Linda Flower Research Articles

The Hard Work of Imagining: The Inaugural Summit of the National Consortium of Writing Across Communities by Albuquerque, NM (review)

Reviewed by: The Hard Work of Imagining: The Inaugural Summit of the National Consortium of Writing Across Communities by Albuquerque, NM Brian Hendrickson The Hard Work of Imagining: The Inaugural Summit of the National Consortium of Writing Across Communities Albuquerque, NM. July 12–15, 2012 On July 12–15, 2012, in advance of the Council of Writing Program Administrators 2012 Conference in Albuquerque, New Mexico, the University of New Mexico hosted the inaugural Summit of the National Consortium of Writing Across Communities (NCWAC) in nearby Santa Fe. In attendance were twenty-four established and emerging scholars and graduate students working in (and across) fields such as community literacy, writing program administration, writing across the curriculum, and second-language writing. Of NCWAC’s twenty-seven sponsoring institutions, represented at the summit in addition to the host university were Arizona State University, University of Arkansas, Bridgewater State University, University of California Santa Barbara, Colorado State University, Georgia Institute of Technology, University of Oklahoma, St. John’s University, Salt Lake Community College, Temple University, Texas A&M University-Commerce, and University of Utah. The purpose of the summit, like that of the consortium itself, was to bring these scholars and their respective disciplines into conversation, with a recognition that the next generation of public intellectuals must, according to Ellen Cushman, “combine their research, teaching, and service efforts in order to address social issues important to community members in under-served neighborhoods” (329). Established at the historic Mary Mac’s Tea Room in Atlanta, Georgia, during the 2011 Conference on College Composition and Communication, NCWAC arose out of a constellation of conversations led by scholars such as Linda Adler-Kassner, John Duffy, Linda Flower, Keith Gilyard, Eli Goldblatt, Juan Guerra, Michelle Hall Kells, Elenore Long, Steve Parks, Jacqueline Jones Royster, and John Trimbur, to name a few; each scholar’s work, distributed along the spectrum of literacy advocacy and instruction, to coordinates—and the connections between them—overlooked or undervalued by traditional approaches to academic writing instruction. In the spirit of sustaining those conversations, NCWAC derived its name from Juan Guerra and Michelle Hall Kells’ argument for a cultural ecology approach to cultivating what Guerra terms transcultural citizenship: “adaptive strategies that help individuals move across cultural boundaries by negotiating new and different contexts and communicative conventions” (296–99). This approach manifested in 2005 in the University of New Mexico’s Writing Across Communities Initiative, which holds that “communicative competence depends upon complex strategies of shuttling between ideas and audiences, a challenging, culturally-dependent process” (Kells 96). Writing Across Communities therefore complements the notion of a writing beyond the curriculum model of writing program administration forwarded by Steve Parks and [End Page 115] Eli Goldblatt, in which students, instructors and administrators “think through and across and outside disciplines” (Parks and Goldblatt 589). Writing Across Communities adds to this ongoing conversation an important contextual and ethical qualifier by framing literacy initiatives within a cultural ecology model, thereby “resist[ing] a culture-blind mode of document production and seek[ing] to guide students to critically respond to the cultural and symbolic systems within diverse contexts” (Kells 98). This mission requires not only that writing instruction across the curriculum must more explicitly “enhanc[e] opportunities to build identification with the cultures of the academy” but also “cultivate appreciation across the university for the cultures and epistemologies our students bring with them” (Kells 96). Writing Across Communities, then, makes an important contribution to the ongoing conversation calling for a radical re-envisioning of the academic mission in light of recent developments in fields invested in literacy advocacy and instruction. However, advocates for this re-envisioning, in performing public intellectual work in service to the most vulnerable communities within their spheres of influence, are likely to render themselves vulnerable to those forces in the academy invested in maintaining conventional modes of disciplinary knowledge-making and professionalization—modes that still hold sway over programmatic missions and tenure review boards inclined to apply to public intellectual work the pejorative service. Furthermore, this new imperative requires a breadth of interdisciplinary knowledge and administrative responsibility far beyond the pale of any one individual’s capabilities, so scholars committed to this work would need to...

