Ong: “Writing is a Technology that Restructures Thought”
Summary:
Ong begins by claiming that viewing writing as a purely mechanical skill “distorts our understanding of what is human” (19). For Ong, writing is a technology we “interiorize” and whose influence on us is largely unconsciously experienced (19). Ong begins by comparing orality and literacy and the cultures that emerge from them, characterizing oral culture as primarily conservative and writing as an “intrusion” into the oral cultures that preceded it. He says that Plato’s criticisms of writing elide the fact that “his philosophically analytic thought . . . was possible only because of the effects writing was having on mental processes” (22).
For Ong, writing initiated more “drastic” changes in human consciousness than print and electronics. Ong next outlines two paradoxes of written text. First, although written text seems inert and lifeless, it may be resurrected and deployed in countless contexts. Second, the meaning of written text depends on the priority of spoken language. And, writing is, on Ong’s view, “completely artificial” in the sense that it must be learned (23). It is transformative in the sense that it can be used to express what could not otherwise be expressed.
Next, Ong says that one of the effects of writing is the way it divides many things in many ways. A significant effect is that it can separate the known from the knower, eventually leading to the idea that knowledge is an object that is separate from the knower, but it is not itself knowledge. Another characteristic is that writing requires interpretation. Writing changes the context of communication and requires a sort of “precision” that oral communication does not. It “separates the past from the present” (26), the writer from the reader, administration from other social practices, logic from rhetoric, academic learning from wisdom, grapholects from one another, “high” from “low” language, and being from time. Its divisive effects become more pronounced as “its form becomes more abstract” (28). Print and electronic forms intensify the transformative potentials of writing, and computers impose another consciousness—that of the programmer—between subjects and objects.
Finally, Ong asserts that the increasing distancing entailed by writing, print, and electronics enables recuperation of “empathetic identification . . . at the level of conscious reflectivity” (31).
Musings:
I love articles that send me to the dictionary. “Noetic: of or relating to mental activity or the intellect” (OAD). Yay! A new word!
While Ong is in a sense correct that orality is antecedent to literacy, things aren’t that simple (I’m not sure Ong would say they are either). I’ve been wondering how oral and literate discursive traditions exist alongside each other and interact within, between, and among cultures. I’m thinking about African American folk traditions and the consciousness-raising tradition of the early second-wave feminist movement. But I’m also thinking about songs, nursery rhymes, jump rope jingles, and modernist poetry, which absorbs and adapts transnational oral traditions to its own purposes.
Ong’s statement that “any understanding of a text involves interpretation” confirms a point I tried to make in class on Monday: that the text-based interactions between students and teachers involves interpretation on both parts, and thus composition theory would benefit from attention to the interpretive theories of literary criticism, rather than viewing itself as separate from them as I have gotten the impression it often does.
Grading and commenting always involve reading, and reading always involves interpretation. Reading instructor comments always involves interpretation. Acts of composition involve going back to what one has already written, and that involves reading and interpretation. In other words, writing always involves reading, and reading always involves interpretation
Instructors must understand what they are doing when they read/interpret student writing; they must understand the way(s) they construct meaning out of students’ texts. And students ought to have some inkling that part of what they’re doing as they write is going back to what they’ve written and interpreting it and hopefully revising it on the basis of those interpretive acts. And, Ong makes a really significant point on this issue when he says that “writing distances the source of the communication (the writer) from the recipient (the reader), both in time and in space” (26). This, of course, implies that writers are constructing more than one identity as they write: they construct themselves as writers, and they construct themselves as readers. I think that it’s only by constructing oneself as both that one can truly enter into language and construct oneself as a member of a particular discourse community. Thus, as we try to teach writing, we must consider the role(s) reading and interpretive practices play in composing and in grading.
Since I’ve already written so much, I’ll refrain from talking at length about my suspicions of oversimplification when one speaks of a separation between the knower and the known, the subject and the object. I’ll just say that subject/object is always a mediated (and mutually constitutive?) relationship and that separations between them strike me as illusions at best.
Flower and Hayes: “A Cognitive Process Theory of Writing”
Summary:
Flower and Hayes discuss some of the complications that arise when composing is characterized as a “series of decisions and choices” (273). They begin by articulating some of the questions this characterization raises, and they note that the answers to the questions change depending on other presuppositions. They opt to begin by examining the writing process to see what really happens when people write. They introduce a theory based on the cognitive processes involved in writing. This theory focuses on four “key points” (274). They next move to address each of these points in turn.
Flower and Hayes first address the idea that writing is “best understood as a set of distinctive thinking processes which writers orchestrate or organize during the act of composing” (275), an idea that they contrast with stage models of writing. They show that while the stage model focuses on the progress of the product, the process model focuses on the writer, thus enabling us to compare the practices and strategies of different writers by studying actual writers as they write using “thinking aloud protocols” (277). This model identifies three elements that correspond to three processes, yet unlike stage models, this model does not posit any particular order in which the processes are enacted. Processes can overlap and writers can return to any process at any time. They examine the ways each element contributes to the overall process of composition.
The authors next turn to the implications of their model as a tool for researchers. They say that writers “simply embed individual processes as needed . . . to help carry out the task at hand” (284). Writers often embed processes unconsciously. Nevertheless, Flower and Hayes say, merely identifying embedding practices does not explain “what guides the writers’ decisions and choices and gives an overall purposeful structure to composing” (286).
Turning to the third point, which focuses on writers’ networks of content goals, Flower and Hayes show how discovery and goal-directed writing are connected. They acknowledge that knowledge, text, and goals both compete and collaborate during the writing process. They demonstrate that their model is not incompatible with the idea of writing as a means to knowledge development by showing how “writers create their own goals” in part by revising their goals in light of what they have learned while writing (290). Finally, they discuss the three goal patterns they’ve identified —“Explore and Consolidate,” “State and Develop,” and “Write and Regenerate.”
Musings:
I continue to remain wary of models based on psychological universalism. Perhaps most importantly for me, this model does not accurately reflect how I write, so I wonder how many other students do not write this way either. And, if language constrains and shapes thought, I wonder whether reliance on this model might not introduce new difficulties to those who whose first language—the language in which they think—is neither SAE nor academic English. Do they write and then translate? I know that many of them do. I know that many students whose first language is English approach academic discourse as one might approach a foreign language in which one is not proficient. Well, if one must translate everything, one doesn’t really come to feel competent, does one? And I, for one, hate doing things at which I never come to feel more competent. So, it seems to me that this model might just encourage our students to fear and hate writing even more than they already do when they walk into the room.
Moreover, this model is hierarchical, so it seems to me that teaching practices based on it might encourage students to continue to view writing as a series of discrete steps that must be moved through linearly. Then, as I’ve said before, what we produce are writers who continue to view writing as a series of little sub-products, each of which must be completed (and might be graded) before they can move on to the next step. Even though they say that their model acknowledges writing’s recursiveness, I don’t think they really capture it.
In fact, I’m growing increasingly wary about having students hand in “drafts” because I’m concerned about fostering the idea of writing as a series of linear steps that culiminate in the “presentation copy.” I’ve started going back over my old essays to see how I wrote in 101 (I keep everything!). I don’t think I ever wrote this way, and because I knew I’d be handing drafts in, I think I spent an awful lot of time polishing early on in the writing process, time that might have been better spent on developing ideas.
Bizzell: “Cognition, Convention, Clarity: What We Need to Know about Writing”
Summary:
Bizzell notes that the ways we have come to see writing problems as thinking problems largely because we have tended to pay no attention to students’ thinking. Now, she says, for various reasons, we have come to recognize that we must attend in new ways to the relationship between thinking and writing. She says that while compositionists agree about some fundamentals about language and language acquisition, they disagree about which of them apply to composition. She divides compositionists into camps based on whether they see writing as fundamentally inner- or outer-directed.
Inner-directed theorists see writing as one possible end of a linear process, each stage of which depends on the “same basic logical structures” (389). Thus, this structuralist model presumes that if teachers guide students through the stages, students will arrive at a point where they internalize the patterns that will enable them to approach specific writing situations, with audience analysis playing a primary role in revising and shaping writing.
Outer-directed theorists hold that the universal structures of language and thought cannot be taught and that the structures are always embedded in a social context that “conditions them” (390). One is always already embedded in at least one discourse community, and one cannot think what one has no word for. For these theorists, the primary goal is to teach students the conventions of academic discourse, to “ease” them into the academic discourse community by illuminating conventions and patterns that it has in common with discourse communities of which students are already members.
According to Bizzell, we need to consider the insights of both inner- and outer-directed theories. She provides an example of how inner-directed models can be enriched by outer-directed critique. She begins by summarizing Flower and Hayes’ model. Then she analyzes its shortcomings by turning to Vygotsky and sociolinguistics to fill in the gaps in the “translating box” (396). She shows that meaning is partly established by the conventions of discourse and thus the phrase “putting meaning into words” cannot adequately describe what occurs when we write and for the situatedness of writing. For Bizzell, discourse communities are akin to Fish’s interpretive communities.
Bizzell offers a nuanced understanding of writing as problem-solving that accounts for its situatedness and its function of “doing (intellectual) work in the world” (403). Bizzell also incorporates an interrogation of the quest for certainty that the use of a scientific model of writing evokes, pointing out the shortcomings with the protocol method and the underlying (and problematic) presupposition that certainty is achievable through the scientific method
Musings:
Well, I hadn’t read this when I wrote about Flower and Hayes. Since I made some of her criticisms myself, it should be clear that I think this model has lots more to offer. And thank goodness someone has finally said that we can have ideas for which we don’t have words! Those are, I think, the most creative, risky, and interesting ideas we have.
Her idea that students can “go native” in academic discourse communities and still maintain other aspects of their identities is one that I share, as is the notion that academic discourse communities can never be free of ideology. Brava! I’ll almost certainly be using this for my paper.
“Distributed Cognition at Work”
Summary:
Distributed cognition is the idea that intellectual interactions with others are not merely guides and stimulants, but “actually vehicles of thought” (136). It is dynamic “cognitive partnership” (136).
The author prefaces his/her account of distributed cognition at work in the BOC by discussing how it applies to a university setting in order to compare the university and the workplace as sites of writing. S/he distinguishes between distributed cognition and socially shared knowledge. The former takes place in the classroom and the latter in the overall institution.
Moving to the BOC, the author makes use of Hutchins’ ship analogy to explain distributed cognition in the workplace. S/he shows the ways that a ship is organized as the workplace is and some ways in which it differs. The main idea here is that the activities of an organization are “shaped by” their “primary goals” (140).
Decision-making at BOC is a complicated process, dependent on conventional genres, conventional lexicons, conventional approaches to data, conventional experiential categories, conventional logical warrants, and a standardized analytical instrument. The model generated by the interactions of these component parts is monitored and revised depending of changes in circumstances. Each genre entails its own characteristic narrative style, level of generalization, and goals. Policy decisions are based on analysis and interpretation of the input from different levels. Additionally, public and institutionally private genres play a part in the framing of problems and solutions.
Finally, the author notes that there are significant differences between the interactions of workers “in even hierarchical structures” and the interactions between teachers and students, because “until the highest levels of schooling, and in most classes, there is little expectation that students will contribute to the ongoing activity of the classroom in the way that fellow workers do” (148-149).
Musings:
While I think that the notion of “distributed cognition” is an interesting one, it seems odd to think about either academic or workplace writing and reasoning as universalizable situations. For instance, not all workplaces (in fact most peoples’ workplaces) are not corporations whose activities have national and/or international ramifications, nor are they all ordered as vertically as is BOC. Nor are all postsecondary academic settings organized as major research universities are. I’m not convinced that these two forms of social organization are analogous enough for a comparison of them to offer the insights that the author thinks s/he has established. For one thing, the author equivocates between the university and the classroom when s/he talks about educational activity. More importantly, the author focuses on the goals and activities of the overall institution when talking about BOC and those of the classroom when discussing education. This shifting focus undermines the analogy, even for comparative purposes. Most importantly, classrooms and corporate workplaces are not hierarchical in the same ways, and the author needs that for the analogy to hold in the way that s/he needs it to.
I’m even less convinced of the characterization of postsecondary education offered in this article than I am of the aptness of the analogy. I don’t think of “the university’s primary purpose as to accredit or to rank students” (136). If that’s the primary purpose of the university, why do we bother to offer classes? This reminds me of Linda Howard’s (one of the Regents) statement during a forum at CSN, when she said that “The only job of teachers is to boost students’ self-esteem.” I asked why schools didn’t, if that was the case, give us all A’s and send us home with degrees. I’ll ask the same question here. Can’t schools just charge a fee, rank students, and send us off? Why don’t schools just test us and issue degrees? Why don’t they just sell degrees? (I know, some do.) It may seem strange to others, but I no more think of the primary business of postsecondary education as issuing degrees than I think of students as customers.
Assessment and number of degrees granted might be administrators’ primary concern, but they aren’t mine. As both a student and as an instructor, I think of assessment as an onerous distraction from the things we’re trying to do together in the classroom. As both a student and as an instructor, I think of those who join me in the classroom as fellow workers in the activity of trying to make sense of the world and to construct new spaces within it for ourselves and for the activities we find worthwhile and engaging. In a very important sense, that means that we are fellow travelers. That is, what students need largely conditions my activity.
I do understand that hierarchy is built in to the classroom in ways that cannot be eradicated, but by making the constraints upon our activities as transparent as I can, I acknowledge the power relations inherent in the organization of the classroom. And, I try to engage student input into both content and process in every way I can think of. Students have a voice in what we read and in what topics we cover, and they have an opportunity at the end of every class to talk about the process of that particular class and how it went so that we can work together to improve our collective experience in future classes. Furthermore, for students afraid to voice their concerns in a face-to-face setting, I provide two other mechanisms for students to evaluate classes and our collective performance: They can drop a note into an envelope left in my mailbox for that purpose, or they can use an email account I have set up with a free service to send me a note. I will provide both the login and the password to every student in the class so that it can be easily accessed and feedback can remain anonymous. The only constraint I insist upon in feedback is that it may not involve ad hominem attacks.
Strangely, I think that the primary concern of the university is learning (notice I didn’t say “teaching”). I think that every other activity that goes on at a university ought to facilitate learning on some level and about some aspect of the experience of being human. Even research. Students are the most important people at the institution, and their needs ought to guide the rest of the activity tat takes place there.
Furthermore, the conception of education endorsed in this article presupposes that students are all the same, that they all learn in the same way, that they all have the same goals in mind, and that understanding knowledge as an object doesn’t involve reification. As far as I’m concerned, this is all crazy talk! Not really an expression usually associated with academic discourse, but this is, after all, a web log, which is a form of journal, and journals are, at least sometimes, free of the constraints of more formal academic writing. Perhaps it’s too emotional of me, but I’m finding it very difficult to think in any color other than red. In fact, I found it very difficult to keep reading through the scarlet veil that dropped over that sentence.
