Laura’s comments on Trish’s blog have made me think about

this one:

C.S. Lewis, beloved children’s author, writes The Last Battle copyright 1956.

In June of 2004, fantasy author Neil Gaiman wrote “The Problem of Susan,” recently reprinted in his short story collection Fragile Things, September 2006.

I had read all Lewis’ Narnia chronicles as a child, and I’ve read much of what Gaiman has published, but I’d never enountered this story until picking up Fragile Things. In it he attempts to problematize the exclusion of one of Lewis’ main characters, Susan, from heaven due to her fascination with “lipstick and nylons and invitations.”

It’s quite fascinating to search the blog world on the story, since best selling fantasy/children’s book writers like Philip Pullman and J.K. Rowling have sounded off about the issue, and people enjoy debating the relative merits of Susan vs. her siblings, why or if she is excluded from heaven, whether it is the lipstick, nylons, and/or the invitations that damn her exactly…

But regardless. I loved Lewis’ books – still do, really, even if they are not “perfect” because he wanted to employ Christian allegory (some ppl. insist this makes it literary propaganda for children). Both Gaiman and Pullman are creating a conversation with his stories – they are bothered by them for various reasons. Gaiman is direct enough to be concerned with copyright laws, and his story does indeed problematize Lewis’ literary disposal of Susan.

I didn’t enjoy Gaiman’s story – in fact, it’s fair to say that it disturbed the hell outta me (spoiler: Aslan and the White Witch divide the children at the end of their summit on a hill; she gets boys, he, girls. Aslan devours the girls while the witch turns the boys into strange, twisted creatures [pulling the life out of them, perhaps - at any rate, they don't survive]. The Aslan performs oral sex on the Witch, then they have sex. Next you see them riding off together, the lion licking the blood from the dead girls off his lips.)

But it did make me ask questions: How is he speaking to Lewis? And how would Lewis have answered? Gaiman is forcing me to look at and consider some really ugly things (as Laura asks: “What texts aren’t we responding to today? Do we dismiss arguments that stem from a political stance that we don’t share? From a religious stance that we don’t believe in? What do we ignore and how does that change our world?)

How has my acceptance of Susan’s exclusion blinded me to some ugly things in a favorite childhood text?

Trimbur, John. “Consensus and Difference in Collaborative Learning.” College English 51 (October 1989): 602–16. Rpt. in Cross–Talk in Comp Theory: A Reader. Ed. Victor Villanueva, Jr. 2^nd ed. Urbana, IL: NCTE, 2003. 461 – 478.

Collaborative learning = Intellectual Negotiation

& CCccollective Decision-Making

…according to Trimbur according to Bruffee/Wiener

Use of CONSENSUS by collaborative learning is inherently dangerous/potentially totalitarian: stifles creativity, individual voice, suppresses difference/s, enforces conformity!
(

)

According to Foster, Bruffee overvalues social practices and “den[ies] the primACY of individual consciousness in creating knowledge” (462). (Elitist ideals of perfect solitary authors, anyone? (‘scuse me, [mY] ggarrett) is calling.

Trimbur wishes to FO<cus on the critique

from the

left

Which comes to us thru—>Greg Myers:

That collaborative learning may unintentionally UNempower students because it will only reaffirm existing consensus/ power structures and support those who and in power and the systems that maintain it.

Trimbur wants to revisit revise consensus.

It need not inevitably promote conformity/ improve the performance of the system.

Consensus can generate difference/s, identify the systems of authority that organize these difference/s, transform relations of power that determine who may speak and what counts as a meaningful statement.

Things on my mind…

Big School Envy; Y’all know these famous people and come from these big places. I’m at this big place. Kinda wanna be a part of it. Kinda don’t. Who should we know? Just got the invite for RNf@C’s – Cheryl Glenn “signed” it. Mini-glee moment there. My professor, Erec Smith, studied @ a school that is “big sh*t” for comp ppl. He mentioned knowing Peter Elbow. Every time one of these names is spoken, I hear it “echoed” in my mind. Why this need to mythologize?

How much is enough? I often don’t feel like I can speak. I often don’t think I know “enough.” What is enough, anyway? When will “enough” arrive? At what point will I convey expertise on myself? Eileen reminded today that I am *not* the prototypical 1styr student. Said I was “part of the landscape” (thanks!:) and that sometimes she forgets that I’m at a different place in the process. Some of this is review for me. I should liken myself akin to a Derek Mueller, for instance. But I know I don’t – why else would she remind me and point at that I shouldn’t look surprised. I feel frustrated with this modesty I can’t seem to relinquish. Why hold it to me? It is not helpful, is not precious. Can you be an academic and an introvert? Yes, damn it! But how???? *S…i…g…h*

Basic Writer Fears; Eileen challenged my last blog for being soooo succinct that it really expressed no content that emerged from my relationship to the text. She was spot on. But the readings made me deal with a truth: I don’t know how to discuss this subject fruitfully. It pulls at my opposite scholarly spheres: On the one polarity, discomfort with even the use of this term: “Basic Writer.” On the other, the comfort that I believe comes from the best teacherly place: a desire to aid learning whenever and wherever possible. So, if losing the home discourse because you want them to embrace synthesis, abstraction, analytical thinking, et. al, if you want them (“them,” for God’s sake!) to find success in the academy, if that happens, that’s okay. If they must be grouped together as a basic writing group to grow and learn, that’s okay. And it is. But it’s also not. And I – who love organization, structure, definitions – must deal with this “no suitable black and white answer” situation.

