Stephen North, in The Making of Knowledge in Composition (1987), makes the old old point that practitioners and their knowledge are often excluded and ignored by researchers, scholars, and theorists in composition. Practitioners don’t try to avoid sharing knowledge and don’t exclude knowledge (which he claims researchers do), and they practice “inclusion.” He “describes the knowledge of practitioners as lore, a knowledge characterized by contradiction because it is driven by the pragmatic logic of ‘what works.’ Because there is no accountability for why something works in a classroom, nothing is ever discarded from lore. North describes current assumptions about teaching writing with the metaphor of a ‘House of Lore,’ a sprawling collection of rooms built from a variety of materials without a blueprint or regard for the coherence of the overall structure” (Faigley, 1992).
– Contributed by Jill Morris