Here’s another one that really set me off: “A student who does not hand in his [sic] work does not impede the operation of the university. (In fact, he [sic] eases the instructor’s task of grading.) (148). Now that could only have been written by someone who has tenure, by someone whose job and/or funding is not in some way contingent upon good retention figures. Because for those of us who face pressure (implicit or explicit) to ensure that students neither drop nor fail our classes, students who do not hand in work DO impede our abilities to do our jobs. And that, my friends, impedes the operation of the university, however it is conceived. Grading is more difficult, not easier, if one knows that too many low grades or withdrawals can mean the loss of a job or of funding to continue with one’s own education. I know of at least one instructor who never gives students less than a C if they finish the semester; no matter what kind of or how much work a particular student has done, s/he will receive a C if s/he remains enrolled in this instructor’s class until the end of the semester. Appalling, don’t you think? And, if the university is conceived as primarily a degree-granting (ranking) business, undermining ranking, as this instructor’s practice does, impedes the primary activity of the institution. There’s no way around that.
This article’s idea of what goes on in the classroom is so much like what Freire calls the “banking concept of education,” what I call the “scarf and barf” method of education, that I cannot see what premises its author and I could possibly have in common regarding what goes on in educational settings. Since it is a commonplace in logic that if participants in a conversation share no premises, the conversation cannot continue in any meaningful way, I guess I’ll close here.
Peace all around.
Friday, March 28, 2008
Monday, March 24, 2008
Annotated Bibliography
Annotated Bibliography
Bazerman, Charles. “Where Is the Classroom?” Composing Knowledge: Readings for College Writers. Ed. Rolf Norgaard. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2007. 181-187.
For Bazerman, the classroom is more than a site or location. He argues that the classroom constitutes a genre, and as such it is an “activity system” in which social relations recur and whose language is both “conventional and typified” (181). On Bazerman’s view, the classroom is shaped by the other genres we bring to it, including the institutional parameters that circumscribe what may be done in it. These parameters include things like course load, available equipment, the physical layout of the classroom, pay, status, and definitions of teacher and student competence. Additionally, instructors’ personal histories playa role in determining what sorts of approaches a particular teacher will be capable of. Moreover, he says, moving the student to the center of the classroom, thus displacing the teacher, has involved recognizing student authority in unprecedented ways.
Bazerman claims that while instructor commitment to the oppressive nature of traditional education has not had the effects for which more radical instructors had hoped, it has led us to view the classroom as a “particular scene of writing” (182) that is neither wholly natural nor wholly artificial. He says that the issue is no longer whether the classroom must be reinvented, but that it is always invented. Nonetheless, it is not wholly invented because institutional expectations, including the expectations of other instructors and administrators, come into play.
According to Bazerman, it is up to instructors “whether these definitions of the classroom . . . are wholeheartedly accepted, wholeheartedly resisted, compromised with, or sublated into some fuller understanding of our tasks” (183). Teachers’ attitudes are based on their notions of the meaning and the goals of the course.
This article is relevant to my contention that students constitute an audience for whom the instructor writes a course.
Danielewicz, Jane. “Personal Genres, Public Voices.” College Composition and Communication 59.3(2008): 420-450.
Danielewicz claims that students construct agency in part “by producing texts in genres with recognizable social functions” (420). She argues for what, she notes, may at first seem to be a paradoxical position: students construct public voices by writing in personal genres such as autobiography and autoethnography.
Danielewicz begins by interrogating “voice.” Voice, she says, is a crucial concept in the teaching of writing, yet it remains oddly undefined, with some theorists arguing that it is not even a legitimate concept. For her, however, voice is a quality of writing that establishes writers as authoritative for the audience and for themselves. Public voice is not inherent, but rather, emerges out of writers’ “engagement with the world” (423).
Turning to Peter Elbow’s understanding of five kinds of voice, Danielewicz focuses her attention on the authoritative voice and concentrates on the possibilities for development of an authoritative voice inherent in personal genres such as autobiography and autoethnography. Defining public voice as one with social intentions, she notes that public voice and power are inextricable linked and that public voice is one of the ways writers establish themselves within discourses of power.
Despite her reification of voice, Danielewicz provides a fruitful framework for understanding the connection between genre and establishing oneself as an authoritative writer. This article will be useful to me for this paper for that reason.
Ede, Lisa and Andrea Lunsford. “Audience Addressed/Audience Invoked: The Role of Audience in Composition Theory and Pedagogy.” Cross-Talk in Comp Theory: A Reader. Ed. Victor Villanueva. 77-95.
Ede and Lunsford address the issue of audience in composition instruction. While their article is primarily concerned with pedagogical issues such as how we ought to teach audience, they provide a useful discussion of what they identify as the two sides of the audience debate: those who believe a writer addresses an audience and those who believe a writer constructs an audience. While some teacher/theorists combine the two conceptions (or aspects of them), they usually privilege one or the other in their articulations.
Ede and Lunsford begin with Mitchell and Taylor’s evaluation of the two major models of composition—writer-focused models and product-focused models. Mitchell and Taylor’s model, like those they criticize, say Ede and Lunsford, does not attend adequately to invention. Mitchell and Taylor’s model privileges one element of the writing process—audience—at the expense of the other three, greatly distorting the process itself. Ede and Lunsford also raise the issue of the “ethics of language use” (81), which they note other accounts lack. In fact, according to Ede and Lunsford, those whose research is based on a conception of the audience as addressed implicitly encourage “pandering to the crowd” (82) and invoke an “oversimplified view of language” (82).
Using Walter Ong’s model as representative, Ede and Lunsford claim that while models that hold that the audience is invoked are correct in the abstract, they do not hold up on a concrete level. One problem with these models, according to Ede and Lunsford, is that audiences rarely form a genuine collective, and hence Ong’s distinction between speakers’ audiences and writers’ audiences doesn’t really bear scrutiny. Furthermore, the process of constructing a role for the audience is more “complex and diverse” than Ong allows (85). Understanding this process can be furthered by attending to levels of abstraction and distance between writer and audience.
Finally, Ede and Lunsford propose their own model of the relationship between writer and audience. Except for a few special cases, audiences may be either invoked or addressed, according to this model. While writers must often adapt to specific audiences (for example, responding to comments), they also construct an imagined audience whose responses and needs they try to anticipate.
This article is relevant to my paper in that I will argue that students constitute an invoked audience as we construct syllabi and an addressed audience once we begin to interact in the classroom.
hooks, bell. “Embracing Change: Teaching in a Multicultural World.” Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York: Routledge, 1994. 35-44.
In this article, hooks defines the goals of transformative/liberatory pedagogy. She provides cautions about the ways hierarchy can be reproduced in the classroom and the ways in which traditional teaching methods reflect the idea of “universal” experience. hooks notes that teachers sometimes fear embracing modes of multicultural classroom interaction because they fear losing control of classes because valuing multiculturalism means that subject matter and texts may be approached in more than one way. She holds that institutions that truly value multiculturalism must provide instructors training, especially since valuing multiculturalism requires that many instructors shift paradigms.
Like Freire, hooks believes that traditional models of education treat students as objects and only instructors as subjects. She claims that education is political, that there is no such thing as an apolitical education. She notes that even those instructors who want to include marginalized voices all too often do not give them the same “respect and consideration given other work” (38), which leads to tokenism.
hooks acknowledges that a transformative pedagogy carries the risk of heightened emotions and conflict into the classroom and that students may not experience such a classroom as safe. Moreover, she notes, transformative pedagogy does not guarantee that social hierarchies will not be reproduced in the classroom; for instance, white males may be the most vocal students. hooks’ claims that safety ought not to be the goal of a classroom, but creating a sense of shared commitment and common goals ought to be. She offers suggestions about how to achieve these goals.
Most relevant to my paper is hooks’ assertion that students often resist this way of teaching, her articulation of the ways in which they resist, and her claims about what their resistance means in terms of their subjectivities and identities.
---. “Theory as Liberatory Practice.” Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York: Routledge, 1994. 59-75.
In this article, hooks says that theory must be directed toward its ends, that it doesn’t move us in the directions we desire without “conscious effort and guidance” (61). For hooks, theory may provide a site for healing for those who do not understand what is going on “around and within” them (59).
hooks discusses some of the ways theory is misunderstood and misrepresented in the academy. Accessible theory is devalued; the inaccessibility of much theory leads people to believe that it is the province of a few special (that is, really smart) people. hooks calls for a more democratic understanding of theory-making that can counter the false assumption that theory is somehow different from and opposed to practice. She notes that inaccessible theory divides and separates by reproducing hierarchy, and that the “trashing” of theory that is often the result of finding it inaccessible reinforces the idea that theory and practice are opposed (65).
For hooks, theory emerges out of our attempts to make sense of our everyday experience, and both the anti-intellectualism evident in dismissing theory as irrelevant and the mystification of theory by inaccessibility “perpetuate . . . conditions that reinforce our collective exploitation” (69). hooks turns to the practice of witnessing, that is, speaking and writing from personal experience, as a means of avoiding the cooptation of the revolutionary possibilities of a transformative pedagogy.
In this article, hooks offers suggestions for ways to avoid treating both others and the self as objects in the classroom that inform my understanding of the inherently hierarchical nature of the teacher/student relationship.
Linkon, Sherry Lee, Irvin Peckham, Benjamin G Lanier-Nabors. “Struggling with Class in English Studies.” College English 67.2 (2004): 149-153. Literature Online. U of Nevada, Las Vegas Lib. 2 Feb. 2008. <http://lion.chadwyck.com/searchFulltext.do?id=R03507880&divLevel=0&area=abell&forward=critref_ft>.
According to Linkon et al., compositionists have considered how class shapes learning and students’ language use. They discuss class-based analysis in composition studies in particular and English studies in general, developing the argument that English scholars’ language allows for a nuanced analysis of “class as a factor in individual and collective identity and power relationships among social groups” (abstract).
Linkon et al note that while class may be divorced from other identity categories as an analytic tool, it must be understood as always “intersecting” other identity categories, such as race, sexual orientation, and gender. They note that students often have to undergo a process of developing empathy for the Other in composition classrooms, and they note that this process is a difficult and sometimes painful one that students will resist.
Linkon et al address Seitz’s notion that the tropes of working-class discourse may conflict with the middle-class tropes of academic discourse. They also discuss other scholars’ attention to the notion that entering academic discourse can be a betrayal of one’s primary identifications, noting that this can be especially problematic for working-class students who tend to view identity as stable rather than fluid.
This article has primarily provided starting points for my research, both in terms of some of the questions I want to pose and sources for further reading.
Lu, Min-Zhan. “Working Bodies: Class Matters in College.” Identity Papers: Literacy and Power in Higher Education. Ed. Bronwyn Williams. Logan, UT: Utah State UP, 2006. 182-191.
Lu begins by offering an account of what she calls the “how-why-what” of writing this article (182). She addresses the issue of visible markers of identity and how they inform audience expectations and reception. She moves to address some of Fulkerson’s criticisms of liberatory pedagogy. In doing so, she interrogates how we define composition and writing. Acknowledging the influence of Judith Butler, Janice Haraway, and David Harvey, Lu holds that writing is an act of an embodied subjectivity. While she notes that bodies are inscribed with cultural meaning, Lu also holds that “the human body is active and transformative in relation to the processes that produce, sustain, and dissolve it” (183). For Lu, writing is also a contextual act, and context affects writerly and readerly expectations of both the text and the body that produces it. She interrogates Harvey’s extension of Marx’s definition of class and concludes that composition functions to maintain the status quo by exerting a Foucauldian disciplinary influence over teachers and students alike. Moreover, she holds that this is especially true when the goals of composition education are held to be ensuring career success and eventual financial security.
Lu implies that composition education should aim toward a transformation of the embodied subject, that it is more than simply the transfer of a specific skill set from one embodied subject to another. She reminds us that the classroom also serves as the site of economic activity: teachers exert their labor power to teach, and students both “extract and bear” labor power in their roles as students and as future workers (187).
This article reinforces my notion that the classroom can be more than a site for the reproduction of “capitalist stooges” and is thus relevant to my paper.
Ortmeier-Hooper, Christina. “English May Be My Second Language, but I’m Not ‘ESL.’ ” College Composition and Communication 59.3(2008): 389-419.
In this article, Ortmeier-Hooper focuses her attention on the needs of ESL students in first-year composition classes. According to Ortmeier-Hooper, the numbers of ESL students is increasing, and many of these students decline to enroll in first-year comp classes geared to meet their needs, opting instead to enroll in mainstream first-year comp classes when they have the option.
Ortmeier-Hooper first examines the ways that the labels ESL and ELL are complicated by students’ affective responses to them. Quoting Eli Hinkel, an ESL/ELL specialist, Ortmeier-Hooper notes that many students who are institutionally identified as ESL/ELL do not self-identify as such, instead thinking of themselves as non-native speakers. In other words, Ortmeier-Hooper examines the disconnect between the ways a particular group of students self-identify and an identity that is imposed on them by educational institutions.
First, Ortmeier-Hooper explores theoretical connections between identity and writing. She notes that Robert Brooke, in Writing and Sense of Self: Negotiation in Writing Workshops, breaks identity down into two parts: other-assigned identity and self-assigned identity. She then points out the ways in which other compositionists have made use of Erving Goffman’s to conclude that there is a “two-fold relationship” between writing and identity (391). Public identity is performance (in Goffman’s rather than Butler’s sense), and ESL/ELL students must negotiate the tension between public performances of identity and private notions of who they are.
Next, Ortmeier-Hooper moves to three case studies in order to illustrate some difficulties that students have negotiating these tensions, which, she notes, can include culturally based misunderstandings of classroom roles. These tensions can lead to resistance and/or capitulation on the part of students.
Because ESL/ELL students are not the only students whose public identities are fluid and multiple, they are not the only students who must negotiate tensions between identities and subjectivities in the first-year comp class. This article is relevant to my paper in three ways: First, it has provided me with a number of primary sources to explore. Second, Ortmeier-Hooper’s findings are, in large measure, applicable by extrapolation to other students. Third, since ESL/ELL students seem to experience institutional labels as efforts to impose identity upon them, their responses are indicative of the responses of those who feel that an instructor’s activities involves the same sort of effort.
