The Maxims:
- “Begin where they are.” ~This one she reclaims a la Freire. Not in order to change “them,” but to bring their conscious awareness to their natural powers of meaning-making. This is an essential Montessori maxim as well.
- “How you construe is how you construct.” ~ “…identifying how forming is central to both reading and writing” (10). ***This seems to me to have major implications for “expressivism”… Who has studied interpretation as an expressivist act? And media literacy adds another dimesntion to this, I think.
- “To understand is to invent [Jean Piaget, Montessorian].” “If we can learn to teach reading and writing [and designing] together…as modes of interpreting, then we can more easily see the justification for teaching creative and critical writing together…Of course, they can be differentiated by the sound principle that they serve different purposes. But they are usually differentiated only in terms of the affective-cognitive opposition. I have zealously preached against this doctrine in several of the talks printed here…[Piaget’s] paradox simultaneously destroys the false opposition of the creative and the critical and declares their interdependence” (10). ***This speaks to the rejection of a mind/body split, particularly with pedagogical implications [Montessori], social pedagogical implications [Freire].. Add to this a rejection of the digital/physical split via a “new materialism” and we’ve got awesome implications for writing pedagogy!
- “Elements of what we want to end with must be present in some form from the start.” ***This maxim taps allatonceness! “They abyss that opens up between…personal writing and expository writing, between ‘free writing’ and ‘guided structured writing’—all these gaps result inevitably when we try to teach according to some linear model in which something allegedly simple must come before something allegedly complex” (11). ***Here she addresses “expressivism,” locating it as a kind of “free writing” or “personal writing”? “Most ‘Engfish’ (Macrorie) and ‘Themewriting’ (coles) results directly from the kind of assignments we make” (11). **What does ‘engfish’ look like in blog design & writing? “The New Rhetoric is no more helpful, with its deconstruction of a process that must be dialectical from the start” (11). ***Here she critiques ‘The New Rhetoric’ (Berlin).
- “To the teacher, the simplest and most general appears the easiest, whereas for a pupil only the complex and living appears easy” [Tolstoy, & Anna Tolstoy’s a Montessorian] (12). “This is the maxim of maxims—the maxim maximus.”***Allatonceness is a model for this maxim of maxims. “Rather, we are making meaning, and that is a dialectical process, not a linear one” (12). ***I wonder if awareness sets the dialectical into motion inside the bubble??? **She mentions Sylvia Ashton Warner twice already, once in this section. Here she cites her notion of “organic teaching.” Then… “The challenge is not to get rid of complexity or to put it off but to clear away distractions so that structure can be apprehended to assure that the natural processes of forming by means of which we make sense of the world can take place when students are learning to read and write” (12).*** AKA: to “prepare an environment” designed to raise student awareness (apprehension) to the fact that they naturally form meanings when they read and write, and how they do it.
- “Only method can guide our thinking about thinking.” ***She gives this to the brief conclusion, though it reads like a maxim to me! What are its implications?
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