Community Literacy and the Rhetoric of Public Engagement by Linda Flower

Community Literacy and the Rhetoric of Public Engagement by Linda Flower

Community Literacy and the Rhetoric of Public Engagement by Linda Flower (review)

Reviewed by: Community Literacy and the Rhetoric of Public Engagement by Linda Flower Christine Martorana Community Literacy and the Rhetoric of Public Engagement Linda Flower Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2008. 281 pp. ISBN: 9780809328529. $35.00. In 2009, the Rhetoric Society of America (RSA) awarded Linda Flower the RSA Book Award for producing that year’s best work in rhetorical study. Flower’s book Community Literacy and the Rhetoric of Public Engagement spotlights her experiences with Pittsburgh’s Community Literacy Center (CLC), an innovative project in community literacy initiated in 1990. The 2008 book details a rhetorical model of engaging the privileged and marginalized voices of community leaders, academics and urban teens into meaningful dialogue that values all perspectives and embraces differences as valuable resources. According to Flower, the discourse of academic cultural critique has taught “us how to speak up [and] speak against” (2 original emphasis). However, what we lack and what this text provides is a model that teaches us “to speak with others [and] to speak for our commitments […] for a revisable image of transformation” (2 original emphasis). The value of Flower’s work rests in challenging prevailing social standards in regards to authority and literacy: who speaks, who is given the right to speak, and who is heard. Primarily, she aims to use her work in community literacy to build a platform upon which those labeled as “voiceless and powerless” can stand (6). Although dominant social structures bestow authority upon a select few, Flower seeks to promote a dialogue model that embraces diverse perspectives and experiences. The book is organized into three main sections. Part 1 (Chapters 1–2) creates a framework for Flower’s investigation into community literacy. Part 2 (Chapters 3–5) presents multiple theoretical perspectives within community literacy. Flower labels Part 2 a section “framed by academic debates”, guided by her effort to “show academics, mentors, and activists working to construct situated working theories of engagement, collaboration, and empowerment” (73). Part 3 (Chapters 6–10) [End Page 155] concludes the book with specific tools readers can implement into their own community literacy practices. Chapter 1 introduces the CLC through narrative prose and invites readers to take a tour of Pittsburgh’s Northside. Flower’s use of vivid anecdotes and participant dialogue sets an informal, conversational tone, a rhetorically-purposeful move as this book challenges readers to consider alternatives beyond traditional academic discourse. In Chapter 2, Flower calls upon her definition of community literacy as “an intercultural dialogue with others on issues that they identify as sites of struggle” (19 original emphasis). She posits the rhetorical agency of “everyday people” (44) central to community literacy. Through rhetorical agency, individuals engage in intercultural rhetoric, a dialogue across cultures that seeks to redefine problems in light of personal and public factors and discuss “what if ” statements on possible outcomes (53–54). These discussions may lead to the recognition of cultural differences and power imbalances; however, Flower encourages us to embrace these differences “as a resource” (55). Part 2, which explores different ideas about community literacy, begins with Chapter 3, where Flower analyzes the current bent within composition towards critique. According to Flower, critique only serves to heighten our awareness of “‘others’ in our society” (78). She asks, “How do we prepare ourselves to go beyond the safety of critique into the vulnerable stance of reflective, revisable commitment – to speak for values or actions even as we acknowledge them to be our current best hypothesis?” (79 original emphasis). Flower calls for rhetoric and composition to “recover the practice of ‘doing’ rhetoric in its wider civic and ethical sense” (81). Then, Chapter 4 takes a slight turn from the previous chapters. Here, Flower focuses on her position as a researcher rather than the research itself. In this chapter, she appropriately labels herself “a person of privilege” (100) and considers the various ways to ethically balance this position alongside her work with community members and the CLC. Ultimately, Flower concludes that her privileged position is mediated by the relationships she builds with those around her: “So the question of What am I doing here? can take on a special urgency and feel very much like a problem of identity...