I expect to consult a great many other sources, including Paolo Freire (Pedagogy of the Oppressed), Judith Butler (Gender Trouble), Annette Kolodny (“Dancing through the Minefield”), Michel Foucault (Power/Knowledge and History of Sexuality vols. 1 & 2), and several articles from the syllabus (Berlin, Ong, Shor, Hairston, Fulkerson, Breuch, Downs and Wardle, and Smith among others). I have not included them in this bibliography because I have not finished (re)reading them, and because I decided to spend the hours and hours it would have taken to start writing the paper.
Peace to all.
Week of 3/24
Shaughnessy: “Diving In: An Introduction to Basic Writing”
Summary:
Basic writing students are presumed to have something wrong with them. The idea that these students must “ ‘catch up’ ” with others reinforces the idea that students, not teachers or institutions, are flawed and hence should “move” or change (311). Shaughnessy suggests that there are “important connections between the changes teachers undergo and the progress of their students” (312).
Using a four-stage scale, with each stage’s name functioning as a metaphor for the “center of the teacher’s emotional energy” (312), Shaughnessy claims that often the first question a teacher asks is what the consequences for him or her will be if s/he flunks the entire class. “Guarding the Tower” teaching leads students to focus on imitating academic language, and teachers become regimented and rigid, unable to adapt their teaching style to the particular class with which they are interacting.
Gradually, teachers enter into a phase in which they are able to see intelligence in students’ writing, and, intending to reach those students s/he believes can move forward to where standards dictate the students should be, the teacher moves into the “Converting the Natives” stage. At this stage, the teacher approaches students with the same condescending benevolence with which the US approaches “Third-World” countries and neither considers students as individuals nor relates what’s being taught to what students already know.
If students and teacher are lucky, one day it occurs to the teacher that what seems “simple and compelling” to him or her is not so for the students (314). This realization (enables? causes?) moves the teacher into the third stage of development: “Sounding the Depths.” In this stage, the teacher observes both students him- or herself and is better able to “mark a pedagogical path for teacher and students to follow” (314). This involves considering the logics and specific difficulties students are operating through as well as the sorts of questions one asks students and the sorts of comments one provides on their papers.
Finally, the teacher reaches a point when s/he “must make a decision that demands professional courage—the decision to remediate himself [sic], to become a student of new disciplines and of his students themselves in order to perceive both their difficulties and their incipient excellence” (317). Teachers who have reached this stage are able to assume that there are students in their classes who are superior to them and to recognize teaching composition as worthwhile and challenging work.
Musings:
While I’m almost always a little leery of attempts to schematize processes, I have known teachers who embodied each one of these stages, even though I have never been a student in a basic writing class. Nonetheless, Shaughnessy’s fundamental claim—that instructors’ attitudes and beliefs about students are crucially important factors in the tenor of a class, and hence in student attitudes toward particular classes and professors—seems perfectly obvious to those of us who sit in classrooms as students.
I had one professor who couldn’t adapt her teaching style to the class. I may have mentioned her before. She graded for form, grammar, and mechanics only. She was completely rule-bound—and she didn’t even know the rules! This prof gave me a D on a paper because she said the works cited page wasn’t in MLA style because it was double-spaced! Needless to say to those of you who know me, the D didn’t stand.
I’ve also had profs whose comments indicated that they saw intelligence in my writing (stage 2), but who never took the time to find out what I already knew. Given my peculiar psychology, these might be the most problematic profs of all. They accuse students of plagiarism because they cannot believe that students enter the room with knowledge. While they don’t mean to be insulting, they question students about the sources of their ideas in a way that indicates that they do not believe the ideas are the students’ own. I’ve actually had professors say to me that they understand that my husband teaches philosophy and that must be the source of my ideas! I mean, really! I have, in the past, rather quickly disabused them of the notion that Joel teaches me at home—as if having over 200 students per semester would allow him the time! As if Joel has any interest in the Continental philosophers who interest me! As if the only possible source of “knowledge” is the superior teacher! These professors assume that students are unsophisticated thinkers who need their guidance in order to find their places in the world. They mean well, and I think they sometimes want to mentor students in whom they see the spark of intelligence, but often mentoring means something akin to theoretical brainwashing, and if you know me, you know I’m not having any of that—from my husband or from a teacher or from anyone else.
Bartholomae: “Inventing the University”
Summary:
According to Bartholomae, students experience each writing assignment as learning to speak or to translate into a foreign language, which involves new and “peculiar ways of knowing” and the “various discourses” of the academy. Moreover, students must move between and among discourses, using appropriate voices. Barholomae calls this process “inventing the university” (624). Since students are required to speak in and inhabit these discourses before they have “ ‘learned’ ” the skills such speaking and inhabiting require, problems arise.
One problem is that it is difficult for basic writers to assume the authority academic discourse requires, and so they take on a teacherly voice and give directions, often using the second person. These “slips” (625) in voice are common, especially in the conclusions of basic writers’ essays, where basic writers often give advice and use “commonplaces” to convey meaning.
Bartholomae distinguishes between language that comes “through the writer” and that which comes “from the writer” (627). Language that comes through the writer is geared toward imitating or appropriating the language the writer believes the audience expects; language that comes through the writer reflects a writer “ ‘thinking and talking to himself [sic]’ ” (627). Students’ writing problems often arise out of their inability to negotiate the shift from “ ‘writer-based prose’ ” and “ ‘reader-based prose’ ”(627). Hence, teaching students to write with an audience in mind becomes particularly fraught.
Bartholomae also distinguishes between the person writing and the writing persona. The person writing must be located in a discourse before s/he can negotiate this transition by locating the writing persona in it. Since students have to be “equal to or more powerful than those” for whom they write in order to locate themselves in this way (628), teachers must be absolutely forthcoming about who they are, what their expectations are and where those expectations come from, and their interpretive practices. Moreover, Bartholomae says that the usual practice of providing students with imaginary audiences does nothing to address the problem of writing for someone who knows more that you do about writing. The central problem for writers is representing readers’ knowledge in their minds.
Bartholomae critiques analyses of the writing process that treat writing as though it is something “separate from the writer and his intentions” (630). He notes that writing is a product as well as a process and that it is in the product that the writer is located on the page. Citing Barthes, Bartholomae holds that the writer is “written by the languages available to him [sic]” (631). The “aha” moment is most likely when students figure out in which discourse they will locate themselves. One’s new ideas or discoveries authorize one to speak.
Knowledge-telling is a discourse in which students locate themselves to complete academic assignments as they learn the discourses in which professionals immerse themselves, according to Bartholomae. Teachers can make students aware of the conventions of the particular discourses of the discipline as a means of enabling them to more easily enter into them.
Next Bartholomae examines essays written by student writers to “see how, once entered, . . . language made or unmade the writer” (636). He supplies examples to illustrate a variety of entry points that different papers offer readers, and he shows how some confer more authority to their writers than others. He notes that the most successful writers made use of a tension between commonplaces that they defined as naïve and one that they defined as their own, more sophisticated view. The most important lesson for student writers, Bartholomae argues, is that what they actually put down on paper is more important than what they intended to write.
Difficulties with the conventions of the appropriate discourses have substantive as well as technical consequences, and progress will become apparent in revision. Bartholomae outlines levels of discursive development; students establish themselves as authorities within discourse in increasingly sophisticated ways. However, these levels “are not marked by corresponding levels in the type or frequency of error, at least not by the type or frequency of sentence-level error” (646). They are marked by an effort to work against conventional discourse.
Bartholomae says that we need to once again attend to the products of student writing, allowing those students who need to imitate the conventions of discourse before they can enter into it and do its work.
Musings:
Bartholomae’s concept of “inventing the university” seems a useful expansion of the ways we try to make students aware of the importance of considering the audience when they write. I’m particularly interested in different ideas about how writers (and readers) establish their own writing/reading practices as authoritative. However, like Jessica, I am skeptical of the idea that language makes anything other than language. The fact that identity construction (and persona construction) takes place within discourse doesn’t mean that the discourse is doing the work, and we need to be very careful about making this distinction, because not making it denies writers agency.
I am, however, quite sympathetic to the idea that writing is product as well as process. As I’ve said before, breaking down a process into little mini-processes doesn’t keep the focus on the process—it just creates a lot of little sub-products at the end of the process. For instance, in one of my classes, we just had a “progress report” due. Since it’s graded separately from the paper that it will eventually be a part of, I viewed it as a product that’s part of a process. In fact, students’ process is very rarely (if ever) what gets evaluated at the end of the class. A paper, a piece of writing is what gets graded. I’ve never had a professor say to me, “Gina, your process is flawless. The paper isn’t so great, but the process was wonderful. You invented; you explored; you revised; you did everything you should have done. This grade is for your process.” Not once. And, if a prof had told me that, I’d have thought they were full of it. The fact is, composition takes place in a context, and there are rules. One of those rules in the comp class is that papers are graded. I think it’s part of the definition of comp or something.
The other thing is that I think we have to be careful about giving students the idea that there is only one academic discourse. There are many, as the discussion among members of different disciplines in this class makes clear, and I thinnk we have a responsibility to let students know that. Of course, I don't think we have the responsibility to teach all of them--Once again, an insight from Jess guides me here: We have to model entering discourses for students so that they can approach different discourses and find their own points of entry in order to participate in them.
Rose: “The Language of Exclusion: Writing Instruction at the University”
Summary:
Rose begins by listing five beliefs about writing that he holds are erroneous because they are based on a “reductive, fundamentally behaviorist model of the development and use of written language, a problematic definition of writing, and an inaccurate assessment of student ability and need” (548). Rose then addresses the five mistaken assumptions one by one, before moving to speculating about better ways to think about academic writing.
Rose begins by surveying the historical development of behaviorist models of writing. Through this approach, he hopes to understand the reasons this approach continues to exert such influence in the academy. This paradigm arose out of early-twentieth-century concerns with efficiency, a desire to establish writing as a utilitarian skill, the medicalization of writing difficulty, and positivism in general.
The stigma attached to Basic Writing is a function of the idea that writing is a skill. On this view, specific skill sets ought to be acquired at specific points in the educational process, and basic writers have not achieved this goal. Thus, they must be remediated, which allows schools to keep their enrollments high while students are brought up to speed. Moreover, the medical paradigm’s transformation of “difficulty” into “disability” intensified the focus on errors, which came to be viewed as a diagnostic tool.
Next, Rose turns to a consideration of the meaning of “literacy.” He notes that the way that literacy “translates into behavior varies a good deal” (559). He says that while basic writing students are literate according to the “common definition,” they lack familiarity with the conventions of academic discourse and academic discursive communities (560). We should be careful in applying the label “illiterate” to those who lack this familiarity for a number of reasons, Rose notes. First, it’s inaccurate. Second, the term carries negative connotations that come from earlier usages. While students may be uninterested in reading and writing, they read and write all the time—it’s just that they read and write things other than those valued in the academy.
Rose attends to “transience.” He says that the idea that student writing difficulty is often viewed as a transient problem that can be solved is an illusion because the changing demographics of American society ensure that students arrive at post-secondary institutions differently prepared dependent on a variety of conditions, over many of which students (and teacher) have little or no control. The myth of transience, moreover, “brings with it a powerful liability” (564). It falsely implies that the past was better than the present and that we can return to that mythical past if only we can figure out the right things to do.
Finally, Rose proposes “a model of written language development and production” that “honor[s] the cognitive and emotional and situational dimensions of language” (564). This model also accounts for the psycholinguistic, literary, and rhetorical aspects of language. It demands that teachers critically examine their teaching practices in order to better understand the theoretical underpinnings of the ways they teach. He suggests that we consider other terminology for discussing writing, terminology that doesn’t involve classifying writing as a skill or a tool.
Musings:
Rose’s article resonates with me because it echoes something (actually, I guess it predates it) I’ve just read in this month’s CCC. See my annotated bibliography for the Ortmeier-Hooper entry. It also reflects the historical reality we’ve been reading about all semester—comp instructors have always complained about how ill-prepared their students are, remedial or not.
I’m less certain about the idea that writing ought not to be characterized as a skill or a tool. I think it can be both, although it’s not necessarily either. While I’m not sure Rose would disagree with this assessment, I suspect he might. My problem is that I want to allow students to have a voice in defining the role writing will play in their lives, and if they choose to approach it as a means to some other end they deem more important, so be it. I often do this myself. I sometimes write because I want a job when I leave here, so I write for publication, even though I don’t much care about it (although I must admit, if I’m honest, that I do like to see my name in print). I sometimes write to sort things out—personal things, ideas, tasks, etc.
I’m very sympathetic to the idea of discourse communities, but it’s important to keep in mind the fact that the academy is not a single, monolithic discourse community. And, it’s just as important to make use of those things that students read and write all the time. We need, in other words, to know who they are and what interests them, rather than constructing them in our heads as we so often do.
Rose: “Narrowing the Mind and Page: Remedial Writers and Cognitive Reductionism”
Summary:
Rose begins by identifying the trend to seek a single explanation for “broad ranges of poor school performance” as “cognitive reductionism” (345). Rose notes that despite repeated challenges from various sources, cognitive reductionism returns, in a variety of guises and from a variety of sources, to discussions about writing and writing ability. Because these claims have significant consequences for teaching writing, Rose proposes to reexamine them.
Rose’s first target is field dependence-independence theories of cognitive style. He notes that attempts to translate perceptions of the relative embeddedness of objects in a field to diagnose how well individuals will perform tasks are misguided because these tests measure how people perform tasks, not how well they perform the tasks. In fact, he says, research doesn’t find what the theory predicts when it is applied to writing. Noting seven problems with applying field dependence-independence theories to writing, Rose concludes that it is inappropriate for analyzing, predicting, or diagnosing student writing because there is no rhetorical-linguistic test of cognitive style. Furthermore, the theory deals only with a “general disembedding skill,” and new data indicate that such general skills may not in fact exist (354).
Moving to “hemisphericity,” Rose notes that empirical and experimental studies have yielded “remarkable insight into the fine neuropsychological processes involved in understanding language and . . . in making spatial-orientational discriminations” (355). He notes that while this field is still relatively “primitive” (355), there are “convergences” and “areas of agreement” (355). He says, however, that oversimplification has caused distortions in how some people characterize the functioning of the cerebral hemispheres. Because much of the data has been gathered from studying people whose corpus callosums have been severed, the data might not be pertinent to those with healthy brains. Additionally, Rose voices some concerns about the techniques used to gather data and the ways the data are synthesized. Little definitive correlation between hemsiphericity and occupation or talent exists.
Next Rose addresses Piaget and cognitive developmental stage psychology. Noting that Piaget’s point of view is “fundamentally logical and mathematical” (361). The problem with this is that this POV presupposes that people actually think objectively and syllogistically. Rose discusses its “appropriation” by those who theorize about college-age remedial writers (362). First, he notes, the model is meant to explain the developmental stages children go through, and thus it is at least questionable how aptly it may be applied to adult learners. He notes other problems with testing, pointing out that failure at a specific task may result in a learner’s being branded as lacking a some fundamental cognitive principles.
