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9 p e dag o g y, l o R e , a n d T h e m a K i n g o f B e i n g Matthew Jackson The first line of the Stephen North’s introduction to The Making of Knowledge in Composition reads: “This book is about how knowledge is made in the field that has come to be called Composition” (1987, 1). By focusing on how people claim to know what they know, North distinguishes what he does from other works about composition that are concerned with what people claim to know about writing. One of the important ways that North talks about the making of knowledge in composition is the everyday “how” of practitioner discourse he calls “lore.” For North, lore is defined as, “the accumulated body of traditions, practices, and beliefs in terms of which Practitioners understand how writing is done, learned, and taught” (22). While I use the term discourse (which, for many readers, carries a more formal connotation ), it is vital to highlight the fact that North feels that lore is primarily a matter of talk, that less formal kinds of talk are the most common , and that this common informal lore represents compositionist [practitioner] knowledge “at its most authentic” (51). This is the kind of knowledge that is made in a tightly-knit community of neighbors as they talk about some of their most significant issues in a casual, across-the-fence kind of talk. It is what we now call, thanks to The Office, “water cooler” ways of knowing. For those of us who have worked outside of academia and shared information over the cubicle wall, it is not surprising that, for North, important types of lore take place informally (24), and yet these bodies of lore are clearly very “rich and powerful bodies of knowledge” (27). In harmony with North’s view of lore, phenomenology, as a philosophical way of knowing, holds as one of its tenets that many of the most important ways of knowing are found in the most mundane of our interactions (this will become important below). Also similar to a phenomenological perspective is North’s claim that “Lore is embodied in the more usual ways humans embody what they 162 TH E C H A N G I N G OF KN OWLED G E I N C OM P OSI T I ON know” (29). As such, lore takes on profound implications for composition pedagogies and philosophies as North, in MKC, seeks to elevate lore to a place of respect in the pantheon of composition knowledge. In what follows, I will attempt to reiterate this goal, albeit from a stance that is otherwise than North’s. i nT U iT i o n and j Udgm en T foR Co m p o siT i o n p hi lo so p heRs I would like to pick up on North’s use of the term embodied in his discussion of lore for compositionists. Considering compositionist lore as an embodied art in practice captures some of the intersubjective essence of the pedagogical relationship that can really only be studied, evaluated , and considered seriously in terms of the lived moment in which it happens. I say this because of the sense of agreement I have with North when he suggests that a pivotal point in practitioner authority—and, as I am arguing, for composition philosophers—is that we must be willing to take compositionists at their theoretical and pedagogical word concerning what is effective practice. As North puts it, if we cannot be “trusted as the best judges of what works and what doesn’t,” then we are not the best people to decide what to do pedagogically. For North, the inverse is also true, and to validate and trust practical inquiry and routine practice is to “accept that Practitioners can see or sense or feel signs of change that outsiders, and even students, cannot: that things are happening that require both involvement and an appropriate sensitivity to perceive” (50). Composition practitioners and philosophers alike may have felt that their sense of personal judgment in their work is somewhat marginalized within the field of composition as well as in academia in general; we often feel that what we have to say, based on personal experience, thoughts, and feelings—even when formalized and published—is marginalized by those in authority. This issue seems to have attained a heightened sense of gravity and a...

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