A Common Ground: The Essay in the Academy

Spellmeyer, Kurt

doi:10.2307/377708

Cited by 15 publications

(8 citation statements)

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“…By initially exploring her own values and associations in writing, she is able to (reconsider her text with reference to those which she subsequently reads, thus partaking in the kind of dialogic thinking and active interpretation that is critical to the development of reading/writing (Spellmeyer, 1989). Finally, writing about and considering issues, themes, or concepts before reading about them prepares students to view texts with "a writer's eye" (McQuade & Atwan, 1991, p. iii), to appreciate authors' perspectives and decisions, to read, in other words, like a writer.…”

Section: Copied Textmentioning

confidence: 99%

Writing One's Way into Reading

Zamel¹

1992

TESOL Quarterly

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Despite research and theory to the contrary, approaches to the teaching of reading continue to reflect a transmission model of reading, focused on the retrieval of information from a text. This model prevents students from experiencing reading as an active, exploratory process, one that involves the making of meaning. It thus denies them their transactions with a text and the realization that reading involves such transactions. In order to give students experiences with reading that demonstrate the ways in which readers engage, contribute to, and make connections with texts, writing needs to be fully integrated with reading. Writing, because of its heuristic, generative, and recursive nature, allows students to write their way into reading and to discover that reading shares much in common with writing, that reading, too, is an act of composing.

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Section: Copied Textmentioning

confidence: 99%

Writing One's Way into Reading

Zamel¹

1992

TESOL Quarterly

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“…He explicitly criticizes Renaissance scholasticism’s 3 logical specialization of knowledge as obscuring the complexity and coherence of real life. His rhetorical style generates a new discourse about knowledge, advocating “a personal worldliness or personal outwardness” (Spellmeyer, 1989, p. 254), terms that would have affronted the purists of the scholastic movement. In contrast to the categorizing conventions of scholasticism, Montaigne viewed convention as a “‘coming together’ of dissonant perspectives in order to restore the lived world, at the risk of imprecision and incongruity” (Spellmeyer, 1989, p. 254).…”

Section: The Education Of Michel De Montaignementioning

confidence: 99%

“…His rhetorical style generates a new discourse about knowledge, advocating “a personal worldliness or personal outwardness” (Spellmeyer, 1989, p. 254), terms that would have affronted the purists of the scholastic movement. In contrast to the categorizing conventions of scholasticism, Montaigne viewed convention as a “‘coming together’ of dissonant perspectives in order to restore the lived world, at the risk of imprecision and incongruity” (Spellmeyer, 1989, p. 254). He sought to find a style that was unrestrained by contrived formality and more able to represent the passing moments of the self, “the actual process of the mind seeking truth” (Croll, 1966; Williamson, 1966, as cited in Hall, 1989, p. 79).…”

Section: The Education Of Michel De Montaignementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Like any good conversationalist, Montaigne does not pontificate but rather digresses and shares stories: “I do not teach, I [relate]” (III:2, 742). 4 The essay is distinguished from prose, poetry and academic writing by what Spellmeyer (1989) calls its “situatedness”: the prominence of the writer’s actual situation (p. 255).…”

Section: From Stardom To the Dentist’s Officementioning

confidence: 99%

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Should We Be Writing Essays Instead of Articles? A Psychotherapist’s Reflection on Montaigne’s Marvelous Invention

Starr

2012

Journal of Humanistic Psychology

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Contemporary psychology may be overlooking an important mode of inquiry by insisting that our primary mode of communication should take the form of scientific articles rather than that of literary essays. The essay was first practiced and then refined by Michel de Montaigne in the late Renaissance and constitutes a unique literary form that incorporates both Renaissance humanism and the then-emerging spirit of scientific discovery. The aim of the present essay is to explore the uses psychotherapists might make of Montaigne’s Essays, both as a fruitful model for writing about and for reflecting on the human condition. The essay was born at a time of great intellectual and spiritual upheaval and renewal. It is freewheeling, unorthodox, forever inventive, and at the same time learned, disciplined, and profoundly respectful of the past. The author looks to the humanist essay as developed by Montaigne as a useful literary and disciplinary device that can help in understanding the gap between purely theoretical or academic psychology and the actual practice of therapeutic psychology.

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“…Highlighting the role of students' discourse in language acquisition, Fishman and McCarthy (as cited in Zamel, 1998) maintain that personal and academic languages need to be blended. From the same standpoint, Spellmeyer (1998) also claims that the only way for students to become insiders in the world o f academic culture is to bring their own personal values, experiences, knowledge, and questions to the new culture. Woods (1996) identifies what both teachers and students bring to the classroom as beliefs, assumptions and knowledge or BAK.…”

Section: Entering a New Discourse Community: Theoretical Perspectivesmentioning

confidence: 99%

From the outside in : a case study of changing roles in an undergraduate first-year discourse community

Goodarzi¹

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A Common Ground: The Essay in the Academy

Cited by 15 publications

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Writing One's Way into Reading

Writing One's Way into Reading

Should We Be Writing Essays Instead of Articles? A Psychotherapist’s Reflection on Montaigne’s Marvelous Invention

From the outside in : a case study of changing roles in an undergraduate first-year discourse community

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