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.

Make Them a Part of the Learning

The main thing I took away from the Research in Composition excerpt - besides the fact that I never, ever want to do formal scientific research - is the overwhelming number of variables that have to be considered in the teaching and learning of composition: the writer variable, the assignment variable, the rater variable, the colleague variable, the rating method variable, and in general controlling all those variables. So why is this relevant if I never plan to research this subject? Because these are factors that we as teachers will have to deal with every day in and out of the classroom. (And I write this as a future teacher.) However, I'm primarily interested in the writer and assignment variables for the purposes of this little blog here.

"Often referred to as measures of writing ability, composition examinations are always measures of writing performance..." We don't evaluate what composition and rhetoric skills the student contains, as if they were a jar that we fill up, but rather what skills they allow consciously or unconsciously to pour out. We have to fill them up first, but we must also teach them how to give back what they've been taught in the most effective and successful manner.

The topics we choose as assignments should be chosen carefully, as they will affect the performance of the student. Disinterest and unfamiliarity could produce poor writing, consistently if the topics are not varied and some attempt made to connect them to students' lives. The diverse population also affects these topics, as everything from maturity level to socioeconomic backgrounds may need to determine at least in part which topics are rejected and which are assigned.

But this topic selection for maximum interest and writer performance seems easier said than done. How do you get students to care about the assignment if they're fundamentally disinterested anyway? For that I turn to the excerpt from Pre-Writing: The Construction and Application of Models for Concept Formation in Writing. The authors' conclusion is mainly that what the student is asked to do in many composition classes consists of regurgitating rules and vocabulary for the edification of the teacher, which doesn't involve the student and is therefore a pointless exercise. "He is not essentially engaged as a human being in what he is doing because the only motivation he is made aware of is extrinsic: he must write correctly and effectively because the teacher and society commands him to."

Most students in composition classes today, I'm guessing, are not planning to become English teachers. They are checking off a box on their transcripts in order to move on to what they are truly interested in, whatever that may be. So maybe we start off a composition class by discovering what those interests are and then demonstrating how writing is used in those other disciplines, how it is crucial for communication and advancement, and how the student can use the class to advance their chosen interests. Already you've involved the student in their own learning process.

I agree wholeheartedly with Pre-Writing's promotion of writing as a self-actualizing experience and that finding methods to encourage that process will only increase students' willingness to engage in it. I do, pragmatically, acknowledge that it's easy to lose sight of that goal when demonstrations of calculable gains in knowledge and expertise are necessary, when students are unwilling to learn, and when the teacher is fatigued by endless composition classes. But we have to seek that balance if we're to provide students with the communication tools necessary to successfully embrace their place in society.

A part of the Academic Tradition

The great academic tradition begins 2700 years ago. A teacher begins with an idea, the student expounds on and expands that idea, and passes it on to yet another student. So we start with Corax, who teaches Tisias, who may have taught Isocrates, a contemporary of Socrates, who teaches Plato about reaching the truth, who teaches his ideal of Truth to Aristotle, who strikes the balance between lofty Truth and inherent truth. It's astounding and intimidating, this chain of knowledge and evolution. These giants of academia and scholarship seem to tower over what we know as education and cast a mighty shadow. It seems impossible to reach the heights they achieved in philosophy and thought. And yet, it's all there for us. Their work is available at every public library and every Barnes and Noble. We can know what they knew.

But I can read every work ever written by (or transcribed for) them and never be them. This world is so different, it's demands and distractions so much greater. The majority of us can never dedicate our lives to scholarship as they seem to have done. So what can we do with this knowledge? Aristotle wasn't working off of original thought. He expanded on what his teachers before him had already built. And that's what we as student's are expected to do. But there is a great distinction, in what I've observed, between education and scholarship. I never noticed the difference in undergrad, but perhaps I might have at a more prestigious school. In simple terms: Education seems to mean learning facts and figures, but also less tangible ideas, and seeking to make sense of them by means of critical analysis. Scholarship, however, seems to require the application of such knowledge to the world around you for purposes of imposing change upon it. This is my definition only, of course. An increasingly larger percentage of the population are educated. But are there more scholars? And can you become a scholar if you don't attend a prestigious university or college?

I have great respect for what I perceive to be, and am still understanding to be, the scholarly tradition. But I don't know that I yet feel a part of it. I feel kinship to Aristotle and Plato and Isocrates only in seeking to learn. But as a 21st century American, having grown up on the A-Team and the Real World and then being nurtured by Friends and American Idol, I don't know if I believe in my ability to truly take the information I've been given and perceive from it some application that will shed light on and alter some aspect of our society.

I'm eager to tackle the Rhetorical Family Tree project for this reason. The idea that present day scholars share the kind of connection shared by the Giants gives me hope that I might one day be invited in to this private club. Or that I might fight my way in to it regardless.

And gives me hope that I will one day become yet another teacher of bright minds in this long chain, this rich tradition.