- “In the early 1970s, this new perspective blossomed into what many compositionists perceived as a revolution in teach….The cognitivist’s interest in writing as a process shifted the focus of writing instruction to the internal experiences and perspectives of the student. These approaches began to envision identity as emerging internally, and urged compositionists to recognize that each individual interpreted the world around them in ways quite distinct from others. Similarly, expressivists saw writing as an act that authenticates and affirms the self” (83).
- “In contrast, scholarly investigations of discourse and composition in the 1980s began to view writing as a complex process that conveys and creates knowledge…Social constructionist approaches to composition expanded the way we thought of identity, asset that it emerged not just form the internal process of the individual, but also from a wider variety of influences: the social conventions we share with other human beings…; that is, social constructionists urged us to see identity not as something internal, singular, and centered, but as a language construct generated by discourse communities and used by them to maintain community coherence” (83-4).
- “In the 1990s, the social constructionist approach has been a useful stating about point for examining the ways in which discourse is political and ideological – as evidenced by [critical] and cultural studies approaches to composition…They have urged us to look at the greater political and ideological forces that structure our ways of thinking, and, consequently, our conceptions of who we are in relation to the rest of the world” (84).
However, he believes, “Our current conceptions of identity are pre-ecological; we have not yet recognized that the whole spectrum of the nonhuman physical environment is embedded in each of our identities” (81). By “nonhuman physical environment,” he seems to mean living entities as opposed to nonliving objects. “Ecological selves perceive their interconnection with others and comprehend the degree to which their own identities are inseparable from the nonhuman world – a recognition that the material world ‘out there’ is a part of our identity ‘in here.’ This recognition accounts for our relationships with locations, material objects, and constructed spaces as well as with the other life-forms and ecosystems that sustain us” (86).
I can connect the concepts of ecologies of composition to environmental sustainability in this way: “What a ‘green’ conception of identity doesn’t need to focus exclusively on the natural world, individuals who recognize the ecological dimensions of identity of align themselves with environmentalist perspectives, since they are concerned with the perseveration and appreciation of all diverse ecological systems” (87). Weisser also argues that the way we see our relationship to nature directly affects how we treat other humans.