Wilmarie’s Weblog

Hairston, Maxine. “The Winds of Change: Thomas Kuhn and the Revolution in the Teaching of Writing”.  College Composition and Communication, Vol. 33, No. 1. (Feb., 1982), pp. 76-88. Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0010-096X%28198202%2933%3A1%3C76%3ATWOCTK%3E2.0.CO%3B2-H

The ‘winds of change’ alluded to in the reading’s title stems from the paradigm shift that gives cause to new modes of thinking in order to solve problems which, much as time and audiences and students, change with time. I agree with this wholeheartedly – I understand that today’s students are a different audience than they were 20 or even 10 years ago. Once the established paradigm, the formula for solving a particular problem, doesn’t suffice or doesn’t cover a particularity, then it’s unstable, and has to evolve.

The article goes on to explain how paradigm shifts are the ones truly responsible for the acceptance of most scientific theories concerning phenomena, but only once the previous paradigm is at a crisis state of failure, not being enough to explain satisfactorily the shapeshifting values concerned. This is a bit frightening, and once it has to do with education, it becomes even more so. We have to wait until it just doesn’t work anymore, until students are not getting the full value out of their education, until they are learning outdated methods to solve archaic problems with obsolete materials, and then we’ll recognize that it’s time for a change?!

The traditional paradigm is not all bad, don’t get me wrong. The assumption that writing cannot be truly taught because it is something inherent in a person is one I can agree with. Anyone can write. The mechanics of it are taught in preschool. But whether any person can write well, write  text that is meaningful and not just informative for the reader, that is something else entirely.  I do, however, disagree with the notion that all writing is linear. This is something I mentioned previously, how we are supposed to teach the writing process and ask students to do brainstorms, diagrams, charts and any other type of prewriting technique before launching out into the essay itself. I myself don’t write like this. I just barge in and write my essay, using the computer to drag text back and forth if I decide the paragraph doesn’t really work at it’s current location. I only use some of the techniques for prewriting if I’m actually stuck in what I’m doing and need to kind of re-shuffle the topics I’m writing about.

Another of the concepts afforded in the article is the way professors and teachers are using outmoded models tfor teaching, and this is so true it’s depressing. Depressing, because it is just a terrible waste: a waste of time, a waste of energy. Time that could be well-spent learning new modes, learning how to stay current, is nonetheless squandered in one-on-one conferences and prewriting exercises.

Now, a change is positive and destructive at the same time. On one hand, it changes things and ends up geared towards a more productive stance than before. On the other, it creates distrust in the established educational theories. I mean, if this doesn’t work anymore, what else is broken? It almost reads like a divorce, the way the article describes it; How did it go wrong? Was it something I did? Is anyone else having asd much trouble with the current models of teaching, or is it just me?

However, there is no need to despair.

Many of the keys and characteristics for the teaching of writing posed by Hairston include making writing holistic, teaching students to find purpose, to write across several rhetoric disciplines, and teaching students to see that writing, more than a means of isntruction, can also be a means of entertainemnt and self-discovery, something that if you’ve read my mutligenre project you know I agree with.