Marilyn M. Cooper

Computer Conferences and Learning: Authority, Resistance, and Internally Persuasive Discourse.

Our professions recent focus on the social construction of knowledge and the roles that discourse and community play in this construction have made some of us aware of disturbing characteristics in our classrooms. We now notice, for instance, that the traditional forums comprising these classrooms-group discussions, lectures, teacher-student conferences, written assignments-generally support a traditional hegemony in which teachers determine appropriate and inappropriate discourse. We notice, further, that this political arrangement encourages intellectual accommodation in students, discourages intellectual resistance, and hence may seriously limit students understanding of, and effective use of, language. As a result, we have begun to recognize the need for non-traditional forums for academic exchange, forums that allow interaction patterns disruptive of a teacher-centered hegemony. These forums should encourage students to use language to resist as well as to accommodate and should enable individuals to create internally persuasive discourse as well as to adopt discourse validated by external authority. In creating such non-traditional forums to supplement the work now going on in our classrooms, we tacitly argue for the importance of discourse in learning, the importance of students talking and writing to one another as well as to the teacher as they attempt to come to terms with the theories and concepts raised in their courses. This particular kind of learning does not take place often enough within the forums characteristic of our traditional classrooms, where interaction-at least the approved kind of interaction-is all too often dyadic, emphasizing the role of the all-knowing teacher discussing a topic with quiet, attentive students who may respond to the teacher but not directly to one another. Socrates tells Phaedrus that this is the ideal learning situation: lucidity and completeness and serious importance belong only to those lessons on justice and honor and goodness

The Ecology of Writing.

The idea that writing is a process and that the writing process is a recursive cognitive activity involving certain universal stages (prewriting, writing, revising) seemed quite revolutionary not so many years ago. In 1982, Maxine Hairston hailed the move to a process-centered theory of teaching writing as the first sign of a paradigm shift in composition theory (77). But even by then process, not product was the slogan of numerous college textbooks, large and small, validated by enclosure within brightly-colored covers with the imprimatur of Harper & Row, Macmillan, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Scott, Foresman. So revolution dwindles to dogma. Now, perhaps, the time has come for some assessment of the benefits and limitations of thinking of writing as essentially-and simply-a cognitive process. Motivation for the paradigm shift in writing theory perhaps came first from writing teachers increasingly disenchanted with red-inking errors, delivering lectures on comma splices or on the two ways to organize a comparison-contrast essay, and reading alienated and alienating essays written from a list of topic sentences or in the five-paragraph format. Reacting against pedagogy that now seemed completely ineffective, we developed methods that required students to concentrate less on form and more on content, that required them to think. We decided to talk about ideas rather than forms in the classroom and sent students

Talking About Protocols.

The cognitive process theory of writing, expounded by Linda Flower and John R. Hayes in the December, 1981 issue of College Composition and Communication and elsewhere, is attractive; as they argue, it improves on previous theories of composing by emphasizing the processes followed by the writer instead of describing stages in the completion of the product and by better accounting for the recursive nature of those processes through the use of a hierarchical rather than a linear description. But their casual reliance on unarticulated theories and an unsound methodology, while it does nothing to detract from our intuitive satisfaction with their conclusions, deprives them of any real support. Our acceptance of such work, if we accord it, will lead us away from, rather than toward, valid understanding of how writers write. Two facets of their work are particularly questionable: their theory of cognitive processes and their methodology for producing and analyzing protocols. Neither of these facets is new with Flower and Hayes. The cognitive processes they descry in writing are in large part those processes involved in purposive behavior. In discussing writing as a goal-directed activity, they rely on the concepts of goals, plans, and scripts developed by cognitive psychologists.1 But their discussion obfuscates much that is clear in their sources and thus seriously weakens their claims for the validity of their theory. Their methodology for psychological research dates from Plato and was made scientifically respectable in the nineteenth-century by Wilhelm Wundt, who named it introspection. But early and late critics of introspection have emphasized the limitations of the methodology, precisely as it is applied to the investigation of cognitive processes--limitations that Flower and Hayes ignore. In what follows we will discuss first the troublesome problems with their theory, and then pass on to the more serious problems with their methodology. In elaborating their model of the composing process, Flower and Hayes, especially in their most recent work, seem to ignore its status as a model and

Writing as social action

Drawing on scholarship in a variety of disciplines - philosophy, political theory, sociology, sociolinguistics, anthropology, literary theory, rhetoric - the authors outline an approach to the study of literacy that does not neglect the cognitive or individual aspects of literacy but rather sees them as largely shaped by the social forces of our political, economic, and educational systems. Ranging from the first-year writing class to adult literacy programs, the essays point the way to effective teaching strategies, program design, and research opportunities.Seven new chapters - on such topics as collaborative writing, discourse communities, womens literacy, and functional literacy - and eight previously published ones make up the book, providing a comprehensive theory of writing as social action.

Shared knowledge and Betrayal

Robert: She didnt tell me last night. Jerry: What do you mean? (Pause) I know all about last night. She told me about it. You were up all night, werent you? Robert: Thats correct. Jerry: And she told you ... last night ... about her and me. Did she not? Robert: No, she didnt. She didnt tell me about you and her last night. She told me about you and her four years ago. (Pause) So she didnt have to tell me again last night. Because I knew. And she knew that I knew because she told me herself four years ago.