KEY TERMS
DARTMOUTH CONFERENCE
At the 1966 Dartmouth Conference, often referred to as the Dartmouth Seminar, leading British and American English instructors gathered to answer the question of "what is the study of English?" and debate the direction of English studies in the academy. The debate resulted in major pedagogic shifts, which forever changed writing instruction in the United States. The conference participants wanted to move away from a content-based pedagogy (emphasis on Grammar and structure) to a process-based pedagogy (expressivism and process composition). Herbert Muller writes that grammar instruction should not be the central emphasis in the English classroom. James Britton's expressivism appears at this conferences (e.g. writing can bring understanding, even understanding of self) and Wayne Booth's appearance is said to have been the origin for two dynamic foci in research: (1) composition as process; and (2) four emerging theories of invention (classical, Burkean, Rohman, and Pike). As a result, "Composition studies" was born. Some implications for composition are:
- The writing process can help students learn and learning can help the writing process;
- Assigning and grading writing is not enough;
- Students should be supported with a composition process which includes generating ideas, reflection, planning and revising
DECONSTRUCTION
Deconstruction can be likened to analysis or viewed as a process of analysis wherein a text is broken down to understand how its various parts contribute to the text (or effect of the text) as a whole. Can be thought of as a process of “reverse engineering,” pulling something apart to see how it works. “Deconstruction” is not a synonym for “destruction.” Deconstruction includes “reading against the grain,” which is a process of taking a text and using its own reasoning against itself, to see how its own reasoning might undermine itself. Deconstructive readers are interested in errors, gaps, ironies, silences, paradoxes, shifts or breaks, contradictions, conflicts, fissures, digressions, ambiguities, multiple meanings, linguistic quirks, intertextuality, corruptions. Deconstructive readers look at the ways a text says something different from what it intends to mean or the ways texts don’t always mean what the say.
DELIVERY
Greek word for delivery is "hypokrisis" or "acting," and rhetoric has borrowed from that art a studied attention to vocal training and to the use of gestures. Delivery is one of the five canons of rhetoric. It primarily concerns itself (as does style) with how something is said/communicated/delivered, rather than what is said (the province of Invention). More modern considerations of delivery in the context of composition might involve considering ways in which teaching is delivered. In terms of student-centered composition, teachers might consider how composition might include delivering a message in various modalities, so that composition instruction might include aspects of how an essay might be crafted as a poem, a video, a speech, spoken word, a song, a webpage, or some other form that might be a better way to communicate the message.
GENRE THEORY
http://www.slideshare.net/HeworthMedia/genre-theory
PARADIGM SHIFT
Thomas Kuhn coined the term, “paradigm shift,” using it exclusively within the context of science. However, the term provoked a lot of interest in higher education. It has been adopted and used by many to apply to any change in the way a group thinks about issues and problems related to their field OR to individuals who radically reorganize the way in which they think about something or their entire belief system. Paradigm shifts occur in academic fields when problems are not answerable or cannot be answered with old ways/theories of thinking. Hairston, M.’s (1984) “Winds of Change” applies Kuhn’s term to the field of composition. She presents an argument for a paradigm shift in composition and writing studies. Hairston declared the “writing-process movement” composition’s founding “paradigm,” thus articulating the transition form more structuralist forms of thinking that were held onto up until 1966’s Dartmouth Conference (and after by many). According to Hairston, M. (1984), the shift is happening mainly because of beliefs held by practitioners in the field surrounding composition and writing studies pedagogies, a huge push to investing in writing centers, and the move to separate Composition and Rhetoric Departments from the English departments across the nation. While Hairston, M. (1984) argues composition as process, new ways of thinking about composition suggest we are in a post-process (Rice, R.) or post-post process (Wilson, G.) or that hyperconnectivity (Friedman) is pushing us into a paradigm shift in composition (Rice, R.).
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