ENGL 5010: Week One Slide Deck

ENGL 5010
Week One:
Introducing
teaching.writing

ENGL 5010
We will practice what is it teach and what is it to learn. This
exploration will of necessity be far reaching: any discussion of
teaching and learning is also a discussion of environment,
embodiment, and cognition. Sociality and identity are also
present and at stake here. How do we come to know both
our worlds and ourselves; how can we come to help
others know themselves and their worlds?

ENGL 5010
This seminar has three primary goals:
1. prepare you to teach English 1900 in SLU’s
Writing Program
2. cultivate you as a university-level teacher
3. enculturate you into the field of rhetoric and
composition

ENGL 5010
We will primarily meet these goals by attentively working through the
major assignments of English 1900 itself. The best way for someone
to learn to teach the course is to actually try it and see how it works.
Additionally, we will achieve these goals via a number of means:
• reading pedagogical, theoretical, and student texts
• writing, collectively and individually, in response to this reading
• discussing key concepts, ideas, and themes
• practicing responses to actual student texts
• meeting with the instructor to discuss progress

ENGL 5010
By the end of the course, we will have achieved the
following outcomes. You will be able to:
• prepare your own adapted version of English 1900
• justify it theoretically, both in writing and in speaking
• plan and deliver lessons and writing assignments
• respond formatively and summatively to student writing

ENGL 5010
Social Annotation
We share our thoughts on course readings by using
hypothes.is, an online annotation application. Annotations
vary from person-to-person, but our overriding goal is to
share reactions, questions, interests, and dis/beliefs through
annotating our readings together. Annotations take the form
of comments, questions, intra- and inter-connections, and
links. Annotations, crucially, add to the readings.

ENGL 5010
Research Binder
At the conclusion of this course, you submit a research binder. This binder
includes every piece of paper you generate over the course of the
semester. The binder is thus a living archive. As an archive, it should have
an organizational scheme that makes it accessible to both you and your
instructor. Individual entries should be dated and described (e.g., quiz,
reading-journal, notes, etc.). In addition to labeling individual entries, the
binder itself should be organized in a coherent, compelling and accessible
way. As an archive, it should trace the work of cultivating yourself as a
teacher.

ENGL 5010
Research Binder
Annotations (after class)
What Aristotle means is that the
rhetorician can see how people might
think through possibilities specific
situation.
Every situation is different, a different
context and a different audience. So the
way you talk about something will be
different in those different situations.
Rhetoric doesnt deal with universal
problems…it deals with specific
problems.
I have to ask about this tomorrow!!!
August 28, 2019
Notes (in class)
Available Means: Rhetoric is the ability to see the available means
of persuasion in every given case
Aristotle: Greek philosopher 384-322. Came up with idea of
available means.
Connotation vs. denotation: connotation is how a word feels;
denotation is what a word means.
● School vs. education…one has a more sophisticated connotation.
● Romance vs. relationship…they can refer to the same thing,
but the words will have different feelings, different attitudes.

ENGL 5010
There is a profound ethical component to
teaching. The word educate, etymologically, is to
lead out, to draw out, to bring forth. We will thus
ask to where are we leading them, what are we
drawing out, and who are we bringing forth?

Labyrinth
Maze

Ingold 131
Technically, the maze differs from the labyrinth in that it offers not
one path but multiple choices, of which each may be freely made
but most lead to dead ends. It also differs, however, in that its
avenues are demarcated by barriers which obstruct any view other
than the way immediately ahead. The maze, then, does not open
up to the world, as the labyrinth does. On the contrary, it
encloses, trapping its inmates within the false antinomy of freedom
and necessity.

Ingold 132
The maze puts all the emphasis on the traveller’s
intentions. He has an aim in mind, a projected destination
or horizon of expectations, a perspective to obtain, and is
determined to reach it. This overarching aim may, of course,
be broken down into a number of subsidiary objectives.
And it may also be complicated by all the other, competing
aims that assail him from all sides.

Ingold 132-33
The path-follower has no objective save to carry on, to keep
on going. But to do so, his action must be closely and
continually coupled with his perception. Lest he lose the way, he
should be ever vigilant to the path as it unfolds before him. He
has to watch his step, and to listen and feel as well. He must, in a
word, pay attention to things, and adjust his gait accordingly.
Path-following is thus not so much intentional as attentional.

Ingold 133
But for the wayfarer in the labyrinth,
following the trail is a task which, like
life itself, he is compelled to undergo;
his doings—those moments of
perception and action through which
his movement is carried on—are thus
framed within this undergoing.

Ingold 134
A variant etymology, however, traces the word to
educere, from ex (out) plus ducere (to lead). In this
sense, education is a matter of leading novices
out into the world rather than—as it is
conventionally taken to be today—instilling
knowledge in to their minds.

Ingold 135-36
Rather, perception proceeds along what he called a path
of observation. As the observer goes on his way, the
pattern in the light reaching the eyes from reflecting
surfaces in the environment (that is, the ‘optic array’) is
subject to continual modulation, and from the underlying
invariants of this modulation, things disclose themselves for
what they are.

