Final Thoughts on 5060

I regret having to let this class go and this great group of colleagues. This class has focused directly on my deepest professional interest, and I have thrived on learning more and digging deeper into it. I don't want to knock Technical Communication, but it has been refreshing to have a class that had Composition and Rhetoric as its main concern. I feel as if I need five more courses like this!

I want to write for a few minutes about a couple areas where I feel I progressed in this class. First, I believe I have made some progress in my project to "make knowledge" in the profession (sometimes called the dissertation). I've been chipping away at North's book The Making of Knowledge in Composition all summer and will soon finish it. This book has opened my eyes to the various ways beliefs about practice in Composition have gained validation or become contested. Harris' chapter on Growth and his examination of the impact of these developmental models on composition teaching when framed within North's different modes of inquiry is one example of how belief is "socially justified" within our field. I'm increasingly seeing how strange a profession we have in terms of how we build knowledge from research.

I focused my annotated bibliography work on finding every research study I could find on "rhetorical reflection" that I could find. This quest was difficult because little or no such studies have been done in the field of composition that I could find, at least using those terms. Reflection is predominantly framed as a post-task activity when it is done in writing. The framing of it as an in-task activity within Composition is practically non-existent under the term "reflection." I'm just landing on revision studies that seem to be a promising area of inquiry, but I need to crack open that research area. As a result, I had to seek out parallel fields and situations that seem to use rhetorical reflection: Nursing, Action Research, Service Learning (formative reflection vs summative reflection), Professional Development, Student Self-Assessment (or Self-Evaluation). I still feel that I am groping in the dark and my hands will land on the mother load of search terms, but it hasn't happened yet. It has been a slow slog.

The 19 research studies I did find (along with 10 related articles) have helped me see various different ways to frame reflection, provided me with lots of bibliographic citations to explore further, and revealed different research designs for how to research reflection. Here is my plan for the rest of August:

1. Finish North's book, chart out different modes of inquiry in summary

2. Create a scenario research design for each mode of inquiry as an exercise

3. Chart out as many different research designs as I can (which includes different research designs based from different research questions). Sketches. Brainstorming.

4. Review all this muck and pull together 5-10 proposed research designs to send to my dissertation committee for review. I'd also like to include a short rhetorical analysis of each proposed design (i.e. the "So What? question analysis) and feasibility analysis (it is do-able?)

The goal of all this is to have a decently clear idea of what my research study design will be by December so that I can begin doing whatever it is I need to do to prepare for that study. It may be that I need it earlier to apply for dissertation research grants? This class has been a wonderful opportunity for me to begin work on this research design. I know I have a lot left to do.

The second thing that sticks with me from this class has to do with big picture views of Composition and what we do as writing teachers--I'm talking about all the taxonomies. My analysis of Berlin's "Contemporary Composition: The Major Pedagogical Theories" (http://www.accd.edu/sac/english/lirvin/TTech/5060/Berlin.pdf) really helped me dig more deeply into these different taxonomies and their limitations. I have been influenced by Berlin as well as Knoblauch and Brannon's philosophical view toward composition (i.e. find the "right" philosophical view, base you teaching on it, and you have best practice), and I have certainly felt the moral overtones that this perspective as a consequence loads any discussion of teaching methods with. I find these categories describing teaching composition (whether Berlin's, Fulkerson's, or Kinneavy's) helpful and each one is alluring, but ultimately I see them as restrictive. This course helped me to see other restrictive categories--process/product, real vs. academic writing, directive vs facilitative response, writing as subject vs writing as activity (post-process stuff). Once we begin to build fences and set up either/or, us/them, right/wrong delineations, I believe we are mis-using these taxonomies. I struggled with these taxonomies last Fall in my reading of Kay Halasek's Pedagogy of Possibility, and I think I understand better her complaint about the limitations of these taxonomies as well. Her solution--and it is increasingly how I am seeing these categories and labels--is to see these categories in terms of continuums and oscillation between them. These elements often are in dynamic tension as counterparts rather than enemies (like rhetoric and dialectic as counterparts). I am deepening my own thinking, in particular, about the dialectic between writing (rhetoric) as subject and writing (rhetoric) as an activity. Last summer I wrote some about it, but in this class I've begun to think in a more conscious way what that means for my teaching practice. I think there are aspects of writing that need to be taught as a subject--despite all the post-modern complaints about foundational knowledge and conventions. Revisiting my own experience as a freshman writer made me feel again what it was like when I didn't have a better mastery (dare I use that word!) of some writing basics like spelling or grammar or sentence construction. It is a fine line working on both writing as a subject and writing as an activity, and I think in this class I have begun to see more clearly what distinguishes those two and how I might shape my curriculum to work on both (I already do, but I haven't framed it in these terms). I guess what I'm also trying to get at is that teaching writing as a subject often gets looked down upon because it is perceived as reductive and elementary, but here again is one of those dichotomies that becomes less than useful when it becomes a matter of right and wrong, good practice/bad practice. Writing as a subject and writing as an activity are counterparts that dialectically inform each other.

So these are some of the thoughts I am left with from this class. I know I will continue to think about this class for a long time.