I think that as the literature courses got older (in that the one that dealt with old English, middle English,etc.) seemed to align more with the cognitive psychology rhetoric. They seemed to be more of a survey class that showed the text and expert discussion of the text, then would build the class around these types of discussions.
My creative writing classes I guess were striving to be a social epistemic rhetorical appraoch, and despite the recent discussions in class, as an undergrad fiction CW I felt that the students that were giving me feedback were opinions that I respected and took to heart. I may have just been in a weird group or maybe Dr. Jones facilitated it in a unique way, I'm not sure but it seemed to be less of search the Platonist truth that only the prof has.
The expressionistic coincides with my high school education, somewhat. I feel that the power of the creative process and art was part of the AP curriculum, but at the same time it was so intermixed with formalist constructions that I have a hard time trying to label it as such.
All of this to say that I have definitely experienced a couple of these educational modes, and I really have to think that each still has its place. I feel that certain literature benefits from a formalist/cognitive approach to be able to relate it to student ( I would still use social/cultural things as well) depending on the subject matter. I also feel the CW classes should strive to be something that should resemble social epistemic (if the teacher can back out of the conversation). In a straight literature course I could see using all three together to better relate literature (peer response, workshop, critical articles, open ended paper topics to emphasize student discovery...).
Of course, the first thing that you should be learning here is that there is no such thing as an ideal course. What we try to do is engage students and support their learning. Every student has a different level of motivation, however, and brings different experiences to it. There's something about teachers backing out of the conversation, like you say, like that Ted talk suggests. But, teachers have content-area knowledge that is needed, too. What's the equilibrium here? What's the best strategy? Nothing is ideal. But, what should we do?
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