I'll start with Dias' "Distributed Cognition at Work." Dias describes distributed cognition as "the degree to which, within specific activities, knowing and/or learning and/or thinking are often distributed among co-participants, as well as mediated through the cultural artifacts available—artifacts which include semiotic, technological, and organizational structures; the process is dynamic and interactive, within a delicate, subtle, constant interplay among participants and means as they operate in tandem (although often with friction) toward the object of the activity." (I wonder if one could use this definition for any action. I would not be surprised to see the act of opening a door defined in this manner within an academic paper). This is a useful definition to bear in mind as the author spends the next 15 pages explaining that different means of communication and intellectual/social interactions are used in academic and professional settings. The hierarchical structure of a national bank in which every member, from the lowly mail room clerk to the president himself, fulfills his role for the greater good of the collective organism, the Bank, is different from the university setting in which one is either a student forced to engage, rather humorously, in the discourse of Great Men, or e a teacher/researcher who holds the key to some invisible treasure chest of knowledge. The Bank, therefore, is something like a pyramid in which every brick knows its place and worth and is essential for the soundness of the structure, while the university system is more like a spinning wheel—either you are on the wheel or trying to get on it, or you're doing something else altogether. I may be giving Dias too much credit though, for his point ultimately boils down to his final paragraph and this one sentence: "the relationship between students and teachers is radically different from that among fellow employees" (150). He proves this by contrasting the difference between how a bank is run (reports and analysis disseminated through the organism) and a university (exercises fed into the wheel). Finally, he suggests that because the two spheres of distributed cognition are so different, one ought to prepare students for the professional one.
Bizzell, in "Cognition, Convention, and Certainty," wants to reevaluate what is called the "writing problem" in the university. She echoes someone from one of our earlier readings that the academic setting is merely one of many discourse communities a student is engaged in. Deficiency in one, is not a cognitive deficiency, but rather an impeded node of access, conditioned by social situations, to that specific discourse community. She goes on the distinguish between two theoretical camps which try to solve this problem: those that are inner-directed and those that are outer-directed. One believes in a one-size-fits-all linear progression of education; the other admits that "universal, fundamental structures can't be taught" and one should instead "teach students that there are such things as discourse conventions" (another idea echoed in previous readings and one that I agree with but find a difficulty with implementing this on a broad scale). Bizzell also finds problems with both camps and, conveniently, proposes a synthesis of the two. "We should think of the current debate between the two schools as the kind of fruitful exchange that enlarges knowledge...I would like to show here how one inner-directed theoretical model of writing can be enlarged by an outer-directed critique." I seem to have missed the "enlarged" portion of this paper, for as I read one, I found Bizzell merely criticizing various other theories. (I was struck by how hostile she was towards Flowers and sensed a stroke of jealousy in her writing, but that could just be me). She goes into great deal explaining Flowers process only to dismiss it as problematic. I didn't read Flowers' article, but as I flipped through the pages, I wish I would have for it seems genuinely interesting. Finally, after going through various theories, Bizzell ultimately concludes that "If the work of these disciplines continues to converge, a new synthesis will emerge that revivifies rhetoric as the central discipline of human intellectual endeavor...one's work and the understanding that guides it cannot be achieved autonomously...In other words, let us emphasize not only discourse but also community."
Allen, I'm totally with you on the difficulty imagining how to implement Bizzell's ideas about teaching discourse conventions. I think, to a large extent, it's a question of vocabulary. When we discuss discourse conventions, what do we focus on? The topoi? The standard rhetorical moves (which she presents in some examples)? The expectations for grammar and vocabulary? Assumptions about audience? There just seem to be so many ways to go, and each is a minefield of stuff-I-don't-know-how-to-talk-about and stuff-that's-been-talked-to-death-in-other-ways.
ReplyDeleteFor example: topoi. In our American Realism class this semester, I find myself struggling with what to talk about, and I attribute that struggle to not having had scholarly exposure to that material before. If you put a Jane Austen novel in front of me, I can tell you the things that people usually talk about when they talk about Austen. I can write a paper that takes one of those things as a starting point. With Twain or James or Garland, though? I feel lost for a starting point, because I don't know what people in the discourse community of American Lit scholars usually say. I'm an outsider.
I guess this is why there's all the advice about giving comp students familiar topics to write about; they'll have some kind of starting point and will know the kinds of things people talk about when they discuss texting and driving, or rushing a fraternity, or learning how to study. The problem (and what Bizzell wants to change, I think) is that the students may just latch onto those starting points and not ever think of them as "what people talk about." It's about creating awareness that the use of a cause-and-effect argument to condemn texting and driving or of a definition of youth as lazy to explain studying problems are common threads that can be found in other arenas.
But discourse conventions are about so much more--how do we develop a full vocabulary for talking about them in one semester? Not to mention changing the vocabulary students already have (e.g. making "grammar" not about rules but about conventions)? Oh, and then putting it all into practice? I don't know. At least trying is probably a good way to spend that semester, though.
Allen, I'm glad you discussed the Dias et al. article in this post since I pretty much skipped the entire thing (I saw that it mostly dealt with a bank and how its employees received information from each other and from the higher-ups, and I was turned off). I can see how it relates to the other readings for this week on Cognitive Theory, but I still wasn't a fan. Again, when you boiled down the article to "the student-teacher dynamic functions differently from the employee-employee dynamic", I thought, "What the hell does this have to do with writing instruction at the university?"
ReplyDeleteSimilarly to your opinion (and Cagle's too) about Bizzell's response to Flower & Hayes, I also felt that she was critical of the study which she spent almost all of her chapter discussing. Her ideas about combining IDT and ODT are good, but I always end up with the same question whenever I read something with an idealistic bend towards resolution: Where's the time? Can all of this be accomplished within a fifteen-week period? Flower & Hayes acknowledged that their study was a jumping-off point for future analysis of writing; Bizzell, rather than doing this, simply goes back and proceeds to criticize their steps.