Twenty Years: Reflections and Questions

Recalling her lifelong research into the connection between emotions and writing, the first editor of JAEPL critiques scholarly contexts that limit the exploration of knowledge about writing

JAEPL, Vol. 1, Winter 1995-1996

Essays Mary C. Doane. Writing Reality: Constructivism, Metaphor, and Cosmology. Two philosophies of metaphor are contrasted in constructing discourse and reality. Derek Owens. Earthworm Hermeneutics. As an alternative to recent misreadings of boundary politics, a more responsible, outsider pedagogy needs to be cultivated. Tim Doherty. Strictly Ballroom? Dancing Along the Borders of Movement and Writing. Multiple intelligences are exercised when movement and writing intersect in the composition curriculum. Ellen W. Kaplan. The Subversive Play: Using Play, Dream, and the Body in the Classroom. The as-if world of play brings body-centered knowledge into the expressive writing class. Randi Patterson and Kim Jernigan . The Found Play: Learning and Teaching the Value of Reading and Writing. The found play is designed to make explicit the interpretive strategies that students use in everyday life, in a literary work, and in critical reading and writing. Frances Jo Grossman. Apples, Cupcakes, and Beige: Subjectivity and Academic Discourse. The relationship between intentional autobiographical reference and academic research yields a discourse called the writer-scholar\u27s story of knowing. Anne Mullin. A Plea for Re-Form Aesthetics in the Writing Classroom. The emphasis on meaning and ideas should be refocused on form as an important aesthetic element in writing. Cramer Cauthen. Writing Ritual and the Cultural Unconscious: The Great Mother Archetype in the Composition Class. Jungian theory and feminist epistemology can be synthesized through their mythopoetic ways of making knowledge. Kristie S. Fleckenstein. Emotional Implication: Performing Within Emotional Gaps. The role of emotional implication is a process by which writers leave and fill emotional gaps within a text, thus creating their readers, text worlds, and themselves. Linda T. Calendrillo. Mental Imagery, Psychology, and Rhetoric: An Examination of Recurring Problems. The parallel debates on mental imagery in contemporary psychology and classical rhetoric have led to its marginal status in composition studies. Hildy Miller. Images at the Heart of Things: The Writer\u27s Unconscious Speaking. Two case studies depict ways in which mental imagery from a Jungian perspective influences writing. Martha Goff Stoner. Mastery: Or, Where Does True Wisdom Lie? Zen philosophy and contemporary physics heighten awareness of wisdom as a process not a product

Front Matter

Editor\u27s Message Many of us come out of formal and advanced training in writing. We are at home with the humanities: philosophy, drama, the arts, aesthetics. We connect easily to both the teaching of literature and to literary exegesis. Ideas about literacy come easily to us. We need to be aware of work being done in the field outside our focus in writing, literature, and language. Connections need to be made between us and other members of our cultural tapestry. Every once in a while someone tells me about the name of a book, an organization, or a journal that I think our member-ship might be interested in. It gives me pause. I have been poking around in this area and have come up with a starter list of like-minded organizations and publishers. The Association for Humanistic Psychology, the California Institute for Integral Studies, the Esalen Institute, the Global Alliance for Transforming Education, the International Society for Traumatic Studies, the Creative Education Foundation, the Collaborative for the Advancement of Social and Emotional Learning at Yale, the Institute of Noetic Sciences, and the Naropa Institute pursue advanced ways to read, to learn, to think, to share ideas and approaches to learning in ways that lie beyond the traditional academic framework. Several periodicals and presses specialize in publishing work of this nature: Holistic Education Review (and Press), The Journal of Consciousness Studies, The Brain/Mind Bulletin, and Zephyr Press. Others specialize in helping people network: Great Ideas in Education, Association of Supervision and Curriculum Development\u27s Network for Research on Affective Factors in Education (and quarterly newsletter), the Resource Center for Redesigning Education, The News-letter for the Association for Rhetoric, Writing, and The Transcendent, out of Washburn University. I encourage readers to become acquainted with these organizations, interest groups, and publishers. Some of the materials that have emerged from them are sufficiently noteworthy to suggest book reviews, annotated bibliographies, and critical essays. Some of the conferences that these organizations hold are sufficiently similar to our workshops to invite some form of cross-fertilization. An interesting side note concerning our organization: One contributor asked me, how political are we? I answered, everything we are and everything we do is political, as political as we are human. Poet William Stafford once said that anyone who breathes is in the rhythm business. Well, anyone who believes is in the political business. The very fact of life is a unending impulse to stay alive, to thrive. It is an assertion. Moreover, every act bears a stamp of interpretation, subjectivity, slant; things we reject; things we perceive in certain ways; things we would like to see done a certain way. Nonetheless, the AEPL tries to be as inclusive as possible, inviting ideas of all shapes and sizes. But material should in some way embody alternative approaches to learning language, and teaching: Consider the following issues as the bases for contributions: How a subject uniquely stimulates language use or teaching; what its potential and problems are from a critical perspective; how it is linked to issues of knowledge, self, and culture; what its connections are to contemporary disciplinary debates within contemporary studies and/or studies of language use and teaching; what its relationship is to ongoing AEPL themes that are emerging in workshops, the summer conference, and the journal. Let me mention some staff changes: I would like to welcome Hildy Miller as Assistant Editor and to thank Mary Deming for pushing the journal from behind as it got going. I welcome Ann Mullin as Book Review Editor, and Sharon Gibson-Groshon and Bruce Ardinger as members of the Editorial Advisory Board. With this issue Martha Goff Stoner officially becomes an editorial assistant. She proofreads copy at the very last stages of production and helps compile our style sheet. Our theme for the next volume is Resistance and Rewards Beyond the Cognitive Domain. By this I mean stories of personal discomfort in, student resistance to, administrative or community hesitance about or interference with the borderland. What issues develop when we teach and learn language in territories beyond the cognitive. By the same token, I also mean stories of personal discovery or renewal, student growth, administrative and community cooperation, so that advances in language education are realized in enabling and constructive ways—how we relate to our administration, colleagues, countermovements, and students

