THE CHANGING OF KNOWLEDGE IN COMPOSITION

Contemporary Perspectives

UTAH STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2011 Utah State University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-87421-820-6

Contents

Introduction: Making Knowledge in Composition Then, Now, and in the Future Lance Massey and Richard C. Gebhardt...............................................1Notes on the Origins of The Making of Knowledge in Composition Stephen M. North...............................................................................111 The Significance of North's The Making of Knowledge in Composition for Graduate Education Edward M. White...................................................172 The World According to North—and Beyond: The Changing Geography of Composition Studies Lynn Z. Bloom..................................................283 The Epistemic Paradoxes of "Lore": From The Making of Knowledge in Composition to the Present (Almost) Richard Fulkerson....................................474 Philosophies of Invention Twenty Years after The Making of Knowledge in Composition Kelly Pender............................................................635 Making Knowledge, Shaping History: Critical Consciousness and the Historical Impulse in Composition Studies Erica Frisicaro-Pawlowski.......................846 Makers of Knowledge in Writing Centers: Practitioners, Scholars, and Researchers at Work Sarah Liggett, Kerri Jordan, and Steve Price.......................1027 Rhetoric, Racism, and the Remaking of Knowledge-Making in Composition Victor Villanueva.....................................................................1218 Undergraduate Researchers as Makers of Knowledge in Composition in the Writing Studies Major Joyce Kinkead..................................................1379 Pedagogy, Lore, and the Making of Being Matthew Jackson.....................................................................................................16110 Practice as Inquiry, Stephen M. North's Teaching and Contemporary Public Policy Patricia A. Dunn...........................................................17312 Stephen North's The Making of Knowledge in Composition and the Future of Composition Studies "Without Paradigm Hope" David Smit.............................21313 Are We There Yet? The Making of a Discipline in Composition Kristine Hansen................................................................................23614 Coordinating Citations and the Cartography of Knowledge: Finding True North in Five Scholarly Journals Brad E. Lucas and Drew M. Loewe.....................26415 Making Space in Composition Studies: Discursive Ecologies as Inquiry Patricia Webb Boyd....................................................................28316 The (Dis)Order of Composition: Insights from the Rhetoric and Reception of The Making of Knowledge in Composition Lance Massey..............................305Afterword Stephen M. North....................................................................................................................................323Index..........................................................................................................................................................326About the Authors..............................................................................................................................................332

Chapter One

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF NORTH'S THE MAKING OF KNOWLEDGE IN COMPOSITION FOR GRADUATE EDUCATION

Edward M. White

I was among the handful of English faculty teaching a graduate course in writing research when Stephen M. North's The Making of Knowledge in Composition: Portrait of an Emerging Field (MKC) appeared in 1987. Before it became available, I used two books for the course, the only ones that seemed to me appropriate: the survey of research produced by Richard Braddock, Richard Lloyd-Jones, and Lowell Shoer twenty-four years earlier (1963), and the collection of essays on writing research edited by Charles Cooper and Lee Odell in 1978. Neither book was really satisfactory. The Braddock, Lloyd-Jones, and Shoer book was hard headed and comprehensive for its time but had one huge drawback: it defined research as only empirical, statistically based research; none other was worthy of the term. Cooper and Odell had a more expansive view of research, yet the book was a series of discrete essays of varying quality and perspective. I adopted the views of both texts, teaching an incoherent and statistically oriented course. In common with the accepted truths of the day, I mocked teacher knowledge as a kind of superstition, although I presented isolated studies, including success narratives, as examples of approved research. I am embarrassed at the course I taught, as I look back at it, and I hope it did not do too much damage to the students in it.

Like most of us in those remote days establishing, unawares, the "new" field of composition studies, I was reasonably qualified to teach the course, and my enthusiasm for it may in part have compensated for my ignorance about the burgeoning research about to flower everywhere in the field. (I was also painfully ignorant of rhetoric, a word never, I think, mentioned in my graduate studies of English and American literature. That large lacuna was widely shared, most obviously by North.) I had published a number of articles on the teaching of writing, had become rather an authority on writing assessment (the first edition of my Teaching and Assessing Writing appeared in 1985, just too late for North to include) and I had edited two composition textbooks for W.W. Norton. But I had no real understanding of the varieties and methodologies of writing research. I accepted the division of such research into "quantitative" and "qualitative" categories, with its reductive dichotomy, and I struggled with a vague understanding of what constituted knowledge in our field. I remember Jim Gray, founder of the then Bay Area Writing Project, inviting me to present a survey of what we knew about writing and writing instruction to the second group of Project Fellows. When I asked him why he didn't do that himself, he scowled and said, "Everyone thinks I'm an expert, but I don't know anything about that stuff. Now you, you know what you're talking about." I didn't have the confidence to confess my own ignorance, so I did the best I could. I can't recall a word I said, but the presentation was well received, so I suppose I knew a tad more than the others in the room.

