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through Perry’s philosophy, is that, “[E]ven with practice and a clear, genuine context, some students might have problems” (212). Why? They explain: Perry’s work suggests that many eighteen-year-olds are struggling to maintain their dualistic world view and so may not be open to an assignment which requires them to take multiple points of view. […] Does it make sense, then, to try to teach them persuasion at this time? (217) This said, they offer their conclusion: “Rather than blaming our students for not working hard or questioning the quality of our teaching, we now attribute some of their problems to their present state of cognitive or ethical/intellectual development” (219). From their observations of those students’ attempts to compose those persuasive essays and the explanation offered through William Perry’s scheme as to why the assignment had been “puzzlingly difficult” for those students, they do indeed arrive at suggestions for other writing teachers who face the same situation they had, whether there is a “persuasive essay” in question or not. They write: Perry […] suggest[s] that formal education can actually encourage cognitive growth […] initiated by some experience of disequilibrium […] facilitated by interaction with peers […][who] often cause students to question their assumptions about the nature and location of knowledge and values. (217) With this perspective established, they continue, explaining the implications for teaching of what they had witnessed: [Our students] must view their peers rather than their teacher as the “real” audience of their essays. And this will not happen if the teacher is the evaluator of the papers: the groups must participate 214
in responding to drafts, in conferencing with the teacher, and in evaluating the final drafts. Once students are genuinely writing to each other, they need to see the importance of analyzing their audience and of making writing choices based on that audience. To do this, students need to be given lots of time and encouragement to interact with each other […]. They have to be encouraged to tell each other not just whether their essays were “good,” but whether their essays “worked” […]. (219) Dinitz and Kiedaisch’s advice – the utter significance of a community of “peers” in the rousing of that “disequilibrium” necessary for the evolution of a relativistic perspective of “truth” and reality - should ring very familiar by now. While they are working from out of Perry’s philosophy, it echoes resoundingly the conclusions offered by Jones and Fishman and their respective “Deweyan” studies. Without those peers, writing for those peers and receiving feedback from those peers, student writers may not progress out of a “dualistic world view” and use writing as anything other than a tool for transcribing the black or white “already-known.” They may never, again, “question their assumptions about the nature and location of knowledge and values.” This is also the same theoretical stance taken by Toni-Lee Capossela in her contribution to The Critical Writing Workshop: Designing Writing Assignments to Foster Critical Writing, a collection that Capossela had herself edited. Although her essay is basically theoretical in nature, her conclusions and suggestions therein indeed come out of her own, seemingly 215
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Stony Brook University The official
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Copyright by Leon Marcelo 2011 ii
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Abstract of the Dissertation The Un
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I dedicate this work to my daughter
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Introduction This work is the culmi
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But the way out of this philosophic
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through experiences in the writing
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the same old thing all over again.
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theory and research permeating thro
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I. With no reservations, I call mys
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fill in all of the empty variables.
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now have my doubts, which is what b
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the invisible, hearing the inaudibl
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“problem-posing education”: a
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“uncertainty.” But when it was
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After the study was finished, Perry
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a vehement belief in “writing wit
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philosophies of teaching. In his bo
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until sometime later - after confro
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eginnings of humanity itself. In th
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conversation and, in its place, pag
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[W]hat happened to rhetoric in Amer
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cannot be discussed because they ar
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States of America in the 1800s for
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making and doing” (6). And for De
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“Allegory of the Cave.” It took
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not a denigration of Christianity,
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severe, black or white: either foll
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easoning behind those words. Early
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transcendent reality and thus satis
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imaginative novelty and creative tr
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eality that the faithful were allow
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with which all other societies were
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field of composition was not, as Co
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ecause of its “epistemological su
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proclamation “Cogito Ergo Sum,”
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This power of modern Western scienc
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under the aegis of Western medicine
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the masters of nature ... Instead o
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and, during this time, “assimilat
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as in specific political, ideologic
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Darkness. For Said, it was in the p
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In its institutionalized form - fre
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III. Before I continue any further,
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It is an unavoidable fact of life.
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Tarnas refers to those “contradic
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news” of such pervasive and overw
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when writers shrink from that uncer
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Uncertainty and the prolonging of U
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falling away to such a “shift”
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Rhetoric. She would root that “sh
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For my real purpose here then, it i
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Although Hairston is writing about
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of them, I was enlightened. I was p
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All experiences, even the scientifi
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the tendency of that reality to mak
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asking the same question: What had
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and “truth” simply ends where i
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silence we have so often deplored [
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attempting to make room for the exc
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said, I would pose another question
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From [a theoretical] point of view,
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It was this “technical rhetoric
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synonym for doing or making as in
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former I will not really pay much a
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avoid Certainty put forward as Unce
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Derrida’s purpose for “deconstr
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“subversion” and there is no
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IV. As a teacher, how do you not be
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urge to “write with Uncertainty,
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his book Embracing Contraries, he e
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iochemical workings of the human bo
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with the densest, most unyielding o
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are, as LuMing Mao explains in his
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a compromise and a retreat, yet ano
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more fully human is curtailed. Eros
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“cooking”: “Between People,
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palpable. To teachers of writing st
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een greatly influenced by this conc
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attribute that movement, that progr
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But this is a somewhat vague answer
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where students perceive “all know
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with a graduation from college or u
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call for thinking. In essence, it i
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Difficulty or obstruction in the wa
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Page 175 and 176: processes? “Morals”? Deliberate
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Page 179 and 180: The more remote supplies the stimul
Page 181 and 182: would say a few things about my ped
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Page 193 and 194: ibliography, and a final report, wh
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Page 201 and 202: teacher staring back at me. A lazy
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Page 205 and 206: Again, if I took that long, hard lo
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Page 215 and 216: of the “Deweyan” community - th
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Page 219 and 220: Shapiro took those seventy essays a
Page 221: instructor’s standing within such
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Page 233 and 234: development” (219). If my experie
Page 235 and 236: e seen as “diverse” or “diffe
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Page 239 and 240: twelve- to fourteen-week college se
Page 241 and 242: for granted. And once you have take
Page 243 and 244: learning community therein. Because
Page 245 and 246: or white” perceptions of reality
Page 247 and 248: to renovate his portrait, Elbow off
Page 249 and 250: Elbow, for example, have said about
Page 251 and 252: Works Consulted Aristotle. Rhetoric
Page 253 and 254: and Process Models of Composing"."
Page 255 and 256: ---. "The Winds of Change: Thomas K
Page 257 and 258: Ong, Walter J. Fighting for Life: C
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