Rose next shifts his attention to orality-literacy theory. He distinguishes between the strong version that holds that literacy “necessarily results in a wide variety of changes in thinking” and that literacy is a necessary (and sufficient?) precondition for abstraction and a host of ther crucial reasoning skills (367), and a weaker version that posits that literacy plays a non-determining role in extending the possibilities of human cognition. While Rose admits that “literacy must bring with it tremendous repercussions for the intellect” (367), problems arise when this theory is applied to composition studies, notably the labeling of some people as incapable of abstract thinking. This problem is methodological in origin: It involves generalizing from one group to a relevantly different group. And, it is not at all clear that literacy provides the essential ingredient in socio-cultural change. In fact, sometimes literacy is used to reinforce the status quo.
Rose says we should beware of “neat, bipolar characterizations” of oral and written language because although there are differences, the “continuum does not adequately characterize these differences” (373). Rose holds that the theories he examines “end up leveling rather than elaborating individual differences in cognition” (376). They distract us from the contextual influences on composition for basic writers; they reflect stereotypes. Rose closes with some cautionary words about the responsibilities and limitations one takes on when one theorizes and a warning about the special concerns regarding comparative studies.
Musings:
While I agree with Rose’s criticisms of those who want to apply Piaget’s developmental psychology to adults, I also wonder how cognitive development theory would look if someone, anyone, would attend to the fact that females’ and males’ brains develop differently. Infusions of sex-specific hormones around adolescence result in different brain chemistry and there is more and more evidence that male and female brains develop differently. Who knows what, if anything, that means about the ways males and females learn.
In fact, some of the newest research shows that if women’s reactions are attended to, one of our most fundamental beliefs about human behavioral development—the fight or flight response—is only partially correct. It applies pretty definitively to males. There is increasing evidence that females’ responses in situations that arouse fight-or-flight in males may more properly be described as “tend or defend.” In other words, females try to defuse and deescalate rather than fleeing (running away from one’s offspring doesn’t seem evolutionarily sound, does it?), and, if that doesn’t work, to defend a space without necessarily defending one’s self. This may explain why female mammals are so much more territorial in general than males.
Please, don’t get me wrong. I am not of the “biology is destiny” school. I think one of the really cool things about being human rather than some other animal is the fact that we don’t seem to be determined by our biology. We have the capacity to transcend what seems to me best understood as parameters instead of determinants. That seems clear. Moreover, it also seems to me that much of what we might currently define as biological may in fact be social (yes, it’s a return to the old nature/nurture debate). In fact, perhaps it’s the case that very little about human psychology and consciousness is either strictly nature or strictly nurture. That seems most correct to me…
Peace to all.
Summary:
Basic writing students are presumed to have something wrong with them. The idea that these students must “ ‘catch up’ ” with others reinforces the idea that students, not teachers or institutions, are flawed and hence should “move” or change (311). Shaughnessy suggests that there are “important connections between the changes teachers undergo and the progress of their students” (312).
Using a four-stage scale, with each stage’s name functioning as a metaphor for the “center of the teacher’s emotional energy” (312), Shaughnessy claims that often the first question a teacher asks is what the consequences for him or her will be if s/he flunks the entire class. “Guarding the Tower” teaching leads students to focus on imitating academic language, and teachers become regimented and rigid, unable to adapt their teaching style to the particular class with which they are interacting.
Gradually, teachers enter into a phase in which they are able to see intelligence in students’ writing, and, intending to reach those students s/he believes can move forward to where standards dictate the students should be, the teacher moves into the “Converting the Natives” stage. At this stage, the teacher approaches students with the same condescending benevolence with which the US approaches “Third-World” countries and neither considers students as individuals nor relates what’s being taught to what students already know.
If students and teacher are lucky, one day it occurs to the teacher that what seems “simple and compelling” to him or her is not so for the students (314). This realization (enables? causes?) moves the teacher into the third stage of development: “Sounding the Depths.” In this stage, the teacher observes both students him- or herself and is better able to “mark a pedagogical path for teacher and students to follow” (314). This involves considering the logics and specific difficulties students are operating through as well as the sorts of questions one asks students and the sorts of comments one provides on their papers.
Finally, the teacher reaches a point when s/he “must make a decision that demands professional courage—the decision to remediate himself [sic], to become a student of new disciplines and of his students themselves in order to perceive both their difficulties and their incipient excellence” (317). Teachers who have reached this stage are able to assume that there are students in their classes who are superior to them and to recognize teaching composition as worthwhile and challenging work.
Musings:
While I’m almost always a little leery of attempts to schematize processes, I have known teachers who embodied each one of these stages, even though I have never been a student in a basic writing class. Nonetheless, Shaughnessy’s fundamental claim—that instructors’ attitudes and beliefs about students are crucially important factors in the tenor of a class, and hence in student attitudes toward particular classes and professors—seems perfectly obvious to those of us who sit in classrooms as students.
I had one professor who couldn’t adapt her teaching style to the class. I may have mentioned her before. She graded for form, grammar, and mechanics only. She was completely rule-bound—and she didn’t even know the rules! This prof gave me a D on a paper because she said the works cited page wasn’t in MLA style because it was double-spaced! Needless to say to those of you who know me, the D didn’t stand.
I’ve also had profs whose comments indicated that they saw intelligence in my writing (stage 2), but who never took the time to find out what I already knew. Given my peculiar psychology, these might be the most problematic profs of all. They accuse students of plagiarism because they cannot believe that students enter the room with knowledge. While they don’t mean to be insulting, they question students about the sources of their ideas in a way that indicates that they do not believe the ideas are the students’ own. I’ve actually had professors say to me that they understand that my husband teaches philosophy and that must be the source of my ideas! I mean, really! I have, in the past, rather quickly disabused them of the notion that Joel teaches me at home—as if having over 200 students per semester would allow him the time! As if Joel has any interest in the Continental philosophers who interest me! As if the only possible source of “knowledge” is the superior teacher! These professors assume that students are unsophisticated thinkers who need their guidance in order to find their places in the world. They mean well, and I think they sometimes want to mentor students in whom they see the spark of intelligence, but often mentoring means something akin to theoretical brainwashing, and if you know me, you know I’m not having any of that—from my husband or from a teacher or from anyone else.
Bartholomae: “Inventing the University”
Summary:
According to Bartholomae, students experience each writing assignment as learning to speak or to translate into a foreign language, which involves new and “peculiar ways of knowing” and the “various discourses” of the academy. Moreover, students must move between and among discourses, using appropriate voices. Barholomae calls this process “inventing the university” (624). Since students are required to speak in and inhabit these discourses before they have “ ‘learned’ ” the skills such speaking and inhabiting require, problems arise.
One problem is that it is difficult for basic writers to assume the authority academic discourse requires, and so they take on a teacherly voice and give directions, often using the second person. These “slips” (625) in voice are common, especially in the conclusions of basic writers’ essays, where basic writers often give advice and use “commonplaces” to convey meaning.
Bartholomae distinguishes between language that comes “through the writer” and that which comes “from the writer” (627). Language that comes through the writer is geared toward imitating or appropriating the language the writer believes the audience expects; language that comes through the writer reflects a writer “ ‘thinking and talking to himself [sic]’ ” (627). Students’ writing problems often arise out of their inability to negotiate the shift from “ ‘writer-based prose’ ” and “ ‘reader-based prose’ ”(627). Hence, teaching students to write with an audience in mind becomes particularly fraught.
Bartholomae also distinguishes between the person writing and the writing persona. The person writing must be located in a discourse before s/he can negotiate this transition by locating the writing persona in it. Since students have to be “equal to or more powerful than those” for whom they write in order to locate themselves in this way (628), teachers must be absolutely forthcoming about who they are, what their expectations are and where those expectations come from, and their interpretive practices. Moreover, Bartholomae says that the usual practice of providing students with imaginary audiences does nothing to address the problem of writing for someone who knows more that you do about writing. The central problem for writers is representing readers’ knowledge in their minds.
Bartholomae critiques analyses of the writing process that treat writing as though it is something “separate from the writer and his intentions” (630). He notes that writing is a product as well as a process and that it is in the product that the writer is located on the page. Citing Barthes, Bartholomae holds that the writer is “written by the languages available to him [sic]” (631). The “aha” moment is most likely when students figure out in which discourse they will locate themselves. One’s new ideas or discoveries authorize one to speak.
Knowledge-telling is a discourse in which students locate themselves to complete academic assignments as they learn the discourses in which professionals immerse themselves, according to Bartholomae. Teachers can make students aware of the conventions of the particular discourses of the discipline as a means of enabling them to more easily enter into them.
Next Bartholomae examines essays written by student writers to “see how, once entered, . . . language made or unmade the writer” (636). He supplies examples to illustrate a variety of entry points that different papers offer readers, and he shows how some confer more authority to their writers than others. He notes that the most successful writers made use of a tension between commonplaces that they defined as naïve and one that they defined as their own, more sophisticated view. The most important lesson for student writers, Bartholomae argues, is that what they actually put down on paper is more important than what they intended to write.
Difficulties with the conventions of the appropriate discourses have substantive as well as technical consequences, and progress will become apparent in revision. Bartholomae outlines levels of discursive development; students establish themselves as authorities within discourse in increasingly sophisticated ways. However, these levels “are not marked by corresponding levels in the type or frequency of error, at least not by the type or frequency of sentence-level error” (646). They are marked by an effort to work against conventional discourse.
Bartholomae says that we need to once again attend to the products of student writing, allowing those students who need to imitate the conventions of discourse before they can enter into it and do its work.
Musings:
Bartholomae’s concept of “inventing the university” seems a useful expansion of the ways we try to make students aware of the importance of considering the audience when they write. I’m particularly interested in different ideas about how writers (and readers) establish their own writing/reading practices as authoritative. However, like Jessica, I am skeptical of the idea that language makes anything other than language. The fact that identity construction (and persona construction) takes place within discourse doesn’t mean that the discourse is doing the work, and we need to be very careful about making this distinction, because not making it denies writers agency.
I am, however, quite sympathetic to the idea that writing is product as well as process. As I’ve said before, breaking down a process into little mini-processes doesn’t keep the focus on the process—it just creates a lot of little sub-products at the end of the process. For instance, in one of my classes, we just had a “progress report” due. Since it’s graded separately from the paper that it will eventually be a part of, I viewed it as a product that’s part of a process. In fact, students’ process is very rarely (if ever) what gets evaluated at the end of the class. A paper, a piece of writing is what gets graded. I’ve never had a professor say to me, “Gina, your process is flawless. The paper isn’t so great, but the process was wonderful. You invented; you explored; you revised; you did everything you should have done. This grade is for your process.” Not once. And, if a prof had told me that, I’d have thought they were full of it. The fact is, composition takes place in a context, and there are rules. One of those rules in the comp class is that papers are graded. I think it’s part of the definition of comp or something.
The other thing is that I think we have to be careful about giving students the idea that there is only one academic discourse. There are many, as the discussion among members of different disciplines in this class makes clear, and I thinnk we have a responsibility to let students know that. Of course, I don't think we have the responsibility to teach all of them--Once again, an insight from Jess guides me here: We have to model entering discourses for students so that they can approach different discourses and find their own points of entry in order to participate in them.
Rose: “The Language of Exclusion: Writing Instruction at the University”
Summary:
Rose begins by listing five beliefs about writing that he holds are erroneous because they are based on a “reductive, fundamentally behaviorist model of the development and use of written language, a problematic definition of writing, and an inaccurate assessment of student ability and need” (548). Rose then addresses the five mistaken assumptions one by one, before moving to speculating about better ways to think about academic writing.
Rose begins by surveying the historical development of behaviorist models of writing. Through this approach, he hopes to understand the reasons this approach continues to exert such influence in the academy. This paradigm arose out of early-twentieth-century concerns with efficiency, a desire to establish writing as a utilitarian skill, the medicalization of writing difficulty, and positivism in general.
The stigma attached to Basic Writing is a function of the idea that writing is a skill. On this view, specific skill sets ought to be acquired at specific points in the educational process, and basic writers have not achieved this goal. Thus, they must be remediated, which allows schools to keep their enrollments high while students are brought up to speed. Moreover, the medical paradigm’s transformation of “difficulty” into “disability” intensified the focus on errors, which came to be viewed as a diagnostic tool.
Next, Rose turns to a consideration of the meaning of “literacy.” He notes that the way that literacy “translates into behavior varies a good deal” (559). He says that while basic writing students are literate according to the “common definition,” they lack familiarity with the conventions of academic discourse and academic discursive communities (560). We should be careful in applying the label “illiterate” to those who lack this familiarity for a number of reasons, Rose notes. First, it’s inaccurate. Second, the term carries negative connotations that come from earlier usages. While students may be uninterested in reading and writing, they read and write all the time—it’s just that they read and write things other than those valued in the academy.
Rose attends to “transience.” He says that the idea that student writing difficulty is often viewed as a transient problem that can be solved is an illusion because the changing demographics of American society ensure that students arrive at post-secondary institutions differently prepared dependent on a variety of conditions, over many of which students (and teacher) have little or no control. The myth of transience, moreover, “brings with it a powerful liability” (564). It falsely implies that the past was better than the present and that we can return to that mythical past if only we can figure out the right things to do.
Finally, Rose proposes “a model of written language development and production” that “honor[s] the cognitive and emotional and situational dimensions of language” (564). This model also accounts for the psycholinguistic, literary, and rhetorical aspects of language. It demands that teachers critically examine their teaching practices in order to better understand the theoretical underpinnings of the ways they teach. He suggests that we consider other terminology for discussing writing, terminology that doesn’t involve classifying writing as a skill or a tool.
Musings:
Rose’s article resonates with me because it echoes something (actually, I guess it predates it) I’ve just read in this month’s CCC. See my annotated bibliography for the Ortmeier-Hooper entry. It also reflects the historical reality we’ve been reading about all semester—comp instructors have always complained about how ill-prepared their students are, remedial or not.
I’m less certain about the idea that writing ought not to be characterized as a skill or a tool. I think it can be both, although it’s not necessarily either. While I’m not sure Rose would disagree with this assessment, I suspect he might. My problem is that I want to allow students to have a voice in defining the role writing will play in their lives, and if they choose to approach it as a means to some other end they deem more important, so be it. I often do this myself. I sometimes write because I want a job when I leave here, so I write for publication, even though I don’t much care about it (although I must admit, if I’m honest, that I do like to see my name in print). I sometimes write to sort things out—personal things, ideas, tasks, etc.
