18: ” …to teach composition is to teach the process of making meaning.” **Which is NOT the “writing process”…!!! Why does this get so screwed up? As though “process” means only one thing… Must look at “process” again in Harris. He’s wrong to say her work doesn’t enter into discussions “in these terms” when one of those terms is “process.” It does! It marks the potential for a profoundly different (and revolutionary) conception of “process.”
18: “This is what I have meant by calling for a theory of imagination: imagination is the most important idea we could have to think with. We should reclaim imagination from those who have identified it with ill-conceived notions of ‘creativity’ and make of it our chief speculative instrument.” ***How does this play out? If I am going to identify a kind of imagination, a kind that can help me differentiate the kind of imagination employed in the process of “creativity” (as popularly conceived) from the kind of imagination harnessed via prepared environments in a classroom designed towards auto-education and critical consciousness, then… I need a “learning imagination”.. It is imagination purposed.
18: “Jargon is never just a list of special terms; it has both aggressive and defensive uses and only insofar as we are alert to the character of such language are we genuinely free to undertake critical thinking about matters in question.” ***Freire & critical consciousness
18: “No one is better qualified to put theory to the test than the classroom teacher: I passionately share I. A. Richards’ conviction that the classroom is the philosophical laboratory.”
18: “What we teach when we teach composition will depend on our views of the nature of learning and of language.” ***I wonder how many of us, writing teachers, EVER articulate these “views”… And how many of us are informed via rhetoric?
19: “…if we consider learning as primarily ‘a disposition to form structures,’ then we can teach composition as a mode of learning: composing is preeminently a matter of forming structures.”***We “form structures” out of allatonceness; the double helix is one of those structures (a metaphor for one anyway).
20: “As a working definition we can think of composition as ‘a bundle of parts.’
20: “if we teach composing as a mode of learning, a way of thinking, then we will be teaching it as a process.” ***This is SO different from “the writing process”… We teach “the learning process” through composing….
20: “Composing is not a process like playing a game of tennis or cooking a meal; there are no hard and fast rules, and it does not proceed in one direction—in a straightforward manner. Composing is not a linear process, though what it creates has linear form. That’s why it’s easy to mistake the methods appropriate to teaching the product as being equally appropriate for teaching the process.” ***Not anymore! The digital! I wonder if we can say…when we’re composing in digital spaces (not just pasting into them)… that the medium more closely matches our natural state, the state of allatonceness? embraces the non-linear even in outcome/product.
20: “We can best help students develop their own powers by assuring that they have occasions to discover that composing is itself a process of discovery and interpretation, of naming and stating, of seeing relationships and making meanings.”
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