Stony Brook University - SUNY Digital Repository

particular teaching philosophy of mine, defined by the founding
of that dialectic between Uncertainty and Certainty, was
“operationalized,” at least not to any overwhelming degree.
Those students wrote a lot throughout their respective semesters
and, by the end of them, very well wrote better than they did
before. But did they leave my writing class having engendered
John Dewey’s “reflective thinking,” the “[a]ctive, persistent,
and careful consideration of any belief or supported form of
knowledge” that comes from “overcoming the inertia that inclines
one to accept suggestions at their face value […] [and the]
willingness to endure a condition of mental unrest and
disturbance”? Or William Perry’s “relativistic pragmatism,” the
“perceiv[ing] [of] all knowledge and values (including
authority’s) as contextual and relativistic and subordinates
dualistic right-wrong functions to the status of a special case,
in context,” eventually culminating with “experience[ing] the
affirmation of identity among multiple responsibilities and
realiz[ing] Commitment as an ongoing, unfolding activity”? Or
Peter Elbow’s “cooking,” the “interaction of contrasting or
conflicting material” that is a “process of one piece of
material […] being transformed by interacting with another: one
piece of material being seen through the lens of another, being
dragged through the guts of another, being reoriented or
reorganized in terms of the other, being mapped onto the other”?
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