Balancing scholarship with experience

What kind of value can we place on personal experience when used as evidence of argument in a classroom? The answer, judging by the instruction and admonishments from our graduate instructors, seems to be very little. The reasoning seems to be that personal experience, anecdotal evidence, is simply unreliable and specific to a small cross-section of human experience. Would Locke and Vico support such a view of knowledge and education today?

According to Locke, in his tabula rasa theory, we aren't born with innate knowledge. Rather, humans develop knowledge through their experiences. Everything we know and understand, then, is dependent on personal experience. "The mind gets its ideas of particular, concrete objects through one of the five senses; it gets all other ideas by reflecting on its own operations." When we attempt to strip away that personal experience from the learning process, are we doing a disservice to students? In composition classes, we as teachers attempt to wean students away from depending on anecdotal evidence to prove arguments. But it is possible that we impede learning and make the process of writing a dry and empty process rather than a rich, fulfilling experience in and of itself. Perhaps we should seek to expand and encourage personal experience. As Corbett says in his essay on Locke, "If our students sometimes fail in doing our writing assignments, their failure may be due, not to the malfunctioning of whatever heuristic system they may have used but rather to the narrowly circumscribed range of their experiences." And if we go to all that trouble to encourage experience for the sake of learning, does it then make sense to stifle that expression of experience completely?

For Locke, experience was knowledge. For Vico, self-discovery was knowledge. What is experience if not self-discovery? "[Vico] also wanted to start a movement of autonomous self-development in the student. The latter must rediscover his soul himself, and must seek the connection between human nature and the Divine. The study of the classics and their expressive formulas becomes a mean of intellectual development and not an end it itself." He respected the classics and saw their value for a well-educated individual, but learning the classics wasn't the end. As we learned from both the article on Vico and the presentation, he believed strongly in sending his students out into the world to utilize their hard-earned knowledge for the sake of their people and society. Again, there is that emphasis on experience and utilizing that experience for productive means.

I don't advocate a progressive form of education that focuses entirely on self-expression to the exclusion of research and presentation of authoritative sources. To do so would be to disregard the rationality and wisdom to be found in scholarship. As Maiullari says of Vico's theories, "The interest and primary aim for every man must be to achieve a balance between his own nature and his own actions, between theory and action." I would suggest that such a strong exclusion of experience is a detriment to the knowledge and development of our students and that we should seek a balance between scholarship and experience.

I tinker before I spam?

As the "Telephone" game was brought up in class Tuesday night, allow me to use it to illustrate a concept that I took away from Edward Corbett's Topoi Revisted and Enos' Recovering the Lost Art of Researching the History of Rhetoric.

We know, thanks to our readings, that the Latin rhetoricians took Greek concepts of rhetoric, Aristotle's concepts, and adapted them to suit the Roman ideals and culture. Some of his ideas were given less importance in this new rhetorical scheme, ideas such as the topoi. To Aristotle, "the topoi were devices enabling the speaker to find those arguments that would be most persuasive in a given situation." They were intended to assist the invention process by enabling discovery of the most appropriate and successful direction in which to take an argument based on the matter of the argument itself. But Cicero and Quintilian reduced the topoi to training devices for students, with the intention that the student would soon grow out of reliance on "this rather mechanical system of heuristics." And later, as described by Curtius' book European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, the topoi "became not so much devices for finding persuasive arguments in letter writing...and preaching...as guiding principles for the composition of literary texts." The topoi became formulas for funeral sermons with "stereotyped themes." New topoi were employed for the introductions and conclusions of poetry, with "hackneyed themes and conventions."

Oh how the mighty topoi had fallen. Clearly, this wasn't what Aristotle had in mind, but why did it come to that? It is the historical research version of Telephone.

The new topoi in the Middle Ages appears to be an attempt to reexamine the topoi from different perspectives. But, according to Corbett, "these new topoi served to formularize literature but did little to enliven or innovate it." They seem to have gone to Cicero and Quintilian for their ideas of what topoi should and could do in literature, or research on topoi based on what Cicero and Quintilian perceived them to be. Perhaps that is a disservice, as I don't actually know what sources they used. But Aristotle seemed more interested in the invention aspect of the topoi and what could be discovered, rather than what formulas might be gleaned from them to cut and paste into a document.

We have lost the art of research, according to Enos, specifically in the field of rhetoric. Primary scholarship is no longer the focus. "Rather, what we are presenting as historical studies are critiques on secondary scholarhip, speculative essays on meta-theory and point/counter-point debates over characterizations of ideologies." Enos sees this shift in the focus of research as detrimental to the field of rhetoric for a number of reasons, not the least of which are a lack of respect for the true art of research and the loss of valuable knowledge.

Essentially, we as scholars are in danger of being caught in an unending game of Telephone. We seek out secondary scholarship and treat it like a primary source, which is a shaky place to start. There is information loss between the primary and secondary sources as focuses shift and meanings are skewed based on interpretation. That is inevitable and it would behoove us to keep that in mind as budding scholars. If we hope to make a lasting and worthy contribution to our fields we might want to stop playing Telephone and attempt to go to the source, whatever form that may be.

Personal Investment

From Pre-Writing, "We described the entire activity called 'writing' as a person's transformation of the events of his life into experienced conceptual structures revealed in language for the sake of his own self-actualization and for communication with other persons through commonly shared patterns of meaning."

I believe in structure in a writing curriculum. Structure is your foundation. It's what you build first, so that later your creation won't come crashing down around your ears. Grammar is important because it is a method of expression and also a connection between a writer and her audience, and therefore deserves time and attention. I also believe in pre-writing and the outline. Structuring an argument, providing argument support, and ensuring logical execution are easier to visualize as new writers with structure supporting it. So yes, I like structure, and rules, and form.

But once your foundation is built, you enter less certain territory. Rhetoric, creativity, and theory in writing require human evaluation. We can tell our students what to think, and that may stick for an hour, 3 weeks, or years. But what we really should be doing is encouraging that human evaluation from our students. We should give them the critical thinking skills to take those areas of thought on writing and learn to deconstruct them for the tools they need. Then, using rhetoric, creativity, and theory along with their own experiences and beliefs, they can build their own creations in which they are personally invested.

A structured argument will always be important because it’s the discourse most often used in daily life, and education should have a practical application. However, I think it’s important to expose students to a wide variety of textual forms, not only to make them aware of the ranges of human expression, but also to allow them opportunities to find their own expression. A balance of structure and free-form writing allows a range of expression while providing stability to that foundation. In short, I think balance is important.

Essentially, all these elements are used to give students the tools they need. But the experience and insight they each bring to the table personalizes the writing process and makes it unique. Whether they are writing for scholarly recognition or to tell a story they need to be invested in the final product and not just regurgitating rules and structure. At this point I don't know exactly how you do that, yet. But I'm personally invested in figuring it out.