Book Reviews
Issue 34.1 Spring 2006
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Self Development and College Writing, by Nick Tingle. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2004. 144 pages.
Reviewed by Patti Hanlon-Baker, Stanford University
Light bulb moments—the moments when students grasp new ideas, grasp what we’re saying about their writing, grasp that they have something important to say, and grasp the various ways of saying it for an intended audience. What is important to teachers in these moments is that students are making steps toward intellectual progress and these moves can be seen in their writing. For students, what is important about light bulb moments is that they sense something has progressed in their intellectual growth—even if they can’t determine exactly what. As compositionists, we are privy to seeing such transitions in student learning, especially through their writing, and our work is geared toward promoting them. Nick Tingle, in Self-Development and College Writing,begins with a version of such a moment as a launching point for his argument.
Tingle’s chapters are involved, his points layered and complex, and are due a discussion broader than this brief review will allow. In general, Tingle explains how psychoanalytic pedagogy (grounded in psychoanalytic theory) better allows us to guide intellectual development that post-secondary studies require. He begins his text with a review of psychoanalytic and developmental theories that explain how intellectual transitions occur, then he applies those theories to building a psychoanalytic writing pedagogy. Using examples of student writing developed from his course assignments, Tingle advocates for a theoretical stance and instructional strategies designed to help students experience light bulb moments, provoking larger intellectual transitions. His examples help to remind us—whether in our hallway conversations when we lament about the messiness of student work or moments of frustration when we respond to student papers—that we need to be sensitive to the intellectual hills that students climb as they progress through course work. His text serves as a reminder that messiness is normal as students move through steep learning curves.
Tingle asserts in chapter one, “Psychoanalysis and Development,” that “[l]earning to master academic writing is not simply a matter of mastering conventions but of actually changing in a basic way one’s ideology of self” (20). Thus the writing classroom can act “as transitional space” for students as they make the developmental move from third order consciousness to the fourth. Relying on Robert Kegan’s work, Tingle explains that the third order of consciousness is the level in which individuals can identify their social roles and view these roles as definitions of selves; the fourth order of consciousness requires individuals to recognize themselves as “different or distinct from its various social and empirical relations” (17). Tingle explains that the moments when students are faced with destabilizing forces, they have great potential to develop intellectually as these moments require students to negotiate social roles, ideas, experience, and words from a more complex perspective not easily understood based on previous definitions of self and their prior contexts.
In chapter two, “Academic Writing, Destabilization, and Extrospection,” Tingle examines how a sample writing assignment demonstrates the theory he advocates. He begins the chapter by asserting that the writing class should have readings “that could be defined as academic” (43), then he leads readers understanding student responses to assigned course readings. Students often claim to dislike course texts and/or not agree because writers’ points are “overgeneralizations.” Tingle believes that “[w]hen students criticize something as an ‘overgeneralization,’ they are registering an epistemological, not a moral, complaint” (43). As student read and write about ideas for the first time, they are forced to come to “know something about their relationship with the world . . . realize that something significant has just happened to them” (58)—they experience destabilization forces. Indications of such destabilizations can be seen in what students critique in course texts. What confounds students as readers may be central to our purposes for assigning such texts, as they are meant to provoke a more transparent analysis of rhetorical, structural, or other elements that we intend to use to guide students to ever more complex understanding and skill as readers and writers. Confounding moments can lead—with effective pedagogy—to light bulb moments. The problem with the “craft approach,” according to Tingle, is that often teachers focus on unclear theses or obvious, clichéd points students make and miss the indicators of intellectual destabilization that can be used to work towards a transition from third order consciousness to fourth order. Tingle believes we need to attend better to these moments and provide writing opportunities and responses that allow students to negotiate their destabilization, those moments when they “call into question and loosen their narcissistically informed allegiances to certain ideals, values, beliefs, and conceptions” (75).