Ingold 136
Or more precisely [things] disclose what they afford, in so far
as they help or hinder the observer in keeping going, or in
carrying on along a certain line of activity. The more practised
we become in walking these paths of observation,
according to Gibson, the better able we are to notice and to
respond fluently to salient aspects of our environment. That
is to say, we undergo an “education of attention.”

Ingold 136
It is not, then, that the walker’s attention is
being educated; rather the reverse: his
education is rendered attentive, opened
up in readiness for the ‘not yet’ of what is
to come.

Readings
153
By the decentering of the pedagogic situation I mean to
insist that teaching is not best understood from the point of
view of a sovereign subject that takes itself to be the sole
guarantor of the meaning of that process, whether than
subject is the student, the teacher, or the administrator.
Decentering teaching begins with an attention to the
pragmatic scene of teaching.

Robinson (2010)
RSA

Readings
154
I want to suggest, however, that pedagogy
also can be understood otherwise: other
than as the inculcation or revelation of
an inherent human autonomy, other than
as the productive of sovereign subjects.

Readings
162-63
Education, as e ducere, a drawing. out, is not a maieutic
revelation of the students to him- or herself, a process of clearly
remembering what the student in fact already knew. Rather,
education is this drawing out of the otherness of thought
that undoes the pretension to self-presence that always
demands further study. And it works over both the students and
the teachers, although in a dissymmetrical fashion.

Readings
151
Pedagogy, I will suggest, has a
specific chronotope that is radically
alien to the notion of accountable
time upon which the excellence of
capitalist-bureaucratic management
and bookkeeping demand.

Readings
20
At this point, the University becomes no
longer a model of the ideal society but rather
a place where the impossibility of such
models can be thought—practically thought,
rather than thought under ideal conditions.

Readings
20
The University becomes one site among others
where the question of being-together is raised,
raised with an urgency that proceeds from the
absence of the institutional forms (such as the
nation-state), which have historically served to
mask that question for the past three centuries.

Cooper
13
We are accustomed to think of influential individuals or
significant writings as the engines of change, and we
overlook the long, convoluted, intra-active processes by
which writing comes into existence and influences us and by
which individuals develop the commitments and happen
into moments or positions that enable their writing to
have substantial effects.

Cooper
13
Writers emerge as new entities
along with their writing.

The word “practice” offers much to us here and throughout
the semester. The term has multiple valances.
Buildings from practice and resonates with our discussion
of the labyrinth and the chronotope of the classroom.
Echoes Cooper’s description of writers emerging as new
entities and follows from the etymology of education.

Cooper
18
I design courses to be lures for feeling, with readings that challenge or
outrage them or with topics so multifaceted and complex that they cannot
fail to find something in that they feel strongly about. I emphasize the
value of writing by taking their writing seriously, by listening carefully to
their ideas, by asking them questions, and by pointing out problems in
their recommendations, policies, or construction of facts. I introduce
habits by simply telling students that these are things that writers do, and
I trust them to adopt habits they find useful.

Cooper
27
Understanding becomes a
matter of composing entities,
events, and meanings, rather than
comprehension.

Cooper
29
Thus, instead of seeing writing as the
intersubjective creation of meanings that represent
or interpret the world, I focus on the affective intraactions
among humans and other entities that
precede and create the possibility of the
construction of new meanings.

Cooper
41
Stengers explains that language does not enable
humans to judge what is objectively true, “to
manipulate the pros and cons” logically using
descriptive statements; instead language
elaborates propositions into a speculative
adventure.

yagelski
ix
bonus slides

yagelski
ix
writing is an ontological act.

yagelski
The ontological concerns being. The key here for Yagelski is that writing isn’t
simply epistemological. Writing is a way of being rather than only a way of
knowing. Importantly, however, is Yagelski’s argument that ways of knowing and
being are one in the same.
ix
that writing is an ontological
act.
What’s key here is the ontological is tied to action.
Being isn’t simply an essence, but an existence: an
activity or, as we will explore, a practice.

yagelski
18
So what counts most in schools—performance on
standardized tests and other measures—is the
means by which schools define students as
beings in the world […] In schools, perhaps more
than in any other cultural settings, thinking is
being. Cogito ergo sum.

yagelski
3
I argue that these widespread and seemingly reasonable
beliefs about writing are actually deeply problematic,
because they reflect a dualistic worldview in which the
writer is understood as a version of the classic Cartesian
subject: an autonomous, thinking being so perfectly
capture in Descartes’ famous line, “I think; therefore, I am.”

yagelski
3
[W]riting continues to be understood by most
people, including most educators, in relatively
simple terms as a technology for communication
and a straightforward, rule-governed process of
encoding a more-or-less stable meaning in a
text.

yagelski
7
Mainstream writing theory […] because it
neglects the effects of the act of writing
on the writer’s sense of being, offers an
inadequate account of what happens as
a writer writes.

yagelski
7
In other words, I advocate a
pedagogy that focuses on the
writer writing rather than the
writer’s writing.