Fulkerson's "Summary" - Badovinac

I would like to start by saying that this was the most frustrating of all the articles/essays to read. There was a paragraph on page 677 that did not make any sense at all. To me, the point of learning and teaching composition is to make sure that certain ideas and concepts are accessible to large groups of people, especially other writers and readers. The difficultly of reading this article was particularly irritating because there were so many good ideas in it. 

I enjoyed the idea that "paradigm shifts" in composition are different from that of other areas of education, because a scholar can go back in time to use older ideas while, at the same time, using more modern and innovative ideas. It's nice that the invention of new ways of composing do not negate those used by our forebears. A person must be highly adaptive to work in fields of English, even more so to work in English academia. It strikes me as funny that we have so many people working on how best to teach composition and yet we are still struggling, as teachers, to get students to write well.

I also found a very interesting scholarly blog about Chris Burnham when I was looking up the meaning of expressive pedagogy (655):

http://erickawillsprecis.wordpress.com/2008/09/14/christopher-burnhams-"expressive-pedagogy-practicetheory-theorypractice"/

I was at a loss on many of the ideas expressed in this article, and so I found myself using the internet profusely in order to discover what was being written about. 

There were a lot of ideas in this essay: process vs. pedagogy, action vs. theory, old vs. new, "heuristic" learning vs. didactic learning, subject vs. writing, and it seems that Fulkerson prefers the new learning over the old. It was from his essay that I discovered a lot of teaching methods that I would like to employ myself. I realized that one of the problems with the way that teaching is often executed is how "students must interpret to the teacher's satisfaction" (663). The very subjectivity of writing prohibits students from being able to write to their professor's desires. An educator's ideals and views should have nothing to do with how a piece of writing is read or graded.

Sherry Stanforth asks the question: "Was the goal to teach [students] better values or better writing or both?" It indicates how difficult a balancing act teaching can be. I believe, after reading this article, that the goal should be to get students' feet wet with simpler topics (pop culture, etc.) and then work them into more complex topics (to teach the basic theories of not only writing, but composition methods of argumentation, which goes beyond grammar and structure, before making the writing topics the center of the discourse). Plus, if students can learn to argue points of their own, regarding things in which they really believe, and about which they have strong ideas, there is much less likelihood of "indoctrination" (665). 

Expressive pedagogy/processes seem to be the best way to get a student writing about her own ideas, but it probably wouldn't really work for the long-term in academia, because first-person essays would probably focus more on opinion rather than making sound, thoughtful arguments based on research. So a good solution seems to be beginning with the expressive processes and then moving into the critical/cultural studies, including the more complicated "feminist pedagogy" (666). I believe that it is important for students to develop their own unique voice before becoming "au courant[s]" (670), before they can think about "writing for an audience" (672), and before they can "discuss the task in the language of argumentation: claim, evidence, assumption, counterviews, and refutation" (673). 

In response to Conclusions and Implications:

I believe that it is not necessary to discard an entire process just because part of it is not effective. Composition, writing and language are all fluid. The fact that "composition as become much more complex" means that no one process or pedagogy is going to be enough, even for the basic composition course. It seems that it would be most appropriate to teach students to be both "successful insiders" and "articulate critical outsiders" (679), and to give them the option of being either or neither. 

This essay does a lot of assuming, but the biggest assumption is that the person reading it is familiar with all of the texts that are referred to. This assumption made the piece more difficult to read, and perhaps it is an assumption that is widely held in essay writing, but a little bit of explanation of some of the ideas would have been appreciated. The research that I had to do as a result of the essay's convoluted delivery was, however, fairly beneficial to understanding the basics of composition and the purpose of it in education.