Roundtable: “How can we better document, preserve, protect, and share our learning?” A Debate over the Preservation and Accessibility of Scholarship in
Composition Studies and Writing Program Administration |
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An overload of information, that is, anything much beyond what is truly needed, leads to information blackout. It does not enrich, but impoverishes. Peter F. Drucker, Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices (1977) |
If we are to take ourselves seriously as an intellectual field—and deserve the respect of those in other fields—then lore must give way to databases! David R. Russell, WPA-L, 7/30/2002 |
Resolved That an ongoing, exhaustive record of scholarship, now made possible by technology, runs counter to the interests and well-being of writing programs and their administration. |
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Affirmative |
Negative |
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1. |
The local regulations that writing teachers and writing program apply do not need past knowledge to function. |
A writing program needs past knowledge since it operates by a constant improvement of regulations so that their application will have better effect, and both the improvement and effect can only be understood through knowledge of the past. |
2. |
Teachers and administrators don't need knowledge of the past; they need recommendations for action provided through policy statement, textbooks, and other summaries, not a mountain of scholarship. |
Teachers and administrators need to appraise the mountain—all the available history and all the available facts—and do so themselves in order to keep from being manipulated by interests other than their own, including the interests of the people who write policy statements, textbooks, and summaries. |
3. |
Teachers and administrators do not have time to read and apply all the available history and all the available facts; indeed the more of it is available, the less the task is feasible. |
The task depends on the kind of scholarship that is available. Teachers and administrators do have the time to read and apply all the scholarly knowledge if summaries, synopses, keywording, and reviews of the research and scholarship are made available in pace with the full record of scholarship now deliverable by technology. |
4. |
The full record of scholarship can now be delivered by technology, true, but who is going to locate and enter it into the delivery systems? The job of teaching or administering composition does not afford people the time to do that. |
Technology now also provides ways for large groups of people to interconnect, so that the task of locating and entering the record can be divided up to the point that one individual's contribution, even a busy teacher's, even a busier WPA's, is doable. |
5. |
But why should a WPA or a teacher do it? Scholarship in composition does not progress as does research in science; rather it circles back through old emphases, perspectives, and trends. An exhaustive record of the scholarship of the past would contain huge amounts of redundant information. |
Scholarship in composition is full of redundancies in part because a full record of it has never been readily accessible. A full and easily consulted record of the past work would help keep teachers, WPAs, and scholars (not that the three are mutually exclusive) from duplicating what has already been done. |
6. |
Back to the "full record," I see. But why should "record" be a given? The mode of knowledge creation, elaboration, and dissemination most appropriate to composition is lore. Lore is a mode that does not need formal keeping of records for its viability, much less an exhaustive keeping of records. |
Lore may be the most common mode of knowledge in the daily enterprise of composition programs but that does not mean it is flawless or can't be bettered. Informal exchange of knowledge—lore—is subject to distortion, distortion that can be critiqued by the past record of formal knowledge. Thus lore grows. |
7. |
What is the nature of that growth? Formal or informal, new knowledge maintains older knowledge that is relevant and discards old knowledge that is not relevant. A full record would just hinder the natural growth of knowledge. |
Time and again in other disciplines, advances in knowledge have been prompted with a return to neglected scholarship. Why not also in composition? To neglect a contribution to the field is one thing; to discard it—block ways back to it—is another. |
8. |
Yet so much of what has been published in composition is local and situational—that is, designed for a short shelf life. Why preserve it? |
Preserve it so it can be used for comparison. The local and the situational are defined as such by comparison with other locales and situations. Out of the comparison are born the local regulations that form a course or a program. |
9. |
The local regulations that writing teachers and writing program apply do not need past knowledge to function. |
A writing program needs past knowledge because . . . [et cetera]. |