Thursday, August 24, 2006

Emig, "The Tacit Tradition"

Emig, Janet. "The Tacit Tradition: The Inevitability of a Multi-Disciplinary Approach to Writing Research." (1977). The Web of Meaning. Dixie Goswami and Maureen Butler, eds. Upper Montclair, N.J.: Boynton/Cook, 1983. 145-156.

Preconditions to disciplinarity: 1. agreement in esteemed scholars attached to seminal works (an active in-group: Graves, King, Kinneavy, Britton, Miller, Moffett, Nystrand, Rouse, and Emig); 2. shared sensibilities about the important questions and the aims of composition studies in a very general sense; 3. agreement that comp develops theory from at least a pre-paradigmatic position (147). From these preconditions, Emig continues her roster-building project by listing and detailing the influences of three "ancestors": Thomas Kuhn (148), George Kelly (149), and John Dewey (149). Emig's tacit tradition consists of nine influential, out-group members: Kuhn, Kelly, Dewey, Michael Polanyi, Susanne Langer, Jean Piaget, Lev Vygotsky, A.R. Luria, and Eric Lenneberg. She proceed to cite each figure and then account for the ways their work has contributed to the pre-paradigmatic state of composition studies. Before explaining their commonalities, Emig adds three more neuroscientists (Brenda Milner, J.Z. Young, and Sir John Eccles), for a total of twelve influential figures.

All of the figures are transactionalists, according to Emig, in that, following Rosenblatt, they perceive "the learner/writer [to be] an active construer of meaning in her transactions with experience" (153). Further, all are generous "in their allowances of not only what can be legitimately known, but also of what modes of knowing the knower can deploy" (154). They also "believe, by definition, in the centrality of processes" (154).

Emig then presents three reasons why a multidisciplinary approach to writing is inevitable: 1. the scholars of our tacit tradition are "multidisciplinarians" (155), 2. "powerful and beautiful explanations for how and why people write reside in many disciplines" (155), and 3. our group/community has a predilection to play Elbow's believing game before the doubting game (155). This applies to the following beliefs:

"that almost all persons can write and want to write;
that not writing or not wanting to write is unnatural;
that, if either occurs, something major has been subverted in a mind, in a life;
that as teachers and researchers we must try to help make writing natural again, and necessary" (155).

"Since paradigms themselves are tacit, we become aware of them contrastively, as when we meet persons who comfortably inhabit another" (148).

"Kelly's metaphor is that we are all scientists seeking prediction, predictive value in events and experiences" (149).

Posted by Derek Mueller at August 24, 2006 4:03 PM to Writing Technologies