The Shift from Consumer to Producer

            Working through the exercise of drafting a tool for outsiders to grasp the ideas presented in this week’s readings, I learned one main and invaluable lesson: organizing material in such a way that would allow strangers to navigate through the concepts within requires a deeper understanding of the texts and an awareness of concepts presented through and within the texts. It requires a shift. In addition, as Anna and I were deciding how to create our tool, we continuously returned to the necessity of usability. We decided upon two main goals for our website: 1) users would be able to read about the 6 central themes we identified as crucial to process in cognition and, 2) users would be able to explicitly see the conceptual connections of the six theorists presented, without having to read the articles themselves. 

The shift from consumer of the text to producer of a text brought many “aha” moments. The first is embarrassing to admit, but it was so crucial to my understanding of the readings and most importantly the connections of the ideas presented in the texts to the practices of composition. I can’t help but wonder if anyone else has had a similar experience. At the start of the readings, I understood the concepts as “process TO cognition”. I thought that process and cognition were two separate entities in composition. My supposition was that students start with their main focus on the process of composition (some sort of lower skill), but as they progress through the course they grow into the cognition of composition, or the awareness of knowing.  As I worked through the readings more and began building the tool, I saw the relationship clearly as “process IN cognition”. These theorists posit that process and cognition work together, process is a crucial part of cognition and definitely leads to it. It is ironic that my experience with building a tool and working through the texts was exemplary of the theories of this week’s readings. It was when I began the process of crafting this tool and reevaluating the texts, were these connections made (cognition).

In addition to the process of crafting the tool, this connection was made most for me in Flower and Hays. They hone-in on the choices that writers make during composition and make clear the connections between the value of these choices and cognition. It can be most clearly summarized in the following statement, “Writing processes may be viewed as the writer's tool kit. In using the tools, the writer is not constrained to use them in a fixed order or in stages. And using any tool may create the need to use another. Generating ideas may require evaluation, as may writing sentences. And evaluation may force the writer to think up new ideas” (p. 376). Further, the choices writers make create networks among ideas and knowledge and “they are created in close interaction with ongoing exploration and the growing text” (p. 378)- much like my personal experience I described earlier.

The image below shows the relationships of consumers and producers in the wild. The consumers are the wolf, lynx, bird, owl, weasel, and fox and the producers are the moose, elk, insects, squirrel, bird, and mouse, with some overlap. Here, the consumer definitely has the upper hand. They are bigger, faster, stronger… and alive. The shift that I have described is not synonymous with the one presented here, nor is it juxtaposition. The two roles work together. By shifting from a consumer of the text to a producer of a text, I am not giving up a position, but rather gaining one. I would not have been able to be an effective producer without first being an active consumer.

Flower, Linda, and John R. Hayes. "A Cognitive Process Theory of Writing." CCC 32.4 (Dec. 1981): 365-387.