Defining the Public Turn

During class today I jotted down two questions to ponder. I may need to come up with some key terms that Weisser and Flower use and define them. This will help me keep track of what they are talking about and can possibly add them to the tag cloud on the posts. However, the question I would like to answer for my own purposes is what ideas can I take from the authors' theory of the public turn to apply outside of academia? I need to think about that one more. Another one to address in another post is how to define consensus, and what to do about reaching it (spoiler alert: probably nothing)? This one I am obviously supposed to have an answer for: How does each author define/construct the public turn? Here's what I think so far:


Weisser gives us a history of the public turn, so we get an idea of the shift from an Objectivist transmission of knowledge about writing from writing teachers to students to a more Subjectivist view of knowledge as residing in each writer (an attempt to make access to knowledge more egalitarian?) to a Social Constructivist view of discourse as a site for creating knowledge (and therefore an even more egalitarian approach to knowledge construction because of increased agency of students?). Also, the overriding sense I get from the narrative so far is that the public turn is student centered, giving the student agency, and wants to give student writing purpose. Another focus is on citizenship through writing. I believe there is also something important about Weisser's definition of Consensus, and that's my other question, that I still don't get even though we went over it in class and everyone had great things to say.


Linda Flower, which I haven't read all of yet, focuses really heavily on giving agency to "subordinate" groups. Thus far the important things I've noticed: not focusing on "consensus," instead the goal to addressing a problem should be bringing voices to the table that are multiple, and accepting of ambiguity and uncertainty. This text focuses more on addressing problems than the composition aspect of the public turn, at least for the first two chapters.