English
In the 1980s, at the heart of the social constructivist movement, scholars in composition theory adopted poststructuralist perspectives grounded in literary criticism. This had the effect of highlighting a group of social and political questions related to writing, its instruction, its production, and its role in education (Harris, 1997, p. 17). British author R. Ivanic proposes, based on K. Bruffee’s work, that “reality, knowledge, thoughts, facts, texts, people, etc. are all constructs generated by communities of peers who share ways of thinking; they are thus linguistic entities generated and maintained by the community in question…but they define and ‘constitute’ for themselves the communities that generate them” (1998, p. 12). For the social constructivists, reality and knowledge do not pre-exist their creation, their social “invention.” It is not by accident that the discourse community concept held great sway at this same time period.
Composition theorists were quite interested by this general and fairly abstract importance of culture and context in the interpretation and construction of knowledge, less in individual learning as such (even though this individual learning is made possible by social interaction). Social constructionism rejected: models of cognitive deficiency, apparently scientific research results, a focus on the individual student independent of context, the search for a common essence of writing process. It took into account the political-ethical dimensions of the student’s situation. This model turned attention to the role of the institution, of the socio-political context, of implicit ideologies, and of the “subject positions” of student writers in the working of university texts (see “subject/subject position” below).
Scholars in this domain became very interested in the relationship between academic language and social-political power, in the status of the student as a progressive participant in the academic world, initiating him or herself in all of the stakes (positive and negative) such a participation presupposes. This perspective engendered a perception of writing as the primary activity in knowledge co-construction.
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