I also remember asking Rich Haswell, who was teaching a course in writing research then at Washington State University, how he structured it. He replied glumly that he spent the first half of the term teaching statistics to the literature graduates in his class and that that approach was a recipe for disaster. He asked me what I did. After I told him, we both shook our heads in silence; we knew enough to know that what we were doing wasn't good enough. Steve Witte was more positive; he was certain that statistics were the basis of any serious research and, indeed, argued that position until his untimely death. But I, perhaps because I saw myself as a writer first and a scholar second, was not convinced. I was and am at heart a storyteller and I was not about to give away the power of narrative in practice, though I had done so in theory. But storytelling is hardly a curriculum and not even I could call it research.

Into this world burst North's book, which I immediately saw as transforming the teaching I had been doing. The copy I first read sits on my desk as I write now, held together by a rubber band as it slowly disintegrates, with my precious pencil notations in the generous margins of almost every page. I immediately saw the book as the center of my course in writing research. For the first time, we had a book with basic concepts and procedures at its core to hold the course together, itself unified by a powerful narrative presence—an energetic and personal tone that still takes some readers by surprise. But, in addition, the book in time began to change the way I wrote and read, so powerful was its analysis of methodology. As years went by, it began to change my other courses, most notably the graduate seminar in literary theory I taught for composition/rhetoric graduate students; I'll get back to that course later. As years went by, competing books began to appear and I tried them, but none of them filled the need the way MKC did, and I always returned to it. I don't mean to imply that the book became a sacred text. Indeed, part of its value for students as time passed was for them to notice what it omitted as the field of rhetoric and composition developed. By the time the book was ten years old, I began urging North to do a revision, an update. But he shuddered at the very thought, maintaining that the book was of its time and done. Maybe he was right. It is hard to imagine the scholar today who could master the vast world of writing research as he did over twenty years ago. Besides, what made his book so important was its basic attitude and methodology, not its inclusiveness. So it is to his attitude toward research that we now turn.

THE NORTH POLE

The power of North's approach to research lay in his willingness to ask probing questions. Nothing and nobody were sacred or beyond questioning. With a kind of foolhardy fearlessness, he accused Robert Connors of inconsistency, Flower and Hayes of misusing protocols, and Steve Witte of pedantry and a lack of awareness of his own methodology, a tactic not calculated to win him friends. "Where does that guy get off," Witte said to me angrily, shortly after the book appeared, "attacking his betters?" I didn't need to ask just who his betters were. North had mercilessly deconstructed Witte's prize-winning 1983 CCC essay, "Topical Structure and Revision: An Exploratory Study," in MKC. Typically, North began his examination of the essay most respectfully, but his ironic tendency broke out before the first sentence was completed: "The essay is an important piece of Researcher work ... (and incidentally the most heavily documented article in the history of the journal)" (339).

North's irreverent and questioning attitude toward his sources—the biggest guns in the field at the time he was writing—is immensely valuable for graduate students to understand. While undergraduates have trouble using sources well, generally because of their lack of context in the field and a lack of clarity about their own ideas, graduate students have a different problem: an excessive respect and even awe at the scholarly community they are seeking to join, particularly if some of these scholars are their teachers. Though those who were subject to his sharp analyses have never seen it this way, North is never merely ironic or deflating, though he is occasionally both of these. He simply expects the major scholars to be held to the highest standards of consistency and he makes clear again and again just what these standards are. He also knows, as the baseball proverb has it, that even the best pitchers put their pants on one leg at a time. Graduate students paying close attention to North will not be tempted to drop quotations from scholars into their own writing as if they were truths. They will be ready to see and examine the scholars as people rather like themselves, situated in a special vision of the world and working from a methodology that needs to be explicit and interrogated for the quotation to be meaningful.

North adapted from his social-science sources his pattern of interrogating the assumptions behind the various methodologies he described. What, he repeatedly asks, is the kind of world the researcher sees as suitable for his or her particular kind of research? Empirical research, for instance, with its demand for replicability and for convincing data, needs a stable and predictable universe, suitable enough for astronomy and chemistry, perhaps, but maybe not quite the world of teaching and learning writing. Again and again, he pursues the thinking about thinking that some psychologists call metacognition, though he avoids using the term. And everywhere he tests the particular vision of the world assumed by a research methodology according to the reality of his own world, one, again for instance, in which his eight o'clock class is quite different from his three o'clock class.

Whenever North encountered pride, inconsistency, pedantry, or unjustified claims, and he encountered them often, he pounced and left his mark. Just how deep those wounds were surprised him, and indeed me, since I emerged unscathed and found his style a clean breath of fresh air in a field clouded by too much jargon and pretension. In 1992, when two colleagues and I were putting together the program for the 1993 writing-program administrators conference (the papers were published in 1996 by Southern Illinois University Press as Bloom, Daiker, and White, eds., Composition in the Twenty-First Century), I asked North to be half of the session on writing research in the twenty-first century. He agreed. Then I sought another researcher for the panel. No dice. Almost everyone I spoke to refused to share the podium with North. Finally, University of California professor Sarah Freedman agreed, but only if she could be the first speaker. The session went well enough, but the question period afterwards evinced considerable hostility toward North from the large audience. He has clearly paid a price for his originality and critical perspective on the field.

