- Practitioners
- Scholars
- Researchers
“Any mode of inquiry can be adapted to investigate a range of problems in writing; each would require, in some form, access to writers, their texts, their situations, their readers, and so on; and the interview, the questionnaire, the writing prompt – al the means by which information about such things might be gathered – might as easily be harnessed by one sort of Researcher as another” (275).
Impetus for book: “In the twenty years of its modern history, then, Composition has gone from begin the least prestigious leg in the ‘tripod’ of the English curriculum to a fairly substantial academic ‘society.’ In the first phase of this transformation, methodological differences were disguised or ignored in deference to unity toward a common goal, the divestiture of the Practitioners. During the second phase, those methodological difference have begun to clash” (363). As Composition is fragmenting, we need to (1) separate from literary studies and (2) find “the grounds for an inter-methodological coherence,” which includes a “re-establishment of Practice as inquiry” (370-1).
Practitioners
Practitioners are interested in the practical applications of knowledge to the classroom. The majority of practitioner knowledge is shared through (oral) lore: “the accumulated body of traditions, practices, and beliefs in terms of which Practitioners understand how writing is done, learned and taught” (22). Lore is “driven…by a pragmatic logic: It is concerned with what has worked, is working, or might work in teaching, doing, or learning [and] its structure is essentially experiential” (23). Anything can be accepted into lore by anyone’s experiences about what has or might work. Nothing is dropped from lore after it is added. Lore is adapted to individual experience, though it is influenced through community as “communal lore offers options, resources, and perhaps some directional pressure” (28). Lore is the least valued mode of inquiry. Practice becomes inquiry: “(a) when the situation cannot be framed in familiar terms, so that any familiar strategies will have to be adapted for use; (b) when, although the situation is perceived as familiar, standard applications are no longer satisfactory, and so new approaches are created for it; (c) when both the situation and approach are non-standard” (33). Practice-as-inquiry has six steps: “(1) Identify a Problem (2) Search for Cause(s) (3) Searching for Possible Solutions (4) Testing Solution in Practice (5) Validation (6) Dissemination” (36).
Historian (Scholar)
Historians “work to provide a coherent past for the field” (59). Historians treat texts as objects “from which they construct a portrait of the past” (60). “The text-as-object is a kind of evidence, a record…of some event in a series of events” (61). North identifies two generations of Historians: (1) those who study the history of Rhetoric (what North calls the pedagogical history) and (2) those who study “historical materials as sources of potentially useful practices [in order] “to account for the political, economic, educational, and other forces that have affect writing instruction…in the Unities States” (what North calls the institutional history) (67). Historians can introduce new knowledge by adding new contributions to the historical narrative – which is accomplished by finding “textual evidence of some kind…to support her claim for the occurrence of the event” (69) – or by finding new connections between events – which will be debated (and found acceptable or not) by scholarly dialect. Historical inquiry follows these steps (71):
- Identifying the Problem
- Empirical Stage: Identifying Relevant Texts; Searching for Relevant Texts; Assembling and Validating Relevant Texts
- Interpretive Stage: Seeking Pattern(s) in Texts; Explaining the Pattern(s): Creating a Narrative; Relating New Narrative to Existing Narratives: The Communal Dialectic; Dissemination to a Wider Audience
Philosopher (Scholar)
Philosophers want “to account for, to frame, critique and analyze the field’s fundamental assumptions and beliefs” (91). Texts are “not objects of inquiry but its medium: various portions of, voices in, the continuing debate…of which their own inquires are a contemporary extension” (60). Philosophy, then, derives its identity from its method, not its subject matter, with the result…that its practitioners are free to turn their attention to any issue whatever” (95-6). This also means that “what matters is how one investigates, not what” (99). This mode of inquiry “is good at framing problems, at making them accessible in this ways so that other sorts of inquirers have a better sense of what they’re involved in” (97). The steps that Philosophers follow are (99):
- Identifying Problems
- Establishing Premises
- Making Argument(s)
- The Communal Dialectic
- Drawing Conclusion(s): Dissemination to a Wider Audience
Critic (Scholar)
