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.