Vallis, Gina L. “Questions of Intent: Communication Disorder, Transfer, and Writing Pedagogy.” Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture 15.3 (2015): 441-457. Web

Summary

This article examines communicative intent in the writing classroom through applying lessons from both personal reflections and studies of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The author discusses problem-solving from a cognitive approach and how it applies in the context of writing activities, ultimately arguing for pedagogy that generates conditions in which communicative intent can be achieved in students.

Quote Bank

“As instructors, we cannot take for granted that the writing that occurs within the classroom context will be communicative. Communication does not always attend writing activity. In the academic context, writing is routinely deployed for a variety of purposes other than communication. Writing to understand is a basic function of brainstorming tasks. Taking notes often serves the purpose of writing to record for later reference, which is a form of cognitive offloading. Taking notes may also serve the purpose of writing to remember, which cognitive social psychologist Margaret Wilson (2002: 629) describes as a form of “symbolic offloading” that provides access to semantic memory and resources central to problem solving and learning. In the simplest sense, any person learning to form letters on a page is technically engaged in the act of writing, but that person is not writing, any more than two people practicing correct verbal enunciation are engaged in a conversation. Using a communicative means is not the same as using that means to communicate.” (444)

“What remains is the recognition that there is some kind of compulsion at work in the acquisition of thinking dispositions in writing. This compulsion is a drive we routinely conceptualize as engagement, which is affective. However, the effort to engage is not, in any context, a description of communicative intent. Engagement may be something instructors would like to have happen in others, but it is not a target skill that can be directly transmitted. Engagement is not an action but an effect. To be engaged is a description of the end result of the activation of drive—the compulsion through which a writer moves down the proverbial road. Without this drive, writing falls short of the rhetorical situation of academic inquiry and remains bound to the context of assigned activity.” (447)

“Imaginative play is a developmental precursor to the ability to consciously manipulate symbolic systems of meaning beyond the boundaries of correspondence. In other words, it is through our ability, in language, to exceed the known that we activate our capacity to wonder.” (453)

“Writing from a question initiates inquiry and opens up the possibility of propositioned logic: the positing of alternatives, the suspension of paradox, and the generative process of forming and testing hypotheses based upon an initiating point of curiosity. It is through questions that I repeatedly return to the “problem” of the writing classroom and how that problem is answered by writing. If instructors are to produce the conditions through which students will engage in writing with the intent of communicating what they have come to understand, those writers must do so as participants in the history of the means through which we produce knowledge. That history does not merely involve collecting and recirculating answers. Rather, writing enters into history through emerging genres in an ongoing process through which thinkers reframe the questions it is possible to pose in their encounter with what we do not know” (455).

Analytical Reflection

In “Questions of Intent,” Vallis explains cognitive processing using the concept of exigence. The author argues that in order for students to “engage in writing with the intent of communicating what they have come to understand,” a fundamental curiosity must be ignited in students. (455) Ultimately, Vallis gets at the heart of the challenge of writing classrooms on which demands of transfer are made: that students are engaged in writing for “the purpose of fulfilling expectations or receiving positive instructor evaluation resulting in extrinsic reward) e.g. approval, a grade, institutional recognition)” (445). Vallis references her son’s autism spectrum disorder (ASD) to discuss writing activity through the lens of problem solving, cognitive disequilibrium, and the use of question generation strategies. In doing so, the author identifies how the drive for sustained inquiry is achieved when “a writer initiates inquiry” (448).

Vallis states “cognitive disequilibrium is not met in a secondary situation that involves answering questions that others have posed but, rather, out of the primary situations in which those questions initially arise” (447). The primary solution Vallis points to for generating an authentic curiosity in students that would drive communicative intent and not just a regurgitation of content, is the importance of question generation – “a process-based, recursive cognitive strategy in which an instructor may repeatedly help to redirect a question in ways that encourage writers to remain aware of their own thinking as they struggle to define the nature of the problem they are attempting to resolve.” (449). The author acknowledges some of the challenges in the question generation approach – primarily the anxiety of students to venture out of their conditioning to have answers, not questions. She goes on to say that the “use of question generation strategies in the writing classroom requires very active and personalized instructional supports … Ongoing prewriting activities can help to facilitate the careful wording of the question. The goal is to incrementally guide writers through supports that gradually fade out as they move toward competency” (450).

While I fundamentally agree with the author’s argument and the proposed strategy, I don’t see the clear distinction for using question generation strategies in a classroom in a way that isn’t fundamentally compulsory and thus potentially not inspiring the drive and curiosity Vallis argues is fundamental to achieving communicative intent. This perhaps may boil down to a question of skill in implementing inquiry-based pedagogy for Vallis herself states, “The central issue arising from research in cognitive science regarding question-based learning has not been in determining its value but, rather, in establishing how to implement, support, and evaluate instructional strategies that use this approach, and no research has been conducted in relationship to writing instruction” (448). The current curriculum of English 101 is steeped in question generation, through free-writes and various activities, and I suspect through implementing the curriculum I will become more adept at the precise strategies Vallis is promoting.