Critics fall under the category of Hermeneutical. Critics have “three major concerns: (a) establishing a body of texts, usually called a canon, for interpretation; (b) the interpretation of those texts; and (c) generating theories about (a) and (b) – that is, about what constitutes a canon, how interpretation should proceed and to what end” (116). For the Critic, “the text itself is, in some sense the ‘event’: that her concern is the relationship between that text and its writer(s), its reader(s), its language(s), and some version of the world (which includes, of course, other texts)” (61). Hermeneutical knowledge is “knowledge about the meaning of texts, derived from the act of reading, articulated as critical analysis, and refined by dialectic” (119). “Hermeneutical inquiry provides [us] access to voices, our own and others: access to the nature of consciousness, in effect, and the way it makes the world in words” (131-2). Critics follow these steps (120):
- Identifying the Problem(s)
- Empirical Stage: Identifying Relevant Text(s) [Bibliography]; Searching for Text(s); Assembling and Validating Text(s)
- Interpretive Stage: Seeking Pattern(s) in Texts; Explaining the Pattern(s): Generating an Interpretation; Relating New Interpretation to Existing Interpretations: The Communal Dialectic; Dissemination to a Wider Audience
Experimentalist (Researcher)
Experimentalists are “those who seek to discover generalizable ‘laws’ which can account for – and ideally, predict – the ways in which people do, teach, and learn writing” (137). Their goal is to create reproducible inquiries that work to get as close as possible to patterns and processes that will always hold true. However, because there is no “absolute certainty…all Experimentalist knowledge, no matter how carefully or rigorously tested, remains relative, a probability” (151). Most often, they use an inductive method. Experimental Inquiry follows these steps:
- Identifying the Problem
- Designing the Experiment
- Conducting the Experiment: Collecting and Analyzing the Data
- Interpreting the Data
- Drawing Conclusions: Dissemination to a Wider Audience
Clinician (Researcher)
North asserts that Emig was a large part of the spread of the Clinical method (197). Clinicians “are concerned with what is unique and particular in some unit within a population (a writer, a teacher, a writing tutorial, etc.), but they also bring to bear on their investigations all that they know about the larger population of which that unit is part; in short, they are concerned with the manifestations of those general laws in particular instances” (200). “The Clinical method…is valuable precisely for what it reveals about individuals” (137). “Clinical knowledge accumulates by accretion. In contrast to its Experimental counterpart, it approaches the world it studies by examining phenomena again and again, looking at them from different angles, probing them in different ways, aiming to render a composite…image…[C]omprehensiveness, not replicability or the need for investigative unanimity that drive [inquiry]” (205). Clinicians rely on their relationships with their “subjects to get the information [they] want” (208). The Clinicians follow these steps (307):
- Identifying Problems
- Designing the Study
- Collecting and Analyzing Data
- Interpreting the Data: Contributions to the Canon
- Drawing Conclusions: Implications for Research and Teaching
Formalist (Researcher)
“Rather than dealing directly with the phenomenon they wish to study, then, Formalists attempt to create an analogue for it – a model, a simulation…[and these] self-contained systems which by definition perfectly…; so while the model may work perfectly, its correspondence to any of the empirical systems for which it might claim to be an analogue – even when there is only one such system – must be demonstrated Experimentally” (138). The systems that Formalists create are tautological in that they must exist and function only within themselves (242). Successive approximation – testing a model to see if its inputs might lead to empirical outputs (254) – is “at the heart of Formalist work” (243). The steps that Formalists follow are (243):
- Identification of Problems/Constructing a Model
- Formalization
- Testing and Refining the Model: Successive Approximation
- Dissemination to a Wider Audience: The Uses of Formalist Knowledge
Ethnographer (Researcher)
Ethnographers immerse themselves into a community in order to find out how the community makes meaning (278). “Ethnographic findings are made in the context of, and thus tied to, the specific phenomena accounted for” (278). “In ethnographic inquiry, individual studies simply don’t add up in the same way. With no single, paradigmatic reality to close in on, the phenomenological-based Ethnographers are essentially in the business of collecting multiple versions of what is held to be real by the people they investigate…rather than working to close in on what is essential or fundamental about it, investigators are better understood as looking to unseat their own taken-for-granted notions of what it is – what it means, how it comes to mean – by investigating and then presenting accounts of alternate meanings” (279). They follow these steps:
Identifying Problems: Finding a Setting
Entering the Setting
Collecting Data: Inscription
Interpretation: Identifying Themes
Verification
Dissemination