"All of the lead articles are working to create links among techne, technology, the technical, and technique in ways that move techne away from an instrumental reading that sees technology as an object to be possessed by subjects and toward a reading of techne that sees the technical as one equal element in a larger, more complex set of relations" (372).
Integrating technique into our conceptualization of techne "moves techne away from a reductive, generic, a-contextual conception of the technical toward a sense that technique operates through human bodies in relation to all other bodies (animate and inanimate) in larger, more complex contexts" (372).
"The human and the technical are no longer seen in opposition but as operating together in complex econologies" (372).
agency and change are partly products of technology
Seeing techne as part of a complex system allows us to conceive of invention outside of just the subject's control. "The assumption of autonomy, presence, and control ignores the ambient, unconscious, habitual elements of invention that emerge out of complex systems that human bodies inhabit" (373).
Hawk wants to institute invention in a post-techne in a complex ecology that integrates "humans with technological and institutional environments--with the goal of invention" (373).
HIGH-TECHNE: TOWARD THE POSTHUMAN
techne a la Renato Barilli--"combination of art and technique"
"Rhetoric, then, puts abstract, technical knowledge and lived, habitual knowledge on equal footing" (374).
Though rhetoric is for political intervention in the Classical sense, we have evolved away from the Classical civic space. "Heideggar's view of techne, on the other hand, redefines the human relationship with technology as one that can no longer be reduced to deliberate human intervention or to a narrow view of human control over the contextual situations--especially human control via technology or technique...Technique consciously transferred through teaching cannot be simply applied to all occasions as an object controlled by a subject" (374).
"Both technology and aesthetics are connected and viewed as art, as techne. As techne they produce ways of seeing and ways of being; they produce constellations, which in turn produce possible ways for humans to be in relation to the world" (376).
"The key point in Rutsky is that being human in the contemporary context is not reduced to exerting human will through technology; it is not about intervening through technology but about dwelling with/in technology, with/in a culture that is intimately intertwined with technology in multiple, complex ways" (376-77).
"A human body, a text, or an act is the product not simply of foregrounded thought but of complex developments in the ambient environment...techne emerges only through enacting relationships...technique becomes a matter of operating in the ambient environment" (378).
POST-TECHNE: PHYSIS AND PORTABILITY
"what I am proposing is to turn this work toward pedagogy and start thinking about techniques, methods, and heuristics as interfaces in ambient rooms" (378-79).
"A posthuman understanding of techne would mean that teachers accept the ecological and ambient nature of rhetorical situations and begin to develop techniques for simultaneously enacting and operating in these complex, evolving, contexts" (379).
"If the seat of agency is no longer the conscious, autonomous subject, then it is important to flesh out the locus of agency in distributed cognition
"Technique as post-techne, then, should set up constellations of relations that allow its users to see something as something else--that is, to see in a new way through those constellations of relations...teching techniques would have to situate bodies within their environments and enact bodily, ambient elements in the service of learning in addition to employing consciously taught elements" (379).
"Heideggar's recognition that something can arise spontaneously from itself and its situation is a key to moving beyond instrumentality and humanism with regard to invention. Spontaneity and chance are not under human control but are the outcome of complex sets of relations, making physis [nature] a source of agency for techne" (380).
"Kairos is not the opposite of techne but its very ground; every technique is (un)grounded in physis, powered by kairos" (381).
post-techne--"placing a body within a situation, utilizing the power of that situation, and enacting ambient elements of that situation in the service of invention. A post-techne doesn't do away with intension as much as it adds a layer of complexity beneath it; that is, it adds an ambient level of cognition. Both action and enaction, thus, become coresponsible" (383).
"The only way, then, to get a sense of the possible effects of a technique is to enact it in a specific kind of situation. The enaction would then need to regularly produce more situationally specific techniques and regularly engage them in that specific kind of situation" (383).
"Techne at this point would begin to operate both consciously and unconsciously. Moreover, as post-techne, it would be driven by the situation, not just the subject or the subject's particular desire to intervene" (384).
TECHNIQUE: A PEDAGOGY FOR POST-TECHNE
Post-techne: "the use of techniques for situating bodies within ecological contexts in ways that reveal models for enacting that open up the potential for invention, especially the invention of new techniques" (384).
"Rather than teaching students general principles for professional writing, Henry habituates students to inventing form their complex institutional situatedness....The subject, then, is not one that intervenes in, as much as coinvents with, the situation" (388).
