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In Book 3 of his Confessions, Jean-Jacques Rousseau writes (among much else) about his struggles with writing:

It is with unbelievable difficulty that my ideas arrange themselves into any sort of order in my head. They circle there obscurely, they ferment to the point where they stir me, fire me, cause my heart to palpitate; and in the midst of all this emotion I see nothing clearly; I cannot write a word, I must wait. Imperceptibly, the great movement subsides, order succeeds chaos, everything finds its proper place; but slowly, and only after a long and confused agitation.

This passage reminds me of some advice Johannes Brahms is supposed to have given once regarding composing. You should begin work on a piece, he said, but then set it aside for awhile without thinking about it. Upon returning to the piece later, you will often discover that some of the problems that first presented themselves have been worked out, and you will have a clear sense of how to proceed.

From a psychological point of view, Rousseau and Brahms both highlight the importance of the subconscious in the creative process. In their view a successful composition is fashioned, in part, outside the realm of conscious intention. I wonder if there is any place for this creative “non-practice” in college composition courses. Perhaps there are ways to foster a productive subconscious creativity with practices that extend beyond the act of writing itself.

In my current work as a Fellow at Baruch, I’ve been encouraging students to formulate questions as they begin to work on research papers. The idea, in part, is that it’s a whole lot easier digging through the literature on a given subject when you know what you’re looking for. The process of coming up with appropriate questions, however, has been more difficult for the students than I thought it would be.

While pondering why this might be so, I stumbled on an article that may or may not be relevant (to the question of why questioning well is hard). In Critical Thinking Development: A Stage Theory, Linda Elder and Richard Paul detail, among other things, some of the traits and implications for instruction of what they call “The Practicing Thinker.” In order for students to become practicing thinkers, they argue, teachers must help them understand that “thinking is inevitably driven by the questions, that we seek answers to questions for some purpose, that to answer questions, we need information, that to use information we must interpret it (i.e., by making inferences), and that our inferences, in turn, are based on assumptions, and have implications, all of which involves ideas or concepts within some point of view.”

The rub is that “The Practicing Thinker” is stage four in what Elder and Paul put forth as a six-stage process through which “every person who develops as a critical thinker passes.” The stages range from “The Unreflective Thinker” (stage one) to “The Master Thinker” (stage six). If there is any connection between this theory and my question, then the students who are having difficulty formulating good questions might be “Unreflective,” “Challenged” (stage two), or “Beginning” (stage three) thinkers, and my job is to move them in the direction of becoming “Practicing” thinkers.

Part of Elder and Paul’s project is to highlight what all of this means for the educational process. I have to admit that I hadn’t thought about teaching in these terms, though I have sometimes wondered whether the seeming lack of critical thinking abilities in some of my students is connected to stages of cognitive development. Any cognitive psychologists or education specialists out there care to weigh in on this?

The current issue of Bostonia (Spring 2007) includes a look at a fascinating new initiative aimed at helping immigrant elementary schoolchildren in Chelsea, Massachusetts. “Project Challenge” is a mathematics program that “makes talk in the classroom the central component of learning.”

The basic idea behind the program is that students can gain a firm grip on mathematical concepts by discussing them. Instead of being told outright whether a particular equation or solution works, for example, children are encouraged to discuss whether a proposed approach seems viable, and to explain why they think the way they do.

The results are impressive: “After three years, Project Challenge students were scoring in the nintieth percentile on standardized math tests, even better than their counterparts in wealthy Boston suburbs. Not only that, but their English and language arts scores shot up.”

This interactive approach to learning is of course familiar to those of us who teach writing. That the “workshop”-oriented classroom could be so beneficial to children learning mathematics provides particularly strong support (in case any were needed) for the advancement of communications-intensive education.

I just came across an interesting article by Cliff Atkinson in the March 1, 2005 issue of Executive Travel. In “Beyond Bullet Points: How to unlock the story buried in your PowerPoint,” Atkinson describes an important point of convergence between the Humanities and the Business World.

The problem with bullet points and slide headings, says Atkinson, is that they typically do nothing more than establish dry, lifeless categories of information. What is usually missing is a story, something “juicy, coherent and full of life.” Hence, “some of the world’s largest organizations have adopted the word ’story’ as their new mantra for corporate communictions.”