I’m very sympathetic to the idea of discourse communities, but it’s important to keep in mind the fact that the academy is not a single, monolithic discourse community. And, it’s just as important to make use of those things that students read and write all the time. We need, in other words, to know who they are and what interests them, rather than constructing them in our heads as we so often do.
Rose: “Narrowing the Mind and Page: Remedial Writers and Cognitive Reductionism”
Summary:
Rose begins by identifying the trend to seek a single explanation for “broad ranges of poor school performance” as “cognitive reductionism” (345). Rose notes that despite repeated challenges from various sources, cognitive reductionism returns, in a variety of guises and from a variety of sources, to discussions about writing and writing ability. Because these claims have significant consequences for teaching writing, Rose proposes to reexamine them.
Rose’s first target is field dependence-independence theories of cognitive style. He notes that attempts to translate perceptions of the relative embeddedness of objects in a field to diagnose how well individuals will perform tasks are misguided because these tests measure how people perform tasks, not how well they perform the tasks. In fact, he says, research doesn’t find what the theory predicts when it is applied to writing. Noting seven problems with applying field dependence-independence theories to writing, Rose concludes that it is inappropriate for analyzing, predicting, or diagnosing student writing because there is no rhetorical-linguistic test of cognitive style. Furthermore, the theory deals only with a “general disembedding skill,” and new data indicate that such general skills may not in fact exist (354).
Moving to “hemisphericity,” Rose notes that empirical and experimental studies have yielded “remarkable insight into the fine neuropsychological processes involved in understanding language and . . . in making spatial-orientational discriminations” (355). He notes that while this field is still relatively “primitive” (355), there are “convergences” and “areas of agreement” (355). He says, however, that oversimplification has caused distortions in how some people characterize the functioning of the cerebral hemispheres. Because much of the data has been gathered from studying people whose corpus callosums have been severed, the data might not be pertinent to those with healthy brains. Additionally, Rose voices some concerns about the techniques used to gather data and the ways the data are synthesized. Little definitive correlation between hemsiphericity and occupation or talent exists.
Next Rose addresses Piaget and cognitive developmental stage psychology. Noting that Piaget’s point of view is “fundamentally logical and mathematical” (361). The problem with this is that this POV presupposes that people actually think objectively and syllogistically. Rose discusses its “appropriation” by those who theorize about college-age remedial writers (362). First, he notes, the model is meant to explain the developmental stages children go through, and thus it is at least questionable how aptly it may be applied to adult learners. He notes other problems with testing, pointing out that failure at a specific task may result in a learner’s being branded as lacking a some fundamental cognitive principles.
Rose next shifts his attention to orality-literacy theory. He distinguishes between the strong version that holds that literacy “necessarily results in a wide variety of changes in thinking” and that literacy is a necessary (and sufficient?) precondition for abstraction and a host of ther crucial reasoning skills (367), and a weaker version that posits that literacy plays a non-determining role in extending the possibilities of human cognition. While Rose admits that “literacy must bring with it tremendous repercussions for the intellect” (367), problems arise when this theory is applied to composition studies, notably the labeling of some people as incapable of abstract thinking. This problem is methodological in origin: It involves generalizing from one group to a relevantly different group. And, it is not at all clear that literacy provides the essential ingredient in socio-cultural change. In fact, sometimes literacy is used to reinforce the status quo.
Rose says we should beware of “neat, bipolar characterizations” of oral and written language because although there are differences, the “continuum does not adequately characterize these differences” (373). Rose holds that the theories he examines “end up leveling rather than elaborating individual differences in cognition” (376). They distract us from the contextual influences on composition for basic writers; they reflect stereotypes. Rose closes with some cautionary words about the responsibilities and limitations one takes on when one theorizes and a warning about the special concerns regarding comparative studies.
Musings:
While I agree with Rose’s criticisms of those who want to apply Piaget’s developmental psychology to adults, I also wonder how cognitive development theory would look if someone, anyone, would attend to the fact that females’ and males’ brains develop differently. Infusions of sex-specific hormones around adolescence result in different brain chemistry and there is more and more evidence that male and female brains develop differently. Who knows what, if anything, that means about the ways males and females learn.
In fact, some of the newest research shows that if women’s reactions are attended to, one of our most fundamental beliefs about human behavioral development—the fight or flight response—is only partially correct. It applies pretty definitively to males. There is increasing evidence that females’ responses in situations that arouse fight-or-flight in males may more properly be described as “tend or defend.” In other words, females try to defuse and deescalate rather than fleeing (running away from one’s offspring doesn’t seem evolutionarily sound, does it?), and, if that doesn’t work, to defend a space without necessarily defending one’s self. This may explain why female mammals are so much more territorial in general than males.
Please, don’t get me wrong. I am not of the “biology is destiny” school. I think one of the really cool things about being human rather than some other animal is the fact that we don’t seem to be determined by our biology. We have the capacity to transcend what seems to me best understood as parameters instead of determinants. That seems clear. Moreover, it also seems to me that much of what we might currently define as biological may in fact be social (yes, it’s a return to the old nature/nurture debate). In fact, perhaps it’s the case that very little about human psychology and consciousness is either strictly nature or strictly nurture. That seems most correct to me…
Peace to all.
Monday, March 10, 2008
Refining the Dissonance Blog
Okay. More clarification. In my paper, I'm exploring whether it's possible to resolve an apparent contradiction between a liberatory pedagogy and the ways writers construct identity through writing. If one constructs identity through writing, when we create assignments, do we also construct a limited number of possible identities for our students? In other words, do the assignments we require our students to complete steer them toward particular identities that they must adopt as their own in order to successfully complete the assignment? If so, can this limiting of possibilities for students be reconciled with a liberatory pedagogy? If it can be, how can it be? If it cannot be, can liberatory pedagogical practices work as they are intended to work in institutional settings with specific pedagogical parameters? These are the questions I plan to address in my paper.
Saturday, March 8, 2008
Week of 3/10
Sommers: “Responding to Student Writing”
Summary:
Sommers says that in addition to commenting on student papers for the same reasons we want others to comment on ours, we “dramatize the presence of a reader” for them by doing so (148). Our comments are designed to assist students: “[T]houghtful comments create the motive for revising” (149). Because the efficacy of comments is little understood, Sommers, Brannon, and Knoblauch tried to discover “what messages teachers give their studnts through their comments” and which comments students ignored when revising (149).
After laying out the parameters of the study (who, when, where, how), Sommers discusses the difference between computer-generated comments and teacher-generated comments, noting a “sharp contrast” between the two (149).
The study found that teacher comments can distract students from what they hope to do with their papers; Sommers calls this “appropriation of the text by the teacher” (150), and she provides an example. She says that because this style of comment often includes multiple directives without any indication of which are the most pressing, students “are encouraged” by this style “to see their writing as a series of parts . . . and not as a whole discourse” (151). This style of commenting, according to Sommers, conflates distinct processes and gives students a mistaken understanding of the revision process. Moreover, it leads students to focus on pleasing the teacher instead of attending to what they want to say.
The study’s second conclusion is that comments often are not specific to the paper and “could be interchanged, rubber-stamped, from text to text” (152). The commands teachers write on student papers are “abstract,” “vague,” and difficult for students to interpret (152). Sommers points out that these directives don’t tell students how to fix the things they identify as being wrong with the texts on which they are written, and they give students the idea that wriing well is a question of finding out the rules and following them. Sommers points out that the problem with these comments is that they confuse process and product, treating first drafts as if they “were finished drafts” (154). The problem is that teachers try to correct writing and not to help students find strategies for clarifying meaning.
Sommers notes that the problem is not so much with individual teachers, but instead is systemic. Instructors haven’t been trained to bring their literary critical skills to bear on reading students’ papers, nor have they received training in commenting techniques. Such training would include, Sommers implies, methods of commenting that would undermine students’ notions that what they have written is already clear, complete, and coherent and would “force students back into the chaos” of “restructuring their meaning” (154). Focusing on the text as a whole rather than on sentence- or word-level changes in comments might lead students to do the same when they’re revising.
Musings:
I certainly agree with a lot of what Sommers has to say. In the Writing Center, I often confronted papers on which instructors had written comments that I, an experienced reviser, couldn’t understand. And, in the example on pages 152-153, I was shocked to find that the instructor had written that a thesis sentence was needed. It seems to me that “Nuclear energy should not be given up on, but rather, more nuclear plants should be built” is a pretty clear thesis sentence; even if the wording is a bit awkward, it’s a damn fine try, if that’s what the student wants to say.
Sommers also makes a good point when she says that there’s no sense in having tudents revise sentences that are likely to disappear from the next draft of the paper. It’s more sensible to have students clarify meaning before they begin to approach syntax, punctuation, style—the things that give writing polish—because it’s a waste of everyone’s time to focus on what won’t be there in the end. That was one of the hardest things for me to get a handle on when I first began working in the Writing Center because I’m so comfortable with syntax and punctuation. And that’s probably another reason that instructors focus on these kinds of things. It makes the commenting process faster, easier. And Sommers’ clsses might be limited to twenty students, across town they’re limited to 25, and instructors teach at least four sections (and often five or six) of comp per semester. That’s not unusual at community colleges, either.
Sommers’ distinction between “strategies” and “rules” is a good one, and I really like her ideas about developing collaborative exercises in revising strategies. I’ll be revising my 101 syllabus over break to do this more comprehensively because Sommers is right—we have to give students a reason to revise, and that reason has to have something to do with what they’re trying to do with their writing.
Connors:“Mechanical Correctness as a Focus in Composition Instruction”
Summary:
Connors’ project is to examine the historical forces that “transformed instruction in wide-ranging techniques of persuasion and analysis” into an “obsession with mechanical correctness” (61). He notes that the democratic and egalitarian ideals of the nineteenth century, combined with the proliferation of public elementary schools and in part by the dearth of colleges in the early nineteenth century affected American attitudes about language use, and language use itself was democratized. There was no “linguistic aristocracy” in early nineteenth-century America. However, the American Renaissance (1820-1860) and a change in the nature of elementary school instruction led to increased interest in grammatical and mechanical correctness, and Eastern provincialism as well as the rise of the ideology of self improvement in the middle of the nineteenth century led to increased focus of grammaticality in the public schools.
Alford’s A Plea for the Queen’s English, with its anti-American bent increased American anxiety about grammatical correctness, reinforcing Eastern linguistic elitism. In the 1870s, colleges began to respond to the newfound American appetite for grammatical prescriptivism, and the goals of higher education came to include “simple mechanical correctness” (64). Before about 1860, grammar and mechanics were the business of elementary schools (when I was a kid, they were still called “grammar schools”—at least in the part of the country where I grew up), but they came to dominate textbooks in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Harvard’s introduction of the writing requirement into Harvard’s entrance exam also increased the importance of grammatical and mechanical correctness at the college level. Although the nineteenth century also saw the introduction of the modes, the trinity, and the methods of development, the “central emphasis . . . always remained on application of grammatical and mechanical rules at the sentence level” (65). The new pedagogy of practice, practice, practice (grammar, grammar, grammar) failed because it wasn’t actually the case that students’ instruction in grammar and mechanics at the elementary levels had been inadequate—the problem was, according to Connors, that students hadn’t had to write much at that level. Nonetheless, grammar-centered pedagogies became “enshrined in [the] textbooks” of the late nineteenth century (66), even though the focus seemed to be elsewhere.
Connors reiterates the information we read in the first week about the teaching loads of comp instructors in the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth century (and I gripe about the loads now!). He holds that focusing on grammar and mechaniscs was a survival strategy for overworked composition instructors, who, even if they’d had the tools to provide more thoughtful comments on student papers, wouldn’t have had the time. This led to the development and publication of usage guides such as Abbott’s and Wooley’s. Since then, textbooks have “shaped . . . writing courses” and wrought changes in rhetoric texts, which began to include more grammatically and mechanically centered content. Finally “textbooks based on the old tradition of rhetorical theory in composition virtually disappeared” (68), and instructors ended up knowing little more about writing than their students because they no longer received any theoretical training. This remains the state of affairs at many institutions, especially those where comp classes are assigned to grad students and PTIs.
Drillbooks and workbooks appeared, but by the 1930s a few people began to question their efficacy and to posit that they hurt, rather than helped, the college writer. These folks gathered research and in the 1940s and the 1950s a revolution in composition instruction began, fueled by the reintroduction of rhetoric in the writing classroom. In 1953, the idea of writing as process found currency, and “the reign of mechanical correctness . . . was threatened” (70). Connors closes by noting that the debate continues, albeit in a different vocabulary, toady. He notes that both the traditionalists and the “proponents of writing as discovery or communication” make good points (70). He says attention to mechanical and grammatical correctness should not be discarded, but “it is not all or even a major part of our work” as composition instructors (71).
Musings:
The historical overview is informative; although I generally like my history to include something more of the economic context. I’m always interested in class, and I’m sure that the fact that grammatical and mechanical correctness came to be considered paramount during the Gilded Age is part of the whole ethos of that very class-conscious era in American history. In fact, when I do the grammar classes, I tell students that one of the reasons they should learn to do some of this correctly is that (in)correct usage is a class marker that can keep them from getting where they might otherwise be able to go. But you’ve all heard enough from me on grammar, haven’t you? I’ll stop.
Hartwell: “Grammar, Grammars, and the Teaching of Grammar”
Summary:
Hartwell says that the issue of teaching grammar is thorny. There are two sides to the debate, according to Hartwell: “the grammarians and the anti-grammarians” (206), and those involved cannot agree about how to interpret the data that research into teaching grammar has produced. His goal is to reformulate the grammar debate in what he hopes will be “more productive terms” (208) by asking four questions. Then he outlines the differences between the two sides, before moving to discussing the “five meanings of ‘grammar’ ” (209), which is a refinement of W. Nelson Francis’ “The Three Meanings of ‘Grammar.’ ”
Grammar 1 is unconsciously used by every language speaker over the age of five. It enables us to make meaningful and “correct” sequences of words without consciously referring to rules, even though they are in fact lawful. Hartwell backs his claims by describing experiments designed to elicit Grammar 1 knowledge from native speakers of English. He concludes that literacy acquisition “profoundly affects” one’s Grammar 1 skills.
Grammar 2 is the goal of linguistics as a science: to articulate the rules intuitively understood—the Grammar 1 rules. Knowing these rules on a conscious level is unnecessary to their use as Grammar 1. However, Hartwell notes, it’s difficult to convince a grammarian of this. Here, Hartwell cites a number of linguistic experts who agree with his assertion. He also describes research from which this knowledge is derived and provides further evidence from two cognate areas, one in the area of artificial language and one from the area of second-language acquisition. The research suggests that Grammar 2 knowledge only becomes functional knowledge after the skills have been acquired at the Grammar 1 level.
