About Writing Studies

The following passages were really useful in helping me think about my own field. Taken from Doug Downs book chapter, "Teaching First-Year Writers to Use Texts."

Writing Studies is marked by a free mix of research methodologies from the humanities and social sciences—or in Michael Carter's terms, the meta-genres of research-from-sources and empirical inquiry (396-98)...Despite its positioning in English departments, Writing Studies also often behaves like a social science. While showing discomfort with positivist empirical epistemology (or a humanist's fear of parametric statistics), the field was born in and continues to value data-driven rather than only or purely theoretical analysis... Resulting from this blended epistemology, a given article may work across multiple fields and take methods as it finds them, even though such practice can lead to methodological "looseness" that the fields originating the methods might take issue with. Writing Studies texts also tend to valorize personal experience and believe that more can accurately be said about the experiences of a small number of writers discussed in detail (as through ethnography, case study, longitudinal study, and interview) than about larger datasets generated through experiment with only limited control of variables. At the same time, drawing from their humanities and literary-studies roots, scholars in the field read and analyze textual discourse with unusual sensitivity. Unlike those fields, however, Writing Studies finds as much value in reading unfinished student texts in this fashion as it does literary texts—a distinction Robert Scholes has argued strongly distinguishes the values of Literary Criticism and Writing Studies. (33-34)

Personal Statement planning?

A Pedagogy of Activity

• Opportunity for student-to-student dialogue/interaction
• Opportunity to write before speech (discussion...we never launch into "So what did you think of the readings?")
• opportunity for collective problem/question posing
• visibility of student words (written)
• frequent opportunity for informal dialogue/conversation w/faculty (written)--blogs, discussion board, "comment" feature of google docs
• collaborative learning and task completion

Importance of talk

Once children begin telling their stories on paper, we'll get a glimpse of what they actually are learning, and from that, we'll find out what we need to teach more explicitly. (17)

This passage fascinates me and pushes me to consider the notion of an pedagogy of induction or inductive pedagogy...if I understand it right? "...inductive reasoning, arguing from observation, while Rizik is using deductive reasoning, arguing from the law of gravity." Similarly, there might be inductive teaching, teaching from observation of student talk and deductive teaching, which is teaching from...what?

...many of the problems of the infant and junior schools would be solved if we could have more adults or older children to engage in talk, for it is above all talk with an understanding older person that is wanted, talk that arises directly out of shared activity in and around the classroom (James Britton, qtd in Horn/Giacobbe p. 19).

By providing opportunities for her students to make meaning and by giving language to what they do, she is doing what Britton advises, "patiently exercising the special kind of leadership [needed] to build a talking community" (James Britton, qtd in. Horn Giacobbe, p. 19)