Abstract

The "writing process" and "writing to learn" approaches to teaching writing, developed in the last three decades, represent not only a practical change in the teaching of writing and the roles of written discourse in education, but also a philosophical change in the ways we understand discourse, learning, human mental activity and the nature of knowledge. Implicit in both the theory and practice of these approaches is a powerful critique of the positivist epistemological foundations which underlie current educational practice, theory and research. Positivism separates personal knowledge from public knowing and denies it authority. Instead these reforms offer us an implicit epistemology which affirms personal knowledge and includes it in what James Moffett has called "the universe of discourse" in and through which all human knowing is constructed. This philosophical shift has profound implications for the classroom and for the generation of knowledge because it gives us an understanding of knowledge making, learning, discourse, composition--as many in the field have called it "the making of meaning"--in which the intrinsic interrelatedness of the practical, the personal and the philosophical can be understood, affirmed and pedagogically enacted