My colleague Todd Taylor weighs in—and thinks he also might be the source for my “formula.” Here, from Todd’s textbook is his version of the three-pronged statement about what we should, as teachers, be aiming to enable our students to do.
- To gather the most relevant and persuasive evidence.
- To identify a pattern among that evidence.
- To articulate a perspective supported by your analysis of the evidence.
And here are Todd’s further thoughts:
“I might have been a source for the ‘neat formula’ you mention, since I’ve been preaching that three-step process as “The Essential Skill for the Information Age” for over a decade now. I might have added the formula to the Tar Heel Writing Guide. I am attaching a scan of my textbook Becoming a College Writer where I distill the formula to its simplest form. I have longer talks on the formula, with notable points being that step #1 sometimes includes generating information beyond just locating someone else’s data. And step #3, articulating a perspective for others to follow (or call to action or application), is the fulcrum where “content-consumption, passive pedagogy” breaks down and “knowledge-production, active learning” takes off.
The high-point of my experience preaching this formula was when a senior ENGL 142 student shared with me the news of a job interview that ended successfully at the moment when she recited the three steps in response to the question ‘What is your problem solving process?’
In my textbook, I also have a potentially provocative definition of a “discipline” as “a method (for gathering evidence) applied to a subject,” which is my soft attempt to introduce epistemology to GenEd students. What gets interesting for us rhet/discourse types is to consider how a “discipline” goes beyond steps #1 and #2 and includes step #3 so that a complete definition of “discipline” also includes the ways of articulating/communicating that which emerges from the application of a method to a subject. I will forever hold onto to my beloved linguistic determinism. Of course, this idea is nothing new to critical theorists, especially from Foucault. What might be new(ish) is to try to explain/integrate such ideas within the institution(s) of GenEd requirements and higher ed. I expect if I studied Dewey again, I could trace the ideas there, just as I expect other folks have other versions of the ‘neat formula.'”
Todd also raised another issue with me that is (at least to me) of great interest. The humanities are wedded, we agreed, to “interpretation.” And it makes sense to think of interpretation as a “method” or “approach” that is distinct from the qualitative/quantitative divide in the social sciences. Back to Dilthey. Explanation versus meaning. Analysis versus the hermeneutic. But perhaps even more than that, since quantitative/qualitative can be descriptors applied to the data itself, whereas interpretation is about how you understand the data. So no science, even with all its numbers, without some sort of interpretation. In other words, quantitative/qualitative doesn’t cover the whole field. There is much more to be said about how we process information than simply saying sometimes we do it via numbers and sometimes via other means.
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