Remember our class's reaction to and discussion of Maxine Hairston's "Diversity, Ideology, and Teaching Writing" article during last spring's class? Given this, I wasn't sure what to expect from Hairston's article "The Winds of Change: Thomas Kuhn and the Revolution in the Teaching of Writing".
Hairston's use of Kuhn's paradigm shift model reminded me of a class I took quite some time ago where we were studying "systems theory". In the case of this class, we identified a system as a social group such as a family, a work group or a class of students for example. It seems that a system always seeks stability or "homeostatsis" by managing and compensating for stress created by internal and external changes.
In Hairston's article, the system under stress was and is instruction in the college composition classroom. It is interesting that she described the movement to process pedagogy as a revolution rather than an evolution since the term revolution indicates an overthrow of a system by forceful means as opposed to a change in a system that evolves over time.
If Hairston were to write her article today, I wonder how she would describe the current state of the system of instruction in the college composition classroom?
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