Grassi's critique of philosophers like Des Cartes and Kant speak to the reasons that composition studies do not fare well in academia. Grassi's critique focuses on the weaknesses of the scientific paradigm. Foss, Foss and Trapp explain Grassi in this way: "Grassi discusses various characteristics of the scientific paradigm, all of which he considers to be limitations of cience in terms of the knowing the world. The scientiric method seeks to discover first principles, yet it does not examine the source of such priniciples. In other words, knowledge exists within the boundaries of the system under examination, but no attempt is made to understand the origins of the system itself" (p. 55). Grassi (qtd in Foss, Foss, and Trapp) claims: "science is only applicable within th erange of a system based, in each field, on its own particular premises, and of course these premises cannot be proved because they form the system's own foundation" (p. 55).
The second problem for Grassi, according to Foss, Foss, and Trapp, is that scientific thought does not consider anything that cannot be generalized to the universe; there is no value in looking at specific cases for the sake of understanding the case only. Grassi (qtd in Foss, Foss and Trapp, p. 56)explains the problem as a "desperate effort of freeing oneself from relativity, from the subjectivity of what appears through the senses."
All of this leads to demoting/undervaluing the humanities, which Grassi explains is another limitation of the scientific paradigm. Any contribution offered by disciplines in the humanities is dismissed because, as Foss, Foss, and Trapp describe, "any discipline that is not grounded in logical processes is denigrated" (p. 56). Grassi explains that a scientific approach to the humanities is a "repudiation of history." Philology, art, and poetry face the same dilemma, and rhetoric "fars no better, because the passions impair the clairyt of though tand ocnsequently are not to be taken into account" (qtd. in Foss, Foss and Trapp, p. 56).
Foss, Foss, and Trapp: "Grassi seeks 'a proper appreciation of humanism's rejection of the rational' and devotes himself to showing how humanism, despite its domination by science, in fact offers perspectives not available to science" (p. 57).
All of this can be used in an argument that one of the primary reasons the field is under-valued is because of this mind set/epistemology.
Monday, March 8, 2010
Saturday, March 6, 2010
Teacher Inquiry -- Saturday March 6
Here I am again in Burnham's TI class. I enjoy coming, even though my heart on Saturdays is always outside. This is a place where I can do professional work that I take no other time to do. In this mini-semester I hope to interrogate my approach to developmental writing pedagogy, with the aim of finding ways of inserting my experience into what I'm reading for my comprehensive exams. I know what I want in a way that can't tolerate doing something if it doesn't advance something. My comprehensive exams must advance more than just another step toward my Ph.D. I want the work I do in preparing for them and in actually writing them to inform my own pedagogy.
So I'm going to continue to talking about Miller's article "Composition as a Cultural Artifact." But first a word about Greg. At breakfast yesterday Pierre and I told him about the composition history question that we are both answering. It asks us to look at how the field has been under-valued. Miller makes the argument that it is under-valued as a result of a cultural imprint -- an imprint that is seemingly set in cement. This imprint places composition teachers in the roles of nurse/doctor (cure the ill student), maid (scrubb the student clean), mother (nurture the immature student), and priest (mediator between high -- academia, and low -- student). All of this makes perfect sense to me. I understand the metaphors at a gut level. But Greg seemed not to get any of this. He asked at least two times something like "who says we're undervalued?" It was a new idea to him. He talked about non-English faculty treating him as if he were a magician. Pierre said that the general public treated him like a saint. In public, I often feel like a leper once I've announced my profession. I don't feel like either a saint or a magician.
Why am I in this field? I came to it in a circuitous way, but the long and short of it is that I like to teach -- I don't know that it is specifically writing pedagogy that I love -- but language in general. I love language and I love to teach, and so here I am. Maybe I would have stayed in TESOL, my first career, except that it is even lower than the field of composition -- less professionalized and the textbooks even less about theories of second language acquisition than writing textbooks. I found like minds in composition -- colleagues who wanted to talk about the complexities of teaching somebody something that can't quite be considered content, but also can't be reduced to a skill, like learning how to write D'Nealian script as a style of penmanship. The idea that writing instruction needs to account for rhetoric, culture, specific skills, critical thinking, gender, class, identity, and the list goes on -- is exciting to me, but so hard to pin down in a world that loves to define and categorize and taxonomize -- a world that only wants to ask questions that can be answered by science instead of through reasoning and judgment -- a world that only valorizes the rational. How can this field of writing instruction -- especially basic writing instruction -- professionalize with in the rank and file? How can it resist the hallowed halls of empircal research? Maybe it shouldn't? Is there more than just two ways of conducting scholarly inquiry and doing scholarly work and producing knowledge?
So I'm going to continue to talking about Miller's article "Composition as a Cultural Artifact." But first a word about Greg. At breakfast yesterday Pierre and I told him about the composition history question that we are both answering. It asks us to look at how the field has been under-valued. Miller makes the argument that it is under-valued as a result of a cultural imprint -- an imprint that is seemingly set in cement. This imprint places composition teachers in the roles of nurse/doctor (cure the ill student), maid (scrubb the student clean), mother (nurture the immature student), and priest (mediator between high -- academia, and low -- student). All of this makes perfect sense to me. I understand the metaphors at a gut level. But Greg seemed not to get any of this. He asked at least two times something like "who says we're undervalued?" It was a new idea to him. He talked about non-English faculty treating him as if he were a magician. Pierre said that the general public treated him like a saint. In public, I often feel like a leper once I've announced my profession. I don't feel like either a saint or a magician.
Why am I in this field? I came to it in a circuitous way, but the long and short of it is that I like to teach -- I don't know that it is specifically writing pedagogy that I love -- but language in general. I love language and I love to teach, and so here I am. Maybe I would have stayed in TESOL, my first career, except that it is even lower than the field of composition -- less professionalized and the textbooks even less about theories of second language acquisition than writing textbooks. I found like minds in composition -- colleagues who wanted to talk about the complexities of teaching somebody something that can't quite be considered content, but also can't be reduced to a skill, like learning how to write D'Nealian script as a style of penmanship. The idea that writing instruction needs to account for rhetoric, culture, specific skills, critical thinking, gender, class, identity, and the list goes on -- is exciting to me, but so hard to pin down in a world that loves to define and categorize and taxonomize -- a world that only wants to ask questions that can be answered by science instead of through reasoning and judgment -- a world that only valorizes the rational. How can this field of writing instruction -- especially basic writing instruction -- professionalize with in the rank and file? How can it resist the hallowed halls of empircal research? Maybe it shouldn't? Is there more than just two ways of conducting scholarly inquiry and doing scholarly work and producing knowledge?
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