"The recognition that theories don't have to be consciously applied to be a part of pedagogical technique can help teachers understand their practices in a new way and make us think differently about new practices" (388).
Hawk's techne: techniques for situating bodies in contexts (371).
Posthuman: a theory that "redescribes the human in terms of complexity" and moves human subjects away from the subject/object binary and considers "humans and the technical...as operating together in complex ecologies" (372).
Agency: reading the situation and not the individual that's in it. Distributed agency/cognition--the ship's captain operates in relation to the ship, the ocean, the weather, etc.
Showing posts with label technical writing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label technical writing. Show all posts
Saturday, October 31, 2015
Sunday, October 18, 2015
Ryan Moeller and Ken McAllister--"Playing with Techne: A Propaedeutic for Technical Communication
Playing with Techne: A Propaedeutic for Technical Communication: [1]
Moeller, Ryan;McAllister, Ken
Technical Communication Quarterly; Spring 2002; 11, 2; ProQuest Social Sciences Premium Collection pg. 185
Propaedeutic: (of an area of study) serving as a preliminary instruction or as an introduction to further study.
"We offer historically grounded, creative meditations on techne that emphasize its manifold nature: it is conversational, ingenious, cunning, full of trickery, and unpredictably artistic. Such mediatations can replace overly complex workplace scenarios in technical communication classrooms, particularly when an instructor wishes to emphasize knowledge making rather than the mechanics and politics of document production" (185).
"Techne is not the act of hammering, not is it the hammer itself. Rather, it is the 'way' of the hammer...Too often, teachers of technical communication press their students prematurely into the role of professional technical communicator" (185).
Moeller, Ryan;McAllister, Ken
Technical Communication Quarterly; Spring 2002; 11, 2; ProQuest Social Sciences Premium Collection pg. 185
Propaedeutic: (of an area of study) serving as a preliminary instruction or as an introduction to further study.
"We offer historically grounded, creative meditations on techne that emphasize its manifold nature: it is conversational, ingenious, cunning, full of trickery, and unpredictably artistic. Such mediatations can replace overly complex workplace scenarios in technical communication classrooms, particularly when an instructor wishes to emphasize knowledge making rather than the mechanics and politics of document production" (185).
"Techne is not the act of hammering, not is it the hammer itself. Rather, it is the 'way' of the hammer...Too often, teachers of technical communication press their students prematurely into the role of professional technical communicator" (185).
"The authors of these and similar texts seem to assume--not without justification--that students enter the classroom with an eye toward a professional life in a disciplined corporate environment...Only later, when students and teachers have already assumed the prescribed 'real world' roles offered them by their textbooks, does the discussion turn toward what many call the technical, stylistic, or grammatical aspects of technical communication" (186).
"Prematurely urging students to assume roles in workplace in workplace contexts and...produce technical documents...skips over the fundamental elements inherent to the learning of any new art: learning and playing with basic concepts, experimenting with them, and using one's imagination to form increasingly complex understandings of what is being practiced" (186).
"Although positioning technical communication as straightforward and pragmatic may meet the practical expectations of career-minded students and help to alleviate some of the pedagogical burdens on overworked teachers, it ultimately displaces the agency of writing in the classroom. It creates the illusion that students' only agency lies within the context and confines of a workplace or in the role of a professional" (187).
"we propose that a better way to introduce technical communication is to allow students to be students, letting them learn and play with the rudiments of technical communication before requiring them to act like experts and professionals...We have found that focusing on readings and discussion of techne is an excellent way to begin this process" (187-88).
"ethics and ideologies are also components of the art they are learning to practice. And rather than forcing them to adopt an employee mentality, students work as students and scholars" (188).
"Our objectives in this article are:
- To inspire technical communicators to think in creative ways that do not rely on corporate terminology or workplace analogies
- To provide teachers of technical communication with a new focus that can be used playfully in the classroom
- To inspire teachers to think of themselves as teachers, not as bosses or representatives of the real world
Opposing Theories of Techne
"Those who limit techne's depth and breadth often do so on the way to either emphasizing efficient workplace behavior...or an overarching sociopolitical agenda that can be facilitated by studying technical communication as a form of praxis. Such reductions do not consider the true range of techne's connotations that have been spun by generations of rhetorician-philosophers" (189).
"most audiences have been trained to expect 'just the facts.' If today's audiences for technical communication holds the objective, neutral transmission and reception of information as its highest good, then technical communicators have little opportunity to envision and enact their own sense of a different social good; the rhetor must, to a significant degree, conform to the audience's ethics...it may only educate them in the mechanisms of corporate capitalism's ethics" (190).
