Roskelly, Hephzibah and Kate Ronald. Reason to Believe : Romanticism, Pragmatism, and the Possibility of Teaching. Albany : State University of New York Press, 1998.
Chapter 1
Stephen North
Stanley Fish
Mike Rose
Cornell West
bell hooks
11: “If practitioners cannot effect change in the ways theory and knowledge are made, and if theory is unconnected to the work of the classroom, then it’s no wonder that [Stephen] North ends up sounding cynical and despairing, making fun of his earlier hope, his lost, large vision.”
“If theory is not tested against practitioner knowledge and history, against student experience, if theories only compete with one another for dominance and never negotiate with practical ‘lore,’ then the kind of thinking about thinking that Berthoff calls for doesn’t seem rigorous. Examining the consequences of ideas for action, asking who’s being served by new theory or ‘restructuring’ might also be considered ‘romantic’ idealism, and romanticism is certainly something North want to avoid in his revised, diminished vision of retreat.”
16: “Many theorists, scholars, and teachers, of course, insist on the necessary relationship between experience and theory, and many work hard to examine and enact that relationship, but increasingly, it seems, the structures of the discipline, its hierarchical obsessions, its drive for status, and its insistence on labels keep teachers separated from theory, and theorists unconnected to the lived experience of those they are teaching. In English departments there is a sad irony in the way that story and theory come to occupy different, opposing positions.”**Is this still the case? To what extent? I think this is what Shor means when he identifies NCTE/CCCC as institutions counter to progress.
17: “Some teachers are hostile to theory, because they do not see the connection to their lived experiences in the classroom or their reading of the literature they love. Yet the opposite perspective leads to an equally disturbing trend: Other teachers embrace theory wholeheartedly in theory, but do not use theory to reflect on or change their own classrooms or implications for re-reading literature.”***This seems to be largely what I perceive happened to Berthoff…
22: “Neither ‘mere’ practicality nor ‘mere’ theorizing, then, will serve teachers who know that thought and life must be related in the work they do in and out of the classroom.” ***Of course these do not happen sequentially; they exist allatonce.
25: “Freire’s life’s work embodies romantic/pragmatic stances; Freire’s work is a struggle to put the concept of belief together with action, to insist that ideas have consequences. His word conscientizao [sic?] means consciousness enACTed. With this term, he counters the tendency to think dyadically, which always leads to one side of the pair being privileged over the other, as Berthoff warns.” ***I’m sure they know better than I do, but what does “think dyadically” mean? We don’t ever actually do that; we always think ‘triadcally’ (or otherwise). What we don’t do is acknowledge the triad; we don’t use it. We use dichotomies. This is reductive. And this is what I think they mean by think dyadically.
“Romanticism and pragmatism both operate from principles of mediation, and we argue that romanticism and pragmatism together offer ways of thinking again about the debates that continue in composition and English studies.” **And in the Humanities at large.
Chapter 2
29: “It is no accident that Whitman appears in this opening, or that Dewey’s Experience and Education is cited prominently in the acknowledgments to this book [Rose’s Possible Lives]. In fact, Rose’s whole project in this massive description of public education in the 1990s can be read as an enactment of both the romantic philosophy of the public poetry of Whitman and the romantic pragmatism of the educator or the people, John Dewey.” *** That’s interesting. No one is half as pragmatic is MM, by the way….
30: What I find so interesting is this valuing of “romantic”… They write of Rose: “But Rose’s rhetoric in Possible Lives is also romantic, romantic in his insistence on paying attention to the ‘social, moral, and aesthetic dimensions of teaching and learning’ (2)…” ***MM is castigated mightily for being too romantic, not “scientific” enough… I wonder if there is a tacit dualism at work here. The authors don’t speak much (yet) of the turn to data, to “scientific” methods (think-aloud protocols?), the urge to value empirical evidence and study in order to legitimize the field. Can’t be done. But we don’t need it. We have a model of a different kind of “scientific method” for teachers (and for the field) in MM’s observation (which, by the way, echoes beautifully AB’s valuing of a practice of observation, and a poet’s, and the whole mindfulness movement…)
“In other words, he is calling for a dialectic between reality and possibility, and his book offers to readers the ‘rich detailed images of possibility’ tha tRose says the public discussion of education so desperately needs (4).”
31: “We want to show how romanticism and pragmatism together construct a rhetoric uniquely suited, as Whitman says, to ‘creating America,’ and, as Rose argues, to sustaining the democratic experiment of education.” ***The current weakness in our democracy, the theocratic and autocratic tendencies of at least a third of America, speaks to an absence, a rejection, of the romanticism/pragmatism the authors speak of here. It also feels solidly feminist and its rejection solidly misogynistic.
