Who is peter elbow

The National Council of Teachers gave him the James Squire Award "for his transforming influence and lasting intellectual contribution" to the profession. The Conference on College Composition and Communication gave him the Exemplar Award for "representing the highest ideals of scholarship, teaching, and service. Summary: Peter began our session by asking us to write on the topic of what we hoped to get out of this session and what problems we face.

He did this to suggest that we need to set up conditions that lead students to write. Free writing that is private is a good way to do this. Writing, he explained, should be about perplexity.

It is good to wrestle with ideas. He suggested free writing about a problem or issue or question. He also suggested using writing after students solve a problem to reflect on how they arrived at the solution.

Peter served as the head of the writing department as a professor at University of Massachusetts, Amherst. I told him how his work had inspired me and shaped what I teach in Brave Writer. I thanked him for his ground-breaking ideas and the influence they had on me. A month later, an email arrived from Peter!

Imagine my shock and anxiety. What if he thought I was a hack? Instead, the warm voice I had come to know in his books greeted me immediately. Peter thanked me for the manual and told me he was glad I was taking his ideas to the homeschooling market since he had no access to home educators. He liked what I had written. Satisfaction and a big confidence boost came along for the ride.

The pattern had repeated itself. As I read his latest book, I discovered that what we do in Brave Writer is exactly what his writing theories set out to assert—only in this case, we were successfully practicing the principles long before he had completed his 7 year magnum opus! Peter invited me to lunch. Now Elbow has drawn together twelve of his essays on the nature of learning and teaching to suggest a comprehensive philosophy of education.

At once theoretical and down-to-earth, this collection will appeal not only to teachers, adminitrators and students, but to anyone with a love of learning.

Elbow explores the "contraries" in the educational process, in particular his theory that clear thinking can be enhanced by inviting indecision, incoherence, and paradoxical thinking.

The essays, written over a period of twenty-five years, are engaged in a single enterprise:to arrive at insights or conclusions about learning and teaching while still doing justice to the "rich messiness" of intellectual inquiry. Drawing his conclusions from his own perplexities as a student and as a teacher, Elbow discusses the value of interdisciplinary teaching, his theory of "cooking" an interaction of conflicting ideas , the authority relationship in teaching and the value of specifying learning objectives.

A full section is devoted to evaluation and feedback, both of students and faculty. Finally, Elbow focuses on the need to move beyond the skepticism of critical thinking to what he calls "methodological belief"-an ability to embrace more than one point of view. This text provides a workshop approach to the teaching of composition.

It addresses students as writers, challenging them to develop their skills by writing often, by exploring their writing processes, and by sharing their writing with others. The flexible workshops allow an instructor to organize and orient their course individually, and the book integrates readings - both student and professional - throughout. It also contains more than writing assignments. To help foster a productive environment for group work, this text offers advice to students on talking with one another about their writing.

The activities in this guide move from non-judgmental kinds of responding to full criticism to help build students' confidence and trust. The guide contains two sample papers, which are used to illustrate different kinds of feedback. It concludes with a summary of ways of responding and suggestions on how and when they're most useful.

The third edition features a new design and incorporates expanded treatment of argumentation and research, in-depth coverage of the Internet including a mini-workshop on composing a web page and computer-based writing, coverage of visual literacy, more material on drafting, and a variety of new student and professional essays. Elbow, Peter was born on April 14,