"The term that once denoted the constant process of theorizing, acting, and reevaluating one's work in the world in order to transform oppressive and exploitative societies into just and egalitarian ones, comes to signify something like 'appropriate behavior,' and techne is reduced to an inoffensive set of techniques that facilitate one's appropriateness" (190).
"it seems to us particularly difficult to teach people to resist an ingrained ideology--expediency is best, for instance--while also teaching them how to occupy that position more fully" (191).
"What Plato was trying to discover...was nontechnical expertise on morality, which is to say philosophy. In order to lay claim to the supremacy of philosophy, however, he had to constrain, dismiss, and exclude other ways of knowing, including rhetoric, techne, and poetry...Unfortunately, Plato's dismissal of both techne and rhetoric has been reinforced through many generations of scholars who have felt little need to search for more expansive understandings of techne that stretch beyond Plato's narrow characterization" (192).
"Dunne admits that Aristotle not only significantly blurs his own carefully constructed delineation of types of knowledge (productive, practical, and theoretical), but also never gives any example of a techne that is not governed by phronesis" (193).
Techne as a Conversation about an Art
"If such indirect factors are to be reclaimed for techne, then research and reflection upon what has come before must be integrated with the learning of technique. The pragmatist may ask: why make field reports or technical memos 'ingenious'? Our answer: because the artisans who create them can't help but make them so" (199).
"How do you teach students of technical communication to be magicians, to draw power from the ancient wellspring of techne? First teach them how to think about how people think (or at least how they might think), which is to say, teach them to be cunning. Only once they've begun to grasp these precepts, do you begin to teach them about the contrivances that will enable them to make the impossible possible" (200).
"But techne is always embodied. It is a way of being, particularly a way of being in relationship to other things. And to people. It is built on failure--hundreds of failures, in fact--and emerges slowly in the form of occasional, but deeply memorable successes. In this sense, techne's 'trick' is that it seems to the uninitiated to be more natural than it is. The only people who know how much work art is are artists and, perhaps to an even greater extent, artists-in-training. Techne is a trick, then, not for beginners, but on beginners" (201).
Implications of Techne as Artisanship
"There is no question that the most common Western classical usage of techne was to indicate artisanship, meaning 'skillful production of an object.'...Artisanship, craft, skill, and other such terms have considerably more depth to them than many of us acknowledge, not only from a historical or etymological perspective, but also from the perspective that they are terms describing human beings' mediated relationships with one another" (203).
"We need to move beyond the descriptions of technical communication as the practice of clearly presenting technical information, and reclaim techne--creative, ingenious, tricky, unpredictable, and utterly human--for our work as teachers and technical communicators" (204).
technical communicators "are artisans. They work under a variety of constraints but are not determined by them because they are liberated through their creativity. They work to teach others in surprising ways, always inclined to try the untried, to privilege change, and to accept chance and organization as co-conspirators in the process of invention" (204).
Saturday, October 17, 2015
James M. Dubisnky--"More than a Knack: Techne & Teaching Technical Communication
More than a Knack: Techne & Teaching Technical Communication: [1]
Dubinsky, James M
Technical Communication Quarterly; Spring 2002; 11, 2; ProQuest Social Sciences Premium Collection pg. 129
"In this article, I argue for a more deliberate emphasis on teacher training by reinvigorating techne as a concept that is far more than instrumental or prescriptive. If we prepare prospective teachers to master the techne of teaching, we encourage them to become user-centered, reflective practitioners who understand the critical need for situational use of knowledge" (129).
"This shortage of graduates trained in technical communication and its pedagogical perspectives can lead to a formulaic, forms-based pedagogy that hinders reflective practice and emphasizes a system-centered, as opposed to a user-centered, perspective" (129-130).
"These unprepared or underprepared teachers ask students to imitate the discourse of the workplace without asking for or offering a more complex reflection about the cultures that produce that discourse or the ethical issues involved in its production" (130).
Some argue that this problem can be solved if teachers learn on the job. By osmosis the teachers, by teaching, will absorb and display good teaching practices. Dubinsky argues that this creates what Aristotle called a knack for something. Teachers that teach via a knack "don't necessarily become user-centered, reflective practitioners who possess the techne of teaching. Without such a techne, they may have a knowledge of how to solve problems, but usually they lack the 'know-how' or strategies needed to navigate the changing dynamics of classrooms that are, by nature, temporal and indeterminate" (130).