Reviews

Reviewed are: Community Literacy and the Rhetoric of Public Engagement, by Linda Flower, Reviewed by Tim Taylor Writings from Life, by Tom Tyner, Reviewed by Robert A. Berens

Neighborliness at the Co-op: Community and Biospheric Literacy

In this ethnographic study of an organic foods cooperative, I examine community through three different facets—the Voluntary Association, the Lifestyle Enclave, and the Neighborhood. I use fieldnote examples to show how each of these community facets corresponds with the three visions of discourse for social change considered by Wayne Campbell Peck, Linda Flower, and Lorraine Higgins. Peck et al.’s most powerful discouse, community literacy, corresponds to the Neighborhood facet of community. The neighborhood holds promise for developing a Biospheric Literacy as developed by Anne Mareck in the introduction to this special issue. The kinds of meanings that she says acknowledge biospherically interdependent human and non-human community members are, I suggest, ritually enacted through neighborly communication. Further, it is through the cordial talk of neighbors that we communicate the kinds of understandings needed to affect positive social change and limit damage to our biosphere.

Review Essay: Town and Gown: Partnering Writing Programs with Urban Communities

Review of three books: Community Literacy and the Rhetoric of Public Engagement Linda Flower Because We Live Here: Sponsoring Literacy beyond the College Curriculum Eli Goldblatt Making Writing Matter: Composition in the Engaged UniversityAnn M. Feldman

Teaching the Complexity of Purpose: Promoting Complete and Creative Communications

The successful communicator is expected to provide communications that are not only complete but also representative of effective thinking (i.e., original). Creating complete and creative communications begins with a disciplined process of discovery—identifying, assessing, prioritizing, and integrating the articulated and embedded purposes. Expanding on the work of Linda Flower and John Hayes, this article first explores a means to promote a thorough examination of purpose. It then provides tools for capturing and integrating these insights into communications that are complete, capable of satisfying the rhetorical challenges, and compelling reflections of the student's creative problem solving abilities.

Linda Flower and social cognition

For three decades, Linda Flower has been one of the leading proponents of cognitive research in the area of writing. This paper reviews her contributions by first looking at her original cognitive process model and then by examining important aspects of her social cognitive theory of writing. Specifically the paper summarizes Flower's view of writing as an active constructive process, as a social and rhetorical act, as negotiated meaning, and as literate practice. Finally, the paper suggests theoretical implications and practical applications of Flower's work for documentation professionals.

The Construction of Negotiated Meaning: A Social Cognitive Theory of Writing

Based on five years of close observation of students, writing and collaborative planning--the practice in which student writers take the roles of planner and supporter to help each other develop a more rhetorically sophisticated writing plan--foremost cognitive composition researcher Linda Flower redefines writing in terms of an interactive social and cognitive process and proposes a convincing and compelling theory of the construction of negotiated meaning.Flower seeks to describe how writers construct meaning. Supported by the emerging body of social and cognitive research in rhetoric, education, and psychology, she portrays meaning making as a literate act and a constructive process. She challenges traditional definitions of literacy, adding to that concept the elements of social literate practices and personal literate acts. In Flower's view, this social cognitive process is a source of tension and conflict among the multiple forces that shape meaning: the social and cultural context, the demands of discourse, and the writer's own goals and knowledge. Flower outlines a generative theory of conflict. With this conflict central to her theory of the construction of negotiated meaning, she examines negotiation as an alternative to the metaphors of reproduction and conversation. It is through negotiation, Flower argues, that social expectations, discourse conventions, and the writer's personal goals and knowledge become inner voices. The tension among these forces often creates the hidden logic behind student writing. In response to these conflicting voices, writers sometimes rise to the active negotiation of meaning, creating meaning in the interplay of alternatives, opportunities, and constraints.

Reviews

The Construction of Negotiated Meaning. A Social Cognitive Theory of Writing. Linda Flower. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1994. 334 pp. Theory and Practice in the Teaching of Writing: Rethinking the Discipline. Lee Odell, ed. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1993. 329 pp. Audience and Rhetoric: An Archaeological Composition of the Discourse Community. James A. Porter. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1992. 185 pp. Approaches to Computer Writing Classrooms: Learning from Practical Experience. Ed. Linda Myers. Albany: State U of New York P, 1993. 225 pp. The Digital Word: Text‐Based Computing in the Humanities. Ed. George P. Landow and Paul Delany. Cambridge: MIT P, 1993. 362 pp. Electronic Quills: A Situated Evaluation of Using Computers for Writing in Classrooms. Bertram C. Bruce and Andee Rubin. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1993. 232 pp. The Tech Writing Game. Janet Van Wicklen. New York: Facts on File, 1992. Marketing Yourself with Technical Writing: A Guide for Today's Professionals. William M. Vatavuk. Boca Raton, FL: Lewis Publishers, 1992. Technical Writer's Freelancing Guide. Peter Kent. New York: Sterling Publishing Co., 1992. 160 pp.

