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.
2 comments:
Gina,
As always I find your observations interesting and enlightening. Because I do sequence my syllabus around developing critical thinking I have put a lot of thought into educating vs. brainwashing (or oppressing). I think for myself it has been a matter of not grading based on what they think, only how well they express it. Of course, I hope that with critical thinking skills they will realize somethings are dumb (like racism) but I mostly hope they will posess the recursive thinking needed to help writing, learning, and living. I can't even say it without acknowleding how silly it sounds, but I don't want to leave you a blog for a comment! I look forward to seeing what you come up with.
Here you seem to want to understand the difference between "liberation pedagogy" and "preparing good citizens" as ends in a writing classroom. This is fine, but it is a totally different topic from the one we discussed during our office meeting, where we discussed topics related to gender and language, I believe.
If you want to better understand the debate over ends of composition, you should skip ahead to the "theories of pedagogy" unit (4/28) and read Berlin, Hairston, and Smith. You should probably also read Fulkerson's article (for week 5/5).
You might also want to read Berlin's chapter 3 from Rhetoric and Reality: Writing Instruction in American Colleges, 1900-1985, which you can borrow from me or the library.
All of this should help contextualize some debate over the ends of composition. Surely, we want to teach writing in a writing class. But Berlin's "Rhetoric and Ideology" racheted up the stakes when he associated certain ways of teaching to certain ideological positions. And here is your dissonance. You don't want to necessarily be teaching a brand of rhetoric that helps produce capitalist stooges. But this is what employers and students want, really (see Jeff Smith's article). So what does one do? That could be the topic of your paper, writing an extended teaching philopsophy of sorts, heavily grounded in theory.
Remember you also have to technically find 6 sources *outside* of class readings. I think I already suggested this to you, but might also read Zavarzadeh and Morton's Theory as Resistance: Politics and Culture after (Post)structuralism. These guys basically say that most people teaching "cultural studies critique" are really capitalist stooges anyway. You'd have to apply this to your own thinking about writing instruction.
Of course, there's opportunity to apply any feminist/post-feminist theory ...
You'd probably also want to see what has been written lately about critical approaches to teaching composition (including Fulkerson's article on our syllsabus).
A journal that typically focuses on theory/critical theory in the writing classroom is called The Journal of Advanced Composition. http://www.jacweb.org/, which is also archived in CompPile up to 2006 (not sure it is still publishing in 2007...).
Anyway, let me know what direction your project is going in. You need to focus it now (as much as you don't like committing to a topic!).
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