Berthoff, Ann E. “Is Teaching Still Possible?

Berthoff, Ann E. “Is Teaching Still Possible? Writing, Meaning, and Higher Order Reasoning”—329-343
“(No writer ever puts in words which he or she thinks are unnecessary; learning to discover that some are is one of the chief challenges in learning to write.)” (330).
“unless and until the mind of the learner is engaged, no meaning will be made, no knowledge can be won” (330).
“linguistic structures or texts or speech acts can only be studied by interpreting the interdependencies of meanings—and by interpreting our interpretations” (331).
Researcher who does not know how to respect the language according to I.A. Richards “He thinks of it as a code and has not yet learned that it is an organ—the supreme organ of the mind’s self-ordering growth” (331).
“The failure to understand the interdependence of language and thought is consonant with the misconception of the role of instruction which, like test design, is considered by Peiaget in mechanistic terms” (335).
“if we let our practice be guided by whatever we are told has been validated by empricial research, we will get what we have got: a conception of learning as contingent on development in astraightforward, linear fashion; of development as pre-self program which is autonomous and does not require instruction; of language as words used as labels, of meanings as a one-directional, one-dimensional attribute; of the human mind as an adaptive mechanism” (336).
“Abstraction is natural, normal; it is the way we make sense of the world in perception, in dreaming, in all expressive acts, in works of art, in all imagining. Abstraction is the work of the active mind: it is what the mind does as it forms” (337).
“What we have to do is show students how to reclaim their imaginations so that “the prime agent of all human perception” can be for them a living model of what they do when they write” (337).
Triadicity is an idea whose time has come. It can help us take charge of the criticism of our assumptions about teaching because in the triadic conception of the sign, the symbol –user, the knower, the learner is integral to the process of making meaning. The curious triangle, but thus representing the mediating function of interpretation, can serve as an emblem for the pedagogy of knowing (338—339).
“Looking and looking again helps students learn to transform things into questions; they learn to see names as “titles for situations,’ as Kenneth Burke puts it. In looking and naming, looking again and re-naming, they develop perspectives and contexts, discovering how each controls the other. They are composing; they are forming; they are abstracting” (339-340).
“The ‘natural environment’ necessary to the growth and development of the discursive power of language requires dialogue” (340).
“The first step of the analysis should be to look at the character of the assignments, at the sequence of ‘tasks.’ In an interesting variation on this theme of ‘narrative good, exposition terrible,’ one researcher contrasts how well students do with persuasion and how poorly they do with argument’ (341).
“They will thus be able to ‘think abstractly’ because they will be learning how means make further meanings possible, how form finds further form. And we will, in our pedagogy of knowing, be giving our students back their language so that they can reclaim it as an instrument for controlling their becoming” (342).