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This essay situates the phenomenon of writing and learning in historical, pedagogical, and theoretical frameworks to isolate write-to-learn methods derived from the “British model” of language and learning. Writing as a mode of learning has maintained its status partly because of the rise of rhetoric and composition as a specialized field and because cross-curricular writing instruction has been offered as one answer to alleged “crises” of literate standards and competence in public and higher education. Generally, the author claims that typical accounts of writing as a unique tool for promoting learning ignore the complexities of cultures, classrooms, assignments, and other media that might equally facilitate learning. The author's reading of 35 studies of writing and learning is that they do not provide the long-sought empirical validation of writing as a mode of learning. He argues that this research is grounded in the same assumptions about language and learning as are common in the lore and practice of “writing across the curriculum” (WAC) and writing process approaches, and as a result, the issue of writing and learning has been framed wrongly. The confounds within this body of research are many of the cognitive and situational variables that would support a model of writing and learning that is compatible with the diverse discourses and experiences within and across institutions.

Background: Various physiologic and biochemical shifts can follow meditation. Meditation has been implicated in impacting free radical activity. Ultraweak photon emission (UPE, biophoton emission) is a constituent of the metabolic processes in a living system. Spectral analysis showed the characteristics of radical reactions. Objectives: Recording and analysing photon emission in 5 subjects before, during and after meditation. Methods: UPE in 5 subjects who meditated in sitting or supine positions was recorded in a darkroom utilising a photomultiplier designed for manipulation in three directions. Results: Data indicated that UPE changes after meditation. In 1 subject with high pre-meditation values, UPE decreased during meditation and remained low in the postmeditation phase. In the other subjects, only a slight decrease in photon emission was found, but commonly a decrease was observed in the kurtosis and skewness values of the photon count distribution. A second set of data on photon emission from the hands before and after meditation was collected from 2 subjects. These data were characterised by the Fano factor, F(T), i.e. variance over mean of the number of photoelectrons observed within observation time T. All data were compared to surrogate data sets which were constructed by random shuffling of the data sets. In the pre-meditation period, F(T) increased with observation time, significantly at time windows >6 s. No such effect was found after meditation, when F(T) was in the range of the surrogate data set. Conclusions: The data support the hypothesis that human photon emission can be influenced by meditation. Data from time series recordings suggest that this non-invasive tool for monitoring radical reactions during meditation is useful to characterise the effect of meditation. Fano factor analysis demonstrated that the time series before meditation do not represent a simple Poisson process. Instead, UPE has characteristics of a fractal process, showing long-range correlations. The effect of meditation waives out this coherence phenomenon, suggesting a weaker and less ordered structure of UPE. In general, meditation seems to influence the complex interactions of oxidative and anti-oxidative reactions which regulate photon emission. The reason for the statistical changes between pre- and post-meditation measurements remains unclear and demands further examination.

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In this review we summarize some of the accomplishments and shortcomings of constructivist accounts of reading and writing activity as part of our argument for social and textual views of literacy. Arguing that reading and writing are inseparable from each other and from other modes of meaning making, we aim to fore ground studies and theories that depict the rhetorical dimensions of literacy. We define rhetorical as referring to the means and circumstances through which readers and writers represent and negotiate texts, tasks, and social contexts. A rhetorical perspective on literacy research and practice calls attention to the ways in which language use crystallizes relations between readers and writers. Such a perspective also brings into focus the extent to which the ways authors position themselves within a certain social space is contingent upon (a) authority (e.g., a disciplinary community's conventions for inquiry, the institution of school, or a writer's expertise). (b) the purposes that bring writers together within a particular social forum, and (c) the topic of their discourse or task at hand. In trying to expand the constructivist metaphor, we intend to contribute to a conceptual vocabulary and imagery for literacy research and practice that draw upon textual and intersubjective explanations of constructive activity in composing.