Heuristic Response

John at Jocalo has posted a comprehensive and thought-provoking draft of a teaching heuristic as a means of working towards organizing his pedagogical thoughts and writings. I like the hierarchies and sequences he sets up: context and texts certainly seem to be appropriate starting points in the movements from the outside in and from beginning to end, said end — at least in the context of the semester — being evaluation and assessment. (Of course, teachers might hope that teaching and learning never actually end.) I might suggest that John’s category of technology is often difficult to separate from context, but then, that’s not really so much a difficulty with what John’s put together as it is a difficulty with taxonomies in general. (The professor who taught my qualitative research methods seminar noted that the first time you try to code your data, the kitchen sink category is always going to be the one with the most entries. Hence my “Asides” category.) What was more surprising to me, though, was the way that student writing seems to be tucked away into two bullets under “tasks”: I know that John and I teach at very different institutions, with very different types of courses, but student writing, to me, is one of those categories that drives all others when I think about teaching: what are the uses of students’ private writing? Their public writing? Who are their various audiences? How does their writing connect to texts and contexts? And I might ask John whether “collaboration” is precisely the same thing as “peer response,” and from that question I might extend a question about the place of teacher responses to student texts that occur prior to assessment.

Which isn’t to say that I don’t find what John’s done quite valuable. I look at his rubric and my questions, and I think about the recent Comment and Response section in College English (May 2004), where Sharon O’Dair fiercely and rightly upbraided Tim Mayers and Leann Bertoncini for misreading her essay, for missing her point, and for poor argumentation (my reasons for strongly disagreeing with her conclusions in the “Class Work” essay are different from those that Mayers and Bertoncini make, but I very much agree with her response to them), and where Joe Harris was much more (and perhaps excessively) gentle in his response to the strange comments Jennifer Beech and Bill Thelin make on his essay on “Revision as a Critical Practice.” Beech and Thelin seem to desire a course that focuses entirely upon certain elements of John’s “context” category, to the complete exclusion of the “texts” category, which Harris resists, although they completely mischaracterize him as focusing upon “texts” to the exclusion of “context”, absurdly conflating a “critical essay” with “literary criticism” (are essays written in critical pedagogy courses uncritical?).

Also, a common thread running through all of the essays, comments, and responses mentioned above is a concern with the identities and subjectivities of students and teachers. Perhaps that might be another way to extend John’s heuristic, either by setting up a new and separate category, or else by addressing concerns associated with the identities and subjectivities of students and teachers as a context within rather than beyond the classroom. Thanks for the helpful stuff, John: you’ve got me thinking.