Front Matter

Editor\u27s Message This is the last issue of my three-year term as inaugural editor of the Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning. There is something fine for me in starting something from nothing, so to speak. What is it about the mystery, doing the truly active research that does not require a library or the internet? I always feel the fun, the risk of doing things other people do not do. That does not necessarily make me popular. But it does make me strong. Then it makes me scared which also makes me vulnerable to criticism. At the same time, maybe because the journal is new, I figured I would be less vulnerable to it. After all, I needed time to work out the wrinkles. Fine tuning would come later. I am competitive. I like being first. I also like the idea of making a modicum of difference. It may make me a curiosity. JAEPL was, for me, after all, a kind of solution to a benign problem. The capacity for us to change our mental lives, the lives of our students, is not a bad thing—even though, in so doing, we discover nothing that wasn\u27t already there in books and in our bodies. Like the chemical basis for the salutary effects of chicken soup, we are discovering a scientific basis of some very old ideas and practices. It has become our charge, in a way, to inform the profession about how ideas in the corners of the academy (the physical and metaphysical, spiritual, emotional, therapeutic, advanced work in medicine, states of mind/consciousness) that have not been admitted to the pedagogical mainstream in composition studies pertain to the work we do. In so doing, we honor the complexity of our subject and its beginnings. I hope we continue to pursue goals of looking inward into the mind and body and outward to social and cultural experience. I hope JAEPL continues to attract not safe but innovative papers that centrist editors marginalize. I hope that our reviewers continue to focus not on what doesn\u27t work in manuscripts but on how they might be improved; that they do not reject a paper that makes them (or the editors) uncomfortable; but rather that they recommend good ones they don\u27t necessarily agree with. With my term as editor at its end last Spring, 1997, 1 wish to thank my exhilarating contributors and understanding authors of rejected manuscripts. I owe my sanity to an exceptional staff who kept things running smoothly. I was enriched by P. J. of Louis Heindl and Son Printers and his staff Art, Lynn, Paul, and Vicki far making my visits to the shop fun and productive, and especially typesetter Sue Schmidt for her irrepressible good will. I hope the talented staff will continue: Anne Mullin and Sharon Gibson-Groshon who I am pleased to say have an eye for quality thought, promising thought, and the aesthetics of the journal. I pass along the torch to co-editors Kristie Fleckenstein and Linda Calendrillo, both charter members of AEPL who come to the journal after having published in it. So, as not to lose momentum, I give them space to talk about their charge. It is with pleasure and honor that we begin our tenure as co-editors of JAEPL During the past three years, Alice and her staff have maintained high standards of editorial and scholarly quality, standards that we hope to preserve. They have also trailblazed new territory, inviting explorations of new connections, always centered by the belief that the point of the probe is always in the heart of the explorer (Bateson, Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity, 1979). We hope to travel the path broken by Alice and by the many fine contributors to the first three volumes of the annual; we also hope to maintain the tradition of pushing the boundaries of that path a bit more, not so much to colonize but more incorporate the power of margins into our thinking. To begin that endeavor, we have chosen Mind, Body, Spirit: Teacher Making Connections as the theme of JAEPL\u27s fourth annual and our first issue as co-editors. By intellectual and spiritual training, our Western culture is dualistic one. Culturally reified with Descartes\u27 differentiation between mind (res cognitans) and body (res extensa), the division between mind, body, and spirit has consistently privileged rational mind over unruly body. Through discrimination, however, Western civilization has also split fact from value and warranted a scientific agenda that justifies the control of all things physical. Now, in the midst of ecological devastation, cultural inequities, and individual pathologies, we in the western world and in the educational community are slowly waking to the limitations of that dualism. We are coming to see the necessary unity of mind and nature. As Gregory Bateson says, There is no mind separate from the body, no god separate from his [sic] creation. The theme of Mind, Body, Spirit: Teachers Making Connections invites further speculations on the ways in which mind, body, and spirit unite. We urge teachers to envision connections among mind, body, spirit, and their teaching and scholarship. Possible areas for consideration include such questions as: What does the healing power of writing, especially narrative, suggest for the connection between word and flesh? What are the strengths or the weaknesses of poststructuralist orientations, currently dominant in composition studies, that transform mind, body, and spirit into textualities? What do we lose or gain from such a perspective? What insights into the mind/body/spirit connection are provided by women\u27s spirituality, especially ecofeminism? What are the methodological as well as the pedagogical implications of connections among mind, body, spirit? What are the possibilities of an embodied discourse, and what are the concomitant challenges to traditionally rigid genre demarcations? How might schema theory, the dominant paradigm in cognitive science and in reading theory, incorporate the body? Frederic Bartlett, the father of schema theory, asserts that schemata are made and unmade on the basis of a feeling. Feeling is also the means by which we turn around on our schemata to achieve consciousness. Therefore, what role does body play in our constructions of knowledge? As always, the theme is intended to initiate thinking, not limit it. Each of the areas listed above, as well as many other topics such as ethics and kinesthetic knowing, fall within the theme of mind, body, and spirit. We urge you to consider the nature of the connections in your lives, your teaching, your writing, and respond to our call for papers at the back of this issue

