I’m still processing the Phelps article, “Practical Wisdom and the Geography of Knowledge in Composition,” but the quote from Nick Fury in “The Avengers” immediately came to mind. Prior to entering academia, I worked as a professional writer in publishing and corporate communications, and in the 10 years since my last degree, I have taught college-level composition. As a result of both of these, I look at writing as a very pragmatic discipline, with an underlying foundation in critical thinking. I see the value of theory, but there comes a point when I lose patience with writing that I feel is needlessly convoluted and theoretical, and long for something more practical. That is how I felt while reading some of the assignments for this week, and it’s an undercurrent in my frustration with “theory” in general.
To paraphrase Nick Fury, I recognize that the learned scholars of academia have formulated theories, but given that sometimes theory is out of touch with practice, or is expressed in such a way as to make what should be a straightforward idea unnecessarily complicated, I have (up until now) chosen to ignore them. However this being graduate school, I recognize the need to better understand abstract theory, so unlike the Director of SHIELD I no longer have the option to ignore theory. Phelps discussion of the three “moments” – attunement, critical examination and practical experimentation (865) reassured me, to some degree, that this was a kindred spirit who was interested in pragmatic applications as well as abstract theory.
This is also one of the reasons why I defected to the Composition side of the English Studies field from Literature; my pragmatism has led me to prefer “what works” based on my own experience in the trenches of teaching Freshman Composition. While I’m apprehensive about venturing out into the deep end of theory, I am glad there are others who have a similar perspective. I still wish that academics would write in a more straightforward way, but I understand that you tailor your writing to your audience, and credibility depends on having a voice of authority….which unfortunately means writing that grates on my sensibilities from years of teaching clarity and brevity.
EDIT:
Having read further, some additional thoughts –
There seems to be a disconnect, at least in some of the scholars the author is quoting from (especially North), in that there is a belief that pragmatic, procedural knowledge is in some way uncritical. While that *can* be the case, it certainly isn’t always that way. When I began teaching, I was frankly terrified – I knew how I did what I did, but I didn’t know how to explain it to others. If that’s all you know, how can you possibly teach? What works for one person doesn’t always work for another, and if you can’t articulate your reasons why you do what you do, you don’t really have a “how” that can be taught and applied to more than one situation. I had to become reflective about my own processes as a writer, and rather than just saying “do this” I had to think about why I did what I did, and come up with ways of teaching that helped students to discover the “why” through analyzing models, and then discuss the “how” of ways to put that “why”into practice.
“Lore” seems to be used as a kind of informal “best practices” – if you do this, you’ll get a good result. However it’s hard for me to conceive of a pedagogy that isn’t at all self-reflective. When I got to the point that I was just doing things by rote, I took a term off from teaching to get my head together, and came back with new approaches based on an analysis of what had and had not worked, refocusing on what the goals of training student writers should be based on the needs of the institution and the job market, and aimed at students where they are now, rather than where we expect they should be. I guess that when people are overworked and constrained by overly restrictive institutional requirements of what and how to teach, that discourages reflection. If you have no power to change assignments or innovate in your teaching, why reflect?