sidenote

this came across on the WPA listserv this morning. It's not a CCCC address but still relevant to our discussions here, I think (and maybe interesting to teach... ? I've posted it on my Bb site for the fall). Also fun in conversation with Stanley Fish's latest bit of drivel in the Times (linked here)

(also, i'm pleading ignorance on copyright etiquette here... are there rules about posting stuff that is only available to subscribers? hopefully the campus subscription is a get-out-of-jail-free card).

Chronicle of Higher Education
November 7, 2008

Writing Is Not Just a Basic Skill
By MARK RICHARDSON

At many colleges, professors trained in the discipline of rhetoric and
composition are finding that the specialized knowledge they bring to
teaching writing is held in thrall to older notions of how we learn to
write - what Linda Brodkey, an author and director of the Warren College
Writing Program at the University of California at San Diego, calls
"common-sense myths of literacy."

Such myths are pernicious. They poison colleges and universities,
affecting the morale of writing instructors, the attitudes of other
faculty members, and, worst of all, students' acquisition of literacy.
We need to understand such myths and to dispel them, replacing them with
a new approach to first-year composition and a new commitment to
upper-level writing.

Common-sense myths of literacy are akin to other common-sense myths. The
truth often turns out to be more complicated than we thought. For most
of human history, for example, it was assumed that time moves at a
steady, equal pace for everyone (unless you are waiting for water to
boil). Then Einstein showed that time moves more slowly for a clock in
motion than for one that is stationary, and our common-sense observation
of time was proved wrong.

The "common-sense" viewpoint about learning to write was born in the
late 1800s, as colleges adapted to the enormous social and educational
changes taking place: industrialization; population growth and
relocation; social mobility; coeducation; and the boom in knowledge that
led to the birth of the modern academic disciplines. A changing society
brought new students to campuses - students of widely varied social
classes and levels of literacy, eager to fill the jobs created by the
new industrial society. In 1874, responding to the influx of new
students, Harvard University administered an entrance exam in literacy
skills. Over half of the applicants who took it failed.

Colleges responded by creating composition courses. Harvard's new
writing courses were taught not by a rhetorician or an English teacher,
but by a newspaperman, Adams Sherman Hill. None of the other instructors
of Harvard's composition courses had advanced degrees, either. In other
words, "composition" was not a strategically planned curricular
development, nor did it evolve out of scholarship or pedagogical
expertise. It was invented in a hurry to resolve a perceived crisis, as
colleges struggled to adapt to the requirements of a new age. And as
Harvard went, so went the rest of American higher education.

Lacking real expertise, first-year-composition instructors were guided
largely by "common-sense" notions about the acquisition of literacy. But
in the 1960s, a whole new period of social mobility generated an
explosion in rhetoric-and-composition theory and practice. Since then we
have learned many truths that fly in the face of common-sense ideas.
Here are just a few:

Students who do one kind of writing well will not automatically do other
kinds of writing well.
The conventions of thought and expression in disciplines differ, enough
so that what one learns in order to write in one discipline might have
to be unlearned to write in another.
Writing is not the expression of thought; it is thought itself. Papers
are not containers for ideas, containers that need only to be well
formed for those ideas to emerge clearly. Papers are the working out of
ideas. The thought and the container take shape simultaneously (and
develop slowly, with revision).
When students are faced with an unfamiliar writing challenge, their
apparent ability to write will falter across a broad range of "skills."
For example, a student who handles grammatical usage, mechanics,
organization, and tone competently in an explanation of the effects of
global warming on coral reefs might look like a much weaker writer when
she tries her hand at a chemistry-lab report for the first time.
Teaching students grammar and mechanics through drills often does not
work.
Patterns of language usage, tangled up in complex issues like personal
and group identities, are not easy to change.
Rhetorical considerations like ethos, purpose, audience, and occasion
are crucial to even such seemingly small considerations as word choice
and word order.
Writing involves abilities we develop over our lifetimes. Some students
are more advanced in them when they come to college than are others.
Those who are less advanced will not develop to a level comparable to
the more-prepared students in one year or even in two, although they may
reach adequate levels of ability over time.
Those truths, and others like them, have reshaped our understanding of
what writing is and how it is learned. But administrators, faculty
members in other disciplines, and even some academics trained in
traditional English studies still cling to common-sense notions about
literacy education. Those notions see composition as a "basic skill"
that students should have attained by the end of their first year in
college at the latest - first-year composition is therefore essentially
remedial - just as Harvard saw it in 1874. From that perspective,
academic literacy is something that students should have when they
arrive at college. If they don't, then one or two courses are deemed
sufficient to bring them up to speed - never mind that any complex
ability that we do not fully possess, like speaking French or playing
the piano, will not be mastered so quickly.