Knack based teachers "teach students to be tool users rather than pratitioners who use tools and reflect upon their uses" (130).
Teaching a techne of teaching will allos teachers to emphasize knowing how, which is a "rhetorical knowledge, contingent and governed by rules of art rather than rules. Teachers who combine knowledge of what they teach with practice--the day-to-day experiences with students--become more effective teachers" (131).
--Art of Knack? Techne and Technical Communication
Most in the academic community eschew techne because they view it as a rule governed art that sits below the theoretical values of episteme.
This reduces techne to a knack or pure technique, which makes those who use it "mere practitioners."
Dubinsky argues that techne bridges the gap between praxis and theory. "More importantly they overlook techne's connection to civic duty" (131).
Knacks become known through repetition. Aristotle said 'knowledge and understanding belong to art rather than to experience' because artists 'know the cause,' and men of experience 'do not.'
"I argue that the techne of medicine is similar to that of the techne of teaching in its reliance upon the contingent and indeterminate and the fact that both patients and students are human, which means that what works for one won't necessarily work for all" (132).
--Techne and Teaching
"One cannot prepare teachers to handle classrooms by providing them with rigid lesson plans and rules. It is more productive to teach them to handle situations as they arise, giving them principles of teaching or rules of art...they will likely learn to make the right decision based on context and student needs (133).
"Because techne is 'a reasoned state of capacity to make'...it also requires a knowledge of the end of the making (the telos). (133).
"I envision the teaching of writing as a techne that requires knowledge of the purpose and the audience--in this case the students who are, in reality, 'the thing(s) made.'" (133).
"However, while learning to do and reading about doing are essential, they are not sufficient to explain techne"
"an essential component to acquiring, mastering, and articulating the logos is to have someone present who can act as a vehicle to bring into language what might have lain dormant in experience only. In terms of teaching, then, if a reflective practitioner has been 'paying attention' and wants to make her implicit knowledge explicit, to bring to light the logos, she needs someone who will help her reflect in new ways 'with a view to refining the skills, on the why of what [she] is doing'" (134).
technitai-- someone who is a practitioner but can explain the reasons behind the thing that they do.
"Possessing a techne of teaching means that teachers are able to respond to signals. They respond not based on rules; they respond artistically" which "comes about through a combination of experiences: learning the history of what has gone before, studying the theories of those who have conducted research--and most importantly--learning to see from a variety of perspectives" (134).
--Focusing on the Student: Writing Teacher as User-Centered Practitioners
The difficulty of teaching far outpaces many other vocational activities that have to do with static objects, like wood or bicycles. Teachers are completely the masters of the object they're working with 'a network of other people who are also agents and with whom he is bound up in relationships of interdependency'" (135).
--User-Centered Approach to Teacher Training
"If we want to emphasize ends and believe that we have an ethical and moral responsibility as makers, then we need to focus on students (the audience/users) as real people in real situations and our assignments as their tasks" (135),
"We also begin to build in an abiding concern for what uses will be made of what we teach...we need to reflect on what occurs there and how it is received and used by students. When we do so, we become far more than 'product-model- testers; we become product designers and reflective practitioners who integrate theory and practice in mobius loop (136).
Classroom work should mirror workplace work.
"the focus shifts from the system and its designer to the product and its users. Both require a full understanding of the complex situations in which students and users are immersed. Both require a willingness to experiment, to 'test' what one develops or helps to develop" (136).
"If we as a discipline, want to transform our classrooms into learning communities and generate critical thinking in order to focus on the ends of use, then we need to study and learn from classrooms where such attempts are being made. We need to hear about those attempts, examine the theoretical underpinnings of those classrooms, talk about the successes and the failures, and study the drama present there. We need to value the practice of the everyday activities of the teachers and students whose stories about 'know-how' have been cut off from the discourse of the profession" (136).
--Recommendations
"The techne of teaching is a collaborative activity that will require some resource allocation and courage from those we might call master teachers...This work could be coordinated with methods courses, which, I argue, should be available every semester and required in the very first...I elarned that theory comes from observation and doing, that we develop our theory in the process of making...I learned that a critical element of techne...is its reliance on the concept of kairos...that makes the techne of teaching so powerful and difficult to quantify" (140).
--Collaborating with Teachers in Other Desciplines
"Thinking through what one does and why one does it--translating implicit knowledge into explicit knowledge--is a means of making it teachable to others" (140).
