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Put simply, “These imaginative recombinations can lead to the
reconstruction of prior beliefs because these conceptual
alternatives can be considered and compared” (95) and, thus,
“knowledge always retains a tentativeness.” For the “Deweyan
instructor” who would help to train his writing students to
become such “agents” through this extremely dialectical
“reconstructive collaboration” to whose utter significance he
testifies, Jones necessitates two things. The first
acknowledges “the primacy of experience,” what he calls “the
starting point of a pragmatist writing course” (89), and
involves “developing knowledge from experience” through
“identify[ing] and examin[ing] felt difficulties through Dewey’s
experimental method of inquiry.” The means of this for students
is the personal narrative, yet with “a social turn”:
The student would narrate a significant life
experience, yet a Deweyan instructor would ask the
student to reflect not just on the significance of
the experience itself but also on the cultural
assumptions implicit within the narration which
influence [those] reflections. (90)
The place of the “Deweyan instructor” in this writing is to
confront the student writer with questions: questions that are
“not usually posed in process-oriented draft comments and
writing conferences” (90) and do not require “a desired outcome
on a debatable issue” (91) but that would bring attention to
those “cultural influences” and “cultural assumptions” revealed
in that student’s writing. In conjunction with this experience-
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