what is On Justification about?

Boltanski, L. and L. Thévenot (2006 [1991]) On justification: Economies of worth. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

To best explain what B & T’s book is about, please allow me a moment to relate a brief representative anecdote, which ought to facilitate the explanation. I don’t have a car, and I haven’t for years. I have a drivers license, and I can drive. I just don’t own a car, and I haven’t owned on for a decade. Not owning a car for a decade has afforded me a privilege insight into car culture. Not driving is difficult—in America at least. The reasons why are manifold. For one, the entire country was designed around the automobile. The west coast is particularly bad. So, in L.A., for example, it’s pretty much impossible to get around without owning a car, since the city itself is so spread out, and the public transportation system isn’t that great. At the level of infrastructure, then, not owning a car is difficult in America. The infrastructure of America itself persuades you to own a car. However, owning a car also encouraged at the level of taxation. Purchasing a car is something you can subsidize. There are literally financial incentives to owning a car. The government subtly pressures you into owning one through subsidizes and write offs—or so I imagine. While I’m sure I could go on to list other reasons why people are pressured into purchasing automobiles (like how they're status symbols), the reason I want to focus on is the fact that owning a car is a good in itself. People buy cars because, say, it's good for the economy. It's downright American. What this means is, even if you have literally no reason for owning a car whatsoever, like I do, since I live right next to where I work, there is still a normative pressure to purchase a car. For example, I've heard rejoinders like, "Don't you want to be independent?" I don't really care to. I don't mind hitching a ride with a friend for that one time a month when I need to get across town--or, I just take the bus. Again, I could go on to tell you interesting stories about people's reactions to my not owning a car, but I've given you just enough context to understand what B & T's book is about. B & T's book is about one particular type of persuasion, how people are persuaded by situations to justify their actions by appealing to higher levels of generality (i.e., the common good). 

But why the metaphor? The metaphor is important because it clues us into an important aspect of this book, namely, what's new and exciting about it. On Justification is a work of sociology. Up until the point at which this book was published in France, which was in 1986, I think, sociology was governed by this guy Pierre Bourdieu. All French sociology was either explicitly or implicitly Bourdieuian. Bourdieu was particularly known for this idea of habitus, which states that you are subtly determined by where you come from. I can't put it any better than this:

In this kind of sociology, at least in the way it is seen by Boltanski (and I tend to share his view), the sociologist knows more about the actors than the actors themselves. Indeed when the actors think they behave on the basis of authentic desires, preferences, evaluations, the sociologist can always trace those mental states back to some habitus formation, to unconscious strategies, and ultimately to the structures of the field. For instance, I am quite sure that I like Beethoven because his music is very powerful, lying somewhere between the classical harmonies of Mozart and Haydn and the sometimes tiring excesses of romanticism. But in reality I like Beethoven because I am driven by my desire for distinction which tells me that, in the “petit bourgeois” academic world where I live, liking Beethoven is a necessity to be valuable. I just try unconsciously to follow the rules of the field. But as my semiproletarian habitus did not prepare me to naturally appreciate Beethoven, I cannot feel that the metallic sound of Herbert von Karajan – that was much favoured when I was young – Is now desperately out of fashion. (Jacquemain 1) 

Importantly, for Bourdieu, the habitus is located, fixed. 

To understand this better, we might ask for Bourdieu to explain why people are inclined to purchase a certain kind of car. He might say that people buy nice cars because they are either trying to reproduce a certain lifestyle or rather that they are trying to move up in the society's class structure. It's important to understand that Bourdieu's schema has great predictive power. For him, class power explains institutions. That is, something like class is necessary in order to explain why people would make super counterintuitive decisions--like buying a car you can't afford, or buying cars you don't need, etc. Either way, for Bourdieu, class is located. You can point to it. If you come from money, you can't escape the influence that the upbringing has on you. 

My point of turning to the metaphor is to underscore the idea that certain economies of persuasion don't have a fixed. locus. In a way, it's like Bourdieu is saying, if you completely redesigned a city, or if you redesigned a city around walking instead of driving, then people would stop driving, since you've eliminated the source of people's desire to drive (i.e., the infrastructure). However, people's motivations are much more complicated than that. As I was saying earlier, people's motivation to drive is tied not only to infrastructure or even culture, but also conceptions of the common good. And I think that last part is really key: culture influences decisions, certainly. In our culture, for instance, it's important for men to be seen as independent, as providers, and even as mobile. That culture exerts a pressure on men to purchase cars. But, similar to what we just saw with infrastructure, if you change the culture, that's not necessarily to say that people will stop buying cars--partly because of infrastructure, sure, but also because of how cars are imbricated in our conception of the common good. To stop buying cars would be bad, say, because of how tightly dependent the American economy is dependent on the automobile industry--gas station employees, factory workers, etc. 

What's at stake, though, isn't between culture and morals, I don't think, but rather between culture and certain ideas about what counts as just. For one, the latter are much older than the former. The latter have a long history, whereas the former are epoch specific. 

Either way, what is On Justification about? It's about a certain class of political ideas that are themselves persuasive, regardless of whatever content they're used to justify. Or rather, to be more precise, it's about a certain class of thought. When I was a study of Cathy Chaput, she'd lecture about the movement of idea to thought. So, for example, Friedrich Hayek came up with a bunch of ideas, then those ideas slowly reified into common sense (i.e., neoliberal doctrine). There's therefore a difference between certain political ideas and ideas that themselves have histories and have started to mediate entire ways of life. 

david harvey connection 

"The Rhetoric of Technology and the Electronic Writing Class"

In "The Rhetoric of Technology and the Electronic Writing Class," Hawisher and Selfe (1991) argue that teachers of composition must be vigilant in order to prevent unwittingly reproducing dominant power structures. As of now, there's an overly optimistic discourse that pervades the fields of composition and/or computers and composition. Teachers talk about technology's pros, about how utopian it is, how it has the potential to erase power asymmetries and realize long-held educational ideals, etc., but they don't talk about technologies darker side--about how, for instance, teachers can draw on ed tech to surveil their students. Thus Hawisher and Selfe (1991) advocate for a more balanced, complete, truthful, etc. discourse about technology in the classroom--rather than the rhetoric of technology that's popular now ("rhetoric" being used in the bad sense, here).

Technology has the capacity to realize different relations between teacher and student, but we have to let it by being critical of the rhetoric of technology. But we also have to listen carefully to the technology itself, to how the technology has the capacity to change the nature of the situation (rather than just reproducing a prior situation).

