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A bio-ethics of personal writing in the compositional classroom: Orientation, mediation, relation, and the mission of writing teaching
Abstract
The ethical use of personal experience as a subject matter for writing in composition classes is demonstrated, supported, and assisted through an application of interdisciplinary scholarship, most centrally scholarship into neurobiological psychology. Research in neurobiological psychology, particularly regarding parts of the limbic system involved in arousal and orientation, demonstrates that subjective individuality is an inescapable concept within the practice of rhetorical skills. At the biological level, language use is modeled upon territorial orientational strategies which take the individual body as a critical reference point. The orientational strategies used by particular individuals are in turn highly dependent upon the great individual variety of perceptual and locational temperament generated by differences in limbic arousal patterns, a variety which transcends differences in mere social location. Comparison of these findings with research in other disciplines permits the strong inference that personal experience is a highly effective subject matter for writing in composition classes because such writing works directly with language-generating abilities in critical ways which tend to become usefully individualized through the students' own efforts. The value of effective teaching must not be put aside in considering the ethics of encountering certain risks of personal writing--and indeed, personal writing itself generates fewer genuine ethical risks than is commonly assumed by academicians who fail to understand the extent to which the pervasive coerciveness of standard educational practices--a coerciveness that personal writing advocates tend to avoid--undermine the ethics of any model of teaching. After exploring these ethical issues fully, the dissertation proposes and explains approaches to teaching and teacher preparation which not only minimize actual risks of using personal experience as a subject matter for writing in composition classes, but also enhance the learning process for students and teachers alike. Analyses of aesthetic cognition, philosophical pragmatism, rhetorical mediation, and the "psychographic" nature of composition ethnographies are presented in order to further the demonstrate how focusing on students' orientational practices and teachers' mediational practices can be interpreted together within an interpretive relational framework that closely resembles--and hence can be called--love.
Subject Area
Educational theory|Educational psychology|Psychobiology|Language arts
Recommended Citation
Rhodes, Keith Stewart, "A bio-ethics of personal writing in the compositional classroom: Orientation, mediation, relation, and the mission of writing teaching" (1994). ETD collection for University of Nebraska-Lincoln. AAI9507824.
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/dissertations/AAI9507824