Grammar 4 rules, those we learn in school, are also “inadequate” without Grammar 1 competence (220). It’s why sometimes the “rules” are “wrong.” Hartwell provides several examples of linguistic constructions in which the rules for forming possessives break down. He notes that this level depends on rote learning.
Hartwell moves next to an argument for redefining error and says that many studies show that students make errors because of instruction (I’m thinking here of the kind of hypercorrection that causes people to say “between you and I” right now). He says that we should “shuck off our hyperliterate perception of the value of formal rules . . . and . . . regain our confidence in the tacit power of unconscious knowledge” (223). Hartwell notes that cross-cultural studies indicate that metalinguistic awareness, rather that grammatical awareness, is “a defining characteristic of print literacy” (223). According to Hartwell, this makes the issue of nonstandard dialect “a non-issue” because Grammar 1 mastery transfers to orthography, despite oral dialect. Moreover, this allows for an understanding of multiple liteacies, once again evident in cross-cultural studies.
Looking at Grammar 5 shows that “the grammar issue is simply beside the point” insofar as style is concerned (225); since most mastery takes place at the tacit level we cannot actually offer beginning writers useful tips about stylistic considerations. Hartwell labels this view of grammar the “romantic view” (225).
Finally, Hartwell turns to experimental research on grammar instruction, and he draws the conclusion that it will show that formal grammar instruction has little to do with “control over surface correctness” or with “the quality of writing” (226). However, it may improve the ability to “think logically” (226). The studies do not agree on this issue. But there is strong evidence that the best teacher of correctness and style is “active involvement with language” (227). In fact, according to several studies, high school grammar instruction is the least important factor in developing beginning writers’ composition skills.
Musings:
Believe it or not, I really liked this article, despite (or because of) my grammar fetish. In fact, I teach grammar in a way totally congruent with what he has to say. Because I begin by telling the students (and meaning it) that it’s useless to try to memorize a lot of rules that are just designed to make us all feel stupid and incompetent regarding a language in which we manage to make ourselves understood all the time. And I mean it. I teach tricks. I teach mnemonic devices. I teach the things I figured out to remember stuff when it made the difference between getting a nickel from Father O’Connor and getting a rap with a ruler from Sister Alexia. And I love the self-referring sentence game (223). I’m gonna play it with my husband when he gets home. He teaches critical thinking. I think he’ll get it right away, but I’ll have some fun with him if he doesn’t!
He’s right about ceasing to worry so much about the rules. I think understanding grammar functionally is much more useful than understanding it prescriptively. For instance, according to a prescriptive grammar, the sentence “I don’t feel well” means that I don’t use my sense of touch effectively. According to the rules, it’s technically an incorrect use of an adverb with a sensing verb. Technically, we’re supposed to use adjectives with the sensing verbs if we’re using them as sensing verbs. But a functional understanding lets me derive the intended meaning from the utterance, and I offer to get the utterer some aspirin or some matzoh ball soup. In this case, I understand that the word “well,” which is usually an adverb, functions as an adjective in this sentence, so I can classify it as an adjective. There are lots of words in English that work functionally, so what’s the difference? Of course, most people don’t think about this in as detailed a way as I just laid out. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it many times over the course of my life: I’m weird about grammar. I think it’s because I spend so much time immersed in philosophy, and theory, and literary analysis, that it’s just refreshing to understand something as being right or wrong. That doesn’t mean I wish to impose it on everyone else. Okay. It does mean that, but I do manage to restrain myself. Most of the time.
Elbow: “Reflections on Academic Discourse: How It Relates to Freshmen and Colleagues”
Summary:
Elbow begins by telling us that he loves lots of things about “what’s in academic discourse” but that he “hate[s] academic discourse” (135). He defines academic discourse as “the discourse that academics use when they publish for other academics” (135). Elbow notes that the reasons for teaching his students academic discourse are obvious, and he lists those that relate to their lives in the academy.
In the first section of the paper proper (couldn’t resist), Elbow argues that nonacademic discourse ought to be an integral part of the freshman writing class. First, he says, most students will not use academic discourse once they leave the college setting. Second, Elbow points out that basing the argument in what people will have to write assumes that people won’t write unless they have to, a pessimistic view in his estimation. Third, Elbow says that good academic discourse presupposes good nonacademic discourse.
Elbow argues for a nonacademic discourse “that tries to render experience rather than explain it,” a discourse that he believes is “particularly important to teach” (136). He envisions this as teaching autobiographical, poetic, and narrative discourses as well as academic discourse. He holds that our job as writing teachers is to try to “pass on the great human accomplishment of written language” (137). He opposes explanatory and “rendering” discourses and says that since students will write explanatory discourse in other classes, it’s up to English to allow space for rendering discourse. Moreover, for Elbow, academic discourse can allow students to mask what they don’t know. Turning to Bakhtin and Vygotsky for confirmation, he says that the true test of whether students understand something is whether they can put it in everyday terms.
Elbow argues that academic discourse doesn’t actually exist because different disciplines have different conventions. He offers many different examples of discourses that might be called academic, but insists that they are so different that it becomes impossible to teach academic discourse. He says that academic discourse(s) focus attention on the packaging rather than on what’s being said. He says that since ideas cannot be separated from the people who hold them the notion of academic discourse constitutes an objectivist bias. He believes that the detachment he says is inherent to academic discourse disguises the fact that discourse is always communication to someone by someone for some purpose. However, he notes that we cannot allow a move to “pure subjectivity” (141); he just want to argue for a discourse that allows one’s personal stake in an issue to be apparent rather than masked.
Elbow comes to altering his definition of academic discourse from the straw man he set up in the beginning of the essay to something more like what it actually is. He moves on to say that since his definition fits nonacademic writing, it’s not really academic discourse—it’s just good writing. There are other ways of defining academic discourse, Elbow claims, but they all lead to the same problem of distinguishing academic from nonacademic writing, so he moves to a consideration of style and conventions.
In his discussion of style and conventions, Elbow notes characteristics of academic discourse: (in)explicitness, lack of forms of “to be,” and certain syntactic and structural conventions derived from pretensions to objectivity. He notes that it can be exclusionary in its use of esoteric vocabularies (i.e., his criticism of Berlin’s use of “epistemic”). He discusses four things he thinks “are taught by the surface mannerisms or stylistic conventions of academic discourse” (146). Then he moves on to an outline of the implications for teaching freshman composition. Perhaps unsurprisingly, what we should learn from what Elbow has said about academic discourse, is that we should be teaching as he does.
Musings:
First, it seems to me that Elbow’s examples he gives of what students might write more if writing classes were better—“to write notes and letters to loved ones . . . to write in a diary or to make sense of what’s happening in their lives . . .” are a huge part of our students’ culture (136). Hell, they’re part of most Americans’ culture. I guess the fact that he wrote this in 1991 might have something to do with this, since the Internet wasn’t a part of most people’s lives at that time. But kids are doing nearly every one of the things he notes. They’re using their phones and computers to do them online, employing grammar, syntax, spelling and other conventions that we didn’t even imagine in 1991. Something else (plural?) is making them reluctant to write in academic settings. It’s worth exploring what that is. Some of it, I think, is what Sommers talks about in her article. Some of it is the fact that . . . No. I won’t go there.
Elbow’s right when he says that very few students will have to write academic discourse once they’ve graduated from college. But, in fact, academic discourse is not very different from the discourse that one employs in the upper echelons of the business world, Donald Trump notwithstanding. I was part of the business world for a long time, and I was immersed in business discourse. The polite way academics have of deflating an argument is nearly identical to the discourse I deployed when I wanted to push a project through that my supervisors didn’t want to see completed. Or started for that matter. I believe I advanced further than I otherwise would have because I “sounded smart.” And, as a woman in management positions in an industry where nearly all managers are men, sounding smart and mastery of the polite putdown were very handy, let me tell you. What was essentially an academic vocabulary was indispensable, and that’s a fact.
Moreover, I’ve supervised hundreds of people who worked in a variety of positions throughout my business career. I never once thought that someone couldn’t write because they deployed academic discourse. Of course each discourse community has its own conventions. Are we supposed to teach them all, just in case? How are we supposed to choose? Should we let students use textspeak because it’s a form in which they enjoy writing? (I did actually find myself telling a young friend that it might not be a bad thing if texting altered our spelling conventions to a more phonetic mode. Of course, the idea that phonetic spelling might be a good thing has been around a long time, but it seems more of a possibility now that texting has become so ubiquitous than it has ever seemed to me before.) I can imagine a young person handing me a resume full of that! I wouldn’t know what the hell was going on. I’d assume that s/he had no idea of propriety. I wouldn’t hire him/her.
Academic discourse is a good foundation, based as it is in critical reasoning, cogency, and politesse, for other discourses. It’s easily adaptable to the jargons required in other areas, such as the FDA and law. Actually, I can see how it might be an impediment in law, whose object is to obfuscate rather than to clarify. Anyway, the fact that it takes a variety of forms, each with its own vocabulary and conventions doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist (138). It might mean that a plurality of them exist, but a plurality of nonacademic discourses exist as well—even within a single genre, like autobiography. That something has not got ontological status doesn’t mean that it isn’t a functional category. You know, like literature. Now, if we could only teach students that academic discourse doesn’t involve writing every sentence in the passive voice! Anyway, I wonder if Elbow thinks that his essay is not a form of academic discourse, just because he uses the first person throughout. Because I’ve got news for him. It’s a tidy piece of academic discourse.
Now, all that being said, I must add that I deplore the elitism of academic discourse. I also find it exclusionary, and its replication of America’s nearly invisible classism, its sexism, its ethnocentrism, its religious hegemonic discourses, and its racism disgusts me. It’s masculinist and makes expressing, or even implying, one’s feelings nearly impossible (Elbow does have something there). But if we’re properly teaching student how to write, we’re also teaching them how to question and assess the functions of the discourses in which they’re immersed. We’re not, in other words, just teaching academic discourse. We’re teaching (hopefully) a buttload of other skills, too. We’re letting them know that this isn’t the only vocabulary that they can use when they’re writing. We’re teaching them how to assess their audiences and the effects they hope to have on the audiences, and how to determine how to deploy language to do that, and how to allow themselves to dive into and swim around in language until they know where they’re going with and in it. If we can do that, students won’t have to “unlearn” academic discourse because they’ll recognize the value of the other discourses to which they have access long before they step into a composition classroom and which they retain after they leave the classroom. In other words, as I tell students, this is just one more vocabulary we can use when it’s appropriate. We don’t have to give up all other vocabularies in favor of it.
And, as Dr. J. noted in a comment a couple of weeks ago, it may be possible to teach students to resist. The question that remains for me is whether it’s possible to teach something and simultaneously to teach how to resist that very thing. I wonder if this means a change in paper topic. Nah. I think I can incorporate this stuff.
I could go on and on about different things in Elbow’s essay. But I don’t feel good, and I’m tired, and I have a presentation to finish for Dr. Bowers’ class.
Peace to all.
Summary:
Sommers says that in addition to commenting on student papers for the same reasons we want others to comment on ours, we “dramatize the presence of a reader” for them by doing so (148). Our comments are designed to assist students: “[T]houghtful comments create the motive for revising” (149). Because the efficacy of comments is little understood, Sommers, Brannon, and Knoblauch tried to discover “what messages teachers give their studnts through their comments” and which comments students ignored when revising (149).
After laying out the parameters of the study (who, when, where, how), Sommers discusses the difference between computer-generated comments and teacher-generated comments, noting a “sharp contrast” between the two (149).
The study found that teacher comments can distract students from what they hope to do with their papers; Sommers calls this “appropriation of the text by the teacher” (150), and she provides an example. She says that because this style of comment often includes multiple directives without any indication of which are the most pressing, students “are encouraged” by this style “to see their writing as a series of parts . . . and not as a whole discourse” (151). This style of commenting, according to Sommers, conflates distinct processes and gives students a mistaken understanding of the revision process. Moreover, it leads students to focus on pleasing the teacher instead of attending to what they want to say.
The study’s second conclusion is that comments often are not specific to the paper and “could be interchanged, rubber-stamped, from text to text” (152). The commands teachers write on student papers are “abstract,” “vague,” and difficult for students to interpret (152). Sommers points out that these directives don’t tell students how to fix the things they identify as being wrong with the texts on which they are written, and they give students the idea that wriing well is a question of finding out the rules and following them. Sommers points out that the problem with these comments is that they confuse process and product, treating first drafts as if they “were finished drafts” (154). The problem is that teachers try to correct writing and not to help students find strategies for clarifying meaning.
Sommers notes that the problem is not so much with individual teachers, but instead is systemic. Instructors haven’t been trained to bring their literary critical skills to bear on reading students’ papers, nor have they received training in commenting techniques. Such training would include, Sommers implies, methods of commenting that would undermine students’ notions that what they have written is already clear, complete, and coherent and would “force students back into the chaos” of “restructuring their meaning” (154). Focusing on the text as a whole rather than on sentence- or word-level changes in comments might lead students to do the same when they’re revising.
Musings:
I certainly agree with a lot of what Sommers has to say. In the Writing Center, I often confronted papers on which instructors had written comments that I, an experienced reviser, couldn’t understand. And, in the example on pages 152-153, I was shocked to find that the instructor had written that a thesis sentence was needed. It seems to me that “Nuclear energy should not be given up on, but rather, more nuclear plants should be built” is a pretty clear thesis sentence; even if the wording is a bit awkward, it’s a damn fine try, if that’s what the student wants to say.
Sommers also makes a good point when she says that there’s no sense in having tudents revise sentences that are likely to disappear from the next draft of the paper. It’s more sensible to have students clarify meaning before they begin to approach syntax, punctuation, style—the things that give writing polish—because it’s a waste of everyone’s time to focus on what won’t be there in the end. That was one of the hardest things for me to get a handle on when I first began working in the Writing Center because I’m so comfortable with syntax and punctuation. And that’s probably another reason that instructors focus on these kinds of things. It makes the commenting process faster, easier. And Sommers’ clsses might be limited to twenty students, across town they’re limited to 25, and instructors teach at least four sections (and often five or six) of comp per semester. That’s not unusual at community colleges, either.
Sommers’ distinction between “strategies” and “rules” is a good one, and I really like her ideas about developing collaborative exercises in revising strategies. I’ll be revising my 101 syllabus over break to do this more comprehensively because Sommers is right—we have to give students a reason to revise, and that reason has to have something to do with what they’re trying to do with their writing.