Atkinson cites Aristotle in his definition of ”story”: it should include “action, a plot, central characters,” and even “visual effects.” He adds that classical notions of rhetorical persuasion should also play a part in the formulation of presentations. PowerPoint slides should thus articulate a story, an old-fashioned narrative incorporating ancient ideas of how to be persuasive.

Some interesting food for thought, I think, for those of us engaged in both Humanities and Business education in institutions like Baruch.

This semester at Baruch I’m working with students who have semester-long research projects. Their first assignment was to propose a topic idea. Most of the proposals were far too broad in scope. This was in no way odd or unexpected. It led me to wonder, though, whether there might be some systematic way to “teach” a sharper focus at the proposal stage.

A colleague of mine shared some ideas she had on the subject, which I’ll paraphrase here. My colleague’s approach is to require students to rewrite proposals until they pass. The proposal has to follow this format: Paragraph 1=Name the focused topic. Discuss what you find interesting in it and how it is relevant to the course objectives. Par. 2=Pose a main research question. This should be a question for which there is no simple (yes or no) answer. Par. 3=Introduce one solid source. Give full bibliographic data, and indicate how this source will contribute significantly to your project. Par. 4=Same as paragraph 3, but with another source. Par. 5=Outline how you will proceed with and complete the project. Indicate what you are still looking for in research, and discuss any potential stumbling blocks.

I’m wondering if anyone else out there has tried this kind of approach. I’m not sure if it would be appropriate for all writers. For some people, the focus seems to come only through the process of writing the actual paper. Any thoughts?

What is the place of the Humanities in the real world? This question haunts me as I reflect on an altogether mundane conversation I had recently with a colleague at my other (non-CUNY) job, where I teach writing. Here’s a synopsis of the exchange:

A (that’s me): “Hi! What are you teaching this semester?”
C (colleague): “Nothing. I finally have some time to work on my own stuff. What are you teaching?”
A: “A business writing course.”
C: “Oh, that’s really great! You don’t have to deal with . . . you know, the ideology.”

The ideology my colleague was referring to is the theoretical framework behind the program’s basic composition and expository writing courses. Instructors teaching these classes have to adopt a fairly prescriptive approach, both in terms of assignment sequencing and instructional methodology. Such requirements are understandable and perhaps inevitable, given the large number of instructors, most of whom are adjuncts. There has to be pedagogical coherence if thousands of students are to be held to the same rigorous standards.

The business writing course, on the other hand, allows instructors a greater degree of autonomy. There certainly is coherence and rigor in the curriculum, yet there is also a refreshing freedom. I suspect that there is more to this than the fact that a smaller pool of instructors (in business writing) requires less directorial oversight. The requirements and standards of the business writing course result from, and represent, goals that are more non-academic in nature. The ideology behind the more traditional writing courses (basic composition and expository writing) is connected to their “background” in the Humanities, while the “idea” behind the business writing course is to prepare students for success in the “real world.”

Yet the Humanities, it seems, cannot serve purely academic interests. In an environment of assessment and academic accountability, the Humanities, struggling to survive in a largely business-driven world, have little room for failure. They must produce results at once satisfactory to the academy and, in some way, relevant to the “outside” world. Administrators of courses like basic composition and expository writing thus have all the greater need for top-down quality control. The relative autonomy of the business writing instructor, in this view, corresponds to the entrepreneurial freedom of the real-life business person, who may create (to an extent, of course) his own means to a purely practical end.

The issues raised by all of this are particularly interesting to me in my work at Baruch, a business school with traditional Humanities requirements. In the upcoming installments I’ll explore how the different institutions I’m associated with are reinventing the traditional liberal arts education, specifically with regard to writing and communication.

There’s a fascinating history of Noah Webster’s iconographic American dictionary in the Nov. 6, 2006 edition of The New Yorker (“Noah’s Mark,” by Jill Lepore).  When Webster first proposed a “Dictionary of the American Language” in 1800, he was roundly criticized for planning to include new words spoken by common people.  The logic behind the attacks, writes Lepore, “went something like this: Because any words new to the United States are either stupid or foreign, there is no such thing as the ‘American language’; there’s just bad English.”

Much later, Webster’s was still criticized for its egalitarian tendencies: “In this magazine [The New Yorker], Dwight Macdonald complained that Webster’s Third had debased the language ‘in the name of democracy.’  The dictionary’s editorial staff had called for a show of hands to make decisions about words and usage.  Macdonald challenged both the method and its premise: ‘If nine-tenths of the citizens of the United States…were to use inviduous, the one-tenth who clung to invidious would still be right, and they would be doing a favor to the majority if they continued to maintain the point’.”

