Start With What You Know: Introduction

Maybe it always makes sense, when you're starting out with a new territory or topic, to start with what you know--defining your domain of knowledge, deciding where you are solid and where you are shaky. So it makes sense to me to begin this semester of ENG 550, Teaching Composition, with a text titled Naming What We Know:  Threshold Concepts of Writing Studies by Linda Adler-Kassner and Elizabeth Wardle. In the introduction, I got the sense that this book seeks to define and outline, essentially, what we are "up to" in the study, execution and teaching of composition. I mean, ok, you are writing and teaching people to write--but why? And how? And when? And for what purposes? These questions need answers that orient the field of study, before the study really begins. 

In the introduction, two lists caught my attention: one seems to give a list of why we teach composition and the other addresses what we teach. In the why category, we teach for critical and cultural study, to express ourselves and our ideas, and to give instruction or explanation (xviii). These are the reasons we teach writing. Human beings use the written word as a manual, of sorts. Written words convey the ideas, instructions and thoughts of the writer in his or her time and on his or her subject. Language, frozen in time, for a purpose, is why we write. The way we teach people to convey their ideas or instructions varies by the methods we use. There are the ways we deliver the lessons or curricula, the prior experiences students have with writing, and the work students do within the course that contribute to their understanding of why and how to express themselves in this written code effectively (xxiii). The additional complexity of composition studies is that it is both "an activity and a subject of study" (xxvii). Composition studies encompasses both the process and the product of writing, so people working in the field must agree on a way to discuss what they do and what they produce in the complex field of composition studies. The Adler-Kassner/Wardle text seeks to convey this message, which is both theory and practice: it theorizes about writing, in writing. 

I particularly appreciated the idea of "the study of composed knowledge" being the basis of writing studies (1). When we write, we compose our knowledge into a variety of writing styles in order to convey a message. There may be differing ideas about what makes that writing "good," based on politics, policy, and standardization, but essentially we are trying to convey knowledge in its various forms in a clear and concise way.  Composition studies seek to help writers practice an analyze their own writing, while giving them opportunities to think about what kind of writing they need to do to accomplish their purposes. We get the opportunity to do some "complexity stripping" with this book, a term that really resonated with me as a reader (8). The text seeks to help "name what we know" so that the somewhat ethereal concept of writing can be communicated as a discipline of study and a method of curricula and assessment can emerge from the fog surrounding this artistic weaving of ink and paper. The authors seek to do this by establishing "threshold concepts" that define what we are up to in writing studies. I look forward to finding the terminology and rhetorical comfort I will need to communicate well what I intend to be "up to" in teaching composition, but also what I am up to when I write.