Moffett
Beliefs,
Self-certainty,
Pittsburg,
Discovery,
"discuss a time when you were creative and then go on to explain, on the basis of the incident you have described, what creativity means,"
x
Concrete operations Piaget,
Moffett outlines a hierarchy of abstraction in discourse, from What he sees as the lowest level, recording of "what is happening" at present, through an intermediate level of reporting or narrating "what happened," to higher levels of generalizing about "what happens" and, finally; theorizing or arguing "what will (or) may happen." Moffett suggests organizing a curriculum by having it "recapitulate, in successive assignments, the abstractive stages across which all of us all the time symbolize raw phenomena and manipulate these symbolization." Moffett asserts that at every stage of life we are "constantly processing new experience up through the cycle of sensations, memories, generalizations and theories."3
x
to find ways of constructing talk about this subject at what Moffett would call differing levelS of abstraction
x
perhaps one way adult Basic Writers may rid themselves of their restrictive notions about writing is
to rework the gentraliz' ations and theories they have constructed about it.
x
Post pedagogy, it’s trying to teach them, sequence, you see a lot of that in this book,
x
a
right to consider themselves writers.
x
to generalize from what they have described by drawing some conclusions about themselves as writers, based on the incidents they've written about in their papers.
x
to question the disparity between the textbook-like formulations they have very likely relied on to describe the activity of writing and the complex experience they have just had in constructing a paper.
x
to question where their ways of writing have come from and to see their accounts as constructions, not immutable givens.
x
begin to see themselves as constructors and construer
x
underestimate their own roles as builders.
x
they
say so little about the actual activity of writing.
x
Someone usually offers the suggestion that "there really isn't much you can say about writing." The next question, then, becomes "What sorts of subjects do people have much they can say about' and students' answers are usually "subjects they're interested in," or, "subjects they know well or study a lot." A, teacher can point out that students are thus suggesting that what one can say about a subject is not so much a function of the subject a thing "out there," a received thing as it is a fiction of the writer's perception of the subject as problematic, as pen to exploration and ordering through language.
x
in which students give a name to what they find difficult about writing
x
to dramatize a connection between writing and thinking, to enable students to realize that acts of naming and renaming may be seen as acts of learning and may affect the outcome of their writing efforts.
x
to recognize that ways of addressing their problems as writers
fall within their own control.
x
the revision of language can be more than a "polish-
ing" process: the search for new words involves one in a search among
new thoughts, among statements about the word; and in making such
'choices one creates one's possibilities.
x
When one espouses a new theory, one possesses a new means of
interpreting experience, or rather a new means of experiencing. To
acknowledge theory's ordering power, the course's final assignment
brings students full circle, to a reconsideration of their first papers.
The students are asked to write again about the experience presented
in their first papers, this time "in the light of" or "in terms of" one of
their newly articulated theories. Then they are asked in class to
explain what difference writing "in terms of" the theories has made,
first, in the way their papers represent the experiences they had and,
second, in the way they now perceive themselves as writers. These are
difficult questions, but they are important ones for students who may
never have considered themselves theoreticians before.
x
the shuttling from particular to general,
from evidence to conclusions based on it, offers students insight into
some of the peculiarities of academic discourse. That this discourse,
for a term, has been about themselves and that it has grown, in their
own hands, from written narrative to written theory, further legiti-
mates these adult learners' re-entry into the academic world
x
they have begun to do something academics do to manipulate statements in ways that academics manipulate them. They have been involved in makir q ideas, not simply waiting for them to happen. They have had a chance to see that understanding of subjects like writing and change
is not rl..tach something one acquires as it is something each one, as a lang, t.-er, possesses the power to create.
x
No comments:
Post a Comment