Pesky process books

It’s not the destination, it’s the journey: its a truism of sorts — or maybe a cliché?  But some authors, particularly those who work in pedagogy, take this line rather too literally.  Some of my favorite books are also the ones that drive me nuts because they make you experience what they are talking about rather than just telling you what they’ve found out.

A good example of this is Sophie Haroutunian-Gordon’s work on teaching through discussion groups. I love these books and have learned a lot from them despite the fact that they are focused on primary and secondary education. Discussion is the holy grail of college teaching and yet many college teachers don’t know how to make it happen, why exactly its so important, or what specifically it consists in. The SH-G answers all these questions. Check out the first chapter of her most recent book.

The thing is, H-G is a card-carrying Deweyian and as a result she doesn’t think you can learn how to have a discussion by just reading a set of instructions about how to have a discussion, or to quickly scan a few short suggestions. Instead, you have to go through the process of watching (well, reading) someone learn how to hold great discussion classes.

This insistence that you can only learn by going through the process is mirrored in another of my favorite books, Robert Boice’s How Writers Journey to Comfort and Fluency: A Psychological Adventure. I think this is the best and — frankly — most amazing book about writing that I have ever read. In the book Boice, a psychotherapist (but not the weird scary kind) and professor of rhetoric (iirc) leads you through one of his writing workshops as if you were a participant. Like H-G, he makes you go through the process of slowly working through the workshop and your own issues in order to help you journey to comfort and fluency as a writer.

Actually, Boice is slightly cynical about the idea that readers will focus on the journey and not the destination. Apparently the first step many authors in his workshop take is to demand that he simply hypnotize them and remove their writer’s block that way. And then… he does! They run around for a week convinced they no longer have writer’s block but not actually writing anything and then finally return to the fold, convinced that they have to take the long way around.

Similarly, Boice provides the readers a numbered list of Official Insights about how to be a good writer, but it is clear that these are best viewed as signposts along the way, not ‘results’ or ‘conclusions’ about how to write lots comfortably. Read in isolation from the larger journey of the text, they are helpful and insightful but… not the same thing as the real journey.

I completely agree with the idea that the best books engage you in a process or journey, and the reading and learning are about going through that process. However, I also spend a lot of time wishing the world was the kind of place where you could just read bulleted lists of conclusions and be done with it — things would be so much easier and faster!

Rex

Alex Golub is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. His book Leviathans at The Gold Mine has been published by Duke University Press. You can contact him at rex@savageminds.org

One thought on “Pesky process books

  1. Come on, Rex. If everything were already reduced to bullet points, folks like us wouldn’t have anything to do.

    On a more serious note, I remember being annoyed when I first read Vic Turner’s Forest of Symbols by how much the articles seemed to repeat each other. It has taken me a while to realize that what those articles are is an invaluable record of how Turner’s ideas developed as he tried them out on different sets of data and noticed new things in what the data were showing him. I’d love to teach or take a seminar in which we worked our way through the book, tracing the process by which his ideas evolved.

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