Lepore continues: “It’s probably a good thing Macdonald isn’t around to browse through the Wiktionary, the online, user-written dictionary launched in 2002 by Wikipedia, and billed as the future of lexicography.  There’s no show of hands at Wiktionary.  There’s not even an editorial staff.”

The implication seems to be that opponents of the “legitimatization” of common usage in language would criticize “Wiki” developments simply because they’re “democratic.”  Yet linguistic inclusiveness surely does not lead inevitably to the acceptance of all sources of information as (at least potentially) valid, I would think.  Aren’t Wikis problematic (potentially) on other grounds?  I wonder what Noah Webster would make of the Wiki phenomenon. 

One issue I often encounter in student writers is a tendency to waste time on generalities. You know what I mean: “Different people have various ways of dealing with difficult situations”; “Fiction is a very powerful thing,” to cite two examples from recent papers. In my comments on such passages I try to encourage students to be more specific, to claim something with some real arguing-power. I’ve recently started wondering, though, how I could become more specific myself in such commenting. How do you get students to get at the essence of something interesting and fruitful?

I may have stumbled upon an answer. A recent issue of The New Yorker (Oct. 9, 2006) contains some fascinating observations by Milan Kundera, under the title “What Is a Novelist?: How Great Writers Are Made.” I quote from the opening section, entitled “To Understand, We Must Compare”:

When the great Austrian novelist Hermann Broch wanted to block out a character, he first seized on the character’s essential position and then progressed to his more individual traits. From the abstract, he moved to the concrete. Esch is the protagonist of the second novel of Broch’s trilogy “The Sleepwalkers” (1931-32). In essence, Broch says, he is a rebel. What is a rebel? The best way to understand the phenomenon, Broch goes on to say, is by comparison. Broch compares the rebel to the criminal. What is a criminal? A conservative, who relies on the present order and wants to join it, who considers his thefts and his frauds to be a professional activity that will make him a citizen like everyone else. The rebel, by contrast, fights the established order to bring it under his own domination. Esch is not a criminal. Esch is a rebel. A rebel like Martin Luther, Broch says.

I’m not necessarily trying to produce great writers (or great novelists) in my composition classes, but I wonder if this technique of developing understanding through comparison might help students move toward better development of their own essential positions. Has anyone out there tried anything like this?

In his book Saints and Scamps: Ethics in Academia (Totowa, New Jersey: Rowman & Littlefield, 1986), Steven M. Cahn espouses a traditional view of the professor as an expert who is responsible to “lead students to master appropriate subject matter” (10).  Cahn criticizes teachers who “minimize their own importance and emphasize how much they have learned from the insight and imagination of their students” (9).  Instructors who abandon their authority in favor of more “egalitarian” classroom practices, he argues, are shirking their responsibility.

Communications pedagogy seems to embrace much of what Cahn criticizes, probably because Writing Across the Curriculum and similar programs have their roots in the egalitarian movements of the 1960s.  The peer review process common in many composition courses, for example, directly counters the hierarchy of the master-pupil relationship: here students can learn from one another without a great deal of intervention from the “expert,” at least on peer-review days.

I’m wondering if there is any dialogue going on regarding this issue, and if not, whether there should be.  Are most writing instructors on the same page about this, or are there voices out there who would restore the preachers to their pulpits, so to speak?  I ask because I hear students complaining from time to time that they get little out of such things as the peer review process.  Their colleagues aren’t proficient enough to offer any meaningful guidance, they say.  I confess wondering sometimes whether the older pedagogical model is perhaps more beneficial to students than we tend to assume.

In the introduction to his book The Language Instinct, psychologist Steven Pinker stresses the idea that language, as complex and specialized as it is, “develops in the child spontaneously, without conscious effort or formal instruction.” Language is the product of an instinct, Pinker argues; it is “no more a cultural invention than is upright posture.”

Clearly this “instinct” produces, first and foremost, spoken language. Writing, which Pinker characterizes as “an optional accessory,” requires some kind of formal instruction.

I’m wondering whether the idea of spoken language as instinct could mean anything for writing pedagogy. Can writing skills be improved by focusing on effective speech? How closely is writing—a cultural invention(?)—related to the instinct to acquire spoken language? Is anyone aware of some current research on this?