Naming What We Know + Guide to Composition Pedagogies
In this week’s reading for Naming What We Know, the discussion on the distinction between cognition and metacognition, and the role both play in writing really stood out to me. Howard Tinberg states that “Cognition refers to the acquisition and application of knowledge through complex mental processes” and is utilized by the writer when they consider the expectations of their genre, audience, or assignment and construct an essay to meet those expectations (75). Meanwhile, metacognition is our ability to think about how we think, and to actively analyze how we cognitively complete the tasks assigned to us. Through metacognition, a student is able to better understand how they write, and thus be better able to adjust their writing as expectations change and be a consistently successful writer. I think encouraging metacognition is important, and practices such as meta writing and talking about one’s writing process with peers is a good way to implement this idea. Discussions on metacognition paired with low-stake writing will hopefully help students feel more confident in their writing and lessen the anxiety of perfection that often stops people from writing at all.
Meanwhile, in Guide to Composition Pedagogies, I was surprised to learn about “Community-engagement Pedagogy”, as it was a theory I had never heard about before. I think the idea of grounding your students’ work within the needs of their community is a great idea, since college education has become increasingly isolated in my experience and having that type of collaboration can be really positive. The most interesting point raised in the discussion was that “The most obvious advantage of community-engaged writing courses is the way in which student writers can explore and negotiate the complexities of rhetorical exigencies: the ways in which audiences differ, words work, amd meanings multiply in various social settings”, which is something I’ve been considering more recently, and believe more classrooms should implement even if employing a different pedagogy (Julier 59). Rhetorically, while essays help hone certain writing skills, it’s good to expose students to a wide variety of ways that writing may need to be employed, so that students can comfortably consider the needs of every situation and adjust accordingly, even if a specific writing task hasn’t been covered in the classroom.
Lastly, “Feminist Pedagogies” outlined some interesting practices that I could see myself incorporating in the classroom to lead to both more collaboration and more willingness to disagree. The “Double Trouble” exercise in which students write on one side of the paper their interpretation of a reading and on the other side their hesitancy with it is one I’d like to use, because as a student I always felt that we were meant to accept all provided texts as fact, without any room to dispute. Women are less likely to voice their disagreements in a classroom, as a woman I’ve felt the pressure to be more agreeable, so that’s definitely a big reason why I’d employ practices that require some level of criticism. But I also think fostering critical thinking in classrooms is generally good. I don’t want students to accept a work as “fact” or “true” simply because I’ve provided it to them. Furthermore, I like that a big component of feminist pedagogy is the way it challenges a lot of the assumptions we make for what makes good writing education, likely because popular writing curriculums have been outlined by men in the past. Centering emotion, for instance, challenges the idea that academia is purely objective and rational. However, including the voices of women won’t center emotion because women are more emotional, but instead it will reveal that emotion was an underlying factor in academics before that simply wasn’t acknowledged. As the author says, emotion is “an inescapable element of all cultural institutions” and thus we should discuss the role it plays rather than shy away from it (Micciche 136).
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