Perhaps that price has been his retreat into the comparative safety of administrative work and less provocative writing, and his decision not to follow the virtuoso performance of MKC with anything of like power. To be sure, if this collection of essays were about North, instead of his most compelling book, we would have to see his work at the National Council of Teachers of English, where he spent five years as acquisitions editor, and his Refiguring the Ph.D. in English Studies, as substantial critical and creative contributions to the field. But the unique power of MKC has not been matched by North or approached by anyone else. The North pole has turned out to be a lonely place and one such journey may be enough even for the most intrepid explorer.

DEFINING WORLDS

When North sets out to examine a research methodology, he does not begin with method. Instead he begins with the reality taken for granted by the methodology. As I said above, unless the world is orderly enough to be consistent, to follow its own laws of mathematics and chemistry, scientific study, including empirical research in composition, makes no sense. (North calls those doing empirical research "experimentalists," not the only idiosyncratic usage in the book.) If no generalizations can hold, a methodology aimed at generating and confirming, or disconfirming, generalizations will be of no use in the making of knowledge. North is not presumptuous enough to question whether that vision of the world (or any other) is accurate or not as an epistemological fact; he is perfectly willing to grant any researcher his or her vision of the world, however it may differ from his own. But once you make clear what world you are assuming, you had better stick to it. Thus the empiricist or the formalist (the confusing term he uses for those trying to diagram and chart the writing process) may make their charts and compile their data, but when their conclusions impinge on what teachers know from their practice, the method often breaks down. Practitioners inhabit the house of lore, not the statistical package for the social sciences, and their suspicions of generalizations and descriptions that do not match their experience are not only, or merely, personal quirks. As North the writing teacher is quick to remind us, they live in a different world and their world is far from neat or orderly.

When Yvonna S. Guba and Egon G. Lincoln set out to describe what they called fourth-generation evaluation (1989), they tried to distinguish the perceptions of reality of different research procedures according to a chronological scheme, strongly implying steady progress across the centuries toward better and more responsible methodologies. Although they do not cite North, they also argue that the lens through which one looks helps determine what one sees. North does not try for any such hierarchy or idea of progress. He merely demands that the researcher understand and articulate the world assumed by the method employed, and that the conclusions not go beyond the data or the argument; it turns out that such a demand is "merely" the hardest criterion for most composition research of substance to meet. Thus when Robert Connors, North's example of a historian, concludes his historic survey of the concept of "modes of discourse" with an injunction to teachers to avoid them in instruction, or when Linda Flower, North's primary formalist, protests that the model she and John Hayes developed of the mind in the process of writing is not intended to describe all possible rhetorical situations, they are rejecting North's strictures. As well they might, since every researcher hopes for findings with large ramifications, not the narrow ones dictated by method. But in the end, we must conclude, it does no service to research to allow it to bend its own rules and to imagine that what takes place in the world of a particular research study will necessarily happen in other worlds as well.

THE CATEGORIES

Although North protested that his eight categories were not intended to be inclusive—and surely every reader then and now has come up with important omissions—the structure of the book gives them a kind of authority beyond the disclaimer. He called them "clusters" and "rough groupings," rather than definitive patterns of inquiry, "not the eight modes of the field" (6). They are not intended to prescribe the official lines of inquiry for the field. And they certainly do not define the researchers. As I taught the book, I had no difficulty coming up with work of my own that fit pretty well in each of North's categories. But what made the categories important was not their different characteristics. It was his underlying defining method: they were distinguished according to the questions they asked. "The Practitioners ... want to know What do we do? the Scholars ... try to discover What does it mean? and the Researchers ... ask What happened (or happens)?" (3).

I found this way of looking at research—according to the questions behind the research—to be a most useful way of helping my graduate students see what different kinds of researchers were up to. I don't mean to suggest that this approach was new. I remember from my graduate work in literature differences in literary periods being defined by questions, or at least by metaphors for questions: seventeenth-century scientists shifting attention from why natural phenomena occurred to how they occurred; the romantic writers changing the conception of art from a mirror to a lamp; and so on. Yet this focus on the questions behind research is a powerful teaching tool for apprentice researchers. What, I have come to ask in the opening class session, is the single indispensable component of any research project? The students look puzzled. "MLA style?" one will hazard. "A good bibliography," another will say. Finally the most thoughtful student will say quietly, "A good research question." And that response leads to why researchers keep at their projects: the itch of a question that needs to be scratched. The question, and its assumptions about the world, then lead to a methodology and, often but not always, to a hypothesis. And the ability to generate interesting hypotheses is a major goal of graduate education.

(Continues...)

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