A related common-sense myth of literacy acquisition sees first-year
composition as a way to prepare students for writing in other
disciplines. However, as Sharon Crowley, a rhetoric-and-composition
instructor at Arizona State University and author of Toward a Civil
Discourse (University of Pittsburgh, 2006), and David Russell, a
professor of rhetoric and professional communication at Iowa State
University and author of Writing in the Academic Disciplines (Southern
Illinois University Press, 2002), have pointed out, writing experts have
learned that disciplinary genres differ.

To take just one small example, most humanities-based writing handbooks
tell writers to avoid the passive voice, but chemistry-lab reports
advise students to write only in the passive. And it is not just usage
issues that vary from discipline to discipline; genres, styles,
resources, approaches, and habits of thought all do as well.

Of course, one could argue that all academic writing should have some
qualities in common: clear organization, detailed development,
mechanical correctness, evidence of critical thinking, and so on. But
literacy studies have shown us that problems with such issues tend to
emerge or recede as students move from genre to genre, so that Bill
might write a narrative paper in first-year composition with no
organizational problems and then go on to write a philosophy paper with
many. Every composition teacher has seen students whose abilities seem
to deteriorate rather than improve as the course proceeds. The new
problems are just fault lines exposed by the pressure of an unfamiliar
genre of writing.

Moreover, a particularly pernicious common-sense myth of literacy
acquisition is that because writing is a "basic skill," almost anyone
can teach first-year composition - newly minted graduate students in
English literature, journalists, high-school English-literature
teachers, even M.A.'s in other disciplines - and that those faculty
members don't need to be paid well, because what they teach is so basic.
But the viewpoint shaped by 50 years of research, analysis, and
experimentation views composition differently. Indeed, writing experts
see in composition a body of knowledge as rich as any other
discipline's. Thus first-year composition should be an introduction to
the discipline of rhetoric and composition (just as Psychology 101 is an
introduction), generating knowledge that students can learn and on which
they can be tested and evaluated through their writing.

From that vantage point, first-year composition is only indirectly
preparatory to writing in other disciplines: What a student will learn
is somewhat applicable to writing a history or psychology paper, but
significant gaps in preparation will remain. Psychology professors who
want students to write effective papers, even at the introductory level,
can't count on first-year composition to have done all the preparatory
work.

Academics who would like their students to become effective writers must
work with professors of rhetoric and composition not only to design
effective writing assignments and writing instruction within their own
courses, but also to create discipline-specific versions of advanced
composition courses and require, or at least urge, their majors to take
those courses. Such courses should be paid for collaboratively, with the
discipline requiring or recommending the course contributing its fair
share.

Finally, expertise in writing theory argues that those who teach
first-year composition should be as credentialed as those who teach
Introduction to Sociology, World History, or Environmental Biology, and
should be paid comparably. The most destructive common-sense myth about
literacy acquisition is that since it is "a basic skill," it ought to
come quickly and cheaply. It isn't, and it shouldn't. Blinded by a
common-sense myth, colleges have perpetuated what Ms. Crowley aptly
calls an "underclass" of writing instructors who are underpaid,
overworked, and often unprepared to teach the subject that students must
learn: rhetoric and composition.

So let's dispel the myths, and with them, first-year composition itself.
Farewell, basic skills. Hello, Introduction to Rhetoric and Comp.

Mark Richardson is an assistant professor of writing and linguistics at
Georgia Southern University.

up to 2003

I'm running out of reading time and, by the looks of things on this blog, you are too! That's ok. It's summer skidding into fall. I wish it were otherwise, but there's no ignoring the steady march toward beginnings...

So, I skimmed the next set of readings (many of which I heard while in the audience, so I have the advantage of memory to lean on). Thematics that rise to the top in this set: diverse community of practitioners that make up the field (i.e., includes 2-year college teachers), the role of race in understandings and practices of rhetoric and the connection to writing and identity, and the hybridity of scholarship in the field (Bishop's piece is part memoir, part institutional history, part call-to-action, and part poem; Lovas's includes multi-media). With this last bit, it's become increasingly the case that people are trying to do scholarship differently, to practice what they preach in the classroom by mixing genres and mediums in scholarly writing too.

