Nystrand, Greene and Wiemelt

Although I alluded to my reading Nystrand in the last post, I wanted to take some time and comment on it article more deeply.

I still stick by my initial assessment that the first few pages are a tough read unless you have some background in literary criticism or linguistics. It does provide an excellent background of the study of teaching writing and composition in the 1970s after the open-admissions programs at CUNY and the Newsweek cover story "Why Johnny Can't Write." (1983) After reading this article in addition to the other assigned readings, I find it interesting that composition and rhetoric is literally another entity within English Departments at the collegiate level. One of the site leaders at the Kent National Writing Project is a doc student in Comp and Rhetoric now. At our meeting this weekend, I asked him about the reading/writing connection at the collegiate level. He told me that a lot of folks in the English Department might not necessarily see a reading/writing connection. Though this may not be news to others, it was certainly news to me. Apparently, you either teach writing courses or literature courses in the English Department - you don't do both. This makes me wonder if we are being honest enough with our students about what they are expected to do at the university level. I always thought divorcing reading and writing was the worst pedagogical idea since corporal punishment. I realized that English Education folks may be alone in considering how writing can be used to teach reading (not merely assess it) and how reading well-crafted texts can be used to inspire and teach writing. Perhaps because I am clearly in the education camp, this article held quite a few surprises for me. I'm guessing this was written for more of a rhetoric and composition audience.

This article helped me to situate my understanding of the different types of critical theories we will encounter in the Tyson book. I think it is an important read before we begin those conversations. I would like to discuss the three different types of rhetoric mentioned on page 269 and 270 - cognitive, expressionist, and social-epistemic. Though I recognized some "big names" as proponents of each (Emig, Flower and Hayes and cognitive rhetoriticians, Peter Elbow and (Donald?) Murray as expressionistic rhetoriticians, and (Carolyn?) Burke as the social-epistemic rhetorician), I would like to discuss how these different theorists might approach the act of teaching writing differently. I can draw my own inferences, but I'm curious how each would figure in today's climate of standardized testing - the great highjacker of pedagogy today.

As I mentioned, I have been looking at this article through the lens of the reading-writing connection - specifically in relation to inference as intention in writing. I found it interesting that, "the study of composition emerged from the strictly pedagogical domain of composition instruction to become a vital area of research on discourse and language processes, akin to psychologists' studies of reading, psycholinguistics' investigations of speaking and language development, and anthropologists' and sociolinguists' research on speech communities." (p.271) I am discovering that as I move away from pure pedagogy into theory, I must have some basic understanding of these other fields. Education does not exist in a bubble. This aspect of the course is what separates my graduate studies from my doctoral work: even master's students still approach the field of education with a practioner's stance. This is the first time I have been forced to consider the implications of theory and, to some extent, science. In light of my reading- writing lens, I thought this quote was the most telling regarding the field of composition studies, "More than anything, the field evolved in its efforts to understand the central problem of meaning in discourse." (p. 272) This is where I see a disconnect between the division of reading and writing paradigm and the act of writing as encompassing writing, reading, listening and speaking. I would really enjoy hearing from a guest speaker one night from the English Department at Kent. If we are preparing teachers to teach students, I think it is important to know what is expected of our elementary and secondary students if and when they reach the university. What are the expectations in a university level English course? Does it differ from teacher to teacher? Is it much different than what I was expected to do fifteen years ago as an undergrad? Has much changed? I was very well prepared for courses I took through the English Department at KSU, but then I had a teacher who, looking back, probably viewed literature and literary criticism through the lens of the New Critics. I took detailed notes about what the professor said the book meant and when I did have to defend my thoughts on texts through literary analysis, I was very good at finding textual support. Are we preparing students for the "game of school" or are we preparing students to be real readers and writers?

But I digress. After reading Nystrand I also had a better understanding of the various "periods" in both literature and composition studies (because, you will notice, even in an analysis of composition studies, it is tough to remove literature). I thought the authors did a nice job of prefacing the description of each consecutive movement and time period by commenting, "In this article we seek to trace the changing centers of gravity that carries composition, linguistics, and literary studies across the last half of the century, not to define hard boundaries or set strict chronologies between the evolving intellectual positions. The irony is that it is only through an articulation of differences in formalist, structuralist and dialogical approaches that we can begin to see important connections among them." (p. 274)