Chris Anson frequently begins his writing with scenarios. He asks us to imagine an overzealous father Sam who wants to impress his neighbors with his toddler Alyssa. He wants the neighbors to think of her as smart. He wants Alyssa to identify famous artists’ prints framed throughout the house. After much practice, Alyssa is able to tell which painting is a Renoir, Klee, Pollock, or Rembrandt. When the neighbors drop by, Alyssa points to a picture and most of the time names the artist.
Anson then explains that in educational terms, Sam has established learning outcomes for Alyssa, and based on its results, demonstrates significant success. Although Alyssa identifies some paintings, she really doesn’t know much about art, analysis, or interpretation—she can identify a few specific pieces from repeated exposure (112-114).
Anson compares this scenario to high-stakes national and state testing in which students are asked to respond to pre-determined outcomes based on routine structures. He challenges the assumption that knowledge based on routine writing skills and assignments can transfer to more diverse writing abilities, genres, and experiences (114).
Anson identifies two types of writing systems: an open system and a closed system. An open system becomes “constantly evolving, contextually mediated, and contextually determined practices, influenced by social and institutional histories, conventions, and expectations” (114). He explains that “proficiency in writing is not a matter of simply mapping a discrete set of learned skills onto new tasks in unfamiliar contexts; it requires the kind of rhetorical, discursive, and textual flexibility and sensitivity that we hope our programs and courses provide” (114-115).
A closed system, on the other hand, “is one in which the activities admit little variation, are habituated over long periods of time, and are learned through repeated practice” (115). By continued writing in closed systems, the “writer will inappropriately replicate the habituated form. . . and the lack of experience in those larger circles would doom them to adaptive failure” (115).
Anson explains that we teach writing in a closed system “when we reduce its rhetorical, linguistic, and performative complexity by created a fixed genre with artificially stable features and then teaching to it as a goal were to repeat the writing behavior ‘automatically’ without regard to different contexts and purposes” (115-116).
Anson admonishes that by having students write in an open system, such as preparing a monthly Internet newsletter, that students do work “across and between those [varied] contexts that gives them the experience of being in an open system, one that does not predict the way that future texts must be created in new and unfamiliar settings but provides the strategic knowledge to be discursively flexible to know how to ‘read’ a context in order to write in it” (116).
Anson establishes competence: “competence. . . describes writers who have developed the writing skills that enable them to perform capably in a variety of writing domains. They have a firm possession of the relatively general writing strategies that give them a great deal of flexibility, for instance strategies of discourse analysis, revision, generating ideas, getting started, overcoming writer’s block, determining and writing for audiences, etc. All of these are strategies that enable the writer to achieve some success in writing in a domain without extensive experience in that domain” (117).
As teachers, we need to allow our students to develop adaptive expertise: the ability to match new situations to previous experiences combined with the ability to abstract general problem-solving skills from previous experiences to apply in new situations” (118). “Good writing instruction, then assumes that it is important for learners to experience a range of writing tasks, contexts, and purposes, and that it is better for them to gain adaptive expertise than a narrowly defined set of skills relevant to a specific, artificial genre. . . Such instruction provides students with more time for sharing their writing and extending it into new domains, a wider range of curricular experiences, and a broader range of genres, and it ‘creates opportunities for students to be in different kinds of writing situations, where the relationships and agendas are varied” (118).
Anson then critiques the effectives of high-stake writings such as SAT writing exams. These closed systems are (1) a-contextual in that they have no purpose other than to test, (2) have no functional audience, (3) are conducted under conditions not similar to any in the world of meaningful written discourse, (4) have prompts restrictive in structure, language, and other variations, and (5) provide no useful feedback (119).
Anson concludes his essay with another scenario. Alyssa’s mother Angela steps into, and rather than have their daughter point and identify artist prints, she provides Alyssa with art materials for her own enjoyment, varied art projects such as postcards and pictures for her parents, grandparents, and relatives. Alyssa has tried to imitate in her own way the paintings framed through the house as well as her own representations of he friend, yard, and beagle. Alyssa is able to now display her developing knowledge or art and her own abilities. Art is no longer about testing but about Alyssa (125).
Anson, Chris M. "Closed Systems and Standarized Writing Tests." College Composition and Communication 60.1 (2008): 123-128.
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