Response to Covino and Moore Howard.

When reading Covino I thought it was weird that the expressivists and those who were against current-traditional rhetoric found “support in the stress on rhetorical invention voiced in a number of historicized approaches to pedagogy” (p. 37). I got a little mixed trying to understand if these authors were advocating for teaching the history of rhetoric or for applying old rhetoric methods in the classroom. I guess my lack of knowledge about rhetoric helped this. I got confused and did not understand if the author was analyzing how the concept of rhetoric was taught in composition classes or how, depending on how people interpreted the concept of rhetoric, composition classes were conceptualized. I liked how Covino related the disappearance of a rhetoric linked to contextual properties with the “rise of science” (p. 43). I don’t know much about the field but I liked Covino’s idea that current-traditional rhetoric is a parenthesis in the development of a field that has always conceptualized rhetoric in an expansive sense. Along with the author’s last sentence, it is my opinion that there is no good or bad rhetorical model but everything depends on how it is applied in the classroom.
Moore Howard’s (are both her last names?) text was really nice to read. In my practice (as much as I can) I like to apply collaborative pedagogy. Actually, I am thinking to apply this concept along with distributed cognitions to a paper that I am writing about the use of the discussion boards in language classes. I enjoyed reading the section where the author analyzes how collaborative learning interrogates how we conceptualize authorship, learning processes and the writing activity itself. I think that the concept of authorship at the same time is related with the capitalist mode of production and it is reflected in the concept of copyright. Knowledge as something that can be possessed is a modern conceptualization and it is consistent with the romantic and individualist notion of authorship. I did not understand completely the section “Writer/text collaboration” and I would love to go over this part in class.