How do we be critical though? or listen to the technology? let the technology itself be an agent? rather than the habit of prevailing education? By sticking to outcomes (64). That was one answer they hinted at.

My question is: how can we be architects--control f count = 1--of classrooms when we, well, aren't architects of the classroom? how can we be architects of technology without being masters of it? is it by turning to information architecture? by design practices? by misusing the technology? by making sure that the technology is making people's relationship to other people better? or is it by changing the architecture in a more literal sense? as in, learning how to advocate for the development of new infrastructure when we're tenured faculty? or maybe by not automatically thinking we have to use the technology? like: thinking of tech as a means to an end? rather than just an end in itself (like, because it's just a means, we can just as easily not use technology for this exercise...)?

"How do entrepreneurs hone their pitches? Analyzing how pitch presentations develop in a technology commercialization competition"

In Spinuzzi et al.'s (2015) "How do entrepreneurs hone their pitches? Analyzing how pitch presentations develop in a technology commercialization competition," they studied the the  sixth  year of  the Korea-based Gyeonggi-do Innovation Program (GIP), a program jointly run by the IC² Institute. From what I can tell, the program brokers between emerging Korean entrepreneurs and U.S. markets. The program provides a service. It claims to teach firms to how to better market their products in a U.S. market, though possibly elsewhere abroad too. But the program also provides feasibilities studies, which the firms get in the form of the Quicklook® report. So the program sends market researchers out into the field, and these researchers determine whether the product has a market in the U.S. or not, and, if so, what that market might look like or consist in. Mentors and judges use these reports as a basis on which to form their judgements of the firm's pitches. So, the GIP got over 200 applicants that year (2013), 25 made it to the semi-finals of the competition, and Spinuzzi et al. (2015) study four of those semi-finalists.

Here's a bit on the GIP:

Such consortia, according to Gibson & Conceiçao, attempt to “shorten  learning  curves  and  reduce  errors”  while  “provid[ing] access  to  regional,  national,  and  international  markets,  resources, and  know-how” ([10]  p.745;  cf.  Park  et  al.  [19],  Sung  &  Gibson [30]). Such programs implicitly emphasize understanding markets and  developing  value  propositions  that  speak  to  the  needs  of  the catchers;    they    typically    provide    actual    market    feedback appropriate  for  the  market  dialogue  we  discussed  earlier.  For instance, GIP contractors research a target market, identifying and interviewing  potential  stakeholders,  then  writing  results  in  the form  of  what  Cornwell  calls  a Quicklook® ([20];  to  understand Quicklook® revisions, see Jakobs et al.[11]), a type of technology assessment  and  commercialization  report  that  articulates  market feedback.   But   when   they   help   entrepreneurs   formulate   their arguments and revise them to address market feedback and needs, programs  such  as  the  GIP  typically  provide  tacit,  context-based support rather than explicit, systematic support. At the GIP, pitch decks    and    associated    genres    are    described    in    templates; instructions on how to conduct the dialogue are conveyed through a  team  of  mentors  with  different  backgrounds,  specialties,  and experiences.  Furthermore,  programs  such  as  GIP  tend  to  take  on entrepreneurs  operating  in  many  different  sectors,  pitching  to markets    with    differing    regulatory    constraints,    competitive landscapes, business developments cycles, and margins; this wide variation makes it difficult to systematize pitch development, and consequently  the  training  process  emphasizes  contingencies  and draws  heavily  on  the  situated  judgment  of  mentors such  as trainers. (Spinuzzi et al., 2015, n. pg)

Per usual, Spinuzzi et al. (2015)  gather data in the form of interviews, artifacts, observations, and surveys. They asked three questions:

RQ1:  What  kinds  of  feedback  did presenters  receive  in  the Quicklook®reports and training? 

RQ2: What changes did they make to individual pitch arguments between training and final pitches? 

RQ3: Do these changes correspond with favorable judges' scores?

To answer RQ1, they found that, in general, judges offered three kinds of feedback: (a) structure, (b) claims and evidence, and (c) engagement. For example, (a) you should add in these three slides at these specific locations in order to better fit yourself into the genre of the pitch; (b) you should qualify your claims, since you're not as original as you think you are (in fact, you should move from the known to the unknown via a matrix that shows how your product matched up against analogous product already in circulation in the U.S.); and (c) you should work on selling the point in person, say, by rolling the film, rather than just showing a still (and bring your product up on stage, while you're at it).

To answer RQ2, some firms changed more than others. However, despite Spinuzzi et al's (2015) claim that "...we saw similarities in how they took up and addressed specific kinds
of feedback in structure, claims and evidence, and engagement" (p. n. pg), I don't really see the similarities, save for the fact that they are all making changes to the feedback categories (structure, claims and evidence, and engagement).

To answer RQ3, as Spinuzzi et al. (2015) themselves admit, it's hard to say. One of the four firms clearly implements the feedback, which results in a co-constructed claim between rhetor and audience (see London et. al, 2015)--"co-constructed" being a good thing. It means something happened. An action took place. But some firms didn't score that well, partly because they didn't implement the feedback, but also partly because they probably thought it was pointless to do so (since the Quicklook® report had identified that the product had no market in the U.S.). Hence we arrive at a motif that we know well from other studies of revision, or even disability studies. It's best to get feedback as early as possible; that way, the feedback will arrive at a point in the development in which change is more realistic. Relatedly, one of the things that Spinuzzi et al. (2015) find is, despite the fact that feedback can be leveled at design, use, or argument, in technology commercialization competition such as this, it's only really possible to change the argument. Despite this limitation, the mentors/judges did in fact make a good point when changed seemed futile. They suggested to one firm that, instead of individually marketing these composters to households, they could market the tech as a factory you could leave garbage at.

While Spinuzzi et al. (2015) never really come right out and say this, or while they don't say this in quite so many words, I think they don't think the competition was run very well. Firms got the market research too late, which was made worse by the fact that judges had the feedback but, by convention, didn't give the firms the feedback until after the initial judgement. Moreover, the consortia didn't scaffold for some of the behaviors wanted its competitors to exemplify: "...they  wanted  to  know  whether  the presenters  could present  compellingly  to  US  audiences—a  factor  that included facility  in  English,  but  also  included  a  general  ability  to  connect (that is, a subjective evaluation that was not further characterized by subcriteria)" (Spinuzzi et al., 2015, n. pg).

Spinuzzi et al. (2015) also recommend that the Innovation Program grade the competitors differently; that is, instead of collapsing all of the metrics into a single score (1-4), they recommend that they be rated on different categories such as claims, evidence, engagement, structure, and so on.