Coleridge's philosophy of composition: An overview of a romantic rhetorician

Coleridge criticism has a stormy quality about it, as if what we know about Coleridge is something we see only by flashes of lightning over some dark landscape. In Experience Into Thought, Kathleen Coburn says that Coleridge is irritating to certain tempers, perhaps especially to the curriculum-making academic mind(67). Her statement is ironic. Coleridge was always working on curriculum. His rage for a system that included the irrational and lucky graces forced him into whole courses about thinking and language, whole encyclopedias of knowledge. Still, the plan in most academic circles seems to have been to place Samuel Taylor Coleridge in the canon as a fragment of history and forget him. After long years of reading criticism about Samuel Taylor Coleridge rather than reading his works, it is time to see if there is a Coleridge worth claiming for rhetoric and composition. One problem in validating a Coleridge for our time is reading him. It seems that we have lost the habit of reading his kind of discourse. Perhaps because of his translations and readings of the German Transcendentalists, Coleridge's prose wanders and speculates, opposes its central premises, comments on itself incessantly. Composition scholars see him as an antithesis of the kind of style recommended in our classrooms and in our journals. Also, as composition studies attempt to establish territory in departmental turf wars, Coleridge becomes an easy target for those who would use him to demonstrate how literary concerns should not be included in composition pedagogy. As much as some might want Coleridge to go away, he will not. Linda Flower argues that Coleridge's inspirational model for composition is a threat to the teaching of composition (Problem-Solving). Ross Winterowd asserts that Coleridge is a primary reason for the devaluation of the literature of fact because his theory of composition or rhetoric lacks purpose (64). In both cases, eminent scholars and researchers in the field of composition are reacting to a stereotypical view of Coleridge and his works, as if the Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan represent Coleridge's philosophy and theory of composition. But there is more to Coleridge's philosophy of composition than his poems, his theory of imagination in Biographia Literaria, or his criticism suggest. Kenneth

Modeling Theory and Composing Process Models

In 1914, near the beginning of World War I, philosopher Pierre Duhem expressed a profound disdain for scientists who used models as conceptual aids. In Duhem's view, models were a kind of mental crutch, needed only by those poor souls who were burdened with an English mind-a mind that was careless, unexacting, and unable to manage complex systems of abstract representation. The French mind, on the other hand, which was characterized by straitness, clarity, and method, did not require the clumsy simplifications provided by models in order to apprehend reality (68-73). Intricate formulae were its daily fare, if not its raison d'ttre. This ability of the mind to handle complex representational systems without the assistance of mechanical or graphic aids was, to Duhem's way of thinking, not only a requisite for true thought but also another clear testament to the superiority of the race over that of the English. Duhem's argument, developed in The Aim and Structure ofPhysical Theory, is interesting for a variety of reasons, not merely because it manages to combine philosophy with a rather quaint form of Frankish nationalism. It is also noteworthy for the contrast it provides to current critiques of writing process models and their underlying epistemologies. To Duhem, meaningful understanding was intimately linked to rigor, mathematical exactitude, and representational precision; since models were simplifications, their descriptions were unreliable and their utility questionable at best. In an age when positivism had not yet been supplanted as the dominant ideology guiding inquiry, Duhem criticized models for their failure to be positivistic enough. To a number of present-day composition scholars such as Patricia Bizzell, Marilyn Cooper and Michael Holzman (Talking, Reply), and William Irmscher, this view of models-in light of poststructuralist epistemology and reflexive methodological criticism-seems naive, a relic of a past age when scientific subjectivism masked itself as objectivity. In their critiques of cognitive writing process models, notably those models offered by John Hayes and Linda Flower (Identifying, Writing), Robert de Beaugrande, and Marlene Scardamalia and Carl Bereiter, these scholars suggest that the epistemological

Balancing Individual Projects and Collaborative Learning in an Advanced Writing Class

