Stony Brook University - SUNY Digital Repository

(359). According to Dewey’s philosophy, such “reconstruction” –
“growth” and “rethinking” – should never be “decisive” but,
rather, know no end.
The truly critical weight placed upon peer revision,
“community,” and the place of the writing teacher not outside of
it but inside, deep within it, and also the crucial influence of
all of this upon that “reconstructive collaboration,” whereby
students’ writing exists as, again, “a mutual reshaping of
author, culture, and text,” and through which perceptions of
truth and “reailty” are seen as, again, “social constructions,
fallible and always subject to revision,” is shared by those
composition theorists and researches who, rather than John
Dewey, would espouse the work of William Perry and, therein, his
“relativistic pragmatism.” At the 1984 Conference on College
Composition and Communication in New York City, Susan E. Beers
presented a paper titled “An Analysis of the Interaction Between
Students’ Epistemological Assumptions and the Composing
Process.” In her essay, Beers describes Perry’s scheme of
“student’s conception of knowledge” (4), his “naïve
epistemological theories of students” as she called it, and how
students at the different stages therein could be expected to
write, Beers contending that “the Perry Scheme […] has
implications for how the process of writing and learning to
write are themselves viewed” (6). Thereafter, Beers poses the
208