Just a quote: "...allow   them   to consider market  feedback and  begin  incorporating  it  intodraft presentations.  It could    also soften    innovators    to    trainer suggestions,  perhaps  making  teams  like  K6017  more  likely  to adopt them" (Spinuzzi et al., 2015, n. pg). Soften.

I had some questions, though. Why was the composition of the authors different? Why was a psychologist on the team (Keela S. Thomson)?

I was also confused about the coding. Did they start by coding the slide decks. Did the emergent categories emerge from an analysis of those artifacts alone? and then were the same categories applied to other artifacts or observations? Quote: "Next, we applied the codes to trainer’s feedback videos, then used the   codes   to   identify   related   feedback   in   the   corresponding Quicklooks.   These   two   data   sets   represent   feedback   that presenters   received   between   their   training   and   final   pitch presentations.   By   coding   them,   we   identified   feedback   that appeared to influence the final pitch" (Spinuzzi et al., 2015, n. pg).

Is the rhetoric that Downs's turns to conversational?

Almost directly after I posted my last post on Downs, he posted this to the WPA-L. Interestingly, too, I read Bazerman's 1980 piece against expressivism, and in it he discussed the distinction between the conversation and the apprentice model. Is Downs's version of rhetoric not conversational?  I get a sense that what's going on here is similar to the disagreement between Spinuzzi and Carolyn Miller, the latter who thinks that activity theory isn't rhetorical. 

I also might add that Carillo and Downs seem to depart on a reading of activity theory. 

One way I've been thinking about Keith's question -- "why have we landed on a kind of reduced Aristotelian rhetoric ... as a commonplace of our courses (and, in spades, our textbooks)?" -- is by critiquing this reduction of rhetoric to "rhet-lite," substituting a few shards of vocabulary for genuine mindfulness and concrete meaningfulness. As happened with "process," our field has sufficiently emphasized the importance of rhetoric that secondary ed and factory-comp now both routinize it ("logos-ethos-pathos!"), squeezed of most meaning and invoked largely as shibboleth. Keith's critique of the resulting generalities seems fair. 

So I certainly don't want to (re)teach rhet-lite. But I do see a need for, and advantage in, teaching a rich contemporary rhetoric despite Keith's hints that if it's teachable it's probably drained of meaningful specificity to begin with, and that writers get by pretty well without explicit knowledge of rhetoric. To an extent I agree with both goads, but I think that in a couple ways, good rhetorical instruction can make however competent a writer more competent.   

1. Part of why Aristotelian rhetoric gets "lite" so quickly is because we (western cultures since its recovery in the 19th/20th cents) place WAY more weight on it than it can (or ever could) carry. Classical rhetoricians in the Aristotelian line tried to deduce the entirety of rhetorical principles from a tiny set of rhetorical situations involving an even tinier set of (privileged and thus non-representative) audiences. That was never going to work. But contemporary rhetorical theory / research has been widely expanding that ground. Sometimes by recovering understanding that did inhere in classical, particularly sophistic, rhetorics but got ignored by the platonic tradition; I'm thinking, for example, of incredibly rich work done on ethos by current rhetoric scholars. Sometimes by responding to the wildly richer array of scenes of rhetoric available to us now as compared to Greek times, expanding our ways of thinking about rhetoric in directions that, quite frankly, simply matter more than much of what Aristotelian rhetoric has come down to us as; here I'm thinking, for example, of rhetorical ecology as elucidated the past three decades. Sometimes through investigation of indigenous rhetorics and rhetorics of dis/ability -- so much amazing work being done on ways rhetoric works outside white, male, ableist cultural expectations. (Apologies if I leave your favorite line of contemporary rhetorical inquiry out of this quick set of examples.)  

Because rhet-lite (a not-very-rich version of Platonist/Aristotelian rhetoric) is more or less ubiquitous background knowledge for many entering college students now, what we need to be teaching of rhetoric in college writing courses is this richness that typically undermines the more simplistic rhetorical understandings. What do we get by adding rhetorical ecology to rhetorical situation, for example, or shifting the focus of ethos from "credibility" to "place and way of being"? Contemporary rhetorics counter various misconceptions of writing that are usually reified or at least not challenged by Aristotelian rhetoric: the lone inspired writer / dictator; the sender-receiver communication model; linear process; the deprecation of emotion / pathetic appeal; the generalization of "audience" into gross types (y'know, young men, middle-aged men, old men); the notion that rhetors are speakers but not listeners; on and on.  

So for me, teaching a rich, contemporary set of rhetorical principles, not Aristotelian rhet-lite, is a crucial path to addressing cultural misconceptions of writing and writing process, and helping students with limited writing experiences beyond school and interpersonal/social-media uses prepare for writing in other scenes (professional, civic, etc.).  

2. I also feel bound to teach various contemporary principles of rhetoric because I think awareness, mindful deliberateness, helps. What I'm reaching for here is the space created by the truths that a) if I try to learn to ride a bicycle, or try to ride a bicycle, by analyzing the physics/biology/chemistry of the activity, I'm pretty likely not to ride the bicycle well, or at all -- but yet b) the world's best bicycle riders know a whole damn lot about the physics of bicycles and the biochemistry of riding them, and that knowledge improves their riding. I don't want to mistake rhetorical theory for writing, and I don't want to say that you have to know rhetorical theory to write, and I don't want to say that rhetorical theory is the best way to teach writing. (I'm pretty sure that the best way to teach writing is to assign a lot of it and then talk and write a lot about what gets written and then write it some more.) But for myself as a writer, for some other writers I've observed, and from what I hear from a fair number of students, there is something really helpful to a writer about being about to understand the why's and how's of the ways writers craft writing for users, and the things writers have to think about to do this, from contemporary rhetorical perspectives. From "here's why the people telling you not to use pathos appeals are so often using pathos appeals themselves and why you should too" to "this is a really complex writing situation and you can think deliberately about all the rhetors in this ecology who are making it so," a rich rhetorical awareness and mindfulness expands a writer's available options and understanding and in many ways can bring some peace of mind, or at least clarity, to otherwise muddled and hazy situations. (Short form: rhetorical awareness strongly assists, or may even be damn near identical with, metacognition.)  

So I want to use rich contemporary rhetorical theory (and there is no way to boil it all down to single a routinized account that can be taught in a single class) to, basically, help writers grow more powerful than when they enter my class.  

