As promised, I'm providing some key concepts and guiding questions for you to think about in advance of next week, when we venture into "Politics" of Self vs. Other.
Remember, of course, that my goal isn't necessarily to encourage us to think in terms of these debates or binary constructions -- the debates are simply there to help us begin to notice a richer, more underlying set of issues about writing as a craft, an art, a discipline, an institutional positioning, and a public activity.
We will spend some time in class on Wednesday actually using print and online tools to compile definitions of some of the following concepts:
- audience
- cognitivism
- critical pedagogy
- Current-Traditional
- discourse
- expressivism
- heteroglossia
- pragmatism
- social constructivism
Here are some guiding questions for us over the next two weeks:
- What role can cognitivism play in helping writers process ideas? In helping writers know what to write about?
- How much can expressivism determine how writers craft their public ethos -- whether on the page, or in the world?
- In crafting that public ethos, what identities or whose identities are being expressed?
- What becomes of the role of reader, writer, audience, or text when we begin to consider writing in these terms: expressive and cognitive vs. constructivist?
And finally, the best news of all. I'll ask you to read Bartholomae's "Inventing the University" and Bizzell's "William Perry and Liberal Education" in their entirety. But I'd like to excerpt the other two essays:
- For Bizzell's "Cognition, Convention, and Certainty" please read from the beginning of the article to the top of page 379.
- For Crick's "Composition and Experience," please read from the bottom of page 259 to the end of page 272.
You are absolutely welcome and encouraged to read these two essays in their entirety, but I will only expect you to have read these segments.
Have a great week,
-Prof. Graban
