The Philosopher as Parent: John Dewey’s Observations of His Children’s Language Development and the Development of His Thinking about Communication

Can John Dewey’s experiments at the University of Chicago’s Laboratory School teach contemporary inquirers about “learning by making?” This article warrants an affirmative answer to this query. Unlike intellectual historians who trace the source of Dewey’s and his colleagues’ 1890s pedagogies to their cultural biases, we contend that these experiments were substantially conditioned by pragmatic kinds of insights. Specifically, we argue that Dewey’s inquiries into own his children’s language development influenced the development of his early educational experiments as well as his later pragmatic communicative philosophy. On this view, the Laboratory School experiments anticipate Dewey’s later thinking about communication. If so, rather than embarrassing educational pragmatists, Dewey’s and his colleagues’ work in the Laboratory School might offer new starting points for thinking about pragmatic education

Mapping Tutorial Interactions: A Report on Results and Implications

At the University of Rhode Island (URI), we believe that assessment of writing center interactions can be useful beyond conventional efforts to measure the effects and effectiveness of tutoring strategies in sessions with student writers. In fact, we believe that assessment may be useful for developing knowledge about tutoring interactions in ways far more general but no less applicable to our field. Elsewhere, we have argued that engaging groups of tutors in assessment of tutoring strategies can yield multiple benefits for writing centers as organizations, such as establishing a writing center as a center for research in the University and fostering the disciplinary knowledge of tutors (Siegel Finer, White-Farnham, and Dyehouse). As a second step in reporting on a multi-year writing center research project, this article shares some results using a new instrument for assessment: tutorial interaction maps. We offer our model of assessment as one that shows promise for facilitating tutors’ understanding and discovery of the work that happens in writing centers, and we suggest that such a model might form a basis for new kinds of tools for use in writing center assessment.University Writing Cente

Science Fiction : Rhetoric, Authenticity, Textuality and the Museum of Jurassic Technology

About two years ago I became interested in museums as rhetorical entities. I took a course at the Allen Memorial Art Museum where I got a sense of how arguments are created through the techniques of visual display, the socalled informatics of museum exhibition. In an art museum, however, these informatics are always bound into a relationship with the aura of the art object as artifact. In the context of a cult of art (an art museum?), the physical fact of an art object\u27s existence can never be rhetorically negotiated. Even if nothing else is fixed, its physical presence acts as a stable foundation and provides boundaries for interpretation. My fundamentally textual ideas of rhetoric in visual display were always superseded by the aesthetic use of aura to enable transcendence for museum patrons. I was frustrated because the contextual rules for these objects did not allow me to question, manipulate and remake them in the way I find so pleasurable with texts and less privileged objects. I turned to other types of museums in order to try and find a space where my ideas of rhetoric could operate without an allegiance to the transcendent narrative of art aesthetics. I considered natural history and science museums, but these spaces also privilege the truth of science or the authenticity of the artifact over the informatics of their display. That I really wanted was a space where the rhetoric of the display could take over and create an argument independent from the indisputable certainties of Art or Science. The thing that I found, the Museum of Jurassic Technology, is so bizarre that I now question my original desire for such a place to exist. However, I have pressed forward with my thinking, trying to find a way to make sense of the MJT. The work that I have done revolves around my personal struggle to think through the issues implicated in this project. There has been a curious outcome of my work: I have lost the critical distance and separation that traditional essays employ in order to persuade. I have struggled to find a way to represent what I think is important about my experience of the Museum in the context of an English Honors essay. The rhetoric in this paper is weird, both as a reflection of the weird rhetoric in the Museum, and as a strategy of exposition. I realize that I am trying to explain something confusing (the Museum of Jurassic Technology) in a confusing way. But perhaps that is the only rhetoric appropriate to this context

Praxis, Volume 09, No. 02: Multiliteracy and the Writing Center

Contents: A Letter from the Editor / by Andrea Saathoff -- An Ongoing ESL Training Program in the Writing Center / by Jessica Chainer Nowacki -- Developing Tutor's Meta-Multiliteracies Through Poetry / by Kathleen Vacek -- Tutor Handbooks: Heuristic Texts for Negotiating a Difference in a Globalized World / by Steven K. Bailey -- The Idea of a Multiliteracy Center: Six Responses / by Valerie Balester, Nancy Grimm, Jackie Grutsch McKinney, Sohui Lee, David M. Sheridan, and Naomi Silver -- Access for All: The Role of Disability in Multiliteracy Centers / by Allison Hitt -- Mapping Tutorial Interactions a Report on Results and Implications / by Jamie White-Farnham, Jeremiah Dyehouse, and Bryna Siegel FinerUniversity Writing Cente