Generating New Theory for Online Writing Instruction (OWI)

Stephen North

Stephen North (1987) describes his eight methodological communities of Composition study as follows:

1. Practitioners: Practitioners gain knowledge through practice and share that knowledge, often orally, but powerfully through some influential writers (22).  North calls the body of knowledge developed by practitioners lore, which he believes is an experiential logic “concerned with what has worked, is working, or might work in teaching, doing, or learning writing” (23). 

2. Scholars: Scholars “share the humanist tradition’s reliance on what can be broadly defined as dialectic—that is, the seeking of knowledge via the deliberate confrontation of opposing points of view” (60).  Yet, North believes, because of the historically marginalized position of Composition studies within most English departments, there are fewer scholars of Composition than one might expect (61).
   1. Historians: Historians strive to uncover and present a “coherent past for the field” (59).

   2. Philosophers: Philosophers consider the “nature of inquiry itself” and thus seek “to examine the philosophical underpinnings of Composition” (60).

   3. Critics: Critics work within what North calls a Hermeneutical mode, dealing with the interpretation of texts (60).

3. Researchers: According to North, the primary charter of the new field of Composition in 1962, was the document called Research in Written Communication, which called for empirical research into Composition and eschewed any exploration that might be considered non-scientific (16-17).  Thus, a slow process of developing research-based modes of inquiry began (135).
   1. Experimentalists: Experimentalists “seek to discover generalizable ‘laws’ which can account for—and, ideally, predict—the ways in which people do, teach, and learn writing” (137).

   2. Clinicians: Clinicians focus primarily on “individual ‘cases’: most commonly, the ways in which a particular subject does, learns, or teaches writing” (137).

   3. Formalists: Formalist use “formal inquiry” to “build models or simulations by means of which they attempt to examine the formal properties of the phenomena under study” (137).

   4. Ethnographers: Ethnographers “make. . . stories, fictions” and are concerned with “people as members of communities,” whereby their mode of inquiry enables them “to produce knowledge in the form of narrative accounts of what happens in those communities” (137).