[Teaching_Composition] Re: Teaching_Composition digest, Vol 1 #1193 - 5 msgs

[Charles Nelson]

Chris Anson asks:

> Why do compositionists not enjoy agency in their own field?
> Why are we not permitted to have stewardship over what we do?
> What can we do about it?

It's not that much different from ethics, religion, politics,
education, law, economics, etc. How many of us without a thorough
academic grounding in these arenas feel no compunction about joining
in some discussion and writing our legislative representatives to take
"appropriate" action pertaining to these areas?

When we move to the "hard" sciences (and this is rather simplistic),
engineers, physicists, or other scientists are hired to produce a
product, and they generally do so, or they don't get hired again.
Compositionists are hired to "produce" students who can write, and we
don't, at least to the satisfaction of outsiders who expect
grammatical perfection and other similar aspects of writing.

Yes, it's considerably harder to have concrete results in composition.
But perhaps part of the fault is related to our lack of having a
background in learning psychology. Understanding theories of rhetoric
and composition is one aspect of teaching students to write. Another,
and crucial, aspect is having a through understanding of theories of
how people learn. Outside of the fuzzy truism that people learn
through participation in communities of practice, I see very little
related to the psychology of learning. Perhaps this is why Fred Kemp
wrote on the WPA-L listserv on a thread that began about Les
Perelman's CCCC presentation:

"The psychology of writing instruction and the ADMINISTRATION of writing
programs is everything.  This list and this group of discussants is not
talking about this.

That's usual."

Charles Nelson