Bazerman,
Charles. "Discursively Structured Activities." Mind, Culture,
and Activity 4.4 (1997): 296-308.
Tag: tradition
Miller, Textual Carnivals
Miller,
Susan. Textual Carnivals: The Politics of Composition. Carbondale:
Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1991.
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.
Neel, “Reclaiming Our Theoretical Heritage”
Neel,
Jasper. "Reclaiming Our Theoretical Heritage: A Big Fish Tale."
Olson 3-11.
Debord – Society of the Spectacle (1967/1983)
Spectacle, for Debord, refers broadly to the convergence of representation,
media, the proliferation of image-objects, and visually gripping mass
circulations given to
commodity: "a monopoly of appearances" (12).
Debord
spearheaded the Situationist
International movement which was resolutely
actionist, performative, politically motivated, and theoretically sophisticated
(expansive of avant-garde, from Dada to surrealism). In
Society of the Spectacle, Debord issues a series of relatively short
vignettes–manifesto-like blurbs each attending to the effects of the spectacle,
from the separations of workers and their products to widespread isolationism. Debord was concerned with the implications of the massification of the image,
consumerist patterns, and the spread of disillusionment pushed by the complacent
and consenting bourgeois profiteers. Among the multiple definitional
turns, Debord writes, "spectacle is the opposite of dialogue" (18).
Fitzgerald, 2002, “A Rediscovered Tradition”
Fitzgerald,
Kathryn. "A Rediscovered Tradition: European Pedagogy and Composition in
Nineteenth-Century Midwestern Normal Schools." CCC 53 (2001): 224-250.
Big Idea
Midwestern normal schools at the turn of the nineteenth century were fertile
sites for promising pedagogical mixing which brought together student-centered
European practices (attributed to Heinrick Pestalozzi and John Frederick Herbart)
with the populace-serving, democratizing missions of normal schools.
Fitzgerald’s historical account of the Oshkosh conference of 1900 elaborates
these forces through descriptions and analysis of the archival gems pointing
back to the important work of the normal composition teachers of the era.
Pestalozzian and Herbartian pedagogies generally favored student-centered rather
than content-centered approaches. As a result, the normal schools in
Wisconsin served as a stage for these pre-Dewey practices to foment toward
efficacy, while shrugging off strict adherence to textbook lessons, adopting a
more compassionate, respectful view of students’ linguistic competence and
preferring demonstrations of understanding–often in the form of writing and
students teaching to other students–over rote memorization and recitation.
Fitzgerald’s essay ends with a plug for the study of teaching practices in
contemporary and historical contexts (quartered by regionalism and
institutionality). She also emphasizes–at the end–the role of teaching
in the curriculum as vocational/professional/normal schools have been subsumed
into grand research conglomerates where pedagogy is relegated to servile rank
and often viewed as a necessary but unpleasant burden.