As to the underlying question -- why do rich systems of thought get wrung out, oversimplified, ossified, and packaged into unrecognizability when we create teaching systems, aids, resources, and curricula -- well, that would require a broader critique of western civilization at least back to Ramus. On that basis always questioning my continuing participation in higher ed --
Doug

"Go or No Go: Learning to Persuade in an Early-Stage Student Entrepreneurship Program"

Spinuzzi et al.'s (2019) "Go or No Go: Learning to Persuade in an Early-Stage Student Entrepreneurship Program" aims to assess whether an early-stage accelerator program effectively teaches its students to develop their businesses's value propositions. 

To conduct this assessment, Spinuzzi et al. (2019) subjected a sample of the program's cohort (n = 8) to an exploratory, qualitative study. In doing so, they collected a variety of different kinds of data (interviews from participants and mentors, slide decks, feedback forms, observations, videos, and surveys), and they interpreted their data vis-à-vis Vogel's three stages of a venture's development. 

Spinuzzi et al. (2019) found that the program was most effective to the group it intended to enroll in the first place, namely, entrepreneurs who were at Vogel's stage two: concepts. However, strangely, only two of the eight in Spinuzzi et al.'s (2019) sample were at this stage, leaving me to wonder: was this small sample representative? Either way, it's strange that so few entrepreneurs were at that stage. All in all, a few entrepreneurs were still at stage one (idea), only a few were at stage two (concept), I think (Spinuzzi et al., 2019, p. 118a), and one was even at stage three (opportunity). Adding to the confusion here is another distinction, the distinction between technology-first and problem-first firms. To be more specific, then, SEAL--the early-stage accelerator program--marketed itself to technology-first firms that were at Vogel's stage two (concept). So, regardless of the specifics, not many firms met the characteristics the accelerator program designed its curriculum for. Yet, the few firms that did fit those characteristics seemed to get the most out of the program. 

Spinuzzi et al. (2019) identified another problem, this one being that the program didn't explicitly teach teams how to iterate their value propositions. Part of the problem, though, was firm's initial orientation. Apparently, based on prior research, Spinuzzi et al. (2019) determined that a service-dominated logic (SDL) is a more effective orientation for early-stage technologies (the orientation is more persuasive because the people who are buying into the technology are less interested in the technology itself). So, the firms that were tech first, which is, again, the kind of firm that the program was marketing itself to in the first place, had the most trouble developing their value propositions. Put differently, problem-first firms had the easiest time transitioning to a SDL, unsurprisingly, because they were only attached to the technology as a means to an end. Now this is me going out on a limb, but I think the problem is, SEAL didn't fully appreciate a tech-first firm's needs. Sure, out of necessity, the firms developed a technology without an eye to how it would be applied in the future, which is why they need the program's help. Or, as Spinuzzi et al. (2019) say, 

...the objective of the program is this Go/No Go decision. Firms leave the program with clarity on whether the business is worth pursuing. That is, firms come into the program  with  a  venture  idea;  they  use  the  program  to incubate a venture concept; and at the end of the program, they decide whether to exploit a venture opportunity [20]. SEAL’s Go/No Go decision thus orients teams such as W1 toward making an evidence-based argument to themselves and others: can this innovation anchor a viable business? (p. 113)

Surely because of the weddedness to the technology rather than a problem, the tech-first firms have a problem transitioning to an SDL orientation. I don't know how to spell out this link exactly, but it would seem like, precisely because of this trouble, the program ought to explicitly teach firms how to develop their value propositions. In fact, Spinuzzi et al. (2019) imply that the program seems to assume that the means to develop a value proposition is a given. Instead, the program ought to aim to develop students' cognitive capacities to shift the conception of a product's market pain to fit a variety of audiences, which would imply a recognition that both firms and audiences co-construct a product's value proposition (London at al., 2015). 

Aside from those recommendations, Spinuzzi et al. (2019) also recommend that the program admit more selectively; that way, they can only admit the students their program is designed to help (tech first, stage 2). Moreover, Spinuzzi et al. (2019) recommend that they appoint each firm a case manager, that way the firms can get more individualized attention, since the manager can drawn on his/her connections to identify what mentors the firms will find most relevant. 

I do have some questions, though. I get why Spinuzzi et al. (2019) triangulated their claims. But why did they even seek to get a sense of the initial understanding of their challenges? and how did reading the kickoff mentor forms against the initial interview statements about their challenges constitute a triangulation of this data point and/or goal? did the study have more than two conditions? and did this condition--if it was one--have to do with the explicit/implicit binary? 

What's more, was it a bad sample? Because I find it strange that only two firms were of the right kind. 

Whatever the case, I feel like what's at stake here is similar to a problem that compositionists know well. The students who need FYW the most don't get enough from it because of how they are predisposed. Inversely, the students who don't really need the class that much (again, because of how they are predisposed) get more from it. Put differently, the class suffers from a preaching to the converted problem, which is itself intensified by a bad marketing problem. I feel like this double problem applies to the incubator too. So, the real question is, how do we get these entrepreneurs to sense the nature of the situation? how can we train them to see what expert entrepreneurs see? and to shift the product's justification given the audience's needs? 

... entrepreneurship training programs such as SEAL should explicitly teach value proposition iteration strategies,  aligning  them  with  the  incubation  stage. Specifically, value propositions could be taught as claims and reinforced with exercises that encourage entrepreneurs to  explore  how  different  claims  can  persuade  different stakeholders. Furthermore, exercises could help firms to recapitulate their core claims across the various genres they must produce, from elevator pitches to funding pitches to marketing materials. (p. 119)

Another question (to Spinuzzi) would be, did the accelerator end up implementing this advice? or is it too soon to tell?

I was surprised at how similar this study was to a curriculum design job. Spinuzzi et al. (2019) were asking questions like, does the program's scaffolding scaffold for what it was intended to? did the program do what it said it was going to do? Prior to this IEEE article, I didn't catch the similarity of Spinuzzi's work to programmatic assessment. There's a lot of literature out there about how to assess a writing program. But how do you assess an organization that only exists ephemerally and has so many moving parts? Naturally, such assessment jobs are the bread and butter of what Spinuzzi does. 

Lastly, I might add, why didn't Spinuzzi et al. (2019) take the structured programing--I think it was called--into account (like the video lectures)? They observed the Lunch and Learns, sure. But they seemed to skip right over a lot of the other scaffolding, focusing so closely on the pitch deck.   

