Ethos, Humanism, and Individualism! Oh, my!

In reading “Expressive Pedagogy: Practice/Theory, Theory/Practice” by Christopher Burnham, I kept finding myself thinking that we live in quite an exciting time! It seems that many of the proverbial pieces are in place for the culmination of something wonderful.

While it initially seemed strange to me that the four branches of process pedagogy should compete as Tobin and Faigley say they do (10), I now see the productivity of such competition: while each division surely hopes to nullify the other, in trying to do so they actually stimulate the others to become more conscious of themselves, much in the same way that Burnham’s “role shifting” serves to evolve meaning, and consequently a writer’s understanding of his knowledge, in writing (24). Gradin’s link between romanticism and expressivism may never have come about had she not felt the need to defend the pedagogy against the claim that it “values invidualism to the exclusion of social concerns” much in the same way that Elbow’s invocation of Plato’s ethos in voice theory was stimulated by antitheoretical claims against expressivism (29).

While opposing branches of process pedagogy appear to unconsciously stimulate others’ evolution, there is also evidence of the beginning of conscious, albeit begrudging, inter-branch verifications. Burnham gives the example of Bruner, apparently at the forefront of cognitive theory, who writes of the “transactional self,” a model of self that Burnham describes as allowing “metacognition and reflection” that “‘penetrates knowledge,’ allowing us to own that knowledge” (28). Thus Bruner admits the cornerstone of expressivism, the paramount importance of the transaction between the self and information, or the community of knowledge, in facilitating learning (27) even as he works by the methods of an opposing branch of process.

Burnham’s summary of Elbow’s “About Voice and Writing” serves to further explicate this phenomenon: “writers need to use both [the expressivist and postmodern views of self],” both the “believer” and the “doubter,” in order to activate writing’s “locus for power” (30). As the many parts of process work to further their own ends, each serves as a stimulant to the other in a communal authorship of the process pedagogy.

Gradin’s description of the aim of the expressive pedagogy, to “empower people through voice” and to activate “personal awareness to act against oppressive material and psychological conditions” (29) is, according to Plato in Poetics, the aim of literature: catharsis. It has been a recorded goal of our greatest philosophers and teachers since Socrates, and it can be seen even in our earliest recorded stories. What the expressive pedagogy adds to this catharsis is the means to amplify its effectiveness exponentially by shifting the point of its origin from without to within. I cannot begin to imagine the kind of future we could collectively create if we were to develop a pedagogy that would foster the birth of such catharsis within the minds of our students, and ourselves. It is an exciting time, indeed.