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instructor’s standing within such a community, became more and
more of a prominent thing within Perry’s scheme, its crucial
presence evinced through the further observations and subsequent
conclusions offered by those two essays. Dinitz and Kiedaisch
published their findings in the Journal of Teaching Writing in
1990. They had observed, seemingly, their own freshman writing
course, the students in which had been asked to “‘persuade the
other members of your workshop group to change their minds
and/or behavior on any topic of your choice’”(209). For Dinitz
and Kiedaisch, the purpose of this assignment was “to teach
students why and how to make writing choices based on their
audience” (209). What they saw left them scratching their
heads:
[T]his assignment turned out to be puzzlingly
difficult; many first-year students seemed unable or
unwilling to make writing choices based on what would
influence their audience. […] They treated their
audience analyses as mechanical exercises: they had
few questions, spent little time, and wrote a
composite essay, as if all the students were exactly
the same. When they shared drafts, some of them
ignored suggestions, seemingly not caring whether
their peers were persuaded. (210)
After sorting through different possibilities for why this had
happened, they finally turned to William Perry (and Jean Piaget)
to “explain choices our students made in writing [their]
persuasive essays” (209) and there they would seem to have found
what they were looking for. The crux of the meaning they had
made of this situation with their students’ assignment, as read
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