Lest we forget about the value of cognitive science to our field, and to writing practice in general, I suggest Jonah Lehrer’s most recent article from The New Yorker, “Groupthink: The Brainstorming Myth.” Not because it forwards anything new about what writing teachers were taught about brainstorming or group activities, but because it challenges us to rethink a practice we use in a rather rote fashion.
Lehrer’s seeks to archive away Alex Osborn’s 1948 book “Your Creative Power,” which was the first real mainstream attempt to vouch for brainstorming as many conceive of it today: an uninhibited thought exercise in which a group of individuals attempt to solve a problem by “storming” it with an array of stream of consciousness free associations. Lehrer wants Osborn’s book to be stored in the library basement not because it did not make contributions to the way people generate ideas, but because its once-ubiquitous assertions have now been challenged and, in several cases, proved erroneous mainly by studies by fancy-pants universities in the American Northeast concluding that the best ideas generated in group settings are not merely the result of free associations uttered in a “safe space” but rather in group settings where ideas are constantly met with healthy doses of criticism and skepticism and my favourite people of all: dissenters.
Yawn. Any writing instructor has known that for years, in writing classrooms all over North America, Peter Elbow’s “Doubting/Believing Game” encourages practice of just these things (although with more of a focus on the individual): Free associations! Realistic assertions. Crazy potentially revolutionary argument! This is so illogical. The only real difference is that, while Elbow broke up the process into larger stages – back and forth, back and forth, doubting and believing, doubting and believing — Lehrer calls for an integration of these processes in a full-on group setting in the final line of his piece: “It is the human friction that makes the sparks.” While Elbow wants individual writers to enter into opposite frames of mind while crafting their composition, Lehrer wants to put believers and doubters into the same space at the same time. But even then he would be hesitant to prescribe such a single mode of brainstorming:
The fatal misconception behind brainstorming is that there is a particular script we should all follow in group interactions.
After reading this I began to think about my own way of “teaching” brainstorming, and the acceptable/common ways of doing so in the field of rhetoric and composition. I do teach clustering, clouding, and listing; I do make assumptions that students know how to do these things; I do put students in groups and tell them to come up with ideas, not really trying to properly distribute the dissenters into groups, or thinking about how one student’s ideology might productive clash, in Lehrer’s words “make sparks,” when confronted by the ideology of another student. I want to challenge myself to no longer view brainstorming as “giving time” to students to think through some ideas, and instead to view brainstorming as an activity that expands students’ perceptions and potential ideas about a given topic by exposing them, explicitly, to criticism and dissent that will disrupt their way of thinking and, through having to resolve this disruption, have them come to reach a new way of thinking, a new take on a given topic.
It’s less about viewing a student as doubting and believing, and more about viewing students as a group of doubters and believers.
