Stillness in the Composition Classroom: Insight, Incubation, Improvisation, Flow, and Meditation

TL;DRAbstract

M students remains an elemental role of instruction. Many have “overlearned” the five-paragraph theme, grammatical rules, sentence and paragraphing exercises, citing sources, and other common forms of instruction. This overlearning presents challenges to the first-year composition instructor who often must disabuse students of what they have taken as gospel during secondary education, before introducing the idea that successful essays require students to engage in writing more creatively. But even the most carefully constructed curriculum or pedagogy must still be implemented in a classroom that contains a very unpredictable variable: the developing human brain. Technological advances in obtaining real-time imaging of the brain, when performing certain tasks, have led to more concrete information on some of its most mysterious functions. What implications might this research have for First-Year Composition (FYC)? To develop a more informed understanding of this question, and to initiat

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