“The stereotypical primary tenet of romanticism—the search for and glorification of self—seems profoundly antirhetorical, or at least a-rhetorical, just as the purview of rhetoric—persuasion of another person or a group toward a desired end—seems antiromantic.” **I hear the sophist/philosopher split here.
“And the popular conception of pragmatism, which casts it as a ‘commonsense,’ thus a-theoretical, stance, places pragmatism in opposition to theories of both romanticism and rhetoric.”
32: Interesting distinction made here between rhetoric and poetry via Mill and Aristotle: “There can be, then, no rhetorical triangle of speaker, subject, and audience; instead, there’s a line, from speaker to subject and back again, with the reader a small, unconnected point outside the line’s boundary. If communication or persuasion occurs, it happens by accident more than by design. The emphasis on expression as the rationale for composing underlies what is labeled romantic theory, and that label leads to the vision of romantic writers waiting for intuition, demanding isolation, and embodying uniqueness.” **Nothing about meaning making here. Rhetoric is old-school.
32-33: “As a philosophical system unique to the United States, it [pragmatism] has been, until recently, largely ignored in the twentieth century; one result of this omission is that, without pragmatism’s mediating function, romanticism and rhetoric have remained conceptual and practical opposites.”
**I want to say “mediating” and think of material media as well. MM
33: …the opposition of romantic and rhetorical stances has dominated much of the scholarly conversation in composition and rhetoric for the last twenty-five years. Ever since James Kinneavy’s 1971 A Theory of Discourse, there has been, in theory if not in pracice, an unwavering line drawn between ‘expressive discourse’ and discourse that ‘persuades’ or ‘refers/informs.'” **These authors find the root of this toxic delineation in Kinneavy…. “Kinneavy sought to explain the relationship of thought to expression…”
33: Interesting discussion of various authors—Emig, Flower, Kinneavy—and how they proscribed divisions on how we account for communication/writing.
34: “Add the psycholoinguistic influences on composition in the late 1980s, which led theorists to argue that ‘inner’ speech needed more emphasis or that ‘social’ speech should be the goal of writing teachers, and the stage was set for an interpretive paradigm in composition that, for twenty years, has centered around self/other divisions, divisions that quickly arrange themselves into hierarchies.” ***Berlin and the social-epistemic
HERE THEY NAME IT: 34: “One Of the most influential and long-standing hierarchies in the field has been James Berlin’s division of the field into ‘expressive, cognitive, and social epistemic’ foundations for theory and practice and teaching writing.”
These authors identify Berlin as opposed to Faigley, interestingly. “But James Berlin’s work set these categories in opposition, not synthesis.” In both ‘Rhetoric and Ideology’ and Rhetoric and Reality, Berlin, like Faigley, presents expressive, cognitive, and social rhetoric in historical progression, and composition growing ever more disciplinary as it moved rom self to society, from simple to complex, from ideologically naive to ideologically complex and aware.”
34: “This three-part taxonomy, useful for a field in the process of defining itself, has become canonical in composition studies over the last ten years; and the story of composition’s growth is now told in terms of the ‘social turn’ the discipline took after Berlin’s overview pointed the way.”
35: “Seeing writing classes as sites of social critique and democratic education, both Russell and Berlin find ‘romantic’ approaches antiquated. Bound in a literary tradition that emphasized individual genius, romanticism’s model of communication, they argue, does not work in a contemporary writing classroom.”
36: Whoa… here’s Gradin, the “social-expressivist” writer. And Winterowd (not quite as “articulate”… 🙂 )
37: “…what goes missing is connection—connection among self and other, personal and public—as well as any examination of method, the ways in which writers/thinkers make the connections, how they observe, act, reflect, and inquire in a developmental process.”
37-38: “…a historical look at the romanic ‘garden’ in order to seek out its rhetoric and its metod, and thus to show how romanticism and rheotirc have never been in opposition, but have always operated together, and always toward the end of creating a critical, tested faith.” ***WHOA! There’s a word: faith. Bold….
38: “Freire calls this combination [??survival and growth?] praxis. Peirce defines it as pragmatism. Both words describe the connection between self and the community, belief in action that characterized the attitude of the colonists and the eventual American philosophy that derived from their actions.
39: “The whole story also includes the powerful tension between individual will and democratic ideals.”
“What follows is not a linear history, but a reflection that asks what difference it might make to look again, and to look in out the way places, for a heritage we might be able to use.” ***YES!
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