths, or a medium for social construction -- remains separate from poetry, fiction, drama, and so on. Others are more critical of such distinctions" (86).

"As we scan different readings (and thus, always, engenderings) of this word and its origins, it would appear that the essay can not signify any bona fide genre. Rather, the term might best be considered an 'open rubric' the intention of which can only be defined locally by the 'rule makers' of specific discourse communities: i.e., the teacher, the test maker, the editor, the publishing company. As paradigm shifts in our technology and culture continue to force us to revamp our definitions of literacy and writing, the debates over the appopriate meanings for the 'essay' will most likely become even more heated and, perhaps to those outside academic communities, increasingly irrelevant" (87).

Invention:
"It has been generally accepted that these 'sets of instructions' are equivalent to what are routinely caled 'heuristic procedures,' what Richard Young, in his 1976 bibliographic essay, refers to as any 'explicit plans for analyzing and searching which focus attention, guide reason, stimulate memory and encourage intuition.' That which is said to qualify as an inventional device or heuristic procedure, however, has been deliberated throughout the history of composition studies" (132).

"While each of [Young's] theories constitute heuristic procedures, their differing forms and functions are the result of differing approaches to the composing process" (133).

(According to LeFevre): "Invention thus 'becomes an act that may involve speaking and writing, that at times involves more than one person; it is furthermore an act initiated by writers and completed by readers, extending over time through a series of transactions and texts" (134; qtd in LeFevre 1).

"Expanded definitions of invention see it 'not just as a method of retrieving what we already know, but as a process that constitutes our inquiry" (134; LeFevre 123).

"Paul Kameen uses the term 'imagination' to describe these forms of 'modern invention' that are strategies 'for the methodical acquisition of new knowledge': classical invention is thus a 'fairly mechanical special case of creative thought that imagination absorbs into its broader systems'" (134; Kameen 85-6).

Young writes: "It is becoming increasingly apparent that as new and significant methods of invention emerge we need to develop a more adequate terminology which distinguishes various arts or methods of invention from the art of invention, that is, the members from the class" (134, Young 17).

Pedagogy: (Karen Fitts)
"Pedagogy -- with no adjective -- became (retrospectively at least) current-traditional pedagogy, then process pedagogy (composed of diverse forms of teaching undergirded by broadly ranging assumptions) and finally critical pedagogy. That pedagogy entered composition studies not routinely linked with an adjective suggests it was then assumed to be self-evident, separable from theory" (168).

"Richard Fulkerson argues that, as a general rule, theory and practice began to be conflated in pedagogy only in the 1980s; before that, it was accepted teacherly practice to discuss the characteristics of good writing without also imagining how writers might write or how teachers might enable writers" (168).

"Woods writes that the discipline-centered see pedagogy as a civilizing influence; it offers values, skills, and precepts to primitive beings, whereas proponents of a student-centered pedagogy perceive themselves as giving voice to (inherently good) humanity" (169).

"Divergent as these perspectives are, they hold in common at least one trait: their localized focus on individual teachers and individual students" (169).

"Freire's primary contribution was in revealing the interactions between education and society, thus elevating pedagogy to its prominent contemporary position as an agent for social change" (169).

Practice/Praxis:
"In composition studies, practice is often joined with theory in a hierarchal binary in which theory informs practice but practice doesn't inform theory" (187).

"Recognizing practice as a mode of inquiry contributes to new understandings of knowledge making" (187).

"A decisive contribution to the contemporary age of politics was Paulo Freire's introduction of praxis to composition studies in the early 1980s. For while practice almost inevitably is set off against theory, praxis erases this polarity through the means of dialectics. Raymond Williams contends that in its modern sense, developed in Hegelian and Marxist thought, 'praxis is practice informed by theory and...less emphatically, theory informed by practice'" (188).

"Praxis thus restores theory and practice to one another..." (188-9).

"In any case, the commitment to greater social and political equity through classroom practices is especially characteristic of feminists, marxists, multiculturalists, and other oppositional pedagogues" (189).

Rhetoric:
"Rhetoric is buffeted by storms of signification coming from two directions. From one direction comes the general public's perception, reinforced by the popular media, of rhetoric as bombast, figurative language designed to cover up either deception or shallow substance" (213).

"From another direction comes the implied meaning, embraced within most academic circles, of rhetoric as the subject matter that gets taught in composition courses" (213).

"For most of this century, rhetoric, supported by a tradition of philosophical/theoretical scholarship, has been invoked to rescue composition from its seemingly anti-intellectual baggage of word-, sentence-, and paragraph-level pedantry" (213).

"The only characteristic these [three] theories share is that their proponents seem to envision their rhetoric as being able either to explain how speakers and writers behave in certain situations or to direct speakers and writers to generate language that has certain, presumably effective, characteristics" (214).