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writers” is extremely significant. As it was for those other
researchers and theorists I have discussed before, it is
imperative for Capossela that writing teachers who would put
Perry’s intellectual scheme to use not stand ahead of or apart
from their students but with them. As Capossela contends, “The
teacher’s most important role in fostering […] development is
not to accelerate it or ‘get it’ to happen, but to offer kinship
in the difficult enterprise it represents” (59). For her, a
“crucial form of support” for students in a course that would
pursue such “critical writing” as Capossela does is “for
teachers to practice what Perry calls ‘a certain openness – a
visibility in their own thinking, groping, doubts, and styles of
communication’ […]” (60). A writing instructor who would teach
according to Perry’s scheme and the theories of “relativistic
pragmatism” therein must not simply be within that peer
“community” but, perhaps even more critically, stand with those
student writers amidst that “uncertainty and lack of closure,”
exhibiting the “pain and risk” of doing so. As Capossela wrote,
such a writing instructor must foster a real “kinship” with
students who are experiencing that “disequilibrium” - writing
and thinking, and living from out of it.
Regardless of whether their work is rooted in the theories
of John Dewey or William Perry and regardless of whether it is
rooted in empirical research or theoretical observation, these
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