JAEPL, Vol. 2, Winter 1996-1997

Essays Jean Trounstine. Sacred Spaces. Drama in the prison classroom teaches that transgression can enhance spirituality. Irene Papoulis. Spirituality and Composition: One Teacher\u27s Thoughts. The author explores her ambivalence about combining her interest in spirituality and her composition teaching. George Kalamaras. Meditative Silence and Reciprocity: The Dialogic Implications for \u27Spiritual Sites of Composing. Recent studies of silence must focus on the dialogical nature of Eastern meditation, examining the values of meditative awareness and social theories of reciprocity. Christopher Ferry. When the Distressed Teach the Oppressed: Toward an Understanding of Communion and Commitment. Jane Tompkins\u27 adaptation of Paulo Freire\u27s educational philosophy is critiqued through exploring the spiritual basis of his idea of the Easter experience. Mary Buley-Meissner. Diversity and Dialogue in Reforming the Academic Community. Affirming multiculturalism in higher education should include discussions of students\u27 spiritual diversity. Arlette Ingram Willis and Shuaib J. Meacham. Break Point: The Challenges of Teaching Multicultural Education Courses. Teaching multicultural education courses to preservice teachers exacts an emotional toll as they begin to acknowledge their ethnic awareness. John Ramey. Transcending Gender: A New Awareness of the Fluid Self in Writing. The constructs of the male and female in the gendered self are not binary opposites but interlocking halves of an inseparable whole. Margaret Batschelet and Linda Woodson. From Writers to Writer/Designers. Instructors should extend the idea of thought in word only to possibilities offered by the visual. Dennis Young. Re-Visioning Psychology in the Writing Class. With its emphasis on soul-work and the imaginal frames of psyche, archetypal psychology helps teachers more fully interpret the motivations and intricacies of writing and learning. Emily Nye. Aiding AIDS Through Writing: A Study and Bibliography. A writing group at an HIV clinic generated four kinds of narratives, each with a different healing function. A selected bibliography follows