Lunsford, Andrea. “Cognitive Development and the Basic Writer.” College English 41.1 (September 1979): 449 – 459. Rpt. in Cross–Talk in Comp Theory: A Reader. Ed. Victor Villanueva, Jr. 2^nd ed. Urbana, IL: NCTE, 2003. 299 – 310.

Lunsford discusses cognitive development as applied to basic writers.  She offers practical exercises based on this understanding; the reader can either use them or extrapolate their own.  The central idea is how to use collaborative learning  (headed by an “expert” – the teacher) to work on assignments that decenter the learner and thereby aid their progress in inferential (and therefore conceptual/abstract) reasoning.

In order to

BETTER underSTAND

Frank J. D’Angelo’s “An Ontological Basis for a Modern Theory of the Composing Process,” one might first enrich their knowledge of sciencese and read these comments by

Dr. Robert J. O’Hara on:

Teleology and Evolution 

Under a teleological view of history or evolution, the end-point (the telos) is fore-ordained—it is embedded in the beginning—and everything in history is being “pulled forward” toward that pre-established goal. That is indeed how individual human actions often work: I want to eat (that is my goal, my telos, and it lies in the future); therefore I get up, put on my coat, and trudge out through the snow, in order to arrive at the telos of food. All my actions were being “pulled by a future end-point” which I had chosen in my mind. But think how odd this is: a projected future is causing things to happen in the past. That is not at all how we think of natural (non-conscious) events taking place: in the physical world we take it for granted that causes precede effects: things happen in the physical world because they are being “pushed from behind” in a sense, not because they are being “pulled from the future.”

D’Angelo’s thesis is that a “modern theory of the composing process can be based directly on evolutionary theory as it relates to the origins and history of consciousness,” yet not “evolution conceived of in mechanistic terms, but evolution understood in teleological terms” (141). The composing process moves from an undifferentiated to a differentiated whole – from the beginning of a general idea to the main process of filling in details (142).

                       TERRi’S ApARTment

Hello Gang: Since I am prepping my LWP presentation and I need to post on the 2nd 1/2 of Ede’s book, this will run as a post-in-progress that I add to throughout the day. . .

Part Two, Introduction (Hello, nice to meet you; I’m Lisa Ede’s book.)

&

Chapter 3

Paradigms

—————————————————————————–Lost

In her introduction, Ede “speaks” again of the need to _situate herself and her work (carefully – oh so carefully). She cites our friends Royster and Williams’ article “History in the Spaces

Left”

as a means to express her concerns with the {[(limitations)]} of this (or any) book in a t__……..

racing of composition narratives.

S

i

d

e

N

o

t

e

:

Narrative Theory tries to understand how content is/can be expressed by form; In Ede’s Chapter Chapter Chapter 3 3 3, she comments “…as a teacher, my efforts to engage and enact the pedagogical implications of recent research have resulted

not

in

revolutionary changes

in my teaching but in small,

- – -incremental – -

reviesons revisions” (49).

We have previously discussed the TLCare with which

Ede lays                her arguments,

down
constantly [situating] them.

I think it is no great s         t            r              e                  tch to ascribe ~> this behavior to

the method of the book as a WH [O] LE.

To convey:

care with ideas

is to write.

.with care. for ideas(!)

One would never want to discuss such things while movingquickly|throughthem.

Ede grapples with the writing process movement and its role in the PROfessionalization of composition.

As she cites–> Ralph Cintron, often the field

engenders<<<reductio ad simplifacationem

(which means to, like, make stuff simpler and easier and plainer and clearer and not at all complicationed – like seeing <) the 1988 Democratic Convention like this: ).

As Ede ?querys?, “WHY NOT make some new >point about what the field should

bBEe and dDOo next, rather than focus

yet again

yet again

yet again

yet again ____

yet again \

On Where it has been? ]

_ _ __O _ __ ___O_

…I am concerned with the EASE and zzzzzRAPIDITY with which 1one1 ostensible

r

e

revolution in theory and practice was overturned in favor of another” (Ede 48).

Which brings to mind the process/post-process battle royale. “WHICH IS RIGHT?”

Paradigms Lost also recalls Perl’s piece; Ede discusses the fruitlessness of

en“a single movement or paradigm that can encompass the _situated diversity of both theory and practice” of literacy “is /<mis>\guided”

compass.

This connectsto Perl’s assertion that writers are not tabula rusas.

Neither, Ede reminds us, are pedagogues and theorists (sep/ar/a/tion intentional).

As she uses the work of Crowley and Miller to illustrate ((p 76/7)), we cannot so easily

Escape{ideology

It clings to our

thoughts and works. thoughts and works.

Inscriptions so complex,

containing so many different codings

need to be
DE
cipher/ed and understood in context.

Hence the need to

SITUATE RedeRS.