The End of Composition Studies

5. Writing and Thinking

98 I maintain,therefore,that it is a wholly legitimate goal of a composition course to encourage students to think about their thoughts,beliefs,and values,and where those came from—before,during,and after writing. Neither we teachers,nor our students, can ever get the words right until we get the thoughts right. —Peter J.Caulfield,“Talk,Thought,Writing and Politics” 5 WritingandThinking I SUSPECT THAT PETER CAULFIELD may be wrong, at least in part, when he argues that we need to get our thoughts right before we can get our words right. It depends of course on what he means, and what he means is not at all clear. His words appear in a book entitled Left Margins: Cultural Studies and Composition Pedagogy, in which Caulfield takes exception to an assertion by Gary Tate that most of the essays in the book, which are ostensibly about the application of critical pedagogy to writing classes, do not talk about writing at all; they only talk about making students aware of their own “ideological subjectivity” or of how language works to shape their views of reality. Where, Tate asks, is the writing in these classes? To which I might add, what exactly are the students learning to do? Caulfield’s answer strongly suggests that students in writing classes taught from the standpoint of critical pedagogy or cultural studies are learning to think critically—“to think about their thoughts, beliefs, and values”—and that is tantamount to learning to write. However, the notion that teaching thinking is an integral part of writing instruction is not new to critical pedagogy or cultural studies. There are many different ways to conceptualize what we mean by “thinking,” and composition theorists have related them all to writing, either by talking about how to get students to think ahead of time about what they are writing , or about how to get them to think in certain ways while they are writing . Generally, pedagogies that focus on thinking before writing promote various heuristics for getting ideas (invention strategies), various planning techniques, or various ways to think through an issue or problem. Pedagogies that focus on thinking during the writing process, which may include Writing and Thinking 99 thinking before writing, promote “reflection,”“metacognition,” or “monitoring .” Scholars associated with critical pedagogy and cultural studies often use the term“critical consciousness”to describe a way of thinking about certain problems or issues. In each of these cases, composition scholars assert that teaching students ways of thinking is a way to help them with their writing. Indeed, many compositionists who promote the use of invention strategies , heuristics, or forms of critical analysis in the classroom seem to imply that the relationship between thinking and writing is direct and even causal. For example, each of the following assumptions seems to underlie a number of currently popular ways of teaching writing: • Writing is a kind of transcribed thought. (A tenet of much of the process movement and those who promote free writing “just to help students get their thoughts down on paper.”) • Writing improves learning and thinking. (A tenet of writing-to-learn and much of the writing-across-the-curriculum movement.) • Better thinking will result in better writing; to teach thinking is in fact tantamount to teaching writing. (A tenet of much critical pedagogy and cultural studies pedagogies.) However, there is a great deal of evidence that these assumptions are overstated , that they claim entirely too much. On the contrary, the evidence suggests that thinking, as a“tool kit”of various kinds of knowledge and skill,can best be understood as those kinds of knowledge and skill that people need to accomplish particular tasks in particular contexts. This suggests in turn that particular strategies for thinking and writing,however we define these terms, may only apply to a limited number of tasks and contexts, that particular strategies for writing-to-learn will aid only certain kinds of learning, and that particular strategies for thinking will aid only certain kinds of writing. And so, contrary to the common assumptions I just mentioned, I would argue the following about the tangled relationship of thinking to writing: • Writing may in some instances be an expression of thought or a representation of thought, but writing is not transcribed thinking. • Writing may also aid learning and thinking, but not necessarily in any clear and unequivocal way. The effects of writing on thinking seem to be local and contingent. • Engaging in reflection or metacognition or critical consciousness...