It's interesting that this fascinating discussion is occurring
at one of the points in the year when, I would guess, most of us
have the least time. Maybe this is for others (as it seems to
be for me) a way to procrastinate . . .
I want to pick up one thing Doug says:
> What I was referring to in my Inkshed article (I think) is
> the broader sense of inkshedding referred to by Russ in his
> recent post. This means, generally, almost everything you do
> with text except the extremes of (a) a bit of lame oral
> discussion in which the teacher fishes for the right answer,
> and (b) essays written to impress the teacher, who is the only
> one who will, however unwillingly, read it. Freewrites,
> semi-freewrites, ungraded assignments, peer review, on-line
> postings, and any number of strategies fill this position. I
> use them all in varying amounts depending on what I'm
> teaching and what I'm trying to do with it.
For me (and I don't know if this is true for others) the crucial
think about inkshedding is its social embeddedness -- that is,
that the writing carries immediate, felt rhetorical force: it's
read, read for what it says, and is written with the knowledge
that that's going to happen.
So (and Peter Elbow and I have had a couple of long talks about
this at the Canmore Inkshed, and since) for me freewiting, in
the classic Elbows on the table sense, is not actually
inkshedding, since its point is that it's free of the
constraints placed on writing that's going to be public (or at
least read by _somebody_ other than a teacher as examiner). Nor
is an ungraded assignment -- nor, really, peer-reviewed writing,
because the peer reviewer's reading (and expected to read) to
evaluate and help rather than to engage (cf. _The Bat-Poet_).
-- Russ
St. Thomas University
http://www.stu.ca/~hunt/
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