Mr Bean Gives Birth

Mr. Bean with Books

As a composition instructor of... oh, my... nine years?! Lordy! As a composition instructor of nine years and an English instructor for over thirteen years, reading a text such as Engaging Ideas by John C. Bean  seemed a bit superfluous. Seriously?! What could he have to say that the hundreds of other texts forced upon me by multiple institutions or by my own warped sense of self-development and curricula improvement did not already say?

The thing is that it's not so much that his statements and claims are outrageous and ground-breaking, mind-blowing revelations.  It's more that he validates many things that we, composition teachers and writers, already know, but he provides the evidence and studies to help prove that we do know what we are talking about.  

The transformative action of writing itself- whether through the manual manipulation of the pen or pencil or the typing of keys, allows the writer to explore and create knowledge that can, it seems, only be revealed, uncovered, discovered, created? through the act of writing itself.  I often equate my writing to giving birth; I pace; I stretch; I sit, lay, rest in odd positions; I sometimes groan and howl in pain. But, eventually, the draft appears.  Many a morning would dawn with sunshine rays illuminating a nicely printed and stapled draft on the table.  One I barely recognize as the horror and pain of the "birthing" or writing process becomes more and more suppressed as time goes on.  Bean refers to Elbow's description of the writing process as tortuous (24).  And as I introduce my FYC students to the idea of the process of writing (Writing in Transit ), starting from the moment the teacher introduces the theme/ topic of the writing, the student should be uncomfortable.  It is in this state, within what Spivak refers to as the double-bind, that growth, reflection, and new knowledge is achieved.  

My thought is this:

In what ways can we help students be accepting of this "double-bind" (Spivak) or "brouillon stage" as Bean terms the "a creative period of confusion and disorder" (18)?  As instructors, we don't want the students to be comfortable with the discomfort as that would be counterproductive.  But, how do we help them to function within this state of discomfort in order to produce and continue through and not succumb to the sometimes crippling fear like deer in headlights? My gut tells me the answer may be in the trust between the student and the instructor.

Some Interesting Quotes to Consider:

"to put it another way, writing is like the box and wrapping paper into which we put our already formulated ideas.  Once writing is imagined as 'packaging' students find little use for it" (Bean 17).  

"critical thinking as 'an investigation whose purpose is to explore a situation, phenomenon, question, or problem to arrive at a hypothesis or conclusion about it that integrates all available information and that can therefore be convincingly justified" (Kurfiss qutd Bean 21).

"what our beginning college writers do not understand, therefore, is the view of academic life implied by writing across the curriculum, where writing means joining a conversation of persons who are, in important ways, fundamentally disagreeing with each other, or, to make the matter less agonistic, jointly seeing answers to shared questions that puzzle them" (Bean 22).

"The student longs for a 'right answer,' resisting the frightening prospect of having to make meanings and defend them.  Good writing assignments produce exactly this kind of discomfort: the need to join, in a reasoned way, a conversation of differing voices" (Bean 23).