Transactional TheoryThe concept of reading and writing, teaching and learning as transaction is central to much of what we as a discipline have focused on in theory, pedagogy, and research for twenty or more years now. Our understanding of the processes of learning how to write and the processes of teaching novice writers has been furthered significantly by the perspective this concept brings. Common styles of teaching writing involving "workshopping", group discussion, text sharing, and collaborative projects are all powered by a high degree of transaction as the "engine" of learning.
Transaction is communication and interaction on a level of deep personal and social significance, where meaning is created and recreated within us as we express our own inner life through language and in turn open ourselves to the linguistic expressions of others.
A language transaction frequently has a persuasive edge by which the beliefs, understandings, and motivations of one person are affected by another. An extensive review of the basis of transactional theory is not possible here, but it can be said that transactionalism rests on the phenomenological understanding of consciousness and knowledge, in which meaning is created in the mind as a response to apprehended phenomena, such as language. Out of this theoretical milieu comes general reader-response theory in literary criticism, whose formulation can be attributed to the German critic Wolfgang Iser. But the transactional impulse also has been identified with a strand of the ancient rhetorical tradition articulated by Isocrates (Fourth Century BCE) and many Sophists, adopted by Aristotle (Fourth-Third Centuries BCE), and further developed into a high art of public discourse by Cicero (First Century BCE) and articulated as a comprehensive educational system by Quintilian (First Century CE).
James Berlin has traced the mixed fortunes of transactional rhetoric in the last two centuries in America, and has seen it merging with ideas about the social epistemic nature of language to inspire in recent decades a New Rhetoric. This New Rhetoric, possibly expressed best in the writings of Ann Berthoff, appropriates the vigor of ancient discourse along with the knowledge-building power of language and places these qualities at the heart of literacy education. There is gives purpose and focus to the teaching of writing, where often in the past mere formalism on the one hand, or cultural elitism on the other, dominated education in American colleges.
A scholar and critic who has written extensively and cogently on this theory is Louise Rosenblatt, author of Literature as Exploration and of other recent concise statements of transactionalism, such as Writing and Reading: The Transactional Theory. Although herself a teacher and critic of literature, Rosenblatt's development of the theory stresses writing as well as reading, and places them on a continuum of meaning making: both operations are in essence transactions, involving not only a relationship with the person beyond the text, such as an author or reader, but with the self (through memory and experience) in the making of meaning. Perhaps more than other reader-response models, Rosenblatt's theory acknowledges the essential role of the text as the transactional channel between writer and reader, providing an objective basis for expressing, adjusting, and constraining meaning-making on both sides.
How might this theoretical model suggest means to describe and perhaps better comprehend writing pedagogy in general? What follows might be one way:
Linguistic symbols of various kinds may be said to pass between "poles" of consciousness along "axes" of communication. Meaning is constantly constructed and reconstructed around the symbol systems that pass along the axes. For example, a writer and reader may be said to be transacting along an axis of written language; the writer creates meaning through composing language; the composed text passes along some axis to the mind of a reader, who transacts with the composer by reconstructing meaning from the language according to conventional (community-based) and idiosyncratic (originating from unique experience) strategies of interpretation. This process functions the same way no matter which direction the text is heading--both teachers and students must create and recreate meaning. The facts that academic or formal language conventions are learned slowly, and that personal experience will differ predictably between students and teachers, means that writers and readers in this context will usually be interacting "unequally."
But the process of transaction does not favor one over the other, and teachers who approach students on the basis of this model are better equipped to conceive of students as active language users. If the model is accurate, attitudes and activities that promote writing development as purposeful meaning making/remaking on all sides are bound to have better effects on development than concepts of teaching that see professors as depositing a wealth of knowledge into passive student "vaults," or students as isolated composing individuals engaged in lock-step "prewriting-writing-revising" stages of text production.
Different types of transactions can be seen within and among students, both also important to the teaching and learning context. In Rosenblatt's model, students/writers carry on two levels of reading as they compose:
- They read their own writing to see how far it reflects the meaning they want to express (writer's sense and purpose)
- They read to test what meanings others are likely to construct for their text (audience awareness).
In taking these transactions to the next logical step, student/writers interact with their peers
- To test their success at audience awareness
- To refine their own sense of purpose within the community of the class
- To build their encoding skills through comparing their knowledge and habits of language use, especially formal conventions
If students and teachers are understood to be enacting these transactions in writing courses, then identifying and supporting them in activities are possible and desirable.
Indeed, applying transactional concepts to teaching has been a major concern of many compositionists in recent years, who have tried to incorporate the several nodes of communicative transactions--that is, writer, reader, language, and world--into meaningful and effective pedagogy. Recent well-known scholars engaging in this type of instructional practice are Peter Elbow and Pat Belanoff, whose book A Community of Writers I have used as the print-text for my on-line classes. Again, this forum doesn't allow a full elaboration of transactionalism in composition pedagogy, but I think it can be said that informed teaching practice has embraced this approach for its potential to create teaching and writing occasions that elicit more purposeful and more committed writing from first-year college students.
If transactional teaching is a good idea in traditional classrooms, we should, I believe, expect it to energize nontraditional environments as well; distance education is a teaching context especially in need of transactional opportunities. Until recently, these have been narrowed and limited by the barrier of distance. Networking via the Internet has offered new means to overcome old obstacles as well as old habits in this area of education, making immediate communication between students and teachers possible through a variety of media.
In this context, it would be instructive to take a closer look at the nature of the transactions that occur in writing instruction, in connection with actual discussions which originally transpired in real-time writing during ENG 103 on-line in Spring of 1997.