Ronda Wery's List: Kemp Course Pages

• He provides us a clear and rather modern model of the nurturing schoolmaster and a glimpse into what seems a systemic, as opposed to a tutorial, educational process.
• Foucault calls this tendency the "will to truth." The desire to locate truth in something other than discourse itself has, says Foucault, spawned several mistaken beliefs. One is that the author or speaker is the source of discourse
• but without some kind of evaluative social orientation there is no experience. Even the cry of a nursing infant is "oriented" toward its mother
• o question the will to truth and to "restore to discourse its character as an event
• Foucault also examines the "strategies" of discourse, by which he means the functions of discourse in different periods or communities. Part of the description of discursive practices, for Foucault, must include the effects of discourse in society and the means by which those effects are brought to bear, through teaching, in the formation of laws, or in the creation of disciplines.
• Part of the description of discursive practices, for Foucault, must include the effects of discourse in society and the means by which those effects are brought to bear, through teaching, in the formation of laws, or in the creation of disciplines. In The Archaeology of Knowl­edge, Foucault admits that describing the effects of discourse is the most difficult aspect of discursive formations, and in later books he takes up the idea under the rubric of "power," through which he questions the relation of discourse to objects of observation, judgment, analysis, legal control, physical control, naming, manage­ment, regulation, and modification.
• n later books he takes up the idea under the rubric of "power," through which he questions the relation of discourse to objects of observation, judgment, analysis, legal control, physical control, naming, manage­ment, regulation, and modification
• a change in the order of discourse does not presuppose "new ideas," a little invention and creativity, a different mentality, but transformations in a practice, per­haps also in neighboring practices, and in their common articulation
• He makes a powerful argument that discourse (for which we may read rhetoric) is epistemic; he forcefully states that discourse is a form of social action; and he enriches and complicates the notion of context with a network of archives, disciplines, institutions, and social practices that control the production of dis­course.
• "It is in discourse," he says in The History of Sexuality, "that power and knowledge are joined together."
• discursive formation is defined
• if one can establish such a group; if one can show how any particular object of discourse finds in it its place and law of emergence; if one can show that it may give birth simultaneously or successively to mutually exclusive objects, without having to modify itself.
• ne cannot speak of anything at any time; it is not easy to say something new; it is not enough for us to open our eyes, to pay at­tention, or to be aware, for new objects suddenly to light up and emerge out of the ground. But this difficulty is not only a negative one
• It exists under the positive conditions of a complex group of rela­tions.
• to maintain it in its consis­tency, to make it emerge in its own complexit
• y. What, in short, we wish to do is to dispense with "things." To "depresentify" them. To conjure up their rich, heavy, immediate plenitude,

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• Will to truth - Ronda Wery on 2010-10-04

• Perhaps the most troubling justification for resisting internet-based, group-grading efforts like ICON lies in the often stated and yet never thoroughly explained concept that putting student documents into a grading pool in which their writing is evaluated solely, and necessarily, on the basis of the writing itself and no other factors undercuts the student-teacher relationship.
  
• This I have called in other places the "genius theory" or "guru theory" of expertise, that those who know what they are doing should be packaging their conclusions in forms that can be accepted without question by other people.
• here are other channels of information that a teacher draws upon when assigning a grade than the capability of the writing itself, and that students, especially successful students, draw upon those back channels perhaps without their or the teacher's even realizing it
• pedagogical essentialism
• • More class time is always better for all subjects
     
  • Computer technology is always dehumanizing and distancing
     
  • Independence in developing assignments and critical terminology is always better (even when the teachers, as in the case of GPTI's, may be relatively untrained and inexperienced)
     