When we design a course in writing, we join that debate over whether we should see individual cognition or social and cultural context as motive force in literate (Flower 282). To remind us of this debate, Linda Flower recently asked, Can we... reconcile a commitment to nurturing a personal voice, individual purpose, or an inner, self-directed process of making meaning, with rhetoric's traditional assumption that both inquiry and purpose are responses to rhetorical situations, or with more recent assertions that inquiry in writing must start with social, cultural, or political awareness? (282). Those three commitments are not really incongruous. All three can be found reconciled in advanced composition course described below. As a course built by students around individualized projects, it encourages students to apply general principles to specialized tasks. Good writers, according to Richard M. Coe, know how to apply general principles of composition to particular writing tasks and contexts (412). With so many different projects resulting from this approach, students' divergent interests must be shared in an atmosphere of collaboration. John Trimbur has stated that one of goals of collaborative learning is to replace traditional hierarchical relations of teaching and learning with practices of participatory democracy (6.11). Yet even collaborative models need to leave instructor with a certain authority. For example, James A. Reither and Douglas Vipond, whose teaching model is based on collaboration, suggest that the most powerful way to arrange this kind of situation is to organize a course so students collaboratively investigate a more or less original scholarly question or field. The teacher sets a research project or question for class, casting students as members of a research group (863). The final exam in my course acts as that long-range research project. This assignment, which is submitted to students on first day of class, summarizes

Response to Christina Haas and Linda Flower, "Rhetorical Reading Strategies and the Construction of Meaning"

Response to Christina Haas and Linda Flower, "Rhetorical Reading Strategies and the Construction of Meaning"

Reply by Christina Haas and Linda Flower

Reply by Christina Haas and Linda Flower

Developing a Sense of Audience: The Student to Student Handbook

The concept of audience is often difficult for young writers to understand. They see writing assignments as work that must be done for a grade. For this reason, many latch onto the teacher as audience. During conferences, I often hear ask, But what do you want me to do? To help with this problem, Linda Flower (1981, Revising Writer-Based Prose, Journal of Basic Writing 3.3) suggests that creating realistic assignments with real audiences will sometimes have a powerful effect on the writing of our students (66). In addition, often feel lost because traditional assignments leave them isolated from the constructive input of their peers. Deborah Brandt suggests a solution for this problem (1986, Social Foundations of Reading and Convergences: Transactions in Reading and Writing, Ed. Bruce Petersen, Urbana: NCTE):

Beyond cognition: The voices in inner speech

the writer's audience. Writing involves moving material from the inside the outside. We need only consult a few recent composition texts see how this inner/outer metaphor shapes the language we use talk about teaching writing. We tell students that the writer's mind is a kind of a box-a storehouse or reservoir, a pool of thoughts, filled with tremendous reserves draw upon. We speak of student writers opening the lid of the mind in order free what is stored inside. As teachers of writing, we want help students tap these sources, sift through your memory, and dredge up ideas. We want help students overcome writer's block, to unlock your mind and release information.' To make this happen, we talk about brainstorming, in which we make a frontal assault open the stronghold of the mind. And when this happens, we call the effect linguistic fluency, the flowing outward of inner speech from the reservoir of the mind. The dualism of this inner/outer metaphor, moreover, permeates much of the discourse of composition studies. Writing, many teachers, researchers, and theorists assume, begins inside, in the inner speech of private verbal thought, and is only gradually transformed into the outer written speech of public text. We habitually think of the process of composing as a movement from monologue, where writers address primarily themselves, dialogue, where writers address others. In this view composing transforms what is inside the writer's head into an external text that can stand by itself. Composing, that is, converts the associative, idiosyncratic, self-referential language that writers use talk themselves into autonomous texts that supply the interpretive contexts, logical connections, and explicit meanings readers expect of public discourse. James Britton's expressive and transactional functions, Janet Emig's reflexive and extensive modes of writing, and Linda Flower's writer-based and reader-based prose, however they may differ in conception and formulation, all assume the polarity of private and public language and an inner-to-outer directionality in composing, a movement, as Flower puts it, from thinking in code

Writing Instruction and Assessment: The Need for Interplay between Process and Product

