Context.
This entry is called The Rationale, since it is more theoretical, even philosophical, than I would like to make this forum, but this is only the first part of an exploration that is more related both to the institutional politics of the situation and to classroom pedagogy. This second exploration next week will rely not only on my own experiences but on those writers whom I find most helpful and specific about the issue—particularly Robert Scholes, quoted below and Ann Berthoff,whose work on the Dialectic Journal is described in the link below and has had the most influence on my teaching and my own scholarly writing:
http://writing2.richmond.edu/wac/2entrynb.html
Peter Elbow and James Slevin have also done pioneering work in this intersection of fields.
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Both to some of my colleagues who come to me for advice in running discussions and to my own writing about Active Learning, the act of writing for each discussion has been often minimized as taking second place to discussions and close classroom readings. Let me correct this emphasis here to say that student writing is the single most crucial element to deepen and clarify their own reading and has more cognitive, intellectual value than any other aspect of running a student-centered, constructivist, “flipped” classroom. One teacher to whom I suggested this proposition told me that he has enough trouble covering the reading material to have students focus on writing as well. But I then asked him to tell me how he came to know what he knows just through reading the material or whether writing—whether notes, lectures, articles, books—was a large factor in the process. Indeed, if we look at how teachers prepare for their own classes, almost everyone I know writes down and organizes his or her thoughts on paper, even if they never return to that paper trail in the course of running each class. The real work is done in the writing. In doing so, we acknowledge that writing is not merely the setting down of what we already know. We push our own fuzzy thoughts to clarity; we find the very act of writing makes us articulate things we didn’t know we knew. As W. H. Auden once said, “How can I know what I think till I see what I say.”
In an even deeper sense my own experiences as a teacher have convinced me that knowledge is not truly one’s own unless it is articulated. I have heard it said that you don’t really know something unless it is articulated. I would go further to say you don’t really know it until you articulate it. Before it is written or spoken our knowledge remains locked in our own subjectivity, shadowy and inert. As we shape it into words, numbers, formulae, it becomes objective, something external to scrutinize, examine, revise. I remember the story of a chemistry professor who, before the age of internet and texting, told his class he wouldn’t be able to respond to all the questions during the lecture period, but that if they would write out these questions and drop them in the box at the back he would respond to them at some later point. One such question consisted of the student beginning “I really don’t understand why. . .” and after half a page of writing down the question himself, he wrote, “OK, now I’ve got it. I figured it out myself. Thanks.” I love that “Thanks” at the end.
Robert Scholes has pointed out a resonant analogy between teaching and psychoanalysis. In the latter, an insight has much more power to heal, to change a patient when it is actually articulated by that patient than when it is spoken by the therapist and only then given assent. Scholes goes on to discuss the writing a student does about a literary text:
Specifically, the text we produce is ours in a deeper and more essential way than any text we receive from the outside. When we read we do not possess the text in any permanent way. But when we make an interpretation we do add to our store of knowledge—and what we add is not the text itself but our own interpretation of it. In literary interpretation we possess only what we create. I hope I am saying nothing new here, only articulating what every teacher of literature has always known: that it is no use giving students interpretations; that they must make them for themselves; that the student’s productivity is the culmination of the pedagogical process.
Hans-Georg Gadamer is even more emphatic:
To understand a text is to come to understand oneself in a kind of dialogue. This contention is confirmed by the fact that the concrete dealing with a text begins to find expression in the interpreters’ own language. Interpretation belongs to the essential unity of understanding. One must take up into himself what is said to him in such fashion that is speaks and finds and answer in the words of his own language.
The act of reading and the act of writing are both parallel acts of interpretation; to agree with Piaget, to construe is to construct, to understand is to invent. Emerson said “There is creative reading as well as creative writing.” Writing about what one has read moves the whole process into a fuller, visible dimension, and makes the act of reading more active, more deliberate, more intensive, more relevant to experience. I find the classes I offer that have the most writing are also the ones that most fully engage the students, and they in turn give me my highest ratings as a teacher. And they are also the ones from which I learn the most.