Connors:“Mechanical Correctness as a Focus in Composition Instruction”
Summary:
Connors’ project is to examine the historical forces that “transformed instruction in wide-ranging techniques of persuasion and analysis” into an “obsession with mechanical correctness” (61). He notes that the democratic and egalitarian ideals of the nineteenth century, combined with the proliferation of public elementary schools and in part by the dearth of colleges in the early nineteenth century affected American attitudes about language use, and language use itself was democratized. There was no “linguistic aristocracy” in early nineteenth-century America. However, the American Renaissance (1820-1860) and a change in the nature of elementary school instruction led to increased interest in grammatical and mechanical correctness, and Eastern provincialism as well as the rise of the ideology of self improvement in the middle of the nineteenth century led to increased focus of grammaticality in the public schools.
Alford’s A Plea for the Queen’s English, with its anti-American bent increased American anxiety about grammatical correctness, reinforcing Eastern linguistic elitism. In the 1870s, colleges began to respond to the newfound American appetite for grammatical prescriptivism, and the goals of higher education came to include “simple mechanical correctness” (64). Before about 1860, grammar and mechanics were the business of elementary schools (when I was a kid, they were still called “grammar schools”—at least in the part of the country where I grew up), but they came to dominate textbooks in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Harvard’s introduction of the writing requirement into Harvard’s entrance exam also increased the importance of grammatical and mechanical correctness at the college level. Although the nineteenth century also saw the introduction of the modes, the trinity, and the methods of development, the “central emphasis . . . always remained on application of grammatical and mechanical rules at the sentence level” (65). The new pedagogy of practice, practice, practice (grammar, grammar, grammar) failed because it wasn’t actually the case that students’ instruction in grammar and mechanics at the elementary levels had been inadequate—the problem was, according to Connors, that students hadn’t had to write much at that level. Nonetheless, grammar-centered pedagogies became “enshrined in [the] textbooks” of the late nineteenth century (66), even though the focus seemed to be elsewhere.
Connors reiterates the information we read in the first week about the teaching loads of comp instructors in the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth century (and I gripe about the loads now!). He holds that focusing on grammar and mechaniscs was a survival strategy for overworked composition instructors, who, even if they’d had the tools to provide more thoughtful comments on student papers, wouldn’t have had the time. This led to the development and publication of usage guides such as Abbott’s and Wooley’s. Since then, textbooks have “shaped . . . writing courses” and wrought changes in rhetoric texts, which began to include more grammatically and mechanically centered content. Finally “textbooks based on the old tradition of rhetorical theory in composition virtually disappeared” (68), and instructors ended up knowing little more about writing than their students because they no longer received any theoretical training. This remains the state of affairs at many institutions, especially those where comp classes are assigned to grad students and PTIs.
Drillbooks and workbooks appeared, but by the 1930s a few people began to question their efficacy and to posit that they hurt, rather than helped, the college writer. These folks gathered research and in the 1940s and the 1950s a revolution in composition instruction began, fueled by the reintroduction of rhetoric in the writing classroom. In 1953, the idea of writing as process found currency, and “the reign of mechanical correctness . . . was threatened” (70). Connors closes by noting that the debate continues, albeit in a different vocabulary, toady. He notes that both the traditionalists and the “proponents of writing as discovery or communication” make good points (70). He says attention to mechanical and grammatical correctness should not be discarded, but “it is not all or even a major part of our work” as composition instructors (71).
Musings:
The historical overview is informative; although I generally like my history to include something more of the economic context. I’m always interested in class, and I’m sure that the fact that grammatical and mechanical correctness came to be considered paramount during the Gilded Age is part of the whole ethos of that very class-conscious era in American history. In fact, when I do the grammar classes, I tell students that one of the reasons they should learn to do some of this correctly is that (in)correct usage is a class marker that can keep them from getting where they might otherwise be able to go. But you’ve all heard enough from me on grammar, haven’t you? I’ll stop.
Hartwell: “Grammar, Grammars, and the Teaching of Grammar”
Summary:
Hartwell says that the issue of teaching grammar is thorny. There are two sides to the debate, according to Hartwell: “the grammarians and the anti-grammarians” (206), and those involved cannot agree about how to interpret the data that research into teaching grammar has produced. His goal is to reformulate the grammar debate in what he hopes will be “more productive terms” (208) by asking four questions. Then he outlines the differences between the two sides, before moving to discussing the “five meanings of ‘grammar’ ” (209), which is a refinement of W. Nelson Francis’ “The Three Meanings of ‘Grammar.’ ”
Grammar 1 is unconsciously used by every language speaker over the age of five. It enables us to make meaningful and “correct” sequences of words without consciously referring to rules, even though they are in fact lawful. Hartwell backs his claims by describing experiments designed to elicit Grammar 1 knowledge from native speakers of English. He concludes that literacy acquisition “profoundly affects” one’s Grammar 1 skills.
Grammar 2 is the goal of linguistics as a science: to articulate the rules intuitively understood—the Grammar 1 rules. Knowing these rules on a conscious level is unnecessary to their use as Grammar 1. However, Hartwell notes, it’s difficult to convince a grammarian of this. Here, Hartwell cites a number of linguistic experts who agree with his assertion. He also describes research from which this knowledge is derived and provides further evidence from two cognate areas, one in the area of artificial language and one from the area of second-language acquisition. The research suggests that Grammar 2 knowledge only becomes functional knowledge after the skills have been acquired at the Grammar 1 level.
Grammar 4 rules, those we learn in school, are also “inadequate” without Grammar 1 competence (220). It’s why sometimes the “rules” are “wrong.” Hartwell provides several examples of linguistic constructions in which the rules for forming possessives break down. He notes that this level depends on rote learning.
Hartwell moves next to an argument for redefining error and says that many studies show that students make errors because of instruction (I’m thinking here of the kind of hypercorrection that causes people to say “between you and I” right now). He says that we should “shuck off our hyperliterate perception of the value of formal rules . . . and . . . regain our confidence in the tacit power of unconscious knowledge” (223). Hartwell notes that cross-cultural studies indicate that metalinguistic awareness, rather that grammatical awareness, is “a defining characteristic of print literacy” (223). According to Hartwell, this makes the issue of nonstandard dialect “a non-issue” because Grammar 1 mastery transfers to orthography, despite oral dialect. Moreover, this allows for an understanding of multiple liteacies, once again evident in cross-cultural studies.
Looking at Grammar 5 shows that “the grammar issue is simply beside the point” insofar as style is concerned (225); since most mastery takes place at the tacit level we cannot actually offer beginning writers useful tips about stylistic considerations. Hartwell labels this view of grammar the “romantic view” (225).
Finally, Hartwell turns to experimental research on grammar instruction, and he draws the conclusion that it will show that formal grammar instruction has little to do with “control over surface correctness” or with “the quality of writing” (226). However, it may improve the ability to “think logically” (226). The studies do not agree on this issue. But there is strong evidence that the best teacher of correctness and style is “active involvement with language” (227). In fact, according to several studies, high school grammar instruction is the least important factor in developing beginning writers’ composition skills.
Musings:
Believe it or not, I really liked this article, despite (or because of) my grammar fetish. In fact, I teach grammar in a way totally congruent with what he has to say. Because I begin by telling the students (and meaning it) that it’s useless to try to memorize a lot of rules that are just designed to make us all feel stupid and incompetent regarding a language in which we manage to make ourselves understood all the time. And I mean it. I teach tricks. I teach mnemonic devices. I teach the things I figured out to remember stuff when it made the difference between getting a nickel from Father O’Connor and getting a rap with a ruler from Sister Alexia. And I love the self-referring sentence game (223). I’m gonna play it with my husband when he gets home. He teaches critical thinking. I think he’ll get it right away, but I’ll have some fun with him if he doesn’t!
He’s right about ceasing to worry so much about the rules. I think understanding grammar functionally is much more useful than understanding it prescriptively. For instance, according to a prescriptive grammar, the sentence “I don’t feel well” means that I don’t use my sense of touch effectively. According to the rules, it’s technically an incorrect use of an adverb with a sensing verb. Technically, we’re supposed to use adjectives with the sensing verbs if we’re using them as sensing verbs. But a functional understanding lets me derive the intended meaning from the utterance, and I offer to get the utterer some aspirin or some matzoh ball soup. In this case, I understand that the word “well,” which is usually an adverb, functions as an adjective in this sentence, so I can classify it as an adjective. There are lots of words in English that work functionally, so what’s the difference? Of course, most people don’t think about this in as detailed a way as I just laid out. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it many times over the course of my life: I’m weird about grammar. I think it’s because I spend so much time immersed in philosophy, and theory, and literary analysis, that it’s just refreshing to understand something as being right or wrong. That doesn’t mean I wish to impose it on everyone else. Okay. It does mean that, but I do manage to restrain myself. Most of the time.
Elbow: “Reflections on Academic Discourse: How It Relates to Freshmen and Colleagues”
Summary:
Elbow begins by telling us that he loves lots of things about “what’s in academic discourse” but that he “hate[s] academic discourse” (135). He defines academic discourse as “the discourse that academics use when they publish for other academics” (135). Elbow notes that the reasons for teaching his students academic discourse are obvious, and he lists those that relate to their lives in the academy.
In the first section of the paper proper (couldn’t resist), Elbow argues that nonacademic discourse ought to be an integral part of the freshman writing class. First, he says, most students will not use academic discourse once they leave the college setting. Second, Elbow points out that basing the argument in what people will have to write assumes that people won’t write unless they have to, a pessimistic view in his estimation. Third, Elbow says that good academic discourse presupposes good nonacademic discourse.
Elbow argues for a nonacademic discourse “that tries to render experience rather than explain it,” a discourse that he believes is “particularly important to teach” (136). He envisions this as teaching autobiographical, poetic, and narrative discourses as well as academic discourse. He holds that our job as writing teachers is to try to “pass on the great human accomplishment of written language” (137). He opposes explanatory and “rendering” discourses and says that since students will write explanatory discourse in other classes, it’s up to English to allow space for rendering discourse. Moreover, for Elbow, academic discourse can allow students to mask what they don’t know. Turning to Bakhtin and Vygotsky for confirmation, he says that the true test of whether students understand something is whether they can put it in everyday terms.
Elbow argues that academic discourse doesn’t actually exist because different disciplines have different conventions. He offers many different examples of discourses that might be called academic, but insists that they are so different that it becomes impossible to teach academic discourse. He says that academic discourse(s) focus attention on the packaging rather than on what’s being said. He says that since ideas cannot be separated from the people who hold them the notion of academic discourse constitutes an objectivist bias. He believes that the detachment he says is inherent to academic discourse disguises the fact that discourse is always communication to someone by someone for some purpose. However, he notes that we cannot allow a move to “pure subjectivity” (141); he just want to argue for a discourse that allows one’s personal stake in an issue to be apparent rather than masked.
Elbow comes to altering his definition of academic discourse from the straw man he set up in the beginning of the essay to something more like what it actually is. He moves on to say that since his definition fits nonacademic writing, it’s not really academic discourse—it’s just good writing. There are other ways of defining academic discourse, Elbow claims, but they all lead to the same problem of distinguishing academic from nonacademic writing, so he moves to a consideration of style and conventions.
In his discussion of style and conventions, Elbow notes characteristics of academic discourse: (in)explicitness, lack of forms of “to be,” and certain syntactic and structural conventions derived from pretensions to objectivity. He notes that it can be exclusionary in its use of esoteric vocabularies (i.e., his criticism of Berlin’s use of “epistemic”). He discusses four things he thinks “are taught by the surface mannerisms or stylistic conventions of academic discourse” (146). Then he moves on to an outline of the implications for teaching freshman composition. Perhaps unsurprisingly, what we should learn from what Elbow has said about academic discourse, is that we should be teaching as he does.
Musings:
First, it seems to me that Elbow’s examples he gives of what students might write more if writing classes were better—“to write notes and letters to loved ones . . . to write in a diary or to make sense of what’s happening in their lives . . .” are a huge part of our students’ culture (136). Hell, they’re part of most Americans’ culture. I guess the fact that he wrote this in 1991 might have something to do with this, since the Internet wasn’t a part of most people’s lives at that time. But kids are doing nearly every one of the things he notes. They’re using their phones and computers to do them online, employing grammar, syntax, spelling and other conventions that we didn’t even imagine in 1991. Something else (plural?) is making them reluctant to write in academic settings. It’s worth exploring what that is. Some of it, I think, is what Sommers talks about in her article. Some of it is the fact that . . . No. I won’t go there.
Elbow’s right when he says that very few students will have to write academic discourse once they’ve graduated from college. But, in fact, academic discourse is not very different from the discourse that one employs in the upper echelons of the business world, Donald Trump notwithstanding. I was part of the business world for a long time, and I was immersed in business discourse. The polite way academics have of deflating an argument is nearly identical to the discourse I deployed when I wanted to push a project through that my supervisors didn’t want to see completed. Or started for that matter. I believe I advanced further than I otherwise would have because I “sounded smart.” And, as a woman in management positions in an industry where nearly all managers are men, sounding smart and mastery of the polite putdown were very handy, let me tell you. What was essentially an academic vocabulary was indispensable, and that’s a fact.
Moreover, I’ve supervised hundreds of people who worked in a variety of positions throughout my business career. I never once thought that someone couldn’t write because they deployed academic discourse. Of course each discourse community has its own conventions. Are we supposed to teach them all, just in case? How are we supposed to choose? Should we let students use textspeak because it’s a form in which they enjoy writing? (I did actually find myself telling a young friend that it might not be a bad thing if texting altered our spelling conventions to a more phonetic mode. Of course, the idea that phonetic spelling might be a good thing has been around a long time, but it seems more of a possibility now that texting has become so ubiquitous than it has ever seemed to me before.) I can imagine a young person handing me a resume full of that! I wouldn’t know what the hell was going on. I’d assume that s/he had no idea of propriety. I wouldn’t hire him/her.
Academic discourse is a good foundation, based as it is in critical reasoning, cogency, and politesse, for other discourses. It’s easily adaptable to the jargons required in other areas, such as the FDA and law. Actually, I can see how it might be an impediment in law, whose object is to obfuscate rather than to clarify. Anyway, the fact that it takes a variety of forms, each with its own vocabulary and conventions doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist (138). It might mean that a plurality of them exist, but a plurality of nonacademic discourses exist as well—even within a single genre, like autobiography. That something has not got ontological status doesn’t mean that it isn’t a functional category. You know, like literature. Now, if we could only teach students that academic discourse doesn’t involve writing every sentence in the passive voice! Anyway, I wonder if Elbow thinks that his essay is not a form of academic discourse, just because he uses the first person throughout. Because I’ve got news for him. It’s a tidy piece of academic discourse.
