Kempian thoughts

Post for class wiki:

To say that I have been influenced in my own pedagogy by Fred's notions of the social construction of knowledge and how we implement that philosophical understanding within our classroom pedagogy, especially within a networked writing environment, is an understatement. Fred and I go way back to 1987-88 when I was a TA in the CWRL at UT-Austin when he was finishing his PhD. I heard then and then in the years that followed as I used the Daedalus Integrated Environment about the blending of notions of collaboration and social construction as talked about by Kenneth Bruffee and Mikhail Bakhtin with ideas and practices of writing process. The enactment of these ideas within a networked environment was a perfect fit--like chocolate and peanut butter going together.

I want to in this post share just a few of my own takes on these notions of how we learn, the nature of writing, and how we teach writing. At one point in my own quest about how to teach writing in the computer classroom, I studied a description of an "essay cycle: that Fred has used in numerous faculty training sessions and that became published in the 1998 book The Dialogic Classroom. (You can see my own summary of this sequencing of an assignment sequence in an article I wrote: available at http://www.bgsu.edu/cconline/irvin/E-Writing.htm ).

What I saw happening was this "feedback look" happening. I talked about the "shared discourse" within a networked environment and how this discourse and the learning that emerged from it became extended through a repeated sequence of **''invention--reflection--reinvention''** Here are just a few quotes from this article talking about this dynamic:

"Extending the shared discourse is like a house of mirrors, with each act of reflection leading to a new act of invention and learning which leads to more reflection.
...
Paolo Freire in his essay “The Banking Concept of Education” captures the possibilities when this shared discourse is extended: “Knowledge emerges only through invention and reinvention, through the restless impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry men pursue in the world, with the world, and with each other” (213). Students’ learning and expression grows as the discourse is extended; however, managing this extended discourse, encouraging it, fostering it, setting it in motion takes a great deal of preparation, as well as tasks and topics which move the students naturally down the slope of interacting with and learning from each other.
(see full article http://www.accd.edu/sac/english/lirvin/Purdue/TETYC-LLI.htm)

My own teaching practice has been shaped by encouraging this dynamic of "loop learning." Since that time, I have zeroed in much more on reflection as the key mediating influence in action and learning (heck, it's become my dissertation). The writing feedback loop, for me, connects directly to David Kolb's notions of experiential learning and constitutes a theoretically significant grounding for process as a theory of writing. Here is a graphic of the Writing Feedback Loop I put together:
http://teachingrhetoric.pbwiki.com/f/wfeedbckloop.jpg

My own hunches are that in-task reflection, done between iterations of the writing feedback loop (i.e. between the drafts) represents a heuristic (by that I mean a deliberate, conscious, and strategic act for generating and negotiating ideas) reactivation of invention. Invention too often gets pigeon holed into "pre-writing" and then forgotten in any pedagogical sense after the first draft; reflection has been framed thanks to portfolios and assessment too much as a post-task activity. What is lost it the inventive power of reflection done within the act of writing. It is in these reflections between drafts that I have discovered student writers negotiate their own "rhetorical stance" or as Helen Foster has described it in a recent book Networked Process, "networked subjectivity." Here is another graphic I have put together depicting rhetorical stance and the dynamics a writer must negotiate as he or she writes:
http://teachingrhetoric.pbwiki.com/f/rstance.jpg

I'm going on far too long on this topic. I want to make one last point and it interests me greatly--and that is the notion of articulation. Articulation as a theory of language and learning is based on this notion that we frame our reality and construct our own meaning by using our own language, but putting things into our own words. Within the feedback look, I know that Fred sees Peer Response and Reflection (or Writer's Reviews) as two acts of articulation that constitute two sides of the same coin. You articulate what you see in other's writing and seek to use and form knowledge and understanding related to the goals and context of the writing task through peer response, and through reflection in writer's reviews you articulate what you see in your own writing.

Where I am at in my own pursuit of my dissertation work is how to research this theoretical idea about how articulation in the form of reflection works and what influence it has on writer's working within a pedagogical context implementing the writing feedback look. (any ideas are welcome!)

Please pardon this long post.