Book Review -- Feb. 23, 1999

Flower, Linda. The Construction of Negotiated Meaning: A Social Cognitive Theory of Writing.
Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University P, 1994.

by Shannon Thomas

˜ "Students are reading, misreading, and rereading the class, its books, their partners, testing out old notions, and constructing new, more complex webs of meaning" (297).

 

Table of Contents - (My review focuses on the italicized chapters)

Chapter 1 - Literate Acts

Chapter 2 - Constructing Negotiated Meaning

Chapter 3 - Construction as a Metaphor for Meaning Making

Chapter 4 - Construction Sites: Observations of Meaning Making in Learning

Development, and Literacy

Chapter 5 - Collaborative Planning: An Educator’s Account of a Constructive

Process

Chapter 6 - "Welcome to College": Construction and Negotiation in a Freshman

Class

Chapter 7 - Strategic Knowledge and the Logic of a Learner

Chapter 8 - Metacognition: a Strategic Response to Thinking

Chapter 9 - Reflection and the Reconstruction of a Literate Practice

Chapter 10 - Coming to Conclusions

Summary

Literate act: "an individual constructive act that does not merely invoke or participate

in a literate practice but embeds such practices and conventions within a personally meaningful, goal-directed use of literacy" (18).

Flower’s claims within the conversation of literacy:

1. Literacy is an action.

2. Literacy is a move within a discourse practice. "Recognizing that we are teaching not literacy but selected discourse practices opens the doors to diversity" (21).

3. Becoming literate depends on knowledge of social conventions and on individual problem solving. Discourse practices need to be appropriate within their discourse communities. "Constructive acts go beyond skills and drills; they go beyond imitation" (24) – compare to Plato.

4. The new "basics" should start with expressive and rhetorical practices.

• Students should be taught through practice and experience rather than direct instruction (26).

• Distinction between public discourse and private expression.

5. Literate action opens the door to metacognitive and social awareness.

Evaluation and Comments

• Using Flower’s definition of a literate act, how do we determine what is "personally meaningful" or what is "goal-directed"? How literate does the act have to be in order for others (teachers, evaluators, other readers) to decide that it is "goal-directed"? How does this fit into the social construction of what it meant by being literate?

• What is literate in one field may not qualify as literate in another (22-3). Flower gives an example about the way we, English-minded folk, might be able to understand the Wall Street Journal, let alone write a paper analysizing stocks and numbers (to disgress a little, which directly addresses an English majors’, specifically my, fear of math and the ability to understand and articulate problems or concepts in mathematics). How do we create standards of literacy across the curriculum (or do we)?

• How do we apply and account for what students of different geographical, national, religious, cultural and economic status produce for our classes? How do we help them communicate their beliefs to a more "universal audience" without infringing upon their rights as individuals to communicate their ideas in their own style?

The mastery of knowledge for which I, and Flower, would argue is the cognitive development of a student to be able to read, interpret and apply a body of literature (not necessarily in the classical/canonical sense); think through, compose and reconstruct their applications; apply that knowledge not only to their personal experience, but take it into a deeper, social understanding of that body; and then to readapt their construction to their audience, using learned conventions of social discourse. The idea adapting to social discourse would not eliminate the student’s ability to personalize a subject but reinforce their belief and understanding systems by taking them into a less individualistic, "others-conscious" level, hence the necessity for social learning and learning a stardardized way of communicating, what Flower terms metacognitive awareness.

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