All of my little questions about how to make ideas from "I, You, and It" and ideas from the Take 20 video add up to one big question:
Is a thorough education in writing/composition studies only really possible in a small, liberal arts environment?
That sounds harsh, but it seems like the more we read these articles, everyone in class says, "Yeah, that's a great idea...but we can't do it on a large scale."
So is that true? Can operating systems like TOPIC provide activities to teach students critical reading, peer evaluations, rhetorical writing skills, etc?
I guess I'm just seeing a big contradiction between "let students write about what interests them" and "we need to be able to grade the papers quickly and effeciently." So then peer review comes in, but at what level do you say, okay, students can give adaquate feedback?
Sorry for such a big question.
A quick question: did anyone else see a correlation between Moffett's "what is happening now," "what happened," "what could happen" etc, and Wordsworth's whole experience/reflection as a re-experiening of the original event in the Preludes? (I think the Preludes, anyway). I was just curious. It didn't seem like an original idea to me, just an idea new to composition theory, stolen from literature (and made more psychological/analytical, not so much "pretty flowers! ah, memories!")
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It's kind of sad to think that all of the interesting ideas and ways to help our students won't work at large institutions, especially since most students go to large schools. I know you and I have similar backgrounds (small liberal arts colleges with bad libraries) and in comparison to here, composition did seem to work better there. We had teachers who largely had MFAs or PhDs, and the structure wasn't a uniform one. Each teacher made their own syllabus and got to title the class as they wished. It was still Rhetoric & Composition, but they could a fancy title like "Technical Writing" or "A Personal Memoir" so the student could choose a topic that was closer to their field of study or interests. It was pretty nice, in retrospect.
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