JAC: A Journal of Composition Theory, Volume 16, Number 2, 1996 Page: 201
202-340 p. : ill. ; 22 cm.View a full description of this periodical.
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Introduction: Who Does the Teaching?
Learning in Different Directions
DAVID BLEICH
MARY R. BOLAND
From the time we enter school we assume and expect that teachers do the
teaching. This traditional model places the students on the receiving end of
teacher transmissions. Yet, when teachers find satisfaction in the classroom, they
often report how much they learned from their students. Most people, however,
are no more surprised at these reports than they are to hear how parents "learn"
from their four-month-old infants. This kind of learning is the kind we place in
quotation marks: although parents and teachers learn, children and students
aren't understood to be teaching. Education is thought to emanate from authority
figures who learn from their own observations and reflections.
Parents and teachers as groups assume responsibility to enlighten, respec-
tively, their children and students. They conduct their lives as if this responsibility
were intrinsic to the social relations of parenting and teaching. Fewwant to reduce
this responsibility; likewise, few know, want to know, or can effect, situations in
which the responsibilities are reciprocal in ways that are not ritualized or contrac-
tual, but spontaneous in ethical, interpersonal, or collective senses.
When the "direction" of teaching is single, we tend not to question it. It is
not something we think of as a category for which there may be alternatives. The
fact that "one category" is equivalent to "no categories" is significant when
contemplatinggenres orkinds of things. Once the same level or degree of teaching
is understood to move also in an "other" (sometimes, Other) direction, many
new categories (or directions) of teaching and learning are possible. The number
of directions becomes indefinite, open-ended, and contingent on how fully
classroom social relations are invited to contribute to the curriculum.
The essays in this special issue suggest how, when the interrelationships
among teachers and students are considered, new categories or directions of
teaching become possible, available, and desirable. This expansion leads to
reconceiving "Rhetoric and Composition" as "Language Use," a subject that
includes attention to all language forms: formal speech and writing as well as oral
and written colloquial kinds, registers, and genres. One can include in "language
use" genres that are at the same time oral and written, formal and informal, those
that move back and forth, that overlap with or convert to other symbolic media.
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Association of Teachers of Advanced Composition (U.S.). JAC: A Journal of Composition Theory, Volume 16, Number 2, 1996, periodical, 1996; (https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc28616/m1/5/: accessed April 19, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, UNT Digital Library, https://digital.library.unt.edu; .