  • Anything smacking of administrative systems, oversight, and collective action is always instructionally debilitating (I call this the "Dilbert Conviction," or the "administrators are always incompent fatheads" presumption)
• TOPIC was written by Fred Kemp through a RAD
• the ingestion of abstracted knowledge, especially in the case of writing instruction, may not be the principal way that people actually learn, or at least learn best.
• Should we miss objectivity in grading in favor of personal knowledge of the writer?
• the difficulty of getting valid feedback from readers
• If the teacher could assemble a panel of expert readers for each student writer, the validity of the feedback and the clarity of the writer's interpretation of that feedback could be greatly enhanced, but such is not possible.
• Recently another view has become tenable (although American pragmatist philosophers, especially James and Dewey
• If a personal knowledge of the student's writing is important to instructional effectiveness, then that is not in and of itself an argument for avoiding the anonymous grading of the grading pool but rather an argument for requiring the classroom instructors to read the writing the students are turning in, whether the classroom instructors are grading those papers or not.
• abstracted knowledge is the product of, not the cause of, behavior.
• hat is, people learn by doing, by engaging in activies or tasks from which the very human mandate to make sense derives principles and abstracted knowledge. The knowledge is not a cause of the behavior but a result of it.
• t's as if both the foul shooter and the hoop are learning at the same time. It is as if (to carry this silly concept a bit further) the hoop tells the shooter what is wrong with the shooter's shots with an increasing expertise, and then at some point the hoop and the shooter change places
• making knowledge over acquiring knowledge
• But according to what standard?
• mechanizes" the evaluation process and encourages a kind of relentlessly cold-blooded dynamic to reading and evaluating student writing.
• Meaningful for the reader" means, in quite complex ways, that the words and word patterns and the underlying meanings generate some relevance within the reader's language and concept context. This tapping into "relevance" in terms of the reader's context is pretty much what "rhetoric" as both theory and practice means, the useful appropriation of the reader's own language and concept context.
• An intelligent analysis of this process would indicate that students must write more and teachers must grade less. Whoop-do-doo. This is something known since the beginning of time.
• to engage real writing contexts. We can do that with plenty of writing and responding, which is logistically feasible through digital interaction.
• TOPIC-type processes engage the learning technology of trial, feedback, and adaptation.
• ould seem to make ICON a more open and fair evaluation system than one in which papers are only graded by the classroom instructor.
• The driving instructor doesn't so much "teach" driving as allowing the driving student to engage in the process of driving in a reasonably controlled feedback situation
• The "hoop" in discerning useful feedback in writing, therefore, is circumscribed by the reader's language and concept context as manifested in words, word patterns, ideas, and idea patterns or relationships.
• In order to use this "hoop" in providing the writer feedback so the writer can adjust his or her effort, in effect adapt to the conditions of success or failure, the teacher must establish for the composition course a "tasking structure" that clarifies the conditions of success and failure for writing attempts and practices writing behavior (process) that generates writing product that reinforces successful writing.
• The database, along with proper interfaces, fragments (literally) the old notion of the writer as a shaper of reality. The "genius" concept of artistry, arising from the visionary model of writers as old world prophets, gets literally "scattered" over thousands of data fields.
• Interestingly, although the TOPIC web application transmits words, lots of them, it is the technology of interaction that is much more important to learning than any particular words delivered, just as it is the technology of driving itself that is much more important than any map or set of directions.
• The presumption in ICON is that students who wish to get help from their teachers will have more time to meet with the teacher outside of class, that reducing the class time by 50% increases the possibility of truly personal contact by 50%. A one-on-one writing conference is, without question, more effective instructionally than a one-on-twenty-five classroom meeting.
• hat ICON leaves too much up to the personal initiative of both the students and teachers.
• ICON defenders, on the other hand, say that quality effort should be shifted as much as possible from the realm of coerced behavior to that of "self-sponsoring" personally responsible behavior.
• It is well understood by both teachers and students that at least 50% of the students in any class meeting of general education courses like first-year composition are probably "zoned out" in various ways and not effectively appropriating what the teacher is offering.
• ICON asks them to see their own instructional value not as a function of their personal contact with young people but as a function of their professional capabilities within an instructional system.
• CON represents by any standard an almost brutal reduction of the personal authority that teachers normally impose upon students.
• what teachers like about teaching, and usually describe as advantageous to the learning of their students, is not necessarily what best encourages student learning.
• But almost all of the students who take composition do not fit into either a creative writing or literature category.
   
   My job is to teach entering freshmen at Texas Tech to write better, not to create new Hemingways or Harold Blooms.
• o why do the students and teachers so readily charge ICON with being an assembly-line, mechanical, and distant process? Computer technology is always suspect in the humanities
• At the same time, it is incumbent upon skeptics to apply genuine analysis to the processes
• CON shifts the instructional burden from the personal capabilities of a teacher to the capabilities of the instructional system as a whole.
• We will not cater to what teachers want for their own emotional enhancement. They are not at the center of this process: the student is.

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• All teacher comments or just the wrong kind (e.g., the kind inexperienced teachers make) - Ronda Wery on 2010-02-04
• the wisdom of crowds - Ronda Wery on 2010-02-04
• Well, this needs a little more support and a little less sarcasm. :) - Ronda Wery on 2010-02-04

• You know, those who do research in higher education generally do it because they like it; it is a sort of recreation for them, which is why it is hard to pry them away from it. Can we tap into the same energy in students?
• Learning has to occur in a community.”