Gallagher: What Writers Do Pt. 1 (Dani):
● Others want to reduce writing to a set of measurable behaviors
● “Our antipathy to behaviorism does not change the fact that we are in the behavior business; we are, and should be, centrally concerned with what writers do”
● Behaviorism is at best a slippery concept with a muddled intellectual pedigree
● Many different versions of behaviorism exist
● According to Skinner, behaviorism is “an empirical, pragmatic philosophy devoted to understanding and explaining human (and other animal) behavior and learning as environmental phenomena (Thyer)”
● Shout-out to Flower & Hayes
● Discussion of behaviorism’s history
● “[w]hether you care to admit it or not, you are in the business of changing, shaping, and creating behavior in your students” (Porter)
● Robert Zoellner: most controversial behaviorist figure in composition history
○ Largely forgotten today
○ Rejected current-traditional on behavioral & humanist grounds
○ Talk-write method
>Zoellner thinking was that he wanted to understand behavior but not control it.
>Teachers should reinforce behaviors that promote learning, but anything other makes them "Less fully human"
>Zoellnerism is a barand of "behaviorist composition."
>Mike rose vilified behaviorism, even though he was interested in it
>Boice made some big steps for promoting behaviorism, especially in combating writer's block
>In his own chapter in When a Writer Can’t Write, Rose suggests that “[m]ethods from behavioral science, anthropology, and literary studies need not be seen as incompatible”
>Even as these writers extol Zoellner, however, they take care to distance themselves from the B-WORD.
>I hope this article has shown both that we have much to learn from our field’s historical engagement with behaviorism and that our antipathy toward the b-word should not preclude us from giving serious scholarly and pedagogical attention to writers’ behaviors.