Proposal

I decided to post my proposal becasue I'm hoping you folks in my class will comment on it and let me know if I'm being clear about my aims. I'm also considering posting parts of my arguments as I construct them. But that's a little scary. Proposal below.

Title: Identity, Community, and the Tyranny of the Syllabus: Resistance Is Not Futile

Proposal: Educators concerned with the development of critical consciousness must listen to what students say matters to them and try to shape classes around students’ interests and concerns. How, then, do we reconcile these aims with the imposition of an instructor-generated syllabus on students? Doesn’t a syllabus tell students what must matter to them in a particular class? Doesn’t it deny students the opportunity to tell the instructor what they want and need? Doesn’t the syllabus interpellate ideal students, thus demanding that actual students erase their own identities and reconstruct themselves as the ideal student hailed by the syllabus? Do we, when we hand out pre-constructed syllabi, deny student agency by limiting their access to potential identities such that dialogue between subjects is impossible? In this paper, I suggest some preliminary answers to these questions through an exploration of the nature of the relationships between the teacher as writer, the syllabus as text, and the students as an audience.

I begin by offering a definition of the syllabus that establishes it as a hybrid document embodying an instructor’s efforts to negotiate the often-conflicting ends of multiple audiences: the institution, the students, and the instructor him- or herself. I posit that the syllabus, as a text, defines the parameters of what happens in a composition classroom. Moving to the issue of identity, I contemplate whether imposing the same requirements on every student erases constitutive identity differences and whether providing identical learning/writing situations for each student forces them all to adopt the identity of an ideal student. I also address how a syllabus can create a public instructor persona that undermines community in the composition classroom.

I conclude that while students and teacher(s) always forge a more or less successful discourse community during the time that they spend together, liberatory pedagogy affords an occasion for analysis and critique of the community that emerges out of their interactions. Uniquely suited to the task, emancipatory pedagogy allows an emergent community of scholars to examine the syllabus as a text and to communally discuss and critique its attempts to impose identity upon them. This paper will appeal primarily to those who see composition instruction as a singular opportunity to claim academic discourse as a site of resistance to cultural and intellectual hegemony and who believe that writing “is a local act of self-construction within discourse,” in the words of Robert P. Yagelski.