Seeing What I Say
Integrating Writing & Reading, Part 2: Ann Berthoff and the Dialectical Notebook
Context. As a follow up to the urgency I feel about uniting writing and reading, I want to share with you one concrete method that has helped me realize—in the sense of “making real”—the benefits and importance of doing so. As I suggest below, Berthoff’s use of what she calls the “Dialectal Notebook” has even more effectiveness now that students use their own imaginations and computers to create similar stuctures in their use of the idea. I present this in the hope those of you who have found similar ideas will share them in this forum.
I want to do everything I can to persuade teachers, K-35, to become philosophers—to remind them that that is, indeed, what they are they consider language and thought, theory and practice, intending and realizing, writing and rewriting: when they think about or consider the meanings of meaning: when, in Coleridges’s wonderful phrase the seek to know their knowledge. —Ann Berthoff
Ideas, even as ideas, are incomplete and tentative until they are employed in application to objects in action, and are thus developed, corrected, tested. —John Dewey
This vision of the interplay between ideas and action, theory and classroom structures, is embodied in Ann Berhoff’s focus on what she calls “method,” a bridge between philosophy and pedagogy, most importantly in the “double-entry or dialectical notebook.” Writing in the days before we wrote on computers, she described a notebook with wide left margins—suggesting law ruled paper—in which the student writes down on one side excerpts and paraphrases from the reading, snippets and summaries from class discussions, and first thoughts on these materials. Then at some later time, maybe the evening after class or the next time the notebook is picked up for more writing, the student uses the other side of the page to write further observations on what was originally written and to deepen the process of analysis and synthesis in relating what first may have been separate facts or notions. The student soon sees that any seeming terminus is arbitrary, only what Robert Frost called “a momentary stay against confusion.” The use of computers in composition now greatly expands the possibilities here; I will write this piece in a simulation, a prototype, of the process by writing some of the quotations and fragments in italics and asking you as readers to imagine these and my own comments in side by side columns.
The dialectical notebook teaches the value of keeping things tentative. . . Unless students prove to themselves the usefulness of tentativeness, no amount of exhortation will persuade them to forgo “closure,” in the current jargon. The willingness to generate chaos; the patience in testing a formulation against the record; careful comparing of proto-statements: these are all expressions of what Keats famously called “negative capability.” —Ann Berthoff
My Book is my Savings Bank. I grow richer because I have somewhere to deposit my earnings; and fractions are worth more to me because corresponding fractions are waiting here that shall be made integers by their addition. —Ralph Waldo Emerson
Thoughts accidentally thrown together become a frame in which more may be developed and exhibited. Having by chance recorded a few disconnected thoughts and then brought them into juxtaposition, they suggest a whole new field in which it was possible to labor and to think. —Henry David Thoreau
I began to use this method extensively in my own teaching not out of theoretical conviction but because of my own writing experience. After my first book I found myself up against a writing block. For an entire year I wrote only book reviews while I worried my string of original ideas had run out. Then I read Berthoff’s article on the dialectical notebook and began keeping my own as I taught a seminar on Emerson. I found as I taught the course, as I jotted down my notes for class discussion and later recollections of the discussions themselves, my ideas seemed also to cluster and shape themselves; it sometimes felt like putting together a jig-saw puzzle with a lot of extra pieces from other puzzles.. I began to realize experientially what before I had only theoretically accepted, that writing fixes our ideas so that we can come back to, reflect on their implications, and revise, quality or even liberate ourselves from. This returning, rereading, and reconceptualizing was the missing step in my previous and not very fruitful attempts to use journaling both in my own writing and with my students.
I do not tell this story to my classes at first. Indeed, I find it best to say nothing at all before they’ve tried it for themselves for a few weeks and had their own experiences and frustrations with it. I do, though, try to create structures within the class itself that enhance the activities of rereading and reflection. For example, I often begin each class by having the students share their notebooks in pairs or in small groups, perhaps write comments on each other’s margins, and then discuss the entire process with each other. This method moves the dialogical mode outside their own subjectivities into an interpretive, shared dimension. Further, I do not give them my own topics for short papers, but ask that they arise organically from their own journaling. Instead of a traditional final exam, I ask them to read through their own writings and create a synthesis or narrative account of their own discoveries through the semester. Throughout her long career, Ann Berthoff has helped my students and myself see that classroom learning and teaching are not a second-order intellectual activities but our version of the scientist’s laboratory, the place where the word becomes flesh, where ideas reclaim a human immediacy and presence.