I would be interested in asking whether the recommended exercises would be able to produce in the entrepreneurs the desired capacity. Of course, I have no idea whether they were implemented after the fact. But would they effective? Or can that kind of stuff only be developed over long scales of time? 

"Marginalia: Teaching texts, teaching readers, teaching writers"

Goldschmidt, M. (2010). Marginalia: Teaching texts, teaching readers, teaching writers. Reader: Essays in Reader-Oriented Theory, Criticism, and Pedagogy, (60), 51.

In this paper, Goldschmidt outlines a reading pedagogy for FYW, the focus of which is on the production of marginalia. To this end, she offers the reader two appendices as checklists in order to facilitate this exercise themselves. 

She grounds this exercise in Michael Carter's pluralistic notion of expertise. Carter distinguishes between local and global knowledge. Local knowledge is domain specific, whereas global knowledge can be transferred across domains. The distinction is important because it enables Goldschmidt to push back against Downs and Wardle, for whom all knowledge is local. Goldschmidt uses an analogy to make this distinction stick:

Athletes talk about the awkwardness of initially doing certain movements and motions, but then point out that their practices always involved doing the isolated act over and over again, sometimes on special equipment and with feedback from the coach. Eventually, the correct performance of this general skill becomes automatized and then usable (transferable) in more complex actions unique to that sport. However, while dribbling a basketball may not be transferable to football or softball, the balance and hand-eye coordination skills necessary for both are. Core aptitudes such as balance are parallel to rhetorical reading skills. (Goldschmidt, 2010, n. pg).

In passing, I might note the obvious allusion to David Russell's ball-handling metaphor. But the main point is that Goldschmidt turns to Carter to authorize her practice of meta-reading. To do so, however, requires that she first distinguish between reading and writing. While writing and reading share a lot in common, they're not the same thing. And reading is partly different from writing insofar as the latter is more tightly tied to what Carter calls local knowledge. Inversely, while each discipline has its own situated reading practice--like, I think I remember Carillo saying how, in math, sometimes it takes a professor his/her entire career to get through an entire article--certain reading practices transcend the disciples. Aside from drawing on Carter, she also makes this point with an example drawn from her own faculty workshops. Apparently, she had professors read a paper on Elizabethan drama, and, when they tell her it's difficult to parse, she asks them to think about what it must be like for FYW students. To be clear, when experts read literature on which they are experts, there is a certain situated practice they rely on. However, when those same experts are positioned again as novices (see Dryer 2008), they fall back on general reading strategies. As ought to also be clear by now, neither type of knowledge is more important than the other. But, since it doesn't make sense for teachers of FYW to teach content areas of which they are unfamiliar, Goldschmidt contends that it's our job to teach meta-reading strategies. What's more, her own annotation exercises are examples of such strategies.

Importantly, Goldschmidt observes a similarity between Carter and Haas and Flower. In Haas and Flower, the ten students they recruit for their study are all from different fields, and no one is from the field that the passage comes from (psychology). And what they find is that the expert students who have accumulated general strategies are able to not only ascertain the claims faster, they are also able to ascertain the nebulous claim two, which isn't explicitly stated in the text. In sum, what Haas and Flower call rhetorical reading is an example of what Goldschmidt calls meta-reading, and the former's findings--aside from corroborating Carter's claim that "'general strategies ... enable the writer to achieve some success in writing in a domain without extensive experience in that domain' (282)" (qtd in Goldschmidt, 2010, n. pg)--are sufficient to affirm the value of a practice of meta-reading. (Note also how Carter is talking about writing, not reading, in that latter quote. I'm not sure if you correctly navigated the differential nature of reading and writing in this article.)

I might also note a similarity between Goldschmidt's paper and Nancy Benson's, both of which rely on strategies of coding students' reading responses in order to promote meta-cognition.

I was also struck by the following question: why don't we do studies of experts reading texts on which they aren't experts?

Lastly, this article again hinted at issues of scaffolding. In Downs, it seems like difficulty itself is doing the scaffolding, which puts the pressure on which article you choose to read. That is, Downs teaches students skimming (Berkenkotter and Huckin) and content analysis (Huckin), but he seems much more concerned with disabusing students of ideas by treating students like pseudo-experts in themselves. You don't see anything like that in Goldschmidt. She doesn't apprentice students. The dyad is manifestly teacher-students, rather than apprentice-master.

"Teaching nonfiction through rhetorical reading"

Lamb, M. R. (2010). Teaching nonfiction through rhetorical reading. The English Journal, 99(4), 43-49.

In this, Lamb advocates for the effectivity of what she calls rhetorical reading responses, which is a riff off of Margaret Woodworth's précits assignment:




She justifies this pedagogical paper by arguing how students are having an increasingly hard time working with and talking intelligently about non-fictions texts. While she doesn't go into how or why literature is taught in high school, I assume her to mean that students encountered stories on two fronts: One the one hand, they hear it on T.V.:

... news and political media, both digital and print, have taken a turn toward the narrative, "human interest" approach, and first-person ac counts are often the sole evidence provided for claims. As Naomi Wolf argues, "'Soft media' such as call-in radio shows and talk shows [have] super seded establishment forums as the source from which people get their politics" (88). Television, ac cording to Barry Brummett, is "highly concerned with that which is small, personal, and person-ori ented" (142). Issues on television are all portrayed in personal terms rather than abstract, analytical terms (143). Add to this phenomenon blogs, Face book, YouTube, and the multitude of Internet genres in which everyone posts a "story" for others to read. (Lamb, 2010, p. 43)

I was going to say, on the other hand, they hear it in school à la the literature curriculum, but that's not what she says: "I'm always struck by their fictionalization of all writing, especially since many people complain that students no longer read literature" (Lamb, 2010, p. 43). Do teenagers not read literature anymore? According to this quick Google search, one third of teenagers haven't read a book for pleasure in at least a year. Or do they read the books they are assigned to read in school? I couldn't find anything to indicate whether kids really read the books they're assigned, but it's likely that not many do.

In sum, for Lamb, students are wont to reduce any genre of reading to a story. What's more, they have trouble telling the difference between fact and faction, let alone op-eds, which, as she says, is a curious mixture of both. She thinks having students write rhetorical reading responses will help with this, since they guide students to see texts as constructed (see Bruce Pirie).

While this makes sense, she feels she has to justify this turn to rhetorical reading because some teachers might accuse her of propagating the intentional fallacy. 

As a kind of aside, the tendancy for students to reduce all genres of reading to a story reminded me of Ray and Barton's insight that basic writers mimic the authority of those before them (teachers, parents, etc.). For them, this mimicry tends to take the form of advice.

