I didn’t even think about this, but Jeff Ward does a great job of linking Trimbur’s article to the work of Geoffrey Sirc, writing:
Geof’s mission, or at least my take on it based in direct conversation as well as reading his book English Composition as a Happening, is that part of what makes it fascinating is its utter ignorance and lack of concern with composing practices outside the closed box of the university. […]
Sirc’s book is an attempt to refocus composition by going outside the discipline to look at composing practices in a wider context. To recalibrate the discipline by looking at the larger “compositional economy.“ I am very much in favor of that. The history of writing studies is enlightening in that it shows just how little pedagogical practice has actually changed—although each succeeding generation damns its forbearers, they continue to perpetuate them. It represents a solid center for a dicipline, but it is not evocative of a radical, or even transformative, pedagogy. Why are compositionists scared to take on the world?
This sounds right on. (I post this here more as a reminder to myself than for anything else.)
