Textbook Review (Partial)

After looking at three, maybe four of the textbooks to choose from for our review, I chose one that had colored shapes on the cover. How very toddler of me. Upon careful examination of the cover, as one of the guidelines suggested, I made an interpretation. Inside a black rectangle are 18 square boxes, each containing a colored shape or symbol; some are elementary such as a triangle or circle, while most are rather obtuse and difficult to identify. Once I had skimmed the book, I found the shapes to symbolize perfectly the content within as basic writing methods are intertwined with complex writing samples followed by critical interrogation. A curious formula perhaps for the first year writing student to decipher. From Inquiry to Academic Writing, written by Stuart Greene and April Lidinsky, appears to be a fine choice for a first year composition instructor as it contains insightful, relevant articles with corresponding inquiries that the teacher may pick and choose from. From preface to index, Academic Writing is undeniably thorough in the teachings of writing and skillfully develops the relationship between reading and academic interpretation. Given the dynamics of the instruction, I believe From Inquiry to Academic Writing best suited for a new professor of advanced composition.

The preface for instructors begins by presenting the authors' pedagogical theory of composition as conversational, social in act, and catalytic in the production of knowledge. I immediately thought of Kenneth Bruffee's "Collaborative Learning and the Conversation of Mankind" and the direct influence it seemingly had on Greene and Lidinsky. Bruffee states, "Writing always has its roots deep in the acquired ability to carry on the social symbolic exchange we call conversation" (551). Now to quote directly from the textbook: "Throughout, we present academic writing as conversational-as a collegial exchange of ideas, undertaken in a spirit of collaboration in the pursuit of new knowledge...we encourage students to see themselves as makers of knowledge" (iii). And Bruffee again, "Collaborative learning models how knowledge is generated, how it changes and grows" (556). Rebecca Moore Howard reinforces the relationship between collaboration and knowledge in Collaborative Pedagogy as she asserts, "When teachers are no longer dispensing knowledge in lectures but are guiding students in the collaborative process of discovering and constructing knowledge, students are empowered" (57). I didn't expect to find such concise parallelism in composition theory, and so quickly. But there it is in the first paragraph of the book. It's oddly rewarding to discover one of the theories of study thus far in such black and white form, in a textbook, used as practical method.

NOT FINISHED

Chaos

I found, ironically, the selection by Ann E. Berthoff to be a little chaotic to interepert. I just used the word chaotic to reflect the state of confusion I was in, which is only one of its meanings. Here are additional meanings of the word chaos: a state of things in which chance is supreme; the inherent unpredictability in the behavior of a complex natural system; the confused unorganized state of primordial matter before the creation of distinct forms. It is the last definition of chaos which is applied to Berthoff's theory of teaching composition. The "primordial matter" in this case are the thoughts, memories, conversations, and ideas that when bound together to form language come to convey meaning. "Meanings change as we think about them; statements and events, significances and interpretations can mean different things to different people at different times" (649). Only when I was able to define chaos in the way that Berthoff does did I find meaning in her language.

Towards the end of the selection, Berthoff reveals a passage similar to one of Bruffee's in stating that, "A writer is in dialogue with his various selves and with his audience" (650). We'll remember that according to Bruffee, "We converse; we internalize conversation as thought; and then by writing, we re-immerse conversation in its external, social medium" (551). The more I read the more apparent it becomes that incoporating a forum of discussion within composition courses is not only crucial but neccessary if the composing process is to successfully exist.