Screen 8 -- In Defense of Technical Skills

Seeing skills as things may fall into the trap of the "what centered" classroom (see Lindemann 259). Can teaching of skills be a how centered activity?

Discounting skills may merely replicate counterproductive distinctions in English Studies, privileging what Craig Stroupe calls "elaborationism":

a term such as "elaborationism" reveals . . . persistent curricular and theoretical differences within the discipline between poetic and rhetorical discourses, which James Berlin has located as the crux of the English professions ongoing crisis of identity (xi). Indeed, it is the mystification of this sense of or critical elaborationism--versus a presumed rhetorical instrumentalism--that has traditionally served as a means to separate the sheep and goats in English studies, a bifurcation that Berlin characterizes as the "governing scheme" of the profession founded on "the division between sacred and profane texts, the division between the priestly class and the menial class, the placing of beauty and truth against the utilitarian and the commonplace" (Visualizing English 35).

"This is the first class I've taken at the University where I actually learned something useful" (Student Response After Learning to Compose Web Pages).