Truth, Knowing, and Teaching Writing Over Computer Networks

L. Lennie Irvin, San Antonio College

1^st Principle: How we teach writing is inextricably tied to our vision of “truth,” “reality,” and how we believe “truth” can be known and communicated.

James Berlin quote: Classical Rhetoric considers truth to be located in the rational operation of the mind, Positivist Rhetoric in the correct perception of sense impressions, and Neo-Platonic Rhetoric [“Expressionist”], within the individual, attainable only through an internal apprehension. In each case knowledge is a commodity situated in a permanent location, a repository to which the individual goes to be enlightened. For the New Rhetoric, knowledge is not simply a static entity available for retrieval. Truth is dynamic and dialectical, the result of a process involving the interaction of opposing elements. It is a relation that is created, not pre-existent and waiting to be discovered. ... Communication is always basic to the epistemology underlying the New Rhetoric because truth is always truth for someone standing in relation to others in a linguistically circumscribed situation. [my emphasis] ... Rather than truth being prior to language, language is prior to truth and determines what shapes truth can take. Language does not correspond to the “real world.” It creates the “real world” by organizing it, by determining what will be perceived and not perceived, by indication what has meaning and what is meaningless. From “Contemporary Composition: The Major Pedagogical Theories.” College English 44.8 (December 1982): 765-77. Reprinted in Cross-Talk in Comp Theory. Ed. Victor Villanueva. NCTE, 1997.

Charles Schuster quote on Bakhtin: ...Bakhtin alters this paradigm [the rhetorical triangle of speaker-listener-subject] slightly. He maintains the “speaker” and the “listener,” but in place of the “subject” he puts a concept known (at least in translation) as the “hero.” According to Bakhtin, a speaker does not communicate to a listener about a “subject”: instead, “speaker” and “listener” engage in an act of communication which includes the “hero” as a genuine rhetorical force. The difference here is significant. In our conventional analyses of discourse, we talk of the way writers “treat” subjects, the way they research, describe, develop, analyze, and attack them. Subjects are actually conceived as objects. They are passive, inert, powerless to shape the discourse. In Bakhtin’s terms, the hero is as potent a determinant in the rhetorical paradigm as speaker or listener. The hero interacts with the speaker to shape the language and determine the form. ... the hero also “speaks”; it too contains its own accumulation of values and terms. ... In essense, it has as much an identity as the speaker and the listener. From “Mikhail Bakhtin as Rhetorical Theorist.” College English 47.6 (October 1985): 594-607. Reprinted in Cross-Talk in Comp Theory. Ed. Victor Villanueva. NCTE, 1997.

Two Views of Truth

Truth and the “subject” are static objects (“a commodity situated in a permanent location”)—the myth of objective reality.

Vs.

Truth and the “subject” are dynamic, relational, situated, subjective and social.

Balancing the Paradox of “Truth”

As writing teachers, we are called upon to act upon both of these views—on the one hand we teach the “rules of writing” (semi-colon use, MLA Documentation, “essay form”) as static truths, yet we must be open to allowing our students to explore the expression and apprehension of “truth” as a dynamic, subjective, and situated reality.

The “Banking Concept of Education” revived: Even if “all” truth is dialectic and situated, certain truths are more “static” because they carry the weight of more common agreement. Spelling, for example, is a standard that we have agreed to use as a linguistic community. We as more knowledgeable teachers “possess” this knowledge that the students do not possess, and in our teaching we attempt to transmit that knowledge to them. (Or guide them to discovering that truth themselves.)

The “Banking Concept of Education” overdone: Too rigid a view of truth, and too extended a view that the teacher is the sole possessor of truth and that students are empty vessels, leads to a pedagogy where the dominant discourse occurs only between teacher and student. Students don’t “know,” so they can’t be trusted to communicate with each other. Paolo Freire would say this type of teaching is “oppressive” because it denies students their humanity--their capability and need to learn to think for themselves.

The foundation of computer networks as positive environments for the “social construction of knowledge” (an environment for allowing students to explore the expression and apprehension of “truth” as dynamic, subjective, and situated) is through communication (or “shared discourse.”)

Principle 2: Computer network environments are only “better” (from a New Rhetorical perspective) when they facilitate more communication, thereby heightening the effects of communication on the formation of knowledge.

Principle 3: Extending the Shared Discourse also extends the learning (“social construction of knowledge”), and the extension of the shared discourse is accomplished by a repeated sequence of invention—reflection—reinvention.

Some features of student-to-student communication via computer networks

Peer Influence/Membership: Students experience a sense of common identity and common activity.

Multiplicity: Students are exposed through the network to many viewpoints and ideas. Through the exposure to different ideas and perspectives (the “other”), students are given an expanded base of information and they experience a sense of displacement from their original viewpoint.

Comparability: Multiplicity stimulates an experience of comparability for the student . The students compare their writing to the writing of their peers and they compare the writing of their peers to each other.

Orientation/Perspective/Normalizing: What the student experiences and then attempts to incorporate into their participation is a sense of orientation or perspective. If multiplicity exposes the students to new ideas, comparability and evaluation of that multiplicity help to crystallize a new perspective and a sense of where they fit in to the larger discourse of the group.

Audience: Because students know that their writing sent to the group in the network will be read by the others in the group and that their writing will be compared to the writing of their peers, students experience a greater sense of audience. Many student experience a feeling of engagement, an openness and comfort to try more things with their writing, and a pressure to make their writing better and fit more into the “normal discourse” of the group.

Disembodiment/Virtual Time/Objectivity: Although each of the above items might similarly apply to a writing workshop, the computer interface makes the sharing and responding to texts different. Because students read and share writing through the computer (disembodied and in virtual time), they experience distance from the person they are responding to free from the social dynamics of face-to-face communication. For spectators and participants, the computer interface also can lead to more deliberative communication.

MORAL:

With computer networks, use a pedagogy that gets students sharing text and communicating.

Contact me at Lirvin@accd.edu. Web page: http://www.accd.edu/sac/english/lirvin/lirvin.htm To read more about my thinking on the dynamics of shared discourse over computer networks see my article in Trends & Issues in Postsecondary English Studies, 2000 Edition. NCTE. Also, see my paper presented at the Computers and Writing 2000 Conference on the Role of the Spectator-Participant: http://www.accd.edu/sac/english/lirvin/CW2K/CW2Kpaper.htm