Two Narratives and a Bore

Alvarez: Despite the intrusive transcription errors, I did enjoy this article. The narrative presentation was refreshing, and the charts made note-taking a breeze. One of the most unreadable yet interesting moments in our version of the text was an idea that Alvarez teased and dropped: “Yet, while we consider the effects of our students’ literacy habits and preparation have upon their learning and ability we teach them, we still have to examine the values and literacy habits which guide our selection, organization and assessment of what we are teaching ...”. (68? .pdf-1). I do see that the focus of the article is “how to begin teacher research,” but the pre-colonic title phrase is maybe a little too personal to Alvarez and has too little to do with the “rhetorical” purpose of her article. Maybe it’s too much to ask that she include discussion of the specific habits of her students, but I think we all would have savored even a small taste of how students’ specific literacy habits led to the their appreciation of a new model for teaching ELA—a question she no doubt has considered.

Another key to Alvarez’s article is that “the first research project a teacher engages in will change the research habits he/she teaches to the students” (70? .pdf-3). She later rejects “the outline, note card, static, positivistic format we are all so familiar with,” and her phrase led me to do a little light reading about positivism. I would be grateful and much impressed if someone can explain how this philosophy/epistemology fits in with the traditional high school process of looking up existing information, organizing it, and presenting it. What happened to “empirical designs”? Did anyone else take from Alvarez’s proposal of a “dynamic, fluid” research method that she also supports an equally fluid and unstable understanding of the results of research in general? Sort of a “Go research. Then do what works for you” attitude?
One last critique of the charts: What’s up with “Step # 4” falling into both “phases” of the research process? Isn’t Phase 2 the implementation phase?

Lauer & Asher: The first few pages of the introduction didn’t really blow my mind. So rhetorical inquiry is deductive and usually turns to other disciplines for analogy before reasoning out a theory; ok. As usual, the language caught my attention. I noticed the differences in the use of rhetorical from Lauer’s argumentative, or convincing along a continuum to persuasive or inspiring (in Alvarez: ”...the teacher research project becomes a rhetorical act, requiring us to do more than research” [72? .pdf-5]). Oddly enough, this continuum for which I have provided a tiny, illustrative taxonomy, are oriented with the beginning and end of a purposeful composition. :-) COOL.

Here’s a question for page 7 of Lauer: Is simply utilizing prior rhetorical inquiry to support empirical inquiry still considered to be multimodal? Let’s not feel pressured to create new rhetoric when empirical studies are in high demand by virtue of induction’s fallibility (haha at least it keeps everyone busy)! It seems to me that repeated empirical tests and reports on the outcomes of a previously rhetorically proposed practice should be a constant task in composition studies or any similar field. We deal with lots of continuums in this chapter: conceptual to operational, descriptive to experimental, even the balance between pure rhetoric and pure empirical inquiry.

Here’s a definition question: “Constructs” seem to be different than the 400 or so “dimensions of human behavior” mentioned in the “General Principals...” section? What are examples of these 400? Also, prewriting as they define it seems to be a pretty narrow “construct,” and I can’t wait to start defining my terms before researching—what a task! I know that the basic essay writing model we use ignores Lauer’s example researchers’ definitions and treats planning as the prewriting itself.

Ede: Lisa Ede has an interesting life story in the literary world. She fell into composition studies and inquired blindly as she unknowingly spread her New Critical herpes into the new discipline—how awful. The article finally got interesting when she took on North and explains that lore is an untenable replacement for inquiry (320-321), yet practitioners are threatened by theory (321). That daily teaching practices may need to govern theory (322) is “action research” in a nutshell. I think one of the best examples of the importance of methodological openness is the controversial case of collaborative writing where deep-rooted biases and distrusts about authorship bring methodology more into the open. This section made me wonder if as practitioners we should be interesting our students (they are already involved) in the theoretical issues at stake in their writing. Should I open up a can of worms with ninth graders? In example: “Johnny, do you see how this method of prewriting and planning limits you to biases?” Would even a twelfth grader step up to bat when Nolan Barthes is throwing heat high and inside with “How is it possible to write?” Ede ends by giving one last shout out to her fem-idol, Flax, and hesitatingly accepts all methodologies of inquiry. I end by suggesting we call composition studies less a discipline than a community and sing the chorus of War’s “Why Can’t We be Friends?”