Among the many developments in writing during the past few years, two dichotomous strands predominate. On the one hand, such scholars as James Britton, Nancy Sommers, Linda Flower and John Hayes have emphasized the writing process as a way not only of expressing meaning but also, through its recursive nature, of helping the writer discover meaning. At the same time, society's intensified concern with students' declining writing skills has led to the inclusion of writing samples in many assessment measures, the scoring of which is focused exclusively on the product. We find, for example, that essays are increasingly used for placement purposes at the college level or for competency-based certification; they are used on a prepost basis to evaluate entire programs as well. The prevalence of these writing requirements is evident in the addition of essays to such different exams as the Test for General Educational Development and the Law School Admission Test. In Florida alone, two major state-mandated tests include an essay portion-the College Level Academic Skills Test, required of all college sophomores before they can be accepted into an upper division program, and the Florida Teacher Certification Exam, required of everyone applying to teach in the state. While this current emphasis on essay tests is heartening in the value it places on the written word, it also is troublesome. The constraints of a typical testing situation often work at cross-purposes with current writing-instruction theories, severely curtailing-especially for weaker writers-any potential applications of the process paradigm. The dilemma is one that must be solved by everyone concerned with writing instruction or assessment.

Structured Heuristic Procedures: Their Limitations

To help students invent or prewrite or limit a subject, many composition specialists advocate teaching students to use structured heuristic procedures-conscious, deliberate search strategies such as Burke's Pentad or Young, Becker and Pike's tagmemic questions. According to these specialists, such help students to explore problems for seminal elements of a solution (Janice Lauer). 1 They enhance students' interpretive powers (Mike Rose).2 They focus attention, guide reason, stimulate memory and encourage intuition (Richard Young).3 More than that, they help students to generate content. Used in different combinations, they can yield abundant raw material (Erika Lindemann),4 help students to dredge up ideas from their subconscious (William Irmscher),5 help students to explore systematically everything they know about a (Linda Flower),6 and provide insights and ideas for any subject (Laurie Kirszner and Stephen Mandel).7 Although I find such claims interesting, I suspect that they are too optimistic and suggest to students oversimplified approaches to heuristic thinking in general. Teachers often qualify the advice they give students, yet their qualifications tend to become lost in their enthusiasm for structured heuristic procedures. Flower suggests that although such are only high probability ways to proceed, for problems like writing, heuristics are the most dependable and most creative way to go.18 Similarly, Young emphasizes that even though deliberate heuristic search is not infallible, it makes data gathering more efficient and increases the likelihood that the account be adequate. 9 Winterowd suggests that although all may not be useful, students should try to understand all of the procedures he recommends so that the will become part of [their] equipment for thinking.10 And Beth Neman tells teachers in her methods text, If care is not exercised, the complex means [of structured heuristic search] can sometimes assume an importance far beyond-even incongruous with-the simple end of a wellwritten paper,11 but she simplifies the problem in her textbook for students,

Looking for Trouble: A Way to Unmask Our Readings

The past decade has seen an attack on the myth of the writer. Linda Flower has traced this myth to Coleridge's account of the creation of Kubla Khan.' According to Coleridge the idea for the poem came without conscious effort; it came fully assembled; it did not require time-consuming choices; and, because it was a gift from the gods, the process of achieving the poem could not be repeated. While Flower does not deny the existence of these Eureka moments, she does argue that this myth breeds passivity on the part of the student who then wants to wait by an open window for inspiration to strike. Fortunately, the testimonies of published writers and the protocols that researchers like Flower have elicited have done much to dispel such myths. Textbooks now go to great lengths to suggest that writing involves a range of choices under conscious control. Less attention has been given to myths of inspired reading. Students frequently speak of the meanings of poetry, and by that expression they usually mean hidden from them but open to another class of readers-professional readers, teachers. So long as the process of interpretation is unrevealed, myths of inspiration can persist; students will claim that they cannot read poetry because they are not good at getting hidden meanings. The poem comes to be viewed as a Tarot card. Traditional practices of teaching literature in introductory courses promote the view of inspired reading because they obscure the process of forming an interpretation. In the traditional classroom the instructor rarely reveals what happens in his or her initial contact with a poem. I recently asked a group of senior English majors whether they had ever seen a literature professor read something for the first time. None had. Indeed it could be argued that many would have resented a professor assigning a poem he or she had not read, coming to class without having read it, and then winging through it, fumbling as we all fumble on any first encounter. Our evaluation forms tell us that we should