Now, all that being said, I must add that I deplore the elitism of academic discourse. I also find it exclusionary, and its replication of America’s nearly invisible classism, its sexism, its ethnocentrism, its religious hegemonic discourses, and its racism disgusts me. It’s masculinist and makes expressing, or even implying, one’s feelings nearly impossible (Elbow does have something there). But if we’re properly teaching student how to write, we’re also teaching them how to question and assess the functions of the discourses in which they’re immersed. We’re not, in other words, just teaching academic discourse. We’re teaching (hopefully) a buttload of other skills, too. We’re letting them know that this isn’t the only vocabulary that they can use when they’re writing. We’re teaching them how to assess their audiences and the effects they hope to have on the audiences, and how to determine how to deploy language to do that, and how to allow themselves to dive into and swim around in language until they know where they’re going with and in it. If we can do that, students won’t have to “unlearn” academic discourse because they’ll recognize the value of the other discourses to which they have access long before they step into a composition classroom and which they retain after they leave the classroom. In other words, as I tell students, this is just one more vocabulary we can use when it’s appropriate. We don’t have to give up all other vocabularies in favor of it.
And, as Dr. J. noted in a comment a couple of weeks ago, it may be possible to teach students to resist. The question that remains for me is whether it’s possible to teach something and simultaneously to teach how to resist that very thing. I wonder if this means a change in paper topic. Nah. I think I can incorporate this stuff.
I could go on and on about different things in Elbow’s essay. But I don’t feel good, and I’m tired, and I have a presentation to finish for Dr. Bowers’ class.
Peace to all.
Monday, March 3, 2008
Dissonance Blog
While my composition classroom experience is decidedly limited (I’ve never taught composition), I have taught Women’s Studies 101; Gender, Race, and Class; and feminist theory at the post-secondary level, admittedly a long time ago. I’ve also trained servers, bartenders, bouncers, caddies, cooks, expediters, dishwashers, exotic dancers (don’t ask), and models. I’ve taught others how to apply stage makeup and how to sew. More recently, I also worked in a Writing Center for about five years, and I’ve “guest lectured” in both composition and literature classes every semester for about five years. I also privately tutor college students in English and French. And, I’m a student. One thing that studenting (if I may construct a neologism) and teaching have in common is that they both often require that I consider those with whom I interact as my audience.
My experience writing is multiple and varied, just as my life experience is. I’ve written grant proposals and bylaws for non-profits, constitutions, short stories, (bad) poems, notes, lists, and menus. I’ve written curriculum vitae, business résumés, and press releases. I’ve written articles, journal entries, song lyrics, editorials, letters, emails, blogs, memos, précis, syllabi, and, of course, essays. And what I’ve noticed is that all of these kinds of writing I’ve done have a few things in common. They all involve reading. They all involve what feels like an attempt to communicate something to someone, even if it’s only to me, myself. Even when I’m the only audience, as in journal entries, I am a reader at the same time that I am a writer, and as a writer, therefore, I am also an audience. That means I’ve considered the audience at some point every time I’ve written anything and every time I’ve taught something.
When I consider audience, I make decisions about vocabulary, syntax, form, grammar, tone. Those decisions are almost never completely congruent with those I make when I speak. But even when I write using precisely the same vocabulary, syntax, form, grammar, and tone as I would when speaking, it’s certainly not the same as when I think. That means that part of what I do when writing is to communicate through a persona, a public identity. One question this raises is whether writing necessarily involves constructing identity/ies or if it merely involves appropriating socially constructed interpellating identities. That is, when we write, do we actually construct identity/ies, or do we merely perform identity/ies that already exist in the cultural lexicon? In terms of identity, is writing creative or performative? Could it be both? When I make decisions about audience, do I also construct an identity for those who are in it?
So, how does all this relate to the composition classroom? Well, as I may have mentioned about a million times, I embrace a liberation pedagogy. If identity is wholly performative, then a liberation pedagogy could be more or less useless because writing will only reproduce available identities, and the goal of producing critical consciousness is a chimera. However, if I construct identity for my audience, then I construct an identity for students (in the very act of creating a syllabus!), which is at least somewhat problematic for liberation pedagogy. I’m not sure this seeming contradiction can be resolved (sigh), but I’m going to give it a whack in my paper.
Believe it or not, a lot of this comes out of thinking about my objection to the idea that the goal of composition instruction is to prepare young adults for good citizenship. I’ve been reading some feminist rhetoric, and Starhawk makes the claim that all attempts to persuade are in effect coercive. That started me wondering if designing a syllabus based on the idea that students ought to be given an opportunity to develop critical consciousness isn’t coercive and thus oppressive in some sense. When I combine this idea with Dr. J’s observation that teaching to produce good citizens and teaching to produce critical thinkers might not be all that different, my head hurts. I think that’s the dissonance.
I’ll make use of some of the articles from the syllabus during the course of writing this paper. The idea grows out of my reading of Yancey and Berlin, all of your comments on my musings, reading all of your blogs, and reading texts I found on CompPile. But looking at the syllabus and skimming some articles from it, I’ll probably I’ll turn to Freire, Berlin, Ong, and most of the articles from the Critical and Cultural Studies Pedagogy section. Additionally, I’ll be using a couple of Judith Butler’s texts, some Foucault, and a bunch of feminists.
I hate coming up with topics as a separate stage from writing. I never end up where I think I'm going. I guess I should remember that when I'm teaching.
My experience writing is multiple and varied, just as my life experience is. I’ve written grant proposals and bylaws for non-profits, constitutions, short stories, (bad) poems, notes, lists, and menus. I’ve written curriculum vitae, business résumés, and press releases. I’ve written articles, journal entries, song lyrics, editorials, letters, emails, blogs, memos, précis, syllabi, and, of course, essays. And what I’ve noticed is that all of these kinds of writing I’ve done have a few things in common. They all involve reading. They all involve what feels like an attempt to communicate something to someone, even if it’s only to me, myself. Even when I’m the only audience, as in journal entries, I am a reader at the same time that I am a writer, and as a writer, therefore, I am also an audience. That means I’ve considered the audience at some point every time I’ve written anything and every time I’ve taught something.
When I consider audience, I make decisions about vocabulary, syntax, form, grammar, tone. Those decisions are almost never completely congruent with those I make when I speak. But even when I write using precisely the same vocabulary, syntax, form, grammar, and tone as I would when speaking, it’s certainly not the same as when I think. That means that part of what I do when writing is to communicate through a persona, a public identity. One question this raises is whether writing necessarily involves constructing identity/ies or if it merely involves appropriating socially constructed interpellating identities. That is, when we write, do we actually construct identity/ies, or do we merely perform identity/ies that already exist in the cultural lexicon? In terms of identity, is writing creative or performative? Could it be both? When I make decisions about audience, do I also construct an identity for those who are in it?
So, how does all this relate to the composition classroom? Well, as I may have mentioned about a million times, I embrace a liberation pedagogy. If identity is wholly performative, then a liberation pedagogy could be more or less useless because writing will only reproduce available identities, and the goal of producing critical consciousness is a chimera. However, if I construct identity for my audience, then I construct an identity for students (in the very act of creating a syllabus!), which is at least somewhat problematic for liberation pedagogy. I’m not sure this seeming contradiction can be resolved (sigh), but I’m going to give it a whack in my paper.
Believe it or not, a lot of this comes out of thinking about my objection to the idea that the goal of composition instruction is to prepare young adults for good citizenship. I’ve been reading some feminist rhetoric, and Starhawk makes the claim that all attempts to persuade are in effect coercive. That started me wondering if designing a syllabus based on the idea that students ought to be given an opportunity to develop critical consciousness isn’t coercive and thus oppressive in some sense. When I combine this idea with Dr. J’s observation that teaching to produce good citizens and teaching to produce critical thinkers might not be all that different, my head hurts. I think that’s the dissonance.
I’ll make use of some of the articles from the syllabus during the course of writing this paper. The idea grows out of my reading of Yancey and Berlin, all of your comments on my musings, reading all of your blogs, and reading texts I found on CompPile. But looking at the syllabus and skimming some articles from it, I’ll probably I’ll turn to Freire, Berlin, Ong, and most of the articles from the Critical and Cultural Studies Pedagogy section. Additionally, I’ll be using a couple of Judith Butler’s texts, some Foucault, and a bunch of feminists.
I hate coming up with topics as a separate stage from writing. I never end up where I think I'm going. I guess I should remember that when I'm teaching.
Responses to Some Past Comments
Well, thanks to all of you who have taken the time to read and comment on my musings. I probably should apologize for the length of my entries, but I won't. I will explain my refusal, however. First, women too often apologize for speaking, and I refuse to perpetuate that silliness. Second, I find that the writing helps me sort things out and makes what I get clearer to me and helps me to see what I really don't understand. So, I'll continue to write a lot, and I hope some of you will continue to read and comment on what I've written. A lot of the time I learn more from the conversation than the reading.
A few things:
My grammar fetish. I think we discussed in class how I reconcile it with a liberation pedagogy. But I've been thinking about it, and I want to repeat what I think I said and perhaps add a little more. First, I control myself. I don't focus on grammatical and/or mechanical errors. Content and ideas are more important to me. Second, when it does come time to address grammatical issues, I let students take the lead, insofar as I can. Two classes before the class on grammar, I ask students to bring in a sheet of paper on which they've written or typed two questions they have about grammar. That is, I ask them to provide the content. I pick the three issues they most often ask about, and that becomes the grammar lesson. Before we actually begin addressing the grammatical stuff, we have a discussion about why they have to know this "crap." I try to present grammar as a means of having power over words, of making the words do what we want them to so that other people will understand them as we want them to as writers. I know this is way too simplistic, but I'm not introducing Derrida to Comp 101 students. Then, as I grade the paper, I consider only the grammatical stuff we went over. I note what other errors I see consistently across papers, and that becomes the basis for other lessons.
Critical thinking: I used the wrong phrase. I mean critical consciousness. And I'm not sure that putting composition in the service of developing critical consciousness is different in kind from putting it in the service of devloping good citizens. But I do think that the development of critical consciousness is prior to good citizenship, and it has the advantage of allowing one to inquire for oneself what one's relationship to society is and ought to be instead of having "good citizenship" defined for one. There is a disconnect here, though. See my next comment to Jess.
Jess, I agree completely that language only creates language. It makes perfect sense to me. To claim that it does more is to continue to embrace a modernist teleological epistemology. What I mean is that if we claim that language creates knowledge, then we are, in a sense, saying that language has a purpose (which is to reify it in a way), and that knowledge actually exists (which is to reify it!). I feel much more comfortable talking about (rationally justified) belief than I do talking about knowledge. I'll address this issue more fully in my dissonance blog. I think. If I don't, I'll come back to it, I'm sure.
The Kant thing: Kant claims (in essence) that we are born with innate organizational categories imprinted in our minds by God. Now, being an atheist, I have some trouble with that. But I do think that perhaps language does provide analogous categories which (we use to) organize experience, thought, lives, values, more language etc. My view isn't as determinist as Sapir-Whorf seems to me, but it's similar.
Technology: I absolutely agree that we shouldn't and can't ignore technology and the ways it's transformed and transforming composition studies. Nor do I want to. Believe me, I much prefer computers and the internet to typewriters and bibliographies. I just want to be careful about the degree to which we let it mediate our interactions with other human beings and with the world. I absolutely agree with you, Dr. Jablonski: We do have a responsibility to prepare students for the kinds of writing situations they are likely to encounter when they leave the academy. It's unfortunate that it's so difficult to reconcile this goal with the institutional goals and parameters to which we must make our pedagogies conform. Because you're right, Dr. J. There're very few venues in which any of us will write any kind of essays outside the academy. Even if we do do, it's unlikely that anyone will call them "essays"!
Technology does raise interesting questions about identity and subjectivity, doesn't it?
A few things:
My grammar fetish. I think we discussed in class how I reconcile it with a liberation pedagogy. But I've been thinking about it, and I want to repeat what I think I said and perhaps add a little more. First, I control myself. I don't focus on grammatical and/or mechanical errors. Content and ideas are more important to me. Second, when it does come time to address grammatical issues, I let students take the lead, insofar as I can. Two classes before the class on grammar, I ask students to bring in a sheet of paper on which they've written or typed two questions they have about grammar. That is, I ask them to provide the content. I pick the three issues they most often ask about, and that becomes the grammar lesson. Before we actually begin addressing the grammatical stuff, we have a discussion about why they have to know this "crap." I try to present grammar as a means of having power over words, of making the words do what we want them to so that other people will understand them as we want them to as writers. I know this is way too simplistic, but I'm not introducing Derrida to Comp 101 students. Then, as I grade the paper, I consider only the grammatical stuff we went over. I note what other errors I see consistently across papers, and that becomes the basis for other lessons.
Critical thinking: I used the wrong phrase. I mean critical consciousness. And I'm not sure that putting composition in the service of developing critical consciousness is different in kind from putting it in the service of devloping good citizens. But I do think that the development of critical consciousness is prior to good citizenship, and it has the advantage of allowing one to inquire for oneself what one's relationship to society is and ought to be instead of having "good citizenship" defined for one. There is a disconnect here, though. See my next comment to Jess.
Jess, I agree completely that language only creates language. It makes perfect sense to me. To claim that it does more is to continue to embrace a modernist teleological epistemology. What I mean is that if we claim that language creates knowledge, then we are, in a sense, saying that language has a purpose (which is to reify it in a way), and that knowledge actually exists (which is to reify it!). I feel much more comfortable talking about (rationally justified) belief than I do talking about knowledge. I'll address this issue more fully in my dissonance blog. I think. If I don't, I'll come back to it, I'm sure.
The Kant thing: Kant claims (in essence) that we are born with innate organizational categories imprinted in our minds by God. Now, being an atheist, I have some trouble with that. But I do think that perhaps language does provide analogous categories which (we use to) organize experience, thought, lives, values, more language etc. My view isn't as determinist as Sapir-Whorf seems to me, but it's similar.
Technology: I absolutely agree that we shouldn't and can't ignore technology and the ways it's transformed and transforming composition studies. Nor do I want to. Believe me, I much prefer computers and the internet to typewriters and bibliographies. I just want to be careful about the degree to which we let it mediate our interactions with other human beings and with the world. I absolutely agree with you, Dr. Jablonski: We do have a responsibility to prepare students for the kinds of writing situations they are likely to encounter when they leave the academy. It's unfortunate that it's so difficult to reconcile this goal with the institutional goals and parameters to which we must make our pedagogies conform. Because you're right, Dr. J. There're very few venues in which any of us will write any kind of essays outside the academy. Even if we do do, it's unlikely that anyone will call them "essays"!
Technology does raise interesting questions about identity and subjectivity, doesn't it?
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