Trusting Your Conscious Behavior

Response 2
After I read the excerpt on expressive pedagogy, I remembered Virginia Woolf’s views on fiction in her critical essay, “Modern Fiction.” Though she was critiquing fiction, I think the characteristics she believes fiction should have can be applied to writing and pedagogy. According to Burnham, expressive pedagogy places a significant emphasis on the writer. His voice or his “imaginative, psychological, social and spiritual development” is what teachers should examine; how these elements influence or shape society should also be a criterion. This is how Virginia Woolf defines fiction as well. She argues that writers, and in our case students, spend too much time trying to please their audience and not enough time discovering what they want to say. In “Modern Fiction” she writes, “ […] if a writer were a free man and not a slave, if he could write what he chose, not what he must, if he could base his work upon his own feeling and not upon convention, there would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe in the accepted style […].” In other words, if we spend too much time elaborating our conventions then we can’t spend time discovering our individuality.

I like the notion that the act of writing helps a writer discover his identity. Burnham explains, “Elbow’s Writing Without Teachers (1973) values the act of writing as a means for both making, meaning, and creating identity.” Writing should be a process that leads you to discover who you are and what you believe. As I write, I usually do not have a purpose in mind, but the process of writing enables me to discover one. I then have one of those “Aha!” moments and find myself saying, “So this what I think about this.” I take the delicate grasp I had on a vague idea and solidify it on paper and in words. Burnham further confirms, “According to Murray, ‘The writer is constantly learning from the writing that it intends to say. The writer listens for evolving meaning…The writing itself helps the writer see the subject.”

That writing is not linear process is an idea I strongly agree with. My thoughts and reflections are never conceived in an organized format. In composition classes organization and discovery should be considered an objective instead of a prerequisite. Woolf emphasizes that the writer should be concerned with his own state of consciousness instead of a historical, literary state of consciousness. She explains, “Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness.” Learning from great writers or the classics should serve as a guideline and not as formula. I am not interested in repeating what has already been said; instead, I’d like to bring to my own perspective to the table. Maybe this is a better way to achieve what the expressivists refer to as “voice” or “ethos.” Approaching writing with integrity and originality allows you to contribute to the scholastic endeavor instead of providing prefabrications on what has already been said.