McCormick - Blog 1

REACTIONS to McCormick: What do you like? What's don't you like? What seems problematic?

I must confess that prettymuch everything we’ve read this semester, my initial reaction has been whole-hearted affirmation, followed by skepticism, followed by varying degrees of “oh hell no!” I just finished reading the first three chapters of McCormick and I’m, like, head-over-heels in love with socio-cultural model, her critiques of both objectivism and expressivism (which I was largely reared under), and the conception of general and literary ideologies in dialogue through the reading process. There, I said it. I’m in the choir, and McCormick is preaching my religion.

Here are some points McCormick made that particularly rang true to my experience:

“Believing that literary texts possess timeless truths is certainly a dominant part of most students’ literary repertoires…”  Uh, yes. That’s exactly what I was taught:  that we study the canon because it has something to teach us about universal human experience. That human experience might not be “universal” never occurred to me or, it seems, to any of my teachers K-undergrad. It was only as I entered the world as a so-called “educated” woman that I began to perceive that there may be some disconnect between my experience, my reality, my truth and others. I was then able to question the notion that some of my early/youthful readings of texts were not “wrong,” as I had been told by cognitive theorists in high school, nor “important just because you thought it,” as my expressivist private college profs would have had me believe. McCormick might say that my “repertoire” had changed.

I love McCormick’s idea, at the end of Chapter 3, that various readings of a text can be considered more correct than others when social, cultural and historical considerations are taken and analyzed. I would like to engage in a class that encourages such critical engagement. It could only be beneficial to the cognitive and metacognitive development of our students. Whether it prepares them for other “college-level” reading and writing tasks is another story.

That is the single early concern that I can name:  if various college (and life) disciplines still revolve around objectivist views, then students will need to be able to seek out “correct” answers from texts and have some awareness of what schemata they bring to the table or are lacking, etc. I don’t think that’s a good—or particularly interesting—way to view the world, but I could see students complaining in the years following a McCormick class that they wished they’d figured out how to summarize and reader-respond to a text or glean facts from a textbook for an exam. I don’t know if I even believe this criticism, but I think it’s something that’s at play in the text and in our college departments.