Walking away from the “build-a-tool” assignment, I think it helped me to expand the preconceptions I had about cognitivism coming into the course. I would still position myself far away from Flower and Hays’ 1981 article, but I was at least able to understand a little better what was at stake in the process/cognitive debate; in doing so, I can now see some value in what Flower and Hays offered the field in ’81 and how cognitivism can be used to build toward a pedagogy when put in dialogue with other theories (a la Carter). Upon re-reading Flower and Hays this week, I realized there were three different kinds of “processes” at play: the stage theory “process” like tagmemics, Flower and Hays’ recusive cognitive “process(es),” and the third provided my me: my conception of “process” as we know it in the field: composition as recursive stages, influenced by the interplay between internalized past experiences and external social forces. It was my own fault that I came to the readings this week with this notion because I assumed “process” had come to use pre-formed in the way I (we?) use it today; but now I’m seeing this process/cognition debate as somewhat of a Kuhnian pre-paradigm debate, in which we had two camps presenting their theories of writing and learning and each was trying to gain adherents through the journals. What we have now is a synthesis of the two—at the very least that while we might think of writing as coming in “stages,” we recognize recursivity, and we don’t think that writing comes soley from the individual writer and a “monitor”—a synthesis attempted by Carter in his “The Idea of Expertise.”

           

Carter attempted to give us the best of both words, as it were. On the one hand, he acknowledges that we do need some starting principles to work with, his idea of general knowledge, on the other he pairs it with context-centered experiential learning that allows students to become specifically trained in a discipline through a “cognitive apprenticeship.” I like this idea, and I think its remarkably similar to what we do with WAC/WID, but I found a fault with the apprenticeship being four years—meaning, while Carter acknowledges we need some general knowledge in FYC, he doesn’t do much to point us in the direction of what that general knowledge might be. I’m absolutely for a student becoming accustomed to a discipline through his/her college career; that’s kind of the point. We see an advocating for heuristics, but what kind of heuristics? Looking at it from 2014, I can’t help but think about how Writing about Writing might be the answer Carter was looking for. As so many WAW advocates ask, why shouldn’t we be teaching the materials of our discipline, the ways we understand composition today? We saw that in Irmscher’s article for this week, where his department dropped classes that didn’t teach the material of the field, giving so many antagonists grounds to dismiss FYC and Rhet/Comp broadly (240). Were we to adapt the cognitive apprenticeship model (and I think we have), we need to start students off with a grounded knowledge of not only how to write, but also what writing is. Introducing students to writing processes, genre, and digital composing spaces gives them a way to see their future writing tasks through these lenses, which can be accomplished by giving our students some theory to work with. However, I think we might be hampered by some tinges of expressivism here; I get the sense we feel like we can’t give our first-year students our theory unless severely watered down and we moreso need to focus on skills-based or voice-based writing. Not only would such a course introduce students to an apprenticeship in R/C, but it will prepare them to take on the cognitive apprenticeship of their choosing.