In chapter 7 of Naming What We Know, Doug Down and Liane Robertson show how threshold concepts can be applied to first year writing courses. I am appreciative of how they demonstrate the interplay between learning outcomes and threshold concepts, showing several examples of learning outcomes in conversation with threshold concepts that meet first year writing students where they are in their understanding of writing. Particularly helpful in thinking of threshold concepts intersecting with some new materialist thought is their discussion on textuality on page 108. They say, “we are concerned with overturning the misconception that form and content are separable; writing integrates them as arranged material.” This idea is taken from the threshold concept Text is an Object Outside of One’s Self that can Be Improved or Developed.
It is interesting to me to think of the metaphors at play that are based on materials and technologies, and how these materials leave a trace in our education that required a kind of unsettling the sediment so that we can name what we know. The idea of “arranged material” carries an interesting trace of intra-action between human and nonhuman agents. Stemming from French military terminology (to put soldiers in a formation), “arrange” has an underlying metaphor of physical movement and control. I think of arranging material objects like furniture or flowers or intangible objects like a schedule or thoughts. In conceiving of writing as arranged material, how does the technologies available service this metaphor for our students? In days of only paper, there may be a quite physical arrangement of materials that could be reordered with the right tools. Word processing brings “cut/copy/paste” functions that imitate the kind of moves scissors and glue could make. Today as writing can be done using tools such as Scribner, the arrangement of materials imitates physical shuffling of written ideas.
Does the phrase “arranged material” metaphorically capture the essence of writing? Does it bolster the physicality and material nature of writing, or does it ask students to conceive of moves that are too far removed from what is physically happening in the writing process?
I wonder about the choice “arranged material” rather than “constructed” material. Arranged makes it seem like students are not creating or building new ideas, just taking others’ ideas and putting them in new orders. On the other hand “constructed” can similarly imply using others’ building blocks, but also implies the bringing forth of something new.
Jack, both you and Meg raise interesting points. For me, writing seems a much less creative act than an assembly of ideas, arranged and rearranged in order to make sense of and articulate clearly the perspective of the writer. For this reason, I found this metaphor helpful. However, I’m wondering, as you are, what students would say? I think it would be an interesting class activity to ask a group at the beginning of a writing class, and then again at the end, to describe which metaphor they think is most appropriate, and why. Thanks for this post; I enjoyed reading it!