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09/20/2005 Archived Entry: "The Practicum"

The Practicum
For those of you blogging at home. . .

A course I've enjoyed teaching here at Wayne is the practicum. I write this knowing (or hoping) that students in the class read my blog. . .only as part of the larger meta-related issues I try to foreground throughout the semester. If I talk about blogging and pedagogy, invention and pedagogy, technology and pedagogy, theory and pedagogy, or any other issue, it is because I, too, am caught within this thinking and because I find the issues relevant for not only first year writing (or any level of instruction), but for ourselves as well.

Part of that means dealing with those theories we encounter - whether we find them attractive or not. One such theory is expressivism. In an essay (chapter actually in a collection) due out within the next couple months, I critique the logic of expressivism as it has made its way throughout graduate practica. That logic has been too centered on the self - on the William Coles model that all knowledge is already within us. And yet, the basic tenet of expressivism is the recognition of personal writing. We cannot avoid the personal.

There is no way to avoid the personal. Blogging highlights that point; most weblogging always begins/involves "I." The essay, too, was designed that way, but in High School English and many areas of first year writing, that "I" is denigrated in favor of something called objective distance (the journalism trope which fails).

A pedagogical moment is to foregournd the the personal as one investigates the theoretical: I realize, I think, I don't get it, I wonder, I notice, I ask, I feel, I disagree, I juxtapose, I distort. . . . there is, of course, an affective dimension to this kind of writing. For that, I find Barthes the most attractive theorist of writing. You don't remove pleasure or the personal from the theoretical/pedagogical. Instead, you complicate these aspects of composing. All composing is pedagogical. The mistake expressivism made is that it simplified matters too easily (Elbow preaches that out of chaos comes clarity). We don't ask for the simple; we require the complex. In that complexity, we find moments worthy of any kind of teaching, moments of insite and ah-ha, of invention and innovation.

And the weblog, updated from the essay, seems an ideal (for now) place to begin that kind of writing.

Posted by Lynda @ 09/26/2005 10:59 AM EST

Coles, of curse, can't help but reference Shaler/Agassiz, and this is un/just the sense of a student looking at fish bones w/o reference to other texts concerning fish bones!

Agassiz's relation to Darwin is crucial.

I would say that it is as as interesting as Geoffrey Saint-Hilaire, who --when all is said and undone-- performs a sense of GEOLOGY, which is a different sense, and yet important all the same

Posted by gvcarter @ 09/21/2005 11:23 PM EST

In grad school I really appreciated Berlin's critique of expressivism (in the "Rhetoric and Ideology" piece that's always anthologized)--fetishizing the individual, etc. But I've come to question the (too easy, too straight) line Berlin and others draw between "expressivism" and unchecked belletrism. Seems to me that's only one possible end of a project that starts with "the personal" (or, rather, *a project acknowledges* that all projects involve the personal).

Posted by Bill @ 09/21/2005 10:13 AM EST

The problem with The Plural I is its "all knowledge exists unto one's self position." The amateur assignment best exemplifies this as well as Coles remarks early in the text that he has come to the teaching of writing without any knowledge about writing. There isn't any context for the work Coles or the students do, no research, no connection to issues outside of first impression. Much of this is discussed in the piece that will come out.

Posted by jeff @ 09/21/2005 07:56 AM EST

I am glad you follow the sense of William E. Coles, even if you un/just must depart from his brand of expressivism. (Robin Varnum's history, -Fencing w/ Words-, I think, suggests apply evidence to support such a departure, and yet (!) who else other than Geoff Sirc or Bruce Horner has taken Coles seriously enough to give "expressivism" a different register ?)

"We cannot avoid the personal."

Again, I quite agree, and I would dis/engage this sense by way of Ulmer's quadripodes of discourse --the popcycle-- that, perhaps, informs the disappointment that Coles's ultimately has.

I don't know ... I trace both my educational and pedagogical roots to a sense of Coles ... Indeed! Coals rather than roots! ... but then, such a switch is to a sense of writing by way of fire (Heraclitus), or rhizomes rather than roots (Deleuze) ...

No. That's not right either. I owe a great deal to Robert L. Root, a retired prof at Central Michigan as much as I do a former student of Walker Gibson-William E. Coles, John Dinan.

... anyway ... what I was trying to say --briefly!-- is that Coles is important, but underserved.

Sirc and Horner are the only figures I know who give Coles his due, and so it is re-freshing to see someone else dis/engaging his work, if in departure.

Posted by gvcarter @ 09/20/2005 10:25 PM EST