It’s A Small World After All: Connecting Conversations Through Time and Space

Creating the interactive map allowed Mandy and I to make visual connections to the underlying arguments presented within the readings for Week 6.  We immediately found that we were both trying to place the individual readings on a timeline, even though it was challenging to see the theoretical connections based solely on time of publication.  From this, the visual representation of a geographical map evolved.  The mode of searching for identifiable key terms seemed to be the most effective way of integrating each reading within the map and linking those terms with a combination of authors and arguments. By identifying the key terms in each reading, it became clear that each argument is uniquely situated within the process-to-cognition discussion; placing these terms in the glossary of our interactive map appeared to be the ideal starting point. Fortunately, Mandy and I both resonated with the idea of instilling a collaborative component, which would increase the amount of additional sources over time. 

By placing the authors and their arguments on a physical platform, an identifiable network based upon their views was created.  For instance, assigning the key term “freedom” to Murray and Olson extended my understanding of how this conversation has spanned decades.  Murray describes the importance of freeing students of rigidly assigned prompts and encouraging them to discover their voices through trial and error (118).  Additionally, he states, “the writing teacher has to stop trying to create a world in which success for the majority day by day is the norm,” emphasizing the importance of the student’s responsibility during the composing process (121).  The conversation continues thirty years later with Olson’s explanation of how “our attempts…to help students become more dialogic and less monologic, more sophistic and less Aristotelian, more exploratory and less argumentative, more personal and less academic…defies even our most concerted efforts to subvert it” (9).   While it is evident that this conversation has continued for years, time has done little to settle the argument.

From a 6-12 educator standpoint, it was enlightening to contend with conversations addressing assessment in writing.  Elbow introduces and disproves the skewed “solution” to holistically scoring writing (i.e. “’training’ the readers before and during the scoring sessions”) and how the “purpose of the assessment and the system of communication” should not be the basis of evaluation (189).  This agreeable argument prompted multiple questions; such as If holistic ranking is “bad” and evaluation is “good”, why are we still ranking student work?  Where do we go from here? Why were we STILL grappling with this issue, after a solution was explicitly laid out by Don Murray almost a quarter of a century prior? Although incredibly frustrating to read, the interactive map was able to ground these arguments and show how the uncertainty of this debate has continued to grow with, unfortunately, no end in sight. 

Because the interactive map contributed to the grounding and overall understanding of the concepts stated above, my hope is that the purpose of this hypothetical tool could aid others in their search for clarification in these discussions.  Opening up these conversations and placing them on a physical platform has the potential to demonstrate purpose and overall awareness of the connections among the authors of the readings in Week 6, as well as other resources that are contributed to the map.

Works Cited

Elbow, Peter. "Ranking, Evaluating, and Liking: Sorting out Three Forms of Judgment." NCTE 55.2 (1993): 187-206. Web.

Murray, Donald M. "Finding Your Own Voice: Teaching Composition in an Age of Dissent." NCTE 20.2 (1969): 118-23. Web.

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: Souther Illinois UP, 1999. 7-15.