"Such collaborations enable us to engage in interdisciplinary discussions about pedagogy, the place of writing, and students" (141).
"This work would assist all parties--teaching partner, students, and prospective teacher--by demonstrating the kind of pedagogy that techne is built upon: collaboration, questioning, and dialogue" (141).
--Collecting Teacher Narratives
"reflective practitioners come to recognize that our knowledge and experiences are not universal" (141).
--Conclusion
"what we believe about students lies at the heart of our implicit theories and beliefs about teaching" (142).
"teaching writing is an art or techne, in which the binaries of theory and practice, form and content, research and teaching are no longer valid. A more appropriate metaphor is a mobius loop, a continuous loop that turns constantly on itself, where theory becomes practice, teaching becomes research" (142).
"Teacher education programs should model the teaching and learning approaches advocated by the discipline and promote the vision of the profession. In addition, such programs should teach students not to accept blindly a set of prescriptions or techniques that someone hands down. Instead, they should help students learn as much as they can about the classroom, the content area, and the students, while also encouraging them to question and engage in conversation" (142).
"By revitalizing techne, tempered with phronesis, I believe that our field can challenge those who have driven a stake between knowing and doing and make teaching technical communication a 'matter of conduct rather than production...a matter of arguind in a prudent way toward the good of the community rather than of constructing texts.' By so doing, we take what Aristotle called a 'reasoned state of capacity to make' and show that it is both a knowledge and a 'capacity for action' that can benefit students and society" (143).
Dubinsky, James M
Technical Communication Quarterly; Spring 2002; 11, 2; ProQuest Social Sciences Premium Collection pg. 129
"In this article, I argue for a more deliberate emphasis on teacher training by reinvigorating techne as a concept that is far more than instrumental or prescriptive. If we prepare prospective teachers to master the techne of teaching, we encourage them to become user-centered, reflective practitioners who understand the critical need for situational use of knowledge" (129).
"This shortage of graduates trained in technical communication and its pedagogical perspectives can lead to a formulaic, forms-based pedagogy that hinders reflective practice and emphasizes a system-centered, as opposed to a user-centered, perspective" (129-130).
"These unprepared or underprepared teachers ask students to imitate the discourse of the workplace without asking for or offering a more complex reflection about the cultures that produce that discourse or the ethical issues involved in its production" (130).
Some argue that this problem can be solved if teachers learn on the job. By osmosis the teachers, by teaching, will absorb and display good teaching practices. Dubinsky argues that this creates what Aristotle called a knack for something. Teachers that teach via a knack "don't necessarily become user-centered, reflective practitioners who possess the techne of teaching. Without such a techne, they may have a knowledge of how to solve problems, but usually they lack the 'know-how' or strategies needed to navigate the changing dynamics of classrooms that are, by nature, temporal and indeterminate" (130).
Knack based teachers "teach students to be tool users rather than pratitioners who use tools and reflect upon their uses" (130).
Teaching a techne of teaching will allos teachers to emphasize knowing how, which is a "rhetorical knowledge, contingent and governed by rules of art rather than rules. Teachers who combine knowledge of what they teach with practice--the day-to-day experiences with students--become more effective teachers" (131).
--Art of Knack? Techne and Technical Communication
Most in the academic community eschew techne because they view it as a rule governed art that sits below the theoretical values of episteme.
This reduces techne to a knack or pure technique, which makes those who use it "mere practitioners."
Dubinsky argues that techne bridges the gap between praxis and theory. "More importantly they overlook techne's connection to civic duty" (131).
Knacks become known through repetition. Aristotle said 'knowledge and understanding belong to art rather than to experience' because artists 'know the cause,' and men of experience 'do not.'
"I argue that the techne of medicine is similar to that of the techne of teaching in its reliance upon the contingent and indeterminate and the fact that both patients and students are human, which means that what works for one won't necessarily work for all" (132).
--Techne and Teaching
"One cannot prepare teachers to handle classrooms by providing them with rigid lesson plans and rules. It is more productive to teach them to handle situations as they arise, giving them principles of teaching or rules of art...they will likely learn to make the right decision based on context and student needs (133).
"Because techne is 'a reasoned state of capacity to make'...it also requires a knowledge of the end of the making (the telos). (133).
"I envision the teaching of writing as a techne that requires knowledge of the purpose and the audience--in this case the students who are, in reality, 'the thing(s) made.'" (133).