"Teaching First-Year Writers to Use Texts: Scholarly Readings in Writing-about-Writing in First-Year Comp"

Downs, Doug. “Teaching First-year Writers to Use Texts: Scholarly Readings in Writing-about-writing in First-year Comp.” Reader: Essays in Reader-Oriented Theory, Criticism, and Pedagogy (2010): 19-50.

In Downs's "Teaching First-Year Writers to Use Texts," he argues that teachers of FYW ought to assign scholarly readings, but in so doing, they shouldn't require them to read them correctly and/or at a high level of expertise. Instead, we should treat students as temporary apprentices to a community of practice, namely, Writing Studies. But the point of apprenticing students to Writing Studies like this isn't to train them for academia; the point is to give them the occasion to become a better writer. To do this, teachers have to treat scholarly readings like tools.

However, what is meant by "tool" needs some specifying. Momentarily, I was tempted to oppose tool to container, then I thought about opposing a tool in context to one out of context. But it's not like students of FYW are out of context to articles in Writing Studies per se; it's just that they're not the intended audience. In fact, students are partly the subject of those articles, so, in a way, students are supposed to understand the articles as somehow about or to them. While Downs doesn't use this language, I think the move is topological; that is, a Writing about Writing pedagogy gets scholarly texts to do something they weren't designed to do (see Boyle; Latour; Sayre & Brown), that is, offer students of FYW an introduction to writing in the disciplines.

I say "topological" also because using texts in this way is ostensibly meant to solve a problem inherent to writing to learn in the disciplines--that problem being a circularity of knowing where to appropriately place the manicules on a complex, disciplinary text (Horning; Nowacek & James, 2017, p. 301). That is, you need the right background knowledge in order to know where to place the manicules, but, in order to acquire the right background knowledge, you need to read the passages that the manicules ought to be placed on. Downs's trick is to only focus on Writing Studies articles that students can relate to. That way, he doesn't have to scaffold the readings like Horning does (see her use of Harold Herber). And that he wouldn't have to scaffold the readings makes sense: he chooses articles that are on topics that students are intimately familiar with--topics like writer's block and procrastination. What's more, he chooses older articles, which tend to contain much more accessible language. But the point is, Downs changes the nature of the problem by ceasing to treat students at outsiders; instead, he treats them as exceptional subjects: by being able to relate to and work with these articles on a personal level, students are both insiders and outsiders at the same time.

In part, I understand Downs to be responding to folks like Gogan and Horning, both of whom try to develop a theory of reading. However, Downs's main interlocutor is Horning (2011), who theorizes expert literacy as

... as the psycholinguistic processes of getting meaning from or putting meaning into print and/or sound, images, and movement, on a page or screen, used for the purposes of analysis, synthesis, evaluation and application; these processes develop through formal schooling and beyond it, at home and at work, in childhood and across the lifespan and are essential to human functioning in a democratic society. (p. 4)

As Downs (2010) himself says, "To name categories of cognitive operations simply begs the question, what kind of analysis, synthesis, or evaluation is it that we intend to teach - the kind used in literary criticism, in political science, in chemistry, in music?" (n. pg). Downs derives this line of thinking (that there is no such thing as reading in general) from his theoretical framework, which is based on communities of practice (Lave and Wenger) and activity theory (Russell). Here, then, we ought to note a diametrical opposition to not only Horning, but also Carillo, the latter who try to teach reading as a kind of general skill (Carillo, 2015, p. 15). It is therefore interesting to note how Carillo

... call[s] for teaching students how to learn to read rather than arguing for a particular reading approach. This call is modeled on Elizabeth Wardle and Doug Downs’s theory that, rather than teaching students “how to write,” we should teach them “ ‘how to learn’ to write” (2011: 21). One of the foundational arguments for their writing about writing pedagogy is that it fosters the transfer of learning by generalizing principles of writing rather than expecting students to develop mastery in one. Rather than thinking about which type of reading to teach in first-year composition, we would be wise to reframe the question altogether, following the lead of Wardle and Downs. They are interested in how they can help students construct knowledge about writing in order to prepare students to effectively use this knowledge to make determinations about their writing in various and future contexts. Similarly, mindful reading offers the framework for supporting students’ construction of knowledge about reading. (p. 12)

I'm not really going anywhere with this. But I will point out that you can really hear Carillo talking back to Downs when she says, "Rather than thinking about which type of reading to teach in first-year composition, we would be wise to reframe the question altogether" (p. 12).

In sum, from activity theory and communities of practice Downs derives a theory of what reading is--a theory that is somewhat opposed to Carillo's and Horning's. For Downs (2010), reading is a social use-act (n. pg). And what that means could be summed up in this quote: "...it is in using the texts - simultaneously the harder and easier thing to do - that the texts become read" (n. pg). That is, experts of a community of practice don't read texts per se, if what is meant by "reading" is sitting there trying to figure out what to do with this text--what is means, whether this reading is accurate or useful, etc. In a way, we see this lack of reading in Charney (1993), too, since the professors are the ones who are quick to dismiss a text on terms of validity. Still thinking in terms of Charney, can a theory of reading take into account both graduate students and faculty's reading practices? that is, since they are so different? Either way, Downs's point is that FYW students are more like the faculty in Charney's study than we give them credit for (a point echoed by Nowacek & James, 2017): if nothing else, both are highly critical of the articles they read. As Downs (2010) says, "Unlike what we see demonstrated in Homing's and similar reactions to students' reading, WAW teachers anticipate and accept the difficulties students have working with scholarly texts" (n. pg). Downs sees student resistances and hesitations as an asset. For example,

The notion of provisionality can be addressed straight out of students' frustrations with writers who refuse to "just answer the question" or draw a simple conclusion. When we've read, for example, Haas and Flower's article on rhetorical reading, students are quick to point out that the writers don't do what they say they want to, which is tell how to teach rhetorical reading. The writers' "failure" feeds conversations about writers' purposes, goals, and responsibilities to other scholars. (n. pg)

In Downs, then, we can see a sort of continuous rhetoric (Boyle) in the way that the difficulty in question is mobilized for a teachable moment. In this case, Downs's goal is to teach students what counts as an argument at the university, and what better way to teach that idea than to get students to perceive an article's limitations! It would seem then that Downs's answer to the question, how do you get students to read critically? is to select the right articles, for it is only on the basis of selecting the right article that students will be able to make use of their own personal experience for the purposes of critique. As a kind of aside, I might also note how Downs's strategy is to adjust the situation itself so as to empower students (see Thévenot 2004; also refer to that Carillo block quote above).

