#13. Peterson's Account of the Social Turn in Composition

In my last post, I announced I was going to be moving the blog to Substack. After some thinking, I decided that I actually prefer Blogspot, so I am going to be keeping the blog here for now. Blogspot feels more lowkey, which I think is a better vibe for a blog like this one. If the blog gets a larger readership, perhaps I may consider moving it again. I will still be keeping my twelfth post up on Substack, which can be read here.

For today's post, I want to discuss a 1993 edited collection that I discovered during the Winter 2026 quarter, when I was working on my seminar paper about the New Abolitionists. I briefly mention this text, titled Theory & Practice in the Teaching of Writing: Rethinking the Discipline, in an earlier blog post. I was drawn to this book initially because it contains an article about the conflict between general skills writing instruction and discipline-specific writing instruction. For those not familiar with this debate, during the 1990s, a number of scholars in favor of abolishing university writing requirements argued that first-year composition, as a course conceived to provide general skills writing instruction (the idea that writing can be taught as a generalizable skill), was not useful to students. The rationale for this thinking was that general skills writing instruction, often oriented around traditional themes and generic research papers, does not offer instruction in real world genres that students need to master for their post-college professional lives. I did not end up using the article in my seminar paper due to length requirements, however I did hold onto this book because I was intrigued by some of its other articles. Similar to other texts from the 1990s I have discussed on this blog (texts like Composition in the Twenty-First Century (1996) and Reconceiving Writing, Rethinking Writing Instruction (1995), both of which I talk about here), Theory and Practice in the Teaching of Writing casts the field of composition studies in a time of fast transition, where new ways of thinking are beginning to replace older ones. The article that I chose to read from this collection discusses a large epistemological shift (not unlike the Fordist / post-Fordist shift mentioned by Berlin) that requires us as writing studies scholars to reconsider the way we treat and conceptualize students. 

Edited by Lee Odell, who served as the 1986 chair of 4Cs.

The article that I chose to read, titled "Learning Through Teaching" by Jane Peterson, feels somewhat unremarkable in the year 2026, as the approach to teaching that Peterson describes is commonplace in today's pedagogical landscape. While modern audiences watch Citizen Kane and find the film boring, critics highlight the undeniable influence of the film on the current cinematic landscape. Modern audiences can't appreciate the innovations that Citizen Kane introduced because they are so commonplace in contemporary cinema. Perhaps Peterson's ideas, in the year 1993, were novel and groundbreaking in the same way and set the stage for later scholarship. At the same time, considering the similarities between Peterson's piece and the Berlin piece that I reviewed earlier, it is possible that many authors of the time were cashing in on a trend and that they were describing the larger ongoing paradigmatic shift from objectivism to constructionism to an ad nauseam degree. Admittedly, this is just a hypothesis from a scholar who needs to be more well-read in the history of the field, but I have enough experience as an academic to see how scholars (including myself) like to jump on the hottest ideological trends. I can think of texts that emerged around the same time as Peterson's piece, such as Stephen North's The Making of Knowledge in Composition, Berlin's Rhetoric and Reality, and Phelps' Composition as a Human Science, which make these grand declarations in more significant ways. 

To summarize, Peterson describes a larger shift taking place in the field of composition studies, where the values of the older paradigm are being replaced by values of the new. Citing the work of Alvin Toffler, Peterson tells us that the old paradigm, reflective of the values of the Industrial Age, offers certain assumptions about the world and the role of mankind within it.  During the Industrial Age, those in power saw nature as under the control of man, and the nature of work and industry ultimately reflected this reality. Assembly lines and job positions were standardized, employees functioned like cogs in a well-oiled machine, and job training thus involved the clean and straight transmission of knowledge from person to person. Within a writing instruction context, the latter point offers an explanation for why current-traditional rhetoric reined supreme within U.S. college writing programs until the late 20th century. As Berlin mentions in Rhetoric and Reality, current-traditional rhetoric is rooted within an objective rhetoric, where truth is located within observable reality, and thus it can be understood and communicated by a well-trained writer. As Peterson points out, this understanding of writing is still very commonplace within writing classrooms, however she does acknowledge that an epistemological shift is taking place where scholars are developing a new, more dynamic understanding of writing. 