"However, while learning to do and reading about doing are essential, they are not sufficient to explain techne"
"an essential component to acquiring, mastering, and articulating the logos is to have someone present who can act as a vehicle to bring into language what might have lain dormant in experience only. In terms of teaching, then, if a reflective practitioner has been 'paying attention' and wants to make her implicit knowledge explicit, to bring to light the logos, she needs someone who will help her reflect in new ways 'with a view to refining the skills, on the why of what [she] is doing'" (134).
technitai-- someone who is a practitioner but can explain the reasons behind the thing that they do.
"Possessing a techne of teaching means that teachers are able to respond to signals. They respond not based on rules; they respond artistically" which "comes about through a combination of experiences: learning the history of what has gone before, studying the theories of those who have conducted research--and most importantly--learning to see from a variety of perspectives" (134).
--Focusing on the Student: Writing Teacher as User-Centered Practitioners
The difficulty of teaching far outpaces many other vocational activities that have to do with static objects, like wood or bicycles. Teachers are completely the masters of the object they're working with 'a network of other people who are also agents and with whom he is bound up in relationships of interdependency'" (135).
--User-Centered Approach to Teacher Training
"If we want to emphasize ends and believe that we have an ethical and moral responsibility as makers, then we need to focus on students (the audience/users) as real people in real situations and our assignments as their tasks" (135),
"We also begin to build in an abiding concern for what uses will be made of what we teach...we need to reflect on what occurs there and how it is received and used by students. When we do so, we become far more than 'product-model- testers; we become product designers and reflective practitioners who integrate theory and practice in mobius loop (136).
Classroom work should mirror workplace work.
"the focus shifts from the system and its designer to the product and its users. Both require a full understanding of the complex situations in which students and users are immersed. Both require a willingness to experiment, to 'test' what one develops or helps to develop" (136).
"If we as a discipline, want to transform our classrooms into learning communities and generate critical thinking in order to focus on the ends of use, then we need to study and learn from classrooms where such attempts are being made. We need to hear about those attempts, examine the theoretical underpinnings of those classrooms, talk about the successes and the failures, and study the drama present there. We need to value the practice of the everyday activities of the teachers and students whose stories about 'know-how' have been cut off from the discourse of the profession" (136).
--Recommendations
- work in a classroom with at least one other teacher in the discipline
- collaborate with teachers in other disciplines
- collect teacher narratives and examine them for their clinical moments in the context of both a methods course and with a master-craftsperson.
"The techne of teaching is a collaborative activity that will require some resource allocation and courage from those we might call master teachers...This work could be coordinated with methods courses, which, I argue, should be available every semester and required in the very first...I elarned that theory comes from observation and doing, that we develop our theory in the process of making...I learned that a critical element of techne...is its reliance on the concept of kairos...that makes the techne of teaching so powerful and difficult to quantify" (140).
--Collaborating with Teachers in Other Desciplines
"Thinking through what one does and why one does it--translating implicit knowledge into explicit knowledge--is a means of making it teachable to others" (140).
"Such collaborations enable us to engage in interdisciplinary discussions about pedagogy, the place of writing, and students" (141).
"This work would assist all parties--teaching partner, students, and prospective teacher--by demonstrating the kind of pedagogy that techne is built upon: collaboration, questioning, and dialogue" (141).
--Collecting Teacher Narratives
"reflective practitioners come to recognize that our knowledge and experiences are not universal" (141).
--Conclusion
"what we believe about students lies at the heart of our implicit theories and beliefs about teaching" (142).
"teaching writing is an art or techne, in which the binaries of theory and practice, form and content, research and teaching are no longer valid. A more appropriate metaphor is a mobius loop, a continuous loop that turns constantly on itself, where theory becomes practice, teaching becomes research" (142).
"Teacher education programs should model the teaching and learning approaches advocated by the discipline and promote the vision of the profession. In addition, such programs should teach students not to accept blindly a set of prescriptions or techniques that someone hands down. Instead, they should help students learn as much as they can about the classroom, the content area, and the students, while also encouraging them to question and engage in conversation" (142).
- If we're going to be a discipline, we need a shared, agreed upon knowledge base.
"By revitalizing techne, tempered with phronesis, I believe that our field can challenge those who have driven a stake between knowing and doing and make teaching technical communication a 'matter of conduct rather than production...a matter of arguind in a prudent way toward the good of the community rather than of constructing texts.' By so doing, we take what Aristotle called a 'reasoned state of capacity to make' and show that it is both a knowledge and a 'capacity for action' that can benefit students and society" (143).
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