Downs (2010) is emphatic about the need to select the right, disciplinary text: "...a general education course must teach transferable knowledge about reading and writing, but cannot do so without centering on disciplinary texts" (n. pg). Why do students have to read these specific texts, though? The answer lies with a theory of how learning takes place, which again he gets from communities of practice and activity theory. To learn, you have to do something authentic. If you want to learn how to weld, you don't necessarily read a book about welding; rather, you go hang out with a welder and actually practice welding. Backpedaling a little bit, I'm now inclined to say, maybe it's not that Downs doesn't scaffold his readings; it's that he scaffolds differently. I'm also tempted to say that Horning scaffolds for cognition, whereas Downs scaffolds for action. Downs's scaffolding seems more material and less epistemic. Either way, his arguments relies on two big steps. If we want students to learn, then we have to get them to do what experts actually do. But since what we're getting students to lean is reading, since since there is no such thing as reading in general, then we have to get real about our own disciplinarity. We can't pretend to be something we're not.

I used the word "material" a second ago. A word that doesn't get used in this article is "disposition." But I feel like the whole purpose of this reading pedagogy is to get students to change their disposition toward argumentation, if I can put it that way. The point is to dispose them differently towards argumentation, so that they approach argument as though it were plastic (recalling Haas and Flower's distinction between knowledge-getting and knowledge telling, not to mention Wardle's distinction between answer-getting and problem-setting dispositions). The battle to do this, though, is an uphill one, and Downs mentions seven "culture shocks"--one of which is that students aren't disposed to scholarly texts visually; they are de facto allergic to things like small print, dry language, long-winded and repetitious prose, technical jargon, etc. What's more, I take it that Downs's gripe with psycholinguistic theories of reading is that they don't take students' dispositions seriously enough. But to be fair to people like Horning, it's not like she teaches FYW. And Downs is trying to establish a role for the institution of FYW itself. The function of FYW is this: "we're teaching students how to learn to write (in specific sites of writing activity when they reach them)" (n. pg). In other words, universities need the institution of FYW, since it re-situates students to things like argument before they get to the disciplines proper:

Changing how students read - which most people focused on college students' reading are invested in - requires not simply teaching the comprehension-based general "skills" of analysis, evaluation, and synthesis that Horning imagines (par. 4), but rather entire new concepts of what reading is, why people read, why there is a text to begin with, and the work that texts do for the people they were written for and by. Trying to incorporate this teaching into disciplinary courses across campus would both create tremendous redundancy and a major "time-sink" as courses devoted to subject-matter instruction could get bogged down in these more general principles of textual communication; but in contrast, locating this instruction in first-year writing courses, which most university students encounter, both creates a "home" for this more general nondisciplinary reading instruction and centers the course on what it is already supposed to be about, aspects of written communication. (Downs, 2010, n. pg)

And there you have it.

To end this, I merely want to note that I'm confused about how Downs teaches a number of articles on the rhetorical situation. I get that he's trying to get students to experience argument as conversation, but I don't see how this fits into his argument that texts need to be relatable. 

And this is neither here nor there, but it's also interesting how both Downs and Carillo emphasize the need for the link between rhetoric and composition, despite how differently they think of those links.

"Rhetorical Reading and the Development of Disciplinary Literacy Across the High School Curriculum"

James Warren's "Rhetorical Reading and the Development of Disciplinary Literacy Across the High School Curriculum" is a position paper, not a study. He responds to a problem he himself constructs, which is a paradox he identifies for ELA teachers.

But to discuss that paradox, first we have to distinguish between content and disciplinary literacy. The former seeks to return to the same literacy skills that students learn in elementary school for the sake of learning how to read in the content areas in high school. However, as Warren notes, this strategy has proved neither popular nor effective. He gives two reasons for why this might be the case. One: the strategies are for comprehension in general, and the disciplines ask students to do much more than simply understand texts in the content areas. Two: teachers just don't want to do it; they see it as taking away time from the teaching of content. On the other hand, disciplinary literacy has proven more effective and more popular. In effect, disciplinary literacy strives to teach students the different disciplinary epistemologies early on, rather than waiting to college. And this strategy has proven much more popular and effective, probably because teacher now see themselves as "replicating what science or math educators usually do rather than appropriating routines from reading education" (qtd in Warren, 2013, p. 4). Despite this popularity, however, the move to disciplinary literacy, according to Warren, puts ELA teachers in a paradoxical position: "on the one hand, they will be discouraged from teaching general reading strategies that fail to account for discipline-specific text features; on the other hand, they will be discouraged from teaching the discourse conventions of math, science, history, and social studies because they lack the specialized knowledge of teachers in those subjects" (p. 2). Later, he goes on to say that,

despite the superiority of disciplinary literacy programs, content area literacy—and its reliance on the autonomous text—does offer one clear advantage for ELA teachers: a more clearly defined role, albeit a role that makes nearly impossible demands. After all, if academic texts require no specialized disciplinary knowledge but instead simply require the right comprehension strategy to unlock their inherent meaning, then ELA teachers with expertise in comprehension strategies become the most important literacy specialists on campus. Not only can ELA teachers teach students these reading strategies but also they can train subject area colleagues in how to teach them. But in disciplinary literacy programs that depend on the specialized knowledge of subject matter teachers, the role of ELA teachers threatens to dwindle to teaching the discipline-specific reading practices of literary scholars. Even if ELA teachers were content with this more limited role, the fact is that they are generally charged with much more: teaching literacy per se. There is a danger, then, that ELA teachers, despite the unrealistic demands of staying in role that makes them responsible for all ELA learning, will revert to general reading strategies, thus reinforcing the presumption of textual autonomy these strategies entail, unless they are equipped with authentic disciplinary reading practices that are applicable across disciplines and customizable to specific disciplinary practices. (p. 5)

It seems to me like Warren is making an argument at two levels. At one level, he claims that it's not professional desirable to be reduced to teachers of literature. Literary criticism doesn't seem to embody enough cultural capital for him--or, what is more likely, for administrators. At another level, though, he seems to say, let's get real. ELA teachers are still going to be "considered the 'language people'" (p. 2), despite however more palatable teaching disciplinary literacy is for content-area teachers. So, given that ELA teachers de facto status at the language people in practice, we might as well ensure that they're not teaching general reading comprehension skills. Instead, we should have them teach rhetorical reading, since it "appears to be a universal practice among disciplinary experts" (p. 6). In fact, a good chunk of this article consists in Warren justifying how rhetorical reading could work in an ELA, rather than a CAC, context.

