Toward a New Neurobiology of Writing: Plasticity and the Feeling of Failure

Abstract

This article will explore the potential of recent neuroscience to inform a writing pedagogy aimed at a habitus of plasticity and emotional intelligence. Arguing that our field has never fully realized the embodied pedagogy called for decades ago by compositionists such as Brand and McLeod, by placing affect theory in our field in conversation with neuroscience, the article theorizes the value of understanding the plasticity of embodied affects as meaningful in writing processes. It demonstrates that neuroscience offers advances in our understanding of the emotions involved in learning while providing practical resources to “recategorize” emotional experiences in ways that will enable students to persist in writing-related tasks and to better realize their rhetorical and social goals. Ultimately, addressing the limits of reason and metacognition, the article claims that our pedagogies must confront the new forms of woundedness and ossification that pose increasing challenges to learning today.