Vacationing in New Mexico.

As I write this blog post, I feel more and more familiar with the argument that Peterson is making, to the point that I will make an amendment to what I initially wrote and posture that her argument is slightly reductive, even for 1993, as she is describing the field's well-documented shift in the late 1980s / early 1990s into more constructionist understandings of instruction and learning. While Peterson goes into detail about the old Industrial Age paradigm, I don't think she offers much explanation for what is replacing it, other than saying that the new age could be "variously dubbed Post Modern or Post Industrial, the Space Age or Electronic Era, the Age of Information or Communication" (p. 12). It seems that Peterson is acknowledging that she is writing before the dust has completely settled and thus she only has a small sense of the changes taking place. Referring to Toeffler again, she mentions that the new era can be characterized by a world that is "highly interactive, interdependent, unpredictable and which increasingly values principles such as cooperation and collaboration, diversity, and flexibility over the Industrial Age need for competition, uniformity, and standardization" (pp. 15-16). She also acknowledges new theories of learning that reflect this new paradigm, which includes "deconstructionism, poststructuralism, cultural criticism, and reader response theories" (p. 14). Essentially, Peterson states that this shift reveals a new way of thinking about writing, which I would argue is similar to Berlin's idea of transactional rhetoric, where textual meaning is fluid and in flux because it is actively and continuously constructed by a human subject.  

Again, while I find Peterson's take on composition history to be somewhat derivative, I do think that the takeaways she offers for instructors, which are actually the main point of her article, are quite helpful and thought provoking. If anything, the historical context that she offers is a setup for her richer argument about teaching. Ultimately, Peterson argues that this new shift allows teachers to consider themselves as learners, where they can fully embrace the interplay between theory and practice. While the old understanding stipulates that a instructor's job is to enact theory in the classroom, the new understanding posits that instructors should not only observe what happens in the classroom, but consequently reason how these happenings might better inform or challenge established theories. She states that instructors can embody this by doing two things: 1) They can respect the agency of students and 2) immerse themselves, be attentive to, and reflective of "data" that emerges during instruction. In talking about data, Peterson hedges that this does not mean instructors need to become empirical researchers. Her model of the ideal instructor-learner sounds more akin to Stephen North's classic description of the Practitioner class in Making of Knowledge of Composition, where instructors might not have well-documented or systemized approaches to classroom research with plans to publish their findings, but more observational and informal methods based on practicality. Another thing that I appreciated about the article is that she explains in strong detail how Mina Shaughnessy, the pioneer of the subfield of basic writing, is an archetype of this model of instructor as learner. I have encountered this connection before (my advisor mentioned to this me once), and I am not sure if Peterson is the first scholar who made this connection, regardless her explanation is quite revealing for someone who wants to be educated about this history. 

Interestingly enough, in discussing how instructors might make the mental shift to better respect the agency of students, Peterson explicitly cites Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed and his emphasis on the importance of dialogue with students, which makes sense as it is easy to see how social constructionist ideas arose alongside the influence of critical pedagogy. I am inclined to notice this as a self-avowed critical pedagogue. This will be a history post as opposed to a pedagogy post for now, as I don't have any magic takeaways for practice that come to mind that I think are worth sharing as I finish up. However, I will acknowledge that I enjoyed reading this article as a historical artifact. As I engage in this journey to understand the history of composition, reading a piece like this is rewarding as I feel myself starting to fill holes that have emerged since I started this project. While I may have been a little bit hard on Peterson in this post, I am trying to put myself in the perspective of someone who was an active scholar during the time she was writing, and thus I am trying to be critical as a "pseudo-contemporary." I will also admit that I have much more reading to do, and as I learn more, I may revise my original understanding of this piece. 

References

Berlin, J. A. (1987). Rhetoric and reality: Writing instruction in American colleges, 1900-1985. Southern Illinois University Press.

Peterson, J. (1993). Learning through teaching. In L. Odell (Ed.), Theory and Practice in the Teaching of Writing: Rethinking the Discipline. Southern Illinois University Press.