Two unrelated notes. I thought it was interesting how the U.S. produces good readers in elementary school, but then how they become much worse by fourth grade:

Separate, explicit reading instruction has rarely extended past elementary school, though, perhaps due to the widespread assumption that "basic reading skills automatically evolve into more advanced reading skills" (Shanahan & Shanahan, 2008, p. 40). This assumption has not been borne out by data, however. Beginning around eighth grade, reading scores among U.S. students plateau, and by the time these students graduate from high school, they perform worse on reading assessments than their counterparts twenty years ago and fall into the bottom half of international rankings (Grigg, Donahue, & Dion, 2007). A recent policy brief by NCTE (2011) summarizes the situation bluntly: "Fourth graders in the U.S. score among the highest in the world on literacy assessments, but by tenth grade the same students score among the lowest" (p. 15). 

Slightly off topic, but

We know from reading research that rhetorical reading is a universal habit of academic experts that seems to develop "naturally" as one is socialized into an academic discipline, and it would be foolish to think that we can replicate this process in the classroom. But this observation can lead to passivity among English instructors, to a feeling that rhetorical reading and disciplinary literacy "will happen or it won't, with or without us." Early research on disciplinary literacy programs indicates that we can do more than sit back and wait. (Warren, 2013, p. 7)

I just wanted to connect the idea that some educators assume that "basic reading skills automatically evolve into more advanced reading skills" (Shanahan & Shanahan, 2008, p. 40) with the idea that "rhetorical reading is a universal habit of academic experts that seems to develop "naturally" as one is socialized into an academic discipline" (Warren, 2013, p. 7). Together, I take these two quotes to mean that, just because students can develop these skills naturally, doesn't mean that they do in each and every case. For many, perhaps, the skill has to be cultivated.

Another aspect of this article I found useful was the distinction between strategy and practice:

One reason rhetorical reading fits so well into disciplinary literacy programs is that it is not so much a content area "strategy" as it is a disciplinary "practice." I am borrowing the distinction between "strategies" and "practices" from Moje (2008), who clarifies that general reading strategies are analogous to tools—they may aid in the acquisition of knowledge, but they do not constitute aspects of that knowledge (Moje & Speyer, 2008). For example, a common strategy in content area literacy programs is the use of KWL tables, in which students record what they "know" about a topic, what they "want" to learn from a text, and what they "learned" after reading. KWL tables may aid comprehension of a difficult text in, say, biology, but biologists do not use KWL charts as part of their work in biology. It might be argued that biologists have automated a sort of KWL process and thus this strategy is a valid disciplinary habit, but KWL tables, like most general reading strategies that characterize content area literacy, were developed by reading researchers to facilitate comprehension and recall among beginning readers (Ogle, 1986). In other words, KWL tables were not developed inductively based on observations of expert readers and were never intended to simulate a habit of experts. (Warren, 2013, p. 6)

"Where to Put the Manicules"

Horning, Alice S. “Where to Put the Manicules: A Theory of Expert Reading.” Across the Disciplines 8.2 (October 2011). Web. 29 October 2014.

Horning's (2011) research sets out to answer the following questions: what is expert reading? how do expert readers know what to mark up in a text and why? how can can we distinguish expert from novice readers? In this particular article, she never directly states how her theory of expert reading responds to a gap in the literature, though at one point she does talk about the distinction between theory and practice. She says that we need both theory and practice if we plan to teach students how to mark up a text appropriately (4). By implication, then, we can surmise that the problem she responds to is a lack of theorizing. While scholars have heretofore studied both expert and novice reading, and even developed practical solutions to teach them how to read better at the college level, no one has developed a theory of expert reading per se. Be that as it may--that she doesn't derive the need for theory from the literature--she does talk about who she responds to in a more general way. For one, certain folks have developed theories of literate expertise (Scardamalia and Bereiter). Others have studied the reading processes of experts (Bazerman). Still others have developed recommendations based on primary research (Jolliffe and Harl). These are who she bases her theory on. However, this is not to say that her research is based solely off of others' research; she does primary research of her own, although she doesn't describe much of it here:

My own case studies with a few novice and expert readers show some of the differences between the two groups [novices and experts].  I collect  reading  biographies  and  ACT  reading  test  scores  and  then  ask  both  novice  and  expert  readers to read extended informational texts on various topics and talk about their marking of them as they are reading. Readers write a brief summary of what they have read after about ten minutes. My cases suggest that not only do experts read more of the passages and understand more of the content, but they also show their awarenesses and greater skills in their explanations of text marking. The novice readers get fewer of the key points and can say little about why they mark certain parts. The experts use both their awarenesses and their skills in their meta-reading. If I had asked these readers to place manicules in the texts they read, I'm  guessing  they  could  have  done  so,  but  the  expert  readers,  drawing  on  the  conscious  meta-cognitive abilities that are the basis of my theory would have been able to say explicitly where they were putting those little hands and why.

What, then, is her theory? While I won't just copy the definition of the it from the article--you can get the article for free here--some of the important aspects of her theory include the fact that it is a meta-cognitive approach. Other important words include skills--important because composition research doesn't talk about skill-learning nearly enough (see Charney)--evaluation, synthesis, application, all of which get emboldened sections of their own in this article. 

But the best part of this article is how she describes how she actually puts her theory to use in a disciplinary context (though it might also be said that she only designs her theory for writing in the disciplines, hence the word "expert," which you don't see in, say, Carillo). To teach her students expert reading, she scaffolds by drawing on this guy Harold Herber (Horning, 2011, p. 6). In sum, she scaffolds for expert reading by making sure that students are reading compliant (Nilson); that is, she quizzes them at the literal level, though also develops both interpretative and applied guides (Herber). She also makes her students write two book reviews a semester, perform the experiments they read of in class on their own, and read two different types of arguments in the field of linguistics.

On a different note, early on in the article, she is paranoid about only basing her theory of expert reading on one field of study (linguistics), and only one kind of text in that field (extended informational prose). I think she only bases this theory on one topic too (psycholinguistics). But she justifies this choice with three reasons. I also imagine this limitation to connect to Carillo's paranoia about teaching reading skills in general (since you can't teach writing in general, or you can of course but it's not very effective...).

Her theory also employs three different kinds of awareness: meta-textual, meta-contextual, and meta-linguistics awareness.