1986. New Orleans. The Conference on College Composition and Communication. The two of us and Elaine O. Lees are presenting on a panel titled “ReaderResponse Theory and the Teaching of Writing: The Teacher as Responding Reader.” Our titles? Salvatori: “Some Implications of Iser’s Theory of Reading for the Teaching of Writing.” Donahue: “Barthes and the Obtuse Reader.” Lees: “Is There an Error in This Text? What Stanley Fish’s Theory of Reading Implies about the Teaching of English.” There was something special about the Conference on College Composition and Communication that year, especially for anyone concerned about reading. A few books had already been published: Composition and Literature: Bridging the Gap, edited by Winfred Bryan Horner (1983); Writ­ ing and Reading Differently, edited by G. Douglas Atkins and Michael Johnson (1985); Only Connect, edited by Thomas Newkirk (1986); and Conver­ gences: Transactions in Reading and Writing, edited by Bruce T. Peterson (1986). More appeared to be on the way, for instance, Reclaiming Pedagogy: The Rhetoric of the Classroom, edited by Patricia Donahue and Ellen Quandahl (1989). College English and College Composition and Communication were brimming with provocative investigations. Interest in reading was, paradoxically, both bourgeoning and at its apex, which we came to recognize only in retrospect. Over the next few years, while we and a few others (most notably David Bartholomae, Elizabeth Flynn, Joseph Harris, David Jolliffe, Kathleen McCormick, Susan Miller, Thomas Newkirk, and Donna Qualley)

A question that captured our attention many years ago and continues to motivate our work, although the audience for that work has expanded and contracted over the years, is “What about reading?” In this essay we adopt a term used to frame discussion at the 2010 CCCC “remix”to revisit in three ways the role of reading in composition studies: in terms of accepted constructions of disciplinary history (and the status of reader-response theory within that history), students (the erasure of “students” as a category of analysis), and the CCCC Convention program (the disappearance and reappearance of reading as a category of professional inquiry).

This article examines the disappearance of the student as a site for theoretical investigation. It considers the ramifications of this development for the disciplinary self-identification of composition studies and for a larger understanding of pedagogy as self-reflexive praxis.

Reviewed are What the Best College Teachers Do by Ken Bain and Life on the Tenure Track: Lessons from the First Year by James M. Lang.

Review Article| January 01 2003 Pedagogy Lost and Regained Patricia Donahue Patricia Donahue Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Pedagogy (2003) 3 (1): 127–134. https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-3-1-127 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Patricia Donahue; Pedagogy Lost and Regained. Pedagogy 1 January 2003; 3 (1): 127–134. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-3-1-127 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsPedagogy Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2003 Duke University Press2003 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Besides the editors, the essayists are Lori Chamberlain, Michael Clark, Dennis A. Foster, Jon Klancher, Randall Knoper, Elaine O. Lees, Mariolina Salvatori, and Nina Schwartz. Donahue and Quandahl present accessible and exciting efforts to explore composition teaching in a new mode perhaps, a pristine paradigm of cultural criticism. Approximately half of the essays investigate the pedagogical agenda implied in the theories of a particular writer Barthes, Lacan, or Burke, for exampleand place such theories in the The remaining essays examine pedagogy as a critical practice. The book does not advocate a single method of instruction but instead reminds us that theory is itself continually modified by the classroom.

The theory that reading is composing-an open-ended, investigative, and active process-is hardly new. Over the past few years, writing teachers have turned their attention to reading and extended the useful term to describe not only the recursive movement among the pre-writing, drafting, and revising stages of writing, but also the construction of meaning through reading. The theories they have drawn on range from the work of reading researchers like Harry Singer, Frank Smith, and Charles Cooper and Anthony Petrosky to critical theorists like Wolfgang Iser, Louise Rosenblatt and Roland Barthes.' While it is difficult to generalize about such wide-ranging work, a quick review of the literature of constructive reading shows agreement on one point: the power of conventions, or schemata, to shape our understanding of a text. But the language for naming this phenomenon is divergent. Reading researchers describe the process of composing meaning in apparently neutral terms-comprehending, reading for meaning, learning from text-and some separate a literal from an interpretive level of reading,2 using Benjamin Bloom's taxonomy (89-90), influential since the 1950s. Critical theorists, on the other hand, show that all composed meanings are interpretations; this is the view we want to illustrate as we describe, theoretically and practically, a sequence of writing assignments used to encourage interpretation in our introductory composition classes. In our view, the same questions asked by critical theory-what is reading, what is the status of a text, how do we clarify approaches to interpretation-are questions to be asked by composition teachers, whose job is to teach students how to compose readings of texts, literary and non-literary, written and nonwritten. With this aim in mind, we agreed to define interpretation as a process of both reading and writing. We discarded conventional injunctions to look at the words, as if simply gazing at words on the page would force them into meaning. We insisted instead that good readers must understand the assumptions that determine what they see, that good writers do not wait for meaning to take