Friday, January 30, 2009

Week Two: Label Me This, Batman

For the most part, I agree with Matsuda's idea of the "discursive" (65) nature of any sort of theory, especially if the proponents of the theory claim for it to be the be-all and end-all of theories: "Big Theory" (74). It took until the end of the essay to bring Kent and Mary Lawrence into the discussion, but they both seemed to have very good ideas about this whole process/post-process idea. 

I agree with Kent that all "writing constitutes a process of some sort," and whether this process is prescribed through teacher and peer input, or whether it is solely the process of the author, it is still a process. To say that writing of the latter sort is without a process is incorrect. I agree that students can benefit from finding their own voices and also from peer and professor-responses to the work, but, as I have said ad nauseam, it does not mean that we should discount all that has come before and has, until recently, informed our composition process.

I think that Lawrence's ideas (through Bruner, apparently) are excellent: "independence and accountability" should be at the top of every student's to-do list when they enter a college setting. Their culture will, inevitably, influence them, as will the cultures and ideas of their peers. As educators, we should also keep in mind that, with this individuality, comes a certain amount of open-minded evaluation of student work. We can't teach our students to think for themselves unless we encourage them to be their own people. Of course there are rules, but we have all bloomed into individuals within the rules of society, or in spite of.

Lastly, I understand that we must have labels and we must be able to take certain things for granted in order to function in academic situations, but it is hubris to think that there is no other way than the way that has been set before us as educators, especially when, as Matsuda says, the process theory (not to mention the post-process that was derived from it) "hardly reached the status of a paradigm" (78). 

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