In a recent podcast, Dr. Fred Kemp shares with us an incident from his early days of teaching that is an example of the type of antediluvian thinking exemplified by English professor Thomas B. Blom’s counterstatement to Maxine Hairston’s article "The Winds of Change: Thomas Kuhn and the Revolution in the Teaching of Writing".[1] Dr. Kemp describes a frustrated veteran teacher who exclaims, “well, I’ve been teaching the same thing in the same way for 20 years and they STILL don’t get it” (emphasis mine).
In this seminal article in the prestigious College Composition and Communication journal, Hairston took a bold stance against ubiquitous and typical English instruction, and uniquely applied Kuhn’s philosophy of scientific revolutions to support her argument. Blom vehemently disagreed with her, and took umbrage as a self-defined member of the majority of teachers who, according to Hairston, are untrained non-specialists and unprofessional.[2]
But can we apply Kuhn’s philosophy to disciplines outside of the scientific realm? I believe we can, and I agree with Hairston when she writes:
“Composition theorists and writing teachers can learn from Thomas Kuhn if they see his theory of scientific revolutions as an analogy that can illuminate developments that are taking place in our profession. Those developments, the most prominent of which is the move to a process-centered theory of teaching writing, indicates that our profession is probably in the first stages of a paradigm shift” (Hairston, 77).
Like the first stage in Kuhn’s scientific revolution, the forward thinking “teach process not product” movement has been adapted by those in the “vanguard of the profession” (Hairston, 78).
Frustrating Blom (and probably others), Hairston dares to label most college writing teachers in the United States as unprofessional:
“They do not do research or publish on rhetoric or composition, and they do not know the scholarship in the field; they do not read the professional journals and they do not attend professional meetings such as the annual Conference on College Communication and Composition; they do not participate in faculty development workshops for writing teachers. They are trained as literary critics first and as teachers of literature second, yet out of necessity most of them are doing half or more of their teaching in composition. And they teach it by the traditional paradigm, just as they did when they were untrained teaching assistants ten or twenty or forty years ago. Often they use a newer edition of the same book they used as teaching assistants.” (Hairston, 79)
Them’s fightin’ words to Blom, who uses his in-depth knowledge of Dickens to compare Hairston’s bad teachers (he considers himself to be one of these) to the “straw men and women whose parents are M'Choakumchild and his bride, that iron-gray maiden the Schoolmarm.” (Blom, 491)
In her reply to Blom[3], Hairston points out that Kuhn’s theory has intrigued, and been adapted by, many writers in many fields who use the Kuhn’s paradigm shift concept to explain new trends. As examples, Hairston gives us two books in very diverse fields (Business and Economics, New Age Studies) that use Kuhn's scientific revolution term as a central metaphor and who have adapted his ideas to their own fields:
1. In Search of Excellence: Lessons from America’s best run companies by Thomas Peters and Robert Waterman (Harper and Row, 1982)[4]
2. The Aquarian Conspiracy: Personal and Social Transformation in Our Time by Marilyn Ferguson (Houghton Mifflin, 1980)[5]
For Dr. Kemp’s frustrated educator, Hairston outlines the probable source of the frustration:
“The writing teacher's frustration and disenchantment may be less important than the fact that if they teach from the traditional paradigm, they are frequently emphasizing techniques that the research has largely discredited. As Kuhn points out, the paradigm that a group of professionals accepts will govern the kinds of problems they decide to work on, and that very paradigm keeps them from recognizing important problems that cannot be discussed in the terminology of their model. Thus teachers who concentrate their efforts on teaching style, organization, and correctness are not likely to recognize that their students need work in invention. And if they stress that proofreading and editing are the chief skills one uses to revise a paper, they won't realize that their students have no concept of what it means to make substantive revisions in a paper. The traditional paradigm hides these problems.” (Hairston, 80)
Of course, it also occurred to me that doing the same thing over and over (in the case of Dr. Kemp’s educator, 20 years) and hoping for a different result never seems to work. Hairston makes a last impassioned plea:
“I see this last opportunity as the challenge to today's community of composition and rhetoric scholars: to refine the new paradigm for teaching composition so that it provides a rewarding, productive, and feasible way of teaching writing for the non-specialists who do most of the composition teaching in our colleges and universities.” (Hairston, 88)
Hairston’s article, Blom’s counterstatement, and Hairston’s rebuttal to Blom were published in 1984. In the 27 years that have elapsed since then, we need to ask ourselves if anything has changed.
To attempt to answer this important question, I turned to personally familiar territory: the English curriculum in Ontario schools. My husband, our children, and I have been recipients of English instruction from the Province of Ontario since the late 1960’s. My husband’s and my training was current-traditional. However, our children’s was different (they were born in 1990 and 1992 respectively).