What also stands out to me, and what gave me a sense of belonging when I first went down this road, is the sense of community that pervades our work as scholars and teachers--understanding community as plural, as that which encompasses (and does not resolve or fully integrate) multiple differences. There is an ethos of caring and commitment that I find very welcoming and...unique in the context of academic culture.

Selfe's essay has functioned as a kind of siren. The important relationship between technology & literacy has only gained steam since she wrote in 1998. What counts as "writing" has changed dramatically...she got that long ago, and we're living with the reality of that right now in our classrooms.

90-96

These addresses illustrate the central place of literacy practices in the life of the field. Evident in these pieces is the growing importance of African-American literacy practices to the politics of writing instruction (whose language gets acknowledged? whose doesn't? why? what's to be gained by studying how minority and/or under-privileged language-users have employed writing, reading, and speaking practices?). And Gere and Bridwell-Bowles focus on the "extra-curriculum" of composition--all of the writing that goes on outside of school. This writing, as they both attest, is often a site of personal and social transformation. B-B advocates that we find ways to allow the outside world into the classroom more often in order to make them "vital places" where students might feel passionate about their work and come to see language as tranformative. She also calls for recognizing more mediums and forms as legitimate in the context of writing and composing. Her address in particular feels very forward-thinking to me. She seems to anticipate the recent emphasis on public writing, community writing projects, and digital/multi-modal writing practices. It seems to me that the field has really made good on her calls to action...all of which were "in the air" at the time, rather than invented by her alone. The convergence of critical pedagogy, politicized pedagogy, and enlarged studies of rhetoric and literacy, as well as the rise of technology seem to be part of the brew.

Who agrees?

The '91 speech by McQuade seems to be a watershed one, in that the speeches that follow seem to have a more personal, more narrative feel...

Knowledge, Disciplinarity, and "Useful Anxiety"

I wanted say more about a provoking thought Allison posted a few days ago. Her comments to Laura's latest post quite articulately captured the participatory feeling that one gets when approaching the comp/rhet/writing studies (whatever we are) field. There is a sense that we can have a stake in it--that there is something meaningful to be said and terribly important to do. And she links it to the self-reflection of the discipline and (if I recall correctly) the way knowledge is constructed within it.

Allison's sentiments, ones that I wholeheartedly identify with, are echoed in Bartholomae's opening comments in his 1988 address. He says of his indebtedness to CCCC that it "provided as sense of community that made me believe I could get started--that there was, in fact, good work for me to do, that it was good work, and that I could do it in good company. My graduate progam did not give me this sense of vocation" (169). In sharing this anecdote, Bartholomae notes that he is "taken" with the number of people who share this story. And my mentioning this might be enough to indicate that I too felt this deep connection with this sense of what the discipine offers, particularly when one is gazing at it from the field of "lit-ter-a-ture". Increasingly I feel a drive to think about comp studies, a sense of circulation and imperative; correspondingly, I feel a stark lack of that drive, overwhelmed by a sense of accumulation and dustiness, when I type about literature.

Allow me to let B. speak for me: "not cranking out just one more paper, not laddering their way up to the top, not searching for difficult texts and dull readers, not bowing or scraping before another famous book, or another famous person, but doing work that one could believe in...where we felt like we could make things happen, not just in our own careers, but in the world" (170).

There is something starkly personal and perhaps hokey about this sentiment. But I would like to suggest that perhaps this feeling about comp studies is MORE than a feeling. More to do with its epistemological....well, not nature, but oh! how about composition? Yes! Its epistemological composition.

In brief I want to link this feeling to a few points in Odell and Bartholomae's addresses. I found myself nodding a lot during Odell's address--for me, he was essentially arguing that we invite the chaos of change and diverging approaches (and with that, dispense with the concern that we have to nail something down in order to count as a discipline). I love how he frames this discussion; his rhetoric to me seems intentionally directed towards "practicing what he preaches"--making a contention/suggestion out of one given point of view (carefully distinguishing from arguing a fixed point of view). He says, "One may argue that our knowledge is tentative, provisional, subject to ongoing revision. If this revision ever ends, so will our discipline. And so will our ability to survive as thinkers and as teachers. Given this point of view, I think we need to be concerned with not with current trends in our discipline but rather with our relationship to those trends.....The question...is rather, What does each of us need to do in order to contribute to the advancement of learning in our discipline?" (147).

