CCCC, New Orleans, 4/2-4/5: Peter Elbow et al.

As I've promised my Teaching Writing students, I'm going to devote some blog posts to the conference that I attended last week, the Conference on College Composition & Communication, which operates within the larger professional organization, the National Council of Teachers of Writing. I came back really energized and newly inspired by a number of conference sessions, and I'd like to report and reflect on them.

Peter Elbow is one of the "stars" in the college composition field. His most famous book is Writing Without Teachers, and one of his most significant contributions is the practice of freewriting, which he believed in 1973 would help writers discover their true voices. I am a believer in freewriting, and in recent years, I've found that students all too often lack opportunities and time to just write without pressure, so I incorporate some freewriting into just about every class I teach.

Another of his important ideas, though, was addressed in the appendix of that ground-breaking book, and is titled "The Doubting Game and the Believing Game--An Analysis of the Intellectual Enterprise." In that essay, he discussed two kinds of intellectual activity (the "games") that we can bring to arguments: we can question and challenge them, the standard form that academic critical thinking takes; or we can try on the ideas we encounter, try to appreciate the writer's or speaker's argument as though it were our own, try to truly understand the writer's thinking--finding reasons for believing as he or she does. Elbow says that when we affirm, we can correct any misunderstanding "by affirming, believing, not-arguing. Your two possible mistakes are blindness or projection" (165): we either miss what's there or read into the argument some meaning other than the intended one.

Now, using the believing game in critical thinking, as Elbow has been doing recently, gives us an empathic alternative to challenging and questioning with the intent to find flaws in arguments. It's a practice worthy of those who want to make the world a better place, in my opinion.

Let's consider how this might work in our classes--as students and as teachers. Let's say we encounter an idea we disagree with when we are students in a class. Does Elbow ask us to accept uncritically what we disagree with, to be good little robots instead of real students? No, but he might ask us to consider the idea carefully and try to understand it instead of dismissing it because we disagree with it. He would tell us that playing the believing game would prevent our missing or misinterpreting something in the argument. As teachers of writing, we might encounter a sentence or an idea in a student's text that we feel compelled to dismiss--but are we sure we're reading it as the student meant it? If we use the believing game, we try to think as the student is thinking, to understand where he or she is coming from--and we may find that our initial reading of the sentence or idea was wrong, that we missed or misinterpreted something. (I can't tell you how many times I've caught myself in a misreading of a student text over the years! I shudder to think how many times I haven't caught my misreading!)

So . . . here's a vastly oversimplified take on Peter Elbow's comments at the conference. I'd like to add that Nathaniel Teich gave an intellectual history of what Elbow calls the believing game, finding precedents for it over several centuries of Western thought, with a special emphasis on the dialogic, empathetic elements, linking it with Rogerian therapy. One of my favorite teacher-writers, Mary Rose O'Reilly, had written a paper that was read by someone else at the conference, who takes the "game" and students' critical thinking efforts seriously and argued for creating a "contemplative space" for students' struggles with new ideas, telling us our job as teachers it to protect that contemplative space. (Again, I fear I'm being very reductive here.) Finally, Patricia Bizzell, who this year received the highest award this organization can give for lifetime achievement, discussed the way that emotions keep insisting on intruding into arguments--even academic argument that we profess is emotion-free. She said we need to come to terms with emotion, rather than pretend it isn't a part of the positions we hold and the arguments we advance for those positions.

This was a very stimulating and thought-provoking session, and I'm very glad that I attended it.

To my Teaching Writing students--you should read Writing without Teachers.