In chapter three, “Theory, Selfobjects, and Falseness,” he uses Donna Qualley’s Turns of Thought and David Bartholomae’s “Inventing the University” to consider writing teachers’ use of theory and what the “writing class as transitional environment” might offer the writing teacher. Before reviewing their work, he discusses views on what drives teachers to teach—the what we do, why we do, and the what it could look like given more overt attention to our pedagogies. He uses this section to explain two positions writing instructors might slip into as they face students who just don’t seem to understand readings, concepts, or course discussions. The first as Tingle defines it is “the moral position [. . .] feeling that one is more valuable or, in some way, morally superior to one’s students [. . .]. The second position I call the amoral or realist position [. . .] asserts itself not as what ought to be but simply as what is” (82). Tingle explores Qualley’s argument that one must abandon one’s own voice to take on an academic voice as an example of the first position. Then, he describes Bartholomae’s point, that one must become someone else in order to take on this voice, as an example of the second position. Tingle argues against both positions, though recognizes why they might explain the approach to academic voice as they do, and suggests that in the writing classroom that relies on psychoanalytic pedagogy, instructors can recognize and appreciate the psychological effects of negotiating complex approaches to intellectual discussions for students as well as our own reasons for clinging to particular theoretical approaches.
In chapter four, “The Transitional Environment and Intersubjectivity,” Tingle provides a complete example of a student’s response to a combined reading and writing assignment in order to demonstrate a student’s step toward the fourth order of consciousness. The example serves to show that the student, although not completely consciously, begins to understand an issue from a more complex perspective. Tingle uses the example to demonstrate how, and his pedagogical choices are based on student work. He builds a case for an increased awareness of what we do and how those choices can influence the intellectual development he explains in earlier chapters. In the final section of the chapter, he makes an argument for allowing students to use the first-person “I” in writing; he argues that he is not proposing that students write “expressively” or “from personal experience” but instead encourages them to “read academic materials and to write about them from their particular ‘I-position,’ whatever that might be” (145). Earlier in the chapter he discusses that students see critiquing the text as sometimes critiquing the teacher. Tingle suggests revealing to students our reasons behind our choices, our changing relationships with texts, to help them identify their own changing relationships; such pedagogical transparency is important to his theory as it demonstrates for students what he is asking them to do in “I-position” writing. He also suggests that instructional transparency and I-position writing provides opportunities for intellectual advancement.
In many ways I agree with Tingle. The university, specifically the writing classroom, provides a context for students to explore what they think about new ideas, work toward intellectual progress. I agree that providing them opportunities to write through the questions/problems they have with texts makes sense. Short assignments, informal responses (homework or in class) that take the form of “I-writing” can help them move to more complicated analyses and arguments about ideas. But I’m left with questions about how well prepared most of us are to work from a psychoanalytic approach or even that it is a desirable approach for a composition classroom all of the time. I think students need to do more than investigate their responses to ideas. I think a rhetorical approach to the writing classroom can consider students response—even from a psychoanalytic view—and help students examine texts asking questions: Who is this written for? What effect is the writer hoping to have? What sorts of evidence is the writer using? Why this form of organization? These questions can also help students consider their own responses to texts and ask questions about how they are responding. While we have to acknowledge that the intellectual moves we are asking students to make are destabilizing, that these moves lead to messy writing, and that the writing classroom can be a transitional space, it is a course in writing. I don’t believe we can teach them to write for every discipline, at every level, but we can help them ask questions about how writing is put together, and I believe these questions can help them understand their own, and others, responses to texts and ideas. We can encounter those light bulb moments through various routes.
Tingle’s major contribution to the field is a reminder to us that very often what we ask students to do is quite simply, intellectually and emotionally challenging and that their responses reveal much about where they are intellectually—and finally, that our frustration with their responses reveals a lot about where we are intellectually and emotionally. It is the intersection of these points that Tingle is asking writing teachers to reflect upon.
Stanford, CA