Odell's sentiments can be nicely linked to Bartholomae's. For me, this connection is forged via tiny phrase that really jumped out at me from B's address: "useful anxiety" (175). As B. states, this anxiety is productive. The uncertainty or relativism or lack of tradition or lack of disciplinary boundary seems to counterintuitively make the discipline approachable (but significantly NOT in the sense that "anything goes"). This anxiety becomes strong exigence for comp scholarship and practice. As Odell plainly concludes, "composing" (an indebtedness to Lunsford here) the epistemology of the discipline in this way generates the "responsibility to contribute to our individual and collective understanding of how people use language to communicate" (151). This anxiety creates an imperative for intellectual engagement and is to me entirely integral to the field. It's what makes me what to think about it, to say the least.

politics, history, identity, change, composing

My subject title is an attempt to mark out the pivot terms in this set of addresses. You get a sense in this group that the politics of literacy is integral to composition's formation, mission, and development. The political consciousness you see in a number of these pieces (Hill, Purnell, Chaplin, & Lunsford) is to me central to "the idea" of composition. Much scholarship since the 80s has sought to make visible buried rhetorics, literacies, ways of doing language in order to demonstrate the myriad ways in which language/speaking are tied up with identity and composing in the broad sense that Lunsford outlines. I really like her formulation, by the way, because she gets us thinking about composing as a primary act of being and being recognized, not simply a "process" of writing. She helps us see that there's a lot at stake in the act of composing--it can mean the difference between presence and absence. If no one takes up the work to compose Diotima, then women's long-standing role in rhetorical theory remains under-developed, and so forth.

You also see in these addresses comp's preoccupation with its own identity. The consensus seems to be that we do well to remain fluid, to resist static definitions and boundaries. Again, as in the first set of addresses, nearly all of the authors appeal to our interdisciplinary heritage as a strength, not something that fractures our work. This hybrid identity still captures the energy and variety of the field and, in my view, generates interesting ways for the field to continue to be relevant.

I like all of these addresses a lot. Too much to say, so I'll just end by saying that I find Hairston's speech provocative to the max! What a thing to say aloud and in print! Her speech seems a capstone to the views expressed in the earlier addresses (the suspicions about "the enemy," the sense of us vs. them, etc.). You get a real sense of the discipline's struggle to become, and this piece helps to grant an understanding of why there has always been tension between comp and lit (something that I think has changed dramatically over the past 5-10 years as more and more scholars come out of training programs that emphasize both areas).

A choice quote from H. about writing teachers do: "As writing teachers we are engaged in a dynamic and loosely-structured activity that involves intensive interacton with people. It is an activity that is tied to living language, that shifting and ambiguous medium that won't stand still to be examined and is never pure, and it is an activity that focuess on teaching a process for which there are no fixed rules and no predictably precise outcomes" (139). I couldn't agree more.

Last thought: history is important to many of these scholars. The early 90s saw a formidable movement around rewriting histories of rhetoric, excavating archives and uncovering lost histories in order to enlarge our understanding of rhetoric and its legacy.

A personal narrative in response to Hill

James Lee Hill’s 1982 speech reminds me to try to always meet my students where they are—instead of expecting them to be where I wish they already were. If I meet them where they are, I am a more effective teacher.

During my first quarter of teaching, I asked my students—all in the Criminal Justice learning community—why exactly were they in college. They were going around a circle, sharing responses; they were all giving statements like “To make more money,” and “my parents think I should,” and “To get a better job.” Not one of my eighteen students said anything remotely close to “I am here because I love to learn.”

At the time, I was so mad at them! So frustrated! Why were my students such shallow individuals? I remember repeating this little incident to friends, to mentors, to those willing to listening in 212.

Many months have passed. I've had time to look back and reflect. And here's the deal: a majority of those Criminal Justice students were what James Lee Hill refers to as “new students.” They have come to UC not out of love for academia, but because a degree is their “socioeconomic ticket” (94).

My frustration with them was a naive response. Hill helped to remind me what I think I already had started to figure out: that I need to remember to meet my students where they are...I need to remember they all have different backgrounds and passions...and maybe some of my students yearn to earn a bachelors in order to move out of the slums...maybe some of my students long to get that BA so they can be a manager at Ruby Tuesday...maybe some of my students aren't even sure why they are there--and maybe they won't even do anything with their degree at all.

But, each quarter, my students are there. They are there, and I have a responsibility to them--even if they don't long to hold a PhD someday.

I am sure that everyone reading this blog has felt frustration, from time to time, teaching students who do not share a passion for learning that we all have (or try to maintain, even when we’re not in the mood). Let’s try to keep that frustration in check. All we can do is model our own enthusiasm for learning, and try to do the best jobs as teachers that we can. And maybe, as happy biproduct, some of our students might catch on, might catch our craving for learning.