Stony Brook University - SUNY Digital Repository

thinking - as a dialectic: always changing, always fluid. As a
result, a writer or a teacher’s perspective of reality or
“truth” will not simply welcome all that is different and
questionable and new but will flourish, further and deepen,
because of them.
But how does this happen? How exactly do you, as a writer
and as a teacher of writing, foster that dialectic between
Uncertainty and Certainty? Where and when should it happen,
especially if that dialectic is, necessarily, always in flux,
without some already defined moment of transition between the
two? These questions have brought me to this work and the five
chapters that comprise it are an attempt to explore and explain
them as well as to arrive at a greater understanding of both
Certainty and Uncertainty and that critical relationship between
them.
I begin by setting the stage for the exploration that
follows by describing my entrance into the field of composition
and rhetoric and, with it, my first exposure to the
philosophical and pedagogical concept of Uncertainty: writing
with Uncertainty and, in turn, teaching towards Uncertainty. In
doing so, I explain what these mean and, through it, work to
define their polar opposite in the form of Certainty. However,
this narrative, while portraying the beginnings of my philosophy
of writing and of teaching, also establishes my exposure,
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