AnnoBib -- “The Problem of Problem Solving”

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Berthoff, Ann E. “The Problem of Problem Solving.” College Composition and Communications 22.3 (October 1971): 237-242. Print.
    Berthoff presents a polemical critique of "problem-solving" and of the singling out of psychological (see Lauer, “Heuristics and Composition”) or political matters (referring to Louis Kampf; not listed here) as relates to the teaching of writing. Sees divergences to/in psychology as a dead-end attempt to help in writing; criticizes the Dartmouth Conference because of internal philosophical differences (communication vs. expression). Sees psychology (and linguistics) as not much help outside their own “field of their competence” (238) and “English teachers should dare to raise their own questions about the nature of learning and knowing and should dare, furthermore, to answer some of those questions which have been thought to lie in the province of the problem-solvers, that protectorate of educational psychology" (239) and that a psychology of learning can be "politically dangerous unless it is conceived in the context of a sound sociology of knowledge" and believes that "the concept of problem solving serves the belief that the school's function is to prepare citizens for life in a technological society" (239).
        Berthoff is generally concerned with an empowerment of the student writer, seeing him as a being of thought and emotion and not a wheel that can turn on and off problem-solving strategies. Though this paper (and Lauer's initial paper) pre-date the period in which I am writing, it is an initial salvo against some of the assumptions of cogntive processing theory – that 1) the field is irrelevant to English studies, and 2) the theory (at least in infancy) is technical and does not reflect the complexity of thinking and inventing. Responded to in Lauer, “Response.”

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