Stony Brook University - SUNY Digital Repository

experiences I’d had in the writing classroom had been handed
veritable “bricks” of “uncertainty” rather than experiencing it,
experiencing Dewey’s “perplexity,” on their own, with their own
writing, for their own lives.
“Uncertainty” had been valorized and “certainty” had been
villanized and what came of this was, to say the least,
unfortunate. It was an utter faith in “uncertainty” that had
allowed it to become turned into something palpably certain.
Because of this, the potential and promise of “Uncertainty” as
heralded by Cixous, Lessing, Freire, Perry, and others – even
myself – was lost in the translation, vanishing into the wind
like a forgotten dream. And I should have known better than to
situate them in an extremely polarized “either/or” scenario
within my perception of things and then cast my attentions upon
only one of them, because “uncertainty” cannot be separated from
“certainty” without repercussions. But one half of the whole is
incomplete. This was something I should have known because of
the impression and influence that prominent composition theorist
and “process” forefather Peter Elbow, in particular his book
Embracing Contraries, had had on me when I was working towards
my Master’s – and still does, perhaps more than anyone else in
the field. But as was the case with Dewey, while I had read
Elbow’s theories of writing and the teaching of writing, it
would seem that I hadn’t really learned from them, at least not
28