A possible "core category" for my theory is what I have called "essay success" (or "writing success"). The concept of essay success, however, seems to fit this school context since it encompasses other aspects of the task than just the writing. Everything is permeated with the influence of the concept of essay success. What problems are identified and recognized come from notions of essay success. What assessments and evaluations are made about the essay as well as the process of composing or the goals for revision are gauged against this notion of essay success. What counts as "coming to know" is that which is closest to essay success.
I have charted out that essay success related to conceptions of the ideal text and the real text. The ideal text equals a fulfillment of essay success; however, the writer's as well as the responder's grasp of ideal text is often (or how about always) imperfect. Likewise, our apprehension of the real text is also an imperfect representation. Peer response is a kind of measuring and matching of the real text against the ideal text. An imperfect understanding of either (or both) leads to difficulties.
These are the kinds of conceptual musings I have been doing with my categories, and it hit me as a kind of recognition that all of this business about essay success sounded a lot like Plato's notions of the Forms (or Ideas). Oh no. While I certainly don't ascribe to the belief that the Forms are immortal and unchangeable and live up in the Empyrean Heaven, I can see that they are another way of articulating the notion of mental models, schema, or representations (so often used by the cognitivist). Task representation. Well, that representation is based upon a mental picture and understanding of the task. What is this mental picture? this mental representation?
Plato, just as I have noticed the significance of this mental model, uses an analogy to communicate this importance. He sets up three components:
--the power of sight (our capacity to apprehend or take in, perception, what is inside us)
--the visible (outside reality)
--light
He states, "If sight is in the eyes, and the possessor tries to use it, and if color is in the things, you know, I suppose, that it will see nothing and the colors will be unseen unless a third thing is there specially created for this purpose" (Republic, VI 507B).
This third thing is light. We see nothing and the visible is not seen unless there is light. Of course, this view contradicts premises of positivistic science which believes no third thing is necessary. Observation is direct and unmediated. Plato may be fairly post-modern (ironically) here since he is saying that our "sight" is mediated and even enabled by something else. For him, it is the Forms--this ideal, abstract conception of things that serves like light to help us see (within ourselves) and makes apparent qualities of reality. Here is Plato making the comparison between the influence of light and knowledge:
"my meaning must appear to be that this, the offspring of the good which the good begat, is in relation to the good itself an analogy, and what the good effects, by its influence, in the regions of the mind, towards mind and things thought, this the sun effects, in the region of seeing, towards sight and things seen" (Republic, VI 508D).
The effect of "the good" is like the effects of light for our seeing. Plato goes on, then, to articulate a theory of epistemology from this analogy: "when it [the soul] settles itself firmly in that region in which truth and real being brightly shine, it understands and knows it and appears to have reason. ...Then that which provides their truth to the things known, and gives the power of knowing to the knower, you may say is the idea or principle of the good, and you must conceive it as being the cause of understanding and of truth in so far as known" (Republic, VI 508D-E). He goes on to distinguish knowledge and truth AS WE KNOW them are not the good. They are good-like.
I think I would need to dig deeper into Plato to get what the heck he is meaning with his equation.
What I think Plato gets at here, and it is exactly what I have been noticing, is the influence of the conception of "the good" or in this case "essay success"--the good piece of writing. He even goes so far as to say that the good is the cause of knowledge:
"Similarly with things known, you will agree that the good is not only the cause of their becoming known, but the cause that knowledge exists and of the state of knowledge, although the good is not itself a state of knowledge but something transcending far beyond it" (Republic, VI 508E). "Coming to know," realizing, figuring things out, seeing now, understanding all are rooted in the good. What counts as knowledge? That which is in alignment with the good.
So where does reflection come in? How does this work within the Writing Reviews. I can't say that this "thinking" only resides or is exclusively present in writing reviews, but what is happening is purely contrastive. Put this up to that. Contrast your text to the image of the ideal text in my head. Reflection, as Dewey noted, involves a "double-movement" which basically goes from the world to our conception of the world. It is out of this contrastive double-movement that I see students "coming to know." This fitting in bounds is the epistemological nature of reflection in the writing classroom.
I don't know if by bringing in Plato's thinking I am helping or not, but I can certainly see parallels between his connection of the Forms to knowledge and my own connection of essay success to what students learn. But I have to think about all this more... . Certainly this theory of epistemology has been critiqued by others.
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