The Winds of Change: Thomas Kuhn and the Revolution in the Teaching of Writing by Maxine Hairston: College Composition and Communication, Vol. 33, No. 1 (Feb., 1982), pp. 76-88
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“Briefly, [Thomas] Kuhn’s thesis in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is this.
When a scientific field is going through a stable period, most of the prac-titioners in the discipline hold a common body of beliefs and assumptions;they agree on the problems that need to be solved, the rules that governresearch, and on the standards by which performance is to be measured. They share a conceptual model that Kuhn calls a paradigm, and that paradigmgoverns activity in their profession. Students who enter the discipline pre-pare for membership in its intellectual community by studying that paradigm.
But paradigms are not necessarily immutable. When several people work- ing in a field begin to encounter anomalies or phenomena that cannot be explained by the established model, the paradigm begins to show signs of instability. For a while, those who subscribe to the paradigm try to ignore the contradictions and inconsistencies that they find, or they make improvised, ad hoc changes to cope with immediate crises. Eventually, however, when enough anomalies accumulate to make a substantial number of scientists inthe field question whether the traditional paradigm can solve many of theserious problems that face them, a few innovative thinkers will devise a newmodel. And if enough scientists become convinced that the new paradigmworks better than the old one, they will accept it as the new norm.
This replacement of one conceptual model by another one is Kuhn’sparadigm shift” (pp. 76-77)
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The Current-Traditional Paradigm: “In an article in the Winter, 1980, FreshmanEnglish News James Berlin and Robert Inkster ascribe other features to the conventional paradigm. Basingtheir conclusions on an analysis of repeated patterns in four well-known andcommercially successful rhetoric texts, they add that the traditional paradigmstresses expository writing to the virtual exclusion of all other forms, that it posits an unchanging reality which is independent of the writer and which allwriters are expected to describe in the same way regardless of the rhetoricalsituation, that it neglects invention almost entirely, and that it makes style themost important element in writing.3
I would make three other points about the traditional paradigm. First, its adherents believe that competent writers know what they are going to say before they begin to write; thus their most important task when they are preparing to write is finding a form into which to organize their content. They also believe that the composing process is linear, that it proceeds sys- tematically from prewriting to writing to rewriting. Finally, they believe that teaching editing is teaching writing.” (p. 78)
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“The assumption is that anyone with a Ph.D. in English is an expert writing teacher” (p. 79).
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Mina “Shaughnessy’s insight is utterly simple and vitally important: we cannot teach students to write by looking only at what they have written. We must also understand how that product came into being, and why it assumed the form that it did. We have to try to understand what goes on during the internal act of writing and we have to intervene during the act of writing if we want to affect its outcome. We have to do the hard thing, examine the intangible process, rather than the easy thing, evaluate the tangible product” (p. 84). (Shaughnessy’s book was Errors and Expectations)
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“From all this activity in the field, the new paradigm for teaching writing isemerging. Its principal features are these:
- It focuses on the writing process; instructors intervene in stu-dents’ writing during the process.
- It teaches strategies for invention and discovery; instructorshelp students to generate content and discover purpose.
- It is rhetorically based; audience, purpose, and occasion fig-ure prominently in the assignment of writing tasks.
- Instructors evaluate the written product by how well it fulfillsthe writer’s intention and meets the audience’s needs.
- It views writing as a recursive rather than a linear process; pre-writing, writing, and revision are activities that overlapand intertwine.
- It is holistic, viewing writing as an activity that involves theintuitive and non-rational as well as the rational faculties.
- It emphasizes that writing is a way of learning and developingas well as a communication skill.
- It includes a variety of writing modes, expressive as well asexpository.
- It is informed by other disciplines, especially cognitive psy-chology and linguistics.
- It views writing as a disciplined creative activity that can beanalyzed and described; its practitioners believe that writingcan be taught.
- It is based on linguistic research and research into the com-posing process.
- It stresses the principle that writing teachers should be peoplewho write” (p. 86)