In 1999 the Ontario Ministry of Education changed its curriculum for Ontario secondary schools: it now specifically outlined the knowledge and the skills that students are expected to develop and demonstrate in each grade. The government further made the curriculum and exemplars available online. The new student performance tasks for English encompassed the four broad categories of Knowledge/ Understanding, Thinking/Inquiry, Communication, and Application, and students are now required to “integrate their knowledge and skills in meaningful learning experiences” and “demonstrate not only how well they had learned to use the required knowledge and skills in one context, but how well they could use their knowledge and skills in another context.”[6] When one looks at the exemplars for each grade, however, one still sees the same formal English instruction that I remember from my life during the time of Hairston’s call to arms.
The new Ontario curriculum claims that it’s central goal “is to promote students’ growth as confident writers and researchers” yet requires the students to “communicate competently using a range of forms and styles to suit specific purposes and audiences and correctly applying the conventions of language – grammar, usage, spelling, and punctuation.” However, the new Ontario curriculum does recognize that “these conventions are best learned in the context of meaningful and creative writing activities that allow students to develop the ability to think and write clearly and effectively.” (Ontario Curriculum, 17)[7]
While the new Ontario curriculum recognizes the “students benefit from opportunities to produce writing that is interesting and original and that reflects their capacity for independent critical thought” and “writing activities that students find meaningful and that challenge them to think creatively about topics and concerns that interest them will lead to a fuller and more lasting command of the essential skills of writing”, the overall expectations focus on the elements of effective writing (ideas/content, organization, voice, word choice, sentence fluency, language conventions, and presentation) and on the stages of the recursive writing process (planning for writing, drafting, revising, editing and proofreading, and publishing). (Ontario Curriculum, 17)
But as Kuhn would no doubt point out, scientific revolutions sometimes proceed very slowly…and although we’re in the third and final phase of the revolution (revolutionary science, where underlying assumptions are reexamined and a new paradigm established), it’s only been a relatively short period of time for our field.
[1] The Winds of Change: Thomas Kuhn and the Revolution in the Teaching of Writing Author(s): Maxine Hairston. Source: College Composition and Communication, Vol. 33, No. 1 (Feb., 1982), pp. 76-88 Published by: National Council of Teachers of English
[2] Response to Maxine Hairston, "The Winds of Change: Thomas Kuhn and the Revolution in the Teaching of Writing" Author(s): Thomas E. Blom Source: College Composition and Communication, Vol. 35, No. 4 (Dec., 1984), pp. 489-493. Published by: National Council of Teachers of English. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/357803 Accessed: 24/06/2011 13:17
[3] Reply by Maxine Hairston. Author(s): Maxine Hairston. Source: College Composition and Communication, Vol. 35, No. 4 (Dec., 1984), pp. 493-494. Published by: National Council of Teachers of English Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/357804 . Accessed: 24/06/2011 13:18
[4] Based on a study of forty-three of America's best-run companies from a diverse array of business sectors, In Search of Excellence describes eight basic principles of management -- action-stimulating, people-oriented, profit-maximizing practices -- that made these organizations successful. [http://books.google.com/books/about/In_search_of_excellence.html?id=knzNIfmU2F0C]
[5] The Aquarian Conspiracy is a study of the changes in work, relationships, medicine, religion, and education that comprised the birth of the New Age. [http://books.google.com/books?id=1btUPwAACAAJ&dq=The+Aquarian+Conspiracy&hl=en&src=bmrr&ei=-jgFTpKJE6jn0QG2q8nACw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CCwQ6AEwAA]
[6] Ontario Ministry of Education. The Ontario Curriculum Exemplars - Grade 9. http://www.edu.gov.on.ca/eng/curriculum/secondary/english9ex/englishall.pdf
[7] Ontario Curriculum – Revised. Grades 11 and 12. 2007. http://www.edu.gov.on.ca/eng/curriculum/secondary/english1112currb.pdf
I tend to agree that both process and product are important when teaching writing, although I'm not sure that process is really AS important. I think it would be very difficult to identify a specific process that would work for all writers. I noticed that my own personal writing process differs significantly from those outlined in the articles we have read so far - for example, I never write the title first. If the final product is good but a student has diverged from a teacher's preferred writing process (if the teacher could even tell, really), it seems unfair to assign a lower grade if the product is good. I'm sure many of us can remember how unfair we felt it was when we completed a math problem and got the correct answer, but lost points on the work because it was not the teacher's preferred method.
ReplyDeleteI believe it is important to teach process, but it must be a process that works for the student, not the teacher. Teachers should guide students to find an individual process that works for them, and to stick with that process or adapt it as needed. If each student has their own ideal process, they should ultimately begin to produce a better product as well.