City Map to World Map: Putting Concepts in Context

Like Mandy, I've been struggling to see the connections and bigger picture behind our readings, and--again like Mandy--I found creating a map for this project helped me begin to draw those connections more clearly. Mackenzie and I chose to create an interactive map based on key terms. Like a prezi, our tool would zoom in and out to view connections, helping us to see key points on a macro level and then zoom in to see more specific key terms and concepts connected to and subsumed by the larger concepts. As we started to chart out some of the main themes we saw running through the readings this week, I began to see not only how these theorists worked together to present a turn toward cognition and student power but also the ways in which they interacted with themes we've been identifying throughout the semester.

Mandy identifies "evaluation" as one idea linking several of the readings this week, and for the concept map Mackenzie and I drew, that was subsumed under "learning climate," the way several theorists this week offered ways this turn to cognition plays into the composition classroom. One theme Mackenzie and I highlighted was the idea of writing as knowledge or writing as learning--a discussion many of the theorists this week either actively engage in or at least touch on. Irmscher echoes Burke that knowing is an action rather than a state, and claims writing as a generative act of knowing, "learning in action" (241). Writing is an act of abstraction, Irmscher claims, and through abstraction we create meaning (243). Murray, too, presents composition as an act of knowledge creation, at least on the level of student perception, when he describes how students must engage with the world critically as they write, reacting and collecting information (119). Olson's discussion of the "rhetoric of assertion" suggests that not only can writing create knowledge, it can also close off and prevent further creation and exploration of knowledge through claims of objectivity and refusal of other perspectives (10). Olson posits instead a view of writing as knowledge making that creates a continuing dialogue of questions without hard, sure answers (13).

Though situated as part of the turn to cognition we identified this week, these theorists also engage themes that recur throughout our readings over the course of semester. The question "how is writing connected to knowledge?" appears in readings as far back in the semester as Berthoff and Brummet, and weaves throughout and underlies the assertions and questions of theorists each week, such as Kinneavy and Moffett. While organizing the ideas of this week's readings into several main themes helped me understand the turn to cognition better, it also helped me place these readings and their ideas within the larger field of composition theory. I can imagine our interactive map of the turn to cognition as part of a much larger conceptual map tool to visually represent many more theories of composition.


Works Cited:
Irmscher, William F. “Writing as a Way of Learning and Developing.” CCC 30.3 (Oct. 1979): 240-44.
Murray, Donald M. “Finding Your Own Voice: Teaching Composition in an Age of Dissent.” CCC 20 (1969): 118-23.
Olson, Gary A. “Toward a Post-Process Composition: Abandoning the Rhetoric of Assertion.” Post-Process Theory: New Directions for Composition Research. Ed. Thomas Kent. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1999. 7-15