Dream Bloggers Invent the University

This essay focuses on the blogs authored by students in interdisciplinary, writing-intensive seminars on the art and science of dreaming at Queens College and Princeton University. The writing for these courses requires students to “invent the university” in the sense that they must find ways to bridge the public and private, or the theoretical and the personal. I argue that blogs have the potential to help students develop strong and distinctive voices in the pursuit of intellectual inquiry—and that because of this, they can help teachers and scholars overcome the intellectual divides between the “expressivist” and “constructivist” pedagogies represented by Peter Elbow and David Bartholomae respectively. In the concluding section, I examine blog entries in which students recount instances in which they dreamed about our course readings (and other materials). These accounts are striking because they offer evidence that students were internalizing and synthesizing course material. To explain this internalization and synthesis, I turn to recent developments in cognitive theory that offer new ways of thinking about learning that I believe will help bridge the expressivist-constructivist divide and develop methods for teaching voice as a rhetorical element of writing, one that is essential to intellectual inquiry.