Notes on The Dogma of Transformation (Newkirk)

I am/was struck by the way Newkirk ties the ends of expressive and critical pedagogies together in the notion of transformation (self transformation) and contrasts these with the earlier pedagogies of Lloyd and Towle at UNH. And I think about how and where Murray fits into this mix, at different times in his career, somewhere between Lloyd and Towle but maybe only sort of with Newkirk?

He was a newspaperman who didn't maybe find the aesthetically-oriented approach of Lloyd and Towle fitting, wanting something less pastoral and more hard-nosed or masculine but also came late in life to the emotional value of autobiographical writing.

At root, though, I'm not sure he was particularly concerned with any of these. I'm not sure he much cared what students wrote ABOUT, just that they experienced writing and learned something about it and hopefully were changed, if anything, to think of not so much themselves differently but their writerly selves differently.

I keep coming back to his idea that students should be treated as writers and led to experience what writers experience as they compose, in the case of WTW1, the ongoing effort to shape evolving meaning and to "solve the writers problems."